Iraq and the American Revolution

Now British forces are ending combat operations in Iraq. I always thought it was remarkable to see U.S. troops in Iraq serving alongside British units, some of whose service histories must go back to the struggle against American revolutionaries in the 1770s and 1780s. The two armies have fought together several times since 1917, of course, but the current conflict in Iraq is, to me, the most reminiscent of that first one between British redcoats and American rebels.

At that time Britain was acknowledged to be wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation in what we now call the “West,” and its people enjoyed the highest known degree of liberty. British colonists in America agreed: From 1756 to 1763 patriotic Americans had fought side-by-side with British troops to defeat the despised French and Indians and expand the British Empire. When London sought to recover some of the costs of that war by raising taxes and tightening administrative control over the colonies, the reaction from the colonists — boycotts, demonstrations, petitions, and open defiance of the laws — seemed utterly excessive. The colonists also objected to King George’s measures to protect his American Indian subjects from encroachments by white settlers. They accused the king of trying to enslave them, while they themselves held Africans in bondage. What could be more absurd? Clearly Britain was justified in sending troops to control these American insurgents — who were aided by terrorist radicals from Spain, Prussia, Bavaria, Italy, Poland — and especially France.

There was no 9/11 attack to confuse the British public with. But there was the threat of the French, Britain’s habitual enemies just across the Channel. Once the American rebels allied themselves with the hated French, the morality of the war seemed plain to many in Britain. The disciplined British soldiers who shipped out to suppress the American rebellion were told that they were vindicating not just their national interest but the cause of liberty. Washington, the principal insurgent leader, was getting help from foreign jihadists who would overthrow the legitimate governments of Europe if they got their way. Soldiers must fight in America in order that Britons could sleep safely at home.

A few days in middle Tennessee

I’m on the way back from Nashville to Birmingham after a visit with my uncle and some research at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. We took a trip down to Lynnville, a little Giles County burg that my uncle favors for its collection of vintage jukeboxes.

We also had a pleasant visit with the volunteers at Lynnville’s tiny one-room library, which commemorates the Robert B. Jones High School and houses its artifacts. Unfortunately the ceiling at the back of the library building threatens to collapse on top of the small collection, which will also no doubt force another relocation of the library, the second in the last decade. A leaky ceiling at the prior location has left its mark on some of the library’s holdings.

There are four idle computers in the library, donated in 2002 by the Gates Foundation but unusable since the relocation, as the administrative password to the machines has been lost. The telephone number for support from the Gates Foundation, which I tried, has been disconnected. I offered to follow up, and am emailing the foundation today to request help. (The Internet café has not yet arrived in Lynnville, and my uncle’s home is not on the ’net either. He takes pride in being “an analog man in a digital world.”)

One thing the library has in abundance is encyclopedias. There were easily a dozen more or less complete sets, including a Compton’s from 1947. The librarians said that no one under the age of 40 ever thinks to consult them.

Chicken jokes moving to a new site

In an effort to make this blog a bit less diffuse in its subject matter, I’ve decided to start a separate site for my odd predilection for chicken jokes. Chickenjokes.wordpress.com was available, so that seemed the obvious choice. Enjoy or avoid, as you prefer.

A brief history of waterboarding

American soldiers torture a Philippine captive as European despots look on with delight (Life magazine cover, 1902).

“Waterboarding” is the latest name for a form of water torture going back to the Middle Ages in Europe, but condemned as illegal and immoral since the 1700s. Banned from Europe, water torture persisted in other parts of the world, including some European colonies, until the mid-20th century.

In the United States, water torture first appears as a means to terrorize slaves. It persists into the 20th century as a routine punishment for African American convict laborers in the Deep South. Most notoriously, it was used by U.S. soldiers on Philippine captives during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). After that war, the technique shows up sporadically in some domestic police departments as a way to force detainees to confess to a crime.1

The “water cure”: Here’s a description by 1st Lt. Grover Flint, 35th U.S. Infantry, of a typical field interrogation in the occupied Philippines:

A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit or stand on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick … is simply thrust into his jaws … as a gag. In the case of very old men I have seen their teeth fall out — I mean when it was done a little roughly. He is simply held down, and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose …, and that is kept up until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious.… A man suffers tremendously; there is no doubt about that. His suffering must be like that of a man who is drowning, but who can not drown.2

Soldiers and officers called this technique “the water cure,” after a type of alternative health care, popular in the 1800s, in which applying cold water to the body was considered therapeutic. By using this term to name an excruciating torture, the soldiers were making what ethicist Jonathan Glover calls a “cold joke” — a humorless witticism that distances the torturer from his own action by making nonsense of the victim’s suffering.

