The Taste of Ashes

Review of Marci Shore's “The Taste of Ashes”

By Brett Warnke

Publication, January 2013

Crown Publishers, New York, 384 pp

  

It was a specialist of the Enlightenment, academic Victor Klemperer, who wrote the greatest diaries to emerge from wartime Germany.  Later, after surviving fascist roundups and the firestorm of Dresden Klemperer settled in East Germany and titled his postwar diaries “The Lesser Evil.”  By 1956 his hopes dried: “I have lost all belief that I might have an effect.  All belief in right or left.  I live and die as a lonely literary journalist.”  The arc of Klemperer’s postwar story paralleled those of other European intellectuals:  individual tragedy followed by animated delusions and crushed hopes. Marci Shore’s new book The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe is a personal literary examination of a region’s intellectual history and her experience studying its ideological collisions.

Professor Shore, a translator and Yale academic, is the author of Caviar and Ashes:  A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  The two histories—many of whose characters remain constant—should be read together as they cover a small and curious world of human effort and thought.  Caviar was a penetrating history of a generation’s coming of age between the twin fires of totalitarianism.  In The Taste of Ashes Shore investigates Eastern Europe’s secret police files, she plumbs the files at Stanford’s The Hoover Institution, and interviews survivors, dissidents, and thinkers to explore the intellectual landscape of a world transformed by totalitarianism.  Shore describes her life as a young researcher in post-Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, all the while scribbling notes in cafes and parlors while moving from deep in the past or grappling contemporary politics.  Part memoir and part history, The Taste of Ashes deftly summarizes events for a popular audience—from the horror of the wartime ghettos, the Jewish Flying University, to the recent surge in death camp as tourism—while plunging into the ideological dilemmas that twisted so many fates. 

The book is rich in personalities:  lyrical poets, journalists, futurists, bundists, Zionists, and Communists.  Writers like Vladimir Mayakovsky, the beautiful and manic Russian poet who, after growing disillusioned who wrote that “the loveboat has crashed against the everyday.”  And like Aleksnder Wat, the futurist, Soviet inmate, and writer who saw his poems as “the casting of a beam of light on things dark by their nature.”  Both these writers were suicides and they weren’t alone.  While too numerous to mention, other self-slaughters include the poet and revolutionary Andrei Sobol, novelist Tadeusz Borowski, the poet Sergei Yesinin, and Trotsky’s daughter, Znaida Bronstein.  Others, even more various, were dispatched in intermittent terrors and purges.  In reading one of Shore’s books, one never knows if a character will make it to the next page alive.  Yet while including dozens of thinkers—many of whom do live natural life cycles and were beautifully profiled in her previous book—Shore renders these complex (and sometimes  narcissistic) personalities so vividly and writes so movingly about their literary production that the reader seems not only to acknowledge but understand the decisions these writers made, however ideological or destructive.    

The Taste of Ashes stitches the recent post-communist history to the tapestry of the avant garde.  Like Weimar, the years between the war were unsteady, filled with reaction, but also shot through with promise before the war and the “frozen years” under Communism.  It is not only the stories of men like Adolf Berman (a Zionist and writer) and his sibling Jakub Berman (an ally of Stalin who oversaw Poland’s security apparatus), two brothers whose paths diverged on the matter of the unquestionable party line from Moscow.  Instead, this book handles themes such as the guilt of writing and the difficulty of writing history as an outsider.  What is it like to be a historian, a speaker of Yiddish, Czech, and Polish, who criticizes choices made during a different zeitgeist?  In one episode, after a lecture, Shore recounts meeting a woman unhappy with her comments:  “You, a young person from another continent,” the woman said.  “You’re unable to understand Poland.”

But anxiety about her “otherness,” is belied by a tireless pursuit:  The writing of history, the disclosure of the past as it was lived by those who shaped its path.  In one instance, she walks through “bleak and beautiful” Warsaw so overcome by the history of the ghetto and the Polish uprising that she vomits.  She was, in her wandering around that somber city, looking for a way to “enter the war.”  She also discovers that the tight-knit authors who produce the literature of the “New Man” were not simply created by blind belief.  “These postwar relationships were epilogues to prewar relationships,” she writes.  “And if I wanted to understand the convergence of the war and Stalinism, I would have to go back in time, to the decades between the two world wars.”

A recurrent setting in her earlier book is Café Ziemianska, a coffee and wine fuel stop for Polish writers, avant gardists, and the political left.  Whereas the country’s interwar prisons served as universities for communists, so did the café.  The intellectual ferment in places like Ziemianska was real and definite at the close of the First World War, a conflict that changed everything.  The café was a place to debate the evolving possibilities; a place to face the new realities of radicalism and reaction, of utopianism and catastrophism. 

