Only because you weren’t successful.
Dude, why do you hate whales?
Who’s John Brown?
A well known whale, I think. Like Moby Dick but a different color.
Ah. It all makes sense now. So, Sampiro thought they should terrorize whales, and Left Hand of Dorkness didn’t?
Wow–I genuinely didn’t think that other people appreciated these kinds of asides. I find them really annoying, and don’t feel that they add anything significant to the discussion, and I figured everyone else was annoyed by them as well.
So, Sampiro: I apologize for my initial comment about the addition of trivia to posts in GD. Sounds like it’s not a problem with your posting style, but a disagreement over what makes for an effective GD post.
Hmm. Went away on a family matter, came back, found out I’m in a pit thread (my third I think). I’m not the least insulted to be pitted but oh how I miss the old days when if I got pitted it went for pages. I suppose I’ll have to resume posting on family matters again to get some street cred back. (The reason I’ve been away in fact has to do with carbon monoxide, a hotter-than-fucking-hell-on-Nazi-night English evangelist, and my Fundamentalist millionaire sister’s attempt to bomb me to the Peace Tables of Jesus, so the material certainly creates itself, but I’ve so few relatives left that…
Well anyway, this is beside the point and we know what’s thought of that, so I’ll just have to respond to the subject at hand. But not now, don’t feel like it, more later.
I will say this:
On April 4, 1968, The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had a pillow fight with his brother, Alfred Daniel (called A.D.). Pastor Andrew Young and Rev. Ralph Abernathy joined in and it went on until all four men were on their backs laughing. Minutes later Martin was dead. A year and two months later A.D., a lifelong swimmer who’d won medals in swim meets, was found drowned in his pool. Will show relevance when I come back, though that might not be tonight and in fact probably won’t.
Ciao.
I don’t know, but his body lies a-mold’ring in a whale.
I think a very balanced view of the whole issue might be had from George Macdonald Fraser’s * Flashman and the Angel of the Lord*.
Yeah, sorry, I love it. Are Mommy and Daddy done fighting yet? I’m not sure if I should come out from under the bed or not.
I have to run several errands but less it be thought I’m ignoring this thread, I’ll start my response. Left Hand of Dorkness, and many others before him and- so long as I don’t hit by a falling cow or something today- many after him will probably observe, if in fact “brevity is the soul of wit” then I am a witless and soulless zombie, and LHOD “is an honorable man” (oh wait, sorry, that’s Julius Caesar not Hamlet), so obviously, it’s long.
PART I
All of us have an emotional fortress that guards our compassion. Too little compassion and one is a monster, but too much and it makes one a marshmallow. In 2010, if you were to hear about an earthquake in a Third World country that killed twenty thousand people would probably thing “Oh my God that’s terrible”, but it’s doubtful that you would shed any tears over it, and it’s because Asia is to far away to lob a shell into your keep. If it was an earthquake in California or Tennessee that killed 200 people it would probably affect you more- even if you don’t live in one of those states, these people are more like you than those in a Third World country and so your empathy is higher. Now suppose there’s a disaster 50 miles away from you, and it kills twenty people, none of whom you know, it probably still affects you higher than the one that killed 200 people in another state.
Now suppose there’s a day when an earthquake kills 20,000 people in a Third World country, and on the same day your dog is hit by a car and killed. Which one is the greater tragedy? Obviously the earthquake. Which one will make you cry more today and even years from now when you think about it? The dog. Is this because you can’t feel or imagine the suffering of the earthquake victims or think somehow they had it coming, or because you feel “hell they lived in a Third World country, suffering’s their lot, fuck ‘em”? No. It’s because you love your dog- it’s an explosion inside of your castle keep, whereas the Third World earthquake is a big bang miles away whose shells don’t come anywhere near your walls.
So what the hell does this have to do with John Brown? Well, it’s like the worth of Jerusalem to Saladin- in some ways nothing, in some ways everything.
It’s hard for us to truly to conceive how much the world has changed just in the past century alone. We know it but we don’t know it- you don’t think of the monumental impact it has on us. We’re close enough in time and space to people who lived in 1859 that their personal letters and their newspapers and their laws and their novels and poems are 100% understandable to us (i.e. not like reading the eccentric 17th century English of the Puritans or Chaucer’s Tales or whatever), and we often use the same roads and the same buildings and the same houses and have keepsakes passed down from them, etc., but at the same time these people could damned well have lived in Ankh-Morpork or Diagon Alley or Narnia for all that we have in common with them.
