No Balm in Gilead

I see posts from folks in younger generations lamenting the shortcomings of the older generation, that is to say, the Boomers—of which, for the sake of full disclosure, I am one. From what I can gather, much of the lamentation is more than warranted. The cost of living makes it almost impossible for kids newly become adults to get ahead in this country. The political divisions that pit us vs. them are so deep that many of us, and not just the younger folks, despair of moving beyond them and into a more perfect union. The state of the school systems in all the states is so abysmal that I, for one, despair of ever having a well-educated citizenry. The price of even the most routine medical procedure beggars us all—or if not the procedure itself, then hedging against illness with unaffordable insurance.

 

And then I think back to when I was a youngster encountering the myriad problems of the last century. Many of those memories are vivid. The unfettered expression of American apartheid in the water-fountain signs that specified this one for whites only, that one for Negroes; the tar-paper shotgun shacks along the highway with hopeless, despairing families barefoot on the front steps; the burning cities and the National Guard everywhere; the debacle of Chicago ‘68, when the whole world was watching a police riot against demonstrators exercising their constitutional right to assemble and petition; the thousands and thousands of kids drafted into and killed in an armed force battling in a senseless neo-colonial war; the corrupt and corrupting politics of Tricky Dicky and his minions in the White House and, finally, in the Department of Justice.

 

It’s true that the economic realities back then were very different from what they are now. Still, although I cannot speak for anyone else, from my own experience the differences are not as large as it appears. I recognize that I’m not the best avatar of my generation’s coming into the working world. I was in school until I was thirty years old, and so I expected to struggle and be financially marginal. Still, even when I finally became a worker, I never ever lived in a house anywhere near the median price nationwide. Indeed, when my wife and I finally bought a house, it was a row house in a poor city, the cost of which was at best a quarter of the median price of housing in America. Even now, after so many years of working and fully retired, we live in a house that’s about one half the median price of housing, which we can afford because we still reside in that same poor city. The one thing that seems to me very unfair in current social reality is the cost of college. The increase in those costs is absurd and obscene.

 

At any rate, the crisis in early twenty-first century America does not seem to me unique or unusual. Here’s the second verse from Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers,” which reflects the realities of 1969:

 

One generation got old

One generation got soul

This generation got no destination to hold

Pick up the cry

 

Would a young person in 2026, when I’m writing this, recognize the sentiment? I think so. What underlies those lines is an experience of social reality very much parallel to current events, from racism to economic inequality and from exorbitant military budgets to the destruction of the planet by pollution, heat, plastics.

 

As is common in the language of our 21^st century contemporaries, the Airplane focused on generational differences. Back then I did as well. I remember the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” mantra, for instance. The people who got us deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War morass were all of them part of that generation that got old. The most recalcitrant of the recalcitrant racists were all of them part of that generation that got old. The despicable leaders who brought the National Guard to foreclose on all legitimate protest against authoritarianism were all of them part of that generation that got old.

 

And then a little bit of reflection. When the Little Rock Nine came to their Central High School classes, it was not that older generation that stood in their way. Their coevals did. When the National Guard soldiers shot and killed students in Jackson State and in Kent State, they were not members of that older generation. They were the students’ coevals. When the Chicago police beat the hell out of demonstrators at the Democratic Convention, they were, for the most part, not part of that older generation. They were the demonstrators’ coevals.

 

The same is true in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The people who bore those tiki-torches in Charlottesville were not Boomers. Only about 40% of people who support our current authoritarian president are Boomers. Most of the tech bros who govern our economic, political, social realities are not Boomers. Zuckerberg isn’t. Musk isn’t. Page and Brin aren’t. Bezos is, but just barely.

 

My point? Blaming a generation for the problems we face, whether we do that in 1969 or in 2026, is just wrong. I’ll acknowledge that the older one gets the less flexible one’s attitudes become. But the “young whippersnappers are fucking up the world” point of view is as common as the “damned Boomers have screwed us over” point of view, I think. As far as I can see, though, it’s not generational differences that create the messes we experience, in 2026 or in 1969. On the contrary, the culprits are the people who hold power, regardless of their generational affiliation. I’ll concede a very important point. Given that older people have had more time to accrue the resources that produce that kind of controlling power, there’s no doubt that older generations have an undue influence on the way the society is organized. Still, I maintain that it’s not the fact that they’re old that makes the difference, but rather the fact that they have power, derived from wealth or social status or whatever resource empowers them.