As far as I know, no one has yet uncovered the origin of the term “waterboarding.” But if it was coined by the men who practice it today, it probably also originates in a cold joke — possibly an attempt to call the torture an “extreme sport,” by analogy with snowboarding, sandboarding, dirtboarding, etc. [Update: Why we call it waterboarding]

Spanish surnames

I’m puzzled by the signatures I’m seeing on official documents in Spanish from the early 1800s. They seem to contradict some of what I was taught about how Spanish surnames work.

My understanding is that Spanish speakers don’t use their “last” name by itself. This is because they append their mother’s surname after their father’s, occasionally with a de or y between them. So the author of Don Quixote had a father named Cervantes who married the daughter of a man named Saavedra; his son was Miguel Cervantes y Saavedra. But when referred to by a single surname, he’s Cervantes, not Saavedra.

Here’s why I’m puzzled. In 1813 the captain-general of Cuba was named Juan Ruíz de Apodaca, so his paternal surname was Ruíz. Yet he signs himself “Apodaca” alone. My only guess as to the reason is the de in front of his maternal surname, suggesting that his mother’s family was ennobled, so that was the name he preferred to display. It’s just a guess, and not one I’m confident of.

The captain-general supervised the commandant of Pensacola (hence governor of West Florida), a man named Mateo Gonzales Manrique — so, one would assume, “Gonzales” for short. He doesn’t sign himself “Manrique” alone, but “Manrique” is always present, both in his own signature and in his correspondents’ references to him. His signature normally reads “Mateo Gonz^s Manrique.”

The abbreviation could be explained by the fact that “Gonzales” is among the most common Spanish surnames, so it can safely be abbreviated (just as English “William” often became “Wm.”). Still, I’m beginning to doubt that Anglo-American references to this man as “Governor Manrique” were founded on ignorance of Spanish protocol, as I’d assumed. Maybe protocol has changed since the early 1800s.

It’s not a burning issue, so I’m not spending research time on it. But it does nag at me, and I’d love to have someone come along and shed light on the subject.

Customer service note

Attention Conservation Notice: This couldn’t possibly interest you unless you live in or near Birmingham, Alabama.

So I get a card in the mail from a local Nissan dealer inviting me to a “car care clinic” on Thursday. They promise a “FREE 100 Point Inspection,” “FREE A/C Performance Check,” and reduced prices on an oil change or tire rotation. It’s a car dealership, so suspicion is in order, but I give them a call to, as they specify, “RSVP.”

I get a voicemail inbox that’s full and unable to connect to the operator.

Even though no one answered, it was an informative call. I have been warned what to expect from Jim Burke Nissan. If I ever become their customer, I’ll have only myself to blame for what happens.

Symposium on the Creek War

I’m doing a talk at Auburn University’s symposium “The Creek War and War of 1812 in the South,” May 22-23 in Auburn and at the Horseshoe Bend battlefield park. The website is at auburn.edu/creekwar

Some widely read historians will be taking part, including Gregory Dowd (A Spirited Resistance), John Grenier (The First Way of War), David and Jeanne Heidler (Old Hickory’s War), and Greg Waselkov (A Conquering Spirit). The Creek War is notable not only for including some of the deadliest battles ever fought between Indians and U.S. settlers. It also led to the conquest of the Creek Nation, which in turn opened the Deep South to settlement by slaveholding cotton planters. It also launched future president Andrew Jackson to national fame.

My contribution will be to talk about Burnt Corn, the fight that turned a Creek civil war into a war between Indians and Americans. The episode, which ended in a rout of the American militia by a smaller Indian force, was the subject of what we now call “spin,” from more than one quarter. I’ll be dealing with claims that the Creek Indians were tools of America’s British enemy.