“Everything was now possible, a dizzying endlessness of possibilities,” she writes.  “It was a time when the boundaries between Marxism in theory and communism in practice were not clear, when both meant revolution, and revolution meant consummation, an escape from nothingness.  Crusty apparatchiks—balding or otherwise—had not yet appeared, nor had anyone glimpsed ominous specters of show trials; for many Polish literati of the 1920s, communism was cosmopolitan, avant garde, sexy.” 

Shore is dazzled by the liveliness of the political discourse in this period during which—more than ever—ideas were precise and alive.  And she reveals the tragedy of communists who, having been the most vibrant and optimistic fighters against fascism and for survival in the death camps, became the most ruthless rulers while in power. 

What Shore captures the cruel paradox of Stalinist communism—which imposed itself in Eastern Europe by military occupation and collaboration—an intellectual’s choice of Marxism was in effect an eradication of subjectivity.  To choose was to occlude the possibility of future choices.  So many succumbed to this sinister bargain and were crushed by its terms, but in the opening of Czechoslovakia’s communism, it was not only the opportunists and the careerists who joined the Party but, as Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera pointed out, “the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half.”  The writers in Eastern Europe who “saw hell twice,” as one deftly put it, will be held accountable for intellectual decisions included what to write and not write.  As the great Tony Judt pointed out in Past Imperfect, about communism’s fellow travelers who hitched themselves to the “locomotive of history,” the intellectual is condemned to choose and very often does make the wrong choice.  True, it is not difficult today to indict Stalinist writers like Wanda Wasilewska whose version of socialist realism is as reviled as passionately by thinkers today as it was lauded by the authorities of yesterday’s “people’s democracies.”  But we are not outside history and Shore includes today’s academic controversies:  What about contemporary intellectuals in Eastern Europe who, as Fear and Neighbors author Jan Gross points out, fail to write the inconvenient past of Polish anti-Semitic postwar pogroms? 

Summoning up the specters of the past can haunt the solitary researcher with painful personal truths.  At one point, Shore is reading author Bruno Jasienski’s NKVD file, one filled during The Great Terror of 1937.  Inside she finds a smashed fly, a fitting symbol for the those “engineers of human souls” who perished in Stalin’s many purges.  Inevitably, she considers the prospect of her own interrogation.  How would she fare under the secret police’s brutal tactics and beneath their bright lights?  “I… had no confidence that I would have behaved well.  On the contrary—I suspected I would have been a coward,” she writes.  But Shore is too sharp a historian to romanticize writers like Jasienski.  While he serialized (the recently reissued) I Burn Paris in 1928, Jasienski was a man complicit in the enthusiasms of his time.  “He was perhaps not quite so innocent as his twenty first-century fans made him appear,” she writes.  “During the Stalinist years he more than once played the role of accuser.” 

            Shore’s book flitters between the hopes and pessimism of people caught in the little cage of Eastern Europe.  Each seems to hold their own experiences, their own truths, but the conclusion is clear:  For most of the idealists to come out of the war, most met a terrible end.  Contingency or determinism?  Order or chaos?  Simplifications, to be sure but part of enduring debates as real and relevant as the battles over religion.  Or as the Bundist leader of the 1943 Ghetto Uprising Mark Edelman cynically asks “And where was God?  He was there, but on their side.”  There is no grace in Shore’s conclusion.  No morals or new ideology waiting to be picked up in the street.  But she does declare what she found in the ashes: 

[P]athological narcissism was not only something one reveled in but above all something one truly suffered from; that absolute subjectivity brought absolute anguish; that radical nihilism and radical contingency were psychically unbearable.  I learned that the nobelest of motives could lead to the bases of outcomes, that actions inevitably had consequences in excess of their intent.  I learned that I could not write a book with a satisfying conclusion, for the lives of the intriguing protagonists were breathtaking catastrophes.  I learned that the past could not be made okay.

