Tyranny of the Minority: Graduating from the Electoral College

One was a former Senator and Secretary of State, even-tempered, highly-educated with a deep knowledge and appreciation of government, from a Presidential family.  Another fancied himself a tough guy, a voice for the common man, a self-made success who deserved to be President.  Bombastic, self-assured, and certainly racist.  On a December day, as the Constitution demands, electors met in their respective states to elect one the next president of the United States.

In 1824, John Quincy Adams, son of the second president, stood for office against Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, who had vaulted to national prominence from the backwoods of Tennessee (or maybe North Carolina).

When the popular vote was tallied, Jackson led Adams by about 40,000 votes out of 264,000 cast for the two.  In the Electoral College, Jackson again led Adams 99 to 84, well short of the 131 needed to win, meaning the House of Representatives would settle it, and the House elected Adams to his lone term.

Jackson, for his part, knew how to hold a grudge.  His supporters worked to bring more voters into the system and, in 1828, he would decisively beat Adams.  But four more times—in 1876, 1888, 2000, and now in 2016—the Electoral College would select the candidate with fewer popular votes. 

Arguments for the Electoral College are well-worn by this time: it assures that the smaller, less populous states get attention; it prevents democratic mob rule; electoral vote totals amplify the perceived mandate for the winner, making governance easier.

Only the second of these, fear of democracy, really seems to have mattered.  In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton argued that the selection of the President by Electors was better than allowing Congress or the people, democratically, to elect the executive.

“A small number of persons,” Hamilton wrote, “selected by their fellow citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” 

The job could not be entrusted to the people, but to their betters who, being possessed of more knowledge and a broader outlook would make a wiser choice, while still reflecting, as Hamilton put it, “the sense of the people.”

James Madison was quite clear that democracy would favor the voter-rich northern states against the southern states with their large number of enslaved people and non-voting whites when in the Constitutional Convention he noted that “the right of suffrage was more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”  The Electoral College was a suitable compromise for slaveholding states. 

However, what the method of election chiefly did was allow the southern states to enjoy the disproportionate influence accorded them by their vast enslaved populations who, though they had no voice in government, counted towards the numbers of representatives and electors, albeit at the discount exacted by the Three-fifths Compromise.

Even in the early elections, before the admission of more slave states and a skyrocketing enslaved population, the advantage was perfectly clear.  Virginia had by far the most electoral votes in the 1792, presidential election, almost half again as many as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, though by free white population it should have been roughly equal to Pennsylvania, and one ahead of Massachusetts.  Combined, the Southern states had electoral clout based on their enslaved populations alone that more than outweighed Pennsylvania’s slate of electors. Small wonder, then, that seven of the first ten presidents were from, or at least born in, Virginia.

That the Electoral College is undemocratic should be no surprise; it was designed to be so.  Its real weakness, though, is that it has been, at least since the 1820s, a failure in its stated purpose.  Even when it has overturned the will of the voters, as it now appears poised to do yet again, it has done so on behalf of another group of voters and under the control of political parties. 

Today we have a different sort of imbalance.  Because each state has a minimum number of electors, regardless of population, a group of low-population states can balance, even overwhelm, the votes of states with much higher population.

Typically, of course, the Electoral College simply follows the popular vote, though with wider margins.  It doesn’t usually radically overturn the will of the voters—even the 3% margin Rutherford B. Hayes overcame in 1876 produced the difference of a single electoral vote.  Far from making decisions removed from the whims of the people, it has endorsed them at almost every turn.

Since it has in the main been an undemocratic institution functioning sort-of democratically, why not just get rid of it?

Simply because when it malfunctions, it does so in one direction.  Not necessarily, even if practically, in a partisan direction, but in the favor of the citizens of rural states, giving those states an outsized say in elections.  They have, then, no incentive to change and there are enough of these states to prevent a Constitutional amendment eliminating it.

Arguments about attention, mob rule, and perceived unity are a fig leaf to cover this fact, that as long as the Electoral College remains, such states will be a firewall for conservatives in close elections like this one. 

It is time, therefore, to recognize the Electoral College for what it is …a mechanism for allowing a minority of voters to thwart the will of a majority or plurality, an instrument for the naked exercise of power.

And we already have the Senate for that. 

