Nation v. Republic

For he might have been a Roosian,  A French, or Turk, or Proosian,  Or perhaps Itali-an!

All.

Or perhaps Itali-an!

Boatswain.

But in spite of all temptations  To belong to other nations,  He remains an Englishman!  He remains an Englishman!

 — Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore

         My headnote from W. S. Gilbert's 1878 Pinafore lyrics includes a joke that some 20^th-century Americans missed, and some 21^st-century Americans might still miss.

         About 1599, in his Henry V, Shakespeare shows a British army in France with captains who are Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and English and who talk of those designations as their nations. Things hadn't changed much that way by the Victorian era in the 19^th century, nor with the mother of a friend of mine who corrected people who thought she was English by telling them she was Welsh. Nor during the run-up to Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, when I saw a Union Jack only at a touristy place in the somewhat-United Kingdom and otherwise saw only the flags of the nations, especially, where I was, the English cross of St. George and the Scots cross of St. Andrew.

         The United Kingdom has one monarch, one flag of union, and four nations. And that's just one country we Americans refer to loosely as "England."

         "Nation" in the old sense was your tribe writ large: your ethnos, your people, and it wasn't something you chose, and it wasn't something you could change. You were born a Russian, Turk, French, or Prussian — and a Prussian damn well wasn't a Bavarian — and that was who you were.

         In that sense, Japan is a nation, and France is, sort of: France was pieced together from different independent medieval fiefs, and some Basques of France are getting restless, which gets one to the issue of Spain and the Basques and Catalans. And digging down a bit one would get to Québécois in Canada and, a bit further, such sensitive issues as Armenians in Turkey in the early 20^th century and the ethnic issues behind "ethnic cleansing" in the late 20^th century.

         In this sense of nation as "tribe writ large," the phrase "a nation of immigrants" makes sense only if you do a very fine-grain analysis of the old tribes and note that many of the big ones in historical times really weren't all that "blood and soil" pure-bred but more like confederations and semi-open communities.

         The First Peoples in the Western Hemisphere are also called "the Indian nations," and that's a plural. When the White folk arrived, they came from different cultures in Europe, and, indeed, even just what we call "the English" — "Albion's Seed" — came in different groups even more local than the current four UK nations and contributed to what Colin Woodard identifies as the "Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" (American Nations, 2011).

         How we count those (North) American "nations" or see our histories — plural — and rivalries isn't crucial; the crucial point is that the USA has not been, is not now, and for a long time won't be, if ever, "one Nation, under God" (or atheist or pagan).

         And unless we exclude a whole lot of people, we're not "a White, Christian" — as in "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian" — nation. (That Christian vs. Catholic line is a quotation from a student of mine: a nice guy I had a talk with on, let's say, religious nomenclature.)

         What we are, I think and hope, is what's identified in the old story of Benjamin Franklin's exiting the final session of the Constitutional Convention to be confronted by a woman who asked, in my paraphrase, «Well, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us […]?", answered with, «A republic, madam, if you can keep it.»

         We are, I think and hope, a republic, with a "mixt constitution" combining a rather monarchical President with an aristocratic Senate and a relatively democratic House of Representatives — as the Founders mostly intended, combined with a robust judiciary to check the other branches, and a professional bureaucracy to get the whole ungainly apparatus to work for what has become a large country.

         And we have citizens: people loyal to the Constitution (as much as they understand it) and to ideals in what has been called a civic religion, celebrated most especially on the Fourth of July, the anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence, one basis of American ideals.

         The Republic, of course, is kind of abstract and intellectual, but, then, you can't touch or smell or literarily feel a nation. Corporations are "fictive persons," but they exist, and money is just paper — or electrons in motion nowadays — backed up by convention and imagination and faith. The Nation also is a matter of symbols, rituals, origin myths, and stories, and in a better world than this one would be a safe and easy way to get emotional commitment to the State.

         In the world we actually have, the Nation gets emotional attachment much too easily, leading far too often to almost idolatrous attachment to symbols and a warm and fuzzy feeling of absorption into the tribe.

         Screw that. Or screw the extremes of "that": the xenophobic chauvinism summed up in Mel Brooks's joke about the first national anthem: "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-six!" Screw unthinking infatuation with our little tribes, with us.

         What we need instead is a mature love for the homeland we were born into or have adopted, a firm patriotism for the American Republic as an ideal and a hope for human dignity. The Republic as a great experiment in self-rule, what Abraham Lincoln called "the last best hope of earth" if we can maintain our Union and expand freedom. We can strive for a nation embodied in a Republic worthy of our love and even that "last full measure of devotion" for the ideal celebrated by Lincoln: the poet of the Republic as "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" — which God forbid should ever be replaced by the low appeal of just another arrogant, self-absorbed band of nationalists deluded by the myths of blood, soil, and ethnic purity.

Opioid Numbers

            A Chicago Tribune editorial reprinted in my local newspaper as "How to halt deadly toll of opioids" (Nov. 13) says that in 2016, "64,000 people died of drug overdoses," generally opioids. In 2014, there were 207,400 drug-related human deaths, so it's safe to assume there were more than that in 2016; 64,000 is for the US.

