Category Archives: history

Taxation (with representation)…

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The sales flyers and ads on TV will tell you that today is Presidents Day. Title 5 of the United States Code, subsection 5103(a) defines it as Washington’s Birthday, and for my purposes, Washington’s Birthday is what I’m going with… Mostly because he was field commander who led the nation-in-waiting in a bloody war of independence at least in part over taxation without due representation. Despite his heroics, George Washington goes into the modern history books simply as a southern aristocrat. Most people don’t know much more about him than he owned slaves and may have been president at some point. That’s a shame, because Washington was basically America’s first badass action hero. He could have been king, but he laid down his sword and went home. What kind of ridiculous self control does it take to say no to a crown?

As usual, none of that is really the point. The point, dear friends, is that I’ll be spending a good chunk of Washington’s Birthday gathering my tax information and preparing to render unto Caesar. Washington’s war of liberation may have ensured that we’d have representation, but the taxation part is still completely out of hand.

Just another day…

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As Pearl Harbor Day slid past more or less unnoticed by the vast bulk of the country last week, my mind set off wondering how long it would take for the anniversary of the great traumatic events of our lifetime to be considered “just another day” on the calendar. Pearl Harbor was one of, if not the defining event of our grandparent’s generation – the clarion call that freedom itself was imperiled across the globe. In their millions, that generation answered the call and rolled Japanese imperialism back across the Pacific and stomped out Nazi fascism in Europe. They did the impossible because the only other choice was to accept a world where the very idea of personal liberty was an endangered species.

Seventy-two years later, when we collectively remember Pearl Harbor, it’s as grainy newsreel footage or from three inch pictures in a textbook. We remember it as a singular event and not as part of a grand, sweeping epoch of history that saw democracy in the world fighting for its survival. Worse, we see those events as something so far removed from our daily lives that they might as well have been made up by Hollywood.

Like the attack on Pearl Harbor for our grandparents, for us the terrorist attack on New York and Washington are slowly slipping into history. Even now, students in our nation’s high schools are too young to have first hand memories of that clear morning in September. How long do you suppose it will be before that too is something confined to the pages of history and 20-second “filler” clips on the news channels?

We owe it to ourselves and to the future to be better stewards of our history. They should know as much as possible about the world they’re inheriting. We’re not doing anyone any favors when we play down or neglect the sacrifices of the past. If I can be so bold as to paraphrase one of the great heroes of my youth – We must always remember. We must always be proud. We must always be prepared, so we may always be free.

We’ve simply poured out too much blood and too much treasure for landmark dates to pass as just another day.

Celebrating Columbus…

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I’m told by today’s endless media loop that celebrating Columbus Day isn’t cool. Blah, blah, genocide, blah, blah, conquest, blah, blah not a very nice man. Blah. Here was a guy who loaded three small wooden ships, pointed them west, and hoped at some point to find land waiting for him on the other side of the ocean before he ran out of food and water.

Christopher_Columbus“But, but,” they say, “He was looking for the Indies and only landed in the Caribbean by accident.” I suppose that’s true… but since I know people who can’t go across town without using their in-car navigation system, Google Maps, and hand written directions, I’m willing to cut the guy some slack considering he decided to cross an ocean using wind power and maps that were, at best, a wild ass guess of what might be out there.

“But, but,” they say again, “He killed all those nice natives.” Yeah, he did that. Can’t deny it. What seems to be forgotten in the discussion is Europe in the 1400s was a regular charnel house. Between the black plague and the Hundred Years’ War, letting the bodies hit the floor in the new world most likely didn’t particularly strike anyone as an unnatural state of affairs. All of our contemporary assessments of Columbus come from a 21st century perspective that is at least a full lifetime removed from any real concept of mass die-offs caused by war and pestilence.

We simply lack a point of reference for what “normal” was in the late 15th century. Even as a student of history, I always had a problem with those in the business who feel the need to apply contemporary morality to historical events. History is all about subtlety and context… and both are completely lacking when we try to hold Columbus to the standards of modernity.

Today, I’m celebrating Columbus Day. If that’s not cool, well, so be it.

Change…

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Most people don’t pay any attention to pocket change. It usually ends up in a jar, run through a sorting machine, and traded in for fresh folding money at the first opportunity. As is my way, I’m a bit of a contrarian on the issue. I’ve always like loose change. Every time I get a handful of the stuff, I pick though it looking for the illusive steel penny or wartime silver nickel. I don’t put enough effort in or find enough of the “good stuff” to even consider it a hobby, but I still look. If you’re patient, every once in a great while you’ll manage to pull out a real gem.

Not long ago I pulled a 1917 “Mercury” dime out of a handful of change picked up over the course of the day. It was beat to hell and back, worn almost slick by the passing of time and changing hands. It was almost a dime sized slug rather than an actual coin. Still if you knew what you were looking at, the barest outline of Winged Liberty was right there waiting for someone to recognize her.

In 1917, when this little dime rolled out of the die at the Philadelphia Mint, Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States and the First World War raged in Europe. By the time the Korean War was halted by a ceasefire in ‘53, it had already been in circulation longer than I’ve now been alive. Sixty years have passed since then, yet here’s a little dime sitting on my kitchen table. Minted before prohibition and before women in America had the right to vote, it’s been out there circulating for the better part of a hundred years. It’s banged up and gritty, but I should hope to be doing so well in the summer of 2072 when I’m as old as that dime is today.