For the dissidents who challenged the bankruptcy that communism became, many of whom were removed from the war by a generation, 1989 was a fittingly ironic end. An illegitimate authoritarianism was toppled by its own internal contradictions, by writers and artists and by an exploited working class.  But for those who remained, 1989 was the sum of all fears.  For those who had gone to the firing squads with the name “Stalin” on their lips, 1989 was a return to history.  After the Frankenstein of capitalism revealed itself in the 1930s and Communism ran out of road in the 1980s, for those caught between the two fires of totalitarianism, what was left to believe in?  For men like Czech playwright and president, Vaclav Havel, life’s most precious and guiding principle was “living in truth.”  And for other thinkers like Adam Michnik and Janos Kis it was the importance of self-limitation and non-violence as a means to radically transform politics.  In these decades after communism, Shore’s book is a necessary creation—a personal memoir, filled with interviews and a history that glows with humanity and shows a new generation the stories of totalitarianism.  By sifting through these ashes with her, from the fragments and glowing embers, we feel and taste what occurred and what remains.  The difficulty for a historian, as Havel points out, is that the dead end logic of communism was that the story had already ended.  After Stalin’s death, few believed in the ossified system, but the historicist logic remained a part of state ideology: 

Public life ceases to be an arena where different more or less autonomous agents square off, and becomes no more than the manifestation and fulfillment of the truth and the will of this single agent.  In a world governed by this principle, there is no room for mystery; ownership of complete truth means that everything is known ahead of time.  Where everything is known ahead of time, the story has nothing to grow out of.  Obviously, the totalitarian system is in essence (and in principle) directed against the story. 

    

The corollary is that the story is then an attack upon totalitarianism.  The inclusion of one character’s story, Jarmila, a transgender dissident who renames herself “Todd James” is masterful.  Jarmila, who immigrates to Vermont and converts to Orthodox Judaism, stands in for personal challenges during transition, the struggle with questions of identity, the frustrations of memory, and the weight of the past.  But Jamila’s struggles, while individual, are not atypical.  And, as if to parallel this struggle, the opening of Eastern Europe has thawed dormant difficulties of identity and religion—persistent sticking points. 

Like Klemperer, closing his life in cynical resignation, so many of Shore’s characters give in to private and public despair.  The taste of ashes is the flavor of despair.  After all, the story of Eastern Europe is a tragedy, not a morality tale.  Shore concludes with a powerful interview.  Slawomir Sierakowski, a philosopher whose work challenges western culture’s dilemma of relativism and fragmentation.  While a neo-Marxist, he’s not one who would have argued that the gulag was just a “tax paid” for the glories of socialism.  He’s a serious thinker.  One whom Shore quotes in a fittingly dark and timely observation:  “In today’s world we know more and more but we don’t use our knowledge to get together and change the world,” he says.  “We use it so that each of us, individually, can adapt to this imperfect world.  That we can get together and change this imperfect world almost no one believes.”   

     

Supermajority to the Rescue? California’s Democrats win a complex victory while opposition inflates expectations

By BRETT WARNKE

California liberals had hoped new supermajorities in both legislative chambers bring in changes to the trend of austerity that has monopolized conversations in Washington.  But the fiscal situation will loom heavy over their governance while political success came from factors other than rising liberalism.  And the growing fad of “fiscal accountability” will no doubt be used as a bludgeon against progressives who push for new or restored spending. 

Political shifts toward Democrats and demographic changes are rapidly underway at a time of great social hardship for most Californians, 6 million of whom live in poverty.  That’s 1 in 6.  Over the last twenty years the income for the top 1% of Californians has increased by 50%, that’s an average of nearly $1.2 million a year.  Meanwhile, income for the middle fifth has fallen by 15%.  Despite these numbers, the cuts to public programs that support the poor will come.  What happened in 2012?  And more importantly, can the new supermajority accomplish much considering California’s deep budget affliction? 

The 2012 state election was historic:  The new class is marked by the highest number (39) of freshman legislators since 1966 and because Democrats won a 2/3 supermajority, allowing them to pass tax increases without Republican support.  Many of the incoming Democrats come from swing districts and 10 incumbents lost, 7 in districts that had been heavily redrawn.  It is the first time either party has obtained the super-majority since the 2/3 threshold was established in 1978 and the second Democratic super-majority, the first one since 1883. 

Tenoch Flores from the California Democratic Party argues that the vote was a referendum on the Republican Party. 

“Democrats achieved a two-thirds majority by out-organizing Republicans and effectively making the case to voters that Democrats are better prepared to lead,” he said.   

But California underwent political changes that made the Democratic supermajority possible.  .  First, the supermajority was helped by term limits and a non-partisan redistricting plan that made districts more competitive.  In 2010, the state began using districts drawn by an independent commission instead of the legislature.  This reshaped the districts and reshuffled the political scene by increasing competition. 

