Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, & Culture

It is sometimes forgotten that only thirty years earlier Georgetown had been a rundown, semi-bohemian section of town, where young cash-strapped reformers drawn to work for the New Deal took up residence in cheap flats and what are now called fixer-uppers. By the early 1960s, when the new generation ascended to power, the area had become the chief bastion of Washington social life, blending remnants of its down-to-earth (and even earthy) past with the grandeur of politics at the political capital of the Free World. To be sure, the intellectual level, except every now and then, was not exactly Augustan; Georgetown evenings during the Kennedy years had a snobbery and self-importance all their own. Still, it was a far cry from the gilded, media-mad place that Georgetown (including some of its surviving overseers from the Kennedy years) became in the 1980s.

The Vital Centrist
A Review by Sean Wilentz

Yes, if you read the literature, novels, and memoirs from D.C. in the New Deal era what can be found is young New Dealers setting up shop for themselves in Georgetown living next door to fallen gentry and collections of slumming Harvard types in Washington for fun and power in the FDR administration.
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The Camelot Myth and Intellectual Pretentions

There is also this:

Over the years, an anti-Camelot myth has arisen that portrays the Kennedy administration as a sybaritic private men's club whose members occasionally took breaks to attend to matters like the Cuban missile crisis. Schlesinger, according to the myth, was the Kennedy family's chief courtier and propagandist, and nothing he says about the family can be trusted -- including his denials that, as he once put it, "an unending procession of bimbos" marched through the Kennedy White House. The journals from the early 1960s contain no hints about Kennedy's unruly sexual waywardness -- which Schlesinger eventually conceded, adding that it did "not constitute John Kennedy's finest hour." Later his love for and loyalty to the clan, and his desire to believe the very best until it became impossible to do so, could get the better of him. But the journals do convey the ease with which high spirits and cultivated, even serious thought once commingled in Washington -- an aspect of the Kennedy years that the prurient revisionists have buried.

Hickory Hill certainly saw its share of inebriated high-jinks, but it was also the site of the so-called Hickory Hill seminars, in which Schlesinger arranged for various intellectual luminaries to rehearse their ideas before administration officials and specially invited guests in an informal atmosphere- -a freewheeling and unusual mixture of personalities as well as professions. (At one of these seminars, the philosopher A.J. Ayer gave a talk that attacked abstract propositions, only to have Ethel Kennedy, a devout Catholic, rise and challenge his rejection of "conceptions like truth and virtue and meaning.") The journals also describe a bygone world of Georgetown salons and dinner parties in which Schlesinger took constant pleasure. There are accounts of gatherings at the Alsops', the Bradlees', and the Harrimans', among others, that emanated political intelligence, elegance, and a certain moral sophistication. Parties do not have to be stupid.

Nothing in the review or the book reinvigorates the Camelot myth. Isn't the "anti-Camelot Myth" merely an unwillingness to accept Disney-like fairy tales as truth? I am not anti-fairy tale, simply opposed to systematic self-deception which is the motive behind the JFK Camelot story. The friendly fascist version of self-deception that is easily found in the Disney fairy tale is especially pernicious. The Disney-fairy tale should be contrasted with the Grimmer kind that always hints at something useful and truthful and uncomfortable. Truly, I am shocked at Sean for wanting to give back-handed support to the Myth of Camelot on the Potomac. There is no need.

As for the intellectual vigor of Camelot, it doesn't and shouldn't impress. Doesn't Sean think that the descendants of ex-Trots and rightwing vulgar Keynsians, those who make up the neo-con and neo-liberal ascendancy from the Reagan admin to the present, also have their study groups and book clubs? I am sure that in 1990 they invited Fukuyama to lecture to them on Hegel and "The End of History". The intelligentsia, whether of the type that once pranced around the Camelot on the Potomac or whether those who were a beacon on a hill in the Reagan administration always have their intellectual pretentions. I do wonder though if the Fundamentalist Christians, imported in mass by the Bush administration to run everything from Iraq to the Department of the Interior, read anything at night except for the Bible and the sci-fi weirdness of The Left Behind series. What would they have made of A. J. Ayer? What would A. J. Ayer made of them?

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The Everyday System of Violence and Moral Insight

Intellectual pretentions aside: What is missing in all of the reviews I have read of Schlesinger 's Journals, and from the book itself when I glanced through it at the library, is any consideration of morality. It is superficially assumed that the only moral questions for those in power are those that are either personal or those that lead one to want to change or not change the system. There is no thought on a deeper moral level how a system of violence can be justified. In a system of violence decisions that create violence are made as a matter of course and as if such decisions were "natural".

