The Bosque Boys

Arguably the turning point in the American Civil War occured during the first few days of July 1863 with the fall of Vicksburg to Union forces and the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. Today's Wall Street Journal Editorial Page online has a list of the 5 best books on the Battle of Gettysburg with brief descriptions.

There are so many great books to recommend that any list will be only suggestive, not exhaustive. These are books I have read recently, or am reading.

Currently I am reading two books from the Founding Era, and finding them fascinating accounts of the establishment of our nation: Witnesses at the Creation by Richard B. Morris tells the story of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison as they pushed for the adoption of the Constitution; Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis uses a series of vignettes to illumine Madison, Hamilton, Burr, Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson and their times. Within the last year I have learned from A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic by John Ferling, and from 46 Pages: Thomas Paine, Common Sense, and the Turning Point to Independence by Scott Liell.

Perhaps, though, the book which moved me most was Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865 by Steven E. Woodworth, a brilliant account of the major army of the west in the Civil War. The courage, endurance, and sacrifice of the men who fought for the Union beggar description. The writing is brilliant. An excerpt :

". . . The time was about 6pm, and the first day's battle at Shiloh was over. As the guns fell silent, somewhere along the Union line a band struck up ' The Star-Spangled Banner.'
It had been a beautiful spring day, and some men had complained of the heat. That night, however, a cold rain poured down in torrents. The cabin Grant had designated as his headquarters was in use by a surgeon diligently amputating and tossing the severed limbs out a window to join a growing pile outside. The steamboats at the landing were likewise full of wounded men. So the commanding general fared as his soldiers did, without shelter under the pitiless downpour.
Sherman found him that night, standing under the scant shelter of a tree lantern in one hand, smoking a cigar. "Well, Grant,' Sherman quipped, 'we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?'
'Yes,' Grant replied between puffs on his cigar. 'Lick 'em tomorrow, though.'"

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Excerpts from a recent essay on "the American character" by one of my American history survey students (C. Buzbee, with her permission):

"If a colonist from the 1700’s visited the United States today he would be astounded. Cars of all makes and models rush along endless highways, skyscrapers line the horizon, cities go on for miles, communication of all forms literally instantaneous, all manner of electrical gadgetry available upon demand. Food abundant, travel magical, military force impressive and formidable, and everyone he would have met would have never known anything but life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A little over 200 years ago, early Americans, poorly equipped, made all this and more possible at great sacrifice to themselves. Somehow in that long ago time, this great country of ours, the richest, freest, most powerful nation on earth was born. How exactly it happened is a long and winding story, full of complexities and ironies but in the end a tale of victory against overwhelming odds. The story of freedom should be familiar to all Americans as it lends illumination and a special appreciation for all the privileges and freedoms that belong to us simply for being an American."

"The end then, we all know, was the beginning. It started with a Constitution, a Presidency, a flag, and an unshakable belief in that all men are created equal and that we have a right to be able to choose our profession, the fabric of our lives, our religion, all ideas that embody democracy. The infant government would continue to experience lows and highs, numerous internal battles (ironing out the kinks) for years to come, and several more wars to live through to obtain the true freedom and working democratic society, the model of the world over that it is today. And still the battle goes on with global issues in which modern patriots who will ever strive to emulate our society in lands far from here. It is our duty, our destiny, the price we pay for the freedom so hard won long ago, to spread the idea so that others can say ‘We the people’."

This weekend, if you rent a movie, try one of these to start your celebration of Independence Day.

1776 A musical account of the events leading up to the writing of the Declaration of Independence. While not exact on some details, remarkably accurate on the debates in Congress. Has some humor also. Adapted from the stage play of the same name.

Yankee Doodle Dandy From 1942, the life of George M. Cohan with all his great music. James Cagney in the title role.

Open Range A classic Western released in 2003. Great American attitudes without cynicism.

Men of Honor Prejudice overcome by determination and courage.

To Kill a Mockingbird One man with courage makes a majority, though maybe not at that moment.

Tears of the Sun American heart, American courage.

Hester Street American immigrant experience in New York's Lower East Side.

Field of Dreams America and America's game.

Seabiscuit How can any true American resist rooting for the Underdog?

Rocky In 1976 it was like the morning star of Morning in America.

Cinderalla Man Root for the underdog.

Barbershop American values in a new setting for some of us.

Drumline Growing up and embracing the values of community (lots of great music as well)

The Legend of Bagger Vance Even those of us who do not play golf can be moved by this film.

Hellboy Character formed by community and by individual decision.

See also our list of movies for Memorial Day
Feel free to add movie suggestions.

Yesterday, David Ignatius, op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, offered an excellent piece, "A Road Map Home," in praise of the realism and diplomatic efforts of Ambassador Khalilzad and the Bush adminstration in working toward an endgame in Iraq.

Ignatius highlights:

"Reconciliation sounds fine in principle, but in practice it can be agonizing. I asked Khalilzad how he would answer members of Congress who are indignant that insurgents who opposed the U.S. occupation might be pardoned by the Iraqi government."

