Pausing to Write amid the Graves

Before our visit to Gettysburg and its battlefield, we enjoyed several busy days in Philadelphia, where we took in all the famed historical sites at the center of the old downtown. They were certainly worth seeing -- at times almost thrilling to see. But we also enjoyed just as much our tour of the area called Society Hill just south of the historic district, where there are dozens of church buildings, housing active congreagtions, amid the restored rowhouses that Philly is famous for. Along with all the churches were many adjoining cemeteries, graveyards being of one of our family's common foci during vacations. I have always loved visiting cemeteries, and Logan has become enamored of the practice as well. Even Marsha has long been fascinated by cemeteries. Shown here is a shot of Logan in one of those Philly church cemeteries on Society Hill. He asked us to move on to the next church down Pine Street while he stayed behind and sat on a cement bench. There he took out his notebook and set to work on some piece of writing he had been laboring over during vacation. Upon our return, I found him still there at work. I never found out what he was writing, though. These matters remain pretty private for teenagers, generally speaking.

I have long pondered my interest in cemeteries. Seeing that generations passed on is always of great interest. And seeing a tangible sign of their passing, the sign being the graves, somehow enriches one's understanding of the past, makes it more real, penetrates one's excogitations on history with a striking sense of reality. In this particular cemetery, found in the courtyard of the Old Pine Street Presbyterian Church, were located the graves of several Native American leaders who were among the first Natives to sign a treaty with the newly created (by revolutionary war) United States of America.

Gettysburg

It was our annual vacation last week, spring break for our boys and Marsha. We went to Philadelphia and to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was another in our series of history vacations. And enjoyable it was.

What do we seek when we go to a place like Gettysburg? What is important about seeing the place, walking over the terrain? The photo is a shot of my 15-year-old Logan charging, a bit too merrily, up the slope toward the momentous pivot of the Gettysburg battlefield, a place called the Bloody Angle, which is now and was then no more than the edge of a small farm field with a low stone wall that is mostly fallen down. The corner in the wall that came to be called the Bloody Angle, upon which I stood to shoot this photograph, is just a couple hundred yards up a shallow slope from the Emmitsburg Road, on which two cars are passing in the distance behind Logan (that’s Marsha walking behind). Close on the right, out of the photo, is the end of the village of Gettysburg, with its many shops and motels, just 300 yards away. In the distance, about 3/4s of a mile off is the monument to the soldiers of Virginia and General Robert E. Lee, which stands at about the center of the Confederate line of 12,000 soldiers who charged the Union defenses on Cemetery Ridge across the intervening crop fields on July 3, 1863 -- famed Pickett’s Charge. We walked the length of the charge twice, once to, once from the Lee momument.

These are difficult questions, ones that hold thousands of thinkers in thrall. Why do we seek to remember? Even, what do we seek to remember?

First, for me, I seek to know the terrain because Gettysburg is so much discussed. Thinkers have long pondered and written about the war that Gettysburg stands at the center of and the battle itself and lately even more to the short speech that played an early role in the ways our nation remembers this battle, Lincoln’s address at the National Cemetery, which is a just a couple hundreds yards in back of the Bloody Angle. One who is an American and a thinker and reader, practically speaking, wants to know a good deal about such an event, for other thinkers have written and keep writing about it in great detail, seeking its meaning, sensing that there is great meaning to it. Knowing the event pays off, unlike some other much-discussed features of our culture. Further, of course, war and battle are compelling and enlightening in general, and since Gettysburg was the site of our nation’s most famous and most discussed battle, it is almost certain that those who study it will find it compelling and enlightening.

But of course, the act of remembering, of trying to know a past event of this kind, has other higher purposes. Trying to know the battlefield better is for me part of an effort to fathom the meaning of the battle, the war, and their aftermath. I hope that by physically standing on the ground that I know so well in my mind from books and two previous visits will somehow deepen or improve upon what I think of the event and to fathom what others think of it in all that complexity and diversity. I sense it strongly that I can just stand in such a place, I can make better sense of what happened there.

So did my visit, my third to Gettysburg, achieve these purposes? I don’t know yet. I expected to be deeply moved, but I felt little. I expected to witness Marsha or my boys being moved, for none of them had been to Gettysburg before. But they didn’t have much to say about what being on the battlefield meant to them and little in their outward behavior suggested what they were thinking or whether they were feeling something profound. But I continue to ponder these things. I don’t want to create artificial reflections, cook up some profound jibber-jabber because I expect profundity and wisdom of myself. I want to be authentic, to describe what is truly happening in my mind and soul as I ponder what happened at Gettysburg as a result of the visit to the site where the battle took place.

