The ascent of the ignorant.

I know I have an Ivy League education which is now supposed to make me ashamed. 

But I am really tired of trying to argue with ignoramuses who don’t know anything about anything on this hellsite.

It will be a miracle if America survives this ascent of the ignorant.

Jon "Bowzer" Bauman.

We need to stop trusting the experts... Trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it's a feature of religion and totalitarianism.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ignoramus.

Bauman, famous for his portrayal as a deep voiced "greaser" in the band Sha Na Na, but in fact very well educated and now a Democratic political activist, has it right.

I've struggled to put together posts on this topic, unsuccessfully several times.  Lots of people like me, Conservatives back in the day, and Social Conservatives still, keep wondering what happened, even while pretty much knowing what happened. We're horrified as the country rockets towards Petainism, or Francoism, or just outright stupidity, even while we wonder how on earth we went to a country in which homosexual propaganda is outright directed at the young.

Justice Kennedy. . . you are to blame for a lot of this.

Anyhow, one of the real stunning things of the Trump ascent has been the ascent of the ignorant.

And that's hard to take.

William F. Buckley, conservative intellectual.  He wouldn't recognize, or approve of, the current Republican Party.

Conservatism used to be fairly intellectual. . .well it was fairly intellectual after the McCarthy era.  In truth, it's always cycled between intellectualism and wild conspiratorial phantasy, just as the left has cycled between  intellectualism and wild eye flaming goofballedry . To some extent, the poor nation is getting both of these now at the same time, but it's most prominent on the right.

Ronald Reagan and conservative George F. Will.  Will left the Republican Party due to Trump.  This is the same room that Trump has made look like a movie set designers version of a 19th Century New Orleans whorehouse.

A big part of Trump's intellectual, if you will, drive now comes from Dominionist who claim to be carrying a sword for Christianity but who don't grasp the mains intellect of it.  It was Cardinal Newman who noted that to know history was to make a person a Catholic, and the Dominionist neither know history nor, for that matter, Christianity very well.  Outside of those carrying a Pine Tree flag are those who are in the Petainist/Francoist Christian Nationalist movement, who at least aren't anti intellectual and are relatively intellectual themselves, when their beliefs are drilled into.

But beyond that are a great mass of people, including people now in power, who reflect blistering ignorance.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Anti vaxxers, who took their initial inspiration from a Playboy model whose only claim to fame was her boobs, and then having had a child (out of wedlock, of course), went into full bore ignorance during COVID, showing how low education in the country generally sunk.  A person can oppose vaccines for themselves on philosophical, or even theological, grounds, but you can't oppose them on scientific grounds. That's just ignorant.  Nonetheless, Trump has elevated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and "Dr. Oz" to positions of real power, when they ought to be in the waterfowl section of the local zoo.  No serious nation would have either of these people in positions where they dealt with anything biological, even if that meant they were disqualified from being dog catchers.

Mehmet Oz.

Most of the cabinet officers we hear from on a frequent basis are total sycophants who sound like their on the losing end of a debate in a high school forensics team.  Some sound like outright thugs.  Our Ambassador to Israel is there as he wants to help bring about the Apocalypse.  

Trump is outright weaponizing the Justice Department into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and persecuting (not a typo) anyone who publicly opposed him.  He's also sending the National Guard, converted into the Ersatzheer, into Republican cities illegally.  While all  this occurs a populace that would have previously flooded into the streets in protests sits on its hand believing that there must really Marxist, Communist, Fascists, Monarchist about to take over these cities and convert them into Communist Anarchist Monarchies.

It's really doubtful the nation can recover from this.

At a lower level, we're debating library books in the children's section which an adult nation ought to be able to sort out in about fifteen minutes. But perhaps a bigger example is the outright believe by people who believe that you ought to drink petroleum oil for breakfast that nuclear power is going to turn your housecat into the central character in 1950s Japanese horror film.  In the meantime, a legitimate concern on the part of some, youth being exposed to pornography, has been captured by local members of the Freedom Caucus who are freely dumb in their local efforts to oppose it, going to public forums like school boards to act up.

The press rarely gets things 100% right, indeed a local big story that I know very well has recently amused me by how off the mark the reporting is, but the press has become a whipping boy for people with agendas on both sides.  Chuck Gray, the Wyoming Secretary of State, is so enamoured of this that he can't pick up a lunch menu without claiming its the product of  the "radical left wing media".  The left accuses the press of ignoring Trump's mental decline, which is obvious to everyone, while the right basically seeks to totally shut down everything but the Völkischer Beobachter.

