Civil War, Surrender, or Secession

 

I am often criticized for being a secessionist. I believe that states should be allowed to leave the United States. For that matter, I think it is a person's right to stand on their roof, raise their flag and declare that their house is now an independent country with the right to not pay taxes or obey regulations on the gambling, drug, and medieval surgery den in operation inside. Granted, there are all sorts of practical problems with actually doing this. I am talking about what a person has the right to do, not whether this is really a good idea. 

What most people miss is the extreme moral price to be paid for not accepting the moral and legal right to secede. Mississippi and California are both states that greatly differ from the rest of the country. Take the state that you sympathize least with. Imagine that the governor of that state got on national TV and declared that unless the Constitution was rewritten to suit them, they will secede from the United States. This would leave us with three options; we could fight a civil war, surrender to their demands, or accept their secession. 

The civil war option becomes deeply problematic if the secessionists have managed to seize military bases, gained the backing of elements of the military, or even the recognition of foreign countries. It is important to keep in mind that the American Civil War was made possible because the South had three months from December 1860, when South Carolina voted to secede, to March 1861 when Lincoln became president, where they could act with complete impunity. Not only did the lame-duck Buchanan administration not begin to call up troops to invade the South but they allowed the South to seize federal forts and armories. This would become important for the coming war as the South lacked the industrial capacity to manufacture the weapons it needed. 

Even if the state had no weapons with which to fight but simply blocked the roads with kindergarteners, could such a one-sided civil war be justified? Are we prepared to call a soldier who ran over a kid with a tank, an American hero who saved the Union? Note that if our opponents know that we have moral qualms about killing children then they will not hesitate to put their kids in danger with the confidence that we will back down and they will win even though they are outgunned. One thinks of the example of the Palestinians, who offer a master class on how to cynically put children in danger in the hope of a propaganda win. 

If we are not prepared to commit mass murder, we can surrender and give the states what they demand in order to remain in the Union. Mississippi might want an end to gay marriage and for abortion to be made a federal crime. California might want to make it a federal crime to misgender someone or impose a green plan on the rest of the country. Are you willing to consent to whichever one you find most distasteful? 

At a practical level, it is absurd to hear liberals and conservatives complaining about what the other side has just done. Take the example of the Dobbs decision. You liberals knew for years that conservatives were the kinds of people who would do such a thing and yet you agreed to be part of the same country as them. By not seceding, you signed a Faustian bargain in which you agreed to allow for the end of Roe in exchange for conservatives not breaking up the Union. If you had threatened conservatives to either pass an amendment to protect abortion or you would leave, would you have been confident that conservatives would have given in? 

By not openly demanding secession, you supporters of abortion demonstrate that your protests are nothing more than political theater. You do not really believe that women are going to be turned into baby-making slaves. If you honestly thought this was the case, you would be demanding secession and threatening total Hobbesian civil war if your demands were not met. 

Extreme anti-abortion antics, while insincere, pose their own risks as conservatives might come to take them seriously as opposed to merely an opportunity to raise money and allow activists to feel good about themselves. If conservatives conclude that civil war with the left is inevitable, they might decide that their best chance of winning lies with starting the war with a preemptive first strike.    

If you find it implausible that states would threaten secession as a weapon to blackmail the rest of the country with in order to get their preferred policies enacted, it is important to recognize that early American history was dominated by the widely recognized fact that the South would only stay in the Union as long as slavery was protected. As such abolitionists operated under the limitation that they could not deny the fact that, if they ever were able to come close to turning their ideals into actual policy, the South would simply secede.

As the North and South developed very different trajectories regarding slavery, the South started demanding that the federal government not only refrain from eliminating slavery but actively work to advance it. For example, the Fugitive Slave Act made a mockery of state's rights when it came to the right of states to not tolerate slavery. Finally, with the victory of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party in 1860, the South decided that they would not even accept being subject to a party that merely claimed to oppose slavery in the territories and they seceded.