W.P. Kinsella- An Appreciation

I did not read all of the works of William Patrick (W.P.) Kinsella, the Canadian author who took his own life by assisted suicide at the age of 81 on September 16.  In fact, except for the occasional re-reading of one of several short stories, I hadn’t read anything from him since 1996’s If Wishes Were Horses.  Following the release of that novel, Kinsella was injured by a van while walking, and for the rest of his life found the concentration, and the desire, necessary for his writing hard to come by.  After 1997, he would not release another novel—though he continued to publish short stories—until 2011.

Like most of Kinsella’s American audience, I came to his works through the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, based on Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe, itself an extension of his earlier short story “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa.”  I remember seeing the movie when I was 18 and being struck by the power of the storytelling.  References to old ballplayers were fine trivia points, even when the screenplay got details wrong, and added meat to the story. 

This led to the book…and then to others he had written.  Then I was primarily reading his baseball stories.  Baseball is a sort of American mythology.  James Earl Jones’ character is right when he tells Ray Kinsella that America has grown up with it; it was born, or at least came into its own, in our rebirth after the Civil War. 

Kinsella, a Canadian, didn’t have much to say about America, except indirectly, but he was the bard of baseball’s mythology.  Having earned his MFA at the University of Iowa, he had at least a passing acquaintance with the American “heartland,” and a feel for the rhythms of small town life that served him well in his writing.  For Kinsella the baseball diamond was the world rendered in miniature, encompassing its possibilities.  The two were tethered, indeed in several of Kinsella’s stories characters are seen to observe that, in theory, baseball diamonds extend to infinity, so all the world is contained in them.

Because of this anything that could happen, that might even be remotely possible, did happen.  A left field created out of an Iowa cornfield could summon the shade of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson.  Armageddon could logically hinge on one pitch, in which the Chicago Cubs either win or lose the National League pennant.  The New York Giants of the 1950s could be a collection of top-notch ballplayers and autodidacts, speaking an average of three languages each, allowing a fourteen-year-old stand-in for the author with an unerring eye to pinch hit. A cabal of devoted baseball fans, waiting for the end of the 1981 strike could, one square foot at a time, replace the artificial in Kansas City’s stadium. 

He wrote of games that went on for thousands of innings, in which gods and various otherwise inanimate objects joined; of twins who played catch in the womb, one destined to be a pitcher and the other a catcher; of baseball dreamers and schemers.  Sometimes baseball was the focus, sometimes it was the backdrop.  In his stories it provided order, and occasional tragedy, to the lives of characters, to the cosmos itself.    

In another cycle of stories he wrote about the lives of Cree Indians on a reservation in Alberta.  These spoke to me less, but they were warm and humorous even in tragedy.  And in them, baseball was never far off.  I know he was criticized for appropriation—something Kinsella derided as a creation of East Coast academics—of First Nations’ voices, but I can’t help enjoying them for their humanity, and the respect with which he treated their lives.

Kinsella, at the end, had suffered a long time from diabetes.  Most of his last years were apparently spent playing on-line Scrabble, having apparently been an avid tournament player.  Due to complications he sought, and received, medical assistance in ending his life.  This year has been one noted for its deaths of public figures.  I’m not surprised by it, and expect next year to be busier; a generation of stars, many hard-living, who were idols to children of the 1960s and 1970s is getting long in the tooth, and the actuarial projections must be grim. 

W.P. Kinsella wasn’t one of those, but his is another loss in a year of them.  Stories about baseball aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I can imagine many people walking away from one of his works wondering what the fuss is about.  But his style is hard to deny.  He wrote touching and often funny stories about mostly real people, usually facing weird situations on or near a baseball diamond (of course, everything that happens happens on a baseball diamond, if you remember).  He increased my appreciation for baseball.  I think of something from one of his stories almost every time I come near the game, and it usually makes me smile.  A tremendous gift, that, and one that leaves the world a little poorer for its loss.

On immigrants, undocumented and otherwise

Immigration, it seems fair to say, has been at the top of our national political agenda for the last several years.  And with the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the republican nomination, it seems to be on everyone’s mind.  There’s no need to re-cap his position, whichever iteration of it he’s on.  I’ve written before about bits of it, especially concerning Muslims, as his proposals have intersected with my own interests.

Since it’s so much talked about, everyone, it seems, has an opinion, especially on what to do about undocumented immigrants.  These are, as everyone knows, people who have entered the country illegally or who have entered the country legally but overstayed their visas.  When I was a child we called them “illegal aliens,” which I think we can agree is less friendly and not just because it spawned a dopey Genesis song.

