A Muslim family in America. Source: The New York Times.

Today’s New York Times has a front-page article titled “U.S. Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?“

The family described in the article seems perfectly nice, so I’d like to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.”

But sadly, the truthful answer is, “yes and no.”

To the extent that Muslims adopt Western culture, customs, values, and behaviors, yes, they do indeed belong. A society is a group of people who share those things.

And there’s the rub. Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, Islam is not a significant part of Western history and culture except as an antagonist. Muslims stand outside the Western tradition.

It’s important to understand what that means and what it does not mean.

It does not mean that Muslims are bad people or that they are necessarily our enemies. It does not mean that they can’t contribute to our society and be accepted in most contexts. It doesn’t even mean that Islam itself has nothing to offer us in religious insights or examples of faith and courage.

What it does mean is that by their answer to one of the most important questions of life, “What’s it all about,” Muslims stand apart. They do not belong. And depending on how they interpret their faith, it means that they disagree with some of Western civilization’s fundamental conclusions about justice, individual rights, freedom of religion, the role of government, and the relationship between humanity and God.

It also means that most Western people will regard them with just a little bit of doubt. The more values and beliefs that people share, the more they feel confident that they understand each other and can trust each other. Don’t blame me for it: that’s just the fact. There are both valid and invalid reasons for it.

And it has nothing specific to do with Islam. It applies to all differences between people. The more extensive and important the differences, the greater is the potential for distrust, misunderstanding, and hostility.

Difference is not a license to treat anyone with less than the respect and love that all people deserve. But it’s foolish to pretend that the difference doesn’t exist.

I’m reading the Sunday New York Times and drinking coffee at McDonalds while I procrastinate about doing the real work of the day.

The Sunday print edition of The Times is about half the size that it used to be. The pages are smaller, there are fewer of them, and whole sections have been eliminated. Partly, it’s because of the recession. Mostly, it’s because there are fewer readers and thus lower advertising revenue. But it’s still a substantial newspaper, one of the few remaining examples of the species.

It’s also, as Churchill said of Russia, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

During the Bush-Cheney nightmare, The Times slavishly suppressed any stories that the administration wanted to keep secret, such as torture, illegal wiretapping, and anomalies in the official story of the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, it enthusiastically front-paged administration propaganda that it knew, or should have known, was false, such as the myth of Iraqi WMDs and various provocateur-fabricated “terror plots.”

Now, however, The Times is printing secrets all over the place. Partly, it might be because Executive Editor Bill Keller is ashamed of his actions during the Bush-Cheney years. Partly, it’s probably because he isn’t as afraid of the Obama administration as he was of Bush and Cheney.

Machiavelli, Nixon, and Obama

The Bush-Cheney regime asked a simple question to get people’s cooperation: “If you cross us, would you prefer to have your back broken or your neck broken?”

The Obama administration, however, wants to sit down and reason with you. If progressives say that white is white and Wall Street Republicans say that white is black, Obama’s instinct is to split the difference and say that white is gray. But as soon as he makes that concession, Wall Street Republicans insist that gray is black, and the negotiations begin again. Inch by inch, compromise by compromise, working Americans get scr*wed.

It’s not for nothing that Machiavelli said it’s better for a prince to be feared than to be loved.

We can see the difference not only in news media but in Congress, where obstructionist Republicans and spineless Democrats blocked or weakened legislation vitally needed by working and unemployed Americans. They’re not afraid of crossing the Obama administration as they were of Bush-Cheney. They’re more afraid of Wall Street, Fox News, and Glenn Beck.

Another brilliant political thinker, less admired than Machiavelli, was — believe it or not — disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon. As president, he tried to make people think he was slightly crazy, so that they believed his actions were not rationally predictable: “If you set him off, Heaven knows what he’d do: he might start a nuclear war!” Nixon called it his “madman theory.” Of course, it was a variation on Machiavelli, whose work Nixon had read.

Obama suffers from the opposite fault. He seems very calm and rational, so his actions and reactions are quite predictable. It enables his adversaries to play him like a violin.

Reporters Sneak Facts Past Censorship

The Times still carries water for the government, if less consistently than it did during the Bush-Cheney era. Having worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington DC, I can see that Times reporters often try to “sneak” forbidden facts past management censorship.

One news story about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after the 9/11 attacks noted, far down toward the end of the article, that (a) in addition to the two towers, WTC Building 7 collapsed but hadn’t been hit by anything; and (b) no comparable buildings before or since 9/11 have ever collapsed due to fire or airplane impacts. The reporter knew.

Another news story about the recent Wikileaks release of Afghan war documents dutifully parroted the government’s line that Wikileaks had not sought the Pentagon’s help in redacting potentially harmful information. But further down in the article, near the bottom, it recounted how Wikileaks  contacted the Pentagon and sought its help to do exactly what the same article earlier said Wikileaks had not done. The reporter knew.

It’s how things work sometimes. When I was a reporter, I once wrote an important article about government security measures that was accurate and had no classified information. The newspaper’s editor re-wrote the first two paragraphs to say exactly the opposite of what the rest of the article documented. The theory was that most people wouldn’t read the entire article, which still had my byline. Anyone who read the whole article must have thought I was nuts.

Bringing Democracy to Iraq

On the other side, there’s still plenty of propaganda in The Times.  A “Week in Review” article about “Winning, Losing, and War” states:

As the last officially designated American combat forces left Iraq, television cameras caught the exultation of a soldier finally heading home.

“We won!” he yelled. “It’s over! America, we brought democracy to Iraq!”

