Fault Lines
The sunny, summer scene deceives. In the foreground are swimmers and a beach. Look again and you will see a cemetery and a ruined fort. The place is Gallipoli, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War.
Beyond the fort lies one of history’s most fought-over waterways, the Dardanelles or Hellespont. On the other shore lie the hills of Troy. Across these waters came some of antiquity’s greatest armies of invasion, both mythical and real: Agamemnon and the Greeks, Xerxes and the Persians, and Alexander and the Macedonians.
In the foreground of the photo lies Europe; in the distance, lies Asia. So the summer scene also marks the fault line between East and West.
On the eve of negotiations between Iran, the United States, and other countries, we might all tremble at the forces approaching history’s frontier.
By the time I got to Woodstock
Friday evening, August 15, 1969, found me in the traffic jam to end all traffic jams. I was on the Garden State Parkway in Northern New Jersey. The cars lined up bumper-to-bumper all around me were headed for Woodstock. I was not. I was sitting on a commuter bus, heading home. I worked a summer job as a clerk in an office building in midtown Manhattan, and I was on my way back to the suburb where I lived.
That was fine with me. At fifteen, I had as much interest in Woodstock as I did in cleaning my room. I didn’t want to go to the concert; I wanted to get away from it and, in particular, from its traffic.
Normally, the bus I took, the 5:15, got home around 6:30 p.m. But thanks to Woodstock (and to a downpour that flooded the roads around Paramus) we didn’t arrive until around 8:30. In those pre-cell-phone days, there was no way to tell my parents not to hold dinner – or to hold their imaginations in check.
When I finally reached my bus stop, I found my father, of blessed memory, pacing around a parked police car. My parents, it seemed, had not chalked up the bus’s delay to peace and love. Rather, they had concluded that, since Friday was payday, someone had robbed me for my paycheck and left me lying in a pool of blood in the Port Authority Bus Station. It seemed absurd then but, now that I have teenagers of my own, it makes a certain wild sense. Anyhow, I can still feel the bear hug that my dad gave me, and my mom’s kisses, when we walked into the kitchen a few minutes later.
One more memory of the day: half an hour or so before the bus reached my destination, while we were still on the highway, it made an unscheduled stop. The driver opened the door to let two Chasidic Jewish men off. They had long beards and were dressed in black. The sun was about to go down and begin the Sabbath, when it is not permitted to ride. Knowing where the nearest Chasidic community was located, I figured that these men had a 10-mile walk ahead of them. It was no deterrent.
Woodstock gave me a free lesson in faith and family. You can keep the music.
Autostradivarius
There are worse places to drive than Italy. But for yours truly, a few thousand clicks up and down the roads of the boot, earlier this month, proved enough of a challenge to satisfy my urge for merit badges for a while.
A search for Hannibal and Caesar took Marcia and me on a two-week driving trip from Milan to Bari to Rome.
Whoooosh! we went down the freeway, silently praying whenever a motorcycle decided to invent a new lane beside us or a semi charged ahead into the left lane, going uphill. Whoooosh! Or was it a secondary road? The degree of tailgating was about the same. How often did I look into my rearview mirror and gulp? “Keep one car length behind for every ten miles per hour of speed” is a slogan that is not likely to be translated into Italian.
But Italians have complaints of their own. “Whenever I drive in America it seems that I am behind an old lady in a Cadillac,” a Roman friend of mine said, when I raised the hair-raising subject of driving in Italy. Hmm, I hadn’t thought of it that way.
“We Italians haven’t got used to roundabouts yet,” another friend commented. I noticed. I noticed the Stop signs that seemed to say, “Stop…if you want to.” I noticed the cyclists weaving in and out of traffic while talking on their cell phone, the Smart Cars playing chicken with Mercedes, and the motor scooters going the wrong way on one-way streets.
“We Italians lose every war,” my friend said, “so we take it out in our driving.” Yes, I suppose so.
I sighed at the road signs that were a maze of arrows, often pointing in directions other than that of the road. I winced at the tiny print of the road numbers. One night, I was tempted to stop the car and get out with a flashlight in order to read them.
But the truth is, I enjoyed it, from the cobblestones of the winding, hill town streets to the signs that simply ended well before you reached your destination, to the trucks that appeared out of nowhere and slowed traffic to a sudden crawl. Driving at home is a chore; driving in Italy is a challenge.