In some quarters, undocumented immigrants are called “illegal immigrants” or even the worst of all, simply “illegals.”  That term offends because it completely de-personalizes and dehumanizes, which I suppose is the point.  I guess if we don’t have to think of them has humans then we don’t have to treat them as humans.  Almost equally offensive is the term “anchor baby,” applied to children of “illegals” born in the United States and thus automatically citizens.  For now. 

None of this is new.  What is new is a suggestion that I recently saw which has made me re-think the whole issue of “undocumented immigrants” altogether.  In a discussion thread, one of the participants made the following argument:

1. Immigration is a legal process
2. So-called “undocumented immigrants” are here illegally and not in that process.\
3. Therefore, so-called “undocumented immigrants” aren’t immigrants at all.

QED, amirite?

At first sniff, this argument stunk, never mind that no alternative nomenclature was on offer. Always wanting to learn new things, I consulted some dictionaries on immigrant and immigration, looking at primary definitions. 

• Immigration: the act of coming to live permanently in a foreign country.
• Immigrant: a person who comes to live permanently in another country

Then, since the definition of immigration refers to immigrating.

• Immigrate: come to live permanently in a foreign country

Yes, the word immigration does contain a reference to authorization, but the semicolon suggests a separation.  Yet neither immigrant nor immigrate makes any such distinction.  The definition for immigrant, for instance, does not read “a person who legally settles as a permanent resident in a foreign country.”  No, after second and third sniffs this argument continued to stink.

Besides the lexical problems, others arose, these more personal.  My mother’s side of the family came to America in the early- to mid-seventeenth century; my father’s in the 1790s.  Ignoring my maternal ancestors who, whatever they were doing, were moving from England to, well, England, we need to consider the paternal line, moving from England to the United States of America.  In the 1790s there were no immigration controls.  Therefore, there was no legal process.  By the argument above, then, no immigration means those Bazemores were not immigrants.  Then what the hell were they?  Settlers?  No, the place they came to, northeastern North Carolina, was already settled.  Clearly there was immigration; there were tons of people migrating in (see what I did there?) to the United States.

They were, not to put too fine a point on it, immigrants.  Etymology is our friend in this.  All of the words under discussion emerged from the Latin verb immigrare, literally “to move into.”  The denotation of the words is pretty clear.  Of course, anyone who studies language knows that usages change faster than dictionary definition, but usage is our friend, too.  By its existence, the term “undocumented immigrant” tells us that, yes, anyone who comes to the country and intends to stay is an immigrant.  The only reason there is any delineation is because we now attempt to control immigration through law.

In fact, what separates an immigrant from any other visitor to the country is that the immigrant is not a visitor at all.  He or she has come to live permanently in this country.  At that point the immigrant, undocumented or not, ceases to be an immigrant—the process of immigration is over.  That person is a resident.

Which is the whole point of the last 700 or so words.  The human beings referred to in this argument are residents of the United States of America.  And if we’re going to be honest in our writing and speaking perhaps we should recognize that fact (though to do so is certainly politically inconvenient).  Why don’t we try “undocumented residents?”  Maybe that will put a different gloss on the matter.

Colin Kaepernick and the American Civil Religion

If this were fifteen years ago, one might bemoan the trees that had died to publish the multitude of opinions on the Colin Kaepernick affair.  Fortunately this is the age of the Internet, and though I’m sure the electricity that has powered the debates has some non-zero effect on global warming, the habitat loss and deforestation is at least mitigated by the fact that those debates are mostly taking place in the virtual world.  For those who have been living under a rock, the short version is this: on August 26^th, prior to a pre-season game, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the Star-Spangled Banner. 

Response was immediate and, as you might predict, ran from  outrage to praise.  Kaepernick’s explanation, that he sat because he had no wish to “stand up and show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” has struck all the nerves you would expect in a polarized political environment where the simple statement that Black Lives Matter has to be followed up with All Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter and, in the newly-ascendant alt-right, White Lives Matter. 

Though most ordinary people seem to think he should have stood up, some have used the opportunity to point out the racist lines in the third stanza of the song (did you KNOW there was one?), which lends a little scholarly gravitas to Kaepernick’s argument, though there is as yet no indication whether he knew this when he made his gesture.