 

If I’m right about this, that it’s not generational differences per se but rather the accumulation of power among a set of people that produces the circumstances that agitated 1969 as much as 2026, then it follows that the key question to ask is whether it’s possible to forestall such accumulation. As I’ve suggested, in the way that societies are currently organized, older generations do elaborate power for themselves simply because longevity allows for the accumulation of the resources that produce power. But, again, it’s not simply longevity and old age that are at issue. Is such accumulation inevitable? Is it preventable?

 

The current crop of tech bros is informative. Up until some discrete point in their lives, those bros were generally speaking on the progressive side of things. My sense is that the switch to a right-wing political stance came as the Biden presidency and democratic congressional folks exerted pressure to regulate the expansion of the bros’ enterprises. It was then, in 2022 and 2023, that the bros experienced efforts to rein in the increasingly monopolistic practices of corporations like Meta and Google while at the same time the government tried to exercise its trust-busting authority. Those government initiatives coincided with the 2024 election, so that the hitherto Democrat-leaning bros became part of the Trump campaign. The most notorious case of support for Trump is Elon Musk, of course, who having voted for Obama and Hilary Clinton and then for Biden in 2020, now contributed near three hundred million dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

 

The switch is not relevant to the primary question I asked, however. Sure there’s no doubt that plutocrats who want to generate even more wealth would not support politicians who seek to constrain their businesses by pursuing antitrust and anti-monopolistic actions against those businesses. But the power was there before the switch took place. The issue I’m trying to figure out is whether it’s inevitable for any society, under any political or economic arrangement, to produce differences in wealth and status that lead to the kinds of social and economic disparities that agitated 1969 and continue to agitate 2026.

 

Is it possible to have an entirely egalitarian society, in other words?

 

As I see it, history suggests that such egalitarianism is not possible. Whether it’s aristocrats in a latifundist system or monarchs in a feudal system or nation states in a mercantilist system or straightforwardly capitalist enterprises, every society on the planet has produced the kind of disparity in wealth and status that engenders an accumulation of power in the hands of the very few at the expense of deep inequalities and inequities.

 

Revolution seems to do no good. The American Revolution is said to be the exception, but Washington Irving saw the fallacy of that assertion when he made Rip Van Winkle wake up to a newly created United States where the only notable difference was that the George III Inn had become the George Washington Inn. The French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? All of them reproduce the same disparities, and therefore the same inequities, as existed before the revolutionary “transformation.” Before and after, it turns out, are the same.

 

Marx dreamt of an utterly egalitarian society. But in practice the societies ostensibly predicated on Marxist principles produce even more disparity in power than any other system, with the exception, perhaps, of absolute monarchy. The ruling cadres in Cuba does not suffer the same painful daily existence that the ordinary Cuban does. The same goes for any other country that has laid claim to being “communist.” The argument goes that all such countries are not really communist but rather were working towards communism via the state capitalism that they actually practiced. OK. Marx’s dream remains a dream, and one regular feature of dreams is that they are not reality.

 

Is it the case, then, that a truly egalitarian society is impossible? Hobbes’s vision of the world before and after the creation of a social contract certainly suggests that such a society is absolutely not possible. Before the institution of the great Leviathan, local centers of power come into being in the “state of nature,” where every individual is in battle against every other individual. Might makes right, as they say, and the more might one person has, the more inequities there are. After the institution of the great Leviathan, that imagined creature becomes the “mortal God,” wielding unchecked authority and power as he wills. Society gains a surcease of the eternal war of each against all, but at the cost of even a hint of equity or egalitarianism.

 

At this point I’m reminded of two passages from the works of very different playwrights. In Julius Cæsar Shakespeare has Cassius say that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” I’d substitute “humans” for “underlings” because, it seems to me, the condition that leads to the disparities of 1969 and 2026 are simply a consequence of our humanity. The second passage comes from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where Didi comments, “There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” It’s the generational difference, we say. Or it’s the economic system, we say. Or it’s the political arrangements of this or that particular society, we say. But Didi knows that it’s our very own feet, our very own selves, the fact that we’re human, that’s the problem.