One of the most curious facts about the battle is that it inspired Alabama’s first home-grown literary work, a mock-heroic poem about the commander of the militia at Burnt Corn called The Last Battle of Sir John Falstaff the 2nd, or, The Hero of the Burnt-Corn Fight. I think it’s a good example of the genre, a slashing satire full of self-reflexive humor and playful allusions, which deserves to be remembered for its own sake. I won’t go into this at the conference, but I believe the poem, by one Lewis Sewall, fell into oblivion because it jarred in so many ways with the canonical origin myth of the Deep South.

Contrast A.B. Meeks’ sentimental romance The Red Eagle, which embroiders the life of Scotch-Indian William Weatherford. It was reborn in handsome 20th-century editions used to afflict generations of Alabama schoolchildren. While I don’t imagine the kids are waiting breathlessly for another 19th-century poem to memorize, I do think it’s high time the rest of us had a new edition of Falstaff the 2nd. Today the poem only survives in a few damaged copies guarded by archivists. Philip D. Beidler at the University of Alabama has published more about this subject than anyone else.

Chicken joke: Leibniz

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Gottfried Leibniz: In accordance with the principle of pre-established harmony, the phenomenon of the chicken appearing to cross the road was caused by the action of monads following instructions given by God. The sufficient reason for the action may be known to God alone.

[More chicken jokes]

Hitler, Stalin, and Rachel Carson?

Rachel Carson (1907-1964), wildlife biologist and alleged angel of death.

When I wrote about the anti-environmentalist textbook Facts, Not Fear, I mentioned being astonished by the authors’ attack on the DDT ban, even though the ban rescued the bald eagle and other American raptors from extinction.

I should have mentioned that the ban came about in response to Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, the first popular work to sound the alarm about heedless damage to the environment.

Now I find that Aaron Swartz has the back story to a bizarre right-wing version of recent history, in which DDT is good for us, banning it has killed poor little innocents in Africa (via malaria), and Rachel Carson is the moral equivalent of Hitler. Versions of this tale, which oversimplify both science and history, have made it into several newspapers of record, the New York Times Magazine, and the fiction of Michael Crichton.

It’s all in “Rachel Carson, Mass Murderer? The Creation of an Environmental Myth.” A quick read, highly recommended.

P.S. Anyone want to venture a guess as to whether Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter-based campaign against malaria (here and here) will turn into a full-court press to lift the ban on DDT? If so, Yorkool Chemical, Sanofi Aventis, and other megacorps should be pleased. They still make the stuff.

The old saw is dull

The proverb Familiarity breeds contempt is based on the same kind of error as the obsolete scientific belief that meat spontaneously breeds maggots, or that cheese spawns worms.

I believe the proverb lost its bearings because of a historical change in the way we use the word familiarity. It originally referred to a kind of behavior rather than to a relationship between people.

Familiar is related to family, so familiarity originally referred to the way one feels and behaves toward members of one’s own household (and of other closed, intimate groups that act like households). With others, though, one should be reserved, courteous, or businesslike, friendly in some cases, but not to the point of treating them as family. Such familiarity, saith the proverb, shall be punished with contempt.

So “familiar” behavior is inappropriately casual or presumptuous where formality or deference is supposedly called for. Consider President Bush’s habit of tagging his staff and associates with absurd nicknames he had invented. No one, of course, was allowed to return the favor and refer to the president as “Dubya,” “Junior,” or “Shrub” within his hearing. The president’s supreme rank, or what we prefer to call “the dignity of the office,” protected him from being repaid for his familiarity.

But setting aside that example, “inappropriate informality” is not what we usually mean when we use the word familiarity today.

Familiarity is a sense of comfortable recognizability: knowing someone well and being well known. It can be a false sense, in that sometimes people surprise us. But to say that this feeling “breeds contempt” is nonsense.

Contempt for a person doesn’t emerge spontaneously from familiarity. It comes from allowing the familiarity to rot, or to fester. Not tending it. Allowing stuff to settle and spread over it.

So I hereby set my face against that old saw.