Contrary to popular opinion and lore, the modern celebration of Thanksgiving is not what the Pilgrims would call Thanksgiving. For them, a day of thanks was a sacred day set aside to read the Psalms and other Scripture, to sing, and to attend church, pray, and listen to lengthy sermons. In fact, the very first Thanksgiving Day in America occurred at the end of July 1623, and did not include feasting. Provisions were scarce that summer, causing William Bradford, in his famous Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, to lament that “The best dish they could present their friends with was a lobster or a piece of fish without bread or anything else but a cup of fair spring water.”
What we celebrate as Thanksgiving is really based on the first harvest festival the Pilgrims had in America. Sometime in October 1621, after the harvest of corn came in, Governor Bradford order a time of feasting. The Pilgrims invited Massasoit, the chief of the neighboring Wampanoags, who arrived in Plymouth with ninety Indians a day early. And for three day, the Pilgrims and Indians celebrated, with songs, games, wrestling matches, foot races, marksmanship (with bow and musket), and military drills under the command of Captain Miles Standish.
Exactly what was on the menu is somewhat of a mystery, but we do know that Massasoit brought at least five dressed deer, while the Pilgrims provided wild fowl, including ducks and turkeys, various kinds of fish, and of course, Indian corn.
This harvest festival didn’t include religious services, but there is no doubt to whom the Pilgrims were thankful. According to Brandford’s account, just before his description of the three days of merriment, he wrote: “They [the Pilgrims] found the Lord to be with them in all their ways, and to bless their outgoings and incomings, for which let His holy name have the praise forever, to all posterity.”
I hope this Thanksgiving found you and your family full of gratitude for the grace and mercy shown by God, and for His many blessings. And I pray that you could, not just on this day of Thanksgiving, but on every day, say with the Pilgrims: “let His holy name have the praise forever, to all posterity.”
Happy Thanksgiving.
In a recent essay, “The Exception of American Exceptionalism,” I argued that Barack Obama does not believe in America’s unique place in the world. This was proved through his percent for bowing before royalty and his need to apologize for our “arrogance” and what he sees as a “dismissive” and “derisive” attitude toward Europe. My conclusion was challenged by a reader (I invite your to read our discussion), which spurred additional thoughts, for which I’m grateful.
At the heart of my previous article, and the discussion that followed, was this question: “Is America just another country, like all other countries—no better, no worse—and does Barack Obama believe this?” I concluded that America is not like any other country, while Obama clearly does. Many in America today have concluded as I have, that what has swept into Washington is a hyper-attitude of moral equivalency regarding America and American virtues. However, if you smell the air, a shift in the patriotic winds is blowing across the country. Citizens are wondering: “If America is not unique or special what is there to love about her?” Or, as Douglas Jehl wrote, as quoted in my previous essay, “what else were 1776 and all that about?”
My reader thought I had spread the butter too thin. After all, he concluded, no harmful consequences have come as a result of Obama’s bowing and apologizing, and besides it’s too early in the administration to judge Obama’s principles. I think not. My reader, I suspect, is looking at this administration only in pragmatic terms. American exceptionalism, however, is an idea, a sort of attitude or spirit about America, that works itself out in pragmatic ways, called policies. Reasoning backwards, from the practical position, what does it communicate about our declared and protected rights to liberty and private property when the Obama administration gives out billions upon billions of taxpayers’ dollars to stimulate a slow economy, to prop up failing business, or to buy those business altogether? What message does the current Congress, along with the support of the President, send to the American people (or the people around the world, for those concerned about such things) that an enormous amount of our economy will be federalized under universal, mandated health-care?