 

Is there then no solution? I think not. A fantasy might suggest that the solution could come from being governed by an artificial intelligence programmed to ensure that no one group elaborates power for itself. I find that fantasy even more dismaying than Hobbes’s Leviathan. Ultimately, I’m afraid, there is no balm in Gilead. We can fret our hour on the stage of life, conspire to overthrow the oppressive system, battle against the forces that keep us down and out. And then we come back to where we started.

 

There’s “progress” of sorts, to be sure. I would not want to be a peasant in 13th Century China or Germany or Ghana or Cusco. I acknowledge fully that the average worker in the 21st century works longer and possibly harder than the average worker in the 13th century. But the conditions of life in the 13th century are spine-chilling for someone raised in the 20th and now living in the 21st century. The progress does not come in the reduction of the differences in power that produce our discontent, but rather in the padding that makes the discontent less noticeable. And here again I acknowledge fully that when the padding fails to disguise the discontent, the result is France in 1789 or Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1959 or. . . . I’m afraid that the United States is now at a point where the padding is getting mighty thin.

 

Again, there is no balm in Gilead.

Writing Accomplished

I’ve written myself into emptiness. Over the last year or so, I’ve produced about five hundred and eighty or so pages of prose. Some of those pages include photographs and pictures, so it’s not all my prose. But still, subtract fifty pages and it’s still a hell of a lot of writing. All of it has been in the retrospective mode. The document with all the images is what I think of as a memoir, which I’ve titled Still Don’t Know What I’ve Been Searching For. It takes seven chapters to complete, one for each place that I’ve lived, from Cienfuegos, Cuba to Miami to Harrisburg to State College, Pennsylvania to Cambridge to Carlinville, Illinois and finally to Reading, Pennsylvania. Seventy-four years of experiences. Like all memoirs, it’s only a partial account of what I experienced. Anything more would take another seventy-four years to complete. It’s also partial insofar as I leave out some things and focus only on events and people who seem to me significant, for whatever reason. I have no intention of doing anything with the document beyond maybe sending chapters to Carlos, my son, so he can get some sense of why his father is so strange a human being. I don’t know how interesting it would be for anyone else, or even for him.

 

The second bit of writing that I’ve done, this one all in the last month, is a fiction, which I’ve titled Never. It's long enough to be a novel, but I hesitate to call it that because it sounds ambitious and pretentious. It’s a fiction. The idea is loosely based on my experiences in the first term of my undergraduate career at Penn State. I don’t mention the school by name in the fiction, but it’s obvious what I mean. The characters in the story are also transparent. I change names, of course, and none of the characters are copies of real human beings. But the intent of the representation is, to me who wrote it at least, self-evident. I suspect that anyone who was around with me in those olden days of yore would be able to figure out the relationship between the fictional characters and real people.

 

The curious thing about writing the fiction was that the whole thing just came out of me without any effort on my part. It poured out like Coleridge’s ceaseless turmoil seething. I’d sit at my laptop and open the document, and the story just came. Even when I took time off from the laptop the story insisted on issuing forth. I’d be in the basement exercising, as I’m in the habit of doing because otherwise my whole body would simply atrophy, and in mid weight-lift ideas, events, dialogues would come into my brain and I would have to stop the lifting and type out an email to myself on the downstairs laptop recording whatever my brain had concocted. The same happened sometimes as I was walking around the neighborhood, also something I do to prevent physical atrophy. Without a laptop handy to type out an email, I would start the recorder app on my iPhone and speak what had flowed out of my mind.

 

The direction of the narrative took its own course as well. I was certain that the narrative would end up sad, verging on tragic. Instead it went in the opposite direction. A happy ending, verging on sappy rather than tragic. That part of it, at least, did not track with my experiences in that first year of college. Not that what I lived through back then was tragic in any sense. It was sad only insofar as something that had seemed precious came to an end, entirely because of my own stupidity I might add. But the fiction did not want to go there. It took a turn that, honestly, I could not have predicted—again, without any planning or pre-plotting on my part. It just happened because that’s the way the play lay, to paraphrase Perdita in A Winter’s Tale. That has never happened to me before. Hell, I’ve never written a fiction before, so there’s never been any time when what came out in my writing was not directed by my rational mind.

