Assistant Village Idiot

I am no WWII expert, by any stretch. I have a friend who is, who teaches history at a college, designed an intricate WWII table game and has played the others in tournament for decades, and just spent two days at the New Orleans museum. I note this last bit because I could not spend two focused days at any museum, not even one devoted to what a wonderful guy I have always been. I can see doing a morning and a following afternoon, but not two opening-to-closing days. I can see getting a membership and coming back often. But you have to really love something to pound it in like that. Perhaps I only say that because I usually go to small, obscure museums that can't put the bang into the displays that a larger, national one can. But I spent an afternoon at the WWI museum in Kansas City and thought my brain was full and could take no more.

I am not in his league. Among amateur historians in America, WWII is by far the most popular branch of study, with the War Between The States a distant second. WWI and the Revolution don't come close. This applies to alt-history and gaming as well as serious study. There are a lot of eyes on this information, and a lot of discussion. Nonetheless, I do know a bit, and as a discussion of Roosevelt started up in the comments under The Other David Wyman, I thought I would give it some air and weigh in myself, not comprehensively, but provocatively. I don't in the least advocate this is what we should have done, but interesting to consider in light of any "Did Roosevelt get it mostly right?" discussion. I think Pat Buchanan does argue for something like this, but I haven't read it.

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Hoover originally did not believe we would need to go to war, and that Churchill and others were unnecessarily provocative so that Western Europe would get dragged in. His vision was that Hitler and Stalin should slug it out without us. It would have perhaps been possible to make reassurances so that he did keep his focus in the East. I don't dismiss this as impossible. There was a lot more Lebensraum in Russia than there was in the Netherlands. After they had destroyed each other, an untouched Western Europe could have imposed its will on both. If that seems irresponsible and cruel of us WRT the Jews, it pays to remember that things could hardly have turned out worse than they eventually did, and the Final Solution might not have been enacted if there were no West threatening Germany. One can even imagine a scenario in which America and NW Europe focused on rescue of Jews, which Hitler was only too happy to be rid of, in any direction. I call that less than 50% likely, but not impossible.

Several things make this whole train of speculation unlikely to have happened, or to have worked. First, if Japan had still attacked under this scenario, the war of some sort with Germany would have been impossible to avoid. However, that attack is not a given, certainly not in a situation where even England and France are not formally at war with the Axis. Pearl Harbor was calculated to discourage us from even thinking of entering the war, because we clearly were thinking of it.

Secondly, it might indeed be irresponsible to abandon the Jews that fully. Though again, how much worse do we think things would have been. Absent the natural "but we have to do something" feelings, would doing nothing have totaled more than six million Jews plus whatever the Soviets added? In this imagined alternative, we don't have to rescue or protect them all in order to get a better outcome. I do notice it would also involve abandoning the Poles and the Czechs right from the start. Worse outcome for them? We set the precedent when we intervened in WWI that we were not entirely indifferent to Europe's, especially England's, wars. (Tangentially, if the Spanish Flu did in fact originate in Kansas, spread to Europe by American troops with devastating effect, one wonders how much good we accomplished.)

Thirdly, there is still the problem of oceans, and especially the North Atlantic. Both Germany and Russia needed freedom to move ships that runs right through seas that the UK, Scandinavia, and France had a lot of say in. Staying out of war may have been impossible for them, and thus less possible for us, trying to supply them.

Fourth, we have no assurance how "letting them slug it out" would actually play out. That we can imagine something as very likely does not mean it is likely. Germany and Japan slugging it out with Russia and China does not suggest stability to me.

It is a hard thing to be forsaken by a bad father, hard enough that it breaks some lives. Outside observers might say "good riddance," but for the abandoned one there is still pain.

How much more to be abandoned by a good father. I thought not only of the Son's separation from the Father, but the Father's from the Son. This is the father that ran to meet the prodigal son. This is the father who kept reaching out to Israel to bring her back. This is the father Jesus turned to when his earthly family rejected him and wanted to put him away. This is the father he went to when he was tired, hungry to the point of starving, frustrated with a nation and even close disciples who did not get it.