The chaos of the Italian road, I realized, was more apparent than real. It was organized chaos, with its own rules. And its own charms: for instance, the interlocking network of highways that means you can get on in Torino and never pay a toll until you get off at Bari, 1000 kilometers later (http://www.autostrade.it/en/). Or the endless patience of the cars behind me, who never seemed to mind when I pulled over on a narrow street to ask directions and thereby stalled traffic. Or the wonderful restaurant chain on the highways called Autogrill (http://www.autogrill.com/Default.aspx), where the service people are friendly and smiling. And where they serve bagels!
Fields and Dreams
Some battlefields state their message plainly, like Gettysburg. Others cry out their pain, like Verdun. But most, I suspect, say absolutely nothing. They are just fields or groves or shopping malls, silent about their bloody past. Cannae is one of those. The site of the greatest battlefield of the ancient world, the place where Hannibal slaughtered 50,000 Romans in an afternoon, and thereby unintentionally inspired the plan that, 2000 years later, led to the disaster that was World War One, goes largely unmarked. Yes, there is an archaeological site at Cannae, but it dates mainly to the Middle Ages, not ancient Rome. There is a museum too, but its artifacts conspicuously leave the battle out. There is a column erected to mark a view over the battlefield, but it isn’t nearly as engaging as the jaunty little train station tucked into the hillside where almost no one could ever find it. “Canne della Battaglia” — Cannae of the Battle – says the station of a little-used branch line, complete with plaques of elephants and helmets over the arcades. (In fact, there were no elephants at Cannae, but never mind.)
It would take the imagination of George C. Scott playing Patton to see Hannibal at Cannae. No soldiers line up here, just row after row of olive trees and grape vines – the latter, heavy with nearly ripe fruit at this time of year. Plaques and markers would help greatly, but the experts disagree about precisely where the great battle was fought. At Cannae, yes, but in what part? A tourist would vote for the valley that flows cinematically below Cannae’s hill, but the fight might well have unfolded on the wider plain to the northeast – out of sight and so, all but offstage. The course of the river that runs through the valley has changed since ancient times. The main crop then was different too – wheat, harvested in June, leaving room for fighting men and cavalry horses.
The only thing that hasn’t changed is the Mediterranean sky. It is still gray in the dawn hour when the soldiers began leaving their camps. It burns brilliantly at noon, when they were still fighting, and turns the sky red at sunset.
Declarations
My kids are past the age for family outings to the fireworks display. I’m not much for crowds myself, so this Fourth of July I stayed home and set off fireworks for the soul. I re-read the Declaration of Independence.
I love the Declaration for many reasons, and not least because it declares. No “on the one hand, on the other hand”; no “but”; no apologies. Instead, something simple: “Goodbye, King George, we are leaving. Here is why.” Living as we do today in an age of fog, we look at the Declaration and see a beacon.
It is courageous too. By putting their names on the Declaration, the signers committed treason. The risk of punishment was real. Just a few days before the Declaration was issued, a colossal British fleet sailed into New York Bay, the largest armada that Great Britain had ever assembled. It took guts to sign the Declaration.
But the signers believed too much in freedom to quake at invasion. In the Declaration, they defined Americans as a free people, unwilling to tolerate governmental abuse, whether brought by royal decree or by warship. The Revolutionaries were not afraid. For example, when they heard the Declaration read aloud in New York City, a crowd took down a statue of King George and melted it for ammunition for the Continental Army.
Today, when the Feds are proposing a massive expansion of their authority, they might remember one of the Declaration’s charges against the King:
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
As a historian, I can find things to fault in the Declaration. It hardly does justice to those Americans who wanted to stay British (an estimated one-third of the population). It is less than fair to the “merciless Indian savages.” It says nothing about the inconsistency of demanding liberty while maintaining slavery.
But the document wasn’t written for historians. It is a Declaration, not an Assessment. We need the hesitation of the seminar room but we also need the Spirit of ’76. Long may it inspire.
Freedoms
It takes physical courage to demonstrate against an oppressive regime that is willing to kill you, as brave Iranians have done this month. Moral courage is less necessary. When someone holds you in chains, it is obvious that you should break them. All honor, even so, to those who risk their lives.
Spartacus would have understood – and approved.
It takes something else entirely to fight against friendly fascism. When the government offers cradle-to-grave security, who says no? Not the average American, to judge from recent events. The ordinary American citizen has neither protested trillion-dollar deficits nor the federal takeover of automobile companies. Now, a new poll shows support, by a wide majority, for a government administered health insurance plan like Medicare (The New York Times, June 21, 2009).
