Impeaching the Black Swan

I have no idea how the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump will play out. Neither does anyone else. The most important thing to remember when reading media coverage of the impeachment process is that the writer has no idea how the impeachment process is likely to go. This goes for everybody.

The standard conventional wisdom has been that impeachment will backfire on the Democrats in a replay of 1998, when the Republicans impeached Clinton but made him more popular. There is no real reason to believe this. I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying there's no evidence it will. There's only reason to expect an exact repeat of 1998, and I'm using the word "reason" loosely, is that a lot of political journalists covered 1998 and therefore assume this will go the same way. That assumption has nothing to do with logic or evidence.

Impeachments of a sitting president are so rare that it's impossible to generalize about them. This has only happened three times in the last 230 years, and one of those times the president resigned before the process finished playing out. Every single instance of impeachment is an outlier. They are all black swans.

There haven't been enough presidents of the United States, or even presidential elections, to constitute a valid statistical sample. But we fudge that, and run the numbers anyway, not always admitting how unreliable the results are. But no one can pretend that three is a statistical sample. That's ridiculous. No one tries to extrapolate anything from a baseball player's batting average after only three at-bats, or should. But this is more like a situation where only three games of baseball have ever been played. Predictions based on that are folly.

Would you read a sex-advice book written by someone who's only had sex three times? 'Or someone who started having sex three times, and finished twice? Pontificating about how impeachments turn out is the same way. No one has enough experience to know what's likely, or what's normal, and what isn't.

Over-generalizing from limited experience is a common mistake and a basic part of many political journalists' approach to their work. If you've ever heard a political journalist talking about some candidate's "Sister Souljah" moment, you've been given a good example. The journalist takes a thing that happened one time during Bill Clinton's 1992 primary run and treats it as something that must happen in all campaigns always. Woe betide the Democratic candidate without his or her Sister Souljah moment. But in fact there is no reason to expect the Sister Souljah incident to be repeated.

There are some people who try to argue that a 2019 impeachment will be a replay of Watergate in 1974 rather than of Clinton in 1998. But there's no reason to think that, either. It's no more likely than a replay of 1998. This doesn't have to be a replay of anything. Something totally different could happen. If there were such a thing as smart money in this case, and there's not, it would probably be on previously unforeseen outcome.

All three of the previous presidential impeachments were weird and therefore hard to compare to one another in any meaningful way. This one is also strange. The first impeachment was of a president who'd been vice-president before the president was assassinated, which had never happened before either, and he was not from the murdered president's party but the opposing party, because of a national unity ticket during the Civil War, and ... you get the idea. Totally unrepeatable circumstances. Watergate was also very strange. The Clinton impeachment was maybe the most "normal," in the sense of the impeached president's wrongdoing being the least unusual (which is not an excuse for illegality but a comment on its statistical distribution), but that arguably makes the Clinton impeachment unusual in its own right, another freak occurrence. Impeachments are so weird that you learn nothing from one experiment that you can generalize to the next. Nate Silver isn't going to help you out of this one.

The circumstances we're faced with are extremely strange, and so is the current occupant of the White House. Trump doesn't fit many precedents or norms. He's a kind of black swan president himself, who sometimes gets treated in the press as if normal probabilities don't apply to him. Trump won despite being behind in the poll and despite losing the popular vote by a bigger margin than any electoral-college winner ever had, so there's a sense in the press that the normal political expectations don't apply and that Trump's awful poll numbers, for example, won't hurt his chances at reelection. (This is another version of the generalizing-from-one-result error. Trump won a massively unlikely victory last time, so some people expect him to win next time. It's a bit like expecting someone who just turned an unassisted triple play to do it again tomorrow.)

It's not simply that we lack the experience to know what will happen or what will likely happen. We don't have the experience to foresee everything that can happen.