I think of myself promising my children that if you are ever pulled away from me somehow I will not rest until I find you. You can count on that in any darkness, that I am thinking about you every moment and will not stop looking for you. I don't even like thinking of the possible plotlines where a parent has to act on that (though some have had the horror of living through such things). I

He had never been turned away before. Perhaps there was some not fully conscious thought in Gethsemane that "this will be hard, impossibly hard, not only physically but spiritually, but I can make it because you are with me." And then suddenly at the very end the realisation I will go into the darkness alone. The one who has always been there will not be there.

I have faulted Wikipedia for crediting liberal outlets more generously than conservative and especially libertarian outlets, but I had to look up something about the Koch brothers today and found Wikipedia's article remarkably even-handed, even complimentary and myth-undermining.

While I was in Nome, the other David Wyman died. A great man. I first heard about him in the 1980's, when I was first interested in the Shoah, the Holocaust. He was teaching at UMass Amherst, but had a little place in Canterbury, north of Concord, NH, where he did much of his research and writing. I may have even first heard about him from a co-worker who was a neighbor of his. I bought and read Paper Walls and found it sobering. Other scholars were a bit annoyed with him for publishing so little, as they heard the breadth of his knowledge at conferences. Only late in his career did he put all his information out publicly.

He founded and ran the Institute For Holocaust Studies, though I don't think he was as deeply involved these last five years. His primary message was that America could have done a great deal more to rescue the Jews in the 30's and 40's - his documentation dismantled the standard excuses that we had done about as much as was possible. His second complaint was that American scholars deceitfully covered for the reputations of the WWII leaders who ignored the plight of the Jews, especially FDR, about whom nothing ill could be said.

My own thought is that Roosevelt was and is defended because much of liberalism itself is tied up in his actions. I also think that is less true now than it was when I was young. I don't think young academics make such a tight connection with his actions and the general defense of left anymore. I am not knowledgeable about such things, however, and could easily bear correction.

I did not get up at 3am to see the Iditarod winner come in, but my granddaughter Aurora and I saw 4th-6th place come in the next day, and a few later ones the day after. We had to have repeated discussions that she could not pet the doggies, even though they were almost in arm's reach. The girl does not listen well. She's one of those you have to get to look you straight in the face and ask her "What did I just say?"

I came up on the same plane as Miss Alaska, Angelina Klapperich, who was at many of the events. She seems a nice enough young woman and must be quite a pianist, if she competed at Miss America with Bumble Boogie.

Aurora was entranced at first meeting, asking if she could have her tiara. She kept circling back around at every event to talk with her, so that Ms. Klapperich eventually recognised her at a distance and would wave.


I saw Hobo Jim at the Board of Trade bar that night, and he mentioned Woody Guthrie, as folksingers of our era are likely to do. I chatted with him between sets and said he reminded me more of Rambling Jack Elliot, which I knew would gratify him, as that is another code name to mention. This song is his best known, at least in Nome, where everyone sang along.[フレーム]

The other interesting bit was teaching Aurora to play Sleeping Queens, which her cousins play. She caught on quickly and wanted to play nonstop. We recommend the game.

We sang this Sunday. I sometimes try to picture myself in the scene when reading scripture or singing worship lyrics.

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When I came to the words "Behold the man upon a cross/ My sin upon his shoulders/" I imagined contritely and gratefully loading my sins there. I didn't know the song. I didn't know the next lines would destroy me.

Ashamed I hear my mocking voice, Call out among the scoffers

No, I would not have been worshipful and repectful had I been there, would I? I would most likely have been like the others. I imagined hearing my own voice in the crowd. I knew it was true, and I was ashamed.

There was a book of historical fiction, or perhaps a murder mystery that my wife told me about years ago. An artist had painted the crowd at the crucifixion, and by some trick or miracle, everyone who saw the painting saw their own face there. (If you know it, please identify it for us.) The people resented the artist, and she thinks she remembers, killed him. The detective called in to solve the mystery sees his own face in the painting as well.

This can be a fun activity of an afternoon for a couple, or even a whole family, especially if the weather is nice and springy. Be sure to take pictures of yourself.

