Phthursday Musings: Past Present Present Past

Before jumping into a very extended musing… If you’re like me and have been horrified by what’s been happening in Los Angeles but also feeling overwhemed about how to possibly help, I’d like to suggest donating to the Hollywood Food Coalition, an organization our friend Molly Knight volunteers for. I think it’s a super logical organization to support right now, and one where you can count on your donations not magically disappearing into “administrative costs”.

I’d also like to say a few words about Bob Uecker, Mr. Baseball, who passed away today at the age of 90.

Everyone in the 80s knew Bob Uecker from the Miller Lite commercials, and from being the dad on Mr. Belvedere, and from his role as Harry Doyle in Major League.

What I remember is sitting in my grandparents’ kitchen some weeknight or another in 1986 or 1987, having changed the radio to WTMJ 620 AM, picking up the not-too-fuzzy Brewers broadcast, with Ueck on the call. I didn’t appreciate then how wild it was that this guy was sweltering in a radio booth in Texas explaining what Jim Gantner was trying to do at the plate and also somehow appearing on television a month later in a ridiculous sitcom centered around a British butler.

Ueck called Brewers games for 53 years. The players loved him. It may have been Johnny Carson who gave him the title Mr. Baseball, but it was true. Nobody deserved it more.

So I’ve been reading a book, and I’m going to write about the book, but I’m going to use it as a springboard for some other thoughts. Up front I’ll warn that to simplify and avoid writing four times as much, I’m going to smash a lot of history into a couple of paragraphs, and I apologize for how confusing this might all get, but I’ll try to worm out of the confusion as I go on.

The book in question is Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan Katz, who I’ve frequently name-checked as the publisher of The Racket (also on beehiiv, also formerly on Substack.) The Racket largely involves what I’ll call “American foreign affairs” with a particular emphasis on Haiti, and especially over the last 15 months, on Israel. It’s highly recommended.

Gangsters of Capitalism is nominally a biography of Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history, who over time came around to the idea that war was a racket (hence the name of Katz’s newsletter) and that he and the Marines had essentially just operated as mercenaries for American capitalists. Butler managed to join the Marines at 16 and get sent off to fight in Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and over the rest of his career he at different times went to the Philippines (Filipino-American War), China (Boxer Rebellion), Panama (when the U.S. essentially stole the land for the Panama Canal), Nicaragua (U.S. occupation of the entire country), Mexico (U.S. occupation of Veracruz), Haiti (U.S. occupation of the entire country), Dominican Republic (U.S. occupation of the entire country), and France (for the tail end of World War I).

Some of you are probably thinking… What occupation of Nicaragua? The Marines were once in China? Veracruz? What?? And this is all very fair, because one of the primary features of a lot of these operations is that the American public knew very little about them, and another primary feature is that not a whole lot of Marines were involved. (Think hundreds, not tens of thousands.)

I’ll give you a little story here about when I was in graduate school. I went to Ohio State, and I was in a history Ph.D. program, and I walked in with a major focus of American foreign relations. At one point, maybe in my second year there, I don’t remember why we came up with this, but I read something like 6 or 7 books about mid-nineteenth century American-Mexican relations, which mostly meant reading about the Mexican-American War. The thing is that zero of those works of history made any attempt to try explicit connections between actions that happened then and the less obvious modern manifestations of those actions. Obviously the Mexican-American War concluded with the cessation of California and Arizona and New Mexico and a whole lot more to the United States, but what are the relevant lessons about all of that for today, when a large and fast-growing percentage of the American population is of Latino and in particular Mexican descent? Well, works of history didn’t try to get into modern sociology or anthropology or anything like that.

Katz does, though. He draws a throughline from how the Marines got mixed up in the Dominican Republic to the extreme racism today of the Dominican population relative to Haitians. And in visiting places the Philippines and China, he’s able to take the history of American involvement and provide insight into some of the important nuances of the way things are.