How we get out of this is really questionable, but education, and I mean public education, is going to have to be they key to a large extent.  People need to learn science again.

I don't know how Americans became so uneducated.  

I went through the local public school system which wasn't perfect, but frankly it was pretty good.  My parents also took a real interest in how we were doing in school, and I think everyone's parents did.  My own kids went through the same system after I had, and it had improved from good to really good.  

Even then, there were some hints of things changing, mostly in the form of a handful of homeschooled showing up in sports and the rise of a series of private Christian schools and schools that were private Christian schools but which wouldn't admit that they were.  Homeschooling was, and is, mostly marked here by what the parents don't want their children to learn.  Some of those parents were really well educated themselves, but imports from elsewhere and often members of distinct minority religious communities.  Outside of the Catholic school, and probably the Lutheran school, this was true of the Christian schools as well.  

Following COVID, here locally, we got the influx of people from somewhere else who detested education even as they put their kids in schools  One member of the legislature enrolled her two kids in the local high school noting how she was a "refugee" from Illinois, where she'd been on a school board.  Now we have a Freedom Caucus legislator being such a problem at a school board meeting she had to be escorted away from the podium when you can bet that every member of the school board is, in fact, conservative.

What I think that tells me is that education elsewhere had declined, and we took in an influx of the uneducated, who in the sprit of the times, spread their views to elements ready to accept it locally.

Another thing is this.

Americans have always had a sort of populist anti intellectual streak, which is heavily ironic as the Founding Fathers of the nation were largely well to do elitists.  Indeed, Jefferson figured the republic would not last, as ultimately it would yield from hard working yeoman farmers to a city living mob, dependent upon the government.  He wasn't quite right, but he wasn't all that far off.  We've had two prior New York born Presidents in the country, a highly educated but quite rural intellectual, a more urbane intellectual, and a real estate developing complete buffoon.  

The essence of populism is that people have a native wisdom.  The problem is, only an educated public does.  Jefferson appreciated that, which is why he so heavily depended on the yeomanry to carry the republic.  Family units, living independently, and frankly as somewhat genteel hardworking Christian farmers.  He wasn't a yeoman himself.  He did foresaw a day in which the republic would be much like it has become, a screaming mass of poorly educated people who were easily lead.

The "new people", German propaganda poster from 1938.  In reality, most Germans never looked like this, just as right now most Americans don't really reflect the ideals of the New Apostolic Reformation. 

Populist movements have in fact always been easily lead.  The Nazis were able to do it with the German populace.  The Communist were able to do it with the Russian people.  The Fascists were able to do it with the Italians.

Manipulation of the masses by forces co opting populist movements is uniformly simply.  The people are worshipped for having common sense, with their leader supposedly reflecting back their wisdom.  Out side of that group, are the enemies, some vague, often faceless group, who are out to destroy the common people.  For the Nazis, those horrific enemies were the Communists and the Jews, as well as Gypsies, Catholics, homosexuals, and Slavs.

For the Fascist, it was the Socialist, Communists and Slavs. 

Soviet realist painting of female farm worker. Female farm workers were a favorite subject for Soviet propaganda posters.  They were always smiling, and tended to be a little chunky.

For the Communists, the population is the workers, whose enemy are capitalists, those who own their own businesses, and people who believe in any kind of religion.

Chinese girls are a favorite of Chinese Communist posters

For Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, which has been co opted by the National Conservatives, it's anyone who isn't a Christian conservative.  

Now, it's always the case that populist movements, after they get co opted, are shot through with hypocrisy  The movements become vehicles for obtaining power and people at the top either never believed in the movement, or they regard themselves as exceptions.  Nazism was virulently anti homosexual, but Ernst Röhm was a flaming homosexual.  Goebbels had been a Communist.  Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler all lived well, not as common people.  English roundheads in the English Civil War may have fought for Calvinist morality, but they kept in some cases mistresses.

And so we have Trump and his followers.  Trump probably has no real solid moral beliefs at all, and is a serial polygamist who was born obscenely wealthy and is getting richer in the office.

The problem with populism is that the bloom always comes off the rose.  It turns out that native intelligence is often pretty ignorant.  It always collapses in one way or another, often violently  It's followers are left to pick up the pieces often having been exposed, by the end, as people who were enemies of the very movement they espoused.  