At my wife's urging, I just read Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker. It has already convinced me to change my habits. The short version is that we have all long known that inadequate sleep is bad for our health, makes us worse drivers and students, and that the ubiquity of electrical illumination may not be an unmixed blessing. The reality is worse. Those things are true, and more dramatically than we like to think; secondly, there are other things like higher blood pressure, lower testosterone and sperm count, worse glucose processing, worse memory, increased depression, mania, and anxiety, irritability, bad judgement and loss of temper; thirdly, many of the benefits of sleep occur in hours 6-8 and have to be set up by the previous 6 hours; fourthly, you can't recover much of what you lost from a bad night's sleep by getting more the next night or even over the next week. Each bit of damage is real, however slight, and unrecoverable.

So get eight hours every night. Getting used to being one of those awake-achievers who gets by on 5-6 a night (which you brag about), is a set-up for Alzheimer's.

Some background on how bad my own decisions have been, which is why I may seem harsh now: I have had a sleep movement disorder, twitching and even kicking, for decades. This makes the deepest sleep more elusive. I avoided a sleep specialist referral for years even though my snoring is horrendous, because I have hypopnea, not apnea. That is, my night breathing was poor, but never stopped in those non-breathing intervals that send spouses into panic. So I figured No Biggie. Though I knew I was by nature a night owl with a later clock, I kept jobs which required early arrivals. I even worked the graveyard shift for four years, because my wife and I were determined to reduce the number of hours our children spent in (gasp) day care overrode other considerations. Now that I think how one's children turn out is much, much more genetic than environmental, this looks like an amazingly bad choice. 22hrs/week versus 16 hrs/week in day care? That's a big deal?

My first sign of aging - okay, I started balding at 20, so my second sign of aging - was bags under my eyes. By longstanding folk wisdom, we get bags under our eyes because of lack of sleep, but I laughed that off as accidental. Well no, it actually is a sign of inadequate sleep, and it shows up as early as childhood. I attributed my inability to drop off to sleep at a decent hour (the few times I tried), always lying abed 60-90 minutes, as anxiety. That goes back as far as high school, and has to do with night owl/morning lark differences. Whenever I had days off with no morning obligations I would sleep 11 hours, days running, my body trying to catch up.

I did catch a 45 minute nap at lunch on work days because I was so impossibly sleepy, and as we are designed for biphasic sleep and should have kept that siesta pattern, I did stumble on one healthy thing. Here's the thing: I was not one of those awakeness-warriors determined to press on, I get 6.5-7.5 hours per 24 (including the nap). It's just that it wasn't very good sleep until about 10 years ago, and that's still not enough. I am a night owl with a half-hour commute for 8am. It just doesn't work. I ignored this, thinking it was bad, but not very bad.

The one that shook me awake, so to speak, was the glucose processing. 50% worse the next day on six hours sleep versus 8. I have greatly reduced my starches (sweets were never a thing) over the last 6-7 years, and have fair but not terrible eating habits, but did not start losing weight until my semi-retirement 15 months ago, at which point I started sleeping more. So I'm gonna ride that sleep solution hard and get even more sleep. It's those last 90 minutes that lay down the glucose and blood-pressure healing mechanisms (medical details in the book).

Sleep cures nothing but treats everything, it seems.

Discussion: Teenagers move into the night-owl category, then drift back as adults into the 40% morning lark, 30% night owl, 30% midrange continuum. A century ago high school started at 9am. We moved to earlier starts in the 20's and 30's, and it's not good. Some districts are developing options for later starts. The 20% of kids who remain early risers dominate at school, but the 80% get cheated. It's not laziness or lack of discipline (necessarily). Their bodies won't fall asleep earlier, and the "getting wiser as you get older" is more biology than decision.

There are a few employment categories which are worst about sleep, but medicine and the military are the worst. I get the reasoning. They are trying to raise the floor, of making adequate decisions automatic even under the worst of conditions, because sometimes the conditions are terrible. With the military, the camaraderie of working through hardship is also important. Yet this is in contrast to, say, athletes, who strive to find the ceiling, the best conjunction of diet, sleep, and training for optimal performance. That might be more important information in today's warfare and medical care.

Plus, why would want your army, or your basketball team, to have less testosterone?