The United States was founded on a Faustian bargain to tolerate slavery in the South. Considering this, what is so implausible about imagining that either allowing red states to ban abortion or allowing blue states to protect it might be a modern version of such a Faustian bargain that is necessary to keep this country together? If you are not willing to openly support secession then you cannot play innocent as to the price you have to be willing to pay in order for there to be a United States. The only America you can expect to have is one run according to the values of your opponents. Any attempt to balk on this reality leads, in practice, to secession if not the truly nightmarish possibility of civil war.     

Once we recognize that the options of civil war and surrender are so morally reprehensible, we are left with only one option, secession. I am not saying that secession is going to be easy. To be clear, my ideal situation would be for the country to remain whole under my terms. As a matter of pragmatism, I am willing to make some concessions to my opponents. That being said, there are people out there whose vision for society is so markedly different from mine that we can make no pretense that they ever will be able to make the necessary concessions to have a united country that would be mutually acceptable. This would leave, as the only options, fighting a civil war or allowing for the United States to be divided into a collection of new countries from the diverse groups, from the left to the right, that currently make up this deeply divided nation. 

The American God, Abraham Lincoln: A Dispatch From a Time-Traveling Anthropologist From Ancient Greece

 

A useful thought experiment for historians is to imagine the kinds of mistakes that someone writing from a different time and place could fall into when attempting to describe our society, particularly if they are already beginning with limited sources of information. This serves to open the historian to the possibility that, as an outsider writing with limited information, he is making equally egregious mistakes about past societies. An example I recently gave some of my students was to imagine what a time-traveling anthropologist from ancient Greece might write about the Lincoln Memorial. It would be obvious to him that the Lincoln Memorial is based on a Greek temple. This resemblance, though, could all too easily become a trap. 

Abraham Lincoln came from humble origins. He gained the presidency out of nowhere without any significant political experience. He then held the nation together through a bloody civil war, only to die tragically soon after victory was won. In looking back at his achievements, it became clear to the American people that Lincoln was really a god who had come down in human form among them to preserve their nation in difficult times. As such, the American people built a temple in Lincoln's honor. Like most civilized temples, the Lincoln Memorial Temple consists of columns to allow for open space with a statue of the god looking out. Above the god's statue is a sign telling everyone that this is a temple. Every year, tens of thousands of Americans visit this shrine to pay homage to this god by reading selections of his speeches placed on the walls of the temple.

When I inquired about their god, Lincoln, many Americans objected, finding the use of the term "god" offensive. Americans claim to practice monotheism, the worship of only one god. This position stops Americans from openly worshipping the variety of powers manifest in nature. As it is only natural, for people to worship the gods they see around them, Americans are forced to pretend to only worship their supreme god Jesus while labeling their other gods as founding fathers, saints, or celebrities. On top of this, Americans pretend that their politics are secular, divorced from the worship even of their Jesus god as if it were possible to separate the actions of a government from the veneration of the gods. Why would anyone obey rulers who did not have the blessing of the gods?    

To be clear, Americans do not place Lincoln on par with Jesus. That being said, both Lincoln and Jesus have their birthdays celebrated as national holidays. Lincoln has the advantage that he is a native god as opposed to Jesus who first arose among Middle Eastern Jews. Since the United States is a young country, there is a shortage of native gods to worship. As such, Americans are eager for gods of their own to replace the foreign gods that have been brought to their shores. 

Recent years have seen the rise of a new cult of Wokism to challenge the traditional American gods. This new Woke cult has been driven by people who, until a few decades ago, were largely shut out of political life though it receives much support from the children of the establishment. Since practitioners of this cult deny the validity of American political traditions and wish to replace them, it can only be expected that they also replace America's gods and their rites with new ones. Hence the Wokists have worked hard to replace Abraham Lincoln and other similar gods like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Christopher Columbus with the god Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a god they have imported from Cuba known as Che Guevara. This process has involved the ritual defacing of the statues of traditional gods. Anyone who doubts whether Americans really believe in the importance of venerating statues of the gods should ask themselves why the Wokists are so keen to eliminate the statues of America's gods and why traditionalists want to protect them. It is clear that, if the Wokists succeed, America's gods will abandon them and the traditionalists will have no choice but to accept the protection of the new Woke gods.   

