Lest We Forget
Franklin H Littell

• Contempt for History

• The Mysterious “Taggant”

• Vulgarity and Civility in Politics

Contempt for History

College teachers are generally agreed that one of the most dismaying things about today’s incoming students is their lack of a consciousness of history. One former student, a high school teacher himself, has suggested that this vacuum exists because many high school courses in history are taught by former coaches with fallen arches who can no longer do the work they were hired for.

Actually, the defect became apparent in their parents’ genera­tion, in the years when courses in American History, American Government, World History, and Literature classics fell away and Mathematics and cognate subjects took over. The education of informed citizens lost market value as training in technical profi­ciency gained ground.

However, many students, cut loose from a secure sense of time and place, lost the conviction that learning anything was worth­while. During the last two decades we have heard colleagues exclaim in desperation about new freshman again and again: “They don’t know anything!” Yet the comment inevitably follows: “They’re bright enough. They can ask the right ques­tions. But they have no sense of rime and place.”

When young citizens are cut loose from the dialogue with the past, they are as danger­ous as rogue cannons. One of our great novel­ists wrote a scene of conflict between an older man and young rebels “who were born with­out navels.” The young rebels lacked a sense of history, sloganized, ignored the dialogue with the past, and mouthed abstractions and propositions they thought timeless. They were, in sum, religious or political fundamentalists with enormous zeal and no comprehension of how human societies, ideas, and practices develop.

We constantly confront the contempt for history; and this ignorance of how human affairs develop and change in young people who talk about the failings of Thomas Jefferson, Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon as though they were contemporaries making decision in the same situations. One of the advantages of judging everyone in a cloudy past from Cloud Nine is the escape from present awareness of time and place, decision, and personal moral responsibility.

An incident involving this escape mechanism at work, linked to uncertainty about time and place, decision, and moral respon­sibility, occurred recently at Iowa State University in Ames. One of Iowa State’s illustrious alumnae was Carrie Chapman Cart, one of the great women of American history. She died in 1947 at the age of 88 years, and a building has been re-named for her on the Iowa State campus.

There are several good reasons for giving her name to a build­ing at her alma mater, but the chief are these: she founded the League of Women Voters, and she devised the political strategy that won by Constitutional amendment the long-delayed nation­al voting rights for women (1920). (Item: the Freedmen gained the Constitutional right to vote more than half a century before women were guaranteed the franchise.)

Amidst general acclamation, someone has discovered that in her correspondence she said things that disparaged Negroes and native Americans. The African Americans and American Indians have been awakening politically in recent years, and they notice such things. She also said some things about voting by illiterate immigrants, but their grandchildren aren’t organized to nurse past wrongs: they are up and out.

Now the Ames chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is demanding that her name be removed from the building recently named for her. (What would happen to any white speaker who referred to “col­ored people.”) The proposition stared the demand that the uni­versity “not tolerate racism in any form or fashion.”

So far the President of Iowa State has kept his head and refused to be sloganized into denying the University’s famous graduate (“warts and all”). She said or wrote those opinions, after all, three-quarters of a century ago.

Let me stipulate that I would never approve of naming any university building for someone who today uttered views of African Americans, American Indians, or any other minority that we today recognize as racist. But if the Ames chapter of the NAACP wants honestly to stand for the principle that “racism in any form or fash­ion” is not to be tolerated, wouldn't coura­geous criticism of Johnny Cochrane’s playing the race card to free a murderer or outspoken opposition to the racist viciousness of Louis Farrakhan be in order? Such civil courage would show a sense of time and place, of how history is shaped and where it may go.

Or are we, with the air full of flying absolutes and general propositions, good for all times and places, in a time warp where the centuries-old, mild cultural racism of a white woman is a more shining target than the vile overt demagoguery of black racists today?

This question cannot be answered responsibly by those igno­rant of history, contemptuous of historical struggles of the past, and blind to their own time and place of decision and responsibility.

The Mysterious “Taggant”

Few readers will remember, but the Anti-Terrorism Bill that recenty cleared Congress included one arcane but highly important clause. That clause was the requirement that ammunition carry identification (“finger-prints”).

Although police and public safety officials had tried for many years to get the provision enacted into law, manufacturers of explosives had until now succeeded in de-railing every effort for socially responsible control. They had used their well-financed “front,” the National Rifle Association (NRA), to defeat the sen­sible requirement that explosives carry identi­fication.

That method of identification, which has been available for decades, makes use of markers called “taggants.” Through the insertion of “taggants” it becomes possible to trace the path of an artillery shell, machine gun bullet, handmade bomb, or other such killing weapon. From the point of impact back through the middle man to the explo­sives factory, the arc of responsibility can be discerned.

The “taggant” is a tiny plastic dot, avail­able in many different hues. A pattern can be implanted in explosives without affecting their power, dependability, or accuracy. By that “finger-print” a recovered bullet or shell, landmine or grenade or amateur bomb can be identified and traced to its source.

Until now, the National Rifle Association has been able to block legislation to slow down traffic in anony­mous anti-personnel weapons. The NRA’s favorite device to appeal to public opinion has been to publicize the happy scene of some young father teaching his son to plink rabbits. (With light artillery? with machine guns? with hand grenades?) The NRA has also been one of the earliest and most lavish lobbies in the use of cash outlays to Representatives and Senators, helping to give us today “the best Congress money can buy.”