The concept of population replacement in Europe and America came up in adult Sunday School today. I posted over a decade ago on the subsequent birthrates of WWII Oppressor and Victim countries. As having children is an expression, and thus a measurement, of optimism about the future I think it is still interesting. Much more might be said. Because extremely low birthrates have been usual in both Italy and Japan for two generations, most children have no aunts or uncles, no cousins. For Americans who grew up with Italian-American families in their schools, this seems frankly unbelievable now.

There is an older set of jokes about conjugations: I am principled, you are stubborn, he is mulish; or Horses sweat, men perspire, women are all aglow. Perspective matters.

Persistence is generally regarded as a positive trait. Yet it doesn't take much increase for it to become pathological. I imagine Hillary Clinton sees herself as persistent, or ambitious. I see her as obsessed. Is there a comp among other politicians, Democrat or Republican, male or female, where being Senator, a cabinet position, and being the party's nominee somehow wasn't enough? Even those very ambitious, persistent people seem to have dropped it and feel they've had a good innings.

In my brief recent exposure to children's television, it is clear that all children are not being told they can be whatever they want or anything they choose - only the girls are being told that. Even Barbie tells them that. The boys aren't mentioned. That's worrisome enough, but the women put before them are more often than not being specifically admired for accomplishing something that females don't usually do, for being the first female something-or-other. That's very nice for encouraging girls not to limit themselves, but it sure looks like a recipe for emotional disaster and sense of failure if those girls choose something that they happen to like, that women also liked a hundred years ago.

The exception is entertainer. Each profession values its own, so encouraging girls to follow their dream and become a singer or a dancer is still okay to the writers.

I asked Alexa if she is friends with Watson and she pretended she didn't know what I was talking about.

I have returned, having been delayed at Sea-Tac Airport for 24 hours after missing a connection from Anchorage by a few minutes. I am slowly concluding that I don't like traveling itself anywhere near as much as thinking about traveling, both the planning and remembering. Admittedly, there would be nothing to remember and little point in planning if there were no actual traveling involved. But I don't like the mechanics of transportation, and other people's homes and habits leave me unable to relax. I did get to see Iditarod Week in Nome, which was interesting. Sort of. There is a scandal, which has fans divided. I don't know if I can do it justice.

I learned more about JoJo Siwa and Lip Sync Battle Shorties than I would have sought on my own. Her job is to be unfailingly and loudly upbeat and encouraging to younger performers. She does it well, but...

From 2007. I keep just picking the first thing that looks interesting in a random month. I should be home tomorrow.

Not a joke or a misprint. Bumbling around doing research for the Beowulf post, I happened across an essay by Guy Davenport, literature prof in KY who studied under Tolkien at Merton College, Oxford. Back in the US, he became friends with Alan Barnett, who he later learned had been a student at Oxford with Tolkien. Barnett related how fascinated JRRT had been to hear about the country folk of Kentucky, growing tobacco and having such English country names as Burrowes, Barefoot, Proudfoot, and Baggins. Two versions of the same story, each with information the other lacks, are here (scroll down) and here. Barnett, BTW, had not heard that his friend Tolkien had later become a novelist and knew nothing of The Lord Of The Rings.

Davenport wrote a NYT piece on it in 1979, but the Times archive only goes back to 1981.

Commentary. The rural West Midlands area that Tolkien patterned the Shire after had become more urban by the time of Tolkien's writing, and the idea of something even remotely like it being preserved in America might well have charmed him. To a European classicist, rural America had much the same remoteness that Professor T was trying to capture about the Shire. Americans would immediately associate Kentucky with Appalachia, which was settled by rambunctious Scots-Irish and English Borderers, and discount the idea of any connection. But Tolkien may not have had that association, and in this case it is not accurate anyway. That section of KY between Frankfort and Louisville was actually settled by a higher percentage of West Midlanders, more like Ohio was.

I looked up all those Hobbit-names, comparing that part of KY with the rest of KY, and with other places across the US. There weren't any Bagginses,* Gamgees, or Bracegirdles, but there were Tookes, Grubbs, Barefoots and Proudfoots, Burrowes, and Pippins. There were no Butterburs, but there were Butterbaughs. BOOderbaw my son pronounced immediately after I'd told him. "We had a Butterbaugh in my class (at Asbury College in Kentucky)" There was indeed a greater concentration of all these names around Shelbyville and Louisville. These names occurred elsewhere in the country, but were much less common - only a few in huge California, New York, and Texas, for example.