From just these few examples should we not come to some judgment of Obama’s principles? Do these actions by the administration, along with the leadership in Congress, reflect the uniquely articulated principles of liberty in the Declaration and protections in the Constitution? Or can we conclude that there are some in America for whom the slavery of their country (to foreign nations who hold our ever increasing debt, for example) is dearer than its liberty? Liberty is rarely lost through a single revolutionary act; rather it is lost through incremental acts, which, in itself, is revolutionary. The American Declaration of Independence enumerated our rights as citizens and the Constitution protects our rights by enumerating the limits of state power. Our founders saw the necessity of a federal government, particularly after the failures of the Articles of Confederation, but wisely determined that that government be limited in its powers to encroach upon the personal liberties of its citizens. Listen to Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Wilson Cary Nicholas, dated September 7, 1803:
Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives. It specifies and delineates the operations permitted to the federal government, and gives all the powers necessary to carry these into execution. Whatever of these enumerated objects is proper for a law, Congress may make the law; whatever is proper to be executed by way of a treaty, the President and Senate may enter into the treaty; whatever is to be done by a judicial sentence, the judges may pass the sentence.
Here is Samuel Adams: “The security of rights and property is the great end of government.” And the “Father of the Constitution” from “Federalist 51″:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
The precautions the founders devised was a system of checks and balances—divided government between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The danger lay in the corruptibility of the human heart, in those who make up those branches. If any one of the three became diverted from its enumerated and limited authority then the system could become dangerously imbalanced and threaten the individual’s freedoms. In this sense our founders did not see government as compassionate, as did George W. Bush who adopted the idea of Compassionate Conservatism from Marvin Olasky. The founders viewed government as force, as power. Like fire, government can be a faithful servant if contained within its proper confines, but a fearsome master if let loose for it will consume the house of liberty and leave behind it the ashes of a once great nation.
In many ways, the fire has jumped the hearth and we have been on a slow burn toward a soft despotism ever since the turn of the 20th century, with the progressive movement. Virtually every president since Theodore Roosevelt, regardless of party affiliation, has championed the progressive/liberal ideology of unshackling the state from the chains of the Constitution. The most notable exception are Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. Obama is clearly the most liberal president since Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and a true believer in the notion that the government can and should fix all social and economic inequalities. Not only is this foolish and completely impractical, it is also a perfect recipe for what Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, called “administrative despotism”—what we’d call soft despotism.
Writing in 1840, Tocqueville warned that America could lose her uniqueness and her citizens be reduced to comfortable servitude to a benevolent tyranny. In a downward, four step spiral, Tocqueville described how we could reach the bottom of this “administrative despotism.”
First, we circle the wagons of through radical individualism, whereby citizens, in their desire for personal gain, become severed from the life and concerns of the country. The “innumerable crowd,” Tocqueville wrote, “of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.”
Second, we are wooed by the bread and circuses the state provides. “An immense tutelary power . . . takes charge of assuring (the citizens’) enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?”
Third, we suffer from soul death, when on a daily basis the state “renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.”
Finally, we become unformed biscuits ready to be made into any shape the state desires. “Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
Tocqueville’s words have become prophetic, because what he so eloquently described in 1840, is what is taking place here in American in 2009. We have a name for it: Socialism or Collectivism. It is based on the failed notion that what is best is equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. This is equality run-amuck. But economically, you can never enrich the poor by impoverishing the rich. Yet, is this not exactly what the Obama administration and Congress are attempting with their policies of bailout after bailout and their rush to saddle the American people under the crushing load of universal heath care? It is nonsense and bordering on madness. One wonders if Washington is fiddling while the country is burning.
In deference to my disgruntled reader, the bowing and apologizing of the President is a petty thing for me to write about . . . if that were all he did. His bowing and apologizing, however, are merely illustrative of something much more important—his headlong charge to reshape America into the mold of an “administrative despotism.” Nothing could be less exceptional or unAmerican than that. It is our responsibility, therefore, as citizens of this great nation, to become full citizens. It is we, in the words of Lincoln, speaking to Congress on December 1, 1862, who “shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” I pray it’s not too late.
He’s done it again.