Laughter aside, it is hardly obvious why our Greek anthropologist is wrong in his interpretation of the Lincoln Memorial. I put it to readers to offer their own responses. As I see it, the primary weakness of our anthropologist is that he approaches American civics with categories and questions from ancient Greece. In his framework, great men naturally flow into minor gods worthy of veneration and divine worship is an extension of politics. An implication of the latter is that he does not think in terms of private religion unrelated to politics. As such, he cannot imagine any freedom of religion any more than most people are able to imagine the freedom to commit treason in the privacy of their own homes. 

In itself, this is not a bad thing. Alexis de Tocqueville understood America through the lens of France with the implicit question of why was it that it was the American Revolution and not the French Revolution that succeeded. Tocqueville's outsider perspective offered useful insights into American democracy. There is certainly a value in Americans being willing to question their willingness to craft neat categories of secular and religious, something that would not have been obvious to a pre-modern. For those without the privilege of talking to a time-traveling Greek anthropologist, the next best thing is reading what Greeks actually wrote about politics and religion.  

The problem with our Greek anthropologist is that he is a little too insistent on his framework. When faced with the reality that Americans do not think in his terms, he is unable to ask the truly interesting question of why Americans think differently from him. Instead, he falls back on insisting that his framework is superior and that Americans simply do not understand how religion and politics function. 

Analyzing people who think in different frameworks is a major challenge for historians, anthropologists, and anyone else in the social sciences as such people are, almost by definition, academics and most people are not. Someone becomes a historian not just because it seems like a nice job but because they think differently from other people. This means that a historian is a double outsider. Not only does he study people who think differently because they are from a different time and place but he is also presumably studying normal non-academic people. For someone on the autism spectrum like me, there is a third level of outsiderness in that most people are neurotypicals. The fact that I naturally think in terms of clearly defined consistent rules may make me a better historian but it only further alienates me from neurotypicals who can be defined precisely by their disinclination to operate under such rules. Yes, I like to believe that I can offer valuable insights into how human societies function but it will always be as an outsider.   

Tolerance For the Children of Gay Parents But Not for Orphans (or Contrarian Aspies)

As part of getting Kalman ready for pre-school, every other Friday, I take him to the Pajama Library Gan Katan at the Jewish Federation of San Gabriel and Pomona Vally. It is a great program and I love the people there. I am particularly grateful to the staff for going the extra mile to accommodate Kalman and me.  

This past meeting, I had an interesting exchange with one of the people running the program. In honor of the national holiday invented by Abraham Lincoln to drum up northern patriotism during the Civil War, we sang a lovely little thank you song.   

Baruch ata Adonai, thank you, God

Thank you for the candles
Thank you for the wine
Thank you for the challah
That always tastes so fine.

Thank you for my family
They love me when I’m happy
They love me when I’m sad.

Afterward, the group leader explained that originally the song said "thank you for my mommy, thank you for my dad," but they changed the lyrics to be more inclusive. I raised my hand and commented that "obviously, this was to be inclusive of orphans." The leader did not take kindly to this and said that this was not for orphans and asked me if I was being sarcastic. I responded that "as an aspie, I am incapable of sarcasm." I let the issue go and we actually had a much more pleasant conversation after group. 

To be clear, I strongly support tolerance for children raised by same-sex parents. It is not as if these children have violated any biblical commandments. I even support tolerance for homosexuals as I am morally opposed to initiating physical violence against anyone. Unlike the group leader, I also care at least as much about orphans, whom I am commanded by the Bible to not offend. I also care about people with sulfite allergies who cannot drink wine, people (like my step-mother) with celiac, who cannot eat challah, and people who struggle with depression, who go through long periods of not being able to be happy without actually being sad. If we were to be logically consistent and apply the same standard as we would to not offending children from same-sex families, the entire song would have to go. When asked if I was serious in saying that I was more concerned about people with celiac than I was about homosexuals, I responded that "as a classical liberal, I always place physical danger over non-physical danger. Since celiac itself presents an inherent physical danger while homosexuality does not, concerns about celiac should take precedence." 