The “taggant,” a device long available for finger-printing explosives, will not directly limit the anarchic mass distribution of tools for killing but will rather make it possible to identify the chain of responsibility after the damage is done. Still, American companies that have been engaged in the sub rosa and enormous­ly profitable shipment of arms to the Muslim forces in “Bosnia,” in breach of the UN embargo, will have to think twice about the possibility that their misconduct may become known to citizens at large, both in America and around the world. And the car­tridge manufacturers that have produced the “cop-killers” that penetrate the officer’s vest or automobile will be compelled to be a little less bold in their anti-social behavior.

After the lawyers on the court floors get through with their financially profitable delaying tactics, and after the lawyers on the bench (“judges”) play their accustomed role in the delay of law and justice, and after the NRA has used its subventions to pay for another excruciatingly banal series of TV shows about juvenile rabbit hunters to disguise what is really going on, the common sense of the public may win out. The concern of citizens for police safety and lives may unite with the moral outrage of true American patriots, who resent seeing their country play the part of a duplicitous trader, to get the use of “taggants” enforced.

“Taggants” are part of an effective answer to terrorism and rogue military actions, both foreign and domestic. Their use should be expected to also sharply reduce the mayhem in American cities and in the countryside, helping to staunch the flow of explosives to individual criminals, companies of terrorists, and private armies.

Lest we forget, the fighting in the streets between private armies was one of the destructive forces that undermined the Weimar Republic and made the Führer’s promises attractive to a substantial percent­age of sober and hard-working Germans. Hitler never won a democratic election or a majority vote, but his minority machine was strong enough that the President, General Hindenburg, appointed him, and prominent industrialists supported him, in establishing a government of centralized violence to replace the anarchy of dispersed violence.

One of the major factors in destroying a republic is by fraud, bribery, and false “fronts” to cause the voters to lose faith in the democratic process. The Anti-Terrorism Act restores hope in America, that in their Constitutional mandate to secure the general welfare the Congress and the President will identify and curtail the illicit manufacture, distribution, and mis­use of anti-personnel weaponry.

Vulgarity and Civility in Politics

Following the State of the Union Address of the President of the United States, the watching public had an appalling demonstration of incivility. It was also a demonstration of a lack of patriotism, of disrespect for the highest office in the land.

While a noisome claque of ill-mannered fraternity boys and simpering poor white trash sat on their hands, a few called “con­servatives” demonstrated that they were genuine conservatives by civility of behavior and respect for the Senator (R., Pennsylvania), was among those who stood and applauded politely at the end of the Address.

A number of neighbors were shocked, indignant at the disre­spect and vulgarity of social behavior displayed by so-called con­servatives. The generalization was rampant: American politics is in severe decline.

I am not sure that the generalization will hold up, although negative political advertising and the buying and selling of Congressmen has certainly stepped up in pace (and cost) since 1980. After all, historical research has exposed to view the savage cartoons and scurrilous editorials of earlier periods of American history. Abraham Lincoln, now commonly regarded as the great­est of our Presidents, was attacked verbally day after day as “an ape,” and portrayed as such in popular cartoons. The verbal and printed attacks of such vulgarians as Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh on President Clinton stand in an old, if dishonorable, succession.

Not that much has changed in brute fact, either for the worse or for the better. During the period before the Civil War, at the time of the other Buchanan, while the Congress was trying hard to suppress any discussion of the most important single issue fac­ing the Union (chattel slavery), physical assaults were not uncommon. On one occasion a member of Congress attacked another with a club and bear him senseless to the floor.

Don’t jump too quickly to celebrate our present higher phys­ical level above incivility and lower decibel levels of incivility, however. What has changed for the worse is substantial: every­one sees and knows everything that happens. The media, and the incredible cost of access, have not only corrupted the politi­cal campaigns and the office-holders: the media have made avail­able to every school child the examples of vulgarity and misbehavior, not to mention lack of simple patriotism, of per­sons in Congress. Even state legislatures are no longer immune

from the light of public exposure, and some of them are even less edifying than their national counterparts.

At the time of the equally vulgar and extremist attacks on Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, for instance, only a tiny percentage of the American people ever read them or heard them. Most people could neither read nor write, and fewer yet had access to newspapers. Among the elite who could read, most were experienced enough to shake down the hyper language and lurid reports to see what small kernels of truth might be left in the bottom of the pan.

Today this kind of misbehavior, disrespect, incivility, and lack of patriotism is on display not only to tens of millions of Americans, but to the whole world. When some months ago I was in a distant city in the Caucasus for a conference, a city of which I could almost say, “You can’t get there from here,” I watched the same programs on CNN that family, friends, and colleagues were seeing in Great Falls, Waco, Evanston, and Philadelphia. And I saw things that made me ashamed that my country wasn’t able to present more worthy political leaders, per­sons better models for our youth, statesman whose conduct com­mended our principles of liberty and self-government.

We shall nor have such leaders, of course, until their election is taken our of the control of the super-rich and the large corpora­tions and put back in the hands of the American people. The sit­uation will not improve fundamentally until candidates are compelled to debate and win on the merits of principles and pro­grams, rather than sliding into office on expensive floods of men­dacious 10 second sound bytes. But perhaps even with the present crowd we shall see less shameful behavior when the naughty schoolboys wake up to the fact that what they are doing isn’t in the closer anymore: it’s our in the open in Moscow, Beijing, Jakarta, Seoul, and Jerusalem—as well as in Muleshoe, Tampa, and Kalamazoo.

Updated Friday, December 28, 2001