Probably not since John Adams appeared before George III on June 1, 1785—a time before Americans had settled on the appropriate use of titles and protocols before monarchs—and presented to the king three deep-wasted bows, has such a high ranking American official genuflected before royalty the way Barack Obama has before the Saudi King (April 2, 2009) and the Japanese Emperor (November 14, 2009). Every administration, from George Washington’s on down, has struggled with the proper protocol before king, queens, emperors, and potentates. In 1994 President Clinton committed a minor faux pas when he nodded his head and inclined his shoulders forward at a White House reception for Emperor Akihito. At the time, the chief of protocol, Molly Raiser said, “It was not a bow-bow, if you know what I mean.”1 I guess Douglas Jehl, of the New York Times, didn’t know what she meant, for he acidly concluded: “Canadians still bow to England’s Queen; so do Australians. Americans shake hands. If not to stand eye-to-eye with royalty, what else were 1776 and all that about?”2
That’s a good question.
Obviously, we don’t want the American President to be unnecessarily rude to any head of state, especially with allied heads of state, but Obama could have greeted the Japanese Emperor with a polite nod of the head and a handshake. One gets the impression, however, that his bowing is more than a sign of respect; its a sign of deference—of announcing that America, if not inferior, is at least no better than other sovereign powers. In other words, there is an exception to American exceptionalism; an exception that American is unique among the “family of nations.” When President Obama was in Strasbourg, France, on what some called “The Apology Tour,” he was asked about American exceptionalism. “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” Obama answered.3 But as James Kirchick rightly points out, “This is impossible. If all countries are ‘exceptional,’ then none are, and to claim otherwise robs the word, and the idea of American exceptionalism, of any meaning.”4 In Obama’s America we are simply part of the smorgasbord in the salad bar of world powers—we are no better and (one hopes) we are no worse.
It hasn’t always been this way. Frankly, it’s never been this way.
American exceptionalism was first discussed at length by Alexis de Tocqueville in his masterwork, Democracy in America. Tocqueville identified four characteristic of America that made her peerless: liberty, egalitarianism (the idea that all citizens have equal rights), individualism (that is, independent or self-sufficient), and laissez-faire (the notion that the free market should work without interference from the government). Many of these characteristic have increasingly come under attack by an ever bloating government and an ever yapping public for more entitlements, especially since the turn of the 20th century, but these ideas were so distinctly different than what the Frenchman Tocqueville knew in Europe or in history that he concluded: “The situation of the Americans is . . . entirely exceptional, and it is to be believed that no [other] democratic people will ever be placed in it.”5 America was not formed around the love of a homeland (place) nor on ethnicity (people) but on ideas (principles). These ideas found their most eloquent expression in the Declaration of Independence. No other nation on the face of the earth had ever articulated such sweeping principles, and then back them up with blood. This is why Abraham Lincoln could proclaim in the Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”6
Yet, ironically enough, the first black president while on his travels to Europe proudly apologies for American exceptionalism: “In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”7
“Arrogance . . . dismissive . . . derisive”—no other president in the history of the United States have ever used such words to describe the country he has led. Where was our arrogance, our dismissiveness, or our derisiveness when Europe turn to America for aid in World War I and World War II? Did Europe know something then that we’ve forgotten today—that America was exceptional and the only country who could have saved them from despotism? Perhaps our President has forgotten, or never knew, what these two worthy Englishmen had known about American exceptionalism:
“America is the only nation that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.”8
–G. K. Chesterton
“The Declaration of Independence is not only an American document. It follows on Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights as the third great title-deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded. By it we lost an Empire, but by it we also preserved an Empire.”9
–Winston Churchill
“The action of the United States will be dictated, not by methodical calculation of profit and loss, but by moral sentiment, and by that gleaming flash of resolve which lifts the hearts of men and nations, and springs from the spiritual foundations of human life itself. . . . Westward, look, the land is bright!”10
–Winston Churchill
Did you notice in Chesterton’s and Churchill’s words what Barack Obama fails to see? American is the “only nation founded on a creed.” The ideas of the Declaration of Independence “preserved” the British Empire. America “lifts the hearts of men and nations and its land is bright.” Too bad the American President is so blind to what others so clearly see—American is exceptional and has no reasons to bow to self-inflated potentates.