Let us put aide Vietnam and Southeast Asia in this discussion, because the line of the Camelot Mythologists now is that JFK would have gotten us out of Vietnam and thus avoided a disaster. But let us conisder the normal and "uncontroversial" decisions of the Kennedy Administration, The daily decisions involving Latin America, which Schlesinger witnessed, are simply not thought about as presenting a moral quandry. These are the years when the Kennedy Administration decided that the military in Latin American countries should be reformed in order to focus on "internal security." Thus the U.S. brought Latin American military officers here to the U.S. to be trained at places like the School of the Americas. These were the same officers that would later lead the armed forces, with U.S. help, in establishing military dictatorships across Latin America, resulting in mass death and torture. What was established by the Kennedy Administration in the 1960s was a framework that created a wave of state-supported mass murder, torture and terror for the next thirty years. It is only in the last few years that Latin America has emerged from this period.

These are just "normal" decisions that must be made to maintain U.S. power and domiinance. Such decisions create the system of violence I referred to above. But it is exactly these normal decisions, the everyday decisions that we make without looking, that are the ones that must be held up to moral scrutiny. I do not expect the likes of Schlesinger to perform this duty for us. He is too caught up in the bright social whirl, the seduction of fame and beauty, the vanity of power and the lust to be close to the "Stars" (in Washington, in Hollywood) but some of our secular public intellectuals (other than Chomsky) could try to point out that there are moral issues that are ignored by Schlesinger in his journal.

Who does this? Who points these morals issues out regularly and consistently? Who focuses on the moral issues of systematic violence? Who looks at the decisions in the everyday life of the powerful (both political and economic) and puts them up to moral scrutiny? Only left religious radicals -- groups similar to the Catholic Worker, some of the Mennonite left, and Quakers. The secular left can do this. But for some reason the secular left has not been able to hold on to this function for long. It is people such as the Berrigan brothers and Dorothy Day and Miles Horton and Bob Moses, religiously and philosophcally inspired leftists who have always been best at this kind of moral prophecy. And further back it was people such as William Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, and Tolstoy and hundreds of radical Anabaptists, who fulfilled the function of moral prophecy. It is these people that often point out that violence is a part of everyday life; that violence is a standard that is daily committed by people in power to the people who do not have power.

Many of these people learned their initial way of thinking about systematic and everyday violence from the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. He saw that the violence of slavery does not occur once and only once. It does not occur only when the slave is kidnapped and put into bondage or when the slave is whipped for disobeying the rule of the master. The violence of slavery is daily and it occurs whenever the slave does something in fear that the violence of his master will ensue if he does not do what he is told. The violence occurs everyday the slave hurts himself morally or physically while performing services for his master or when the slave is unable to perform services for him/herself or his/her friends and family. People such as Garrison pointed out that the decisions for this kind of systematic violence were attenuated and abstracted in such a way that the people who actually made the most important decisions did not have to see the consequences of the decisions that they make. The important people are able to sit safely and comfortably in their political palaces and bourgeois brownstones while others bloody their hands. In this way, the system of violence is standardized and institutionalized.

Reading reviews of the Schlesinger book, I ask myself: Why has the secular left so often failed to hold on to the moral criticism of systematic violence? Such criticism is a proper "utopian" function of criticism of society. It is a criticism that implicitly contrasts what we can be as individuals and a society with the current failure and success of what we are. Is it because the secular left too easily disdains the poetry of everyday and integral utopianism (of living "the moral life") as antagonist to everyday political and economic organization and infighting? I have no real answer. I am not religious. But it was the insight of the early socialist movement that some aspects of "radical religion" were to be admired. People such as Karl Kautsky once wrote about how early Christians were a revolutionary movement with many admirable attributes. He sought to incorporate the insights of the early Christians into the socialist movement.

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A. J. Ayer and Ethel Kennedy: Logical Positivism and Catholicism

The most interesting meaningless fact in the review was the bringing together of Ethel Kennedy and the great philosopher A.J. Ayer in a debate that I am sure would have shook the philosophical community to the core, if the philosophers had only found out about it. We can all be happy that Ethel Kennedy opposed A.J Ayer. She was bright enough to know that philosophical skepticism of the logical positivist variety and the recitation of the Roman Catholic catechism could not co-exist.

I don't mean to snicker. I actually think that the conflict betweent A.J. Ayer and Ethel Kennedy is the same theme as the one between being able to see systematic violence and simply accepting the world as it is without looking. Only in this instance I am not sure that there is a side to take.

The fact that you can express your views openly and without fear in this "terrorist" state of America is a privilege that ordinary Cubans are not allowed..The fact that you have uncensored open access to the internet to present your views and gain access to a multitude of information is a privilege that ordinary Cubans are not allowed..the fact that you're free to spread misinformation and be an apologist for a repressive tyrannical regime should be your shame..and the fact that you will delete this message should prove that you're no better than they are. Just call me an old fashioned Cuban who wants his country's freedom..and as far as I can see, an enemy to that end is you.
see Cuba, Responsibility, and the Republic of Hypocrisy

"Surveys grossly underestimate women's sex lives: everybody, especially women, is reluctant to reveal the truth.
We know this because there is a way to of getting women to talk. Hook up college students to a fake lie-detector machine, and young women report almost twice as many sex partners as women feeling no such pressure. In fact they report as many partners as their male counterparts. So men and women may be far more similar than sex surveys have made us believe."