Traditional colonialism was straightforward: countries with modern weapons would take over land and people without modern weapons. The United States pursued a newer idea early in the 20th century, that of “dollar diplomacy”: leverage money as much as you leverage weaponry to control foreign economies. And if a country should select the wrong leader, see to it that the leader is overthrown and replaced with someone more compliant.

I knew a lot of the high level stories that are in Katz’s book, but I didn’t know some of the particulars of the Filipino-American War, or some of the details of exactly how Marines got involved in Central America and the Caribbean and what lingering resistance had to be overcome. It had been a long time since I’d read anything about the Boxer Rebellion - did you realize that small military detachments from eight countries joined (mostly) together to invade China and occupy Beijing? That American Marines fought alongside troops from Japan and Russia? Most Americans know nothing about this. But it’s different in China. It’s different in a lot of places.

World War I and World War II were obviously on a different scale entirely. But it’s Korea and especially Vietnam where the American approach broke down, because so many more combat troops were required, and because we had television. Most Americans don’t think of America as a hegemon, as an empire, and much of this is because for so long it was so easy to hide most of the levers of control. By the end of Vietnam, though, hiding things which actually involved significant numbers of Americans was increasingly difficult. The best the U.S. could often do was, to borrow from Warren Zevon, send lawyers, guns, and money.

Now, I knew a lot of this. I read about a lot of this, in grad school if not before. I have not been under any sort of long-standing delusion about how well America has treated so much of the rest of the world. Even so, even though I have known, it is still… revealing… to be reminded of the true depths of the racism embedded in American capitalism. And of how so much of the truly stupid shit that goes down has its roots in American exploitation.

And yet what are we supposed to do with this knowledge, this understanding? How does this allow us to help? To engage? To build empathy? I thought about some of this while reading the book because I know I could have gone a teaching route, one where knowing a whole lot more of the history would make sense, but… what was I supposed to get out of the details of the occupation of Nicraragua?

I’ve written at different times about dissonance: a word I attach to the phenomenon of knowing something, and knowing that it is important and relevant, but not behaving like the importance or relevance is at all regarded. American exceptionalism, I think, is rooted in an incredibly deep dissonance. Whatever the English think about what it means to be English, or the French think about what it means to be French, the construction of the American mythos is something unique. The English might think they’re better and the French might think they’re better but America was created as something “better”, and so all of the pretending otherwise, all of the denying facts, all of the looking the other way, is truly more antithetical to the notion of being American than it all could possibly be to the notion of being English or being French. But precisely because it’s so antithetical, it’s also so much more necessary. If we don’t construct more useful stories about ourselves, then how do we come to terms with ourselves?

I think we can regard much of what’s happening socially and politically as indicative of how this necessary dissonance has fallen apart. When Trump rhetorically asked “You think our country’s so innocent?” he was affecting a pivot that I don’t think many of us really appreciated. See, we as a country have, in bits and pieces, been confronting more and more of the realities of our past, and have from time to time actually been apologizing for some of those realities. We’ve apologized because it’s seemed like the right thing to do, but we’ve also apologized as a sort of salve for the rupturing of the dissonance. Those of us who want to continue to believe in the positive things about America - and there are a great many to believe in - want to buy into an overall narrative of overall progress, and when confronted with unfortunate realities, it can be nice to apologize for them… especially when they’re historic, especially when - to borrow from Phil Ochs - the circumstances don’t actually affect us personally.

But Trump was suggesting something entirely different: that we need not deny or apologize. It seems preposterous to suggest that such a compulsive liar would be telling us we shouldn’t feel like we need to deny things, but parse it more closely… it’s the different between lying to avoid getting into the trouble, and lying because you need to believe the lie. America, for so long, has done both. And what he’s tried to reduce it all to is a different kind of lie: sure it happened, but it wasn’t a big deal.

Well, you name it, it was a big deal. It is a big deal.

