Blogs > Cliopatria > Things Noted Here and There ...

Diana Applebaum - 7/1/2005

Can we talk about the historical arguments in Feldman's intorductory section?

"In the overwhelmingly Protestant world of the framers' America, there was a common belief that taxation for religious, purposes violated religious liberty."

Except, of course, for all of the states that taxed people to support an established church in the early decades of the republic.

Can anybody recall how many states did so and until what year?

This is not my field, but without pulling an reference works off my shelf, I am certain that Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut had established, state-supported churches until a decade or two into the nineteenth century.

This does not negate Feldman's argument , of course, but he cannot, as he does, base his argument partly on the false assertion that in the U.S. the government has never taxed people to support an established church.

David Lion Salmanson - 7/1/2005

I heard him on NPR this morning and he really seemed dumb. For example, his solution for the Intelligent Design debate was to debate it as science and if school boards still wanted to teach it that was OK.
But the thing is, there is no science to ID, so in effect, there is no debate. He wants fundamentalists to play by common rules in something like this but they can't and won't. If you think the flood really happened the way it says in the Bible, you have to throw out all kinds of things, not just evolution, which is the tip of the iceberg. This guy has been in the ivory tower too long.

David Lion Salmanson - 7/1/2005

Mr. Proyect,

Patty (yes, I am on a first name basis) has always been about telling complex stories that challenge people's assumptions about what they think they know about the past. How telling that you can only listen to her when you are in agreement with what you think her point is.

That said, I have been disappointed with the series of op-ed articles. When Patty starts writing in her self-conciously public intellectual mode she comes off like a Tom Friedman re-tread where her personal experience narrative becomes the point of the article rather than an opening.

Having made that critique, however, I would like to point out that nobody treats graduate students at conferences with more dignity and respect than Patty. She never fails to find the human in all of us, in either the present or the past.

Jonathan Dresner - 7/1/2005

Thanks, Ralph. I've gotten a bit further in Feldman's piece, and I've gotten to his "solution".... I don't think so.

offer greater latitude for religious speech and symbols in public debate, but also impose a stricter ban on state financing of religious institutions and activities.

Ignoring, for a moment, the conflation of "government" and "public" (there's no ban on religious speech or symbols in public spheres, only in government circles and properties; there isn't even a ban on legislators citing faith or lack thereof in their public debates), this ignores a few things. Look at what he wants to replace the Lemon test with:

the state may neither coerce anyone in matters of religion nor expend its resources so as to support religious institutions and practices, whether generic or particular.

The whole purpose of the Lemon test, as I understand it, was to give some concrete reality to those principles. What he's basically calling for is for "values evangelicals" to surrender the gains they've made in funneling money to religious social and educational institutions and for "legal secularists" to give up any actual legal protection against government promotion/support of "religion" (we'll talk about what religion later; his attempts at ecumenicism are kinda weak) through word and symbol. Why would this be a better halfway compromise than the half-hearted system we've got now?

The rest of the article is retreaded arguments -- at least if you've been reading some of our secularity debates -- about the self-inflicted nature of feelings of exclusion and the importance of majoritarianism in creating a sense of unity, however false or shallow.

The section on (opposed to) funding parochial education through vouchers reveals a great deal about Feldman's position, I think. His argument against vouchers is one that "legal secularists" have used against government funding of religious institutions for a long time: the freedom of religion makes these fundamentally divisive institutions, and government money should not support people pushing anything other than the needs of the government, and the people as a whole. He's trying to create a new national identity which makes "values evangelicals" comfortable (enough so they don't mind losing billions of dollars in funding) without making any specific group uncomfortable. (or, where necessary, denying the utility of responding to that discomfort)

I think one of his fundamental flaws is that by creating the category "values evangelicals" to encompass a sometimes uncomfortable coalition of religious leaders and movements he ignores the competitive side of the "evangelical" groups: they don't mind the idea that at some point we might have to pick and choose which one is better or closer to the "American Heart" because they think they will be it. Though there might be some issues on which they are pushing in the same direction, there is a fundamental divisiveness to these sectarian movements which no plea for national unity is going to overcome, at least not in the short term.

Jonathan Dresner - 7/1/2005

I grew up with that song. Still, Mr. Proyect, and I'm sure you're tired of hearing this from me, I can't tell whether you're in favor of it, opposed to it, or equating it with Limerick.

Louis N Proyect - 6/30/2005

It is not a question of contradiction. Oppressed people can often adopt the characteristics of the oppressor. Malcolm X and Franz Fanon dealt with this phenomenon at great length. My problem with Limerick is not that she called attention to flag-waving on Indian reservations but that she put a positive spin on it. This seems much more in the spirit of what I would have expected from here:

Ira Hayes
by Patrick Sky

CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

Gather round me people there's a story I would tell
About a brave young Indian you should remember well
From the land of the Pima Indian
A proud and noble band
Who farmed the Phoenix valley in Arizona land

Down the ditches for a thousand years
The water grew Ira's peoples' crops
'Till the white man stole the water rights
And the sparklin' water stopped

Now Ira's folks were hungry
And their land grew crops of weeds
When war came, Ira volunteered
And forgot the white man's greed

CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

There they battled up Iwo Jima's hill,
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again

And when the fight was over
And when Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes

CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

Ira returned a hero
Celebrated through the land
He was wined and speeched and honored; Everybody shook his hand

But he was just a Pima Indian
No water, no crops, no chance
At home nobody cared what Ira'd done
And when did the Indians dance

CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

Then Ira started drinkin' hard;
Jail was often his home
They'd let him raise the flag and lower it
like you'd throw a dog a bone!