I’m not about to opine on this situation, any more than to say that I personally find most rituals a bit silly.  Who cares if Colin Kaepernick doesn’t want to stand for (or Gabby Douglas forgets to put her hand over her heart during) the national anthem?

Plenty of people it turns out.

Kaepernick (we will mostly leave Douglas out, as she has claimed her actions were accidental and there is no reason not to believe her) has performed a social sin of the highest order—he has declined to participate in a key ritual of our civil religion.  American Civil Religion, as I have written earlier concerning a controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance, is a set of references and symbols, often referring to a non-specific God, that are intended to recall us to a higher purpose for the nation.  Routine references to the Almighty in the Pledge, in the motto “In God We Trust,” in the invocation of “God bless America” in every political speech are related to this.

Indeed, the American Civil Religion is so prevalent, that I have come to suspect it is the chief sect of most Americans, superseding the cult many participate in on various Sabbaths. 

There are many rituals in the American Civil Religion, and one of the most common is the complex of rites surrounding the display of the American flag before public spectacles, especially sporting events.  Having the flag brought in by color guards, the march to the center of the field, the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” are acts of worship (unkindly, we might call them idolatry).  Through them, spectators are momentarily bound—the word “religion” probably originates in the Latin religare, “to bind”—to one another, members of one family.

When Colin Kaepernick declines to stand for the national anthem, he is declining to participate in the American Civil Religion.

Of course in America this shouldn’t be a problem.  The First Amendment to the Constitution secures for us all the right to participate (or not) in religious services, to speak (or not) as we choose.  But the real challenge Kaepernick presents is not one that is always amenable to logic.  Even in a relatively secular country like the United States religiosity, signaling religious belief, carries a great deal of importance.  

For reasons stretching deep into prehistory, religious display has evolved as a proxy marker for trustworthiness.  Religious people, speaking generally, trust other religious people, a phenomenon that it has been suggested is responsible for widespread distrust of atheists.  Since religiosity is a way of signaling, “Hey, you don’t know me, but you can trust me,” people who do not show religiosity are unconsciously signaling that they are not to be trusted.

This distrust is exactly why the responses to Kaepernick unfold as they do.  A small number of people, who have eschewed much display of faith in the American Civil Religion, don’t see the problem.  For larger numbers of people, who consider themselves patriots, who love the flag and all that they think it stands for, Kaepernick’s refusal to stand is nothing more than a wholesale rejection of their faith.  That’s why even a potentially accidental transgression like Douglas’ garners so much attention.  Because, even though religion is a proxy marker for trustworthiness, reminders of secular authority can mitigate the distrust of the non-religious.  Secular authority subsumes sectarian identity in the public sphere.

And the American Civil Religion is one of those “secular” authorities, one that is supposed to be the same for all Americans (though it, too, sometimes fails the non-religious).  What happens when Americans decline to participate in it?  

Watch the fallout from Colin Kaepernick’s actions to find out.

Religion By Other Means: Politics and Ultimate Meaning

During this year’s odd primary cycle I have been moved many times to refer to the “movement” that has accreted around Vermont senator Bernie Sanders as something of a “cult.”  When I have made this criticism, it has usually stemmed from the vitriol of Sen. Sanders’ supporters whenever any criticism is launched at him.  This has been especially true when he has engaged in the naked sort of politicking that he and his supporters have criticized rival Hillary Clinton for.  Whenever the foibles of the leader are pointed out, supporters can be counted on to reply that it’s different for Bernie, that when he does the things that other politicians do, he’s not really doing the things that other politicians do.  Such rationalization seems like the adoration cult followers give to their leaders, who are so self-evidently right that, when we see them doing wrong, the fault is not in them but ourselves.

Yet the more I thought about it, the less surprised I was, because I am increasingly convinced that politics, at least in the United States, is simply religion by other means.  I think it may be argued that every political movement in the United States and Western Europe is a Christian heresy of sorts, a point I am not prepared to press here.  But I am prepared to offer a provisional argument on the issue of politics as religion, and to offer some preliminary thoughts of the place of groups like those supporting Sanders in it.

It is a truism on the left that religion and politics should forever be separate, just as it is a truism on the right that they should not.  On the left (and it is here that I place myself) the argument is that religion should have no part in the governance of a pluralistic nation and that secularism, government neutrality on issues of religion, should be the rule.  The right argues that we have become too secular, that we have fallen away from our religious underpinnings and that only by returning to them can we, to steal a phrase, make America great again.