'"Ending a war is as difficult as fighting a war," Khalilzad went on. He noted that many conflicts in American history have ended with a general or partial amnesty -- from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Civil War to the U.S. Army's battle against insurgents in the Philippines. "To end a war, you must balance the requirements of reconciliation with the requirements of justice," he explained."

Ignatius asserts that the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a key victory in "[t]he political-military strategy embraced by Khalilzad and Casey over the past year [that] has combined aggressive military operations against die-hard insurgent groups with outreach to elements of the Sunni insurgency that (in theory) can be co-opted."

After the death of Zarqawi, the ambassador claims significant progress toward that end, reports Ignatius.

Ignatius in conclusion:

"Listening to America's ultra-realist ambassador, it's obvious that the buzzwords of the Washington political debate...don't have much relevance for what the generals and diplomats are trying to achieve. This messy war won't end with a victory parade but with a process that is messy itself -- slow, precarious, ambiguous. But the alternative is an open-ended U.S. military occupation of Iraq that nobody wants. As Khalilzad put it: "If you don't want reconciliation, it means you must fight on.'"

In addition to Ignatius's analysis, I will add some of my own thoughts:

Recently, the word "timetable" has claimed center stage in any discussion of Iraq. Does the President have a timetable? YES. Although the WH denies a timetable, any serious reading of the situation in Iraq and Washington leads to only one conclusion:

Iraq must be wrapped-up by January 20, 2009. The Bush braintrust is big on presidential history (especially that of Bush-41). They have taken great pains to avoid the missteps of the father, and they understand that unfinished business is risky business (for example: see Saddam and Somalia).

Prediction: President Bush will not leave Iraq in the lurch. The coming congressional campaign season will see quiet progress on the civil side of things, which will allow for moderate draw-downs of US troops.

Then, in the weeks and months after the election, President Bush and the USA will "get bloody." In a similar move to the assault on Fallujah in November of 2004 after the presidential election, I expect the President to make one final push for military supremacy in Iraq.

The President is never going to face another American election. This is an advantage for him. His legacy depends on victory in Iraq. All he needs to do is win. On the other hand, President Bush's moment is drawing to a close. After the Congressional election, the remainder of his term will be measured in months.

He must defeat the insurgency before they (the insurgents) come to view him as a lame duck. The USA may have won the war in Iraq with the re-election of President Bush in 2004. An insurgency is hard-pressed to wait-out an American president for four years. But if the USA does not deliver the knock-out punch early on in 2007, the insurgency will see a light at the end of the tunnel.

What goes without saying, of course, is that no future president, Republican or Democrat, will be invested in this war like George Bush. No successor to Bush will feel the press of history in the same way that the President copes with that oppressive sense of urgency and necessity every day of his administration.

History is not always a downhill slide; in the U.S. we have some progress we can take pride in.

A decade ago or so, I agreed to serve as a “room dad” for one of our sons elementary classes. In December we made a field trip to Fort Parker, near Groesbeck, Texas. About the time we finished touring the fort it began to rain. Needing a covered area for lunch, we hopped back aboard our busses and took our sack-lunches a short distance north to the Old Confederate Reunion Grounds near Mexia. For those of you from farther north, for decades after the Civil War Confederate veterans and families would gather for annual celebrations. Eventually many counties in the South built Reunion Grounds that included permanent facilities. The Old Confederate Reunion Grounds near Mexia has a large covered pavilion, perfect for our needs.

We arrived, handed out the lunches, and the kids exploded off the busses, running to the pavilion. White and black and brown, there they were eating together, talking together, running together, under a roof built to shelter partisans of the Lost Cause: descendents of slaves playing with descendents of slave owners and Confederate troops.

Sometimes things do get better. Have a Happy Independence Day.

I recommend Peggy Noonan's column in the Opinion Journal today in its entirety: "Stop Spinning: Contrarian thoughts on Hillary, flag-burning, the Times and 'The View.'" It is brilliant and a must-read from start to finish.

I am posting and associating myself with her remarks on the flag amendment. She says what I have been thinking. I have held my fire on this issue over the last few weeks (a more apt analogy, perhaps, is that I "could not get a shot off"), but, nevertheless, Peggy Noonan gets it exactly right with her comments.

Noonan:

"The flag burning amendment is a bad idea, and will not prove, in the end, politically wise or fruitful to any significant degree. Three reasons. One is that the American people can sense, whether they support a constitutional ban or not, that they're being manipulated. They know supporters are playing with their essential patriotism for political profit. They know opponents are, by and large, taking their stand for equally political reasons. They can sense when everyone's posturing. It's not good, in the long term, when people sense you're playing with their deepest emotions, such as their love of country.

"Second, nobody thinks America is overrun with people burning flags, so the amendment does not seem even to be an exotic response to a real problem. There are a lot of pressing issues before the Congress, and no one thinks this is one of them. Voters know it's hard to do a risky thing like define marriage as a legal entity that can take place only between an adult human male and an adult human female. That actually would take some guts. It's easy--almost embarrassingly so--to make speeches about how much you love the flag.