Yet despite my lack of feeling, I remain fascinated with Gettysburg, I suppose, obviously, because it is a pivot of that great war, which makes it a great pivot in our national history, which makes it a pivot in world history, even in the history of humankind, which makes what happened at the Bloody Angle a pivot of almost unfathomable moment. Something vast and terrible and wondrous and great in human history turned at that place on the afternoon of Pickett’s Charge to the stone wall, with the weight of all the events leading to the place and the moment pushing behind all those soldiers on both sides. Not that there weren’t other pivots -- and many have been the pivots proposed. This time around, I learned a new one while skimming a book in a Gettysburg book shop: that the battle for Culp’s Hill on Day Two of the battle, Saturday, July 2, 1863, was probably the greater failure, for the Confederacy that is, than the failure at the Bloody Angle the day after. But it seems to me in all my studies of this event that the assault at the Bloody Angle is the most telling axis of the war. But beyond this, for now, I am empty of deep thought and deep feeling, as I have often been when pondering what happened at Gettysburg.

I’m O.K., You’re O.K. -- Terrorists Are O.K., Too

Well, isn't this just peachy? I write a couple pieces about how diverse and tangled and difficult the study of terrorism is, and I get back two rather divergent responses (see the comments to my last excogitation on 3/27/08) -- one that suggests that all morals are relative and another that claims that it's a perfect black-and-white no-brainer that Islam is evil. Well there you go. It’s a difficult world out there, full of disagreement to the last degree, as I have studied and written about at great length. At least, I have yet another sign that my excogitating is on the mark.

So, let’s start with you Kev, you sly dog. You’re going to try using my questions to you about morally judging the actions of Pizarro (a discussion from Kev’s blog about his bike trip around the world) to trap me on the subject of terrorism? I feel honored. (The photo, by the way, has nothing to do with anything. Just a shot I like of the Lake Michigan shoreline a couple springs ago.)

But your first big point is a little shaky. Are radical Muslims really so alien in their thinking? Hardly. Think of the British colonial war and later the more pernicious American war against the Native Americans. Think of Sherman’s March to the Sea near the end of the Civil War -- which many scholars think is a momentous event in the history of warfare, the moment when someone bumped the world over some moral line by purposely committing terrorists acts against a civilian population. Think of our dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How many civilians were incinerated? 150,000, give or take. For what purpose? Well, wasn’t it to terrorize the Japanese public and government into surrender? Alien? Hardly.

So I don’t see Islamic terrorists as all that alien. But what about this matter of morals? Well, I will ask you similar questions as in our discussion of Pizarro. If you think all morals are relative, which you hint at, what are you proposing to do about terrorism? Just let it continue? You seem to think that’s the way to go. But can you really believe that? You actually hint that since we have no way to say that terrorists are wrong or bad, there is nothing we are morally permitted to do about terrorists. In fact, there is even a deeper hint in your comments that you might actually think that reason requires us to regard terrorism as good -- that because terrorists regard their terrorist actions as values of good to them, we are required to accept those values as good.

But let’s set those strange hints aside for the moment. You make no guess about what causes terrorism or what might cure it. But let’s imagine that you really do want to stop terrorism, regardless of those hints that you think we’re morally helpless in this situation. If your idea is 1) to blow the hell out of them, and then to hunt them down like dogs and hang them like cats, well, that’s the current course this country is taking in some ways. So you should be happy about how things are going. Let me say that I think that we have the perfect moral right and duty, even the responsibility, to hunt terrorists down and kill every last one of them (with the proviso that the hunting and killing should be performed in moral ways and by moral means). But that’s because I think they’re morally wrong, not because I think they’re morally good or because I think all morals are relative. Or if you’re idea is 2) to just let them go on killing at their leisure, since in your mind everyone’s bad is someone else’s good, well, then I think you’re just a plain ol’ "postmodern" fool. No one is obliged under any moral system to accept the killing of his kith and kin because someone else values the killing of those kith and kin. No one. This is the basic moral right of self-defense, which I believe is one of the very few truly universal moral principles.

So, Kev, I don’t know why you’re bringing up moral relativism. It doesn’t appear to have any bearing on the questions of the causes and cures of terrorism, the subject I’ve been excogitating upon. Look at it this way. If all morals are relative, then we Americans can do whatever we want and destroy terrorists in any way and by any means we wish. Fine. (Let me say, though, that this is why I think moral relativism rather dangerous: it tempts us to think that we can do ANYTHING we wish to get whatever we want.) But if we’re morally good and they’re evil, well, then we Americans also can go ahead and disable or destroy them in any way that is moral and effective. The only problem is if we’re morally evil and they’re good. I’ll have to excogitate on that possibility over the next week.

You’re right about the interpretation of the Bible, of course. But I don’t regard the Bible as the WORD OF GOD or as a sacred set of texts with any authority over me or anyone else, so that point is moot in regard to this issue.