Learning from My Students in the Inexhaustible City of Rome

ROME

Week three. This is my seventh or eighth trip to Rome, and my longest. I'm trying to stay one or two steps ahead of the students I am teaching here. They are seasoned cultural travelers by now, and they have learned a tremendous amount. There are days when I'm not sure what I have to teach them. Whenever they are otherwise occupied, I hop the bus (the dreaded 870) into the heart of Rome and wander about with maps, a guidebook, and my notebook and camera.

Tom Schulzetenberg, the U-Mary Rome program director, has mastered the city in his three years here. He's an invaluable guide. He's gone out of his way to make it possible for me to take the students to a number of places that are off the beaten track: the ancient port called Ostia Antica (Rome's Pompeii); the Non-Catholic Cemetery, where the English poets Keats and Shelley are buried; the emperor Hadrian's fabulous villa at Tivoli. Today, at our final lecture, I taught them the meaning of a number of Latin phrases that have made their way into English, including in loco parentis, "in the place of one's parents." Tom and his wife JoAnn have served in that capacity with real grace. As you know, U-Mary makes much of its capacity to create "servant leaders." I find it easier to recognize that quality than to describe it. Tom and JoAnn are the epitome of servant leaders—warm, generous, humble, thoughtful, careful, and firm--and they have sacrificed a great deal to live abroad on behalf of the liberal arts at UMary. If you think living in Rome is easy, just try it.

When I get home I'm going to burn my travel clothes, and rethink many of the rhythms of my life. The cars here are miniscule. If all the Ford F250s of Bismarck alone were loosed in the center of Rome, the traffic jam would paralyze the city for weeks. People here can park a Smart Car in a space we wouldn't attempt with a bicycle. I've walked between six and ten miles a day without even thinking about it, and while I walk the city I keep puzzling over why the Romans are so much fitter, leaner, and healthier than we are. Hmmm.

I wish we lived in a society that chose to send all college students for a semester or a year abroad. Many of the fundamental problems of American life would be solved if we had a universal Fulbright program. Foreign travel to a nation that doesn't speak English is the first important step towards global wisdom. We may be America—always the elephant in the room, and sometimes still the class act—but there are scores of countries that don't live as we do, do things in our way, consume at our Rabalaisian pace and volume, and yet they are perfectly civilized. Many of them, in fact, score higher on the happiness index than we do. To travel abroad is to realize that our way of doing things is not the only way, and not invariably the best way.

When we travel to other countries—as I keep telling my students—we are guests in another culture, and it is important that we pull back a little from our full "display" of our American brand of style, confidence, and expressiveness. We should never for a minute be ashamed of who we are and where we come from, but we should remember, too, that being an American (as opposed, say, to being Canadian or Norwegian) comes with a burden and a special responsibility. We are the richest, most powerful nation on earth (ever!), what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called "the indispensable country," and that automatically rubs others the wrong way at times.

Whenever I travel abroad, I am ashamed that I am essentially monolingual. Once, long ago, when I was married, my wife and I spent a week with one her college classmates, an extremely talented woman named Silka from Munich in Germany. She spoke four or five languages, including French, Russian, and flawless Oxford English, the Queen's English. Her husband had eight languages. We went out to dinner one night with her brother and sister-in-law. The sister-in-law, some kind of European slacker, spoke only German and English. So the dinner was conducted in English, as a favor to the "Americans." I asked for permission to pay and to settle the bill in my weak German. As I recall, I bungled my few sentences so badly that I wound up in a Turkish prison!

Traveling holds a mirror up to us. We are invited to gaze into that mirror, or at least glance at it when we observe how other humans go about their business, and how they respond to us in their midst. Whenever I travel I make resolutions that make New Year's look like a routine Thursday. Theodore Roosevelt, in addition to being one of the most active men who ever lived, and a career politician, once shocked a White House guest, from Poland, by giving her a sustained analysis of the history of Polish literature. In 1910 he lectured about German literature at German universities—in German. Like Jefferson, he was a true citizen of the world. I had a professor friend at UND who learned Russian merely for the pleasure of reading Tolstoy in the original. At this point in my life, I would settle for reading French, Swedish, German, Russian, and Italian literature in translation, but where's the discipline going to come from, and who will grant me the 27-hour day? 

A few days ago we went to St. Peter's Square to hear Pope Francis deliver a homily to celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Right on time, he appeared at the appointed window. I watched him deliver his remarks through my binoculars, while the mass of people watched him on the Papal Jumbotron. He seemed joyful and genial and completely unself-important as he delivered his remarks and waved to the assembled multitude.

After Pope Francis had withdrawn and the crowd began to disperse, one of the students walked with me to the city center. Along the way, he suggested that we duck into one of the scores of nearly identical looking Baroque churches in Rome, the kind you might well just pass by on your way to lunch. He explained to me that this was the Church of the Gesu, the first Jesuit church to be built in Rome, dedicated in 1584. Inside he gave me a brief but really impressive commentary on the various features of the church, and the ways in which it epitomized the Counter-Reformation. Here was my student, a young citizen of the world (since September!) teaching his professor in a graceful and helpful way. A few days earlier, a new young friend, the son of one of my closest friends back home, told me that during Lent he and his fellow seminarians walk to a different church every day for 40 days for early morning Mass. I'd give anything to join those pilgrims.

Rome is truly inexhaustible; me, not so much. I'm now eager to get home, to sit with my mother in her spare Congregational church in Dickinson, to decorate a genuine Christmas tree, and to set up my new heroic spring reading schedule. This has been a bellissimo viaggio, which, so far, is the sum total of my Italian.

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Veduta interna della Basilica di S. Pietro in Vaticano. 1748. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

All Hail Monsignor Shea for Creating the U-Mary Rome Campus

ROME

Week two. Recently I took the University of Mary students to the top of St. Peter's to the cupola. It was a day of rain in Rome, so the view from the top of the dome was not optimal, but we were, for goodness sake, standing at the apex of St. Peter's Basilica and looking out on one of the greatest cities of the world. Even through the drizzle we could see the Colosseum (80 AD) off in the distance, the Pantheon (126 AD), the Roman Forum (no date can mark all that it contains), and approximately a gazillion churches and basilicas, if I may use a technical term. It's overwhelming. I took scores of photos. Now they all look, as I surf back through them, like drizzly grayed-out photos taken from St. Peter's on a rainy day. With almost everything in life, you have to be there to experience its fullness.

All hail Monsignor James Shea, the president of the University of Mary, for establishing a Rome campus. I've had the opportunity to observe the 24 students who have spent this semester in Rome. About three-fifths of them are North Dakotans, the others mostly from Minnesota and South Dakota. One or two of them flew on an airplane for the first time to come to Rome.
One young woman had been working her family's grain harvest in northern Minnesota for 18 straight days before she flew. Her mother packed while she drove grain truck. Then, suddenly, they were here, halfway around the world, many of them getting their passports stamped for the first time, in a place where not very many of the local folks speak English, and where most of the assumptions and rhythms of daily life in the American Midwest break down fast.
Nor, when they arrived after 15 hard hours of travel, a day later than they set out, were they allowed to rest and unpack and regroup. No, they were taken immediately on a long day of jet-lagged touring around Rome to get some sense of the immensity of the adventure they have undertaken. If a liberal education is designed to take us out of our comfort zone without disabling us from preserving our core value system, Monsignor Shea's Rome campus is one of the supreme educational opportunities that begin in the faraway state of North Dakota.

It is said that on a very hot summer day in Iowa you can actually see the corn grow. Since Labor Day these students — the raw seed stock of North Dakota and Midwestern life — have grown in ways that will take your breath away. They are still kids, of course, college students, children of the heartland, full of laughter and the somewhat alarming exuberance of late adolescence. But they have undergone a cultural metamorphosis here that will mark them for life.
Some of them are nursing majors, or engineers, or business majors, but here in Rome they are all being baptized together in vast ocean of high culture. Rome is a humanities course on steroids: painting, sculpture, mosaic, architecture, music, history, literature, engineering, urban landscapes, sometimes all within the walls of a single structure.

Thanks to their experience here, they now know the difference between Renaissance and Baroque. They know why, when, and how Michelangelo was prevailed upon to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12). He did not think of himself as a painter, and then he painted a whole ceiling of stunning masterpieces.

They know why, and under what historical circumstances, he was brought back decades later (1536-41) to paint the Last Judgment on the wall above the altar in that chapel. They know how to talk about the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. They can discuss Gian Lorenzo Bernini's magnificent, uncanny, astounding "Ecstasy of Saint Theresa"without smirking.
They know now how to change buses, on the (to put it kindly) erratic Rome transit system, and wind up where they wish to be. They can order food without pointing at the menu. They attend Mass in Latin, Italian and English. They have tried food they would reject outright in Bowman, Bowbells, or even Bozeman, Mont.

They have broken their connection — for some an addiction — to television, for there is none at the U-Mary Rome campus, and the Internet is sufficiently dicey here to discourage incessant recourse to Facebook or email. And, perhaps most astonishing of all, they cannot use cell texts as their primary way of dealing with the rest of humanity.

Some of what they have learned, some of what they have become, will be hard to communicate back home. I have throughout my whole life found that transaction — trying to explain to others, even my closest friends and kin, why something was so meaningful, so important, so tender, so mysterious, so compelling, so destabilizing — a challenge, usually a matter of frustration.

So in the end the stories we tell repeatedly usually slip to that which is universally translatable: the time you ordered what you thought was X, and it turned out to be something that should never ever have found its way to a plate; the day you tried to find an angel food cake mix or sweet potatoes in a Roman grocery store; the day you left your wallet on the tram. These are important stories, the stuff of all travelers, delightful to tell, entertaining to hear.

But there will be other stories, too, harder to find words to express, and they are equally or more important. The young man from Wishek, a football player and business major, who stood in front of Michelangelo's David (Florence) and cried for the first time at the unbelievable beauty of what the human spirit can create at its best.

The young woman from Harvey who really understood for the first time the sacrifice of the cross when she saw an old Italian woman struggle to kneel on rheumatic knees at a Mass at St. John Lateran. The sense of helplessness one feels in the face of Raphael's staggering talent, or the feeling of shared humanism (confidence in the human project, kinship with a people who lived thousands of years ago) one feels for the Romans of Hadrian's time while craning one's neck towards the oculus of the Pantheon. Or the sadness of trying to gaze at Michelangelo's Pieta long enough until you have drunk it in completely, realizing that you can never bring enough to it to give it the loving attention that a piece of art that perfect deserves.

For the moment I want to concentrate on the students who are North Dakotans. I can see from watching them day after day, in study, in community, in laughter, and in recreation, that their lives in some important way will never be the same. They will return to the Great Plains deeper, fuller, a little more complicated, perhaps a little more restless than they were when they boarded that plane months ago.

As a mere Congregationalist, I cannot say for sure, but I think they will be better Catholic Christians for this experience. I think they will almost automatically become leaders at the University of Mary, in Bismarck, in North Dakota, and in America, thanks to this profound adventure. What a gift U-Mary has given them, and what a gift they are going to give back to the social fabric of North Dakota. Not one of them is cocky. Not one of them is, "Yeah, I can't wait to eat a real pizza!"