I think both of these miss the point.

I’d like to suggest that, for many people, politics is religion.  This is not to argue that it has supplanted, for instance, the Christianity that so many Americans profess.  Rather, one runs alongside the other.  On the left, the tracks are skewed apart; on the right, they move towards an intersection. 

Most Americans are members, to varying degrees of both sects.  Such a situation is not unprecedented—it was faced by Rome as it expanded throughout the Mediterranean world and incorporated diverse peoples. Conquered people saw their pantheons assimilated to the Roman pantheon, becoming part of the larger Roman civil religion.  At the top was the imperial cult, centered on the living god in Rome and his divine predecessors.  As long as one did not commit the sin of atheism, the denial of any god, one could get along fairly well, and in day-to-day life follow the practices of their forebears (this was a positive thing; abandoning the religion of one’s forefathers was an act of impiety).*

Compare this to the civil religion of the United States.  Its gods are the Founding Fathers, agents of a supreme but ultimately unknowable and generic God, who bestows blessings on this country as long as we acknowledge divine providence in some non-specific fashion.  Its rituals are the Pledge of Allegiance, the national anthem at sporting events, and the ritual invocation of God at the end of every political speech.  America’s God is so non-specific that the gods of immigrants can be assimilated to it, much as the Roman pantheon absorbed the pantheons of conquered people.

Politics is the church of the American civil religion, and politicians are the clergy of it.  I don’t simply mean this metaphorically.  Since the eighteenth century we have increasingly used government to answer the sorts of questions traditionally answered by religion.  Not questions about the origin of the world or our place in the cosmos, but the questions of how our society should function and how we ought to relate to one another.   These are, in their way, questions of ultimate meaning, as they define the world we will live in.  Political language is the language we use to pose and answer these questions.  Founding documents, especially the Constitution, and the writings of the founding generation are its sacred texts, the texts we resort to and quote (or misquote) to make a particular point.

Our own political church has two main denominations, Democratic and Republican.  Like different Christian denominations there is a core dogma: professed belief in republicanism, some adherence to the notion of American exceptionalism, reverence for the Founding Fathers.  There are also differences, mostly centering around the interpretation of the sacred texts and the amount of lay participation that should be permissible.  Small wonder, then, that political fights can be so vitriolic; we are dealing with fundamental matters.  Each denomination views itself as the guardian of an unchanging orthodoxy that continues on in the tradition of the Republic’s founders, and denounces the other as heterodox.

Yet each major denomination is large enough that the other’s denunciations are largely irrelevant, just as a Catholic accusation of heterodoxy against, say, the Baptists would be.  Each can continue to compete for the votes of the laity, with elections deciding the result.  However, there are minority factions within each party for whom the charge of heresy bears some weight and the major denominations are left with the quandary of what to do with them.  In the tried and true fashion of Christianity, the parties generally try to co-opt their heretics, taking the best ideas and pushing those who will not be reconciled farther and farther to the margins.

This is where the libertarian wing of the Republican party was four years ago, before it morphed into the Tea Party movement and threatens to foment another schism in American politics through the nomination of Donald Trump.  It is also where the Bernie Sanders movement, if it can yet be called that, is now.  Guardians of Republican orthodoxy fought the Tea Party until they needed it.  Something similar might happen to the Democrats.

It’s not an accident, I think, that these two movements are so readily paired.  Both are characterized by their receptivity to a message of economic grievance, to a sense that the elites have sold them out and left them behind.  We might in this see the cry of late medieval parishioners who felt their soteriological needs were not met by absentee or illiterate clergy.  Grievance is surely the seedbed of revolutions.

Trump’s challenge to the Republican orthodoxy is the challenge that truly threatens a schism.  It is analogous to the Arian controversy that threatened to destroy attempts at Christian unity in the fourth century.  Paul Ryan, representing the orthodox party, has met with Trump in an attempt to restore unity.  How that ends we’ll have to wait to see.

