December 24, 2006
Congressional Morons III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:55 AM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that Henry Clay and Virgil Goode don’t have much in common other than both having been members of Congress. If Clay loused up a quote from Hamlet, it wouldn’t surprise me if Goode had never heard of Hamlet. However . . .
He writes, “Carson—a conservative Democrat and a graduate of Baylor, Oxford, and the University of Oklahoma Law School—has less positive things to say about the House of Representatives itself. Repeating an anecdote from The House, in which Henry Clay embarrasses himself by fumbling a Hamlet quotation, Carson asks, ‘The institution now headed by Dennis Hastert may share the same name as that led by Clay, but which member of Congress today reads Shakespeare? Is it possible to imagine a single twenty-first-century politician . . . who is so confidently educated as to recognize a minor quotation from the Bard, much less a misquotation?’”
I think this is a fallacy in two ways.
First, it is the fallacy of everything is going to hell, that the past was more glorious, more heroic, more cultured, more everything good than the present. This is nonsense. We remember Henry Clay because he was a giant, a man who played a major part in the history of this country for 40 years. But he, and a few other giants, served in Congress with many damn fools, ignoramuses, and jerks who are utterly forgotten today. So we tend to think of Henry Clay’s Congress as having been full of Henry Clays and Daniel Websters, when it was in fact much more richly endowed with Virgil Goodes and Sam Brownbacks. Similarly, a 150 years from now, Virgil Goode will be a footnote, while people will still know about, say, Sam Rayburn and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Second, actually a sept of the first, it is the fallacy of yesterday’s culture that what the cultured man of the past knew and admired must be what is important and admirable today. While Shakespeare will be read and loved “as long as men can breathe and eyes can see,” other classics will be read mostly by scholars. I remember when I was a young man talking with my grandfather, who told me that my cousin was reading Xenophon in Ancient Greek class in college. “Imagine being able to read the Anabasis in the original,” he said. “I had to read it in translation.” I made some noncommittal noise, unwilling to say that the notion had never once entered my head to read it in any language. At least I’d heard of it.
Although my grandfather (born 1881) never went to college (never finished high school for that matter, although he later went to law school—you could do that in those days), he had read not only all of Shakespeare (he was unbeatable at identifying Shakespeare quotations) but all the great classic historians as well: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Bancroft, Prescott, etc. While I own most of his copies of these men’s books, I have only dabbled in them and don’t feel terribly guilty about it either.
Equally, what an earlier time might have dismissed as mere entertainment rather than art is sometimes regarded today as the highest culture. The British poet Alfred Noyes, most famous for “The Highwayman,” wrote a poem called “The Barrel Organ,” about that instrument being played in the City, London’s financial district, at the end of the business day: “There’s a barrel organ carolling across a golden street/ In the City as the sun sinks low;/ Though the music’s only Verdi there’s a world to make it sweet/ Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven meet . . .”
It’s been a few generations since a piece of music has been referred to as “only Verdi.”
I think this fallacy arises because the present is always so messy, so full of ignorance and stupidity and discord, while the past has been carefully edited, its great men separated from its fools, its battles lost and won. A hundred and fifty years from now, I have no doubt that people will say that we lived in a golden age, when men were men and art was art. How glorious it must have been, they will say, to have lived at a time when Newt Gingrich was maneuvering so brilliantly to capture Congress for the Republicans after 40 years of Democratic rule, when Steven Spielberg was making movies, when the Beatles were pouring out their music to the world!
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