When I first read that, I thought of the incident years earlier when news media reported that Iraqis had spontaneously pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Of course, the whole thing was staged by the Bush-Cheney administration for propaganda purposes, and many of the people pulling down the statue weren’t even Iraqis, having been flown in as actors for the “unreality TV” show.

Did a soldier really yell that nonsense about bringing democracy to Iraq? Possibly. Was the soldier instructed to say it, and was the incident staged for propaganda purposes? Almost certainly, and the reporter had to know it.

Fearless Leader Bush

But of course, we all remember how Fearless Leader Bush called Americans to arms in 2001-2002, saying that “it’s time we brought democracy to Iraq.”

Oops. He didn’t say that. He said that dat debbil Saddam Hussein, whose only difference from Bush and Cheney was that they dress better, had nookular bombs and anthrax-spraying aerial drones that he was going to unleash on American cities. Darth Cheney went on TV to say that “we know where the weapons labs are.”

General Colin “Uncle Tom” Powell went before the United Nations with a faked slide show purporting to prove that Iraq was bristling with illegal WMDs. Administration officials and surrogates also peddled the false story that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, thereby to provide a fig leaf of legality to an otherwise naked act of aggression.

The Bush-Cheney regime didn’t invade Iraq to make it into a democracy. Bush and Cheney lied and frightened Americans into supporting the war:

• Because they wanted to conquer and loot the country.
• Because Dubya wanted the glory of being a “war prezadent.”
• Because they wanted to enrich their friends and military contractors.
• Because they wanted to regain control of Iraqi oil resources for themselves and their friends in the oil industry.
• Because they wanted to satisfy their perverse lust for murder and destruction.
• Because they wanted to increase the threat of terrorist attacks, real and imaginary, so that they could destroy the tattered remains of Constitutional protections for ordinary Americans.

Saddam Hussein is dead. Bush and Cheney are still walking around free, and they will be supported in luxury by taxpayers for the rest of their evil lives. You couldn’t write this stuff as fiction. Nobody would believe it.

Stoning a blasphemer in ancient Israel. A scene from the film "Monty Python's The Life of Brian." The rabbi (John Cleese) is about to get bonked in the head.

What’s so bad about stoning?

All right, it’s a rhetorical question. I oppose capital punishment of any kind, and that includes stoning.

Questions about what people “deserve” for various crimes are impossible to answer. How much punishment should they get? What kind? And who has the right or the duty to inflict the punishment?

In an insightful book called Without Guilt and Justice, philosopher Walter Kaufmann (1921 – 1980) showed that those questions are much more difficult than you might think. The only defensible justifications for punishment are deterrence and rehabilitation. Under our current for-profit prison system, those goals are rarely achieved. But I digress.

Much of the current publicity about stoning comes from the need to justify the U.S. government’s continued occupation of Afghanistan (which kills a lot more people than stoning). Neoconservatives also use it to demonize Iran in anticipation of an Israeli attack on that country (which would kill a lot more people than stoning).

However, Sunday’s New York Times revealed some facts about stoning of which I was previously unaware. As horrendous as stoning is, some of the laws governing it seem to embody a certain amount of common sense. It’s not the unmitigated exercise in barbarism that some political writers make it out to be. Not unmitigated, at least.

First, stoning is not prescribed by the Qur’an, the Muslims’ central holy book (they also recognize the Jewish and Christian scriptures). Instead, stoning is prescribed by Islamic legal traditions called hadiths, which are something like the interpretations of Jewish law contained in the Talmud. The hadiths apply it mainly to the crime of adultery.

As is often the case, religious traditions develop laws based on the needs and customs of the society in which they arise. Because lineage and family were so important in Middle Eastern cultures, adultery was considered a very serious crime. The religious tradition prescribed a correspondingly serious penalty.

Second, just as with Jewish and Christian religious law, very strict standards were established for proof of guilt. To prove adultery, four male eyewitnesses had to testify that they witnessed the act. That makes adultery difficult to prove because it is usually carried out in secret. As a result, stoning for adultery could be expected to be rare.

Moreover, the four eyewitnesses had to give the same account of the facts. If their stories differed in any detail, they would be subject to punishment. That would discourage accusations of adultery unless the witnesses were quite sure about what had occurred and very serious about testifying. Yes, sometimes witnesses might collude. But getting four men to tell the same story, in the face of punishment if they’re found out, is a barrier to false accusations that would not exist if only one witness was required and if perjury was treated lightly.

Third, the people responsible for convicting someone of adultery had to take personal responsibility for carrying out the punishment. If the adulterer confessed, then the judge had to cast the first stone. If witnesses proved the adulterer’s guilt, then one of the witnesses had to cast the first stone. For most people who are morally normal, the idea of injuring another person by stoning is horrendous. That, too, would discourage false or uncertain accusations.

Of course, those are the Islamic laws and traditions governing stoning. Thugs and psychopaths don’t care about laws and traditions, so they’ll stone anyone they dislike and feel great about it. But that’s not unique to Islamic countries.

The article mentioned one other fact I hadn’t heard:

The former head of Iran’s judiciary made several recommendations to judges not to impose or implement stoning sentences, but all have been ignored.

Much like the United States, where it’s hard to rein in “conservative” judges who want to impose cruel and unusual punishments on anyone who falls into their clutches.

Stoning is still wrong. It’s still barbaric, but so is all capital punishment. At least stoning seems to be governed by some sensible, if not failproof, safeguards.

What caused the American “Civil War”?*

That question provoked a serious, thoughtful debate between readers of this blog. In the Comments section of my article, “The Hijab and the Flag,” they exchanged views, arguments, and more facts than I had ever known about the Civil War.