- Douglas Jehl, “The President’s Inclination: No, It Wasn’t a Bow-Bow,” The New York Times, June 19, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/19/weekinreview/the-world-the-president-s-inclination-no-it-wasn-t-a-bow-bow.html (accessed November 19, 2009).
- Jehl, “The President’s Inclination: No, It Wasn’t a Bow-Bow.”
- James Kirchick, “Squanderer in Chief,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2009), http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/28/opinion/oe-kirchick28 (accessed November 19, 2009).
- Kirchick, “Squanderer in Chief.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 430.
- Abraham Lincoln, “Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg,” November 19, 1863, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 7, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 23.
- Barack Obama, “Remarks at Strasbourg Town Hall,” April 3, 2009, Strasbourg, France, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-President-Obama-at-Strasbourg-Town-Hall (accessed November 19, 2009).
- G. K. Chesterton, “What I Saw in America,” in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 21 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 41.
- Winston S. Churchill, “Liberty Day Meeting,” July 4, 1918, in Churchill By Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations, ed. Richard Langworth (New York: PublicAffiars, 2008), 128.
- Winston S. Churchill, radio broadcast, April 27, 1941, in Churchill By Himself, 131.
To all our veterans: Thank you!
“I am no orator . . . / But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man, / That love my friend; and that they know full well / That gave me public leave to speak of him: / For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, / Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech. . . .”1
Marc Antony’s assessment of his oratorical powers while eulogizing Julius Caesar could easily apply to Rocco Landesman’s (the Obama Administration chief of the National Endowment of the Art) October 21, 2009, speech to the Grantmakers in the Arts. It was . . . neither witty nor worthy. What caught my attention, and the attention of others, however, was one idiotic, illogical, and ignorant paragraph.
There is a new president and a new NEA. The president first. This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.2
Where does one begin with such mind-boggling nonsense? There were exactly eighteen presidents since Teddy Roosevelt, include Obama. Does Landesman really believe that not a one of these men had actually written their own books? He should of at least been able to recall that Jimmy Carter, a man of the left who supported Obama, had at least written one of his twenty-three books (including works of poetry). But when one has fallen under the spell of the “Artist in Chief,” little things like historic accuracy are simply inconveniences. Just to set the record straight here are a few historical facts of presidential authors since TR:
- Calvin Coolidge—granted didn’t write a book, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless—translated Dante’s Divine Comedy purely for personal pleasure.
- Herbert Hoover wrote twenty-five books, including two renowned works: one on mining and another on fishing.
- John F. Kennedy wrote two books and won a Pulitzer for one of them (though debate still rages as to whether Profiles in Courage was ghosted by Ted Sorensen).
- Richard Nixon wrote eight books.
- Jimmy Carter, as already mentioned, wrote twenty-three.
- Ronald Reagan wrote enough radio spots in his own hand to fill a book. Wait, there is a book of these manuscripts called Reagan: In His Own Hand.
Oh, by the way, Lincoln never wrote a book.
He clearly shows himself to be no logician. Just because Obama is the president of the “most powerful country in the world,” as was Caesar during his day, how does that make Obama the most “powerful writer since” JC? Do I hear a collective, “Say what?” Time will tell, I suppose, but I’m betting that Obama’s two books just might fall short of Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography, which is considered a national treasure. And that’s if we only compare Obama the writer to his fellow presidential club members.
But here is the fun part. Thinking about Obama being the “most powerful writer since Julius Caesar,” I was perusing the shelves in my library and wondering how these writers would stack up to Obama’s literary genius. Here’s my assessment—and I think Landesman would agree:
- J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—Pour that man another drink.
- Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man in the Sea—A dead fish.
- Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird—It’ll never sing.
- Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind—Hot air.
- Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—Throw it back.
- Hariet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—It’ll never make it out the door.
- Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—All wet.
- Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—It missed the boat.
How about some non-American writers? How “powerful” is Obama compared to them? Miguel de Cervantes is tipping at windmills. Victor Hugo might as well stay in the Paris sewers. Aldous Huxley lives in a cowardly world. Fyodor Dostoevsky should never leave the monastery. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should stay locked up in the gulag. And Winston Churchill? A pansy.
