[Editor's Note: I pass along the missive you'll find below without comment. (Because I know next to nothing about the situation at Antioch.) That said, I was asked to post this by a very dear friend, whose very dear friend works at Antioch. So there you have it. Oh, there's one more thing: the petition is is somewhere around the bottom third of the text. If you're interested.]
Dear …,
I am writing to ask whether you might be interested in endorsing, and helping us circulate, our petition in support of Antioch College (please scroll all the way down to see the text of the petition and the petition link).
On June 11, 1963, after federal troops forced Governor George Wallace to allow two African-American students, Vivian Hood and James Malone, to enroll at the University of Alabama, John F. Kennedy gave the above speech, perhaps the finest of his career. (The highlight of the address begins around the 4 minute mark; part 2 can be found here; the full text and audio are available here.) A day later, Byron De La Beckwith killed Medgar Evers. Then, near summer’s end, more than 200,000 people participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. King shared his dream for the nation. Less than three months after that, Lee Harvey Oswald (please, don’t start) assassinated JFK. Finally, a bit more than a year after Kennedy’s Civil Rights address, on this day in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson honored Kennedy’s and Evers’s memories by signing the Civil Rights Act.
Well isn’t that a neat package, tied up with a pretty bow? Actually, the story’s much more complex than that, probably too complicated for a short-form blog post. For example, Kennedy’s support for Civil Rights was often notoriously lukewarm. And Johnson, at the time Senate Majority Leader, had infamously tried to have it both ways with the 1957 Civil Rights Act: insuring that the legislation would be gutted, to placate Southern Democrats, while shepherding it to passage, a subtle nod to the party’s pro-Civil Rights wing. By 1963, though, JFK had embraced the cause. At least sort of. Confronted with the intransigence of segregationists like Wallace, and worried that the U.S.’s image as a free society would suffer in the eyes of the international community at the height of the Cold War, Kennedy pushed for a Civil Rights Act — until he was killed. Which is when LBJ picked up the torch.
President Johnson, aided by Hubert Humphrey and other Democratic advocates for the bill in the Senate, then locked horns with LBJ’s longtime friend and mentor, Georgia Democrat and white supremacist, Richard B. Russell, who said: “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our [Southern] states.” (You can see LBJ above, looming over Russell. God, Johnson was a scary prick.) Beginning in March 1964, Russell organized segregationists in the Democratic caucus for what would be the longest filibuster in the Senate’s history. Johnson and Humphrey worked tirelessly to outflank them. But the two Democrats had to rely also on Everett Dirksen, a leading Senate Republican, for support. Finally, on June 10, 1964, Dirksen had the votes for cloture. Russell and the segregationists stopped yapping. And less than a month later, the Civil Rights Act came to the floor.
Even that’s just a fraction of the Act’s legislative history, as lawmakers continued maneuvering behind closed doors. The bill, as originally written, forbade segregation in public accommodations and outlawed discriminatory hiring practices, but only those based on race. Then, at the eleventh hour, Senator Howard Smith, a Democrat from Virginia, added one word to the legislation: “sex.” Hott! Smith’s detractors claimed that the Senator, a segregationist, had amended the text to scuttle the bill. Smith, though, insisted that he was working with Alice Paul, that he was championing women’s rights. Regardless, the final bill made it illegal for an employer to “fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions or privileges or employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Title VII of the Act also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to implement the law.
When I was a lad of about fourteen I saw a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said “Union Pride” next to a picture of Old Glory, and I figured it represented a reaction against the many pickup trucks with Confederate flag bumper stickers. Because what other referent could “union” have?
I challenge anyone currentlybeingcriticalofWesleyClarktodisprovehispointon its face. I don’t want to hear anything about Clark’s own military record or Barack Obama’s lack of one.* I want you to list the specific executive qualities cultivated by twenty-three bombing missions and five years in a POW camp.
Yes, I’ll hold.
Zoom zap a do do walla do dop diddly do dum dum dum dap da dap da doom—
The bumper sticker looks good in real life, too. If I had a bumper I would put it on, but I don’t normally drive a car, so you’ll have to settle for me spokesmodelling it. The white band around it is just excess backing-paper, not part of the sticker, which does a full bleed to the edge. The printing is sharp. I like it.
The above is Wes Clark on Face the Nation, suggesting that having been a prisoner of war during Vietnam doesn’t necessarily qualify John McCain to be President of the United States. Actually, Clark’s argument is more nuanced than that: he notes that McCain, for all his heroism, lacks command experience, which might really be relevant to working in the Oval Office. The best part of the clip, though, is the reaction — first incredulous, then angry, finally fuming — of Bob Schieffer, the show’s host. Schieffer, who served in the USAF for three years as a public information officer, simply can’t believe that Clark would dare spew such apostasy.