(Which, if you think about it…)

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"Spaccato interno della Basilica di S. Paolo fuori delle Mura." Giovanni Battista Piranesi. c. 1751. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

The Joys and Sorrows of the Electronic Globe

ROME

I am spending Thanksgiving in Rome. I give thanks to the global internet for making it possible to write these words 5,185 miles away from the turkey my mother and daughter are cooking in Dickinson. The students I am teaching for the University of Mary are down the hall Skyping their families back home. We live in an age of technological miracles. How is it that humans can zip around the planet this way and communicate more or less effortlessly over vast distances? If our civility and peacefulness and generosity of spirit were equal to our technological wizardry, the world would now be approaching utopia. But while we give thanks for the abundance of our lives, radical Islamists are cutting the heads off people including American journalists, they regard as infidels. And we, admittedly, are killing Islamists we regard as evil doers with drone strikes and cruise missiles. As humans overcome space, the paradoxes of human nature become more biting. We can send video of stupid pet tricks to the far corners of the planet effortlessly, and free, but we cannot get water to dying people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Just as I wrote that last sentence, my computer "rang," and Skype announced that my daughter was video calling. And suddenly there she was, sitting at the kitchen table of the house I grew up in in Dickinson, not quite clear as a bell, but a hundred times more clear than when Neil Armstrong bounced down onto the surface of the moon. I could see her expressions as if I were sitting across that table from her. I could see, for example, that she got a good night of sleep in her first night in North Dakota. Good news for a busy college student at the end of a hard semester, and for her doting father who worries that she studies too hard.

We talked for 45 minutes, for free. For free! How is this even possible? If you had said to me when I was a junior in college (1975) that the day would come when you could talk free for most of an hour between Rome and North Dakota, I would have said, "Never gonna happen." If you had said that there would be video, too, free, I would have said, "You've been reading too much science fiction." But there she was, laughing, telling stories, talking about the chaos in Ferguson, Missouri, asking me about my flight to Rome, etc. Behind her I could see my mother bustling about the kitchen making her famous pumpkin chiffon pie for tomorrow (I wrote this on Thanksgiving eve). Mother is the epitome of domestic efficiency, and—if the truth be told—she is a kind of kitchen Nazi who does not welcome help when she is hard at cooking, baking, or clearing up. She was cracking eggs while my daughter was cracking jokes, and from time to time Mother would chime in from four or ten feet away with a wise crack of her own, or "refute" something my daughter was saying. They have the most amazing love for each other that I have ever seen between grandmother and granddaughter, but they are neither of them very sentimental in that love. They tease and jostle each other in a kind of running dialogue. When Mother said something particularly opinionated, I could actually see my daughter raise her eyebrows for her father's benefit. Fortunately, there is no recording of the video conference.

I was telling my daughter about a field trip I have planned for my students on Monday—to Ostia Antica, the ancient port of Rome where the River Tiber meets the Mediterranean. I told her one of the things I want these students to see is the place where St. Augustine's beloved mother Monica died. There is a famous passage about it in Augustine's Confessions. My daughter is a classics major—Latin and Greek—and so before I had really begun my description she was telling me where Monica was finally buried in Rome, and that in that church we could also find a painting by Caravaggio. So my 20-year-old daughter in the middle of the plains of western North Dakota was teaching her father, the teacher, half way around the world. 

So now as I write these words in the aftermath of that sweet conversation I feel bittersweet. On the one hand, I am so thankful that I was able to connect tonight (their today) with the two women who mean most to me. To see my mother separating egg yolks from egg whites, and waving her wooden spoon mock-menacingly at my daughter when she disputed some anecdote, while my child rolled her eyes and laughed with pure joy, was a great delight and comfort. It was almost as if I were in that kitchen. I could see the stairs up to the second floor. I could see the big kitchen window and the snow-strewn yard beyond, and that wonderful glaring white light of North Dakota on a cold crisp November day. I was with them in some genuine way, and it was infinitely more familiar and intimate than a long distance telephone call. And yet…

As I write the last of these words, I am overcome with sadness. Being away from them during my favorite holiday of the year (theirs too) was going to be hard, and I had worked up some pretty strong stoicism to get through this. In some sense it would have been easier to remain resolutely in this zip code than to peer in virtually on theirs. I wanted to hug my child. You know that hug that redeems everything in life. Even a four second hug can serve as a full top-off on love. There she was, tantalizingly close, full of youth and life and joy and love, eating the occasional barbecue potato chip, as if we were not engaged in spectacular form of techo-badminton. But she was also untouchable. It felt like one of those ghost stories in which something or someone is completely "real" until you reach out to hold them, but then your hand goes right on through the illusion. There is a story in Virgil's Latin epic the Aeneid (Book Two, I think) that works like this. If we were still Skyping, my daughter would now inform IM me the passage, with a slightly (and carefully) raised eyebrow that her father could have forgotten precisely where to locate the passage. So now I have decided to have my U Mary students read one of the twelve books of the Aeneid next week.

So here I am, sitting in an office on the Rome campus of the University of Mary. One by one the students have shuffled off to bed. The campus is quiet (it is only quiet when they sleep!). It is now technically Thanksgiving here in Italy, where Thanksgiving is not celebrated. But I'm not really here now, though the fingers that type these words are tired. I am across the world at that kitchen table in Dickinson, listening to the love contest between the two women who flank my heart, and contributing the occasional sentence. I can smell that pie.
And I am immensely thankful, in a way that I would not be if I were there, but with a wash of sadness like the vanilla mother is swirling through those beaten eggs.

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Travel-Worn Reveries as Thanksgiving Looms

Last week, I was flying from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, in two gulps, and having a very bad travel day. All the things that go wrong were going wrong, and when I finally got to my hotel with my damaged new luggage, wanting a hot shower more than anything in the world, the check-in agent turned out to be a very officious and unpleasant person who instantly discerned that I had not suffered enough for one calendar day. By the time she finally handed me my keys, thirty minutes later, I wanted to have a giant meltdown in the lobby of the hotel. I had a fantasy of just sitting down on the polished marble in the middle of the lobby and emptying my two broken suitcases of every item, piece by strewn piece, and then decanting a whole can of shaving cream over my body, while chanting the first verse of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

I went quietly to my room.

Two hours later, after a meal (mediocre) and a glass of wine (excellent), I tried to step back and put things in perspective. Thanksgiving is coming, after all. Before I write to you again, we will have celebrated our national day of gratitude. It is, in my opinion, easily the best holiday of the year and often the best day of the year. So as I sipped my wine, I decided to take a play from the Sheila Schafer happiness playbook, and make a list of things for which we all can be thankful. My friend Sheila claps three times in front of the mirror every morning, to express her gratitude for the miracle of life, and for all the gifts that she has been given by the grace of God. She is the happiest person I know.
 
Well, first of all, we are the most mobile people who ever lived on earth. I started the day in Washington, D.C., and ended it in Seattle, at the other end of the continent. That's 2,716 miles. Total transit time 6 hours, 44 minutes. All the heavy lifting was done by the industrial revolution. I merely sat in two snug 38,000 foot reading rooms, sipped beverages brought to me by friendly uniformed attendants, and lost myself in my book. After a lifetime of flying around, I still regard it as a kind of miracle that you can wake up at one end of America and go to sleep at the other. Just think back. On a good day, if everything went precisely according to plan, if there were no accidents or screw ups, Lewis and Clark might make 15 miles. And that's with everyone pushing and tugging and rowing with all of their might, dawn to dusk. I was miffed when they ran out of peanuts on my second flight.
 
And speaking of books. We are living in a golden age of books. Thanks to Amazon.com and its rivals, I can hear about a book at a dinner party somewhere, order it with a single keystroke (no typing in all that tedious billing and shipping information, and the credit card number, plus the security code), and often enough it is waiting for me in my mailbox when I get home three days later. And that's the slow way to get books in the 21st century. If you don't mind reading a book on a screen, you can as often as not get it instantly. I've actually downloaded books, in seconds, at 35,000 feet, while soaring at 500 mph over the deserts of the American West. How is this even possible? What would Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1398-1468) say about that? What would Thomas Jefferson think? With these breathtaking technologies, plus our superb currency-credit systems, and the wholesale digitization of the backlog of books from prior centuries, it is now possible to read just about anything you might ever want to read, immediately, on demand! I'm going to Europe in a few days, and my backpack will carry approximately 15 books (alas for my back), but I have pre-loaded 30 more books, some of them giants, on my iPad. In the face of that, how much annoyance can a power-drunk hotel desk clerk cause?
 
And speaking of backs. Thanks to pharmaceutical chemistry, nuclear radiation, lasers, and synthetic materials, we now live much longer than we used to, at a higher rate of well-being and productivity, with infinitely less pain. The life expectancy of First World people essentially doubled in the Twentieth Century. Today's men and women easily survive their first grave health scare (early 60s) and frequently enough survive the second and third crises, too. The quality of dental care we enjoy in America is enough to make anyone thankful to live now, rather than in the Age of Queen Elizabeth I, or for that matter in the Age of Jefferson, when you could expect to gum your gruel sans teeth for the last decades of your life. The "lying-in" period for women in childbirth in Jefferson's era was two weeks to two months. Today most women who give birth are kept in hospitals overnight merely as a precaution, and to provide some on-site neonatal assurances. Think of reconstructive surgery for those born with cleft palates or harelips, for those who survive grievous car accidents, or women who undergo mastectomies. Think of in utero surgeries that correct miniscule malformed heart valves or underdeveloped stomachs or lungs. We are living in the age of miracle and wonder.
 
Think about communication for a moment. When I was in college I called home once a month or so, collect, and I could hear my father at the other end of America, somewhere away from the phone, grumbling, "Tell him to write a letter," or "Can't this wait until Thanksgiving?" If we called my Grandma Rhoda long distance, she immediately asked who was sick—or dead, because it was not permissible to spend money on long distance calls if there were no big announcement or emergency. Today long distance is too cheap to meter. Some Saturdays I Skype or Face time with my daughter for a full hour, on high resolution video, free, wherever she happens to be and wherever I find myself. When she is busy I can follow her rhythms on Facebook. When she is very busy she sends me a puny little text, "Hey, papa," or "'Sup," that gives me the assurance I need that she is alive and well. In the Age of Jefferson, letters invariably began by hoping that the recipient was still alive. Communication was slow, uncertain, a kind of shot in the dark. If Lewis and Clark had had cell phones and GPS units, things would have been so much easier.
 
I've just ordered another glass of Pinot Noir. Remember back when in North Dakota your choices were red wine or white, and Inglenook was regarded as a quality wine for special occasions? When I go up to my room I'm going to watch Federico Fellini's great epic film of Rome, La Dolce Vita (1960), downloaded instantly for $3.95. But it could be any of a hundred thousand movies or television series.  
               
For all of that, now that I've cheered up, the things for which I am most thankful have nothing to do with technology, or money, or stuff. They are two women, one biologically old but young of soul, the other biologically young but smart and wise beyond her years, or her father's.
 
Happy Thanksgiving.

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A Sad, Colossal Setback for the Bill of Rights

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means. When, in the battle of Germantown, General Washington's army was annoyed from Chew's house, he did not hesitate to plant his cannon against it, although the property of a citizen. When he besieged Yorktown, he leveled the suburbs, feeling that the laws of property must be postponed to the safety of the nation.

Jefferson to John Colvin
September 20, 1810

The U.S. Senate's decision to continue permitting the NSA to monitor calls of millions of Americans (335 million to be exact) is a shameful violation of the Bill of Rights. Thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, we now know that the NSA has tapped into the trunk lines of all the major internet providers, from Google to Apple, and that it listens in on hundreds of thousands of "conversations" on email, Facebook, and audio cell phone communications. The NSA engages in this wholesale brand of surveillance without warrants or court orders. If you invoke key words--"terror, bomb, Taliban, etc."--your communications might trip wires in our security agencies, and get your entire life monitored without your knowing it, and in direct violation of the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments to the Constitution.

When Snowden and courageous journalists revealed that these illegal searches were taking place, the NSA lied, denied the allegations, tried to destroy the reputations of the individuals in question, and eventually charged Snowden under provisions of the Espionage Act.

On November 18, 2014, the U.S. Senate voted to maintain the existing surveillance law. Sixty votes were needed to reign in the domestic spying of the NSA, and the vote to proceed with the bill failed at 58-42. All of the nay votes were cast by Republicans. The new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs. The threat from ISIL is real. It’s different from what we faced before.”
 
The gravity of this decision can hardly be exaggerated. It was one thing to permit such illegal surveillance when the nation, including most members of Congress, did not really know what the NSA was up to. But now that we know--and nobody refutes Snowden's allegations, which constitute undeniable proof of official wrongdoing--one would expect any liberty-loving American, any liberty-loving member of Congress, to have deep misgivings about such surveillance, and to demand of the NSA and all other information and security agencies or sub-agencies within the national government, that they prove to all of us that such violations of the Bill of Rights are necessary to American security.

They cannot do this, except to invoke whatever is the latest and most convenient "threat" to the national security.

As the passage from Jefferson's letter to John Colvin indicates, even our greatest civil libertarian understood that there may be times when "a strict observance of the written laws" must yield to emergency conditions, but do we really believe that the rise of militant Islam is a sufficient reason to permit wholesale surveillance into the lives of American citizens. Do we need that broad a net to tease out improbable terror plots. When Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA spying, the immediate "defense" of such practices was that they had actually prevented a number of terror attacks on the United States. It is simple enough to say such a thing, but the NSA was subsequently unable to name a single credible threat that had been quashed thanks to this level of spying.

In other words, our government is counting on our relative indifference--"Hey, I got nothin to hide!--and our dark fears--"Hey, if that's what you have to do to keep us safe, have at it!"--to subvert the Constitution and create a creepy, dangerous, and outrageous Surveillance State.

Texas Senator John Cornyn said that the reform bill, taht would have restricted some of the worst aspects of NSA domestic spying, "basically takes us back to a pre-9/11 lack of capacity to identify terrorists making telephone calls in the United States. I think that sort of unilateral disarmament would be bad for the country."

Really? Adhering to the Bill of Rights represents "unilateral disarmament" of the United States in the face of the terror threat?

It's one thing for mealy-mouthed Senators to cave in to official lies and a paranoid narrative about American security, but where is the citizen outrage about the greatest damage to the Bill of Rights of the last century?

Jefferson opposed the 1798 Alien and Sedition acts and called them "worthy of the 8th and 9th century." Does anyone believe Jefferson would regard this sort of massive, even universal intrusion, not on the communications of foreign nationals, or non-American terrorists, but on the entire population of the United States, as an acceptable sacrifice for national security?

The question is simple. Is there no other way to protect American security than to throw out the Bill of Rights? Have we now acceded to Dick Cheney's proposition, that if we knew what he knows, we would cheerfully accept a security regimen that makes Orwell look like a Rotarian?

You decide.

Further Reading:

• Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side by Leonard W. Levy
• The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction by Akil Amar
• No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

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The Capacity of Material Prosperity to Undermine Prairie Radicalism

Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading books about the Nonpartisan League, including the standard history of the NPL, Robert Morlan's Political Prairie Fire. The League will achieve its centennial moment during the 2015 legislative session in North Dakota. It was during the infamous 1915 session that Cass County legislator Treadwell Twitchell (who appears to have received his name out of a Charles Dickens novel), allegedly told the desperate, crusading farmers who had assembled at the North Dakota capitol to "Go home and slop the hogs!" Twitchell later claimed that he had not made the incendiary remark, but he's stuck with it one way or the other. It's an essential part of the NPL legend, and whatever he said in February 1915 touched off one of the most remarkable episodes in American history.

In 1915 nine out of ten North Dakotans lived on family farms. The great majority of them were struggling against almost impossible odds to put food on the table for their families and buy seed for next year's crops. Out-of-state banks controlled the credit supply. The interest rates they charged were steep, even usurious. Out-of-state milling and elevator corporations controlled the price of wheat. Their grain grading systems were self-serving, often corrupt, and their scales were sometimes rigged to their own advantage. Out-of-state railroads monopolized the transport of grain at a time when automobiles and trucks were rare in North Dakota. The whole "system" was designed to benefit what the NPL called "Big Biz." North Dakota was essentially a grain-production colony controlled by powerful individuals and entities located in Minneapolis, Chicago, and beyond. One historian has called that North Dakota "a tributary province of Minneapolis-St. Paul."

The farmer-citizens of North Dakota had attempted to improve their conditions in a range of ways, beginning with the Populist Movement, but without measurable success. By 1915 they had come to realize that until they took control of the means of production—until they broke the out-of-state monopolies that controlled the economic destiny of North Dakota—they would never know even moderate prosperity. They were, in short, driven to a revolution—not at the end of a pitchfork or musket, but at the polling booth.

The Nonpartisan League was the brainchild of Arthur C. Townley, Fred Wood, and Arthur LeSueur. Townley was the organizational genius. He was a gifted political strategist, a brilliant stump orator, and a born rabble rouser. His goal was to sign up enough farmers to take control of North Dakota before the opposition realized what was happening. In this he succeeded, thanks to the newfangled Model T Fords he rattled over the dirt roads of the state, and his willingness to accept postdated checks from financially strapped farmers. In 1916 the League (technically nonpartisan but in fact mostly an insurgency within the dominant Republican Party), elected a majority in the ND House of Representatives and Lynn J. Frazier of Hoople as ND Governor. Frazier got 79% of the vote. Two years later, Frazier was re-elected, and both the House and the Senate were now solidly controlled by NPL legislators. That made the legislative session of 1919 one of the most interesting in North Dakota history. Virtually the entire League program was enacted: our three-member Industrial Commission was created, with a broad mandate to "engage in the business of manufacturing and marketing farm products" and to "establish a system of warehouses, elevators, flour mills, factories, plants, machinery and equipments, owned, controlled and operated by it."

This was a breathtaking mandate. If the League program had been fully implemented, we might have established a bunch of state-owned banks, state-owned elevators in many locations, state slaughter houses and cold-storage warehouses, and a range of value-added agricultural processing factories (all socialist) scattered across the North Dakota landscape. What we wound up with was a single state-owned bank (Bismarck) and a single state-owned elevator (Grand Forks). Even so, by 1920 North Dakota was "the most socialist place in America."

Well, my, how things change.

The question that puzzles all historians is how the little conservative backwater of North Dakota found itself in the midst of a socialist revolution. We were then, as we are now, a very conservative people. Some historians say those pesky Norwegian immigrants carried a reformist sensibility with them to Ellis Island. Others point to the worldwide workers movement of that era. It is true that the period between 1900 and 1945 represents the high-water mark of international socialism. In thinking about the meteoric rise of the Nonpartisan League it is worth remembering that all the major European countries, including Great Britain, were teetering on the brink of socialist revolutions in the years before World War I. North Dakota's radicalized farmers took power in 1916-1918, just at the moment of the Russian Revolution (1917).

My answer is simple. I believe there are two types of radicals—ideological radicals and reactive radicals. The first category includes people like Lenin and Trotsky or—in the American context—Thomas Paine and even Thomas Jefferson. These are men (and women) who possess what might be called "the revolutionary temperament." It's amazing to me that Jefferson could have been elected to the American Presidency. His writings are full of surprisingly radical pronouncements like, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Such radicals are comparatively rare—and they almost never taste power.

The other brand of "radicals" are essentially reactionaries. They have no instinct for revolution. They are, by habit, non-political. They just want to live their lives with economic sufficiency and something like a "square deal," to use Theodore Roosevelt's favorite formulation. They have no particular ideology. They are certainly not averse to the profit motive. They do not wish to redistribute wealth or level the social order. But when the existing social, political or economic systems are rigged to exploit them to the point of peonage, when they cannot make ends meet no matter how hard they work, otherwise conservative people can be driven into temporary radicalism. One of my oldest friends once gave me perfect advice: "never drive anyone into a corner they cannot get out of except by going over the top of you."

This is what happened in North Dakota in 1915. The actual winning of power in 1916 and 1918 was such an ecstasy that it siphoned off much of the revolutionary anger. It was a stunning and largely unexpected political catharsis, but it perhaps had the unintended effect of returning many of the "radicals" who pulled it off back to a kind of complacency. Meanwhile, World War I broke the trajectory of the farmers' movement. Prices rose. There was a worldwide demand for maximum production. The Wilson administration passed repressive crisis legislation that crushed dissent: the Espionage Act of 1917 (still in effect, though often amended), the Sedition Act of 1918, etc. Townley was jailed in Jackson, Minnesota, for impeding recruitment of the farm boys he rightly recognized as "cannon fodder" for the plutocratic munitions industries fattening on war profits (and profiteering).

Once the Great War had changed everything, and a few of the League's goals had been met with largely symbolic reforms, North Dakotans returned to their normal, largely apolitical, and traditionally conservative ways.

And today, the great-grandchildren of that radical episode are having a mushy love affair with Big Biz. This would have killed Townley; it would sadden Jefferson; and probably it would hurl TR right back into The Arena.

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North Dakota: A Child of Yesterday, Child of Promise

Even by American standards, North Dakota is a child of yesterday. The Declaration of Independence was written 238 years ago, and the Constitution 227 years ago. I spent some time last week with Grace Link, the former First Lady of North Dakota. She is 96. That means she has been alive for 76% of North Dakota history. She is strong and healthy and eager to talk the issues. "Well," she says, pushing a plate of homemade cookies across the table, "I guess I am slowing down a little." And all I could think was, when I'm 96, I will have been dead for 15 years. It's ok to slow down a little. There are many North Dakotans older than Grace. We have been a state for not much more than one long lifetime. Art Link's parents were immigrants who came to northwestern North Dakota from the Sudetenland. We are that recent on the world's stage.

In England I lived for a time in a house that was built 300 years before President Harrison signed North Dakota's statehood papers in 1889. We are just getting started here.

It always makes me a little uneasy, however, to conflate North Dakota statehood with North Dakota history. Native Americans had been in this place for thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands of years, before white people stumbled in. They had developed an integrated and sustainable lifeway in a very harsh environment that left a light, almost imperceptible footprint on the land. We should have listened more and conquered less; we still should. The earthlodge villages clustered around the Heart and Knife Rivers were the epicenter of a continental trade network before Columbus first held a mariner's compass in his hands. Even the white history of North Dakota is much longer than the story of our statehood suggests. The French explorer Verendrye was here in 1738, and Lewis and Clark lingered among the Mandan and Hidatsa in 1804-05. It's easy to slip into Eurocentrism in talking about the history of North Dakota.