The unkindest cut of all is that none of these accomplished writers, to say nothing of Thucydides, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, any of the biblical writers, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Dumas, George Orwell, or a thousand other writers I could think of, come close to the “powerful” literary pen of Baraka Obama.
In all this idiocy and stupidity we can at least be grateful that Rocco Landesman isn’t heading the Department of Education.
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.2.219-24, in William Shakespeare: Complete Works (New York: Barnes and Nobel, 1994), 599.
- Rocco Landesman, “We Know Art Works,” October 21, 2009, Brooklyn, New York, http://www.arts.gov/artworks/?p=13#more-13 (accessed October 30, 2009).
Discovering intriguing ironies are one of the joys of studying history. The serendipities of times and events are a historian’s delight, even if the subject is not delightful. For example, it was ironic that Abraham Lincoln, who was seen as the savior of the Union and the savior of the black race from slavery, was assassinated on Good Friday, shot by an actor in a theater. It was ironic that the body of John F. Kennedy was being carried from the White House, placed on a cortege, marched to the Capitol to lay in state, while the body of his assassin was being carried out of the Dallas Police Department’s garage, after being fatally shot himself, placed in an ambulance, and rushed to the same hospital in which JFK received treatment for the gunshot wound that took his life.
Just recently, history has given us another irony. While not nearly as consequential as the assassinations of sitting United States Presidents—in fact, it’s almost downright silly—it does offers insights into human folly. I’m speaking of the Nobel Peace Prize that was award to Barack Obama on October 9, 2009.
Much tongue wagging has occurred over the surprise award and many have written about it. Some have commented on the premature nature of the award. What, after all, has Obama actually done—after only nine months in office—to bring about peace and receive the award? Almost everyone agrees, both on the political right and left that the answer is: clearly nothing. It used to be you actually had to accomplish something worthwhile to win an award as prestigious as the Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, not any more. Others wrote about how awarding the prize to one who hasn’t literally done anything of note diminishes the prize. Fair enough, but the prize lost much of it luster in 1994 when the Nobel committee awarded the prize to Yasser Arafat. And still others worried that the prize could be seen as influence peddling, particularly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on climate change—meddling by liberal, elitist Europeans to persuade a liberal, elitist European-style American President to adopt a liberal, elitist European mindset in American foreign policy. I’m not so sure the Nobel Peace Prize is all that persuasive in this regard; it seems like its just preaching to the choir. While others cry foul and call it simply anti-Bush: “Obama won the prize because he isn’t George W. Bush.” That he isn’t. And then there are the wonkish types who either say the prize could turn into a political plus for Obama and America (especially if it gives him/us credibility in leveraging Russia and China on Iran’s nuclear ambitions), or be a political albatross (if it is seen like Obama is giving in to or agreeing with Europe’s naiveté about how the real world works, or it appears that he is continuing the “Apology Tour”).
I don’t want to trivialize the potential implications of the award, but I find the announcement of Obama as the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates ironic. The Saturday evening before the announcement Saturday Night Live performed a skit in which Obama was grading his accomplishments thus far. On global warming, gays in the military, immigration reform, limits on executive power, and torture prosecutions the total score was “Not Done.” Less than a week later, the Nobel committee awarded Obama the prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strength international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The juxtaposition of the SNL skit and the language of the Nobel committee’s statement is rich—“Not Done” and “extraordinary efforts”; the two are oxymorons. Extraordinary efforts usually produce results, accomplishments, “dones,” not “Not Done[s].” The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland took pains to justify the award by saying that Obama has “created a new international climate, [one in which he has] given hope for a better future [based on] values and attitudes shared by the majority of the world’s population.” In other words, Obama was awarded the prize for not being George W. Bush and for preaching hope of accomplishing some utopian vision that somehow encapsulates the majority of the world’s values and attitudes. Now that is an audacious hope if there every was one!
Obviously, to the committee, Obama is enlightened, and with his enlightenment the world will become more civil, and with our renewed civility we’ll become more tolerant of each others’ values and attitudes, and with our worldwide majority expressions of tolerance we can now engage in one giant group hug.