Sanders’ challenge is different.  Drawing from a great many independents, it seems unlikely that he will create a schism among Democrats.  Going back to questions about cults earlier, I think that Sanders and his supporters are political Gnostics.  Gnosticism is a term used to describe a variety of ancient religious systems that emphasized a strict duality consisting of the material world and the spiritual world.  Christian Gnostics argued that an evil god, referred to as the Demiurge, created the world and the spiritual Jesus came to redeem it.  By embracing the secret knowledge of Jesus, adherents could escape the clutches of the Demiurge and be redeemed.

It’s hard not to see this in parts of the Sanders movement.  Those of us who find ourselves at odds with it are told that we must not clearly understand Bernie, for to understand is to believe.  And belief, we are told, will free us all as more and more people learn the truth.  Nebulous “elites” and “one percenters” are the forces of the Demiurge working in concert to keep our divine sparks shackled to the world of toil.  The DNC represents the party orthodoxy, interested in maintaining its monopoly on “truth” to keep itself in power. 

One can see vestiges of this in Trump supporters as well, which should be no surprise since the Tea Party emerged from another Gnostic sect, this one comprising Republican libertarians.  Like some latter-day Augustine, I can speak personally of this.  My time as a libertarian showed me many who again saw themselves as possessed of a special knowledge that would liberate the world, fighting the Demiurge (the Federal Reserve, the United Nations…take your pick) that sought to drag us all back in the muck.  If only, we were convinced, people would take the time to listen and think, they would come around.  It by no means characterized all libertarians, any more than it characterizes all Sanders supporters, but it was a prevalent strain in my interactions.

None of which should, by this point, be surprising.  If we are to take seriously the notions of politics as religion by other means, we should expect nothing less.  The battle is not over votes or over power, the players seem assured, but over the soul of America itself.

 *Christianity in the Roman world ran into trouble because it refused to play along, committing all three cardinal sins: it refused to participate in the imperial cult, it denied the gods of others and, at least in early generations, Christians abandoned the faith of their forefathers as they converted.  

Artifacts of Memory, Memories of Artifacts

When I held the key to the Bastille in my hand, testing its cold heft, I could imagine the clank of the massive lock closing.  Another person, having held the object, had opined that the lock opened by this key would have been easily picked, but that seemed hardly a weakness.  Who would have worried about break-ins at the heavily-guarded medieval fortress in the heart of Paris?  Breakouts would have been the more logical concern, though by the time the fortress fell there were only seven prisoners.  When the vainqueurs, officially numbering 954, decided to effect an entrance, the lock was surely an afterthought.  Once the edifice was in flames the key, now useless, was gifted to George Washington by the Marquis de Lafayette, a present from French revolutionaries to the Americans who had inspired them.

But of course, this wasn’t the key to the Bastille.  Ridiculous to think that such a priceless artifact would accompany the representative of Mount Vernon to this teaching seminar in Raleigh.  This key was a cast iron replica of the original which at that moment rested on display at Washington’s home, an object that is apparently one of three original objects that has remained at the house over the centuries.  Whatever emotional associations I made with the key I held in my hand were mine, it would seem, since unlike the original it had never passed through Lafayette’s hands to Washington’s (with Thomas Paine serving as an intermediary on one leg of the trip).

Holding this object brought to mind a scene from the Philip K. Dick novel The Man in the High Castle, as well as in the superb Amazon.com television series based on it.  In the scene, which takes place in an alternative world where the Axis powers triumphed in the Second World War, an antiquities dealer discusses what makes a certain object more valuable than some other, identical, object.  He displays two cigarette lighters, one of which had rested in the pocket of Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he was assassinated (the turning point in this world’s history) and another lighter, in all respects the same, except that it had no association with FDR.

What makes the one an object that his customers would pay thousands of yen for and the other a mere trinket?

Historicity, we are told.  That Roosevelt had held the locket, that it had been in his pocket as he died, imbued it with some essence lacking in other lighters.  In the show the antiquities dealer tells us this is all balderdash but that his Japanese clients believe in it is enough for him, and allows him to make his living. 

By extension, we can see that this applies to all sellers of memorabilia.  The baseball, or jersey, or signed photograph or autographed first edition itself isn’t the draw…it’s the personal connection to a sports hero, or movie star, or author.  Touching these objects, collectors seem to believe, will allow some of the power of the famous person to come through, much as some cannibals believe they can gain the power of a vanquished foe or the wisdom of a revered elder by eating their remains. 