 

It’s true that I’ve often said to myself that I don’t know what I think about some subject or topic until I’ve written my way into it. But that is not at all the same thing as I experienced with this fiction. Writing my way to knowing what I think about something is a quite deliberate, rational process. Writing simply helps me think my way through to a conclusion. If I’m then going to turn what I’ve worked out for myself into an essay for publication or for presentation at a conference, I will begin the formal writing with the conclusion I’ve reached more or less as the thesis that I will argue. With the fiction none of that ratiocination took place. It just happened.

 

I remember reading many times comments from authors who said that their writing worked in that way, that it just came to pass as if the writer were transcribing something produced by someone else. Joan Didion has a wonderful essay, “Why I Write,” that traces out exactly that phenomenon as she experienced it in writing two of her major works. Her conclusion in the essay, her answer to its title, is that she writes in order to discover what happens. I’m no Joan Didion, but I now see exactly what she meant.

 

I have no intention of doing anything with Never. I did forward it, all two-hundred and ninety-six pages of it, to my wife. She hasn’t read it yet. I suspect that she’ll find it not just sappy but silly. That’s ok. I have no ambition to be a novelist nor of publishing what I’ve written. But I am curious what she will say about the dialogue. I think I’ve done that ok. It’s something I never thought I could do. I’ll be happy if she doesn’t hate the dialogue.

The Strangest Dream

All the talking heads are going on about the midterm elections as if they were going to proceed as elections have always proceeded since 1788. I had a nightmare last night, which I’m afraid may turn into our reality come November.

 

I dreamt that the Speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate refused to accept the votes of states and districts where democrats won. I dreamt that when people gathered to protest that action, the leader of the executive branch declared a state of emergency and nationalized and deployed the National Guard to protect Congress. Not that the demonstrations were violent—nothing at all like January of 2021. But there were crowds jeering and cheering, and that set off the executive branch.

 

I dreamt that when the demonstrators persisted in exercising their right to peaceably assemble, the National Guard was ordered to fire on the crowd. Many of the Guardsmen refused to follow the order, but many did. And to ensure that orders would be followed, the executive deployed regular Army troops in support of the “loyal” National Guards troops.

 

I dreamt that at the Pentagon all the top brass that objected to the orders from the executive were not just dismissed but imprisoned. Armed guards were posted in the Pentagon to ensure that there’d be no response from any recalcitrant officer.

 

I dreamt that the House and Senate leadership appointed their own choice of representatives and senators. I dreamt that representatives and senators who objected to what was being done were jailed, declared traitors by the executive, and hanged, their chairs given over to people appointed by the leadership.

 

I dreamt that when finally a case came to the courts, the SCOTUS decreed that under the theory of a unitary executive, everything that had happened was entirely constitutional.

The Post-war Order

I have to say that the US did wonders for the whole world in its post-World War II invention of a world order that sustained peace and tranquility for over half a century. Well done indeed.

 

What made that order possible was the bipolar division of power after the war. I don’t mean that the presence of the Soviet Block was necessarily planned, or that it was in itself essential for the order. What I do mean is that the existence of a mortal enemy to the order as the US conceived it made it possible for the US to be ruthless without seeming to be ruthless and in the event to increase its power, influence, and wealth.

 

Think about all the actions that the US took, either on its own account or by proxies, to stop Soviet expansion, or rather the expansion of communism with the Soviet Union as the ultimate agitator in the process—forgive me the terms I’m using here, from “expansion” to “agitator” and a lot of others in between. I’m writing from the angle made necessary by being in the US myself.

 

There were the big ones, both in the number of casualties and in the direct engagement of US troops. In Korea there were more than five million dead, and in Vietnam somewhere over four million. The minor engagements—minor from the point of view of total dead and a marginal involvement of US combatants—are so myriad that they cannot be easily counted. To pick a continent: there’s the Angolan Civil War, the Congo Crisis, the Ogaden War in the Horn of Africa. There was much manipulation of political actors elsewhere—in Kenya, in Nigeria by deliberate inaction, in Sudan, in Mozambique.