He died drunk one mornin'
Alone in the land he fought to save
Two inches of water in a lonely ditch
Was a grave for Ira Hayes

CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war

Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes
But his land is just as dry
And his ghost is lyin' thirsty
In the ditch where Ira died

Oscar Chamberlain - 6/30/2005

What follows is not a rhetorical question but a serious one. How does the essay you quote contradict the other?

The tone is certainly different, but I don't see an essential contradiction.

Louis N Proyect - 6/30/2005

American Indians join the military for the same reason that any poor American does, out of economic desperation. In any case, even if there was a pervasive patriotic mood in places such as Browning, Montana (and there isn't), I would expect Patricia Limerick to question it. She is a trenchant critic of frontier capitalism, so I don't know what motivated her to wave the flag.

Here's the true Patricia Limerick as far as I am concerned:

The Denver Post, May 16, 1999
VIOLENCE, PAST AND PRESENT Brutality of Old West romanticized
By Patricia Limerick

Five years ago, I wrote an essay on the wars between the United States and Indian people. For most of the summer, I was an insomniac, waking every night to think about bleeding bodies, fractured bones and internal organs exposed to the air. Here is one of a thousand stories that, read one after another, made each night too long.

In the midst of the Modoc War in the Pacific Northwest in 1873, a white trooper named Maurice Fitzgerald said that he saw a captive Indian "woman begging piteously for her life. 'Me no hurt no one, me no fight,' she whined." According to Fitzgerald's report, an officer then said, "Is there anyone here who will put that old hag out of the way?" A Pennsylvania Dutchman stepped forward and said, "I'll fix her, lieutenant." He put the muzzle of his carbine to her head and blew it to pieces. When it comes to the memory of violence, the human mind has a lot of options. There is the kind of memory that devastates the soul, in which the tearing of flesh and the ending of a life lodge in the mind and block the approach of any other thought or feeling. There is the kind of memory that comes and goes, evaded and denied much of the time and then back in unexpected surges. There is also the kind of memory that wraps justification and righteousness around the violence; individual misfortune may have occurred, this form of memory insists, but a greater cause - winning the continent for a deserving nation - prevailed. And there is, of course, amnesia, which sometimes seems like the most desirable approach.

Most peculiar of all is the kind of memory that took possession of the history of violence in the nineteenth-century West. This is a style of memory that transmutes misery into adventure, brutality into amusement. The Alamo, the Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek have not been forgotten; they are familiar names, lodged deep in national memory. But they are episodes of the historical theme park known as the Wild West, and public memory has taken the cataclysm of violent death that occurred at those sites and rendered it bloodless and "lite." The wars had barely ended before their stories had become material for entertainment - for light reading, for movies, for children's games.

Oscar Chamberlain - 6/30/2005

I am not expert on Limerick's body of scholarship. I've read some articles and had the pleasure of hearing her speak back in the early 1990s. From what I have read, I suspect that somewhere near the center of any changes has been been her grappling with the interaction between myth, belief, and fact in the context of the American frontier.

Regardless of how she has or has not changed, what you describe so colorfully as "flag-waving crap" strikes me as an attempt to grapple with the complex and intriguing emotional relationship between Native Americans and the United States. I have seen it myself: in a Lakota dancer who included his military insignia among the decoratiions that he wore, in a close and dear Stockbridge friend who is a retired Army major and a fierce critic of our current policies in Iraq, and in the annual "Honor the Earth" Pow Wow held at an Ojibwe reservation, where the color guard is an important part of a ceremony that also seeks to continue pre-conquest traditions.

Maybe her examples are not representative, but they are not lies. The phenomena is real. The complexity is real, and if you have a better understanding of it than her or me, please share it.

Louis N Proyect - 6/30/2005

I have no idea what has happened to her. I own a couple of her books and can't reconcile their militancy with the flag-waving crap that appears in the NY Times op-ed. Just one item that caught my eye as a visitor to the Blackfoot reserves in both Montana and Alberta and as a long-time observer of Blackfoot politics. The Earl Old Person she cites ('One of our responsibilities is to teach our neighbors what it means to be American.') has about as much credibility among Blackfoot activists as Papa Doc Duvalier had in Haiti. The Blackfoot people have been victims of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and their hand-picked tribal councils for most of the 20th century. Earl Old Person symbolizes this corruption to a tee.

Ralph E. Luker - 6/30/2005

If by "you", you mean me: would I want to pigeonhole you? You're at your best when you are flying free.

Jonathan Dresner - 6/30/2005

What, every new NYT commentator has to create polarizing dichotomies now? Is this a hazing?

Sorry, I gave up as soon as I got to the definitions: I know you probably want to stick me in the "legal secularist" camp, but you can't exclude me from the "values evangelicals" camp, either, based on his definitions. Maybe I'll try to plow through it again tomorrow.