The first person to file a homestead claim in North Dakota was a man named Joseph Rolette. The date was June 10, 1868. I have never been to the site, Section 4, Township 163-57, Pembina County, but I mean to make a pilgrimage. Actually, he never proved up his claim. By 1925, 39% of North Dakota's total acreage had been homesteaded, 17,417,466 acres, 118,472 total claims. Only Nebraska had a higher percentage of land taken up by homesteaders. The number of farms has steadily declined in the course of North Dakota history. Today, there are approximately 31,000 farms in the state. It goes down by 200 or so per year, though I am predicting that that number will begin to rise as the "new agrarian movement" takes root on the northern plains and young couples create smaller non-traditional farms like islands in an agribusiness sea. Meanwhile, after the Civil War, a huge swath of North Dakota was given to the railroads as an incentive to thrust their rails across so unlikely a landscape. The total runs to more than 10 million acres.

The first hundred years of North Dakota history represent our agrarian phase. We all know this story: family farmers struggling to eke out a living against seemingly impossible odds: a fierce climate with a short growing season, periodic drought, a weak credit and transportation infrastructure, and—frequently enough—exploitation by out-of-state railroads, milling companies, and banks. That first century was punctuated with periodic attempts by the farmers to take control of their destiny: the Grange, the Populist Party, the Farmers Alliance, the Socialist Party, the Nonpartisan League, the Farmers' Holiday Association, the cooperative movement, etc. In the end, it was the New Deal and the postwar federal Farm Program, coupled with reasonable consolidation, that brought economic stability to the North Dakota family farm.

What we needed most of all was economic diversity. Great leaders like William L. Guy (1960-72) worked to make sure that some of the value-added remained in North Dakota by way of mine-mouth coal generating plants, and sugar beet processing within our boundaries; and Governor Ed Schafer (1992-2000) carefully crafted a business-friendly climate by way of our tax and regulatory protocols.

Since the ND Centennial (1989), and certainly since the Millennium, North Dakota has been beginning to pass out of its agrarian phase into something else. Agriculture was still the number one industry in North Dakota, but fewer young people wanted to stay on the land, and the rural population of North Dakota had begun a dramatic mass exodus to our cities. Then came the Bakken Oil Boom. If ever there was a fundamental "game changer" in North Dakota history, it was the confluence of a limitless volume of oil bearing shale and breathtaking new extraction technologies. Agriculture will, of course, continue, but, west of the Missouri River, we are rapidly becoming an industrialized landscape that produces more wealth from carbon than from wheat, cattle, and corn. It's going to be wild ride in the next 50 years.

Still, to understand what it is (or at least what it has been) to be a North Dakotan, you have to drive on blacktop roads for five or six hours on a gray wintry day with some ground drifting of snow flurries. It may be mid-morning or mid-afternoon, but the clouds are dark and looming and close to the earth, and the sun, if it appears at all, is nothing but a pale silhouetted disk you can sometimes make out where the cloud cover is thin. It's day, but it feels as if God forgot to turn all the banks of lights on. The earth is inert and everything seems to be in hibernation. The trees of the shelter belts are bare. From inside your car you can almost hear the rattle of the bleached out corn stalks in the wind. A tumbleweed rolls over the gray asphalt on its way to Texas. You drive past one abandoned farmstead after the next. You know the ones that are still occupied, because there are six or eight vehicles parked in the circular drive. You can drive all day through that countryside and it looks essentially the same all day. It's not quite flat. Here and there you cross a coulee where the road dips down to accommodate, or you climb up over a rill, and always you feel the swell of the Great Plains. It is a vast brooding landscape in every direction seemingly to the end of the earth. Every twenty minutes you pass through a town or what used to be a town, with a silver water tower with some painted out graffiti on it, a hapless main street where you find a Rexall Drug store and think, "Wow, there are still Rexall Drug stores!" A café with eight big pickups parked haphazardly around its corner lot. Three bars. A post office in a Quonset. The library/senior citizens center in the old J.C. Penny building. And then suddenly you have drifted past the King Kone Drive In at the end of town, "closed for the winter Go Bobcats!!" and you are back out in the big open again, and the ground drifts are getting a little more frequent and ominous.

You feel free. And you feel little. At the same time.

This is North Dakota. The land matters at least as much as the civilization we have plopped on it. At least for now.

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Happy Birthday North Dakota: You Are Now 125!

Today is North Dakota's 125th birthday. On this day in 1989, at 3:40 EST, President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the statehood papers for North and South Dakota, signed them, and shuffled them again, so that it would be impossible to know whether we were the 39th or 40th state. Today North Dakota is giving itself a fabulous 125th birthday gift. The magnificent $52 million expansion of the North Dakota Heritage Center is celebrating its grand opening today. Our state museum has always been great. Now it is world class.

After a 125-year struggle to forge a viable rural civilization in an exceptionally challenging environment at the heart of North America (Eric Sevareid's "blank rectangle"), about as far from the centers of power, money, culture, and access as it is possible to be, suddenly everything seems possible for North Dakota. Many of the bedeviling historic problems of North Dakota life have suddenly been "solved" or at least addressed in a way we could not have expected back in 1989, when we "celebrated" our state Centennial in a somewhat muted and anxious manner. Those historic challenges--outmigration, rural decline, the slow death of small towns, underfunded public institutions, including K-12 schools and higher education, economic marginality, over-dependence on agriculture and federal aid—all seem less dramatic today.

For most of North Dakota history we have been a quiet agrarian people. As late as 1975 it would not have been inappropriate for us to erected winter-welded signs at the portals leading into North Dakota, saying, "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people." That's Thomas Jefferson speaking, the man who bought North Dakota but never visited it, a man who never had to feed calves at 47 below or shovel out the fermented grain at the bottom of the bin.

As long as food matters—and what matters more in life?—North Dakota will be primarily a farm state. Oil may bring in greater revenues, but I agree with the Jeffersonians, including former ND Governor Arthur A. Link, that the highest and best use of our land is family farms. In fact, I believe a new agrarian movement (even revolution) is taking root in America, and that the number of farms in North Dakota will start to grow, though they will not be the industrial giants of the late twentieth century.

We have never been a glamorous people and the great majority of us could never be accused of being fashionable. For most of our history we have found it possible to live here only through hard work, gumption and grim perseverance, frugality, stoicism, thrift, and extremely modest expectations. Almost every one of us has kin who were cash poor all of their lives, conservative in every purchase and every life decision, dressed usually in patched and hand-me-down clothing, humble to the point of self-effacement, but who managed somehow to put one or more of their children through college, and died in genuine prosperity. I remember watching my grandmother Rhoda pay an old hired man at the end of the wheat harvest. She carefully put a few dollars into his gnarled hands, and then pressed a handful of coins into his palm. She paid him to the penny, and there was no possibility that she would round up his wages to the next dollar. Things were that tight.

That set of dynamics made us who we are. There is something magnificent about it.

It was said of Thomas Jefferson that he could "tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet." For that he is regarded as America's Renaissance man. But the farmers and ranchers of North Dakota, and their sons and daughters, can—even now--strip an engine, cultivate a field, judge a rodeo, weld a chassis, build a barn or fence, wire a house, pull a calf, roof a shed, dig a drain field, drive a school bus, milk a cow, eviscerate an antelope, can cucumbers and tomatoes, back a horse trailer into a crowded space, chair a meeting, or lead a capital campaign to build a new church. This massive, marvelous competence and pragmatism has allowed us to survive in the semi-arid, windswept, and sub-arctic place we call North Dakota. We Dakotans are outstanding at the basics, and—in the end—the basics matter most of all. When the national or world collapse comes, where do you want to be, midtown Manhattan or Mott, Los Angeles or Linton?

We have been through some very tough times in the history of North Dakota. In 1933, for example, the average North Dakotan earned $145 per year, compared to the national average, in that terrible time, of $375. More North Dakotans abandoned farms and left the state during the 1930s than at any other time during our history. Steinbeck could more accurately have written The Grapes of Wrath about North Dakota than Oklahoma and Arkansas. Say what you want about FDR and the New Deal, but his rural stabilization programs saved North Dakota, and rural electrification was one of the most significant things that ever happened on the Great Plains. At one point, in 1935, 175,000 North Dakotans were on direct federal assistance. The federal government has played an essential role in North Dakota's survival.

Historically, we have exported wheat and cattle, coal, and oil, but also topsoil, water, and our young people. Things are changing now, thanks mostly to new technologies. The Bakken boom is convincing many of our children to stay in North Dakota, rather than fulfill their early adult dreams elsewhere, and the new amenities that come with economic success make North Dakota more attractive in cuisine and culture than ever before. Genetic modification has brought us drought-resistant strains of wheat and corn that enable us to harvest abundance much more often than in the first 100 years of North Dakota history. North Dakota was one of the pioneers of no-till agriculture. Soil erosion—one of the most significant problems of North Dakota history—is now largely a forgotten issue.

From an economic point of view (jobs, prosperity, lowered taxes, state budget surpluses, opportunity for new businesses, adequate funding of our basic institutions), this is the very best time in our 125-year history. It seems to me that no rational being, surveying the long, sometimes grim, struggle of North Dakota history, can wish the Bakken boom had never happened or would go away. (Managing it wisely, at a sustainable pace, with the fewest growing pains, is another matter altogether). If we had to choose birthday messages for North Dakota on November 2, 2014, we'd want to quote Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who told the people of Great Britain in 1957, "You've never had it so good."

Life is easier now. There is far less heavy lifting.

My concern is whether the "new North Dakota" will be as successful in shaping human character, resourcefulness, and integrity as the old one that is so undeniably and perhaps inevitably passing into ancient myth. There is no turning back. Most North Dakotans frankly do not wish to go back to or even romanticize that more strenuous, marginal, hardscrabble life. But all of us, I believe, recognize that something that has been essential to our identity as a people is being lost, and that in some important way we will be less even as we are more. That's the paradox of modernity.

I love this place.

Happy birthday North Dakota.

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Somewhere Below the Bombast, Real Issues Await Us

I don't know about you, but I will be mighty glad come November 5 when the 2014 election season is over, and we can all calm down and get on with our lives again. If America was still a healthy democracy, we would all now be engaged in careful and respectful political debate. We'd be filled with pride to live in a nation where so much actual power resides in the hands of the people. We'd be agreeing on the facts, and debating the merits of the candidates and the issues. It is not civic pride that I feel, however, but confusion and disgust. If you have been reading the expanded letters to the editor page of this newspaper, or watching the television ads, you have been provided a short course in all the logical fallacies and deliberate political distortions available to human ingenuity.

Let the yard signs come down. Of this much I am sure: when archaeologists dig up Bismarck 10,000 years from now, they are going to wonder just who this "Sitte" was. And Oban and Potter and Martinson and Kaiser.

If we were wise, we'd ban all political ads on television. There are really only two types: the Reaganesque "It's Morning in America Again" ads with children playing in parks and farmers leaning proudly against combines; or "Willie Horton" ads designed to damage one's opponent by proving that he is a corrupt hack who is soft on crime (or race). Both types engage in subliminal messaging. In other words, they are not really about public policy or even political character, but rather about our primal hopes and primal fears. When was the last time you saw a political ad on television and took it at face value as a reliable, fair, and representative short portrait of a candidate or an issue? What is the useful civic takeaway of an ad in which a rancher pets his hunting dog and says he's a sixth generation Montanan? Impressive though that is, how will that make him a better U.S. Senator? It doesn't tell us how he will vote on immigration reform. It doesn't even tell us how he will vote on the farm bill.