If you've only rolled a pair of dice three times, most of the possible outcomes have never occurred. There are eleven basic outcomes, from rolling a two to rolling a twelve. After three rolls, you haven't seen most of those. In fact, you may not have seen the most likely outcomes yet. Seven is the most likely result, coming up once in every six throws. But if you've only thrown the dice three times, the odds of seeing at least one seven are only between 42 and 43%, less than half. You are more likely not to have seen a seven than to have seen one.

That doesn't mean seven can't or won't happen on the next roll of the dice. It remains just as likely as it ever was, as do all the other results you haven't rolled yet. (Similarly, if you have only seen three at-bats of baseball, you may not have seen a hit, or a strikeout, or a walk, which doesn't make them any less likely in at-bat number four.) Expecting the next throw of the dice to produce the same result as the throw just before it, and discounting the possibility of an outcome you haven't previously seen, is obviously a mistake.  But that is exactly how many people are discussing impeachment.

The current thinking is that the party that impeaches the president will be punished by the voters, because that's the conventional wisdom about what happened last time. (We can debate that, too, but for purposes of this argument I won't.) No one talks about any political risk for the party defending its president, or facing a backlash from voters for shielding a president who's committed crimes, because that's never happened before. But "never happened before" in this case means "has not turned up in a minuscule and not necessarily representative sample of three freakishly-strange events." That something didn't happen in the first three tries doesn't make it impossible. It doesn't even necessarily make it unlikely.

In the same way, the three results you have seen aren't necessarily the high-probability ones. You might have rolled snake-eyes or boxcars in the first three rolls, either of which only happens once every 36 times. A thing that happens only three percent of the time is something that could and does happen. To bring things back to American political history: in 1804 the United States had only had three vice-presidents. One of those three had shot another Founding Father dead. That didn't mean that future veeps had a 33.3% likelihood of killing a Cabinet secretary in a duel (which would get us up to sixteen killer vice-presidents at this point). It just meant that three examples is nowhere close to being enough to get a sense of what's normal. (Presidents Washington, Adams, and Jefferson weren't exactly a representative sample themselves.)

We don't have enough of a historical track record to know what's likely, or even the full range of what's possible. As the late, great William Goldman said about the film business, nobody knows anything.

Alea jacta est, kids. Buckle up.

cross-posted at Dagblog. Please post comments there, not here.

Some People Are Not Duelable

I'm not a big proponent of bringing back customs and manners from hundreds of years back. The centuries I study were much worse to live in than this one. But there is one concept from Ye Olden Days that (suitably retooled), I have always found pretty useful. That is the concept of people being "not duelable." I use it in my academic writing. I use it in my daily life. I occasionally teach it to graduate students. And it turns out to be a concept that both the Age of Twitter and the Age of Trump badly need.

Now, dueling itself is a vicious custom and should not come back. But that custom contained one illuminating rule: dueling is something that happens between equals. (It's also restricted to the upper classes; humbler folk who fight with swords, like the playwright Ben Jonson, are just street brawling.) You only duel people who are, generally speaking, on your own level.

If you're a 17th-century gentleman, or a Russian aristocrat, or a young swell in Flaubert's Paris, you don't get in duels with servants or bartenders or some poor hapless working stiff. That's beneath you. (I'm not going to idealize this practice; this is mainly about not giving the hapless working stiffs a fair shot at the rich folk, or allowing the working stiffs to fight back.) Fighting those people isn't simply wrong. The wrongness isn't even the main problem. Fighting with those people is demeaning to you. It lowers you. It invites shame and ridicule.

Early in the 20th century (a little late for this sort of thing), the novelist Vladimir Nabokov's father got so angry about a yellow journalist's attack on him that he decided to challenge someone to a duel over it. (Neither Dr. Cleveland nor Dagblog endorses fighting duels or threatening journalists.) Did he challenge the person who wrote the article? No. That person was, from Nabokov Sr.'s point of view, just some greasy little scribbler, not worth the bother of tussling with. Papa Nabokov challenged the newspaper publisher. (The younger Nabokov has a wonderful chapter about this episode in his memoir, Speak, Memory.)  None of this is exactly Nabokov Sr.'s finest hour, but it taught me the basic "not duelable" concept, which has real value.