 

Perhaps the slyest of destructive interventions took place in South Africa, where the US supported the apartheid as a counter to Soviet influence while at the same time objecting to the domestic effects of the apartheid system. The absurdity of that position still stuns. In practice, South Africans of all races, except the whites naturally, suffered decades of displacement and psychological denigration predicated on the ostensible superiority of whites and therefore the ostensible inferiority of Blacks, Coloreds, Indians—all the mincemeat categories invented by the Afrikaners to justify their control of the nation.

 

I am not considering the interventions in South and Central America and the Caribbean—there are limits to what I can write more or less briefly.

 

All those manipulations, intervention, actions, and wars were justified because of the threat of Soviet communism to the order that the US established. And there’s no doubt that Soviet communism did indeed represent a threat to the world order. I am by no means excusing the USSR. What I am suggesting is that the USSR played right into the hands of the American world order. I cannot imagine such actions taking place without the threat of communism to justify them. And the result of the Soviet threat was obviously the concomitant expansion of US power, prestige, and wealth. Many millions died. But the American century was secured.

 

Again, the post-war world order was on the whole a good thing. It would have led to increasing global wealth and welfare for everyone, the "everyone" especially emphatic had there been no Cold War antagonism between the US and the USSR. That antagonism simply made it easier for the US to improve its own position in relation to the rest of the world and to reward those who followed its lead, albeit with dire consequences for compatriots who resisted the US position.

 

The Soviets . . . I don’t understand the Soviets. I am assuming that the ideological stance of communism as opposing the depredations of capitalism is little more than smoke and mirrors, as it was in the US for domestic consumption, so that even now to accuse someone of being communist almost guarantees that the person will be persecuted, if not prosecuted. It’s obvious that the Soviet agenda lost again and again. It’s equally obvious that nations that adhered to communism fell further and further behind those that followed good old US capitalism. Think North Korea. Think Cuba. Other than for the sake of preserving the power and wealth of the ruling class in those nations, and perhaps—just as a possibility—the desire to resist American hegemony, why persevere in communism? China might be held up as a counter-example. It seems to have become an economically successful nation despite being “communist.” Is it? It is a single-party state. It is ruthlessly authoritarian. So was Nazi Germany.

 

To finish the thought of the US and the post-war world order as benefitting from the Cold War, consider what happened when the USSR disappeared and the threat of Soviet communism with it. The US—I guess “the West” is now a more appropriate term—immediately discovered a new threat to its hegemony, namely Islam. Indeed, I recall a radio broadcast by one of the right-wing Christian fundamentalist pastors (could it have been Pat Robertson? I can’t recall), which aired within a couple of months of the dissolution of the USSR. The pastor made reference to the Book of Daniel and its warning that Israel would be assailed from the north. It may be needless to point out that the pastor understood “Israel” as both the current state of Israel and the community of Christians derived from the promises of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, with special emphasis on the US. And what’s north of the state of Israel? It had been the USSR. That was gone. What remained is Islam.

 

The threat of Islam hasn’t replaced the threat of godless communism as easily as that pastor imagined it would. Certainly the folks currently in charge of the world order keep trying. But the success of the strategy is nothing like the success of the anti-communist agenda. The result? The world order staggers. It may be on its way to collapse and replacement by something else.

 

Yeats predicted that what’s to come is a “rough beast . . . slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.” He may be right. I don’t know. What I do know is that the American century, and the post-war order that codified that century, was also pretty rough.

Terrorism and Patriotism

Was John Brown an agent of liberation, or was he a terrorist? That is an unfair question because it does what so often happens in discussions of controversial subjects. The “or” produces the unfairness. Brown’s actions were brutal, deliberately so. In 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, Brown and a group of his followers dragged five men and boys from their homes and killed them. Surely that is a terroristic act. But then the motivation for the act remains within the realm of liberation. The people he killed—at Pottawatomie Creek and then later in Missouri and in Virginia, Harper’s Ferry—were active proponents of slavery, slave owners, fierce defenders of their “right” to own other human beings as chattel property. In Brown’s religious fervor, and in any morally righteous universe, such men represented evil. His actions worked towards the liberation of all the enslaved people of the United States.

 

Change the “or” to “and,” then.