California’s voters did pass Prop 30—a tax increase assumed in the budget that Democratic candidates supported and high Democratic turnout supported.  But it doesn’t add funds.  The state has already, under a Democratic governor, reduced spending in most areas including health and social service, universities, community colleges, the courts, and state administration.  Prop 30 simply prevented further cuts. 

UCLA Professor Daniel B. Mitchell is skeptical that the new super-majority will usher in a restoration of funding support or new programs. 

“Governor Brown doesn’t think so,” Mitchell said.  “Although technically a 2/3 vote could override a gubernatorial veto of more taxes that is very unlikely to occur.  Some of the Democrats that were added to get to 2/3 come from swing districts.  They aren’t going to vote for more taxes.” 

Many of the seats won by Democrats were not in comfortably liberal areas.  Instead, they ushered in moderate to conservative “valley Democrats.”  Also both parties will be looking ahead to the 2014 races which appear more Republican-friendly, whereas the fall 2012 fell in more favorable Democratic territory.  And while historic, Democrats should not get too overconfident.  Roughly 1/3 of the races were decided by less than 10 points. 

The second argument for Democratic success was the new “blanket primary” or “top-two primary” which allows all candidates to run in a single primary regardless of their affiliation and the top two candidates who receive the most votes advance for a runoff, even if they are from the same party.  Previously, voters had to vote to the party to which they were registered and candidates of that party now made infamous by the Sherman vs. Berman Democratic face-off in the 30^th district.  Yet, most incumbents won reelection in nearly the same numbers as before. 

“Under the new top-two primary and new legislative districts, those Democrats have to be careful not to lose voter support.  And even those in districts that are solidly Democratic under top-two have to pay attention to minority Republican in their districts.  That wasn’t the case under the old primary system,” Mitchell said.  

Thirdly, Governor Brown seems to have succeeded in getting more young voters to the polls by threatening to cut $500 million from higher education, which would have brought tuition increases.  Voters between 18 and 29 made up 28% of the electorate, an increase of 7% from 2008 and 13% from 1996 levels. 

Interestingly though, while appearing more Democratic with population swelling in the Bay area and southern California, the state’s voters are increasingly independent.  While Democrats once possessed 60% of registered voters, their numbers have dropped to 44%.  True, 38 of 53 House of Represenative seats are Democrats and while the party won their super-majority by remarkable wins in the 20 contested seats, 2014 races are more Republican-friendly and special elections in 2013 may open as members seek other elected offices before their legislative terms expire. 

Republicans, though, are taking a breath after devastating losses.  They have little power in government and one likely path will follow the McConnell opposition in the wake of a 2008 sweep—oppose everything and see what happens.  Currently, there are 400,000 fewer Republicans than eight years ago despite 1.6 million more voters; today, less than 30 percent of the state’s registered voters call themselves Republicans.  Steven Smith of the Labor Federation argues that Republicans are down but not gone.  “Everything the legislature does moving forward is going to be under the microscope and the Republicans are going to relentlessly attack the supermajority does,” he said.  “It is the only weapon left in their arsenal, try and publically attack them.  They don’t have much sway in the legislature anymore,” Smith said. 

Eric McGee, a policy fellow at the Public Policy Institute who studies policy and elections described in a web video the future prospects for incumbents and how future races in California will depend on a revision to a term limits law.  “Previously, there was no reason to contest a sitting assembly member or state senator since he/she would be forced to retire anyway,” he said. 

“Now, any new legislator can potentially serve longer.   Six years longer for the assembly and four years for the senate.  This might encourage potential challengers to throw their hat into the ring rather than wait as long as a decade for their next chance.  In fact, this logic already applies to congress relations where there have never been term limits.  But where competitive seats will most likely nurture the hopes of enterprising politicians in particular parts of the state.  In uncompetitive states, the top-two primary gives candidates a second chance to knock off the incumbent in the general election, even if they don’t win the first time” McGee said. 

A fourth factor in the victory is California’s rapidly changing demographics.  In 2012, the Democrats’ younger and Latino constituents went to the polls--1/3 of races were decided by less than 10 points.  And while once a bastion of the right wing—being the incubator for Nixon and Reagan—in the last twenty years California has become more reliably Democratic on the electoral map.  Part of the change has been an increase in diversity:  In 2010, 40% of the state’s population was White while Hispanics totaled 38%.  In thirty years, Asian-Americans, 73% of whom voted for Obama in the 2012 national election, climbed from 5% to nearly 13% of California’s population.  

The next chapter for Democrats will be the difficulties of governing with consistently bleak estimates for California’s budget.  Democratic spokesman Flores believes able governance will ensure reelection in 2014.