Let's broaden the definition of "duel" here to mean any public or semi-public conflict which, on some level, involves your reputation. That's what duels were: fights designed to protect one's reputation, and when someone was not duelable that meant that fighting them, or even challenging them, would only damage your reputation more. Some kinds of political slagging and point-scoring qualify, alas. So do some entertainers' public feuds: two rappers beefing with each other are both acknowledging each other as peers and trying to raise their profiles. And, like it or not, academic writing has its share of this, both because professional reputations are closely tied to that writing and because academic debate works, especially in the humanities, by disagreement. It is almost impossible to write a publishable article about Shakespeare where you don't at least politely suggest some other Shakespeareans are wrong about something. Often, people are much less polite. Sometimes scholars get into epic running beefs. The letter pages of the Times Literary Supplement are notorious for hosting ongoing tweedy vendettas. The question of who is duelable and who isn't in academic arguments is one I've given a lot of thought to, and it needs a post of its own.

One of my favorite examples of non-duelability in pop culture is Crash Davis in Bull Durham, flat-out declining to compete with boy idiot Nuke LaLoosh for Annie's favors: "I'm not interested in anyone who's interested in that boy." Translation: I'm not going to compete with that idiot, because he's not a suitable rival, and it would be demeaning to compete against him." Not duelable, bro.

Two major-party Presidential candidates going at each other is unpleasant and arguably unseemly. But you can't say that conflict is inappropriate. As nominees, they are peers. But if the President of the United States, with all the majesty of that office, decided to beef publicly with say, an ESPN personality like Jemele Hill, which is too crazy to ever happen, he would be attacking someone non-duelable. If he were to get petulant with an NBA player, that is fighting with someone non-duelable. Calling an unemployed NFL quarterback a "son of a bitch" in public is totally attacking someone non-duelable.

Trump does not make the duelable/ non-duelable distinction at all. He fights with people who have vastly different statuses. He goes after the grieving parents of an American serviceman killed in action. He beefs at Rosie O'Donnell, still, for God knows what reason. He gets in spats with the Emmys telecast and the Apprentice, with ESPN. The list goes on, unfortunately. It's depressing to see.

The first problem with this is it's wrong, because the people he goes after are weaker and have no defense. One of the basic reasons large categories of people were originally designated non-duelable is because those people did not have swords or guns. (The laws often restricted weapon ownership to the upper classes.) Picking on the poor grieving mother of a dead serviceman is a disgusting way to use your power. It's wrong because unjustly harms other people. It makes you a bully, and a thug, and an asshole.

The other two problems, which are interrelated, are problems because they harm you, rather than your target. The main problem is that it destroys your dignity. You get into the gutter to fight some rapscallions, what you win is a trip to the gutter. You get dirty and you make a depressing spectacle of yourself.

Trump does not preserve the dignity of his office. He screeches at people who are, since inauguration, vastly below him in station. Part of this is that Trump still insists on operating like a fairly low-level New York media figure, a guy who gets into arguments on a call-in radio show. He's like a less well-adjusted Howard Stern. Part of it is that, frankly, he's a psychologically damaged personality. The rest is that Trump has always behaved like someone from an entirely different social class, rather than like a normal, socially-adjusted rich New Yorker. For all his money, he has never been able to learn the rules of upper-class Manhattan, social norms that usually get expressed as "taste," "manners," and "class." That he's a rich guy with the manners, and open resentments, of someone from a much lower class has always been a big part of his appeal. But it's not an act; Trump isn't someone who can charm donors to the Met and then switch it up to bond with a cabbie. He genuinely doesn't understand the normal rules of upper-class behavior, including the rule that some fights are just beneath you.

What Trump gains by his refusal to observe decorum is the ability to attack people that Presidents usually don't attack. What he loses is the protective aura of his office's dignity. It feels wrong to insult a President of the United States in certain ways, but that's ultimately predicated on the fact that the President isn't going to shout crude insults at you, either. The aura is a two-way protection.

