The General
Robert E. Lee is, quite possibly, the single most revered public figure in the South, during the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and to this day. First and foremost, Lee is the personification of the tragedy of the Confederacy and the war. A patriotic American, he fought bravely in the Mexican-American War (along with Ulysses S. Grant), commanded the US Military Academy at West Point (from which he graduated close to the top of his class) and helped map a section of the Mississippi river (a fellow Army Engineer!). His decision to resign his commission and defend his beloved Virginia was entirely preordained, as was the war itself, which was the result of decades of political bungling, predating the General’s own birth. He famously wrote to president Lincoln’s adviser “Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”
And the war came.
Men like Abraham Lincoln and General Sherman absolutely understood that beating the Confederacy on the battlefield was but one step to restoring the Union. Treating the South in a humane way, supporting reconstruction (with a lower-case “r”) and welcoming the seceding states back into the fold of the United States were all critical to the long-term preservation of the Union. They didn’t hang the General-in-Chief of the Confederacy; they recruited him. Robert E. Lee played a vital role in supporting Reconstruction and reconciliation, and promoting it to the South. He owned slaves up to the war, which the fact that he provided them with an education or freed them is no excuse, but he was not a supporter of “the peculiar institution” and, in fact, wrote “So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South.” His recognition and stature only grew after his death, and he remains the supreme figure representing all that is sorrowful about the Civil War, and noble about the South. He continues to play an essential role in the uniting of North and South. Those who call for tearing-down of monuments to him simply do not know their facts, and the vital place the General has in our collective history. What’s next: Smash the beautiful stained-glass window placed in his honor at the National Cathedral? Expunge all references to “The Dukes of Hazzard”? We should not attempt to apply modern-day moralities to historical figures of yesteryear. It’s equally foolish to refer to him as a “traitor”; one cannot be an enemy and a traitor at the same time. In 1874 Senator Ben Hill said of him:
“He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbour without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward.”
Robert E. Lee was, and remains, an American icon. I stand with the General.
Park Place
I drove to our local supermarket last week. It must have been a busy afternoon, as the parking lot was full. In driving around looking for an open spot, I went by the places reserved (by law) for those with a handicapped tag. Those were followed by spots allocated for expectant mothers (no indication of how “far along” one should be in order to qualify), followed by places reserved for “Veterans” (no explanation of type of discharge or, for that matter, Veterans of which military? I have an Honorable Discharge from the Israeli Defense Forces, which actually once helped me qualify for an additional $500 discount on a Chrysler minivan from an NC dealer), and finally, “Shoppers with Children” which I selected as appropriate, given that I have three of those (albeit two in college, and one in High School). It’s one thing to honor veterans at a ball game by giving them free admission, or let families traveling with small children board airplanes first. But this ever-evolving self-classification system at the supermarket parking lot is asinine.
Into the Fold
When I was a child my family used to go on countless road trips in the US. Some were day-trips, others involved overnight camping or motel stays. They all had one thing in common: roadmaps. For the shorter ones, we would rely on free maps picked up at gas stations (I distinctly remember Getty and Texaco as being the preferred publishers) or, for longer excursions, my father would pick up a “Trip-Tik” from the local AAA office, with our route clearly marked over individual, spiral-bound map pages. This had the great advantage of simply flipping over the pages as your trip progressed, without converting the driver or navigator into expert origami paper-folders… And these maps had one great advantage over modern-day navigational devices: they gave you a spatial sense of location. As you followed the planned route on the map, you invariably saw where you were, what’s up ahead, and what would make for an interesting, spontaneous stop. A good road map would also show you the terrain, places of interest and, of course, where the Getty and Texaco filling stations were located. Navigation systems focus on getting you from point “A” to point “B” in the most efficient manner, with no opportunity for meandering or getting lost, two of the best perks of traveling. And, pray tell, what kind of cognitive development does one get from following an “In two hundred feet, turn left” instruction? A common conversation in our household is “Where are you now, son?” “I don’t know, but I’ll be home in twelve and a half minutes”. “How to Read a Map” is rapidly becoming a lost art, along with handwriting a thank-you card and darning socks. We all remember the old joke about Moses not asking for directions in the desert. Thank heaven he didn’t consult a GPS; the Israelites would have missed-out on all the fun.
Don’t even get me started on digital watches.
On the Job
Given the fact that so many senior members of the Trump administration are new to government work and public service, we quite often hear the phrase “on the job training”. For me, whenever I hear that phrase, I think of Kyle.
In the early Nineties I was a Materials Manager at a Floridian manufacturer of aircraft materials. Our products consisted mainly of decorative coatings for the interior of aircraft, which were usually ugly shades of beige or gray, but served an important purpose of retarding cabin smoke and fire in case of an incident. Drab, boring yet, like anything that goes into an airplane, incredibly expensive. Our clients were airlines and airplane manufacturers alike.
There was an employee on the production floor named Kyle (his real name). He was responsible, competent and, above all, affable. That last trait earned him a promotion to our Inside Sales department, where he was shown the ropes and assigned multiple airline customers. This lasted several weeks, after which, one morning, he simply stopped showing up for work. Phone calls to his apartment went unreturned, and eventually the Vice-President of Sales hired someone for the vacant position.