 

According to the OED “terrorist” as a political epithet doesn’t come into English usage until well after our Tea Party, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, when a British newspaper of 1794 called “terrorists” those radical Jacobins who ignited the Terror. In usage not associated with the Terror, the word doesn’t appear until 1806 when another British newspaper refers to Irish freedom fighters as “terrorists.” As a religious epithet, “terrorist” appears at the same time as in political discourse to describe the hell fire and damnation sermons of radical sectarians.

 

Destructive as they were, even the Jacobins are both/and—terrorists to be sure, but also patriots seeking the radical liberation of the people of France. So too the Irish “terrorists” seeking freedom from British domination and the radical sectarians who wished to terrorize their audience into salvation.

 

And so the categories of patriotic hero and terrorist come trailing clouds or perspective. The savage white men disguised as Native Americans who threw British tea into Boston Harbor are our heroes, but their terrorists.

 

Not as violent as the Jacobins, the participants in the Tea Party nonetheless had in mind the same sort of goal as did the Jacobins. The OED, again, defines the more general sense of “terrorist” as follows: “A person who uses violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims; esp. a member of a clandestine or expatriate organization aiming to coerce an established government by acts of violence against it or its subjects.” The tea-partiers to a T.

 

Nowhere is the coincidence of terrorism and patriotism clearer than in the Middle East. From the perspective of Israelis every one of the Palestinian groups, from the PLO and Fatah through Hezbollah and Hamas, is a terrorist organization. There is no doubt about the truth of that designation. Random shooting, coordinated attacks, constant subversion of the Israeli state add up to the use of “violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” The political aims are themselves terroristic insofar as one articulated goal of the groups, some of them at any rate, is the destruction of Israel itself. The rallying cry, “from the mountains to the sea,” means erasing Israel in order to establish a comprehensive Palestinian state.

 

From the Palestinian perspective the political goal of the terrorism is necessary, essential to freeing the people of Palestine. They note that the state of Israel is itself founded at least in part because of the terrorism of Jewish groups like the Irgun. Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, located in the British-controlled Palestinian Mandate, in 1946. Many Jewish groups in the 1940s condemned the terrorism, which was in effect part of a comprehensive militant campaign against the British mandate, ultimately seeking the establishment of a new state, Israel, as the homeland of all Jews.

 

Britain and the US had moved towards founding a new state regardless of the Jewish militancy, and in 1948 the UN agreed. Israel became a new country. Israel would have been born without the terrorism. Whether the terrorism worked to hasten the birth is arguable. It may be worth noting, however, that Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, ultimately became prime minister of Israel. Also of note is the current prime minister’s opinion that the bombers of the King David Hotel were “heroes.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument? It is “very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action.”

 

So too would Fatah and Hamas and Hezbollah argue. After all, the British mandate in Palestine happens to coincide almost exactly with the borders of Israel.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine#/media/File:Map_of_Mandatory_Palestine_in_1946_with_major_cities_(in_English).svg

 

The Palestinian terrorists’ political goal is to recuperate what the Jewish terrorists accomplished. Currently Israel is responding to that goal as ruthlessly as possible. The attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct 7^th 2023 has given the Israeli government license systematically to destroy Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip. That approach to “solving” the Palestinian problem has also empowered Israeli “settlers” to attack piecemeal Palestinian households and communities in the West Bank. In any other context those “settlers” would be labelled “terrorists” because their tactics come straight from the terrorists’ handbook, to “use violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” Whether the government’s approach to Gaza is also terroristic, state-sponsored terrorism, is a live question. Much of the world seems to think so, at any rate.

 

In any morally reasonable universe there ought to be a clear dividing line between terrorism and patriotism. Unfortunately we do not live in a morally reasonable universe. We’re stuck with perspective and point of view. To be sure, most people—I have no idea what percentage of humans, but suspect a very large majority—respond with revulsion to acts of violence and intimidation. Until self-interest of some sort enters the question, that is. Once that happens, terrorism becomes justified by the political goal of the terrorists.

John Brown is not unique in this regard. Hamas justifies the October 7^th attack as a step towards “freeing” Palestine. Netanyahu thinks the bombers at the King David Hotel are heroes in the “freeing” of Jews.

 

Early Modern revenge tragedies tell us the result. An endless cycle of violence, all of it justified on the basis of some grand political objective. Simply put, there is no balm in Gilead.