“2012 was the year voters decided they had enough of the Republican Party's slash and burn philosophy. In 2013, it's going to be up to Democrats to demonstrate that we can in fact govern responsibly and effectively and we intend to do so,” Flores said. 

The new legislature and Governor Jerry Brown will need to tackle a $1.9 billion budget problem in order to pass a balanced budget by June 2013 for the next fiscal year.   And while it is a “dramatically smaller budget problem” than the state has faced since the financial crisis, according to the Legislative Analysis Office (LAO), it produces a crisis of expectations for Democrats.  With little stimulus to the states, the financial institutions, households, and businesses have been forced to “deleverage” which requires saving and reducing consumption and further slowing hopes for recovery.

 According to the LAO report, the projected national recovery period is “much longer than for the prior recessions” because of the overall unwillingness to lend (and as a result) inability to spend.   According to Professor Raphael J. Sonenshein, executive director at the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles for California, a lot depends on the national recovery. 

“That recovery has another year or two to do,” he said.  “California will come out of it slowly when business conditions improve and there is less spending on catastrophic economic things.  My guess is that the state has another rough year to go, at least.” 

Democrats then will be in an unenviable position:  They will have to continue to cut while increasing taxes.  The conservative media is banking on either overreach or under-delivering on Democratic promises.  The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is revving up expectations, in an editorial the paper argued that “the silver lining here is that Americans will be able to see the modern liberal-union state in all its raw ambition.” 

But despite the bugaboo of redistributive liberalism, there are few funds to fight over or be “ambitious” with, even with recent reductions in the state’s $2 billion prison payroll.  Governor Brown’s harsh cuts left prisons unable to adequately care for and supervise thousands of California prisoners and, overall, the combined number of federal, state, and local government jobs in California has declined—down 1.7 percent from one year ago. The bulk of the decrease is attributable to a drop of 35,000 jobs in local government educational services.

Eventually, according to Mitchell, “payroll taxes will have to go up since the state’s unemployment insurance fund is in trouble due to high unemployment.”  But Sonenshein, believes otherwise. 

“[Tax increases] are not an easy sell,” he said.  “If I’m a politician who wants to get reelected, I can’t be a lockstep voter.  I don’t see an appetite from the leadership to get tax increases.  Swing voters won’t matter for general policy.  There may be legislation where Republicans and moderates ally with the governor.”

Competence, according to Sonenshein, will be the measure of the next two years of the Democratic supermajority.  “2/3 or not, getting through this crisis would be a victory.  When you get this much power the question is:  Can you use it to govern effectively?  Getting a budget that adds up would be a pretty good achievement,” he said. 

Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tempe of the state senate says he wants to use the Democrats’ new supermajorities in the Legislature to reform the state’s taxation system and the initiative process.  Given the budget woes, according to Sonenshein, even safe liberals who are eager to restore funding after years of deep cuts will need to lower expectations and temper their rhetoric. 

“It’s just too risky,” he said.  “They’re not done cutting.  They’re not done cutting and they don’t want to raise expectations.  The metaphor I like to think about this is:  The patient didn’t die but he’s not yet out of surgery.”   

  Steven Smith, of the Labor Federation, argued in similar terms.  “Prop 30 helped stop the bleeding, but it doesn’t put the state on a path of fiscal solvency,” he said. 

One alternative to difficult tax increases is identifying additional revenue sources.  Several such sources include corporate tax breaks whose intended purpose is creating jobs.  The Labor Federation favors identifying and pushing legislators to eliminate them.  

Such tax breaks lack transparency and accountability and were often inserted at the eleventh hour in bills order to get Republican votes.   Also, the breaks often lead to big companies cutting hire wage jobs and moving to another part of the state to get a higher tax break and lower wages. 

“This is a lose/lose situation when we are subsidizing the loss of high-wage jobs,” Smith said.  “We don’t want to eliminate every tax break.  We want to put it to the jobs test:  If they’re not creating jobs, we need to eliminate them.” 

Labor hopes to re-tool other breaks like the Change of Ownership because it costs the state money and puts some companies at a competitive disadvantage to others.  

“We enter this next year with eyes wide open about the challenges,” Smith said.  “It isn’t like all of a sudden the sky opens up and we’ve got a perfect situation to pass priorities that have been reduced in recent years,” he said. 