If we took the millions of dollars that have been spent in North Dakota this year for the ballot measures alone, and spent it instead on civics classes in our public schools, we'd be infinitely better off. Among other things, that money could be used to train young people to see through the lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks, demonization of the opposing point of view, false claims, red herrings, and straw man "arguments" that now pass for political discourse.

First I see an attractive young mother from a small town who says that local pharmacies are essential to the sanctity of rural life. Half an hour later I see an attractive young mother from a small town who says that she'd be able to afford antibiotics for her children's ear infections if only we'd permit fair competition to drive down the prices. Later still I see an attractive young mother from a small town declare that once the big box stores get control of our pharmaceutical supply, they'll jack up the prices, just you wait. By the time the evening is over all I want to do is move to a small town--because the camerawork is always done on a perfect July evening, just before sunset; people are greeting each cheerfully other on main street; everyone has a world-class dog; and, as Garrison Keillor says, all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children, even those with ear infections, are above average. Give me some political ads shot in ground blizzards.

I'm sure you have seen those electronic dog fences that mark the perimeter of someone's property. When the dog gets close to the perimeter it is gently warned by a bell or a sweet little vibration in its electronic collar, but if it goes over the line it receives a shock. After a few weeks the dog becomes a model citizen. If there were any real justice in the world, there would be a little shock when citizens or political handlers stray from the merits of the issue or the provable facts. And when a political candidate lies, or attacks his (or her) opponent, or tries to hide behind veterans or the American flag or the Bible, that should bring on the taser.

Here are some of the "arguments" I would like to see discouraged by timely electric shocks:

1. Questioning the motives of the other citizens. Example: "Anyone who votes against Measure 6 has never gone through a divorce?" Really? How do you know?

2. Deliberately exaggerating the consequences or the cost of some proposed measure. The dollar numbers being thrown around about Measure 5, for example, the Clean Water amendment, rise to more insane and apocalyptic levels week by week. We need to vote on the merits of this proposal, not on the myths.

3. If you read letters to the editor across North Dakota, the writer's preferred vote always leads to paradise on earth or at least preserves the happy status quo, and the other option (the wrong vote) leads to the end of civilization as we know it. This is known as "binary thinking" or "the law of the occluded middle."

4. Accusing "out of state interests" of intruding themselves into the purity of North Dakota life. In almost every case, both sides take all the out of state money they can. I find it interesting that a state whose shale fields are now being developed with gigantic quantities of out of state money provided mostly by out of state entities to bring up oil that mostly benefits out of state interests, could be so prickly about "out of state" intrusion into the political process. Perhaps I am missing something.

5. Playing the "freedom" card. Example: "If you ban smoking in restaurants, you are letting them take away our freedoms, the kind our Founding Fathers intended, the kind we fought for in World War II?" Really? That's what WWII was about? Who knew?

And 6. Normalizing the worst-case scenario and the slippery slope. Here's the logic. "If Measure 7 passes, the Rexall Drug Store in such and such a village may have to close. Ergo, if Measure 7 passes, all small town drug stores will close. If all small town drugstores close, our children will die of strep throat. This will lead to the collapse of rural America. Do you love your country?" This is also known as reductio ad absurdam. But you see it every day in some form or other.

Call me a naïve idealist, but it seems to me that the system only really works if election "debate" clarifies the issues and provides citizens with the information they need to make responsible choices on election day. Given all the time and the vast sums of money devoted to these elections, the citizen who walks into the voting booth should have a clear idea of what a proposed ballot measure would do, what it would not do, what problem it is trying to solve, at what cost, what problems it might in turn create, who is likely to gain from its passage, and who is likely to lose. In other words, what we need is good information, not political spin.

As usual, we'll muddle through. But we deserve better.

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If We Were Still a Republic, Heavy Security Would Not Be Necessary

"When I hear another express an opinion, which is not mine, I say to myself, He has a right to his opinion, as I to mine; why should I question it? His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote to bring all men by force of argument, to one opinion?"

TJ letter to his favorite grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph
November 28, 1808
  
Thomas Jefferson had no Secret Service protection. He walked to his inauguration. He rode his horse alone around Washington, D.C., during his eight years as President. No attempts were made on his life.

The recent breakdown in Secret Service protection of President Barack Obama has alarmed the American people. Several individuals have gotten over the White House fence and even into the building itself. On one recent occasion, the President rode in an elevator with a man who had a gun on his person. We are fortunate that there has not been a serious assassination attempt on President Obama. The head of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson, resigned in early October in the face of these disturbing incidents.

The U.S. Secret Service was created in July 1865 to combat an epidemic of counterfeit currency. It was not until the 20th century that it began to protect national officers, including the President.

The first Presidential assassination attempt occurred on January 30, 1835, nine years after the death of Jefferson. An unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence approached President Jackson after he left a funeral held in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol. His gun misfired. Jackson, 67, who was a soldier and a serial duelist, clubbed his attacker several times with his cane. Lawrence managed to pull out a second pistol. Fortunately it misfired when he pulled the trigger.

The first President to be assassinated was Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865. After that James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy were assassinated in office, though many more attempts were made on sitting Presidents.

Jefferson never feared assassination, and he passed his entire, sometimes controversial life, without a security detail. He did, however, receive his share of hate mail. During his second term, when he chose to respond to British and French hostilities on the high seas with a total economic embargo, his popularity was seriously damaged. One citizen wrote, "You have sat aside and trampled on our most dearest rights bought by the blood of our ancestors." Another exploded with, "You red-headed son of a bitch." Jefferson's response was more bemused than alarmed. "They are almost universally the productions of the most ill-tempered & rascally part of the country," he wrote to his closest friend James Madison, "often evidently written from tavern scenes of drunkenness."

There may be several reasons why no attempts were made on Jefferson's life. First, as the Andrew Jackson incident proves, guns were relatively primitive in Jefferson's day. Each gun fired a single bullet only, and then took a considerable time to reload. Second, the President was not as well known then as he is now, in the age of hypermedia. Most citizens of Jefferson's time had no idea what the President looked like, and they would have had a very hard time picking him out of a crowd. Most Americans lived their entire lives then without any contact with the national government of the United States. Not only was all politics local then, but life was profoundly local in every way.

Most important, perhaps, is the fact that we were a republic then and we are a quasi-monarchical nation now. We are closer to Rome in the age of Augustus than we are to the illusory republic of the Founding Fathers. Augustus pretended that the Roman republic still existed, paying a kind of sentimental-cynical lip service to old republic forms, while ruling the emerging Roman Empire as an uncrowned monarch. So little was at stake in Jefferson's time that it would have been unlikely for a citizen to fixate on any national figure. Jefferson defined his role in the most restrictive and unambitious way. His goal was to reduce the national debt, reduce the size of the army and navy, eliminate internal federal taxes, and return as much sovereignty as possible to the individual states. Not much to decry in terms of Presidential authority.

Thomas Jefferson was a cheerful stoic, who didn't take himself too seriously, and who had a confident, serene, and undramatic view of his life as.as statesman. It would have been uncharacteristic of him to think about personal security. His daughter Maria was more concerned about the loneliness and craftiness of the White House than she was about security issues.

Read the full text of Jefferson's superb letter to his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

Further Reading:

• Jefferson's English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo and the Republican Revolution by Burton Spivak
• To His Excellency Thomas Jefferson: Letters to a President edited by Jack McLaughlin
• Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty by Jerry W. Knudson

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One Glorious Stolen Day Before the Snow Flies

Knowing that winter cannot be far off, I stole a whole day out of my life last week and ventured to Sitting Bull's cabin on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Sitting Bull (1831-1890) was more or less just minding his own business at a lonely homesite a long way from Fort Yates when Standing Rock Indian agent James McLaughlin decided to have him arrested in mid-December 1890. McLaughlin regarded Sitting Bull as a thorn in his side, an impediment to assimilation, an aging hero of the Resistance whose very existence might inspire other Hunkpapa Lakota to hold out against the conquest of their lands and way of life.

McLaughlin authorized Sitting Bull's arrest by a squad of "metal breasts," i.e., a large force of Indian policemen backed up (at a distance) by white soldiers in case things go out of hand. The dawn arrest was bungled, the inevitable skirmish ensued, and the great Lakota seer was shot in the back of the head at point blank range. Thus died ignominiously and entirely unnecessarily one of the great figures in Dakota (and North Dakota) history. His role in life, forced upon him by iron historical circumstance, was to defend his people and his homeland from those who came to take it away for their own purposes. Among other things, he was one of the masterminds of the stunning Lakota and Cheyenne victory at the Little Big Horn in June 1876. By the time Agent McLaughlin decided to eliminate him fourteen years later, Sitting Bull was really not much more than a harmless old man trying to live out his last years as far away from white people as possible.

Last year I learned the hard way that it is impossible to reach the cabin site after the snow flies. So I drove first to McLaughlin, South Dakota, and then on back roads to the turnoff, after which you bounce and jolt along to the cabin site through roads so rutted that your head caroms off the roof of the car with some regularity. It's precisely the kind of road that should lead to Sitting Bull's cabin: not for the faint of heart, not for all seasons, rugged enough to make you remember it's a pilgrimage not a casual jaunt.

I've been to the cabin site maybe five times, all in the last few years. It's one of the most beautiful places on the Great Plains, on the north bank of the Grand River, across from some rugged river hills, nestled in a broad grass valley inhabited only by cattle (and ghosts). You have to want to go there. The quiet at the site is so complete that for a few minutes you almost cannot believe that such a place can still exist in our bustling noisy world. As I sat where the cabin once stood, I heard a lone late-season meadowlark sing its perfect little song. Unfortunately, I do not speak its language, so I could not learn what it had to teach.

The cabin is long gone. What remains are a small fenced enclosure with a marker (for others killed in the skirmish), a big metal SD historical sign, and such reverence objects as pilgrims choose to leave at the site. There are always a few medicine bundles of bright cloth tied to the fence, which encloses a twenty by thirty foot patch of sacred ground. The medicine bundles usually contain small quantities of tobacco. Once I found a beaten up copy of the Bible there. Often there are small pieces of animal bone, or metal rings, or beads.

The historical sign was written long ago by South Dakota white historians, before the American Indian Movement (AIM), before the Indian cultural renaissance of the 1970s. The phraseology of the sign has a somewhat condescending feel to it (it is usually the victors who write history), so a few "rasp and file revisionists" have done some careful editing of the raised metal text. Where the white historians described Sitting Bull as a "clever prophet," the Lakota (or pro-Lakota) "editors" have filed away the arguably belittling adjective "clever." The original writer summed things up by calling Sitting Bull "misguided." That word has been more or less obliterated by those who do not share that view.

Vandalism or not, I am filled with admiration for what the revisionists have done at the site. They could have torn down the sign altogether. They could have shot it full of holes, or thrown paint or blood on it, or spray-painted expletives across the full text. Instead, with considerable care and precision they have filed off the most Eurocentric phrases on the sign, but left the bulk of the historical inscription in place. You can still make out the words they have removed—probably that was purposeful—but at the same time you have been made aware that the dominant culture's interpretation of this important historical moment is no longer acceptable, at least to the individuals who spent several hours working the revision with hand tools. It is clear that they had strong feelings about what was offensive in the original language, but they have engaged in an act of historic dialogue rather than mere outrage. That's precisely what we most need as we think about North Dakota history in a new, holistic, fully contextualized, and nuanced way.