Colonialism, Slavery, and the Modern World

Having listened to a The Ancients podcast on “How Slavery Built the Roman Empire,” I started to do some online searching for states that had slavery or some other form of forced labor as part of their commonplace social system—together with colonialism, the source of much of Rome’s slaves

. I had so many positive results that it finally occurred to me to switch the direction of the search to countries that had nothad such system. That’s when I found this chart:

 

https://ourworldindata.org/slavery

 

The data the chart reflects is depressing, of course. I recognize as well that some of what it presents is, if not positively inaccurate, still a bit too optimistic for its own good. For instance, while the British Parliament’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did end slavery in the Empire, forced or coerced labor did not exactly disappear in the British colonies. Another podcast, “Indian Indentured Labour,” streamed by In Our Time, laid out in painful detail the way that in the Empire’s Caribbean money-making colonies, the indentured servitude of Indian subjects of the Raj in effect replaced slavery in a way that made the term “servitude” more descriptive than “servants.”

 

The chart also takes us from the early Modern period all the way to the Post-modern world that we now inhabit but does not include any pre-modern state—nothing about Rome, for instance, or the Parthian Empire, or the Ghanaian Kingdom, or the Gupta Empire, or the Mayan or Incan Empires or several Native American Chiefdoms and Confederations, or any of the Chinese dynasties, or. . . . As far as I can tell only the Inuit and Aboriginal Australians, neither group in any way associated with colonial imperialism, did not practice any form of slavery. Some hope for humanity after all, it seems.

I was interested in the history and spread of slavery and forced labor as a way to think about the basis for the wealth and superior standard of living enjoyed by most Europeans and their colonial epigones. In fact, I find it almost impossible to distinguish the modern slave trade from modern colonialism. I suspected that Europe and its erstwhile colonies are wealthy now because they practiced slavery from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. For European nations the wealth derives especially from but certainly not limited to the Transatlantic slave trade and the rooting of slavery as the primary tool for extracting wealth from the European colonies in the New World. In Asia and Africa and Australia it was not the Transatlantic slave trade that served as the basis for European wealth, but the enslavement of natives in the various colonies served the same function.

 

Wikipedia provides a ready accounting of the wealthiest countries in the world, by total GDP rather than by per capita GDP, where tiny countries like Singapore, San Marino, and Monaco rank high because they manipulate money. I reproduce here a list of the top ten countries.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

 

China, Japan, and Russia did not participate in the Transatlantic slave trade. That is not to say that China, Japan, and Russia did not have their own forms of slavery and forced labor. India and Brazil, also home to slavery, may seem to stand outside of the picture, but no more so than does another European colony, the United States. All three of those nations are ex-colonies, enjoying today the fruits of slavery and forced labor as practiced in the period from the sixteenth century to the present.

 

I recognize that other phenomena besides slavery are in part responsible for the wealth of some of these nations. The huge populations of India and China, the geographical and natural plenty of the United States and Brazil—all of that played a major role in engendering the wealth of those countries. But would those characteristics suffice without the grounding of slavery and forced labor?

 

Certainly in the case of the relatively small European nations—the UK, Germany, Italy, France—their wealth rests firmly on the foundation of colonization and slavery. Would the UK have produced the Industrial Revolution without the immense wealth that the sugar plantations of the Caribbean colonies provided? The connection between wealth and historical slavery may not be so obvious in countries like Germany or Italy, which certainly practiced their own form of enslavement but whose imperial ambitions come late in the period. But without the effect of slavery on the general European polity, would Germany and Italy be on that list? Of the top twenty-five economies in the world, European nations and their major colonies hold eighteen spots. Some of those countries, like the Netherlands and Spain, are in the same colonial and slavery ballpark as Britain and France. Belgium, a tiny country, is on the list—one could ask of Leopold II why that is the case. Others—Ireland, Switzerland, Poland—seem to me to be on the list by virtue of the general European exploitation of the rest of the world.