Normally, the dignity of the President's office keeps people from calling the President a bum, but Trump doesn't respect the dignity of office and so it doesn't protect him. If a pro athlete called a president, any president a bum, I'd usually think that was a classless move. But the President in question called another pro athlete a son of a bitch in public yesterday, so he's the one who changed the rules.

And related to the loss of dignity is the problem that when you get down in the gutter to fight with some guttersnipes, the guttersnipes might win. Trump publicly slagging on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry opened the door for LeBron James to just lay Trump out:

U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!

— LeBron James (@KingJames) September 23, 2017

That's not the golden political rhetoric of yesterday, but Trump is playing the playground diss game, and as playground disses go this is a classic. Trump has no one to blame but himself.

(I do not mean to imply that Mr. James is a guttersnipe. He is a sublime athlete and a philanthropist. But he's also a guy who sweats for a living, not somebody who gets called in to give the Cabinet advice. Do you remember when FDR got into that public insult match with Joe DiMaggio? That's right. You don't.)

The bigger question is whether the dictator of North Korea is duelable for an American president. All of Trump's predecessors thought not, and didn't waste time trading insults with a small-time dictator. Trump, who has no sense of dignity, is getting into a slagging match and, on balance, losing. But actually, this is not at all how people used to talk before duels. Duels are about saving face, but also about finding a way out of conflict if you can: a lot of energy focused on finding a way to say everybody's honor was satisfied without anyone bleeding out. Sometimes that failed, but that was the focus. Papa Nabokov found a way not to fight that duel. Trump and Kim are not looking for an elegant way out of this. They are woofing at each other like playground antagonists, both scared of looking "weak" by backing down. It's a situation that usually leads to the two knuckleheads trading blows because they're afraid not to.

The danger, of course, is that if these two idiots come to blows, it's not just them.

 cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

The Moral Necessity of the Civil War

So, Donald Trump said some stupid and ignorant things about the Civil War. Not much of that is worth discussing: the man says stupid and ignorant things because, well, he's stupid and ignorant, so there isn't much to analyze. The one part we should stop to think about is Trump's conviction that the Civil War should have been avoided. That's not an idea that he came up with on his own. He doesn't come up with ideas on his own. He picks them up from outside. This idea has been around a long time.

Trump regrets the Civil War. He wishes that the Civil War had not been fought. He got those ideas from other people, and those people are very, very wrong.

Let me say, up front, that if there had been a way to free every American slave without bloodshed, that would have been great. I am not for American lives being lost at Gettysburg, any more than I am for American lives being lost on Omaha Beach. But I do not regret that the United States defeated the Confederacy any more than I regret that United States defeated the Nazis. I will say this clearly: the Civil War was a good thing.

Trump is voicing the regret that the Civil War was fought at all, the regret that white Americans had to come to blows with one another over something as trivial as the freedom of black Americans. "No reason" for it, in Trump's words, as if the freedom of millions upon millions of souls were not a reason.

But history, our own history shows us that there was no peaceful bargain that could have freed the slaves, for the simple reason that slave-holders stubbornly refused to release their captives. There was no compromise on the table: the Confederacy rebelled rather than accept any further compromise.

And freeing the slaves, all of the slaves, is not a negotiable demand. Slavery is a terrible crime. It is inexcusable.

Now, somehow all of this has become impolite to say. You are supposed to be considerate of white Southerners' feelings about slavery. It is considered rude to speak about their ancestors' horrific crimes against millions of people without considering the delicacy of their feelings. In fact, you're supposed to say something polite about how awful Reconstruction is, which is like talking about how terrible the GIs who liberated the concentration camps were. I'm through with it. The truth is the truth.

Is this about regional pride? Okay then. As a Northerner, I take enormous regional pride in the defeat of the Confederacy and much deeper human pride in the abolition of slavery. Those are great and precious achievements. If you are an American but are not proud of these things, you cannot call yourself a patriot.