One of the readers, who hails from Canada, thinks that slavery was the paramount reason for the Civil War. Another, who lives in Virginia, thinks that economic and Constitutional issues were most important.

The official reason for the war, as the story is told today, was to eliminate the undisputed evil of slavery. As the saying goes, “history is written by the victors.”

Because most people have little interest in history beyond graduating from high school, they accept that explanation without question. And even some people who do think about history conclude, based on their reading, that slavery was the cause of the war.

People in former Confederate states, however, are less inclined to accept the official explanation. The reader in Virginia is one of them. And when I mentioned the dispute to a software engineer from Louisiana, he agreed that “of course,” economic concerns were paramount and that slavery was a side-issue.

Identifying Causes

But it’s not as easy to identify “the cause” of a historical event as many people believe.

It’s difficult enough to identify “the cause” of an event in a laboratory. Identifying “the cause” of a historical event is particularly difficult. Almost all events have multiple antecedent factors that can be identified as causes: historical events are particularly complex. Which factor we identify as the most important cause is not entirely subjective, but there’s a large element of subjectivity and interpretation.

Consider a simple case. One billiard ball hits another billiard ball, and the second ball then rolls into a pocket of the billiards table. What caused the second ball to roll into the pocket?

Without hesitation, most people would say that the collision between the two balls was the cause. But what about the player’s deft use of the cue to start the first ball rolling toward the second? What about the perfectly-flat surface of the table, without which both balls would roll in unpredictable directions? And what about the bet that the player made with a friend that he could make the second ball roll into the pocket?

All those factors, and many more, were required for the second ball to roll into the pocket. Which factor we identify as the cause of an event depends on several factors. We tend to say that the cause of an event is:

• Something that closely precedes it in time.
• Something close to it in space.
• Something in the situation that changes.
• Something in the situation that we can control.

It also depends on what kind of story we’re telling and for what purpose. If we’re teaching a college physics class and explaining vectors, then we focus on the relative directions, mass, and velocity of the balls. If we’re doing surface integrals in calculus, we focus on the surface of the billiards table. If we’re discussing psychology, we talk about the motivations of the players. And so on.

Our Purpose Influences Our Choice of a Cause

The point is that in even the simplest situations, there are many causes involved in producing a single effect. And historical situations are almost never simple.

Moreover, our goals and interests determine which causes we consider most important. It is thus unsurprising that historians beholden to the Union emphasize slavery as a cause: they want to justify the Union’s invasion and subjugation of the Confederacy. Confederate historians are in a similar situation. They want to justify the Confederate states’ secession and independence. Therefore, they emphasize economic issues and the states’ Constitutional right to secede, just as they downplay the issue of slavery. Neither side is being dishonest. Both are merely interpreting the evidence in light of their own world-view, values, and assumptions.

Similar reasoning appears in other contexts. In medicine, for example, doctors tend to identify the cause of an illness as a factor that they can treat, such as a bacterial infection. Other causal factors are involved, of course — such as nutrition, the general health of the individual, and so forth — but doctors can usually do something about a bacterial infection. So they identify the cause pragmatically, since they can prescribe a drug for it. Other factors are more or less ignored.

The most we can fairly say is that slavery, economic issues, the Southern states’ Constitutional right to secede, and the political dominance of the Northern industrial states were all causes that led to secession of the Confederate states. They were also causes of the Union government’s war on the Confederate states. Note that the war is separate and independent of the states’ secession, which the Union government could have allowed as the U.S. Constitution required.

Thus, to ask “what caused the American Civil War?” is too vague a question. One factor might have been the most important cause of the Confederate states’ secession, and a completely different factor might have been the cause of the Union’s decision to invade and subjugate the Confederate states. We really must separate those two questions.

Dispelling Myths About the Confederacy

To help understand why Confederate states seceded from the Union, it’s important to dispel a few myths about the Confederate states, racism, and slavery.

Myth: Confederate racism was unique

Many, perhaps most, people in the Confederate states were racists in that they considered blacks inferior to whites. Historian David M. Potter notes in his book The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861:

This was the doctrine of the inherent superiority of whites over Negroes. The idea was not distinctively southern, but it did have a distinctive significance in the South, for it served to rationalize slavery …

As Potter observes, the belief in white racial superiority was not unique to the South. It was quite common among those of European ancestry until very recently. The Scottish economist Adam Smith, considered the father of modern economics, makes a side comment in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that the wealth of a European peasant:

…exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

(Book I, Chapter I, at the very end of the chapter)

The English writer Walter Bagehot said in his book Physics and Politics (1872) that

The mixture of persons of different race in the same commonwealth, unless one race had complete ascendancy, tended to confuse all the relations of life …

(Chapter 1, “The Preliminary Age”)

And of course we have the words of “the great emancipator” himself, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, who said that:

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. And I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbids the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.

And as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

(Lincoln-Douglas debates, debate at Charleston, September 18, 1858)

Those are shocking statements today, but they were common beliefs of white Americans until the middle of the 20th century. They were not unique to the Confederate states.

Myth: Most Confederates fought to defend slavery

A very poignant statement of most Confederates’ reasons for going to war was given by Robert E. Lee in April of 1861.

Lee, who was a colonel in the Union Army, had been offered command of all Union military forces. Instead, because he considered himself first and foremost a citizen of Virginia, he resigned his commission and took command of Confederate military forces. In his resignation letter of April 20, 1861, Lee wrote to Union Army General Winfield Scott:

[My resignation] would have been presented at once but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life and all the ability I possessed. During the whole of that time, I have experienced nothing but kindness from my superiors and the most cordial friendship from my comrades …

Save in defense of my native state [of Virginia], I never desire again to draw my sword.

