Editor:
To complain of a columnist’s style is like complaining that a cactus sprouts spikes or that a dandelion sails seeds. The columnist is who he or she is, and the column appears in the newspaper to say so. The style of the columnist’s expression will not change much from week to week, nor will the attitude nor the tone. And the columnist’s politics, for the most part, will remain consistent.
So it is mostly self-indulgence, except for some possibility of prompting a worthwhile thought or question among the readers, which leads me to complain of two of your regular columnists. One columnist is too simple; the other is too complex. Neither of the two writes well about history. They have thoroughly dissimilar styles except that neither of them uses much detailed, clear historical information.
The too-simple writer is Donald Lambro, who says that President Bush “believes deep down inside that his decisions to replace terrorist dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan will stand the test of history” and that by that “test” Bush “will be proven right” (Herald, Jan. 11). Lambro’s thinking here is too simple because the decision to invade Iraq was not merely in order “to replace” a “terrorist dictatorship.”
Other writers more knowledgeable than is Lambro, particularly Peter W. Galbraith, have shown that Bush’s policy toward Iraq demonstrates an inattention to history, especially to the history of Iraq. Furthermore, according to Galbraith’s knowledgeable and convincing account, “The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End” (Simon & Schuster, 2006), no one initially ordered the military to prevent the looting of antiquities and libraries in Baghdad. The result was a vast loss of priceless artifacts and records. That lack of oversight showed a disdain for history.
If Lambro is too simple, another Herald columnist, Diana West, is too complex. Again, the difficulty is about history. Can the following statement possibly make any sense? “The question is, does Anti-Semitism’s origin in Islam, whether Christian or Islamic, become a chicken-egg question for scholars, or does it actually matter?” (Herald, Jan. 18) The meanings do not connect enough even to puzzle as a labyrinth. The generalities and abstractions merely pile up to sound as though underneath the pile there may be some profundity. But there is not. Absurdly, the title of West’s column is “Set history straight on anti-Semitism”!
Because both Lambro and West invoke history in a very broad sense, it seems relevant to consider the origins of European historical writing, especially the work of the ancient Greek “father of history,” Herodotus (c. 490 B.C.-c. 425 B.C.). A recent essay in The Atlantic (Jan./Feb. 2007) by Robert D. Kaplan has the heading “Thucydides may have been the more trustworthy historian, but Herodotus would have been more fun to share a wineskin with — and is a better guide to the god-filled geopolitics of the current era.”
The concluding paragraph of that essay contains these thoughts: “Given the adversaries we have fought, and are likely to fight still; given the mirages that cloud our own judgment about distant places about which we think we know much, but in fact know little; given all of that, the dreamlike delusions and psychoses revealed in the stories of Herodotus provide a richer insight into what we are up against than does much contemporary analysis. Coping with the world of the coming decades will require an arresting imagination. Leaders who cannot mentally escape their own narrow slots of existence will fail.”
Kaplan’s idea applies not only to political leaders but also to columnists, both simple and complex. The challenge is to “mentally escape their own narrow slots of existence.”
We readers, too, can work to overcome narrow-mindedness. A good way to do that, Herodotus seems to assure us, is to read history — that particularly memorable way of attending to humanity.
Luther Scales
To complain of a columnist’s style is like complaining that a cactus sprouts spikes or that a dandelion sails seeds. The columnist is who he or she is, and the column appears in the newspaper to say so. The style of the columnist’s expression will not change much from week to week, nor will the attitude nor the tone. And the columnist’s politics, for the most part, will remain consistent.
So it is mostly self-indulgence, except for some possibility of prompting a worthwhile thought or question among the readers, which leads me to complain of two of your regular columnists. One columnist is too simple; the other is too complex. Neither of the two writes well about history. They have thoroughly dissimilar styles except that neither of them uses much detailed, clear historical information.
The too-simple writer is Donald Lambro, who says that President Bush “believes deep down inside that his decisions to replace terrorist dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan will stand the test of history” and that by that “test” Bush “will be proven right” (Herald, Jan. 11). Lambro’s thinking here is too simple because the decision to invade Iraq was not merely in order “to replace” a “terrorist dictatorship.”
Other writers more knowledgeable than is Lambro, particularly Peter W. Galbraith, have shown that Bush’s policy toward Iraq demonstrates an inattention to history, especially to the history of Iraq. Furthermore, according to Galbraith’s knowledgeable and convincing account, “The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End” (Simon & Schuster, 2006), no one initially ordered the military to prevent the looting of antiquities and libraries in Baghdad. The result was a vast loss of priceless artifacts and records. That lack of oversight showed a disdain for history.
If Lambro is too simple, another Herald columnist, Diana West, is too complex. Again, the difficulty is about history. Can the following statement possibly make any sense? “The question is, does Anti-Semitism’s origin in Islam, whether Christian or Islamic, become a chicken-egg question for scholars, or does it actually matter?” (Herald, Jan. 18) The meanings do not connect enough even to puzzle as a labyrinth. The generalities and abstractions merely pile up to sound as though underneath the pile there may be some profundity. But there is not. Absurdly, the title of West’s column is “Set history straight on anti-Semitism”!
Because both Lambro and West invoke history in a very broad sense, it seems relevant to consider the origins of European historical writing, especially the work of the ancient Greek “father of history,” Herodotus (c. 490 B.C.-c. 425 B.C.). A recent essay in The Atlantic (Jan./Feb. 2007) by Robert D. Kaplan has the heading “Thucydides may have been the more trustworthy historian, but Herodotus would have been more fun to share a wineskin with — and is a better guide to the god-filled geopolitics of the current era.”
The concluding paragraph of that essay contains these thoughts: “Given the adversaries we have fought, and are likely to fight still; given the mirages that cloud our own judgment about distant places about which we think we know much, but in fact know little; given all of that, the dreamlike delusions and psychoses revealed in the stories of Herodotus provide a richer insight into what we are up against than does much contemporary analysis. Coping with the world of the coming decades will require an arresting imagination. Leaders who cannot mentally escape their own narrow slots of existence will fail.”
Kaplan’s idea applies not only to political leaders but also to columnists, both simple and complex. The challenge is to “mentally escape their own narrow slots of existence.”
We readers, too, can work to overcome narrow-mindedness. A good way to do that, Herodotus seems to assure us, is to read history — that particularly memorable way of attending to humanity.
Luther Scales