The attempts to show a similar speech pattern I find less convincing. Rural archaic constructions all sound very similar at first go until you take them apart. That archaic constructions persisted at all, however, would have been known to Tolkien but still likely to intrigue him.

One commenter on a Tolkien site suggested that examining the census records for 1910 - 1930 for that area might be more revealing than a current phone listing. Likely true, but I'm not likely to do it myself.

Update: There is a Cooter Baggins who graduated from a HS in Indiana, right across the river from that part of KY. Hmm.

*There is a Bilbo Baggins in Louisville, but I assumed that was a taken name, not a christened name..

Just a browse from 2015. Toldja I had it right. I know my myths.Half a year ago, I had a major complaint about the script of Frozen, centered on the complete lack of buildup to Hans suddenly turning on Anna. Not a hint throughout the film, and in fact, he makes a rather selfless gesture not long before. It's just bad myth-making, bad narrative. One might not see a turn to evil the first time, but on repeated viewings there should be hints along the way.

Apparently there were hints, and more, but they never made it to the script because of other plot considerations. There's a fascinating explanation of those changes in this Weekly Standard article by Jonathan V. Last. Short version; Hans was not originally evil in the script, but when the plot changed, someone had to set the last rescue scene on the ice in motion, and nothing else was ready to hand. So Prince Hans, contrary to his good nature so carefully built up in the first 90% of the movie, had to be called into service as the villain, because there was no one else there.

This kept coming up over at Quora, so I am linking to my several posts about William Sidis, from 2011. Many of you are in the comments, and James figures prominently. As this is multiple posts, I will let it cover a few days.

I no longer get notifications from Quora, and I am relieved. I kept nibbling back in, even though I told myself I was going to quit. I think I marked their email notification as spam by mistake, and haven't heard from them since.

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Prediction from 2009. The ACA was collapsing, but is now being neutered instead. Up until Trump took office, was this true? Only sort, I think.

I doubt that I’m the first across the finish line with this, but I did want to get my predictions in early. When health care reform doesn’t work, it won’t be Obama or the Democrats’ fault. Whether it will be fault of some industry, such as insurance, or of conservatives, or of Congressional Republicans – that I can’t tell you. I think that could vary according to political circumstances.

There will also be a considerable number of people (I can think of several off the top of my head), who will be certain that health care in America is nonetheless better than it was, impervious to any actual data. Their impression that we are at last a “good country” will trump any health outcomes.

Regarding this last matter, I wonder if the desire to be thought of as a good country by some social standard is related to the deep insult non-believers feel at the suggestion that religious people don’t believe they also can be moral.* There is a touching, perhaps even childlike wish to “be good.”

*Answer: It depends entirely on how one defines one’s terms. Any individual unreligious person can be more generous or honest than many or even most religious people. They don’t tend to be so, but it certainly isn’t impossible. That tendency is unlikely to be accidental, but diverse explanations are possible. At great extremity, when the costs are very high, do religious people tend to behave better? Well, no one does very well, frankly, so no one should be bragging. But the few who behave morally even under duress tend even more strongly to be religious people. Yet caution must be applied in interpreting this. It may be that their religion makes them more able. It may also be that those of determined morality are more likely to seek out congenial religious systems. Egg. Chicken. As to the question of whether religious or nonreligious people are more moral by the definition of having warm feelings toward others, I consider this uninteresting.

Okay, that was three subjects in three paragraphs and a footnote. I’m displaying some lack of focus on this post.

I touched down in 2009 and grabbed this. James made the point that reprising older posts is n ot strictly being conversational, and he is absolutely right. I'm doing it anyway. I will do it all week, because I will be watching the Iditarod mushers come in.

Evangelicals lack knowledge about the European churches which they spring from. Christian school history books will reference some high points of the Reformation, with particular emphasis on translating the Bible into the language of the people, but religious history for them very nearly ends at 100AD and picks up again at 1600AD in colonial America. This is changing, but remains largely true. Exceptions to this run along ethnic lines, as each group does tend to preserve something from its ancestral faith even into the New World.