Clark’s appearance and then several follow-ups, the Obama camp’s speedy and perhaps ill-considered repudiation of Clark’s comments, and McCain’s subsequent efforts to claim that Clark besmirched his honor while simultaneously burning Old Glory and spitting on a nun have generated quite a bit of conversation today. (See, if you can stomach it: Clark “swiftboated” McCain.) All of which means that Barack Obama, because of an increasingly oft-used property of guilt-by-association that applies only to Democrats, doesn’t support our troops. It seems that most of the talk, as the preceding rant suggests, has been about the politics surrounding this absurd brouhaha.* I haven’t seen many people considering whether Clark is right on the merits, whether McCain’s tenure in a Vietnamese prison camp leaves him no more likely to succeed as president than Obama, who has no military background.
That’s where Fontana Labs provides us with some much-needed help. Labs kind of beat Clark to the punch about a week ago, responding, in a post over at Unfogged, to what was then Richard Cohen’s** latest in a succession of execrable columns. In that piece of drivel, Cohen suggests that, because of McCain’s wartime experience, the American people should ignore his serial flip-flopping of late. The Maverick will be resolute when it counts, Cohen assures us. Labs***, in his nut graf, replies:
Thanks in large part to John Doris and Gil Harman, a lot of philosophers are vaguely familiar with situationist psychologists who think that there’s very little predictive value to our folk-psychological character concepts. As I understand it, one situationist theme is that (for example) courage as traditionally conceived is far too broad: someone might have courage-in-situation-x but fail to have courage-in-situation-y, and there’s very little correlation between the two fine-grained traits. Hence we shouldn’t expect courage-on-the-battlefield to predict courage-in-committee-meetings. But we do, and so are led into error. McCain is a really interesting example of the phenomenon just because both his courage and his failure to be courageous are on full public display.
Yes, just so. And furthermore, circling back to and expanding upon Wes Clark’s original point about experience, history is agnostic on whether great warriors make great presidents. In the “yea” column you’ll find George Washington. Because I’m feeling generous and Eric’s looking over my shoulder, I’ll thow in Teddy Roosevelt. And if you insist that I expand the column to include borderline cases, we could also talk about Andrew Jackson****, Harry Truman, and Ike. The “nay” column is far longer, so I’ll just hit the highlights: Zachary Taylor, U.S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, John Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and, of course, George W. Bush.
Perhaps more interesting than any of the above, though, is this: the nation’s two greatest commanders in chief, and, not coincidentally, two greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never served in the military.
The point here isn’t that heroic service in the armed forces should disqualify a candidate from the presidency. That’s just silly. But it’s equally silly to assume that valor on the battlefield will translate into excellence in the executive branch. That such a claim is the centerpiece of John McCain’s bid for the presidency — and make no mistake, it absolutely is — speaks volumes. Which is why McCain and his flying monkeys in the press corps are lashing out so fiercely at Wes Clark. All of that said, why Barack Obama is taking his whacks at Clark is anybody’s guess.
* See the updates. I’m totally wrong about this. Oops.
*** You’ll have to decide for yourself if “Fontana Labs” is just one of the many pseudonyms that “General Wesley Clark (C, Cuba)” deploys when he prowls the web. Clark used to be notorious for commenting under the handle, “SACEUR.” Until, that is, Petey outed him for hating on John Edwards.
**** You have no idea how much this pains me. No, really.
[Update: Here's Clark artfully elaborating on his earlier comments without apologizing at all. Veep? Maybe so. Maybe this is all some super-complicated gambit in which Clark serves as attack dog, Obama disavows Clark's comments, and then they come together to conquer the world. Via TPM.]
[Update II: Oh look, The Editors covered this issue. It looks like I was wrong that nobody was writing about substance. Please ignore my post. Sigh.]
[Update III: There's also substance from the awesome Sir Charles at cogitamus, which I usually read every damn day. Rats. Wait, I have a novel idea: I think I'll read my favorite blogs, beyond just TPM, before I write my posts in the future. Then I won't look like an idiot. Er, quite as much of an idiot.]
Because Walt wants “This Day in Pony History” (even though nothing makes him laugh) and because Ari is a self-hating Canadian, it falls to me today to mark, for This Day in History, the 141st anniversary of Canadian Confederation. On this day in 1867, Canada became “one of the great facts of the world,” or as the Globe observed, deploying characteristic Torontonian caution, it became for citizens of Upper Canada a day that “may well be heartily rejoiced over as the brightest day in their calendar.” And it came not a minute too soon. For nefarious schemes were evidently afoot, such as those providing that “the States of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Canada East, and Canada West, and the Territories of Selkirk, Saskatchewan, and Columbia, with limits and rights as by the act defined, are constituted and admitted as States and Territories of the United States of America.” Why, apparently some Billy Yanks sang as off they went to war,
Secession first he would put down
Wholly and forever,
And afterwards from Britain’s crown
He Canada would sever.
When I think of Canadian patriotism, I think of principally of October 30, 1995, when the referendum for Quebec’s secession failed; I was in Toronto for that, and have an anecdote or two. But that’s not this day in history. But that thing reminds me of two other things, which are below the fold. Cheers and greetings to all our Canadian readers.
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