Smith believes the labor coalition will not squabble over the spoils of victory—not just because there are few spoils—but because of Speaker John A. Perez and pro tempe Steinberg’s efforts at uniting a labor-activist coalition around voter priorities.  If successful, California may produce a useful model for governance maintained by a liberal-leaning environmental, labor, health and human service, and non-profit group coalition.  If unsuccessful, it will likely be a tale of underperformance, disorganization, and a failure of these constituencies to organize the public or pressure leaders who were elected for more rather than less government action.    

“There is going to be cooperation between the legislature, the governor and the constituencies,” Smith said.  “This will be done incrementally and it’s necessary to start that way because we are in a challenging budget situation, though, that doesn’t mean you can’t be thinking long-term about making those investments that I think we all agree need to be made,” he said. 

Lincoln's Folly

Lincoln’s folly

By BRETT WARNKE

If Lincoln is consistently ranked as one of the country’s preeminent presidents—earning endless historical attention, novelization, fanfare kitsch, and now even Hollywood dramatization—Americans should also recognize Abe’s lesser addressed contribution to American politics: Andrew Johnson. 

Lincoln’s little-discussed choice for Vice President was the worst decision of a successful candidate in American history.  The Siena College Research Institute has asked 238 presidential scholars to rank presidents five times since 1982.  Johnson, Lincoln’s successor has had a consistent place on the sea floor of presidential rankings, alongside Lincoln’s cockeyed predecessor James Buchanan.  In 2011 he was dead last. 

In her 2011 biography of Johnson, Annette Gordon Reed called Johnson “spectacularly unsuited” to be President in 1865, citing him as the man who “botched Reconstruction, who energized and gave aid and comfort to the recently defeated enemies of the United States, the first president to be impeached by the House of Representative.”  It is simple.  “America went from the best to the worst in one presidential term,” she wrote

Steven Spielberg, ever cursing his films with optimistic endings, did give Andy a silent cameo behind the yarn-spinning Lincoln at the conclusion of his new film.  A Spielberg sequel, however unlikely, disclosing the dysfunction of American politics, which reached its paramount with a President Johnson, would be more appropriate today.  Or, at least, more necessary for “change in Washington” than a soothing flick about unity, sacrifice, and compromise.  Especially, as our politicians peddle austerity to us as if it were necessary. 

The trivia night facts about the senator from Tennessee might include his impeachment by what he labeled “Radical” Republicans and his rescue by one vote.  But with a shamefully low number of 33, Andy Johnson has fewer likes than Frito’s on facebook.  And even the National Park Service is currently looking for someone (anyone!) to be an interpreter at his home in Greeneville, Tennessee.  

Little about Johnson has leaked into contemporary popular culture, despite his crashing failure whose consequences were felt deep into the twentieth century. 

 Lincoln’s selection of Andy Johnson should sully the sixteenth president’s bright legacy a bit more than it does.  By diluting, obstructing, and delaying necessary social legislation during nascent Reconstruction, ripping at the seams Lincoln spent his best years spinning.  

If Lincoln ever remotely suspected assassination during the twilight hours of the Civil War, the obsessed Johnson’s selection was even more reckless.   Lincoln, who could warm up an Arctic night, was the perfect blend of pragmatism and principle.  Meanwhile, the racist Johnson who believed in a “White Man’s government,” was “self-sufficient, grim, impervious,” according to biographer Clifton Hall.  Hall writes: 

No man was ever less qualified than Johnson to overcome prejudice by virtue of his personality…He possessed none of the appealing gentleness, broad sympathy, and deep understanding of and love for humanity, none of the saving humor which made up so much of the greatness and power of Lincoln. His mind was narrow, bigoted, uncompromising, suspicious; his nature solitary and reticent; his demeanor coldly repellant or violently combative. 

 Recent books have been written about Lincoln’s proclivity for friendships (We Are Lincoln Men by David Herbert Donald.) Yet his Vice President was notoriously friendless and wary of southern aristocrats for very different reasons than Lincoln--class envy and personal resentment.  Jaded Johnson was the most intriguing kind of antihero—a small man in power who thought he was the little guy.  However, in Hall’s words, Johnson did have three admirable qualities “singleness of mind, tenacity of purpose, and indomitable persistency.” 

But these traits were borne of an inflexibility Lincoln might have imagined as a roadblock to the compromises necessary in a postwar era. 

 Branded the “Tennessee Tailor” for his humble illiterate upbringing, Johnson is, after all, the godfather of trust your gut, strict-constructionist absolutism.  And if he is scorned by contemporary Democrats and forgotten by his fellow conservatives, he was the heir to an eerily familiar form of American “limited government” fanaticism.  (You know, one of those “self-made” boors who never miss an opportunity to tell you about how they never missed an opportunity and why you should act accordingly.) 