This seems odd, but it is partially true of every religious group in America. Even Catholics, Jews, and the Orthodox, which have abundant histories in many times and places, tend to focus on the foreign context which immediately preceded their ancestors coming to America. The evangelicals are just more pronounced in this. The fundamentalists are more pronounced still - I will get to them later.

Will Herberg wrote Protestant, Catholic, Jew in the late 50's, about an era when nearly everyone in America identified with one of those categories - the era we grew up in. He made the observation that not only did most Protestant churches in America seem more like each other than they did like their European origins, but that even Catholics and Jews had a generic Americanism about them, in contrast to their churches across the water. These latter commonalities were not so pronounced, but still observable. Foreign visitors often remarked on it, seldom with approval, and American visitors to Europe were often struck by the difference between Mass in an Italian village or worship in a Lutheran edifice outside Munich and what they experienced at home. Language was certainly a large part of this, and the appearance of the people around them in the old place and the new, but a strain of Americanism seemed to infect all churches.

This is less true now, as the wealthy, dominant, well-attended American churches have influenced the European churches since then. There was an informality at Mass outside Dublin that was different from the world Tracy's great-grandparents left. It is as much a globalization as it is an Americanization of the world's cultures, but we get the credit and the blame as the most recognisable player. (On a side note, McDonald's is often a focus of anger of the world's nations at their disappearing culture. No one here asked for this, I have heard English friends complain. Well sure they did. There was an existing market for beef sandwiches cheap and fast in a consistent setting that included clean restrooms and preparation standards. The fat and calories seldom exceeded the local fare. People have flocked to such places as soon as they've opened - even in Paris and Vienna - because they met a need that already existed. No new values were imposed.)

Thus, Americans tend to highlight the history of the Christian church in America. Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Jews are likely to know something more of their faith's history, but not often a lot - and not always accurate. Evangelicals are an exaggeration of this trend, not an exception.

Modern evangelicals descend from two broad church groups: frontier fundamentalists and those from the mainstream denominations who have disliked the changes of the last decades. The former group was bitterly anti-Catholic (and often anti-Lutheran, Episcopal, and Orthodox as well, because they were too Catholic-seeming). The latter group, not so much. They tended to see Catholics as another mainstream denomination - a bit more separate and hierarchical, but not entirely different. The alliance between Catholics and evangelicals around the issue of abortion, and to a lesser extent around issues of sexual morality, has seriously undermined the anti-Catholic tendencies inherited from the fundies. One can still find it, but it's disappearing. Anti-catholic prejudice among evangelicals now comes more from the ex-Catholics.

Fundamentalism comes from an interesting coincidence of the printing press and frontier culture, including especially architecture and formal education. The Protestant idea of having worship in the language of the people may not have been an accidental coincidence with the invention of the printing press and the general spread of a moderate literacy in Europe. Protestantism has always been very Bible-centered in that way. But this written word emphasis was balanced by the houses of worship themselves in Europe. St. Dennis-by-the-Wey might switch from Catholic to C of E, but it was still dedicated to St. Dennis, still had the same windows and pews, and childhood memories. People might want to throw off Roman rule and structure, but there was never any thought of throwing the whole thing out.

On the American frontier, settled largely by a combination of Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, all with a history of independent religious meetings outside of the church building, plus a German/Moravian strain of Pietism that emphasised simplicity and personal devotion. These throve in a region where there were no church buildings, but had constant movement, little formal education but a respect for the written word, and a fierce independence. Me 'n my Bible is all I need. There's God right there, in the book. Portable. Individual. Little wonder that one-time salvationism, rather than community involvement, took off so well. The Scots-Irish moved out from Appalachia and settled southwest, which may be why the beating heart of fundamentalism has always been Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and west Tennessee. The frontier settlers in the northern half of the US, the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians, had similar attitudes, but a bit more connection to history, tradition, and decorative arts in the sanctuary.