Feel free to reject my conclusions, but note that I operate from a clear set of principles. If you want to disagree with me you are going to need to set forth your own principles and it will not be enough to say that you are tolerant as that just begs the question of whom. You cannot say that celiac patients should know that we love them and accept their challah-less lifestyles as it is equally reasonable to assume that children from gay families know that we accept them even with their two mommies or daddies.     

When it comes to not giving offense to homosexuals, there are two logically consistent positions. We can say that everyone, gay, straight, or celiac, must be protected from offense. Alternatively, we can say that society has established certain codes of speech and behavior and these include not using exclusionary language against homosexuals. Not that homosexuals are inherently more deserving of protection than those with celiac, but we recognize that society cannot protect everyone and so we must accept that society, for whatever arbitrary reason, has chosen homosexuals. Note that saying that society is being arbitrary is a more powerful reason than saying that it actually makes logical sense. I can always counter your logic. But if society is being arbitrary then I have no choice but to accept this as the price of membership. 

As it should be clear from the example of the song, total acceptance is not really possible. Whatever language you use, someone will always be excluded. This leaves the second option. If the group leader had rebuked me by saying that I was being impolite, then she would have been on solid ground. Of course, there is a price to be paid for such a position in that it is fundamentally a conservative position. If she did this, she would not be able to claim that she was being open and welcoming. Her argument would be as valid and morally useless as if she criticized my holding a fork and knife in the "wrong" way.

As an aspie, I get fearful whenever I hear liberals talking about acceptance that does not explicitly mention those on the autism spectrum. To not include those on the spectrum is to imply that we are not deserving of acceptance. I have no problem living in a society with arbitrary rules that I have to either take or leave as long as we are being honest about it. If we are going to talk about acceptance, then I demand the right to be accepted as a highly contrarian aspie, who fulfills his state of being by attempting to elucidate the most logically consistent position he can, regardless of whether neurotypicals feel comfortable. Anything less does not allow me to feel safe and accepted.     

Historical Progress and Reasonable Men

Miss S. raises some issues with one of my arguments from my presentation on Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. I argue that history should be taught with a decidedly unpolemical stance, even when dealing with societies and institutions that most people today would find morally abhorrent such as slavery or open patriarchy. History should be presented from the perspective of those who lived then. We need to ask ourselves what was going through their heads when they did these things and what they would say in their own defense. The moment one takes a judgmental stance and starts to cluck about people in the past not being open minded or tolerant than one is no longer doing history. Miss S. asks:

 Reading your post I can't help but feel as if your method of justification for the behaviors of people from the past fails to own up to the great potential that men possess. I'll explain why in a bit, but this is surprising because you seem to view those people and those societies in/from the past in high regard; higher regard than I (a non-historian) does. By our modern definition (and maybe even a historical one) "great" men were not those who compromised too often. If anything they were incredibly stubborn and rarely achieved any accolades for their behavior while they were alive.

You present slavery as an example of a social situation where bad moral actions (even for that society, at that time) could be reasoned away by the short-sightedness of the society and their reluctance to compromise their economic foundation. Perhaps I am interpreting this entirely wrong, but why should it be encouraged for the students to empathize with such a mindset and not be critical of it? There were plenty of other individuals from that same time period who were quite critical of the institution of slavery (I don't think anyone is debating that). What you have is a situation where sociology mixes with history and you have an example as to how gross acts of immorality can exist and the society at large puts up with it. Like how the Romans watched people being mauled to death by beasts in the Coliseum for sport. Like how our society today retains very little modesty in regards to sex.

In politics, yes you routinely make "deals with the Devil"; but also, if you notice, when you look throughout history, some of the great societal changes came about because either leaders or a group did not compromise -- and took the "all but nothing" stance. Believe it or not, this is not an outright criticism of your efforts. In fact if I were your student, I would find the exercise to be an interesting one. I would just wonder how you could explain away the impetus of ideas that were uncompromising and self-serving; yet impacted history greatly. Your approach would justify the actions of American slaveholders; but not that of the American (Union) government.