What does it take to say no to a state that, unlike Iran, wants not to shoot you but to smother you with its embrace? It takes: knowledge of the track record of nanny states in Europe and Canada, with their inadequate services and bankrupt budgets; skepticism about the plans of the elite, with their inevitable loopholes for the privileged few; a prickly fortitude that sets greater store by the freedom to fail than by the security of being told what to do; education in the civic tradition of western democracies and republics, from the Greeks and Romans on; religious faith in the divine mercy that allows the individual to struggle against enslavement by his own emotions, a drama in which government’s role is to step aside.
Perhaps Iranians know all that. Americans once did.
Speeches
In spring 196 B.C. the Roman proconsul Flamininus gave a speech. The scene was the Isthmian Games, near Corinth. Rome was the new master of Greece, after having smashed the Macedonian army the year before. The Greeks were used to being pushed around by great powers like Macedon. From Rome, they expected more of the same.
So they were thunderstruck at Flamininus’s words (which he had a herald proclaim). Greece, he said, was free. The applause was so loud that frightened birds are supposed to have fallen dead from the sky.
Poor Greeks. They thought that when Flamininus proclaimed Greek freedom, he meant it. Actually, Flamininus meant that the Greeks were free to obey Rome. “Freedom,” to Flamininus, meant that each of the hundred-plus little Greek city-states was on its own. Neither Macedon nor any of the various Greek federal leagues could unite them. In other words, it was the old Roman policy of “divide and conquer.”
But the Greeks didn’t hear that. They fell for Flamininus’s charm and overlooked his ruthlessness. They insisted on actually trying to be free. Rome was not amused. Two wars and fifty years later, a Roman army had sacked Corinth, one of Greece’s greatest cities, and hauled the surviving leaders of Greece’s political elite into exile. Greece was now a Roman province, and a poor and neglected one at that.
About 2200 years later, the representative of another imperial power has gone east to give a speech. President Barack Obama’s address in Cairo, like Flamininus’s in Greece, received rave reviews. (That is, unless you are an Egyptian democrat, an advocate of the justice of America’s Iraq War, a skeptic about the willingness of the Palestinians to live in peace with Israel, or a worrier about the Iranian bomb.) But whether it will bring freedom – the president used the word or its variants seven times – and peace – he used the word or its variants twenty-eight times – is questionable.
American concessions will be interpreted as weakness. America will be tested in ways that are frightening and dangerous.
Honeyed words bring temporary relief but they sow the seeds for long-term conflict. Ask the audience at Isthmia.
New Gladiators
In Spartacus’s day, gladiators advertised by parading through town, displaying their fierce physiques and touting their records of wins and losses. Nowadays, states advertise by testing missiles and nuclear bombs and then peddling the results to a global audience. So, Iran and North Korea in the past week. Their weapons make them winners; the implied loser is the United States, the superpower that maintains the world order that these two states seek to change.
For the U.S. to respond to every challenge would be to play a losing game of tit-for-tat. Some tests, however, are too important to ignore. The U.S. would pay a high price, for example, if it failed to counter Iran’s rising power by protecting its allies in the Middle East, from Israel to Saudi Arabia, and from Egypt to Turkey.
That cost, however, pales beside the price of failure in Northeast Asia. Command of the Pacific is a pillar of American power and prosperity. America’s post-Second-World-War hegemony in the Pacific has depended on the support of Japan and the defense of South Korea (and Taiwan) in order to check Chinese expansion. But South Korea and Japan are the two biggest potential victims of North Korean nuclear weapons. Neither state is able to defend itself without a patron. Either they will find support from the U.S. or they will jump on a new bandwagon – China’s. There is also the danger that, when it comes to Japan and South Korea, American irresoluteness now will drag us into a war to defend them later.
To retain the confidence of Japan and South Korea, the U.S. must respond to North Korea’s challenge. With nuclear weapons in play, war is unthinkable. Economic sanctions and strengthened anti-missile defense programs, followed by tough negotiations, may be the best course.
United Nations resolutions are a good start. But, against missiles and nukes, words will be about as effective as they would against a gladiator’s sword.