The Scots-Irish in particular, because of their historical memory of the Siege of Derry and mutual suspicion of Catholics in Ireland (see Belfast, Glasgow, with equal murder rates to US cities) were anti-Catholic and carried that prejudice long after they had ceased to have much connection with actual Catholics. They were suspicious of Easterners, more suspicious of Europeans, and most suspicious of all of Catholics, which seemed to them the distillation of everything wrong with Europe. So they also disliked Episcopalians and Lutherans for not rejecting Catholicism forcefully enough. Preacher talks straight from the Wordogod. You can look it up yourself.

By about 1800 you see the emergence of fanatically anti-Catholic sects, such as the Seventh Day Adventists. The reputed antisemitism of these groups is more mixed. They were very ambivalent on this score, some even being philosemites. Their only history was Bible history, but they counted it as their own, and so...er, well, despite the natural animosity that all human groups seem to feel for one another, and despite all the inherited stories about Jews killing Jesus, these were people who took their Bible stories very seriously. They saw themselves in those stiff-necked Jews. If that tribe had rejected their own Jesus, well, brother, you 'n I might not have done any better. The lives and beliefs of their actual ancestors or institutional ancestors faded into the mist.

As the frontier was settled, buildings built, and people grew up in towns they stayed in, the usual irony occurred: they became deeply conservative about the times of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. The historical impulse will not be denied, I think. The fundamentalists identified strongly with the lives of their immediate ancestors, even if they had forgotten most of what had been five to twenty generations before. The King James Bible itself became a part of the faith. (I don't know if you ever run across that, but there are still fundamentalists who believe the KJV, derived from the textus receptus, is the only reliable translation. A weird guy who developed an interest in my two Romanian sons tried to convince them of that - an amazing denseness when you think of it. The Bible that God uses - his return address stickers actually say that.)

Hey, I kinda like this essay. I think I'm going to post it.

So, completely lost in the whole understanding of Catholicism and its symbols and rituals is the idea those people couldn't read. They needed that. And the best of them devoted their lives to expressing the great truths of the faith artistically. What would you do? And as for keeping a great deal of Latin in the Mass, it was not only an expression of Vatican dominance and intentional mysteriousness. It also communicated the transnational, universal nature of the church against the tribal and nationalist urges of human beings in general.

In a related matter, this is why American evangelicals do not hesitate to evangelise Jews - which annoys the heck out of Jews who are aware of their history in Europe among the Christians. But to the evangelical, all that history seems to have nothing to do with them. They are related biologically only in the most distant way. They are related institutionally only indirectly. They repudiated the European churches two- three hundred years ago. There has been prejudice here, but no pogroms, no holocausts.

Until very recently, I sided with the Jews on that. I am a bit of a philosemite. But after getting into an online argument with a Jewish woman who regarded even modest modifications to the idea of Christian perfidy as mere evasions, I have looked at this differently. How many centuries is enough before the American experience of Jews outweighs what our seventh cousins did? As a medievalist, I felt quite connected and sorrowful about the Christian persecutions. But in the argument, I started to question my premises. My institutional and biological ancestors were Swedish Lutherans, Puritans from the south of England, Scots-Irish Presbyterians. For what reason should I feel an identification with any persecutors of Jews? If Christian doctrine leads so readily to antisemitism, why did it not infect my people as well?

In 500AD the Mediterranean had culture and civilization, China had culture and civilization, Persia and India had culture and civilization. Europe had violent, 99% illiterate, barbaric pagan torturers. Enter Christianity, very irregularly and incompletely, and the whole world slowly changes. It is fashionable to accuse Christianity, especially Catholicism, of all the ills of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages. What if the opposite is true? What if the crimes are mainly the crimes of all human tribes everywhere, killing outsiders and having no values above tribal loyalty? Except that monks kept good records, and the desire for virtue preceded virtue itself, so we have an ample catalogue of Christian sins.

The Puritans get the rap and reputation for witch-burning for a one-off incident in a notoriously unreligious seaport in Massachusetts. In Europe, the farther east you went, the more witches got burned, especially in the less religious areas.

But that's another story. I get irked about the misreporting of the Crusades and the Inquisition, too. People have a narrative that is congenial to their desires, and cherry pick the historical data to suit that.

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