It didn't have to be this way.

There were real reasons that the mass of people were discontent.  Ignored on immigration and the erosion of an industrial base for decades, and watching the decay of moral values even as they joyously participated in that decay themselves, there was a real opportunity for a return to true conservatism.  Even National Conservatives had the opportunity to participate in that, although they'd lost faith in democracy in general which caused them to choose not to.

When this flies apart, and it will, the reckoning is going to be huge.  What will have been achieved is to anger those who became victims of it.  The real number of populists in the country is fewer than supposed, and the true diehards fewer yet. Trump mostly won because Joe Biden chose to run in his dotage, which was obviously advanced, and which camouflaged Trump's mental decline.  That can't be camouflaged any longer.  

Nonetheless, like good fascists, the GOP is going to go down with Trump, even though it need not to.  Mike Johnson is effectively releasing cheery news from the Führerbunker as the edifice of the Republic literally collapses around him.  The Leader and his Favorite Architect plan a monumental building as an old one is destroyed.  Miller and Bondi send their thugs out to hang supposed enemies from lamposts. Loyal reports from loyal lieutenants about not being able to hang on are ignored.  Vance consults his Plans for the Fatherland book as if he has a political future.

It should be obvious where this is headed.

But it's easier just to blame it on Trump's style, or his amazing intelligence that we can't grasp, and just ignore it.

Monday, March 27, 1775. Choosing Jefferson as an alternate.

The Second Virginia Convention named Thomas Jefferson as an alternate delegate to the Second Continental Congress, replacing Peyton Randolph, who was then presiding over the Virginia House of Burgesses. 

Last edition:

Friday, March 24, 1775. Rushing toward war.

Labels: 1770s, 1775, American Revolution, Colonial North America, John Hancock, Virginia

Wednesday, February 9, 1825. John Quincy Adams chosen as President.

The 1824 Presidential election, which ran from October 26 to December 2, 1824, saw Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and William Crawford run for the oval office.

John C. Calhoun was elected with a comfortable majority of the vote for Vice President. 

However, none of the main contestants for the Presidency held a an electoral vote majority.  On this day in 1825 the House of Representatives voted,with each state delegation casting one voted,  elected John Quincy Adams as President, giving the election to him.

Andrew Jackson was a bufador, so Adams was the right choice.  Unfortunately Jackson (a Democrat, I might add) would revive, and, and come back, Trump like. Indeed Trump, who is also a bufador, admires Jackson, or claims to.

For years, the local Democratic Party here had Jefferson Jackson Days, honoring the supposed founder of the party (who wasn't) and its early populist leader.  Populism was a main element of the Democratic Party, like it currently is of the Republican Party, from Jackson's election through the 1980s, when Reagan's Southern Strategy co opted the Southern Democrats and Rust Belt Democrats, unfortunately.  Now, the GOP is what the Southern Democratic Party had been.

One of the comforting things about knowing history, I might add, is to know that there were prior eras when we acted darned near as stupidly as we currently are.

Last edition:

Thursday, January 27, 1825. Origin of the Trail of Tears.

Labels: 1820s, 1825, James Monroe, Native Americans

How did so many of us, become so mean?

Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

An item from Cowboy State Daily columnist Dave Simpson (who is not from Wyoming, like so many of Wyoming's far right are not):

Dave Simpson: Wyoming Paid Us To Cut Dead Trees

Within the column:

Apparently California hasn't had the good sense to encourage landowners to clear their land of the brush that went up in flames around Los Angeles last week, taking 24 lives and destroying 12,000 homes so far. One report explained that landowners clearing brush could be fined for killing rare, protected plants.

Good grief.

Here in Wyoming, we made our places less prone to fire.

Too bad California didn't encourage landowners to do the same.

They're paying the price now.

What a massively ignorant and mean thing to say.

The replies on twitter, at least, were not clueless:

Stephanie Hewitt@Stephhewitt1 2h

But even with thinning the forest, the Snowy Range would not survive with hurricane force winds during a forest fire. Stop the grandstanding.

Indeed the recent fire in Albany and Carbon Counties more than proved that. 

Buckwild @veedawhoo 3h

Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back chief🙄

Exactly. 

Traveler@JuniperMesa 1h

Fill Sky will massive amounts heat trapping gases, catastrophically overheat Planet = catastrophic climate change, Aridification, Megadrought, FireStorms gone Runaway, beyond Apocalyptic self reinforcing feedback loop, not "potential", Rocky Mountain Ecosystem, not built for heat

And right again.