Now, saying this in such a crude way is considered "incivility." That was exactly how it was framed before the Civil War, as certain white people in both the South and the North deplored the rudeness and incivility of the slavery debate. By this, they meant the intemperate rudeness of the anti-slavery side. The same complaint echoes through the 1840s and 1850s: wasn't terrible that people couldn't just put aside their trivial differences and get along in harmony?

"People," in this formulation, means white people. What about the black people? They, and their human rights were the "trivial differences" meant to be put aside in the name of good manners.

Ever since the Civil War there has been a cultural and political project of reconciliation, meaning reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners. This project, like the antebellum campaign for compromise and civility, focuses on solidarity between white Americans at black Americans' expense. Black citizens' rights are not only ignored, but deliberately kept out of the conversation as a potential obstacle to white people singing Kumbaya with each other.

This can't-we-get-along project fosters the ridiculous lie that the Civil War was somehow not about slavery, the explicit declarations of the Confederates notwithstanding.We're told that the Civil War was "complex" and had many subtle causes, as if the issue of slavery alone did not dwarf every single one of those causes. And the noble cause of white people's harmony requires Northerners to be tactful and nearly apologetic about the war. Northerners are expected to seek Southerners' forgiveness for stopping their ancestors' monstrous crimes against humanity.

To hell with that. The Civil War was about slavery, and it was the slavers' fault. No subtlety or nuance is important enough to change those basic facts. Those are the central truths, and the rest are details around the edges. The Civil War was never going to be fought over tariff policy.

But these are still the unwritten rules of civility in America, especially around discussions of race. No one expressly announces these rules, and no one could, because they are morally depraved. But they are carefully followed: you can observe them in our politics and our media. The unspoken rule is that white people are meant to be polite and respectful to other white people at all costs, and disrespect to a fellow white is mannerless incivility. Defending the rights (and basic humanity) of non-white people is never treated as an excuse for being "uncivil" to a white person, least of all a white man. Rather, "incivility" is treated as yet more offensive when performed on behalf of people of color. To impugn a white person, and disrupt the serenity of American intra-honky harmony on behalf of someone considered lower down the racial hierarchy is treated as a particular insult and outrage.

This is why in some conservative quarters calling someone a racist is considered the most horrendous and unpardonable offense. Not because the accused person is not a racist, but because they are, because (although this can not be stated) they consider it morally outrageous to violate a fellow white person's privilege or to embarrass them on behalf of anyone from another race. The "anti-racists are the real racist" response is built on the deep emotional conviction that blacks, Latinos, etc., are indeed inferior and that it is a mortal insult to be upbraided for the sake of a person that one does not accept as an equal.

Do you think I'm wrong? Watch cable news for a week. Listen to your loud uncle at Thanksgiving. Watch the tape of Mitch McConnell silencing Elizabeth Warren for incivility. The incivility is calling another white person to account for their racist words and deeds. Jeff Sessions's racist words and racist actions are matters of public record  It is treated as the greatest of sins. Shooting unarmed black children is deemed, by some, and honest mistake, but calling other people racist is treated as entirely beyond the pale.

That is the logic that imagines the Civil War an unnecessary tragedy: a world view that imagines white folk as fully alive and human, meant to live in untroubled harmony together, and views the problems -- even the most basic rights and needs -- of other races as insignificant issues that must not be allowed to disrupt white folks' mutual amity.


But the Civil War, although tragic in its means, resulted in triumph. The liberation of millions of human souls from bondage is one of the greatest victories of all time. Would it have been better if those millions of Americans had been freed voluntarily? Yes. But that was not going to happen. And they had to be freed. I thank God for that victory. And I bless the Republican Party that did it, a Republican party that we my never see again.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Having a Partisan Thanksgiving

I hope you've all had a happy and relaxing Thanksgiving. I was lucky to host this year, with both my wife's family and mine traveling here to scenic Ohio, and I was also the lucky cook. (I took over turkey and gravy a few years ago, but this was my first year doing the whole meal, and -- since people had traveled to see us -- also feeding the crew on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.) And I was lucky enough to avoid political arguments at the table, because no one in my family voted for Trump. But political arguments on Thanksgiving are not the end of the world. Thanksgiving, as a national holiday, is the direct result of political conflict, and it's a mistake for us to forget that.