 

So yes, slavery and forced labor seem to be par for human course from ancient times all the way to the present—some nations still practice forced labor and, in effect, slavery. As “How Slavery Built the Roman Empire” made clear to me, slavery derived from colonial ambition was the essential component of ancient empires, without which there would not have been a Rome or a Mughal Empire or pharaonic Egypt. But for the modern world, from the sixteenth century onwards, it seems to me self-evident that slavery and its attendant colonial underpinnings have made our world. Slavery gave birth to the wealth of Europe and its sometime colonies.

Decrepitude

My publicity limited to the students in the college where I taught, my body now creaks much more than it used to do when I was “A sixty-year-old smiling public man.” I was born in January of 1952, and as I write this in 2026 I am 74 years old. Add whatever number of years is appropriate for the date you’re reading this and understand that I am deep in this absurdity, as Yeats calls it, “Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog's tail.” Alas, I’ve long passed the “Excited, passionate, fantastical” phase of old age Yeats claims for himself as he circles the tower.

 

I’ll call it my lumbago, although I’m not quite sure what that ailment really is. I’ll add the rheumatics in my hand and the gout in my right great toe that suppress the pleasure of touch, and the dimming eyesight, and the failing hearing, and the tongue tasting only what’s over-spiced, and the nose growing daily larger while the attar of a rose fades into memory—take all of the aches and the fadings of Blake’s chief inlets of Soul, and they draw a veil across excitement and passion and fantasy.

 

What’s left? Memory, what there is of it. Old folks sit on the park bench trading stories of the past, the bookends of lives once led, the pair securing the volumes between them so the memories do not simply sublimate. It’s not because they have nothing new to say but because it’s only in the past that life seemed to have excitement and passion and fantasy—a purpose, perhaps, best suggested in Howard Cosell’s habitual pleonasm, “The future is ahead of him.” Or her.

 

And there are passages in the past that truly bless the soul. That moment of rapture when first you saw her naked, that hour of bliss when first you made love to her, that passion of the soul when first you fell in love. Everything so exciting, so passionate, so fantastical. So much still to be known.

 

I was an unfortunate child in many ways. I lost my country, and with it the web of relations from those early years, then my father, then my siblings. I was in no one school for longer than three years, and in one case for only a month, followed by the remainder of that year in another and then yet another for two years. Friends with whom to sit on a bench? Impossible to maintain friendships when transplantation loomed as an ineluctable fate. Memories, what there are of them, remained solitary, and I a lone bookend, all sense of memory dribbling through the unstoppered other side.

 

And then there came college. Even in that first year, indeed that first term, came my first real experience of friendship, in the dormitory house of the fifth and sixth floors of a tower of rooms for students suddenly free from the constraints of anything but their own relations. Now fifty-six years on, some of those kids, now women and men old like me and even older, like the guy who had returned from his stint in the Air Force and was a whole quarter century old back then—some of those kids sit on the park bench with me, trading memories and holding fast to a past that we hope will not trickle out and disappear.

 

But trickle out those memories do. Physical distance intervenes, another veil. Those old friends spread so far away so we cannot sit together on the park bench and instead substitute “social” media. A Face Book post. An Instagram photo. Poor substitutes for the flesh and blood that was the ground for friendship in the first place and fueled the excitement and the passion and the fantasy of old. In the gaps between posts and photos nostalgia takes root and turns the past tawdry with false feeling. Real memories hide behind the veil.

 

Did you really see her naked? Did you really make love to her? Did you really fall in love?

 

We meet from time to time, infrequently. Such meetings cannot sustain the reality of that mutually lived past. Yet another veil now, temporal distance. Fifty-two years of disengagement as the boys and girls became women and men, became spouses, parents, grandparents. How can the past focus into sharp relief when the shade of those years darkens it?

 

What intervenes between then and now? More excitement of naked bodies, more passion of making love, more fantasy of falling in love—but this time true and permanent, real love that even in the decrepitude of old age brings abiding joys. And the joys of the present veil the joys of the past, irrecoverable it turns out.

 

The brain too throws its veil over it all. The synapses don’t fire, and with those squibs excitement fades entirely. The acetylcholine doesn’t flow, and with that loss passion disappears completely. Beta-amyloid coats the hippocampus, and all fantasy withdraws behind a curtain. The faces of friends become blank canvases. What is a park bench?

 

Then no memories left at all.

 

What persists? The pain of mere movement, the world bound to the bonds of a decrepit body. The final veil, death, would bring relief.