But the world is a big place, with many divergent peoples, religions, values, and attitudes. Yet, somehow (without actually doing anything in office), Obama has captured the hope and dreams of the majority of the world’s population. Ironic, isn’t it that the very day of the announcement he had a scheduled meeting with the cabinet to discuss whether more troops were needed in the war in Afghanistan? I wonder what the world’s values and attitudes are regarding American military power on display in a foreign country? To say nothing of the fact that the prize was for peace.
Oh, well. What are you going do? Let’s all gather round for a group hug, what’d ya say?
Sixteen months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his brother, Robert traveled to the Caribbean island of Antigua. Grief-worn, Robert was becoming a shell of a man. The former first lady, Jackie, and others, accompanied him on the trip. Jackie took a book, which she gave to Robert that became a catalyst of courage, propelling him out of his depression. The book was Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way.
Hamilton’s book is a lively written summary of Greek thought, as captured in their history and literature, particularly in the plays of tragedy. Robert Kennedy’s biographer, Evan Thomas wrote of Kennedy’s attachment to to Hamilton’s book and especially the tragedies.
The saving grace for Kennedy was the exaltation Greeks found in suffering. “In agony learn wisdom!” cries the herald in Aeschylus’ Prometheus. The Greeks understood that “injustice was the nature of things,” but that the awfulness of fate could be borne and redeemed through pain. By reading the great tragedies, Kennedy could find meaning (and relief) because “tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry,” Hamilton writes. “Tragedy’s one essential is a soul that can feel greatly.” Few souls ever felt more than Robert Kennedy’s. He committed to memory, and often quoted, the last passage from Hamilton’s chapter on Aeschylus. The author has been describing Agamemnon’s accursed fate, and the fate of the House of Atreus, to “visit upon the children the sins of the father.” But “pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps on the ladder of knowledge,” writes Hamilton, quoting Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”1
What Kennedy found in reading Hamilton’s descriptions of the Greeks and in reading their plays many others have also found. There is a powerful and personal pull in tragedies, which is particular to the Greeks, who conceived it and perfected it. Greek tragedy endures because the Greek mind had the capacity to see the world without compromise. They faced evil and suffering unflinchingly. And even in the midst of terrible evils they could see beauty and truth in the world. In other words, the Greeks were realists when it came to the sorrows and joys of human life.
After the age of Homer, the epic poet who penned The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Greeks began to think deeply about human life, and started to perceive that it was bound up with evil and suffering, and that injustice was the nature of things. The Greeks wrote songs and stories of beauty before the age of the tragic play, but now they wanted to know why there was evil and suffering in the world along with beauty and truth; they wanted to explain the apparent contradiction. Their attempts at wrestling with this contradiction in a dramatic manner became know as “tragedy.”
As an art form, tragedy has a very narrow history and an exclusive club of authors. The greatest tragic plays were only produced during two periods of literary history. The first period was in the Athens of Pericles, often called the “Golden Age,” from 450–429 bc. The second period was in Elizabethan England, from ad 1558–1603. These two periods had at least five things in common. First, both nation states were at the height of political power. In Greece, the Athenians had defeated the invasion of the Persians at Marathon (489 bc) and Salamis (480 bc), and England ruled the seas with the sinking of the Spanish armada in ad 1588. Second, heroes abounded and heroism stirred the hearts of ordinary men. Third, civilians in both nation states were secure, peaceful, and prosperous. Fourth, freedom to think and create flourished. And fifth, both the age of Pericles and the Elizabethan era were passionate times. With such a constricted period of time in which great tragedy was written, there are really only four great tragic authors—three Greeks and one Englishman. The first, and perhaps the greatest, tragic author was Aeschylus. The other two Greeks were Sophocles and Euripides. And the British playwright, obviously, was Shakespeare.