Of course, as Simpson, who actual Wyomingites would not regard as a Wyomingite (you have to be born here or in a neighboring state, wondering in as an adult doesn't count), is from the far right, and as a far right migrant who didn't grow up here with winters were real, probably is in the climate change is a fib category.

It isn't.

The old saying is "paybacks are a bitch". 

How naive and clueless can a person be to not realize that an urban fire.

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Raymond Chandler, Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories

The fires were driven by Santa Ana winds, strong, extremely dry katabatic winds that originate inland and affect coastal Southern California and northern Baja California.

Chandler wasn't kidding. They're something else, and indeed "Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks."

I fear that Wyoming is about to get a real dope slap.

California contributes five times more to the Federal coffers than it receives.

Then I rapped upon a house with a U.S. flag upon display

I said, "Could you help me out, I got some friends down the way"

The man said, "Get out of here, I'll tear you limb from limb"

I said, You know, they refused Jesus, too, " he said, "You're not him

Get out of here before I break your bones, I ain't your pop"

I decided to have him arrested, and I went looking for a cop

Bob Dylan 115th Street Dream.

Wyoming receives more than it gives.

Sitting there smug with a 307 beer can isn't going to change that.

And we have disasters, including fire related disasters, every year.

This year, the Hageman homestead was burned in one such fire.

Guess the Hageman's didn't know enough to clear the underbrush?

I suspect nobody is going to say that.

And if the fires return here next summer, and its been a very dry winter, what will people who hold such mean spirted views say?

And will Wyoming, which had its hand out for disaster relief in 2024, be too embarrassed to ask for it in 2024.  Simpson speaks for a common view here, and the GOP is threatening to hold disaster aid to California up.  Indeed, our Senator, in his new whip role, has hinted at that.

Nature and events have a terrible way of humbling the arrogant.

Every proud heart is an abomination to the LORD; be assured that none will go unpunished.

Proverbs, 16:5

Wednesday, September 24, 1924. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum arrived in South Dakota

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum arrived in South Dakota at the invitation of historian Doane Robinson to carry out plans to carve an epic statue of four Presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt in the state's Black Hills.

Last edition:

Thursday, September 18, 1924. Leaving the Dominican Republic.

Labels: 1910s, 1916, 1920s, 1924, Dominican Republic, United States, United States Marine Corps

February 4, 1824. Thomas Jefferson to Rev. Jared Sparks.

 

The topic was African slaves in the United States, and what to do about/with them.  Jefferson advocated for establishing an American colony in Africa.

Sparks was a very early Unitarian minister who had served as the Chaplain for the House of Representatives, and who would go on to serve as the President of Harvard.  He died in 1866 at the age of 76, having therefore had a life span which would have overlapped the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Civil War.  Fairly typically for the era, he'd been married twice, his first wife having been taken by death when they'd been married only three years.

Friday Farming: The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian of the Week, Thomas Jefferson.

The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian of the Week, Thomas Jefferson.:   

Agrarian of the Week, Thomas Jefferson.

 

Thomas Jefferson is on that cast of characters that's gone from deeply admired as a hero to treated as a goat in later years, the latter due to his problematic relationship with slavery, that latter being uniquely personally problematic in his case.

Jefferson was an agrarian, but he was not a member of the agrarian class.  Indeed, as a planter, his class was in some ways in opposition to the yeomanry.  But he saw them as the foundation for the republic and feared the day when that would cease to be the case, an act which led to his support for acquiring Louisiana, which he inaccurately believed would give the country 1,000 years breathing room.  His warnings once seemed too dire, but now seem to be rapidly coming into fruition.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 49th Edition. The speaking truth to the unwilling edition.

De l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace

Georges Jacques Danton (often mistakenly attributed to Frederick the Great due to misattribution in the movie Patton).

Governor Gordon had the audacity to speak the truth.  More specifically, he stated:

It is clear that we have a warming climate.  It is clear that carbon dioxide is a major contributor to that challenge. There is an urgency to addressing this issue.

Wyoming is the first that has said that we will be carbon negative.

Gasp!

Well, of course the populist GOP in the state leaped on this. 

Gordon is well-educated. Where you get your money doesn't determine scientific truths.  Loving the state doesn't mean ignoring dangers to it so that we can exploit it until we die, leaving our children with a less livable planet and one that was different from the natural world we love.