If you ever happen to wonder why I’ve paused to look though my handful of change at the gas station or fast food drive through, now you know. It’s because every now and then you get to hold a sliver of history right there in your own grubby little paw… and you can’t have that much fun anywhere else for just ten cents.

The difficult right…

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The obvious direction to take tonight’s post is towards a memorial for Baroness Thatcher. The trouble with having a job and not being able to update the blog in real time, of course, is that the major outlets are already doing a fine job of lionizing the only Prime Minister other than Churchill that Americans know by name. Lady ThatcherI’m not sure that I can add much in the way of new information or even original thought. Still, marking the passing of one of the 20th century’s great statesmen only seems fitting.

​For those of us of a certain age, the world we’ve inhabited all our lives was largely shaped by the Cold War trinity of Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul II. ​Even though she’d been out of the public eye for more than a decade, with Lady Thatcher’s death this morning the one last living thread connecting us to our much younger selves is severed. Through the benefit of 30-years worth of hindsight, it seems she was on the leading edge of a political movement that got a lot more right than they got wrong. In a career that spanned some truly tumultuous times, that’s as much a mark as anyone could hope to leave.

Long after anyone reading this has made their own final exit from the world’s stage, it will be left to the historians to judge the merits, unencumbered by personal memories of their subjects. The historian in me has a lingering suspicion that our successors will be far kinder to them as a group than their contemporaries have been.

Godspeed, Lady Thatcher. The world is a safer and more free because you chose to stand on principle and do the difficult right rather than ​following the path of ​the easy wrong.

Quack…

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Medical science isn’t likely to find a bigger cheerleader than me… most of the time. When the chips are down, I can almost always count on them to come up with some chemical concoction the in some way improves my quality of life. Except this week, of course. I’m not in any way disputing the official medical diagnosis of “it looks like you have some fluid behind your eardrum,” but I am, however, disputing the “keep doing what you’re doing and give it another week” advice. It’s not like I’m in there asking for uppers, downers, or even leeches. All I’m asking for is something better than the standard little red pill that I’ve been taking every time I get sick since I was a kid. After two weeks, I don’t think asking for something with a little more horsepower is an unreasonable kind of thing.

Medical science? Meh. Quackery. You failed me. Next time, I’ll just got to Walgreens, buy them out of NyQuil, and sleep til I’m better.

I don’t need your Civil War… (we’ve got our own anyway)

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Today’s 150th anniversary commemoration of the beginning of the Civil War got me thinking – which is generally a dangerous proposition at the best of times. The war is long gone, faded into blurry photographs and dusty history books, but the issues it was fought over are as alive today as they were when the first shells burst over Ft. Sumter. Maybe we’re not arguing over who to count as three-fifths of a person or the legal status of people, but we’re certainly still trying o figure out the role of the federal government and where national power ends and state or local power begins. We’re fighting our battles today with words and budget appropriations, but it’s easy enough to squint your eyes and imagine how such a fight could devolve into canister shot and gunpowder.

It would be too easy to think the United States grew up in the last 150 years. The Union, such as it is, still stands after all – But are we really any closer to being able to have a civilized discussion about the hard issues that face us than were our predecessors? Take a long look at Fox News or MSNBC and then answer that question.

Valentine…

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Cupid_is_CreepyAccording to the legend, Valentine was an early Christian priest who defied Imperial edict and performed illegal marriage ceremonies for Roman soldiers. The emperor forbade such marriages in order to prevent his troops from becoming too fond of home and hearth and therefore unwilling to depart its comforts for life in far flung garrison towns on the edge of empire.

By order of Claudius II, Valentine was arrested, charged, and convicted of treason. While awaiting the sentence of death to be carried out, Valentine seduced the young daughter of the jailer. For his crimes against the state, Valentine was beaten, stoned, and beheaded in 270 AD… Which means to show the love we have for one another, each year on February 14th the western world celebrates the execution of a convicted traitor and pedofile.

From all of us at jeffreytharp.com to all of you out there on the internet, have a very, very happy VD… which ironically is another thing you’d probably run into if you spent a lot of time with treasonous pedofiles like the saintly Valentine.

Date and Places

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It would be easy to spend the day wallowing around in the news coverage of the 9th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, but I’ve actually done my best to stay away from that today. Sure, I paused and reflected about where I was, where we were, and what we’ve become since then. I’m starting to see how our parents generation can point to the time before President Kennedy’s assassination as seeming to be more innocent. Hindsight does that, it seems; rounds off the sharp edges and gives things past the soft glow of a Norman Rockwell painting.

The world was a violent place long before September 11, 2001 and it will be violent a thousand Septembers from now. Even knowing that, there will never be an anniversary of this date that doesn’t drag me back to the memories of that morning – to the shock, the disbelief, the anger, and the pure raw hatred of those few who came here to attack us on a crystal clear September morning. History usually dulls some of the feeling in telling the story of the past. Maybe too few years have passed or perhaps this is one of those memories you keep with stark clarity for the rest of your life. In any case, it’s been a tough one – even without the accompanying chatter of the media.