So, a quick history lesson:

Everybody knows the story about the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation. And that's true, in the sense that the event really did take place. But that's not when Thanksgiving became a national or even a regular holiday. The Pilgrims didn't have another Thanksgiving the next November. And some people know the historical fact that Lincoln proclaimed the first regular, national Thanksgiving, although that fact tends to confuse people. How did this holiday get founded twice, first in 1621 and then in 1863? And how can it be that Thanksgiving's two original moments happen more than 240 years apart?

A quick google search will explain that Lincoln simply set a standard national date for Thanksgiving, which different states were celebrating on different days. And that is part of the story. But that makes it sound as if the whole country was already united behind Thanksgiving, which only the logistical problem of deciding when to have it. That's not true. (Think "things left to the states to decide" and "Lincoln" and you'll see where this story is going.)

The real truth is that Thanksgiving was originally part of America's cultural wars, and so was Christmas. We now think of those two holidays as part of a single season, but they used to be indirectly (and sometimes pretty directly) opposed to each other. Not everyone celebrated both, and the division between the holidays broke down on regional, religious, and ideological lines.

Thanksgiving is a New England thing. It was originally a regional holiday, celebrated by New Englanders. It's also, not to put too fine a point on it, a Puritan holiday, celebrated in the Northeast by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and other churches with Puritan roots. Thanksgiving was especially valuable to these Puritan-leaning New Englanders because they did not celebrate Christmas. They actively despised Christmas as a lot of heathenish nonsense. Celebrating it, or even closing the store on December 25, went against their religious beliefs.

On the other hand, Christmas was widely celebrated in the South, which had been heavily settled by Anglicans who observed the traditional liturgical holidays. (New York was also a stronghold of Christmas, partly because of its old Dutch roots and partly because it was such an ethnic and religious melting pot.) But plenty of Southerners wanted nothing to do with Thanksgiving. They saw it as alien: a celebration of another region's culture and another denomination's beliefs. They were not wrong. A lot of Southerners also saw Thanksgiving as an abolitionist thing, and they weren't wrong about that either. The lead campaigner for Thanksgiving as a national holiday was the novelist Sarah Josepha Hale: a feminist Yankee abolitionist. Thanksgiving was against Southern values.

Christmas spread more or less nationwide in the 1840s and 1850s, although it did not become a legal federal holiday until 1870. But it was slowest to spread in New England and, although I don't want to overstate the case, there was at least some overlap between the people campaigning for Christmas in New England and the people campaigning for national unity and brotherhood, meaning appeasing Southerners on the slavery question. Thanksgiving spread out across the country as well, perhaps more slowly, because people kept moving west from New England to places like Michigan and Ohio and bringing Thanksgiving with them. So there was eventually an overlap where states celebrated both holidays, but Thanksgiving in November did not really spread in the South.

Thanksgiving, our holiday of national unity and togetherness, became a national holiday because the North won the war. Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving nine months after the Emancipation Proclamation. Sarah Josepha Hale was happy about both. American Thanksgiving was a victory for Northern abolitionist values.

We don't remember all of this story, because we don't like to remember it. Our country can never forget the Civil War, but we work very hard to forget the twenty or thirty years that led up to it. We like to talk about unity and civility and getting past partisan divisions. We don't like to remember that unity, civility, and compromise were key arguments for continuing to permit slavery. We forget that the opponents of slavery were called divisive and accused of tearing the country apart. If we remember that, we would have to remember that the Civil Rights Movement was accused of tearing the country apart, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was called a radical communist. We would have to remember that the people calling for unity and mutual understanding in the 1950s and early 1960s were calling for more sympathy for Southern segregationists and their feelings about their local traditions, that demands for justice were called unnecessarily confrontational.