MemorialDay, 2009
A spring afternoon several years ago found me in Volterra, Italy. I was following in giant footsteps by coming to this town. Located in the hills of western Tuscany, Volterra sits on a steep rise that commands the route between Pisa and Florence. The town’s strategic location and wealth, derived from alabaster and iron ore, have attracted conquerors ranging from Sulla to the Medicis to Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army in World War II. Volterra has survived sieges and sacks, bloodshed and butchery. Today still a walled city, Volterra’s beauty seduced the English novelist D.H. Lawrence and the Italian poet d’Annunzio.
In contrast, I had been attracted to Volterra by the most prosaic of reasons: Kilroy was here. As a private in the U.S. infantry in July 1944, my father, Aaron Strauss, had marched with his regiment on the hills around the town.
After moving in and out of Rome in early June, the 350th U.S. Infantry had continued north through Latium and Tuscany. At first they met with little or no resistance, but in southern Tuscany they found minefields, booby traps, and pockets of German infantry on hilltops. Outside of Volterra, Aaron had his most dramatic moment of combat.
On July 8, 1944, the U.S. 88th Division attacked Volterra from the valley below it. The 350th U.S. Infantry approached the town from the west. As Aaron remembered, it was the afternoon and the sun was strong. He was carrying his carbine. His squad, a group of about a dozen men, went up a hill during a German artillery barrage, shells whizzing all around. They were led by one Lieutenant Orebaugh. As the squad advanced, a shell dropped at their feet. It was a direct hit and my father and his buddies should have been blown to pieces. It turned out, however, to be a dud. Dud shells were common, but not common enough to make you forget a brush with death. A half-century later, it was one of my father’s most vivid memories of the war.
In 2001, that memory brought me to Italy. I stood on the ramparts of Volterra and looked down on the hills stretching downward for miles and miles. The sun shone but a cool breeze stirred; in March, Volterra is noticeably colder than Rome. Birds sang. The volcanic slopes, covered with the light green grass of spring, undulated sinuously toward the horizon. It was hard to imagine that on those same ramparts, on a summer day fifty-seven years before, the citizens of Volterra eyed the American army moving up from the south. The Volterrans knew that the Americans might liberate them from the Germans, who occupied the town, and release them from the starvation that was threatening. At the same time, they were terrified that the battle might destroy their city.
One of the young American soldiers advancing on that obstacle was my father. As he marched on Volterra on a July afternoon in 1944, a week before his twentieth birthday, he came close to ceasing to exist. And if he had bit the dust outside Volterra, so would have I.
So I stood on the windy walls of Volterra and looked down the way you might look out at the gorges from Delphi or at the valley, where Pickett charged, from Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, or at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. I looked out the way a child looks out at night from the deck of a ship and marvels at the majesty of the stars and the emptiness of the ocean.
My father passed away three years later, in 2004. I will be forever grateful that I had the chance to sit and talk with him about the view from Volterra.
Core Values
When I took up a rowing some years ago, I learned that things were not as they seemed. People speak of “pulling an oar,” but in fact, rowing is more about pressing than pulling. By pressing against the foot-stretcher, a rower’s legs do more to move the boat than his arms do by pulling the oars. If that seems counter-intuitive, consider this: in every stroke, bracing is just as important as pressing. Unless a rower braces the stroke with the abdominal and lower-back muscles, he loses a lot of the power of the leg drive.
In other words, good rowing depends on having a strong core. So does success in other sports.
Gladiators, for instance, could hardly have delivered effective sword thrusts without core strength. Not that the crowd would have seen any six packs beneath the flab cultivated by gladiators, both as protection and to allow bloody but relatively harmless flesh wounds!
To turn to modern sports, a boxer cannot punch effectively without power in his lower body. A golfer cannot execute a strong swing without engaging the muscles of the butt. A baseball pitcher cannot leverage his main source of power without a strong core.
Any good trainer can tell you that. And trainers do, all over America, every day in gyms from coast to coast. And what do we the people do in response? Bench presses and biceps curls, if we are guys. Men work on the glamour parts of their bodies and leave the core to sag. The result: beer bellies and back pain. Women, it seems, do pay more attention to core exercises, but usually in the mistaken hope of cutting flab by spot reductions. Or so I am told.
The weak core is all too obvious a target for moralists and pundits. Are Americans’ values as flabby as their guts? Is a country without a strong core a nation without a soul? What would Cicero say about a civitas carens fortitudine musculis abdominis (a commonwealth lacking strength in the muscles of the abdomen)?
Chill out, folks. It’s Memorial Day weekend. Happy summer. Enjoy yourself, but don’t forget the crunches.