Haiti is a particularly excellent example of all this. There’s a rich throughline all the way forward from the Haitian revolution and the founding of the first free Black republic in the world to the atrocious rumors spread by the Trump campaign in 2024 about Haitians stealing and eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio. I remember learning about Haiti in grade school, but only about Toussaint Louverture and the revolution, certainly not about the draconian financial measures the French enacted on the Haitians later in the 19th century, or about the U.S. occupation in the 1910s, or about the depth of the racism involved. Few nations in the world have been so thoroughly held down as Haiti.

Recognizing this, having this reinforced, and reinforced in some depth, truly does matter for me in terms of my ability to not just intellectually understand what has happened there, but to more deeply empathize with the Haitian experience - and not just the Haitian experience. I find that a deeper appreciation of not just the history but of the throughline makes me a better manager, a better friend, a better husband, a better father. It can be difficult to precisely explain this, but I’ll put it like this: there may be some truth to a statement like “boys will be boys”, but there’s also something other than truth there, and the idle acceptance of pithy aphorisms as founts of wisdom, that’s the most fertile kind of soil for what I’m calling dissonance - where dissonance is something akin to the weeds growing in the gardens of our minds. The dissonance isn’t quite the same thing as lies or hatreds or racisms, but what the dissonance can do is choke out the empathy and compassion of the gardens, and that’s what makes it possible for those other things in turn to take root. (I actually think a little dissonance is probably a good thing, because otherwise I think it’s possible to get entirely overwhelmed. I think balance is important. But balance doesn’t need to include hatred and racism. Those are just different kind of imbalance.)

This is often the time when I’ll apologize for the places I’ve taken a metaphor to, but, nah, I think that’s all pretty good.

So why read about obscure atrocities? Well, it turns out they still resonate. And we can understand more about the dynamics of the world in which we live. And even if we aren’t especially able personally to impact, say, the current state of affairs in Haiti, we are able to modulate the way we understand our collective places on the planet, through the way we treat other people, through the knowledge we share, through the empathy we try to grow collectively. Understanding the need to confront not only denial but also the shifting excuse that the truth doesn’t actually matter much anyway… it can be hard to measure our own individual impacts, but collectively, even when it feels like things are going remarkably poorly, we truly are keeping things from getting even worse, and maintaining the potential for positive reversals.

I managed to reference two songs in the above so a moment for each of them here.

“Lawyers, Guns and Money” is from Warren Zevon’s 1978 album Excitable Boy. It’s fresh in my memory because in exchanging notes about our respective preferred awful English football clubs, I referenced the song in joking that Leicester’s top recruitment priorities, in order, are lawyers, accountants, and defenders, and Edouard responded that “the top two priorities are what got [Manchester] City to where they are”, and, well, he’s right.

So here’s a 1980 performance of “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, which looks like it was filmed in about 1930:

My other reference was of course to Phil Ochs and “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”, specifically the line of introduction in the live version:

In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects: 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.

As ever, you have to listen closely to the crowd. Do they get it?

I had no idea what title to give all this, and in the recesses of my brain I came up with Past Present Present Past, the title of the memoir of the Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco. Somehow a copy of this wound up in my hands many years ago - I think because it somehow wound up in my dad’s hands many years before that. Ionesco was grouped in with the absurdists, his best known works being The Bald Soprano and Rhinoceros.

I read a lot of Ionesco’s stuff back in 2009, a year during which I logged 62 books, a number probably higher than even my heaviest year of grad school. (Absurdist plays do tend to go a lot faster than detailed histories of the Mexican-American War.) That year I worked downtown, took the El, and didn’t have a smart phone, and so I just devoured books. There was a theme in the middle of the year, too, as I read other famed absurdist writers like Samuel Beckett and John Stossel. I also read two Thomas Pynchon books. I clearly had strange ideas about what I ought to have been doing.

I do not remember the first damn thing about anything I read from Ionesco, except that Rhinoceros was both absurdist and anti-fascist, but good golly if I didn’t always love the title Past Present Present Past. So, this week needed a title, and I think I picked a fine title, and this week also needed a cover photo, and so, thanks Eugene Ionesco, and also thanks to the WWF, here you go: a fine photo of a rhinoceros.