Imagine coming of age in an age where dead babies and raw sewage and malnourished immigrants and slaughtered animal carcasses were all just facts of life. You’d have encountered them all. You’d likely also have seen or at least lived in the house with somebody who had seen public hangings, public whippings. You’d know women with stretch marks that looked like tiger stripes who had boobs down to their knees by the time they were 35 and you would have probably personally witnessed some truly awful deaths (milk sick, cancer, epidemics, fire [very common death], etc.) all in an age of few effective painkillers and almost no effective cures.
Sticking with the dead babies because they’re particularly important I think, I sometimes use as a random sample when discussing “past times” the faces on currency. Let’s take a look at 'em here for just a notion as to how common dead babies and dead children were:
$1-George Washington: Washington had no kids but his wife had four. Two died as babies, one died of an epileptic fit (for which there was no treatment) when she was a teenager. His stepson Jack, the only one to survive to adulthood, had seven children- three of whom died in their cradle- before he died of fever the month of his 27th birthday.
$2- Thomas Jefferson: He married his wife Martha when she was 23 by which time she was a widow who had borne two sons, one stillborn and the other dead of fever at the age of 3 a few months before her second wedding. She and TJ had six children, of whom three died in infancy. She died giving birth to the youngest, a daughter (Lucy) who died at the age of three. Of her 8 children only two lived to grow up: Patsy, who gave birth to thirteen children (of whom amazingly only two died in infancy, though several died in young adulthood and most had infant deaths of their own), and Polly, who bore three children, two of them dead within days of birth, before dying herself in childbirth at the age of 25. If you want to count Sally Hemings, she bore 5 known children (one of whom died in early childhood) and possibly more.
$5-Abraham Lincoln- witnessed the death of his mother, which was from milk sick and a terrible agonizing way to go; her foster parents died the same week and he attended them as well. His younger brother died in infancy when he was little and his older sister died an agonizing death in childbirth along with her child when he was a teenager. Of his own four sons he outlived two and his wife outlived a third; his son Robert’s only son, Abraham II, would also die young.
$10- Alexander Hamilton-luckier than most- of his 8 known children only one died young, though his oldest son famously was killed in a duel at 19 and his oldest daughter had to be confined within the family home due to insanity.
$20- Andrew Jackson had no biological children and neither did his wife, but they raised several and of those at least three (including the Creek orphan Linkoyer) died in childhood. By the time he married Jackson had outlived two older brothers who died young and his mother, and he was born after the death at a young age of his father.
$50- Ulysses S. Grant- in this as in every other time I use this poll he is the exception: his four children all survived him, though he and his wife both lost siblings in childhood.
$100- Benjamin Franklin- he had a small family for the time (2 kids by his wife plus the infamous William); he lost his son Francis in childhood and his daughter lost children in childhood. Franklin’s father had 17 and it was considered remarkable that 14 lived to adulthood. (His father was a contemporary of Cotton Mather who outlived all but 2 of his own 15.)
Of John Brown’s 20 children only 11 lived to adulthood; Lee was luckier than most, only 1 of his 8 children dying in infancy (2 of his daughters died in early adulthood), though his wife was a chronic pain ridden invalid and the only grandchildren born during his lifetime died in infancy. (One of the pieces of evidence used to suggest he’d had a heart attack before Gettysburg was uncharacteristic absentmindedness, which included a letter in which he asked his daughter-in-law to kiss his grandson for him even though Lee had written her a sympathy letter on the baby’s death two weeks before.)
Relevance? Well, I will tell you, I really will- and yes, let me state upfront that I know nobody disputes there was high infant mortality at the time- but this, while it may seem trivial, goes very much to the heart of my points in the Brown thread.
I’ll be gone a few hours, but will return.
God does that bring back memories. True and weirdly relevant (if only coincidental) story: my sister and I once hid from a parental battle in an old slave cabin.
ETA: Mentioned it on here once.
Bestest, Gentlest, Pit Thread ever!!!
“I heartily endorse this thread”
–Arthur Linkletter.
So then, back to dead babies, which like dead puppies aren’t much fun. And while I won’t say that dead babies were the least of it, they weren’t the most of it.
Consider you these other facts of life in the 19th century: raw sewage, damned near everywhere. You’ve got your own in outhouses, if you live on a plantation you’re talking many many pounds of waste (human and otherwise) every single day, if you live in town there’s horse and oxen shit in the streets and there’s everybody’s outhouses and public outhouses (all of it seeping into the water table which even then they understood to a degree- it was a large reason people moved as often as they did). In addition to sewage you’ve got your innards, and pretty much everybody has seen intestines, and if they’re lucky it’s just animal intestines from a slaughter. Depending on where you live there’s also danger of anything from Indians to wild dogs (remember- no such thing as rabies treatment, and rabies is a THOROUGHLY nasty way to go) to highwaymen to worry about- somebody raids your house the nearest thing to 911 is to send your 9 year old running 11 miles to get somebody). Death is always one stepped on rusty nail or contaminated chicken meat or coughing peddler germ away.