Nor, might I add, does having to believe in a set of facts contrary to science and nature amount to a requirement for being a conservative, and it should not be a requirement to be a real Republican.  Likewise, working in the current economy, in any occupation, does not amount to a requirement that you have to believe in its purity or that things should not change if they need to.

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder. 

Last Prior Edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. 48th Edition. Freaking out over the Polish election.

Blog Mirror: This Day in History: Aitken's Bible

 

This Day in History: Aitken's Bible

And also, given a comment, the myth that "most" of the founders were Deists:

The Myth of the Founders' Deism (Chapter One of Did America Have a Christian Founding?

On G. K. Chesterton and his Anti Semitism.

The Catholic blogosphere has been having a war over G. K. Chesterton, the late English writer and polymath.  Some of it, were I not so tired and worn out, would be heartbreaking, as former fans of his, particularly converts, have discovered his anti-Semitic views and come around to condemning him. At the same time, hard right wing Catholics, whom are I supposing a separate interlocking circle that crosses over into the Trads and Rad Trads, but don't include all of those bodies by any means (I suspect most of them do not know who Chesterton is) may be over adopting him.

All this exists, moreover, in the bizarre context of our times in which the left doesn't see a biological or social construct that it doesn't want to attack, which makes in some ways Chesterton a perfect man for our times, as he warned of so much of this.  That's why, to our recent surprise, we saw, and it caused a lot of comment, Giorgia Meloni quote the English writer to the effect:

Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

She stated that in support of her hard right conservative views.

A lot of this debate over Chesterton, both from the right and the left, really misses the point, in my view.

Whenever dealing with a great man, we have to ask ourselves a series of questions.  Ironically, in some ways, we have to ask one that has been recently examined by the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom. "Was he a saint?"  But beyond that, do we require great mean with huge thoughts to be saints?  And do we always require them to be right in order to consider these ideas?

In some ways, this is frankly why ancient philosophers get so much more of a pass than modern ones.  We don't even think much of their private lives, really.  We know that Socrates was married at least once, to Xanthippe, and might have had a second wife as well. We also know that Xanthippe might have been 40 years younger than Socrates, which would cause all sorts of Twitter twittering today, but we just don't think of it.  And he's a philosopher that we know a lot about.

Chesterton, on the other hand, we know boatloads about, as he's a relatively recent figure.  His cause for canonization, which failed, resulted in all sorts of commentary about him in various forms, including some people who claimed he couldn't be a saint as he was fat, so therefore he must be a glutton, and an "alcoholic", based on his exhibiting the typical English pub culture of the time.  Much more serious, however, are his anti-Semitic utterances.

So let's start there.

They exist.

Now, I'm not able to really go into detail on them, as unlike true Chestertonians, I've read very little of Chesterton.  Like a lot of people who fit broadly into his fan base, so to speak, I've read the various pithy quotes you are able to find, and up until a recent bizarre Twitter episode, I hadn't read any of the anti-Semitic ones.  I'd heard them referenced, and excused, but I'm not going to try to do that as they seem to go beyond what we might expect, although at the same time a person can't really deny that there is evidence that cuts the other way as well.  The year following his death, for example, you find American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, making this comment:

Indeed, I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist . . . I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory!

That's hard to square with the claim that Chesterton was an unabashed anti Semite.  In contrast, some point out that Chesterton said something like there was some good in Hitlerism and some of that was in Hitler himself.  He both condemned Nazism while saying that part of the reason that it came about was because of a "Jewish problem", a fairly astounding claim from an educated man who should have known better, although that was a fairly widespread belief in Europe at the time, and it surprisingly still has much more retention in Europe today, in spite of everything, than it should.  In some ways, Chesterton on this topic gives us a really odd example of a person really forcibly trying to take the middle ground by advocating both sides of it, on a topic in which there really is no middle ground.

But here's the thing.

Having bad, even horrible, views, doesn't discredit your other views which are not so tainted, and they don't define the person unless the person adopts them to the extent that they do.

Hitler was a tremendous opponent of smoking.  He hated it.  He was right to hate it, but beyond anything else, he hated cultures that he regarded as non-Germanic, with the Jews, followed by the Slavs hated to the point of murder. That's why Hitler and his followers are defined by their murderous beliefs, and not by their opposition to tobacco or their construction of the autobahn.