            It is a number that needs to be put in context and analyzed.

            In 2014, there were 2,624,418 total deaths of Americans, nearly 46% of them from heart disease and cancer. The 64,000 figure would put the US death rate from drug overdoses between those in 2014 for diabetes (76,488) and influenza plus pneumonia (55,227).

            What makes the 64,000 newsworthy — aside from money, politics, and the good old American obsession with drugs — is that such deaths are largely preventable.

            The Trib editorial suggests some ways of prevention, but we need more detailed numbers and analysis.

            To clarify a related discussion, I've suggested that the most direct way to decrease gun deaths in the USA would be to provide old men like me ways of killing ourselves more elegant than blowing out our brains. How many of those drug deaths are relatively nonmessy suicides? We might have less an opioid crisis than one of despair; and the responsible social answer to despair is psychological intervention and helping people achieve lives worth living.

            Are many of the deaths from accidental overdose? We keep down the rate of overdose deaths for legal drugs by regulation of purity and labeling. A direct way to reduce deaths by accidental overdose would be similar supply of FDA-approved illegal drugs, dispensed by responsible people. If we refuse to supply drugs of certified purity and dosage, then we need to make that decision consciously, and tone down laments about the horrors of overdose as such: we clearly have other priorities.

Climate-Change Revisited: Thought-Experiment (20 Nov. 2012)

            I've got a thought-experiment for you: "Let's pretend" for grownups.

            Let's pretend our sun is moving into a cycle of greater output of energy trivial for the sun, but important on Earth since we get a period of warming, what looks to be a long period. And the question would be what humans could do to moderate the effects of this sun-caused climate change.

            Some astronomer might note the "greenhouse effect" on our neighbor Venus, whose surface is very hot not just from Venus's nearness to the sun but also from its (mostly) carbon dioxide atmosphere, which efficiently traps heat.

            One thing we might try to slow down the heating of the Earth would be to reduce the carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.

            One way we could do that is to do some things we should do anyway to reduce our use of fossil fuels and leave some oil, coal, and natural gas for future generations, along with an infrastructure that runs well and fairly directly on what in human terms is the virtually unlimited power of the sun. We could leave a legacy of power from wind, water, geothermal sources, and focused sunlight, photovoltaic cells — etc.

            Got it?

            As a practical matter, for policy decisions, it's not crucial what the source is of long-term climate change, including the source of net global warming. If net global warming is occurring, we can help cool the planet by reducing carbon emissions.

            So stop already with arguments that human-released greenhouse gasses don't cause climate change! Reducing greenhouse gasses can help reduce the risk, and we owe it to future generations not to gamble with their planet, and try.

Patriotism, Teams, and Tribes

I've got three stories for you, one I've told before.

A decade or two ago, I complained to the manager of the Aerobics Area of the Miami University (Oxford, OH) Recreational Sports Center that the Muzak was too loud (getting through both ear stopples and heavy-duty hearing protector muffs). Among other things, he asserted, "But it's your music, meaning classic rock, which was the general soundtrack for the growing up of my generation. I responded that "My music is music I can turn off."

Possibly also at the "RSC," a colleague sort of trapped me for a mild rant on his sense of betrayal by his team, the Cincinnati Reds, whose manager and upper-echelon coaching staff he believed incompetent. Eventually I smiled and asked "Then why don't you fire the manager and the least competent coaches?" He said, "I can't do that; only Marge Schott can do that." "Then it's not your team," I said; "it's Marge Schott's team."

Long before that, when I was in high school in Chicago, the senior class advisor accused me with, "You never take part in school activities." I told her that I was in Key Club, actually, and that she was angry with me because of something I'd done working for the senior class; but, okay, I did put most of my effort into non-school activities (I was an officer of a freaking charity and that was a serious commitment!). "I can never be elected principal," I finally told her, "and I put most of my efforts into groups where I have some influence ... the possibility of clout." (Offered a choice, I never wanted to be the president of an organization but a VP or secretary or such: someone with access to the president, someone who'd be consulted.)

I'm at an extreme here, growing up political in Chicago, and in the Cubs neighborhood to boot (where many became either fanatical fans or learned to enjoy Wrigley Field without getting emotionally involved with that baseball stuff we viewed from cheap seats). Movies I liked greatly, but otherwise I wasn't much into being a spectator.

Most Americans, I suspect, are mostly fans of the American Nation: what Trey Parker and Matt Stone called "TEAM AMERICA" (WORLD POLICE). Part of Tribe America: or a subgroup felt to be the real America. A minority of Americans, I think, want, primarily, to be citizens of the Republic, with at least the possibility of at least a tiny bit of influence. These are overlapping groups and don't have to be opposed. But those on the other extreme from me, people who identify with Team America as "one Nation, under God, indivisible" and monolithic — these folk are right to see small "r" republicans, Americans who want to be citizens of a republican state and not members of a tribe as competitors for the soul of America and deeply opposed opponents.

We are in one of those "hearts and minds" struggles, and it will not be pretty.