Then there’s the financial aspect of it: closer than death for adults is financial ruin. You have farmers like the Lincolns of course who are on the lower end of the spectrum and have seen their neighbors farms seized for $30 debts (the Lincolns themselves lost title to their Kentucky land due to speculators swindling) but even if you’re much better off than poor whites- even if you’re rich- financial ruin is never more than a few steps away: a couple of really shitty harvests, a crash in cash crop prices, floods, an epidemic that wipes out your livestock or your fruit trees, a late winter, an early summer, literally earth wind fire water (i.e. soil goes bad/tornadoes/fires in the fields or the barns/floods) and you go from lace curtains to bare feet pronto. And this isn’t even getting into the really poor folks like the Irish immigrants and the dispossessed, many of whom literally starved to death or suffered major health problems due to malnutrition; today when we say “do that and you’ll starve” we generally mean “do that and you’ll never have any money and always be behind on your bills” because today food is cheap and plentiful enough and there are enough state agencies exist that it’s very rare for people to go through extended periods of hunger and malnourishment, but then ‘starve’ meant ‘starve’.
And in many ways life for the common shmo of 19th century rural America was much more similar to that of a medieval or ancient peasant than it was to that of a modern day suburb family: no phones/no lights/no motor cars/not a single luxury; you still lit your fire with flints, information still traveled at the speed of human in places without telegraphs (i.e. most places and all homes but the White House), travel was difficult and dangerous and expensive.
And of course you could keep on going, but let’s wrap this particular mother up and move onto others. What’s the point of all this?
The point is: we all know about the high infant mortality and the billion fold dangers that existed, but it’s difficult sometimes to feel them. Imagine that you grow up in a time and a place where it is taken for granted you are going to see dead babies and probably a mass grave or two in your life and where staying alive is a full time job and extremely hard work. How thick do you suppose the walls of your emotional castle is going to be? How wide is the catchment area of your compassion probably going to be? When the bottom most rung of the hierarchy of needs is met only a fraction as often as today, how much are the more noble and loftier notions going to require your attention do you suppose?
And this is important in understanding the world of John Brown. There were probably very few people who didn’t see the moral and ethical problems and essential unfairness with slavery, but these were people who had developed- as a matter of absolute necessity- a hide like a hippopatamos. Is it unfair that slaves should labor all day without wages and that their families can be split up? Yes, it is, and some slave owners are downright bastards, but I just don’t have the leisure to dwell on the problems of others when of my 9 children 3 died in infancy, 3 more died in the same week of cholera, and of the surviving 3 one ain’t looking too good and the other 2 are tending the crops because if we don’t pay that $189 we owe we’re going to be poor relations at best (or if not that dire at very least "I have my own set of problems and they are pretty damned life and death problems).
There was so much suffering that people’s tolerance for the suffering of others was of necessity very high. This went for everybody, not just those who were daily exposed to slavery. Consider John Brown who considered slavery such a crime against nature: where did he make his bones? Kansas.
What was this Connecticut Yankee doing in Kansas to begin with? He was there because his family had struck out in Ohio, Massachusetts, and New York and he had sent some of his sons there to get another family farm going in hopes maybe this one will finally work- sure there are tornadoes and dust storms but there’s lots of money to be made in wheat and the land is there for the taking.
Why was the land there for the taking? Why was it that in the thousands of years since the Indians came across Beringia (or from Israel depending on your view at the time) they had just ignored this land? Well, because they… hadn’t. It was home to or part of the territorial lands of numerous tribes: the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Sioux and others all had staked out territory before Lewis and Clark and then with all the 19th century removals you had eastern tribe after eastern tribe being given lands there: the Wyandots, the Sauk and Fox, many other tribes including a few Cherokee and Saponi and Creek settlers had all been promised land there in formal treaties recognized by the U.S., which when whites began spreading into those territories from Missouri and points east made the U.S. say “Yes, we do have an ironclad treaty promising this land to Indians… fuck 'em. We took their stuff here and left them with nothing but gristle and shit, well guess what, now we want the gristle.” The land Brown’s family settled had been taken in violation of a treaty with the Indians, and this did not seem to bother him any more than it bothered the other settlers who were running in there.
