Balance of Power

In my 2/7/08 post, I cited Ellis as follows:

Both individual citizens and sovereign states often required coercion to behave responsibly, which meant that the federal government required expanded powers of taxation and ultimate control over fiscal policy.

Among the problems with this claim, notice this core assumption: the federal government will "behave responsibly" in its use of coercion.

How right the Founding Fathers were to do everything in their power to assure a balance of power in our government. Too much power in one group's or one man's grasp is dangerous.

Check your premises.

Dilbert

Today, while doing some technical housekeeping, I decided to add a link to the Dilbert homepage.

Being fuzzy on how to use HTML to display on my blog both a free Dilbert graphic and a link to the Dilbert home page, this site gave me the necessary guidance. That assistance combined with the Blogger wizard engine (which makes so much of blogging a joy) gave me the result I wanted, which you can see on the right side of my blog now.

Incidentally, I love that I can do that—just plug a search into Google to get an instant answer to a technical point that is not second nature to me. Man, the Internet rocks!

I added the Dilbert link because Scott Adams is so well in touch with the nutty patterns of behavior that afflict life in most large organizations.

Sacrifice: A romantic delusion

"Making voluntary sacrifice the operative principle of republican government had proved to be a romantic delusion." So writes Joseph Ellis on page 168 of His Excellency at the beginning of the section named Infant Empire in chapter 5.

Here, there is certainly a romantic delusion. Ironically, the delusion is the notion that sacrifice—voluntary or not—is romantic.

Ellis adds: "Both individual citizens and sovereign states often required coercion to behave responsibly, which meant that the federal government required expanded powers of taxation and ultimate control over fiscal policy."

The only proper role of government is to manage the use of force to protect us from force (and fraud)—be it from abroad, from our neighbors, and especially from the biggest force wielder of all: our own government. As Washington himself apparently wrote or said: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." Damn straight.

So, when Ellis associates, in effect, "behaving responsibly" with "sacrifice", he's in dangerous territory.

Sacrifice means to surrender a higher value for a lower value. Given this, Washington was certainly not sacrificing when he risked his life for years to defend everything he loved about America as it was and as it could become. He was gloriously selfish.

The greatest man in the world

Though I knew Washington had earned King George's awe (calling him "the greatest man in the world") when he surrendered his sword after winning America's independence from Great Britain, I did not know that he did so fully aware of the fates of the Roman and English republics at key points, that they fell to military dictatorships.

Ellis also reports that Washington's opinion of America's government, which, at the time, was only the weak Congress operating under the Article of Confederation.

So, while how America was going to work was not yet evident and not looking good under the Articles, one thing for Washington was crystal clear—how America was not going to work—i.e., under a dictatorship, not while he lived.

Not only did Washington lay down his sword, he stopped his officers from raising theirs. On this critical moment in history, Ellis writes: "Whereas Cromwell and later Napoleon made themselves synonymous with the revolution in order to justify the assumption of dictatorial power, Washington made himself synonymous with the American Revolution in order to declare that it was incompatible with dictatorial power.

This and all it implies is one of the most moving moments in history for me. It has earned from me an emotion that does not and cannot come lightly—reverence.

God bless George Washington.

Gasp!

Yup, the Patriots perfect football season came to a crashing halt in the final game. Ouch.

But the opposing team, the New York Giants, was too much for them. They earned the win, playing especially well on defense. They kept Brady, one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history, off balance for most of the game.

So, I tip my cyber hat to them. Well done, dammit! ;^)

A hero of the first degree

His Excellency continues to be fascinating and enjoyable. Ellis' is a good storyteller.

In his coverage of Washington, he necessarily touches on Nathanael Greene, who armed Washington with excellent counsel time and time again. While I am familiar with him, Ellis' work has given me a much closer look at him. I admire what I see, enough to put him high on my list of important figures to study. If anyone has a good biography to recommend, please leave a comment.

At a critical juncture, when Washington's competence is being questioned (with cause) and he was spoiling for an all-or-nothing battle, Greene reminded him that he had no choice but to fight a protracted defensive war. "Your Excellency," Greene advised, "has the choice of but two things, to fight the Enemy without the least Prospect of Success...or remain inactive, & be the subject of Censure of an ignorant & impatient populace."

Greene added that not only would Washington risk a defeat with another attempt to repeat the Trenton-Princeton successes of the previous winter in the current winter, but it would also "expose the weakness of the militia to the enemy and not only them but to all europe who now consider them much more formidable than they really are."

Washington accepts Greene's counsel even though its wisdom runs against his grain personally. Ellis writes that Washington's decision not to act "completed his transformation into a public figure whose personal convictions must be suppressed and rendered subordinate to his higher calling as an agent of history, which in this case meant that winning the war was more important than being himself."

While I agree with Ellis that this occasion merits special recognition, I don't share his summation in this case. I hold that there is no higher calling than this—to keep clear the distinction between the "I wish" and the "it is"; that is, to keep clear the difference between your emotions and your rational lock on reality. Washington does that in spades here, fighting through his personal emotions, his past conclusions to see the reality immediately before him, demanding a new approach to solve life and death problems on an historic scale.

In my book, this makes him a hero of the first degree, not because he suppressed his convictions but because he held mightily to his reason, to his ruthless objectivity to serve his admirably selfish interest in winning the war.

God bless him.

The American Cause

In His Excellency, Ellis reports that

widespread support for what Washington described as the "American Cause" was in fact cresting, and would never again reach the height it achieved during the Boston siege. "The spirit of '76" should more accurately (if less lyrically) be called "the spirit of late '75 and early '76," because patriotic fervor began to erode just as the war became politically official and militarily threatening.

Ellis goes on to report the following:

The mythological rendition of dedicated citizen-soliders united for eight years in the fight for American libery was, in fact, a romantic fiction designed by later generations to conceal the deep divisions and widespread apathy within the patriot camp.

Interesting. Among other things, this reinforces in my mind the importance of ideas as opposed to trying to accomplish very difficult (to put it gently) goals across time primarily on emotion. An emotion can carry you only so far. An idea can carry you forever, gaining momentum as you continue to feed it daily with your choice to honor it.