Of course, like my impressions of the storming of the Bastille, this entire process occurs in our minds.  There are countless millions for whom hefting the replica of that famous key would have been nothing more than a physical appraisal of the object; the thing itself need be no more valuable than the iron it was made of.  My momentary reverie only occurred because I know the story of the Bastille, and I knew that this key was a replica of the other, more famous one.  So why bother?

Because I lied earlier—that object I held is really, literally, the key to the Bastille.  Though it was probably cast within the last couple of decades, it is just as real and just as much the key to the Bastille as the original displayed in Washington’s home.  How is this possible?  Staying in the present, this key was made using the original as a model.  It is made, inasmuch as it is possible, of the same material.  It looks the same, it feels the same (or so I assume), it probably tastes the same, has the same weight, harmonics, etc.  Were I to sneak into Mount Vernon in the dead of night, and switch the two keys, no one would likely be the wiser. 

If I destroyed the original I had stolen, who would know... or even care to?  Allowing the secret to die with me, the world would go on believing that the key in the display case had been touched by some anonymous vainqueur, Lafayette, Paine, and Washington.  The key I placed in the display cabinet would, to all intents and purposes, be the original. 

I also held the key to the Bastille in another, more direct sense.  Having this replica, and the ability to travel back in time, I should be able to unlock the famous prison.  Again, the circumstances of its production are irrelevant; if it would unlock the nefarious lock, it is the real key, historicity be damned.  And that’s a damned peculiar thought, one sobering to a historian, or anyone concerned with grasping reality, whatever that is.

The Holy Innocents

I dream myself as Moses this time, as the year comes ‘round again.  Moses is a different dream, one I cannot recall having had previously.  In the dream, I am triumphantly leading from Egypt those holy innocents who had been passed over by the Angel of Death, their lives saved by the blood of the lamb.  I do not, as is more customary, dream myself a witness to the slaughter of those countless other lambs, the children of Israel, in the days following the birth of Christ Jesus, their blood flowing in a wailing sacrifice, a vain attempt of a vain king to prevent his defeat by the Prince of Peace.  Nor do I dream myself cast as a companion in the flames to Shadrich, Misrach and Abdenago, consumed unlike them, my faith found wanting, wavering in the moment of judgment, my failure flattering to the vanity of Nabuchodonosor and his pagan idols.

No, it is as Moses that I lead the innocent on their Exodus, vouchsafed a vision of a promised land that I will never enter, though I wander the desert for forty years in search of it.  Rather than parting the waters, God parts the flames of our testing, that they may march forth from them—Benoit, Anne, Hugh, Jean, Mathilde, Remi, Mary, Simon, Wilfred, Guibert, Hildebert, Judith. Charles, Renaud, Arnaud, Richilde; poor, dead Theodatus, soon to be exhumed and desecrated; behind and exhorting them all Etienne and Lisois; and, stretching into the shroud of memory the countless others, some with names famous to all and others who died as unknown as I will die.  God parts the flames and then He parts the walls of the proud city, its king, his allies and his adversaries, some called holy men, vanquished as were Nabuchodonosor and his idols by the piety of those facing the flames.

And why not?  Moses is, in some ways, my mirror image.  Born of royal blood, I was adopted and raised by a commoner, raised to farm and be part of a family, to perpetuate the cycle of birth and death, fecundity and sterility.  Yet my birth marked me and I entered into the church, escaping destitution and the crudity of my mother’s life, awakened by the knowledge of letters and texts, embraced within the bosom of the Church to serve her, and to serve her patrons, and so to become a witness to the struggles over who exactly was serving whom.  Then, granted a vision of my own, I fell afoul of my Church but, for reasons to be revealed, was not destroyed rather cast in, as it were, an ark, sealed in these monasteries I have encountered in my forty years of wandering, wondering whether there is a promised land for me.

This, then, is my dream as the year comes to a close.  It wakes me as such dreams always do, filling me with dread purpose.  That I should someday die forgotten is just.  But that they should pass from human memory unremarked ranks as sin.  For they were remarkable, those men and women with whom I broke bread and explored the truths of scripture and the world.  Unafraid to face matters others considered best left unspoken, willing to risk temporal and eternal damnation for what would be viewed as their sins, they sought only after truth and to know the mind of God on its own terms.  What each found is known only to them, and they took their insights and their visions to the grave, their scant writings burned along with them.  Wretched memory could never contain all that they knew, but it does encompass them, and that immortality I can seek for them.