"Third, Americans don't always say this or even notice it, but they love their Constitution. They revere it. They don't want it used as a plaything. They want the Constitution treated as a hallowed document that is amended rarely, and only for deep reasons of societal or governmental need. A flag burning amendment is too small bore for such a big thing. I don't think it will come up as a big issue every even numbered year. I think it's going to go away. There's too much else that's really needed."

On the other hand, I was also impressed (but not swayed) by the arguments of one of my favorite public servants, Orrin Hatch, who did very well in explaining the legislative and judicial history of this issue, as well as the principle at stake:

Hatch :

"[U]nelected judges have mistakenly concluded that it is the courts that have exclusive dominion over the Constitution. This was certainly the case in 1989, when a severely divided Court reversed 200 years of jurisprudence and overturned the considered judgment of the American people in almost every state.

"For generations, the American people provided protections for their flag. On June 20, 1989, forty-eight states and the District of Columbia had statutes that protected the flag from physical desecration. On June 21, 1989 all of those statutes were unconstitutional.

"How did this come to pass?

"One vote on the Supreme Court switched. That’s it. One vote, and the will of the people was overturned in nearly every state. For many years the Court well understood the obvious and compelling interest of political communities in protecting the American flag from desecration."

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Note: This essay is the third installment in a series entitled, "American Lives," which spotlights great Americans, famous and anonymous, who have lived exemplary American Lives.

This particular piece is something of a departure, in that it spotlights a young person who is in the very earliest stages of living an exemplary American life. Nevertheless, his already compelling story is instructive.

Jonathan Treviño is eight years old and lives in a “colonia” in Peñitas, Texas, approximately eight miles north of the United States-Mexico border. Thanks to the vision of John Shary, a developer from Omaha, and a 320-day growing season, the Rio Grande Valley is one of the largest citrus producers in the world. But the Valley is not a lush garden spot. The climate is dry, averaging twenty-three inches of annual rainfall, and the days are hot and dusty. This area is also one of the poorest in the nation, with a per capita income of $9,899, according to the Census Bureau.

Jonathan lives on a crudely paved street off a farm road that connects via another road to the state highway north, which connects to an interstate highway that traverses the heartland of America. He lives in an unfinished home with his parents and his two brothers (ages ten and sixteen) and his two sisters (ages three and thirteen). The children all attend public school, where they have won many ribbons and other honors for their academic achievements, which they proudly display on their bedroom walls. The family has several bookcases filled with Bibles, other religious literature, textbooks, children’s stories, and American history, including the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Most of these volumes are in English.

For Jonathan, summer days are spent playing with cousins and friends and his brother, Sebastian. Their oldest brother, Orlando, works in the fields with his dad during the break from school. Jonathan and Sebastian play football (American) and catch “horny toads” and geckos and do their best to stay clear of red ants, scorpions, and rattlers.

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Der Spiegel online is reporting on the brutal treatment received by dissidents in Communist China. Linked by Drudge. The lead paragraph

"China's Communist Party officials are employing brutal methods in dealing with difficult citizens. The most recent victim of what appears to be government-sanctioned brutality was a farmer who suffered a broken cervical vertebra when he was attacked by thugs."

(Okie Gardener) I do not believe the repeated mantra of "economic progress leads to political freedom." For one thing, philosophically I am not a determinist, especially not an economic determinist. For another, it seems to me that a nation can have a strong economy without political freedom--Nazi Germany did very well. I think those who claim that economic development in Communist China will lead to politcal freedom are just trying to absolve themselves of the guilt of making money on the backs of opressed Chinese labor.

This is the last excerpt from the speech of the Rev. Israel Batista Guerra, the General Secretary of the Latin American Council of Churches, that I plan to post. For the earlier posts and comments see here and here. In this excerpt Guerra shares his perceptions and understandings, as one Cuban-born and living in Ecuador, of the animosity toward the U.S. that often manifests itself in Latin America. Whether you agree with him or not, I think we should listen in an effort to understand how others see us. The following is a list of his reasons for the resentment and animosity.

"Manifest destiny: The United States assuming a messianic and missionary role toward the rest of the world: the model of democracy and society that is to be implanted on a global scale.

Individualistic enclave: An individualistic and fragmented understanding of the human being, guided by egoism and excluding [?sic] efficiency. What counts is to be winners, without concern for whoever gets left behind.

Parochial vision: Feeling itself threatened, the country looks for enemies, and in seeking security fosters the ideology lf violence and terrorism. The physical and mental borders are closed and a limited vision of the world acquired.

Corporate interests: In the past the United States was and made itself known through its people. Today it is the corporate interests and their transnational businesses that present the image of its society. The United States is its people and not its corporate interests. We want to be in relationship with the noble citizen who walks the streets of its cities and worships God in the temples." full article pdf link at bottom of page

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