In a disastrous speaking tour Johnson mysteriously labeled “The Swing Around the Circle,” he campaigned to unite northern and southern conservatives.  He failed miserably, splitting even his own Cabinet.  From town to town, with Grant and Seward forced to be at his side, Johnson recited the same speech with the repeated refrain “I stand on the Constitution!”  The Nation’s editorialists got it right in 1866 after his huge Congressional defeat:  “The conductor of the train, as Mr. Seward so felicitously termed [Johnson], has found out that the train has run over him, instead of his having run away with it.” In the same article, the writers described how “passion and prejudice” “are the staple of [Johnson’s] political sentiments.”

The man couldn’t set a foot right:  As commander in chief he opposed universal black suffrage, was nearly removed from office, constantly compared himself to Jesus, nullified legislation, ignored the Senate’s rights at confirmation, and savaged the Freedman’s Bureau (which educated former enslaved people) as costing “more than the entire sum expended in any one year under the Administration of the second Adams.”  (In an ironic reversal, the sixth president sought major infrastructure and education investments but was blocked at every turn by Congress.) 

Johnson’s was a record worth of more attention by Lincoln and his staff.  In today’s parlance, Johnson needed a bit more vetting.  His was a noisy form of status quo apologetics and stump-top windbaggery; in 1869 The Nation called him a “skill of a veteran honeyfugler and inveigher” and his voting record would have made Rand Paul look indulgent:  He tried to cut white-collar public employee salaries, voted against aid for hunger-ravaged Ireland, fought to limit funds to the Smithsonian, opposing infrastructure in his own district, he sought a cap on the number of public clerks, and even voted against raising pay for Mexican War soldiers during wartime.

                All this, by the way, was part of the record by Lincoln’s selection of Johnson in 1864. 

True, the VP selection process sordid, especially then.  In 1864 Lincoln had dumped the useless party hack, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, in favor of a Vice President Johnson in what must have seemed a savvy gesture at reconciliation:  Not only was Lincoln selecting Johnson, a Democrat and a southerner, he was offering himself as a post-party unifier.  (He previously offered the slot to the much maligned but quite efficient former occupier of New Orleans, Benjamin Butler). 

How did this collision of lives occur?  Both Lincoln and Johnson were ambitious storytellers, raised by women, from humble origins in America’s rural interior.  In fact, Johnson’s resume looked better than Lincoln’s, having an unbroken chain of successes:  He was an alderman, governor, representative, a noted military governor of a southern state, Vice President, and a senator whereas Lincoln had only served in the Illinois legislature and gone to Congress for a single term.  

Johnson’s life, according to one east Tennessee opponent, Oliver P. Temple, was “one intense, unceasing, desperate, upward struggle.”  But while Americans now adore “the outsider” status of politicians, Johnson entered Washington in 1864 unable to lead his own party and with few connections.  Yet, in blood-spattered 1862, Johnson did show competency and resolution in governance; traits which Lincoln might not have predicted would be impediments in a period of legislative compromise.  In fact, Secretary of War Stanton wrote to Johnson after the war, “With patriotic promptness you assumed the post [of governor], and maintained it under circumstances of unparalleld trials, until recent events have brought safety and deliverance to your state, and to the integrity of that constitutional Union for which you so long and so gallantly periled all that is dear to man on earth.”

The key to the contrast between Lincoln and his heir, according to historian Eric McKitrick, was not success:

It lies rather in the way success was conceived.  For Johnson, personal fulfillment had long since come to be defined as the fruit of struggle—real, full bodied, and terrible—against forces specifically organized for thwarting him.  Not for Lincoln.  Johnson, all his life, had operated as an outsider; Lincoln in most of his world dealings, and temperamentally as well, was an insider. 

                Frederick Douglass sized-up Johnson nicely quite early, inauguration day 1864. Johnson spotted Douglass and the latter described a returned glance filled with scorn before Johnson flashed “the sickly smile of the demagogue.”  But give Johnson some credit, he was drunk.  After three glasses of undiluted whiskey, the ailing Johnson embarrassed himself in front of the filled Senate chamber—so much so that Lincoln was forced to comment saying “Andy ain’t a drunkard.” 

                The little-known Johnson was the worst man for the worst period in American presidential history as well as Lincoln’s greatest but least known blunder.  The New York Times obituary read that “undoubtedly the greatest misfortune that ever befell Andrew Johnson was the assassination of President Lincoln…his posthumous fame would have been brighter without this high honor and the consequences it entailed.” 