So the point is that life was brutal and nasty and often short in the antebellum era and skins were accordingly thick and if unfairness was noticed it wasn’t dwelt on because as Tiny Clint observed “Fair’s got fuck all to do with it” and few were immune to this and Brown himself was among them. Because of this it is UNTHINKABLE and RIDICULOUS to view the people of that time as having sensibilities and ethics and compassion remotely like our own, and to do so is to get into a heated debate over which fast food chains would be the biggest hit on Arrakis/Dune/Desert Planet (the answer being Arbys but that’s another story) in that it’s if not a damned-from-the-start project it’s too ridiculous to contemplate. They must be viewed through the lenses of their own time and this is easier said than done. And does it make slavery right? No, but it makes its social acceptance perhaps more understandable.
TO BE CONTINUED BUT POSSIBLY NOT SOON
This belongs more properly in the other thread. Since the endless recursions and side-treks annoy the shit out of me, I’m not really going to read them; rather, I’ll skim looking for where you make your point. If that means you’re not interested in conversing with me, so be it.
That said, nobody said that slavery’s social acceptance is impossible to understand. On the contrary, I said that the evil of slavery is a thoroughly human evil. However, I find it highly suspect to suggest that 19th-century people could not have sensibilities, ethics, compassion remotely like our own. We know, for example, about all the breast-beating that happened among people who kept slaves–and how different is this from the breast-beating that happens among people who today worry about the greenhouse effect when they’re 30,000 feet above the Atlantic flying to Europe on vacation?
And we know that of the ex-slaves who wrote about slavery, there wasn’t a high pro-slavery contingent; and many of their reasons ring very true to us modern folks.
We’re not talking about a culture founded on fundamentally different values, e.g., ancient Rome. The essentially Christian values that underlay 19th century US are very similar to the essentially Christian values that underlie our current society.
The debate we’re having is very similar to the debate that people had during the nineteenth century. Consider at the time that plenty of intelligent, involved people thought of John Brown as a terrorist then–but plenty of intelligent, involved people thought of him as a hero. To suggest that there was one set of values back then, and that the brutality of life made those values fundamentally different from ours, is to vastly oversimplify the social history.
No, I prefer to continue it here because I can call you a vapid snarking asshole, which imo you are. Your inability to make a decent point is exceeded only by your inability to see a point; this season must be hell for you as you look at all the decorated trees and wonder what that shiny round thing is on the top. And please notice that posters who I think it is fair to call neutral also say that you’re unable to grasp a simple point even with [the employment of colors.
More later but I’ve got a Dexter/Boardwalk Empire/Walking Dead date.
Shalom
Jon-Jon
Just to jump on the bandwagon, I made a thread a while back that came to the same conclusions Sampiro just did regarding how human empathy has changed over time. It appears that Rousseau gets the upper hand on Hobbes once you move people out of societies where infant death and mass starvation and horrible infectious diseases are daily occurrences.
Just for the record slavery included all that terrible stuff you described, plus beatings, forced mutilations at another whim, oh and the rape of anyone, including children that the slave owning waste flesh had a mind to.
You’re honestly telling me Southerners of the area were too fucking stupid and helpless to make due without slavery? Chronic alcoholism? Inbreeding? Why the fuck were they so helpeless that they were forced to rape young black girls and, and beat, mutlilate, and work the parents and relatives into an early grave?
Most of the era’s version of the developed world had successfully abolished slavery despite also having the problems you named. Why were southerns such incompetent evil pieces of shit?
Further why did southerners carry on their oppression and hatred of African Americans into living memory if slavery was just a pragmatic reality of a bygone era? Quite frankly until the north set them straight AGAIN southern culture was content to brutalize, kill, and oppress their fellow man. Tell me, if it wasn’t something inherent in Southern culture, but just a pragmatic reality, what horrors forced southerners to arrest a man for setting on the front of a bus with dark skin?
What horrors forced southerners to burn a man’s house for being “uppity”?
Slavery was just the biggest travesty of a degenerate culture passed down from traitors, and evil pieces of shit. The flaws of that culture were still present after sanitation systems, vaccines, and automation were in place. Why did southern police release attack dogs on peaceful protesters who just wanted equal treatment under the law?
Further if southerners were so busy worrying about day to day problems, why did they have the extra time and energy to commit treason and conspire in the murder of 600,000 of their country men over the results of a fair election?
Face it there were some good southerners, but the culture was rotten and evil to the core.
I believe what Sampiro is talking about is our monkeysphere. A human being’s monkeysphere is about 150 people - everyone else is outside of your monkeysphere.
Oh, the irony, given the first response to the thread, and given your belief that prolix=wisdom. You’ve perpetually misrepresented people (remember how Harriet Tubman thinks Brown is crazy?), changed your argument (remember how Brown used to be a terrorist?), and gone loco for insults when there’s any question of your elegance of writing. You can call me whatever you want; have at it. You remain a supercilious asshole, and while I apologize for criticizing the writing style in GD, I welcome your proffering further evidence of the OP here.