We like to tell ourselves a story about a united, harmonious nation, joined in consensus. That story is neither true nor healthy. Our history is one of repeated confrontations over core national principles, and maybe most importantly a history of confrontation over race. And, time and again, Americans who stand up for racial equality, for America's best republican-with-a-small-r traditions, are accused of incivility and divisiveness. Because the cardinal rule of American political etiquette, in 1856 and in 1956 and in 2016, is that it is divisive and uncivil to take non-whites' side against one's fellow white people. How can you be so unpleasant and make such trouble, when surely whatever this problem is can wait?

That's still the story today, when there are public calls to unify behind the most divisive political figure in modern history, a politician who only sees some Americans as real Americans. The call for "unity" is a call to accept that racist, tribal definition of America, to "unify" by excluding a third of our fellow citizens and to pretend that they are not "really" American. That isn't unity. And that isn't the America I celebrate.

But Thanksgiving is a reminder of one old, deep strand in the American spirit, a strand that has stood by unpopular principle and resisted wrongful power. That's the spirit of the Pilgrim Separatists at Plymouth, and the spirit of the New England abolitionists who followed after them, with a heavy helping of Revolutionary patriots in between. I am grateful for that American legacy, which we need today as much as we ever have.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

RNC Cleveland: Local Grievance Edition

Trump and his circus have left town, and so have I. But before I turn myself over entirely to watching the DNC on GMT, let me point out a few local Cleveland issues that bothered me about this convention. I've already blogged about the big stuff. Let me just get some Cleveland things off my chest.

1) As someone who used to live in downtown Cleveland (at least for most of the week) I felt a special sympathy for the immigrants and first-generation Americans who live and work downtown in the convention zone. Back when I lived on East 12th Street, I did all my local grocery shopping from a little store run by Arab immigrants. For a party that talks endlessly about small business owners, the Republicans talk a lot of smack about the hard-working immigrants who own many of those small businesses.

I found myself thinking a lot about the family that runs that grocery, and what it must be like to have the neighborhood around your family store be taken over by America's Number One immigrant hater and Muslim basher. Sorry, guys. I am really, really sorry.

2) Well-known former actor Scott Baio used some of his ridiculous prime-time slot to misuse Langston Hughes. This is standard practice among conservatives, who find "Let America Be America Again" too tempting a phrase to resist (although they can easily resist actually reading Langston Hughes's poem, which means the opposite of what they think it means. Generally, they seem pretty good at not reading things.).

But even if this has become standard operating procedure, it takes a special amount of ignorance to misuse Langston Hughes's words in Cleveland. Langston Hughes is from Cleveland, Chachi. There are places named for him inside the convention "event zone." Do a little research before you open your mouth, and have some respect.

Also, for those of you keeping score at home, Baio kicked off the Republicans' Monday-night theme of "taking language from black folks without giving them credit."

Hughes's poem is a little masterpiece, at once embracing the best version of the American Dream, the dream of freedom and equality, while acknowledging that "America was never America to me." Or, out another way, Hughes points out that that vision of America has never been completely real, but that it can and should and must be. Here's a little taste:

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe. 

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

If you like that, just wait until Hughes really gets going:

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.  

You can read the whole thing here. If this sounds to you like exactly the opposite of the hateful Republican convention and the hateful demagogue it nominated with a "false patriotic wreath," you're exactly right. It is the opposite of that.

On a related topic: Shut up, Chachi.

3. In the middle of all the disorganized hate-mongering, Unindicted Co-conspirator Chris Christie revealed that Trump the First would, if elected, purge the civil service of Obama appointees.  Not just get rid of Obama's political appointees whose terms automatically end when parties change power, but any career civil servants, the non-political types who are there to do their jobs no matter who the President is. What Trump and Christie want is the power to fire the entire civil service, everyone with a government job, and potentially replace them all with political appointees.