True, a man is responsible for his own choices; a burden Johnson’s legacy (and his future historical interpreter in Tennessee) will heavily bear.  But Lincoln did disastrously choose Johnson for the country.  America has selected men with worse and slimmer resumes for the White House.  But Johnson was insulated from review by a cocoon of hasty process, strained politics, and war.  Luckily, few subsequent elected embarrassments—save Nixon—have marked the country and presidency so deleteriously after being selected as the executive’s number two. 

The Eagleton, Quayle, Ryan, and Palin selections should give voters pause.  If our pitiful party duopoly offers us nothing worthier, perhaps Hollywood could at least produce a feature film that—if not a historical cautionary tale—offers the public more than the politics of healing.  Perhaps revealing the true politics of obstruction by individuals like Johnson or his many heirs is the surest path to reform. 

                 

Review The Sunset Limited

                  Ever wake up, eye the room and consider never getting up?  It's worth considering.  Maybe staying in bed isn't such a bad idea.  It was that defender of the concept of man's original sin, Blaise Pascal, who wrote that all of man's problems stemmed from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.  Philosophy, after all, then and ever since has been about preparing to die.  

                The Sunset Limited Cormac McCarthy lives out Pascal's one-room maxim--the two characters ("White" and "Black") don't leave a small apartment (for a while)--using their time to consider existence, grace, suicide, nothingness, and a universe with/without divine supervision.  Black, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is the kind of Christian one can tolerate:  committed but considerate, faithful but devoted to questioning his own apologetics.  He begs his God for the power to voice Truth to White, played by Tommy Lee Jones.  White is a professor of philosophy who has run out of track; earlier in the evening he threw himself in the path of the Sunset Limited model train in New York's subways.  Miraculously, he was saved by Black in what could be grace, or misfortune for the luckless White. 

                  This isn't a standard play.  It has the brooding beauty of O'Neill and McCarthy's obsessive focus on life and death.  What other topic is there for old Cormac anyway?  The only movement in the drama involves slight action around a single apartment in a slum; the only conflict is in the dialogue and the possibility that White will leave the room and meet a preemptive fate.  Albert Camus, the French-Algerian author, probably wrote the most famous work on the question of suicide.  Camus opened his Myth of Sisyphus with these lines:  "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.   Judging whether life is or not worth living amongs to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.  All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards.  These are games; one must first answer."  Why bother?  Why wake up?  Is there radical contingency or some wicked game of grace and holy meaning?  Is "God" just and loving, a "gentle Jesus meek and mild"?  Or is he some gnostic overlord, ruthlessly indifferent or (even grimmer) actively on the side of radical evil!  With the state of the world, Black and White have a lot to talk about.  Both take the debate seriously and personally.  "It is personal," White admits of his obsessions and preoccupations.  "That's what an education does.  It makes the world personal."   

                   Black is kind and generous and honest.  And he's chosen to live his life sincere and committed to a higher power whom he is convinced "saved him" in the jailhouse.  (Though, as White points out, the bloody episode we are provided illustrates the wicked logic of God's grace.)  White repeatedly asks Black why he lives in the apartment.  It's unsafe, deep in the ghetto.  Black admits that he likes the simplicity and feels his work is unfinished.  Why leave?  Martin Luther King's picture stares calmly behind the characters, wrapped in a baggie and hanging from the wall.  But, admittedly, the best lines belong to White.  And Tommy Lee Jones is amazing as the spiky, easily offended and desperate White.  As the dawn opens behind their conversation, White is exasperated:

                I don't believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and  din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There's a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy.

               What is so powerful about McCarthy's two-man show is that by the end you are can identify with a distraught believer and a hopeless man lost in the bleak labyrinth of nihilism.  For White, "the good" was culture.  Meaning and truths, however constructed and buried under a flurry of quotation marks, could be sought if never fully obtained.  But the "fragile" and "frail" culture that propelled him onward, according to White, is precipitously vanishing.  Slawomir Sierakowski, a Polish intellectual and neo-Marxist, recently admitted in an interview:  “In today’s world we know more and more but we don’t use our knowledge to get together and change the world."  He continued, "We use it so that each of us, individually, can adapt to this imperfect world.  That we can get together and change this imperfect world almost no one believes.”  

                Perhaps, if we cannot radically change the world, maybe we can improve it so that we can live decently within it without need of a collision with the Sunset Limited.  Then, at least sleep could come a little quicker and waking up would be a little easier.