George Bernard Shaw once said: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." I think Miss S. would agree with Shaw as would most people. I cannot disprove this claim, but would point out that it is based on a flawed human perception of history. One of the common traps that people fall into, when dealing with history, is narrative thinking. When studying historical events we look for stories to tell, ones that have all the qualities of the fictional stories we manufacture out of our own imaginations simply for entertainment. A good story that will hold onto the attention of listeners and readers is going to have a unified story, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, a limited number of characters, clear heroes and villains, something important at stake, like saving the world, with a climax in which everything will stand or fall based on one person making a single decision in just one moment. Since we like these sorts of stories, we will purposely try to construct historical narratives along these lines. The problem with narrative thinking is that there is no particular reason to assume that events in the physical world really do operate like this. So we fall into the trap of a self-selecting bias; we see what we want to see even if it is a product of nothing more than our imaginations.

Does history advance because of a few brave heroes who do things that others think are impossible, defy the odds, and save the world? We wish to think this so we construct heroic narratives where society progresses through conflicts in which the good guys win in the end. A more accurate view of history would be that society evolves as part of a continuous process. The mechanism for this change is not clear cut conflict, but the compromises that different factions reach as part of their ongoing dialogue. Why did the Civil Rights movement succeed? Because blacks defeated their enemies with their marching or because mainstream America became convinced that giving blacks equal rights strengthened Middle America by bringing in moderate peaceful blacks and expelling segregationist whites? Middle America made a deal with black America and we are still working out the details. The same thing goes for the gay rights movement. Their success, ironically enough, has been due to their ability to adapt themselves to mainstream culture by seeking mainstream marriage than trying to actually change mainstream culture. For all the talk about extra-marital sex among American youth, the standard is still mainstream marriage. Groups outside of the mainstream make their deals with mainstream America and both sides win in the end.

It is very easy to admire someone like John Brown who made a martyr of himself trying to free slaves. But what did John Brown accomplish; he got a lot of people killed in Kansas and most famously at Harper's Ferry. In the end, he freed no one. On the other hand take Abraham Lincoln, who is often drafted in the cause of American hero. Unlike the Lincoln of popular myth, though, the real Lincoln was very much the political pragmatist. In 1860 he did not run on a platform of getting rid of slavery, just to not allow slavery into the territories. How many slaves did the Great Emancipator free? Zero. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in territories not currently controlled by the Union. That being said it set the stage for the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments by binding the American government to the ending of slavery. It was not the moderates who were being short-sighted. In a sense, it was people like John Brown who were the real short-sighted ones.

We wish to find that hero who took on the forces of darkness and forever changed the world for the better. We want it so badly that we will write him into history, running over any inconvenient facts in the process. When writing fantasy we could leave our Saurons and our Lord Voldemorts as being motivated just by evil. I do not understand evil as a motive. The closest I can come is the pursuit of good ends through means that are so evil that they cancel out the good at the end. For example, there is trying to save the world by becoming a dark lord tyrant and nuking most of it. In fantasy, one has the luxury of not having to seriously consider the "villains" and can just tell the story from the perspective of the "good guys." As a historian, though, I also have to be willing to consider "Sauron" and "Voldemort." Since it is precisely such people who represent the greatest difficulty, understanding them becomes the task that dominates my work as a historian.

Does History Have any Utilitarian Value? A Response

In Part II you state, "The humanities have no utilitarian." In Part III, you state that history-buffs are of "no practical use to anyone" because they do not analyze primary/secondary sources and do not use the historical method, which in turn implies that the work of historians does have practical value. In Part IV, you challenge post-modernists who do not believe that the humanities have intrinsic value. My confusion may be cleared up if you could explain the relationship between those statements. Does your assertion that the "humanities have no utilitarian value" exclude history (i.e. Does history have utilitarian value? Practical value? Non-utilitarian value?). Also, is History part of the Humanities or is it a Social Science? Does it make a difference as to whether History has utilitarian value if you classify it as one or the other? 

I view history as part of the humanities and not as one of the sciences, social or any other. As part of the humanities, history has no utilitarian value; it does not produce any goods with direct empirical benefits for human beings. Also, history is outside of the sciences as it has no predictive value. During the nineteenth century, it was quite common to view history as a science and to formulate specific laws. Hegel and Marx are good examples of this. In fact, Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, because he saw what he was doing for history what Darwin had done for biology. This endeavor to find laws for history and create an overarching narrative has failed. Admittedly there is still the popular notion that one can learn from the past. But you will find about as many professional historians who believe this as you do scientists who reject evolution. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series there is a character named Hari Seldon who, through his study of psychohistory, is able to formulate laws as to how human societies work to such an extent that he is able to predict the future with mathematical precision. He foresees the collapse of the Galactic Empire and a Dark Age lasting thirty thousand years. Through the creation of the Foundation, Seldon hopes to preserve the knowledge of the Empire so that the Dark Age would last only one thousand years. (Asimov essentially took Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and turned it into a series of science fiction novels.) No historian can do what Seldon does. We are just as clueless as everyone else. History as a science, therefore, is going to have to stay, for now, in the same realm as hyperspace travel, in science fiction. 

So what purpose does history serve that we bother to have students waste some of their valuable time studying it? The most obvious answer, and in my view the least important, is that history is useful for giving context for present-day events. For example, it is reasonable to expect that young people participating in our recent election of Barack Obama should know something about the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It may also be reasonable to expect that they know something about the history of American slavery, about the Civil War and about Abraham Lincoln. It is reasonable to expect that, with all the discussion about the recent downturn in the economy, people should know something about the Great Depression. Again this is not learning lessons from the past, this is just being able to put events into a certain context. The key difference between lessons and context is that context does not point and say that this happened in the past therefore you should do … . (whatever action fits into the ideology of the speaker) This understanding of history justifies at the very least that students in elementary school and high school should have to take some basic history courses taught by a teacher with a degree in education but not history. 

For me, history is important for three reasons. The first is that history is a method of thinking, a way of interrogating texts that is of vital importance for processing present-day issues. When I read a newspaper or listen to a public speaker, because I filter everything through the historical method, I read and hear a very different text. One that the authors of the text usually do not want me to pick up on. This interrogation of texts is quite similar to a police interrogation of witnesses and suspects. While it is possible to learn this method without studying history, I would say that history is a very useful setting because it allows you to step away from the issues of your day. For example, most people living in modern America have no particular strongly felt convictions one way or another as to who was right in the Hundred Years War, the English or the French. This leads to my second reason. History, when properly taught, encourages one to transcend issues. While the English and the French fought the Hundred Years War, for the historian, neither side is right or wrong. Both sides are products of their specific place in history. The historian, in his own mind, gets to bring both sides together and make a sort of peace between them. Imagine a generation of politicians trained on this sort of historical thinking and imagine how different our public discourse would be. (For more on this concept see Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History.) The third important thing that history does is that it forces one to confront a culture whose values are not one’s own. Not only is one forced to confront this different culture but one also finds oneself, in some sense, being drafted to defend this culture, now dead and buried, to a world that has passed on. In one sense this is very conservative as one is defending the past; in another sense, this is very liberal as it involves challenging present norms in society. 

With these three reasons in mind, I can affirmatively say with a clear conscious that history is an important field of study. Important enough that not only should children study it in elementary school and high school but that they need to be taught it by a teacher trained in the historical method and not an education major staying a chapter ahead of them in the textbook. Furthermore, history is something that should be a requirement in universities. Finally, for a select few, history and the historical method should become a way of life that they devote themselves to mind, body, and soul.

Michael Moore Learns about Patriotism: Some Thoughts on American Carol

Before the film, American Carol, started there was an ad for the National Guard. It featured National Guard troops in action spliced with Dale Earnhardt Jr. driving in a NASCAR race with heavy metal music in the background. I take it as a good sign that I am capable of looking at something like this with a mixture of confusion and amusement. I take it as a sign that I am not some mindless drone of the conservative movement. I am not certain what Dale Earnhardt Jr., who I am sure is a wonderful guy, and a patriot who supports our troops, and NASCAR has to do with the National Guard. The dramatic high point of the ad was a scene in which a Humvee full of American soldiers is driving full-throttle through the dusty streets of a Middle Eastern town when all of a sudden a soccer ball crosses the Humvee’s path. The Humvee breaks and comes to a complete stop right in front of the soccer ball. A soldier gets out and with a nod from his commanding officer kicks the ball over to a Muslim boy, who looks back at the American soldier with a look of awe, gratitude, and respect. Upon seeing this, I broke laughing; this was too over the top to bear. I think it is a problem when you cannot tell the difference between a propaganda piece and a piece of satire.

American Carol bills itself as the first conservative film to come out of mainstream Hollywood and is devoted to sticking it to the liberal establishment. (I would point to Team America: World Police as a film that preceded it.) It is a send-up to Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol and spoofs Michael Moore. It features an overweight radical leftist documentary filmmaker in a Michigan State baseball cap named Michael Malone in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. Malone despises all things American, including his tall good-looking all all-American nephew, who is serving in the Navy. He hates America so much that he wishes to abolish the Fourth of July. The night before he is to speak at an abolish the Fourth of July rally, Malone is visited by the spirits of John F. Kennedy, George S. Patton, and George Washington, who teach him the true meaning of patriotism.

I laughed my heart out through the film’s eighty-plus minutes and would have loved to have gotten more. I am not sure what was my favorite bit; a group of black slaves breaking out into hava nagilah while picking cotton or the shootout with ACLU zombies out to deliver injunctions to make it impossible to check the bags of potential terrorists and destroy the Ten Commandments. (This still does not compare to season four of Twenty-Four when the villain, upon finding out that one of his people had been captured, calls a group named Amnesty Global to inform them that an innocent man was being illegally held by CTU. A lawyer from Amnesty Global then shows up with a court order, banning CTU from questioning the person they hold. Fortunately, Jack Bauer ignores this and proceeds to break the guy’s fingers one by one until he gives over the information necessary to save the day and stop a nuclear device from wiping out Los Angeles.)

I feel that I can recommend this film to everyone across the political spectrum, without any sense of guilt, as a hands-down brilliant piece of political satire. I am not saying this simply because I agree with the film’s politics. I enjoyed watching Michael Moore’s films too. Bowling for Columbine was absolutely hilarious and even Fahrenheit 9/11 had its share of good moments. I think that Michael Moore is a brilliant filmmaker whose work can be enjoyed regardless of one’s politics. (I also think that Leni Riefenstahl’s films are genius despite the fact that they are Nazi propaganda.)

While I enjoyed the film I had a number of problems with it. These problems may seem like quibbling on my part but I do see these things as a cause for concern. The film has Patton show Malone an alternative universe where Lincoln had followed Malone in thinking that violence never solves anything and did not fight the Civil War. Malone finds that his family has moved to the South and that he is now a major slaveholder. A very funny bit without any question. The problem is that Patton came from a Confederate family. His grandfather fought under Robert E. Lee. Of all the people that the film could have picked to make their point, Patton might not have been the best choice. Patton also takes Malone to the Munich conference of 1938 where Neville Chamberlin shines the shoes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. It was great having Hitler strumming a guitar and singing a peace song, but, and maybe this is me being the nitpicky historian, it bothered me that Tojo was put in Munich. Japan had nothing to do with Munich.

These small historical bloopers could be laughed off if it were not for the fact that it is part of a larger assault on academia. The film clearly has a gripe with academics. Malone even gets to visit a peace studies course at Columbia University where the professors break out into their hippy selves and sing about how it is 1968. While I have my problems with academic culture, I am not comfortable with this sort of head-on attack, mainly because I suspect that what lies behind it is not just a rejection of the academic culture as it exists at present but also a rejection of academia of any sort. Whatever problems I may have with academic culture as it exists at present I am a believer in the academic process. Universities, even the radical leftist parts, have an important role to play in our society. I am not certain, though, that the filmmakers share my concern. If they did they would have bothered to get their history right.

As an academic on the right side of the political spectrum, I believe that radical changes need to be made to the university system. I think that the hard-left culture that dominates campuses is a problem. That being said, I do not think that the solution is for a right-wing takeover. I fear that too many on the right are not just against liberal academics but would seek to destroy all academia.