We used to do it that actually, and it is no way to run a serious country. It rewards partisanship over competence. (Imagine a system in which every election leads to someone replacing your mailman, and where the mailman doesn't actually have to do his mailman job as long as he does his real job as a political activist. Sound like fun? It wasn't.) This is outrageous just on the level of basic good governance and, you know, wanting to actually operate like America.

But here's what really hacks me off: it was Republicans who changed that corrupt system, Republicans who created our professional, non-partisan civil service, and for that to happen a Republican President of the United States had to die.

He was President James Garfield. He was murdered by a lunatic assassin who was enraged at civil service reform. He was from Cleveland. He is buried in Cleveland. His tomb is about six miles or so from the convention floor.

So let me say that it is particularly grotesque that these alleged Republicans demand a return to the old corrupt "spoils system," in the city where the man who gave his life to end that corruption has his tomb. Chris Christie wants to turn basic civic services into crass political tools? Huh, funny. No one is surprised. That's what he's already in trouble for doing.

But if Chris Christie wants to badmouth that particular Republican achievement, all I can tell him is: "Meet me at the Garfield Monument and say that again."

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

A Story from the Crusades

Apparently, some people are very upset that President Obama suggested that some Christians did bad things during the Crusades. Where does he get off saying something like that? Let me tell you a little story from the Third Crusade.

in 1191, King Richard the Lionhearted (or rather, Richard Coeur de Lion, Roi de l'Angleterre; Richard didn't speak any English) was besieging the city of Acre. The siege had been going on since before Richard had arrived in the Holy Land, and capturing Acre would be his most important victory during the Crusade. And eventually the defenders of Acre offered to surrender. 

Richard accepted their surrender and promised to spare their lives. He gave them his promise as a king that they would be spared.

And then, naturally, Richard began negotiating a ransom deal with the Muslim Sultan, Saladin (Salah ad-Din). They made a deal that Richard would turn over his 2700 Muslim prisoners in exchange for 1500 Christian prisoners, a ransom payment in cash, and a piece of the True Cross (an object everyone involved considered a fragment of the actual cross on which Jesus had been crucified). Richard set a one-month deadline for payment. So far, so good.

When the deadline rolled around, however, Saladin was caught short and didn't have the full ransom together. When Richard and Saladin tried to work out an alternate payment plan, things got testy. Richard's idea, for what it's worth, was that Saladin hand over the money and captives he had, Richard hold onto all the Muslim prisoners, and Saladin take Richard's promise as a king that Richard would turn the hostages loose when he got the final payment. Richard figured his promise as a king should be good enough. Actually, the implication that it wasn't was fairly insulting.

Then, with negotiations stalled, Richard got angry about waiting. So he took out all 2700 prisoners and had them killed.

He did it on a hilltop outside Acre where Saladin and his army could see the executions happening. That would teach them. The fairly small Muslim army on the scene tried to rescue the prisoners, but the larger Christian army held them at bay until all the hostages were dead.

A few follow-up questions: hadn't Richard given those prisoners his promise that he would spare their lives? Why yes. Yes, he did.

And wasn't the original plan part of a prisoner exchange? What about the 1500 Christian prisoners that were supposed to be swapped for the 2700 Muslims who got killed?

I think you know what happened. Those 1500 people got executed as a reprisal. Saladin didn't really have a choice. His troops had been made to watch their fellow-Muslims executed in cold blood, and after that they weren't ready to deal with Richard, or any of the other Crusaders, at all. The whole war got bloodier and more ruthless.Once you kill your prisoners, the new rule of war becomes No prisoners.

Is there an upside to this story? Why yes. The good news is that in the Fourth Crusade, Christians did not commit any atrocities like this against Muslims.

You see, the Fourth Crusade never got to the Near East at all. It only got as far as Constantinople, the capital of Orthodox Christianity, which the Crusaders promptly sacked. Then they went back to Western Europe. The Fourth Crusade didn't do anything despicable to Muslims because the Crusaders decided to do despicable things to other Christians instead. Happy ending, right? Deus vult and all that.

This has been a brief message from History Everyone Has Known for a Long Time. Thanks.

cross-posted from Dagblog