If I were teaching a course on the history of the American West, I would ask my students to find out what they could about who wrote the original text for the sign, where, and especially when, and then to think hard about the revisions—especially how they simultaneously preserve and yet re-write the original text. Then I'd have them find other historic markers on the Great Plains, particularly those concerned with cultural conflicts, and think about ways in which they might be re-read and re-written in light of what we now know about the complexities of our history.

The Grand River meanders along just south of the cabin site. Like the Heart River or the Little Missouri, it is a grasslands river, here and there graced with stands of cottonwood trees. About a quarter mile downstream on my side of the river I saw what I thought was the perfect cottonwood, tall and very old, standing a little apart from the rest, with a triangular array of golden yellow leaves high up, shimmering in the fall sun, golden, yellow, slightly orange, some still green, all brilliant and the whole effect simply magnificent. I ventured over to the base of the great tree. It almost certainly was not there in 1890, but it sprang up within living memory of those dark and bloody days on the northern plains.

As I lay on my back on the grass, hands cupped behind my head, deep in the grass, almost buried in the grass, listening to the breeze dance in the brittle cottonwood choir above me, soaking up the last squibs of the summer sun, I thought about the coming of winter to the northern plains. It is coming, like it or not. The trees will soon be bare. Many of the dirt trails that I love most in North Dakota will soon be closed for the winter.

But for the moment I was just a lazing creature in the tall grass, toasting in the afternoon sun, in one of the least industrialized places of America, on a carpe diem journey into the middle of nowhere.

This is what we must conserve.

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The Jefferson Hour at Tidewater Community College (October 15, 2014)

Clay Jenkinson, a humanities scholar who adopts the persona of Thomas Jefferson, engaged students and answered questions during a morning session on Oct. 15 at Tidewater Community College's Chesapeake Campus. Students from American literature classes and others came to the Black Box Theatre in the Chesapeake Academic Building for the one-man performance.

www.tcc.edu/arts

A Sigh of the Loss of the Age When Dickens Mattered

As Dickens wrote, we live in the best of times, we live in the worst of times. I’m giving a couple of guest lectures at BSC for my friend Kimberly Crowley. The novel we chose together is Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” published in London in 1861, at the same time the American Civil War was beginning.

The students are smart, engaging, and eager to learn. They have way more street sense than I had at their age, and they have been exposed, in their short lives, to a breathtakingly wide range of cultural stimuli.

Still, I don’t think I have had much success with Dickens. I certainly don’t blame them. But I feel a powerful sense of loss. It is possible that we truly live in a post-literate time. People read, of course, perhaps now more than ever, but the number of people who read Dickens (1812-1870) or Dostoevsky, etc. is diminishing rapidly until I think we may be reaching the collapse point.

There was a time not so long ago when you could walk into any college literature course anywhere in the English-speaking world, slap a Dickens novel down on the desk, and expect students to have read it a week hence. And most of them would do so. It would not be easy reading. But they would do it, because there was still widespread agreement that it was important to read such books, and our K-12 educational system still worked hard to prepare young people for such challenges.

In my time, the only way around actually reading a classic was Cliffs Notes. The stigma of being caught consulting such a cheater’s guide was huge. Today, thanks to the Internet, there are hundreds of websites dedicated to Dickens and “Great Expectations,” many of them outstanding, some with sample student essays, and all with the kinds of study questions that help you get through a hard book for the first time. Today it is possible to have a serious encounter with a great novel (or biography, or work of philosophy or theology) without ever reading the book. Think of that.

I’m a slow reader — I believe it has held me back in life — so I have to really commit myself to read a book as long as “Moby Dick” or “Crime and Punishment.” If I started reading “War and Peace” today, and only interrupted my reading long enough to sleep and eat, I’d need a very long week to get through its 1,440 pages (567,000 words). And who ever has such a week of unstructured time?

I’m both a professional reader and old enough to have been educated in the “big hard book” tradition of American education. If I find it hard to carve out enough time to read “Great Expectations” (185,000 words, 500 pages), imagine how much harder it is for students, who did not grow up in that more bookish era, who are usually working part or full time in addition to taking college courses.

Besides, these young people have never not known television. I grew up when there were just two channels, when you had to get up out of your chair to turn the channel, and when the broadcast day ended after the nightly news. These students grew up in a world saturated by media; now they can watch or hear virtually anything on demand.

Most television remains the “vast wasteland” that FCC chairman Newton Minow described back in 1961, but with hundreds of cable or satellite stations, and a virtually infinite range of Amazon Prime or Netflix options, there is now always something of high quality worth watching. In that “matrix,” Tolstoy doesn’t stand a chance.

We have a breathtaking array of ways to entertain ourselves. In Dickens’ time, there were few. We must simply face the truth. Books have come to play a pretty minor role in personal entertainment in the 21st century. I believe it is important not to wring one’s hands and bemoan this loss as if it were the “death of civilization as we know it.” I certainly don’t think it does any good to browbeat college students for not knowing what they have never been taught or expected to know. We must meet them where they are, and give them the tools they will need to thrive in the decades through which they will lead their adult lives.

But. We are all subject to the human condition. By which I mean that we all dream beyond our capacity to achieve. We all know jealousy, envy, and impossible longings. We all have self-doubts. We are all subject to waves of self-destructive activity. We all have periods when we doubt our faith. Everyone steps back from time to time to wonder what it’s all about, what the meaning of life is, how old and big and purposeful the universe is, and how it came to be.

We wonder why we were born, what our larger purpose is, and where we go when we die. All of us, I believe, bear scars that cover soul wounds that can never fully be healed. All of us do things we know are wrong, and then we wonder how that could have happened. And we know ecstasies that are impossible to communicate to others.

That’s part of what I mean by the “human condition.” Where do we turn for clarification, for insight, for possible answers? Some turn to God and prayer. Some turn to priests and pastors and psychologists. Some turn to family and friends. I turn to all of these for help, but principally I turn to the humanities, the set of texts that wrestle incessantly with these very questions.

I’m not trying to generalize for the culture at large, but I know I don’t speak merely for myself or English majors, when I say the world will be a lesser place without Charles Dickens in it. Dickens gets at some aspects of the human condition better than anyone else who has ever tried.

Dickens illuminates the life of anyone who has experienced family dysfunction (and who has not), anyone who has felt the heartlessness of the society in which she or he lives, anyone who has been damaged by the pace and the cost and the injustices of the legal system, anyone who has any form of obsessive compulsive disorder, or lives with someone who suffers from that malady.

Dickens’ ability to explore and unpack the human character is stunning. His prose sometimes takes your breath away. There are passages in Dickens so great that you literally have to get up from where you were sitting because something in his way with words, some offhand psychological insight, some perfect detail, or his ability to articulate what you already knew but could never have put into words, forces you out of your seat.

At that glorious moment you want more than anything else someone on earth to share the experience with. The terrible loneliness of reading is that there is almost never anyone to call or write or reach for in the dark.

But the chief reason to read Dickens is the almost infinite pleasure he provides if you can steal a few hours from the noise and pace of our times, sit in a good chair, and surrender to the imaginative universe of one of the world’s greatest geniuses.

Start with "Great Expectations."

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Want to Make Things Worse? Abolish the State Board of Higher Education

When we go to the polls on November 4, we'd be making a serious mistake, even a colossal mistake, if we abolish the State Board of Higher Education, and replace it with a three-person commission. I repeat: as we seek to get better accountability and performance in higher education in North Dakota, the very worst thing we could do would be to pass this dangerous amendment (Measure 3), which would throw our entire system into pandemonium. It might even lead to an exodus of students from our 11 colleges and universities.

Higher education is expensive and complex. We need a fairly large and diverse State Board that represents every region of North Dakota, and brings a range of backgrounds, perspectives, ages, professions, and expertises to the table. A three-member commission appointed by the governor would be too small and too beholden to the person who appointed them, to protect the autonomy of our colleges and universities. Autonomy is the key word. Imagine for a moment a system that would permit the governor (whoever she or he is) or the legislature to start micro-managing higher education. Oy vey. The existing State Board of Higher Education is the right instrument for governing the system. It needs to be tweaked a bit, I think, but not abolished.

If we did this rash and unnecessary thing, we would be jeopardizing the accreditation of our 11 state colleges and universities. And no, this is not some sort of convenient talking point for those who advocate retaining the existing system. It is the stark truth. Accreditation of North Dakota's colleges and universities is granted by an entity known as the Higher Learning Commission, headquartered in Chicago, one of six regional accrediting organizations in the United States. The Higher Learning Commission exists to make sure that institutions of higher education meet certain standards, so that the public (and taxpayers) know that our large investment in higher education is paying off. We routinely certify and license accountants, dentists, doctors, nurses, even lawyers. Those "accrediting" entities protect us from fraud and shoddy work. That's precisely why we accredit institutions of higher education.

The Higher Learning Commission has no interest in intruding itself into North Dakota's political arena, but it has been asked by a range of disparate individuals, what would happen if the people of North Dakota passed this amendment. Their answer, very cautiously stated and with many humble disclaimers, is simple: chaos, and a serious threat to continued accreditation.

Delivering college and university education to young people in the 21st century is proving to be a complex and at times problematic business. I can understand why the public is frustrated. Tuition just keeps going up and up, in spite of the fact that North Dakota is now a very wealthy state. Each of the 11 institutions in North Dakota, and particularly the two flagship universities on the eastern border, at times appear to regard themselves as independent city-states like Florence or Venice, too proud and too grand to be governed by "outsiders" (like the State Board or the Chancellor of Higher Education). Meanwhile, something like 20% of the students who arrive within college and university gates require remedial training in math and English. The list is long.

So what is to be done?

The answer is not to blow up the system out of frustration, and install something that has not been carefully studied. The proposal before us—to eliminate the State Board and create a three-person commission—was hastily thrown together at the end of the last legislative session. It was born of frustration and impatience rather than careful reflection. If the people of North Dakota want to make fundamental changes in the way higher education is governed, we should create a blue ribbon commission to study best practices throughout the United States and bring a series of recommendations to the legislature, or empower a legislative interim committee to explore options and report back. At the very least, we should enter into a serious dialogue with the Higher Learning Commission to see what reforms or new models would meet their exacting standards, and which would be counter-productive.

A state government does many things—pave roads, collect taxes, manage wildlife—but higher education is a uniquely complex undertaking that needs a very significant measure of independence from the routine legislative and bureaucratic process. Jefferson famously said that his University of Virginia "will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind, for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead." To protect the intellectual life of colleges and universities, where professors sometimes produce scholarly discourse that is unpopular or provocative, where many essential research projects seem abstruse or frivolous to "common sense" citizens looking in from the outside, we need to maintain a wall of separation between state government and the sacred work of the universities.

The existing State Board of Higher Education was created to protect our colleges from the political meddling of North Dakota's populist Bill Langer (Governor 1932-34, 1937-39), who fired seven NDSU (NDAC) employees for failing to contribute to one of his campaigns. The Agricultural College (as it was then known) lost it accreditation for several years owing to Langer's machinations. The State Board of Higher Education was created thereafter to ensure academic freedom at our colleges and universities, and autonomy from political pressures.