Tragedy is the transcending art of living with passion and purpose, to find truth and beauty, in the face of evil, pain, and death. According to the Greeks, the opposite of tragedy was not joy, it was timidity and apathy. Hamilton wrote, “When humanity is seen as devoid of dignity and significance, trivial, mean, and sunk in dreary hopelessness, then the spirit of tragedy departs.”2 Only the poet can write tragedy, for only the poet can create a meal out of the strange mixture of pain and pleasure, ugliness and beauty, falsehood and truth. Tragedy “is nothing less than pain and pleasure transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry” Hamilton asserted.3 A sense of mystery shrouds the tragedy. It’s not merely pain, sorrow, or disaster—these leave the audience depressed. The mystery in tragedy is its ability to transcend pain into pleasure, what we might call “Tragic Pleasure,” which Aristotle described as, “Pity and awe, and a sense of emotion purged and purified thereby.”4 Friedrich Nietzsche described this “tragic pleasure” as, “The reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed.”5
But not any play that stirs the emotions can be consider tragedy. Every tragedy must meet at least five essential elements. First, tragedies must deal with suffering. “It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows [Matthew 10:29-31]. Endow them with a greater or as great a potentiality of pain and our foremost place in the world would no longer be undisputed. Deep down, when we search out the reason for our conviction of the transcendent worth of each human being, we know that it is because of the possibility that each can suffer so terribly. . . . Tragedy’s preoccupation is with suffering.”6
Second, tragedies must create characters with greatness of soul. Tragedy’s one requirement is a soul that can feel greatly. As Hamilton wrote, “The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly—that and only that, is tragedy.”7 The small soul can never know tragedy—sorrow or heartbreak, yes, but not the passion of tragedy.
Third, tragedies must call forth transcendence. Tragedy is something that reaches above and beyond the pit of pain. Suffering in of itself is not tragedy, not even undeserved suffering of the innocent. Nor is death necessarily tragic. Tragedy is the ability to call forth redemptive sympathy. This ability to call forth transcendence is found in the spiritual struggle, not the physical struggle.
Fourth, tragedies must concern themselves with the dignity and significance of humanity. Hamilton said, “The dignity and significance of human life—of these, and of these alone, tragedy will never let go. Without them there is no tragedy. To answer the question, what makes a tragedy, is to answer the question wherein lies the essential significance of life, what the dignity of humanity depends upon in the last analysis.”8 The tragic writer must concern himself with the significance of life. The comic writer, in contrast, is primarily concerned with the surface of life. What do outside trappings have to do with tragedy? Nothing.
Finally, tragedies must delineate a purpose in suffering. For the Greeks, the purpose of suffering was to teach men the truth. Just as Robert Kennedy memorized: “‘God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’”9 The Greeks saw their suffering as a means of hope for others who suffer, to point them to the truth. Quoting from Euripdides, Hamilton recorded, “Yet had God not turned us in his hand and cast to earth our greatness we would have passed away giving nothing to men. They would have found no theme for song in us nor made great poems from our sorrows.”10
One can see why Robert Kennedy found solace, paradoxically, in the tragedies of the Greeks. He came to some answer to Hamilton’s question: “Why is the death of the ordinary man a wretched, chilling thing which we turn from, while the death of the hero, always tragic, warms us with a sense of quickened life? Answer this question and the enigma of tragic pleasure is solved.”11 I don’t know whether Kennedy came to fully understand or accept the greatest tragic story of all, but the good news for the Christian reader of tragedy is the fact that the tragic suffering and death of Jesus answers Hamilton’s question and fulfills the essential elements of a tragedy, finding its ultimate purpose in the resurrection.
- Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 287.
- Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), 232.
- Aristotle, quoted in Hamilton, The Greek Way, 229.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Hamilton, The Greek Way, 230.
- Hamilton, The Greek Way, 230.
- Hamilton, The Greek Way, 233–34.
- Hamilton, The Greek Way, 235.
- Hamilton, The Greek Way, 233.
- Aeschylus, quoted in Hamilton, The Greek Way, 257.
- Euripides, quoted in Hamilton, The Greek Way, 237.
- Hamilton, The Greek Way, 237.