(Annals of America, Volume 9, pp. 258-259)

On the same day, Lee wrote to his sister, Anne Marshall:

With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army and, save in defense of my native state, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword.

(Annals of America, Volume 9, pp. 258-259)

If the leader of the Confederate military forces thought that slavery was an issue, he did not consider it an important enough issue to mention.

My point is not that slavery was a non-issue. It clearly was an issue for some people on both the Confederate and Union sides. However, many other people in Confederate states considered their states’ self-defense and right to self-determination (as sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution) to be the most important issue.

Myth: Most Confederates approved of slavery

If many Confederate citizens went to war to defend their states and their communities, rather than to defend slavery, then the idea that they supported slavery becomes less of an obvious corollary.

In fact, many southerners did disapprove of slavery and expected it to be abolished peacefully. The most important factor in their disapproval of slavery might have been the ideals of human equality that they professed and genuinely believed. Potter notes that:

[Racism] furnished southerners with a way to avoid confronting an intolerable paradox: that they were committed to human equality in principle but to human servitude in practice. The paradox was a genuine one, not a case of hypocrisy …

Southern leaders of the late 18th and 19th centuries had played with the idea of some day eliminating slavery. That was, in part, why the South had acceded to the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territory in 1787 and to the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808. It was why a limited number of southerners had emancipated their slaves …

(Potter, op cit, p. 459)

One of the people who despised slavery was none other than Robert E. Lee, who wrote to his wife in 1856:

In this enlightened age, there are few but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.

Lee both hoped and expected slavery to be ended peacefully, as it had been in other countries:

Emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influence of Christianity than from the storms and contests of fiery controversy.

Given the prevalent anti-African racism in the South (and the North, and pretty much everywhere else), it would be foolish to deny that some people did support slavery. But enlightened people did not support it, whether they fought on the Confederate side or on the Union side.

Myth: War was necessary to eliminate slavery

The institution of slavery was not unique to the Confederate states. It was also legal in the Union states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, as well as in the District of Columbia. The U.S. Supreme Court had found it Constitutional in 1857. And, of course, slavery had existed all over the world for thousands of years: in the Middle East, in Greece (where slave labor made possible the otherwise enlightened moral and philosophical life of Athens), in the Roman Empire, in Asia, and of course in the countries of Europe. As the Encyclopedia Britannica observed:

The economic regime of every society which has recently become sedentary is founded on the slavery of the industrial professions.

(Encyclopedia Britannica 11th Edition (1910), Vol. 25, p. 216, “Slavery”)

When the American Civil War took place, slavery had already been eliminated peacefully in most European countries and their colonies. Britain abolished slavery by an act of Parliament in 1833. France did it in 1848, Portugal in 1858, and Holland in 1863. Latin American and South American countries were a little ahead of their European mentors: Argentina did it in 1813, Columbia in 1821, and Mexico in 1829.

As noted earlier, many Confederate leaders opposed slavery. Because slavery had been abolished peacefully in other countries, there was every reason to believe that the same thing would happen in Southern states. The fact that war, destruction, and massive bloodshed were not needed to abolish slavery does not make it impossible as a motivation for some Union government officials. But it does make it less rational.

As Usual, Many Causes

Where do we look for the causes of the American Civil War? Do we look at the views of a majority of people in the Union and the Confederacy? Or only at the views of politicians and newspaper editorial writers? Or do we restrict it to people with real power to make war happen or to avoid it?

Like most historical events, the American Civil War had multiple causes. There were good and bad people on each side. On each side, some hated black people while others, like Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, regarded blacks as the spiritual brothers and sisters of white Americans. For some people, slavery was the one and only issue, just as today, there are “single-issue voters” who care only about abortion or war. For other people, Constitutional concerns, self-determination, or the preservation of the Union were paramount.

It seems to me that the whole enterprise of attempting to find a single cause for a large and complex historical event is mistaken. What we should do is admit that it has multiple causes, and then try to learn whatever we can from what was one of the most destructive and tragic episodes in American history.

———————–
* I call it a “civil war” only because that is the phrase almost universally used to describe it. In fact, of course, it was a war of secession like the American Revolution. Confederate states wanted their independence but the Lincoln administration, acting against the U.S. Constitution, refused to allow it.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

Let’s take a break from current events to contemplate some truths that will out-last the next news cycle.

You’ve probably heard this quote, but you might not know its source:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

That’s the only line most people know from “Essay on Man” by the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The more complete version of the quote hints at the wisdom contained in the rest of the poem:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.

In other words, people are never satisfied with what they have. We always hope for a “blessing” that is yet to come. Rich people want to be richer, or to be loved; tyrants want more power; humble people wish for more material comforts or security. What we have is seldom good enough for us. We always want more, and we think ourselves ill-used because we don’t have it yet.

Pope’s “Essay” is replete with such insights, beautifully and often poignantly expressed.

About the complexity of human nature, he writes:

What would this man? Now upward will he soar,
And little less than angel, would be more;
Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears,
To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.

But Pope has a prescription for all that discontent:

Presumptuous man! The reason wouldst thou find,
Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade.

Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather, man’s perfect as he ought.

Who finds not Providence all good and wise,
Alike in what it gives and what it denies?

Pope recommends an attitude of serenity and acceptance toward things we can’t control. In this, he anticipates the serenity prayer written by 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Pope  saw that people are not merely thinking beings, as some contemporary writers insist. They are also buffeted by self-love, emotion, and instinct that bias their judgment:

Two principles in human nature reign:
Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain.

Self-love and Reason to one end aspire,
Pain their aversion, pleasure their desire;
But greedy that its object would devour,
This taste the honey, and not wound the flower.

If only the executives of BP had used their reason to “taste the honey without wounding the flower,” the Gulf of Mexico wouldn’t have been damaged by BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But like all of us, the people running BP fought an internal battle. In their case, the battle was joined between self-love (the desire for more, more, and more profit regardless of consequences) and reason (understanding the importance of protecting the Gulf, its people, and its other living creatures).

The same principle applies to Wall Street banksters who wrecked the world economy. In a different way, it applies to politicians who lead their countries into wars of aggression to enrich themselves and their friends by destroying other nations and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Even if it’s sometimes hard to overcome self-love, reason gives us the ability to see and do the right thing:

This light and darkness in our chaos join’d,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.

But we need to be careful how we live and what we do, because repeated exposure to evil can make it seem normal:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Every person is vulnerable to the siren song of self-love, so we must be on our guard against it:

Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in the degree;
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise;
And even the best by fits what they despise.

Pope alludes to the joys and the brevity of human life:

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite.
Scarfs, garters, gold amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age.
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tired he sleeps, and life’s poor play is o’er.

What insight he packs into those eight lines! All through our lives, one trifle after another catches our attention. Shallow and stupid as they often are, such trifles fill our days with joy. And though the toys get more expensive as we get older, mostly they’re still just toys, whatever ponderous nonsense we tell ourselves about them. We love them not because they’re precision instruments, or because they’re important, but simply because they make us happy.

We occupy ourselves with rattles, then romance, and early or late with religion. At the end, as Shakespeare says, we fly away to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” our life’s poor play over at last. And we barely pause to take a bow before the curtain falls on our little drama:

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar,
Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.

We live with our little joys for the moment and with our giant hope for the future. It’s less poetic than Pope, but “what’s not to like?”

“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” wrote newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to his reporter in Cuba in 1898.

Hearst was using his news media empire to promote a war against Spain so that the United States could seize the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. And just as with the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, a false-flag attack (the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine) was used to create a casus belli.

The rulers of countries have traditionally used news media to promote wars. Under the Bush-Cheney regime, The New York Times and cable news shows constantly promoted false stories about “threats” by Iraq against the United States, just as they currently hype false stories about the supposed threat posed by Iran.

The goal was and is to provide a pretext for aggression against those countries. It doesn’t do any good for the American people, for the soldiers on both sides who are wounded or killed, or for the non-combatants in those countries who are slaughtered. But it lets slimy politicians pose as heroes: “war prezadents,” as Dubya Bush put it. It does lots of good for weapons manufacturers and other war profiteers. And it does lots of good for the government officials and their friends who loot the conquered countries, and into whose pockets that loot disappears.

Two recent events prompted those thoughts.

First, I was sitting in a coffee shop drinking coffee and doing some work. As usual in such places, there were several television screens tuned to “news” shows. One of the screens is always tuned to Fox News, where the hosts typically agitate for war, push ever more tax cuts for the rich, and debate about whether President Obama hates all Americans or just white people.

Another screen was tuned to the Headline News Network (HLN), which seems like a news version of the Lifetime cable TV channel: if I recall Lifetime’s slogan, “television for women, and men are no damn good.”

Cable TV News Is Not Serious

TV hostess Jane Velez-Mitchell (left) interviews comedienne Lily Tomlin.

One of the talk-show hostesses, Jane Velez-Mitchell, looks like a cartoon caricature of an overly made-up and coiffed celebrity. Her perpetually pursed lips make her look like she just swallowed a bug and is trying to cough it up.

If you go to the CNN Web site, you can find out more than you ever wanted to know about Ms. Velez-Mitchell, including her “lifelong battle with alcoholism” and the fact that she recently came out as a lesbian (mazel tov). And in fairness, I found out why her lips look so weird: she was born in 1955, which makes her 54 years old, and she’s undoubtedly “had a little work done.” She does look pretty good for 54: I wouldn’t have guessed she was that old. Her shows typically deal with celebrities, nasty divorce cases, custody disputes, and lurid insinuations that someone might or might not have kidnapped a child / murdered a cheerleader / and so forth.

Nancy Grace

The other notable hostess is Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor with a trademark sneer who seems like a pretty nasty piece of work. After being cited several times for ethical misconduct as a prosecutor, Grace became a TV commentator. Her shows cover pretty much the same ground as Ms. Velez-Mitchell’s, albeit with a meaner edge.

The first time I ever heard of Ms. Grace was in 2006, when she used her show to browbeat a mother whose two-year-old child had disappeared. The day after Grace insinuated on her TV show that the mother was involved in the disappearance, the mother committed suicide. Grace also hyped a prosecutor’s false accusations that Duke University lacrosse players had raped a black stripper. Later, the accused players were exonerated and the prosecutor who brought the charges was disbarred for misconduct. But Ms. Grace walked away clean, her trademark sneer intact.

Cable TV News Hypes a “Threat” from North Korea

What brought all this to mind was the headline that the HLN channel flashed this morning along the bottom of the TV screen: “North Korea threatens U.S., South Korea with nuclear deterrence.”

What?! North Korea is threatening us? Why, those cheeky little yellow bas**rds! We’d better attack them right away so they don’t threaten us anymore.

Take a breath, people. North Korea is “threatening us with deterrence.” In other words, if we attack them, they’ll counter-attack. The nerve of those foreign devils!

Of course, we could just not attack them, but what would be the fun (and profit) in that?

The Moral Equivalent of War

"Pragmatism and Other Essays" by William James.

The second thing that led me to these musings was an essay I read last night by William James (1842 – 1910) and titled “The Moral Equivalent of War.” James, an American philosopher / psychologist who taught at Harvard and was “the father of American psychology,” is too little known these days. His essays “Human Immortality” and “The Will to Believe” are classic statements of a rational basis for Judeo-Christian religious faith.

In “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James surveys the psychology that leads to war:

We inherit the warlike type … Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this, they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars.

But, James notes, we have a problem. Civilization has made us increasingly aware of the conflict between our actions and the moral principles we profess:

At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but we are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service.

And then he gets to the point most relevant today:

Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally avowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.

You see? It’s not that our rulers wanted to conquer and loot Afghanistan and Iraq. They attacked us! Well, they didn’t attack us, but they wanted to. Or planned to. Or might have at some point in the future. So we had to attack them first.

It recalls a comment made by another American writer, Mark Twain, in Letters from the Earth:

So what do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you believe that there is a human mind.

I believe that there is a human mind, but some days, I wonder about it a bit.

All hail Marx and Lennon.

The Times newspaper of London recently ran an article and reader forum asking a question that no American newspaper would dare to ask:

“Was Marx Right?”

The Marx in question, of course, was not Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo, or even the 1980s pop-rock singer Richard Marx. It was Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose villainous shade terrified generations of schoolchildren, and more than a few American politicians, from 1917 to 1991.

That terrifying figure, of course, was the Marxist boogeyman of right-wing legend. The real Marx was a considerably less threatening presence. He wasn’t a very nice fellow, to be sure: a personality defect he shared with Beethoven and Wagner. Mostly, however, he was just an academic scribbler with dreams of changing the world.

But the question “Was Marx right?” is too blunt an instrument. Right about what? Marx was an economist, political philosopher, social analyst, activist, and anti-Semite. He had a lot of opinions about a lot of things. Some of them were daft. Some of them, however, are starting to seem pretty brilliant.

Marx the Classical Economist

Unlike the nightmarish cartoon of his alter ego, Marx did not come out of nowhere. He followed in the footsteps of other classical economists and tried to solve problems that had stumped them.

Chief among his predecessors was Adam Smith (1723-1790), who in 1776 published The Wealth of Nations, a book that set the agenda for all work in economics since then. Conservatives and libertarians often wear ties bearing Smith’s picture, but they’ve never actually read anything he wrote. They wouldn’t like him if they did.

What Economics Does

In talking about Marx or any other economist’s theories, it’s important to understand what economics really does.

Almost all economists, for example, talk about what tends to  happen in the long run and “at equilibrium.” But the long run is always in the future and the economy is never at equilibrium. All economists, regardless of their ideological biases, tell a story about how they think the economy works and where they think it’s going. They can often cite evidence to support their stories, but the economy is so complex that that there’s usually some evidence to support almost any theory.

As a result, it’s impossible to “prove” that one economist’s story is right and another’s story is wrong. What you need to do is compare what the story says with what you see going on in the world. How closely do they match? How well does a story explain the current economic situation and predict future economic developments? Does a story make internal sense?

A story that matches reality, explains well, predicts future events, and makes internal sense is a good economic story. Marx’s story is a fairly good one. So is the story told by Keynesian economists. So is the story told by monetarist economists, though the true parts of that story are included in the Keynesian story. Conservatives often prefer the story told by Austrian economists, although — or perhaps because — that story has turned into little more than an apologetic for big business.

How Workers’ Wages Are Determined

Marx was trying to solve a problem that had baffled earlier economists, including Adam Smith.

First, they assumed that economic value* is created by labor. Therefore, if it took the same amount of labor to produce two things, then they had the same economic value or price. Market conditions can affect prices in the short run, but in  the long run, the prices of goods tend to reflect how much labor it takes to make them. According to classical economists, that is the “natural price” toward which the actual market price will gravitate over time. Thus, the natural price in classical economics corresponds to the  “equilibrium price” in modern economics: the price toward which the actual market price moves over time but almost never reaches.**

Second, they assumed that if two things exchanged for each other, then they had the same amount of economic value.

Third, they assumed that when workers got paid, they were exchanging the products of their labor for the money from the capitalist.

By those assumptions, the products of workers’ labor should tend to be equal in economic value to the money paid by the capitalist. But if the capitalist pays workers exactly what their produce is worth, and then sells it for exactly what it’s worth, then there’s nothing left over for the capitalist. Where does the capitalist’s profit come from?

Marx answered that the capitalist was paying for not for the products of the workers’ labor, but for the workers’ labor power: for their ability to produce. Instead of buying what the workers made, the capitalist was basically renting their ability to make it. And notice what Marx did: He took the same facts as Adam Smith, but told a different story explaining those facts.

Like any other commodity, the workers’ labor power has its economic value (price) determined by how much labor is required to produce it. In other words, wage levels are determined by how much it costs to feed workers, house them, and sustain their ability to produce value for the capitalists.

How Surplus Value Turns into Profit

Suppose that it takes only four hours of an eight-hour working day for the worker to produce enough to keep himself or herself alive and producing. Under the capitalist system, that’s the value of the worker’s labor power and that’s how much he or she will tend to get paid in the long run.

But the workers still work an entire day for the capitalist, who pays them only for half a day. The extra half-day for which the workers don’t get paid is the “surplus value” that the capitalist receives as profit.

Note that this isn’t because capitalists are bad people: some are and some aren’t. Surplus value exists because of the way the capitalist system works. The capitalist doesn’t produce anything himself, but he gets money because he has money. Most modern economists disagree with this view, but in Marx’s time, it was a tremendous insight and a great leap forward.

Modern Economics Takes a Step Backward

Most modern economists take a more, shall we say, “cooperative” attitude toward capitalism.

Instead of saying that the worker’s labor has a specific value — even if that value is sometimes difficult to calculate — modern economists say that its value is subjective.

In other words, the worker’s output has no specific value: instead, it’s worth whatever the capitalist says that it’s worth. There can be no “surplus value” because the value of what each worker produces is defined as whatever the capitalist pays him or her.

No matter how low wages get or how high profits get, no matter how unfairly the system is rigged in favor of Wall Street, corporations, and the politically-connected rich, it’s all good.

The workers get paid only a pittance because that’s all their labor is worth. The capitalists and their top managers get paid a fortune because — well, because they must be contributing something valuable or they wouldn’t get paid so much. That’s what passes for logic in modern economics.

Money Distorts Our View of the World

Marx’s greatest insight was in seeing how capitalism distorts our way of seeing the world.

Under an economy of simple commodity production, each worker produces a good or service. He/she exchanges that good or service for money, and then exchanges the money for other goods and services. For example, a farmer grows wheat, exchanges some of the wheat for money, and uses the money to buy clothing.

So the pattern of economic life is C-M-C: commodities get money, which in turn gets more commodities. Useful things are the beginning and end of the process, with money seen only as an instrument to get them.

Under capitalism, however, the capitalist starts out with money, uses it to buy goods and services (raw materials, machinery, and labor), and then exchanges the result for more money.

The pattern is now M-C-M: money is the beginning and end of the process, the Alpha and the Omega. No longer merely an instrument to buy useful things, money becomes the center of the capitalist society’s worldview, as it has become the center of ours.

Economic Crises and Unemployment Are Essential

Marx saw occasional economic crises not as a problem for capitalism, but as an essential feature of the system.

Economic crises throw people out of their jobs and into the “reserve army of the unemployed,” to strike terror into any workers who still have their jobs. That makes wages drop and gives capitalists relatively more profit both during and after the crisis.

The current recession follows the pattern Marx predicted. As millions of workers have lost their jobs, and others have taken pay cuts, Wall Street and corporate profits are higher than ever before. There are currently five unemployed people for every new job. Hundreds of people apply even for the most menial and low-paying job openings. Workers know that they can easily be replaced. It’s a race to the bottom.

Update: The New York Times gave additional confirmation of this phenomenon in its July 26, 2010 article “Industries Find Surging Profits in Deeper Cuts.” As the article observes:

Many companies are focusing on cost-cutting to keep profits growing, but the benefits are mostly going to shareholders instead of the broader economy … “There’s no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy,” Mr. Harris added. “Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits.”

Marx on Balance

Marx didn’t get everything right. His explanation of what causes economic crises (changes in the “organic composition of capital”) is dubious. His conception of human nature (not discussed here) is completely unrealistic. But on balance, particularly in economics, he got a lot more things right than many modern economists. Maybe that’s why we hear so little about him in our time.

——————————————–
*Classical economists distinguished between economic value (price) and use-value (usefulness). To illustrate the difference, Adam Smith compared water to diamonds. The use-value of water is much greater than the use-value of diamonds: if you don’t get any water, you’ll die. Paradoxically, however, the economic value of diamonds is much greater than the economic value of water. A thing must have use-value in order to have economic value, but they’re not the same.

**The difference is that classical economists thought the natural price of goods was determined by how much labor it took to produce them, but that supply and demand also influenced the current price. Modern “neoclassical” economics says that the equilibrium price of goods is determined by supply and demand, but that labor costs also influence the current  price. The two viewpoints are essentially mirror images of each other, with classical economics focusing on how production affects prices and modern economics focusing on how market conditions affect prices. Both are valid viewpoints, and each is useful in analyzing different aspects of the economy.

For More Information

Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume I. London: Penguin Classics, 1976. There are three volumes of Marx’s Capital, but you can get most of the essential ideas from Volume I, which is available inexpensively in paperback.

Sweezy, Paul M., The Theory of Capitalist Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970. This is a classic, definitive, clearly-written primer about Marx’s economic theory. If you just want to get the basics, it’s the best.

Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

What would victory in Afghanistan look like?

That’s a question nobody wants to discuss. We hear vague talk about timetables, the Taliban, and the need to “accomplish our mission,” but people carefully avoid talking about what the mission is.

Of course, to understand the mission, you need to understand why the United States invaded Afghanistan in the first place.

The Bush-Cheney regime launched the invasion on October 7, 2001. It did so under the pretext of hunting for Osama bin Laden, who it said was the mastermind of the 9/11 false-flag attacks.

But months before the 9/11 attacks, the Bush-Cheney regime had already started planning to invade Afghanistan on behalf of the oil industry, which wanted to build an oil pipeline through the country and considered the country’s Taliban government too unreliable as a partner.

Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks were only an excuse to invade Afghanistan, just as they were only an excuse to invade Iraq. American troops were never there to catch Osama bin Laden or to avenge the 9/11 attacks.

Afghanistan’s Taliban government and its people played no role at all in the attacks, and Osama bin Laden played only the minor supporting role of a scary-looking Arab boogeyman. Everyone else in the world knows it. Only in the United States, where the population is addled by infotainment and starved for real information, does a large minority of people still believe the official story.

So if the real reason for invading and occupying Afghanistan is to secure the country for exploitation by multinational oil companies, what would “victory” look like? It would have to include an Afghan government that:

• Represents multinational oil companies against the Afghan people.
• Does what the US government tells it to do, at least most of the time.
• Is powerful, organized, and ruthless enough to crush any resistance.
• Allows the US and other Western powers to use Afghanistan as a staging area for attacks on other Middle Eastern countries.

In other words, Afghan president Hamid Karzai would have to look a lot like the Shah of Iran, which the US and UK put into power after overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953.

It’s pretty obvious why people want to talk vaguely about “accomplishing the mission” but want to avoid defining what the mission is.

To define the mission is to condemn it.

People on both sides of the Atlantic often misunderstand what the American revolution of 1775-1783 was about.

If you look at the writings of the American founders, many of them proclaimed that they were fighting for their “rights as Englishmen.”

They did not see political separation from Great Britain as a break from their traditional political ideals. Instead, it re-affirmed those ideals in the face of what they saw as the crown’s mistreatment of its colonial subjects. It was only later that the American revolution was re-envisioned as a radical change like the French revolution.

Americans and Britons are still much more alike than different. Our common traditions, language, and civilisation make us the most natural of friends in every area, not just the political.

Bless them by not sending them to kill people who haven't attacked us? Naah, don't talk crazy.

Bless ‘em all, Bless ‘em all.
The long and the short and the tall,
Bless all those Sergeants and WO1′s,
Bless all those Corporals and their bleedin’ sons,
Cos’ were saying goodbye to ‘em all.
And back to their Billets they crawl,
You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean,
So cheer up my lads bless ‘em all.

Sometimes, I wonder what people are thinking. Or if they even think at all. There’s scant evidence of it.

My favorite deli in Indianapolis went out of business last November and has been replaced by a pancake restaurant. On the window next to its door is a large, crudely-painted invocation requesting God to “bless our troops.”

The painting shows the soldier kneeling, his head bowed reverently. And what is the object of his reverence? Here’s a hint: It’s neither a Christian cross, nor a Jewish star of David, nor even a Muslim star and crescent. But it is a religious symbol.

It’s an American flag to which the soldier kneels and bows his head.

Hmmm. That reminds me of something I read somewhere, in a book that all the conservatives are supposed to like. It said something like this:

You shall have no other gods before me.
(Exodus 20:3)

Ahh, yes, it’s that whole idolatry thing. But I’m sure we can let slide a little idolatry if it’s in the service of killing a bunch of dirty foreign infidels who speak gibberish and who happen to be sitting on top of our oil.

Inside the pancake restaurant, I looked at at the menu. The first thing that caught my attention was “Freedom Toast.”

Now, you might not know what that is. I asked the waitress. “French toast,” she said.

During the reign of Bush the Younger, we were supposed to hate the French because they said it was a really, really bad idea for us to invade Iraq. They said there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, whatever those are, or that it posed any threat to the United States, or that it had any involvement whatsoever in the 9/11 false-flag attacks.

Bush supporters urged that we change the name of French fries to “freedom fries” and French toast to “freedom toast” to show our disdain for those “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” as the Bush people called the French.

And we all know how that turned out. Iraq was bristling with nuclear missiles aimed at New York and Chicago. Its ships were lurking off American coasts prepared to launch anthrax-spraying drones. And Saddam Hussein personally ordered the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Oh, wait, none of that happened.

Everything that the French said turned out to be true. Everything that the Bush-Cheney gang said turned out to be a pack of lies.

So, who wants to eat “Freedom Toast”? Apparently, it’s people who still think that it was a great idea to invade Iraq, that Bush was a good president instead of a traitor, a psychopath, and a war criminal, and that we should not thank the French for trying to stop us from embarking on a disastrous and ruinously expensive military debacle. There aren’t many of those people, even in Indiana.

The original author of the “Freedom Fries” and “Freedom Toast” idea, Republican Congressman Walter B. Jones, has since disavowed it and gone back to eating French fries and French toast. Maybe he even drinks a little French wine, I don’t know. He was ignorant and bellicose, but he’s neither insane nor is he an idiot. He knows the truth when it stares him in the face.

But truth is the first casualty of war, and of presidents who want to make war. Partly that’s just because of our flawed human nature. As the American novelist Mark Twain remarked, the human being at his best is a kind of low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst, he is unspeakable. People support wars partly because, God help us, human nature inclines us to believe that killing other people is a lot of fun.

Mark Twain is best-known for his novels Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. In addition to being good stories, they dramatize the evils of racism and slavery. They’re not read much these days because they also use “the N-word” to denote black people. But given that Twain argued against racism and prejudice, you should remember that until the 1950s, the N-word was in common use. Most people used it with no malign intent, however offensive it might be today. If someone uses it today, he’s doing it on purpose and means to say something offensive. In Twain’s time, it was not so.

But I digress. Twain also wrote a wonderful short poem called The War Prayer. Very few people have heard of it; even fewer have read it, though everyone should read it. And lucky us, it’s not under copyright, so I can reproduce it here for you.

You will recognize yourself and your town in it. I do. And like me, you might feel a little ashamed:

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory –

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think.

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. the whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words.

Listen!

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;

Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;

Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;

Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;

Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;

Help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.

For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord,

Blast their hopes,

Blight their lives,

Protract their bitter pilgrimage,

Make heavy their steps,

Water their way with their tears,

Stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.

Amen.

(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.