About a month later, our General Manager Carl Marks (his real name!) received a phone call from an apartment complex in our town. Apparently, Kyle had skipped town without notice, and the landlord was cleaning-out the apartment when he came across a box filled with papers bearing our company’s name. They wanted to know if Mr. Marks would like to come over and take a look at the box, and see if it was of any importance.
The following morning our order backlog (the number of orders yet to be produced) increased instantly by fifty percent. It seems that the sales department assumed that Kyle was instructed on how to enter sales orders into our computer system; he was not. Every time a purchase order would come in, usually by fax, Kyle, uncertain as to what should be the next step, would take it home with him, and place it in the box. Eventually he gave up and took off, giving our company its single-largest sales-booking day in its existence.
My question is: Who’s going to be Carl Marks to the Trump administration’s Kyles?
Pocket Framers
Since the recent Presidential Elections, I often find myself looking-up various clauses and amendments in the Constitution. While I have a very nice bound booklet of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States sitting on my desk, for the past seven or eight years I have carried with me, on my phone (and reinstalled with each phone upgrade) an app containing these documents, making for a quick and convenient lookup whenever I find myself uncertain of particular laws, or yearning for possible actions. This immediate accessibility of our Nation’s founding documents undoubtedly makes me a better-informed citizen. Which brings me to my point:
Why don’t the cellular carriers, who sell us our mobile phones, include such an app by default in each device distributed? It surely comes at virtually no cost, is an apolitical act, and it represents a great opportunity to better educate the citizenry at-large (not to mention the ability to settle various bar bets which we may experience in the near future). If the Gideon’s do so for bibles in hotel rooms, why can’t the phone companies do the same for the Constitution?
The Juice, Loose
I remember exactly what I was doing on October 3, 1995: I was driving to our local jewelers in Palm Harbor, Florida, to pick up my wife-to-be’s wedding ring. I pulled into the parking lot just as news broke on the radio that it seems that the jury had reached a verdict in the case of “People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson”. Like most of us at the time, I was transfixed by the day-to-day coverage of OJs trial over the preceding eleven months and would not miss this for the world, so I stayed in the parking lot, in the car, to hear the clerk monotonously intone the jury’s decision. When it was over and I walked into the jewelry shop I noticed the sales people scurry back to the counters from a back room, where one could see a small TV tuned to a news channel, as it probably was from the time of that infamous Interstate 405 white Bronco chase. 95 million watched the chase, while a full 100 million tuned-in for the verdict.
At first I started following the trial simply because the celebrity of the defendant, and with the gaze of one who cannot turn away from looking at a train wreck. A few weeks later I recognized that the radio and television broadcasts had offered great insight as to the machinations of a complex criminal trial. As a junkie of courtroom drama (the best of which remain Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution” and Sidney Lumet’s “12 Angry Men”, both from 1957) I got sucked into the daily grind of Objections, Advisements, Sidebars, Stipulations, and the rest of those fascinating motions and determinations. This was something that was truly not seen before, and was quite possibly a precursor to Reality TV. All that was missing were ongoing interviews with the jurors, and all bases would have been covered. Two things had become apparent to me: The first was that from the beginning all participants were extremely self-conscious due to the live reporting, which substantially affected the procedures, interactions, and presentations by the principals. The second was that, without a shred of doubt, OJ had indeed brutally murdered Nichole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman; the evidence presented was simply too compelling to reach any other conclusion.
As the trial dragged on it started unraveling the very fine, loose threads of race-relations around the country. Only four short years after the Rodney King beating, police officer acquittals and subsequent riots, the trial was becoming a referendum on something much bigger: institutional racism in law enforcement. As the defense brilliantly shifted the focus of the trial to that arena, I began thinking to myself: “OJ’s gonna walk.” And walk, indeed, he did.
Many courtroom spectacles have been dubbed “The Trial of the Century”: the 1906 trial of Harry K. Thaw, accused of murdering famed architect Stanford White after he allegedly raped his wife, model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, was one of the most lurid and sensationalist judicial events ever. It was the first trial in which a psychiatric evaluation was found admissible. The trial is one of the multiple storylines in E.L. Doctorow’s incomparable novel “Ragtime”, and our patron saint Harry Golden himself wrote extensively about it. Of course if it’s history you’re after the Scopes Trial of 1925 (Teaching Evolution in Tennessee) or the Eichmann Trial in 1961 (The Holocaust) have a much greater significance, but for the sheer societal impact my money’s on OJ, which had two terrible outcomes: justice was not served, and law enforcement departments around the country failed to learn from it. The seeds of the “Black Lives Matter” movement weren’t sown in Ferguson, Mo., but in the Los Angeles County Courthouse. It’s no surprise that the story of the trial has been the subject matter of several TV shows, including a critically-acclaimed miniseries, giving a new life to the cast of characters that had us all spellbound back in 1995.
Epilogue: OJ has been incarcerated in Nevada following an armed-robbery conviction. A few weeks ago, I clicked the CNN website and there he was: Older, white-haired, limping, but the same old narcissistic self, this time making his case in a parole hearing, which was unsurprisingly approved. I instructed my 17-year old son to sit and watch the hearing with me, thus passing the baton of OJ-gazing to the next generation.