I do believe we need some structural changes in the way we constitute the State Board. I favor a variation of what in judicial circles is known as the "Missouri Plan." An independent committee recommends a slate of worthy applicants to the governor. The governor chooses someone from the list. Then the State Board has to confirm the appointment by formal vote. Two years later, that board member has to stand for re-election by the people of North Dakota. This would provide important new tools for both the people and the board. The board could, if it felt strongly enough, reject a governor's appointment. This would seldom happen. And the people could vote no confidence to a board member who is perceived to be out of sync with the will of the electorate. We want good individuals on the State Board, but we want them to be more accountable to the people who dig in their pockets to pay the taxes to support higher education.

In my opinion, we do not need radical changes. What we do need is pretty simple: a long period of stability and good governance. We've had a rocky last decade, but with the appointment of Larry Skogen as Interim Chancellor we have begun to find a rhythm of integrity, stability, honesty, and good sense. There is very widespread agreement in North Dakota that Dr. Skogen has been an excellent Chancellor, that he has stopped the hemorrhaging, rebuilt the University System office, and shown us the path to a new era of good feeling in higher education. If the State Board now hires a more permanent Chancellor of Skogen's integrity—someone who understands the unique character of North Dakota, someone who seeks both excellence and harmony—we will stop talking about the problems in higher ed and get on with the real business of our 11 colleges and universities: preparing young people to be complete human beings, to have the tools to realize their dreams, to be enlightened citizens of the United States, and to compete successfully in an increasingly complex global marketplace.

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Autumnal Setbacks in the Serenity of the Garden

Autumn is definitely here now, unmistakably. The sun now glares directly in my face as I drive to work at 7:45 a.m. It gets dark so early in the evening now that it feels as if the endless summer light just collapsed overnight sometime in the last three weeks.

The cottonwood leaves are starting to turn. There is nothing quite so lovely as the cottonwoods along the sacred Little Missouri River when they burst into fiery yellow-gold sometime in September. They define the term "achingly beautiful." Hiking the badlands on a crisp autumn morning when a jacket is required but soon becomes a burden, when the light is so clean that it clarifies the beauty of every object in nature, and the blue of the autumn sky makes you weak in the knees, that's reason enough to live in North Dakota. Hunters hunt as much for this as for the birds and venison. Hunting allows strong rural men to be poets for a few days per year without losing face. I love listening to farmers talk about the pure satisfaction of the first day of the wheat harvest without self-censorship, and hunters are positively romantic when they talk about the quality of the light and the sense of oneness with nature as they move through the grassland or stubble.

On the morning I wrote this I woke up three times before dawn—first, of course, to pee, which can be done on autopilot without really waking up at all. Then to pull a blanket off the floor below the bed and drag it up to my chin. Finally to go pheasant hunting in the back yard. But the blanket first.

One of the purest delights of autumn is those mornings when you wake up sometime before first light realizing that you are cold, because you fell asleep under a single sheet, and the temperature has dropped ten or fifteen degrees in the course of the night. You are still very tired and groggy, a little grumpy that this mere meteorological circumstance has disturbed your sleep, and for quite a while you pretend that you can maybe gut it out till your regular waking time without searching for the errant blanket at the foot of the bed. I don't know why we all try to resist just fetching the blanket and getting it over with—a simple motion, after which we know things are going to be much better--but we all procrastinate, losing good sleep meanwhile, until the discomfort finally becomes painful enough to tip us into action and force us to do what we should have done half an hour sooner.

I spent that much time, or more, doing a variety of heat and convection experiments under my bed sheet. I tucked the sheet right up to my chin. I got into the fetal position. Then I got into the fetal fetal position, until I looked like John Lennon on honeymoon. Then I pulled the sheet over my head. I thrashed in place a little to generate some internal fire. After all of that, I cursed under my breath and reached over the end of the bed to get the blanket, a lovely Pendleton of rich chocolate brown with wide rust and charcoal stripes. A perfect autumn blanket.

I love the process of warming up. Of course you want to be warm instantly, but if you are patient and just let the experience unfold, you can actually learn to enjoy the thermodynamics. The acute chill disappears almost immediately with the advent of a blanket, and then the gradual "toasting" process actually creates an exquisite joy. The continuing slight chill makes you glad to be alive. With any luck I can at this point fall asleep again for some really satisfying "top up" sleep.

Alas.

Sometime in late August, a little terrorist cluster of pheasants began to ravage my garden. I ran after them with a baseball bat. I sprinkled commercial varmint repellants along the perimeter. I begged my friend Jim to turn his faithful hunting dog Lizzie loose in the district. I bought live traps. I wired the sheaths of my sweet corn shut with rubber bands. I threw netting over my tomatoes. But these were pampered suburban welfare pheasants, who knew no decency and did not respect the rule of law. Eventually I bought a paint ball gun—actually a paint ball assault rifle—and began to obsess about revenge. Those pesky pheasants transformed me overnight from a serene Jeffersonian gardener to an enraged and pathetic Elmer Fudd.

Last weekend I gleaned most of the last produce from my garden, ate a couple of perfect minimalist garden meals, and began the autumn cleanup and shutdown. I pulled the tomato cages and stacked them as carefully as such unwieldy contraptions can be stacked. I pulled up all the gallon-sized tomato cans and put them in a neat pile. I mowed the whole garden and prepped it for a thorough fall tilling. The only produce still on the vine is in my raised Monticello garden: a few Hidatsa squashes, an ear or two of Mandan corn, a few Jefferson Costoluto Genovese tomatoes that are still worrisomely green, and two butternut squashes.

My point is that I had, by now, largely stopped fixating about the pheasants. Whenever I walked past my paint ball rifle near the back door, I had begun to feel faintly ridiculous. Maybe I had over-reacted. One must share the abundance, after all, and the fine dynamics of evolution have made plants such as corn and tomatoes desirable to a variety of critters so that their seeds can be distributed across the land. Maybe the pheasants were not perpetual entitlement bums, but just troubled birds going through a rough patch. Surely they had some melancholy sense that they would not be alive much longer. Perhaps they quote Ecclesiastes in the evenings as they hunker in the prairie just west of my yard.

So when I woke for the third and final time this morning to the sound of "kuk… kukk.. kuck" in the vicinity of the garden, I slipped out onto the deck in a mostly light-hearted mood. I was clad in suburban camouflage--t-shirt, boxer shorts, and slippers, holding a faux Rambo and Full Metal Jacket assault rifle stocked with orange paint ball ammunition. Nothing ridiculous there!

The pheasant saw me coming and slipped between two rows of corn stalks. I approached as silently as Natty Bumpo, then fired a burst of ten paint balls into the corn. The appalled pheasant flushed and squawked at me menacingly as it flew off. Point made. Time to shower.\

But when I looked into my raised Jefferson garden, my heart fell on the ground. I was light-hearted no longer. My last acorn squash had been violated by those very pheasants. I do not exaggerate. The entire interior had been consumed, after a gaping hole had been pecked through its many hard rinds. I would not have thought it even possible for a bird to hack its way into such a well-protected vegetable. My last garden dinner was now entirely despoiled.

I fell into a towering, drooling, helpless rage, and swore that I would eat the culprit(s) for spite, with a commercial squash on the side, even if their breast meat was stained with orange pigment! I rushed into the house and reloaded my magazine.

O the humanity. This ain't over.

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Don't Throw Out the Rascals, Throw Out the System

This last week the U.S. Constitution reached its 217th birthday. When the Founding Fathers, 55 men, all prominent, completed their task in mid-September 1787 and emerged from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the great sage of the delegates, Benjamin Franklin, was asked what exactly they had produced behind closed doors. He replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." 

In almost every meaningful respect, we have lost it.

Lately I have been reading about the last days of the Roman republic (146-44 BCE). Rome's long career of military conquest beyond its rational and defensible borders had put unbearable strains on the ancient senate. Roman armies had ceased to be manned by sturdy citizen soldiers from the small farms of Italy. They were increasingly replaced by foreign mercenaries who fought for money rather than liberty. Meanwhile, a motley potpourri of refugees had poured into the city of Rome from all the provinces and occupied territories. Many of them did not speak Latin. Most of them did not give a fig about the Roman constitution. They were less interested in becoming true Roman citizens than having access to the increasingly large and expensive grain doles that Rome established to buy off crime and urban unrest. Power-hungry men like Julius Caesar and Pompey bribed and hustled their way to the top, amassed large personal armies with which to overawe each other and all virtuous opposition, and provided the masses with mindless but showy entertainments to take their minds off of all that they were losing. (Today, we call that Keeping Up with the Kardashians).

Rome had gotten too large and unwieldy to be held together any longer by its ancient republican constitution. Earnest patriots like Cicero and Cato did their best extend the life of the old system with strenuous orations about virtue, simplicity, the rule of law, and why the republic still mattered. But when the inhabitants of a nation cease to share a common spirit, a common sense of mutual affinity and mutual sacrifice, a common sense of national identity, it's only a matter of time before the whole enterprise collapses.

Eventually, Caesar's grand-nephew Octavius (Augustus), gathered the shattered Roman state together under his personal dictatorship, solemnly staged a few faux-republican rituals now and then to allow people to pretend they still governed themselves, and got unapologetically with the real business of Rome: world empire. I believe we are approaching that moment.

Benjamin Franklin's republic was designed for a different time (when a musket was a high-tech weapon and the Atlantic Ocean was a moat of almost infinite width), and—frankly—for a different people (a largely English-derived population of highly educated farmers and small tradesmen). Our Constitution was designed to move public affairs forward at a glacial pace—which made sense in a three mile-per-hour world where nothing much was at stake. The Founders could not possibly have imagined the zip and frenzy and lethality of the modern world—cruise missiles, Internet commerce, the internal combustion engine, nuclear warheads, skyscrapers, or the capacity of a government agency (the NSA) to listen to every utterance of every single citizen whenever it wishes, for good reason or bad, instantly and secretly.

Like it or not, the United States is not a quiet and isolationist backwater any more. We somehow became the world's sole superpower and cultural hegemon, wealthy beyond dreams, with more than 750 foreign military bases scattered all over the planet, and a breathtaking, boundless appetite for resources, especially carbon. And yet we continue to try to govern ourselves with a constitution written by agrarians and isolationists dressed in wigs and waistcoats, who just wanted to be left alone by their national government.

Look at our national paralysis. We cannot pass immigration reform. While we dither 10,000 illegal immigrants cross our borders every single day. We cannot find consensus on a national health care delivery system. We cannot establish a sane national energy policy. We cannot agree on national educational standards, but by all measures we are slipping behind other nations in literacy, math, science aptitude, and engineering. We cannot decide who takes us into war, the House of Representatives (as the Founding Fathers insisted), or the president, who increasingly rules by executive order, mostly because nature abhors a vacuum and a great nation must do something.

Meanwhile, the people are fed a steady diet of what the Romans called "bread and circuses." We spend more time debating the felonies of football players Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson than we do the "high crimes and misdemeanors" of our public officers. I've watched some of the ESPN discourse about these crises in the NFL, and on the whole the discussions have been more thoughtful, civil, and nuanced than the political debates on Fox and MSNBC.