In contrast, I suppose, Thomas Jefferson wrote profoundly on the rights of man.  At the same time, he was shacked up with his dead wife's half sister, who was an enslaved black woman. The relationship started, following his wife's death, when the slave was quite young, probably still in her teens. That's really icky.  The children of that illicit union, we'd note, were held in bondage as well, which is exceedingly weird.

That latter example gives us an example closer to what we find with Chesterton.  Jefferson was a brilliant man, and wrote in opposition to slavery, none of which kept him from having an illicit unmarried long-lasting and deeply strange relationship to his sister-in-law.  Should we discount his writings?

Probably not.

And here I guess is the uneasy measure.  People are full of vices, some of them exceedingly serious.  Some people let their hatreds and vices define them.  That is what they come to stand for, by their own actions.  Hitler's perverted view of German superiority defined his political party and what it stood for, and came to define what Germany of the 30s and 40s stood for.  Lenin and Stalin's malevolent view of  the "class struggle", which lead to mass murder, came to define them.  

Franklin Roosevelt's long-lasting extramarital affair did not come to define him, however. And while he's not now regarded as a good President, Warren G. Harding's two affairs have not come to define him.  Actor Pat Morita's alcoholism did not define him.  Jimi Hendrix's drug consumption, which helped kill him, didn't define him.  Caravaggio's murdering a man over a tennis match has not come to define him.  Django Reinhardt's alcohol consumption diminished his abilities over his lifetime, but that has not come to define him, nor has Richard Burton's alcoholism defined him.  Churchill was known to have made utterances sympathetic to Mussolini prior to World War Two, and even after World War Two Churchill made a surprising remark about the rise of Hitler, which he warned against, having made sense in the context of desperate Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

It's problematic, of course, when we are faced with a character like Chesterton, who serous failing was in print and therefore not really possible to ignore and not legitimately subject to being excused.  Nor are that a self-destructive personal vice, like alcoholism.  It's much closer to Jefferson's bedroom hypocrisy.  It's different from that, of course, in that Chesterton's views were openly stated, whereas Jefferson's actions were kept hidden.  A person could debate which was worse, I suppose, in that context, but for a brilliant writer, that's all the more problematic.

Some of it was the context of the times and culture, to be sure.  Anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in European culture and remains pretty potent today.  But Chesterton actually stood principally against his culture, which makes this failing more difficult to accept.

So where to land?

Like Caravaggio's paintings, his works are too valuable to ignore.  The adoption of them by fringe elements of the far right today, including the far right in religious circles, does not change that, and indeed chances are high that Chesterton would levy his sharp tongue against many of them today.  It means, however, that he's a flawed hero, and in at least one serious way, which makes him a pretty typical hero at that.  There are, to my layman's eyes, reasons not to canonize him which are both theological and political, none of which is to say that he did not find salvation.  Indeed, we ought to be careful about our own souls, with many of the critics and readers of all kinds no doubt, like Jefferson, harboring secret or open vices.

So the troubling writings should not be excused or diminished.  Not everything the man said or did was right.  But by the same token, the writings of Jefferson's pen in aid of the infant United States are not rendered a nullity by his long-running bizarre home behavior.  The character of the works must be measured in the main, with those that fail being noted as failures, even evil failures, which does not mean that the rest cannot be considered.  It also does not mean that the man can be adopted in the main, safely, for those with modern radical causes.

The key may be the question whether the failings define the man, or are a horrific exception to his definition.  Hitler's failings defined him.  Jefferson's did not.  Chesterton's, serious though they were, do not seem to define him either, which is not to excuse them.

Tuesday, April 13, 1943. Jefferson Memorial Dedicated.

Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial on the 200th anniversary of President Jefferson's birth.

Jefferson Memorial, Washington DC

Another blog's item on this:

April 13, 1943 – Dedication of Jefferson Memorial

If the memorial were to be dedicated today, there's be protesters and consternation, noting correctly that Jefferson was a slave owner and had bedded one of his slaves, who was a half sister to his late wife.  We have the luxury of protesting, of course, as today we're perfect.

Radio Berlin announced the discovery of the graves of the Katyn Massacre, which became a propaganda point for the Germans.  That fact is thick with irony, given the extent of which Nazi Germany was involved in mass murder, of which the Poles in general were an early victim.

644th Tank Destroyer Bn at Ft Lewis WA. Wikib101hermann, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons