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This is not our fathers' Republican Party.Republicanism now comes with a code thicker than blood. Hagel can give the bad news to a group of Vets. He can call it a mess, but he won't break rank, nor will any other republican of note. Many of you thought McCain was a reasonable man. Is he? He was victimized by his party in South Carolina, and he still hangs with the guys who beat his family up. What's he doing about Iraq besides "staying the course"? The Republicans who disagree will do nothing other than keep some distance.
Hagel will retreat to the sidelines.Others will follow. The Democrats will argue over whether to beef up or pull out. There is no anti-war movement here, and I don't think there will be. The White House and Pentagon will continue to be given a free hand to spill the blood of our soldiers and waste our resources. Civil war in Iraq will ensue. Bush will have to bring the troops home when it's clear that the country never had any idea what this war was about, and will not have the stomach to double or triple the amount of boots on the ground. We will lose and and in doing so will walk away from 2/3rds of the world's oil reserves.
Am I being too pessimistic?Posted at June 26, 2005 6:40 PM in response to Show Me, Don't Tell Me
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History of Greece- George Grote, 1846-ish in ten volumes is, I think, still the definitive work of narrative history on ancient Greece. Some of the historical details may be superceded by more recent work, but no historian in English of ancient Greece understood the whole of ancient Greece better, in my opinion, and conveyed more clearly in narrative the (his)story of Greece from the perspective of democratic Athens. He was, if I'm not mistaken, prevented by his father from going up to an Oxbridge education, worked in the family's banking business, and formed a collegium to study the sourcesin pursuit of his avocation. His training in ancient languages allowed him to read all of these with enough facility, and I dare say speed, that he was able to weave the many sources into a highly readable and informing narrative. One of the great joys for a classicist, if he's got his hand on the volumes that have footnotes rather than endnotes, is to see, and sometimes read the sources at the bottom of the page. The breadth and depth of his scholarship would put all but a handfull of classical scholars to shame.
Of course, we don't read 10 volume works of history anymore. We don't have the time. But I think its worth noting that our species' intellect used to produce minds that were happy to understand the history of a nation in terms of stories and to see the whole of the history in the form of a dramatic arc with ab beginning, middle, and an end.
Posted at June 9, 2005 6:35 AM in response to History