We need to take our lesson from the Romans, so that we do not suffer their fate. Here's what that would mean. Wisdom consists of calling things by their right names. We are no longer a republic, and we aren't in any meaningful sense a democracy. The evidence suggests that we are now a global consumerist empire, a worldwide military-petroleum resource complex, ruled behind the curtain by corporate interests whose principal loyalty is not to America, but to profit. Even before Citizens United (2012), moneyed "interests" had virtually unlimited access to members of Congress, and now their ability to choke the system with money is essentially infinite. Many members of Congress really do set out to be good public servants and to represent the will of their constituents, but they are so completely suffocated by privilege and surrounded by individuals of vast wealth and power and presumption, that they soon cease to have a meaningful link to average Americans. The Constitution we like to celebrate (every September 17) is a lovely relic, a sweet chapter in civics textbooks, but it now bears very little resemblance to the way we are actually governed.

Second, we need to step back and rewrite the Constitution to address the pace, and the technological and demographic conditions of our time. In other words, we need to jettison the mythology of America so that we can get back on track with the modern mission of America. Given our global reach and our colossal international power, given our insatiable material desires, and given how dangerous the 21st century is proving to be, we are going to need a more efficient national government with fewer of the checks and balances that hold up legislation. We are going to have to grant the president more power, because otherwise he is just going to have to take it. It's this simple: we can either rewrite the constitution to get on top of the actual dynamics of the way things are done, and thereby stay in control, or we can cling to the fiction of our "republic" and seek to restore it, while the actual work of our government is done in secret conclaves by people who have never been elected.  

I know I sound pessimistic, but I'm not. We are a very great nation, filled with of people of integrity and creativity and good will. We just need to take back our government from those who have hijacked it. We deserve better. If it ain't broke don't fix it, of course, but since it is clearly broken right to the core, we the people have to step up and renew America.

We need to become Jefferson's people again—with some updates.

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The Thrill and the Honor of Participating in Ken Burns' The Roosevelts

"It was my crowded hour!" 

Theodore Roosevelt on July 2, 1898—the day he led the charge up San Juan Hill.

The response to Ken Burns' latest documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History has been overwhelming. All credit to Ken Burns, who is a genius, and Geoffrey Ward, who has been researching and writing Ken's scripts for many years, and who is the shining star of "talking heads" in this 14-hour epic about TR, Eleanor (his niece) and FDR (TR's 5th cousin).

Working with Ken Burns has been one of the principal honors of my life. I was one of the talking heads in his documentary on Jefferson (1998), and an historical adviser to the film. I was in The National Parks: America's Best Idea. And now I have had the joy of being a commentator about Theodore Roosevelt in this film.

The wonderful outpouring of congratulations and praise I have received has moved me beyond my ability to describe. It is so strange looking at a television screen, seeing George Will, Dorris Kearns Goodwin, H.W. Brands, Patricia O'Toole, and others giants of our time, and then suddenly seeing myself. It's a little disorienting, and of course I half blush and half cringe to see a: what I said; b: how I said it: c: how it fits into the larger context of the film.

I was interviewed several years ago for the film, at Ken's home and studio in Walpole, New Hampshire. One sits in a chair about three feet from Burns, with a film camera rolling and a separate audio track, and there is no rehearsal, no hint of what he might ask. He just starts with some provocative statement, and his questions, his penetration, his visual responses, his followups, all bring out of the interviewee (or at least this one) much more than we came to say or thought we had in us.

Then you leave for the airport, cursing the day you were born, wishing you had said that differently, and thisbetter, and that more succinctly. Whenever I come home from Walpole, I write a formulaic letter begging for a second interview. This never happens. Ken says, "The best way to stay off the cutting room floor is to 'stick the landing.'" 

After that, you (or at least I) actually half forget that I was interviewed at all. And I assume that what I had to say, even if it helped to inform the script, would surely have wound up on the cutting room floor.

Finally, often several years later, when the film airs on public television, I like everyone else have to watch to see what's in it. As someone who makes documentary films himself, I am always astonished by Burns' genius as an editor.

Frankly, I wish in The Roosevelts I had said a few things I did not, and wish I had not said, or said differently, a few things that wound up in the film. In particular, I wish I had softened a little my statement that Roosevelt was a killer. He WAS a killer, to be sure, and in some ways a jingoist and a warmonger, but that needs to be contextualized very carefully before it can fully make sense. TR lived in a more "heroic" age than ours, and it was still widely felt then that war was the grand test of a man's character and a nation's destiny. TR's thirst to kill quadrupeds was not so much bloodlust (though perhaps there was some of that) as a desire to dominate the world around him. The same dynamics that characterized Roosevelt led Europe into the most disastrous war in its history in 1914. Millions of young man sang and exulted as they marched off to bloody and muddy death in the trenches.

At any rate, there is so much more to admire in TR than to criticize--it's a shame to spend much time questioning his actions or motives. He is one of the most fascinating, most exuberant, most energetic, curious, questing, intelligent, and well-read men of American history. He is so much larger than life that the phrase doesn't do him justice.

I feel honored to have had the opportunity to study him, and to be one of those to try to make sense of him for America's greatest documentary filmmaker.

Two people have contacted me to tease me for using the phrase "writingest president." One of them is one of my dearest friends, my old secretary Naomi Brooker of Grass Valley, CA. The other is an Australian woman I have never met, who said, "at least you did not say threepeat!" I stand by my phrase, though I actually borrowed it from one of the greatest historians of our time, Donald Jackson, who wrote about Lewis and Clark as "the writingest explorers of all time."

I've reconnected with old lost friends in the last few days, and made some new ones. Two of the historians I most respect in the world have taken the time to write letters of praise. I'm on cloud nine, humbled, moved deeply, and of course RESOLVED to get better, learn more, master more, become better read and better educated, and to make this one of the moments which increase one's creative life rather than cap it.

I think this is Ken Burns' best film ever, no thanks to me, and that the episodes on FDR and Eleanor are, if anything, dramatically better than those on Theodore.

Again, to all of you, heartfelt thanks. Bully.

Further Reading:

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
• Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough
• Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life by Kathleen Dalton

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Well Done, Our Good and Faithful Public Servant

Valerie Naylor has been the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park since 2003. Now she is retiring. I'm glad for Valerie, who is one of my closest friends, but sad for North Dakota. We need her brand of quiet but unapologetically firm leadership now more than ever, as the fracking industrial revolution encircles the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP).

Valerie has been an amazingly effective public servant during her 11-year tenure. She has borne the responsibility of protecting the national park through a period of unprecedented challenges: a pesky south unit inholding whose private owner tried to transform into an outsized pile of cash; repeated efforts to force a bridge across the sacred Little Missouri River in the vicinity of Theodore Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch; the long and divisive campaign to protect the Eberts Ranch (in the prime Elkhorn Ranch viewshed) by permitting its private owners to sell it either to the National Park Service or the U.S. Forest Service (in the end, it was the latter); the great elk-reduction controversy of 2010-2011, which even Valerie's loud and sometimes abusive critics eventually praised as a "classical textbook case of wise and thoughtful management"; and now the impact of the oil boom.

How do you honor private property rights and cooperate with reasonable development and at the same time protect North Dakota's only national park, which consists of three relatively small and separated units that sit right in the heart of oil country?

If the Bakken oil boom were on the perimeter of Yellowstone National Park there would be two very important differences. First, there would be an extremely robust local, regional, and national debate about responsible development in the vicinity of the park. Unfortunately, Theodore Roosevelt National Park and its crown jewel the Elkhorn Ranch are not sufficiently well known across America to generate the kind of national conversation they deserve. With most other national parks—Rainier, Arches, Yosemite, and perhaps especially Yellowstone—it is immediately and automatically understood that they belong to the whole people of the United States, that it is in the entire nation's interest to cherish and protect them, and that the local communities are not always the best custodians of their integrity.

Second, Yellowstone is so much larger than TRNP that perimeter distractions have less visual and audio impact on the heart of the park. Yellowstone National Park embraces 2.219 million acres, Theodore Roosevelt merely 70,000 acres, the largest parcel of which (the south unit) contains only 46,158 acres. From most places in Yellowstone or Glacier, you cannot see outside the park. You feel that the park goes on forever in every direction. There is almost no place in TRNP where you cannot observe what happens on the other side of the perimeter fence. From the highest point in the south unit, Buck Hill, you can see well more than a dozen oil sites, some of them of course flaring their untapped gasses. National park perimeters matter all over America, but they matter more in small parks than in the large ones.

Valerie has worked hand in hand with oil companies to limit their impact on the park experience. We go to national parks for many reasons, but somewhere near the center of their mission is a determination to provide us all a sanctuary from the everyday hustle and clutter of our advanced industrial civilization. We go to the national parks to enjoy a simplified, more basic experience in a place that is kept as far as is possible in its natural state. The national parks are remnants—perhaps "islands" is a better term--of the vast untrammeled wilderness that America once was. We go to them to find relief from the bustle, the humdrum, the consumerism, and the over-domestication of modern life. Theodore Roosevelt said we go to them so that we don't get too soft and comfortable.

Valerie has been a lover of Theodore Roosevelt National Park since she first visited the badlands in her childhood. She has worked in a number of other national parks and monuments in the course of her career, but this was the assignment she most wanted. She fully understands that a national park supervisor must address whatever challenges come her way, but I think it is fair to say that her life's dream was not to spend the heart of her career in weekly, sometimes daily, negotiations with oil company executives, striving to win little half-satisfying victories about where to place the rig, and what color to paint the storage tanks to blend in with park terrain. The amazing people who are drawn to careers in the National Park System have souls that are drawn to the bison snorting on the banks of the river in the morning fog, or the restoration of native grasses in a landscape that has been compromised by leafy spurge, or that exceedingly rare glimpse of a mountain lion slipping over the ridge. They want to do positive work to enrich the properties they manage, not fight rearguard skirmishes at tedious indoor public hearings.

I have had the good fortune to observe most of Valerie's tenure at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. She has done superb work along the lines of her park service job description, often in the face of criticism, but always in a way that makes her critics or opponents respect and genuinely like her. There is nothing brash or assertive or self-aggrandizing in her management style. She has such obvious integrity and character, and is so unfull of herself, so quietly dedicated to process and rational decision making, so unwilling to take the bait in the sometimes bombastic public debates, that she has won over two types of skeptical people: know-it-alls who believe they could manage the park better than any trained professional; and the large body of people who have an instinctive distaste for federal authority, federal supervision of the public domain, and federal employees (the feds!).

Valerie is not one of those temporary federal officials who appear on the horizon to take up a job, do it well, fraternize to a certain degree with the local folks, and then move on to the next assignment without much fanfare. She has become a friend to Medora, the badlands, and the people of North Dakota. In some cases, she has become family.

Now Valerie has purchased a beautiful modest conversion van RV. She plans to travel extensively throughout America—and beyond. She has more wanderlust than almost anyone I have ever known. I imagine her exploring America in that lovely rig, meandering from national park to national park and to wild places throughout the continent that most of us have never heard of. She has friends all over the country. She has an insane desire to step foot in every county of the United States.

I feel a little grumpy about her plan. My most persistent dream—since I was 18 years old—has been to buy a brand new, cat-free conversion van RV and travel the country for a year or two with books (now miniaturized on iPad!), cameras (no darkroom now required), and a typewriter (no postage now required). How I will envy Valerie as she wakes up in that rig, somewhere in America, on our public lands, with nowhere particular to be and a moose nosing about in the clearing.

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