Well folks,
the Daily Globe Review is back after a long hiatus.
Why? well simply this Julian Asssange has kicked me in the ass hard enough that I will do my best to be a little disciplined with my time and attentions on the net.
If I see something imortant - to important to be ignored as much as it probably is...well then Daily Globe Review has a home for it.
I am also looking for associate editors, camera folk and fellow truth/transparency/real democracy to widen our coverge.
cheers,
the angry indy
Friday, December 3, 2010
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
a different slant on the civil war than what I recall from Godwin!
dd
A Jeffersonian View of the Civil War
by Donald W. Miller, Jr.
In the schoolbook account of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln rose to the Presidency and took the steps needed to end slavery. He led the country in a great Civil War against the slaveholding states that seceded, restored these states to the Union, and ended slavery. Accordingly, historians rate Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents.
People in the South, like my great-great-grandfather Louis Thomas Hicks, had a different view of the war. Louis Hicks fought in the Battle of Gettysburg in the Army of Northern Virginia, commanding the 20th North Carolina Regiment (in Iverson’s Brigade of Rodes Division in Ewell’s Second Corps). He led his regiment into action on the first day of the battle and was forced to surrender after losing eighty percent of his men (238 out of 300) in two-and-a-half hours of fighting. In his personal account of the battle, he wrote, "[As a prisoner] I lied awake, thinking of my comrades and the great cause for which we were willing to shed our last drop of blood." His daughter, Mary Lyde Williams, echoed similar sentiments in her Presentation Address given at the Unveiling of the North Carolina Memorial on the Battlefield of Gettysburg on July 3, 1929. She began her address with the words, "They wrote a constitution in which each state should be free." Four children, including her granddaughter, my mother, who was then 10 years old, removed the veil that covered the statue.
Today American children are taught in the nation’s schools, both in the North and South, that it was wrong for people to support the Confederacy and to fight and die for it. Well-intentioned, "right thinking" people equate anyone today who thinks that the South did the right thing by seceding from the Union as secretly approving of slavery. Indeed, such thinking has now reached the point where groups from both sides of the political spectrum, notably the NAACP and Southern Poverty Law Center on the left and the Cato Institute on the right, want to have the Confederate Battle Flag eradicated from public spaces. These people argue that the Confederate flag is offensive to African-Americans because it commemorates slavery.
In the standard account, the Civil War was an outcome of our Founding Fathers failure to address the institution of slavery in a republic that proclaimed in its Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." But was it really necessary to wage a four-year war to abolish slavery in the United States, one that ravaged half of the country and destroyed a generation of American men? Only the United States and Haiti freed their slaves by war. Every other country in the New World that had slaves, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, freed them in the 19th century peacefully.
The war did enable Lincoln to "save" the Union, but only in a geographic sense. The country ceased being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign states. Instead, America became a "nation" with a powerful federal government. Although the war freed four million slaves into poverty, it did not bring about a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln and historians such as James McPherson and Henry Jaffa say. For the nation as a whole the war did just the opposite: It initiated a process of centralization of government that has substantially restricted liberty and freedom in America, as historians Charles Adams and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have argued – Adams in his book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (published in 2000); and Hummel in his book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996).
The term Civil War is a misnomer. The South did not instigate a rebellion. Thirteen southern states in 1860-61 simply chose to secede from the Union and go their own way, like the thirteen colonies did when they seceded from Britain. A more accurate name for the war that took place between the northern and southern American states is the War for Southern Independence. Mainstream historiography presents the victors’ view, an account that focuses on the issue of slavery and downplays other considerations.
Up until the 19th century slavery in human societies was considered to be a normal state of affairs. The Old Testament of the Bible affirms that slaves are a form of property and that the children of a slave couple are the property of the slaves’ owner (Exodus 21:4). Abraham and Jacob kept slaves, and the New Testament says nothing against slavery. Slaves built the pyramids of Egypt, the Acropolis of Athens, and the coliseums in the Roman Empire. Africans exported 11,000,000 Black slaves to the New World – 4,000,000 to Brazil, 3,600,000 to the British and French West Indies, and 2,500,000 to Spanish possessions in Central and South America. About 500,000 slaves, 5 per cent of the total number shipped to the New World, came to America. Today slavery still exists in some parts of Africa, notably in Sudan and Mauritania.
Britain heralded the end of slavery, in the Western world at least, with its Bill of Abolition, passed in 1807. This Bill made the African slave trade (but not slaveholding) illegal. Later that year the United States adopted a similar bill, called the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, which prohibited bringing slaves into any port in the country, including into the southern slaveholding states. Congress strengthened this prohibition in 1819 when it decreed the slave trade to be a form of piracy, punishable by death. In 1833, Britain enacted an Emancipation Law, ending slavery throughout the British Empire, and Parliament allocated twenty million pounds to buy slaves’ freedom from their owners. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer rightly described this action as one of the greatest acts of collective compassion in the history of humankind. This happened peacefully and without any serious slave uprisings or attacks on their former owners, even in Jamaica where a population of 30,000 whites owned 250,000 slaves.
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9). With no fugitive slave laws in neighboring states that would return fugitive slaves to their owners, the value of slaves as property drops owing to increased costs incurred to guard against their escape. With slaves having a place to escape to in the North and with the supply of new slaves restricted by its Constitution, slavery in the Confederate states would have ended without war. A slave’s decreasing property value, alone, would have soon made the institution unsustainable, irrespective of more moral and humanitarian considerations.
The rallying call in the North at the beginning of the war was "preserve the Union," not "free the slaves." Although certainly a contentious political issue and detested by abolitionists, in 1861 slavery nevertheless was not a major public issue. Protestant Americans in the North were more concerned about the growing number of Catholic immigrants than they were about slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.
After 17 months of war things were not going well for the North, especially in its closely watched Eastern Theater. In the five great battles fought there from July 1861 through September 17, 1862, the changing cast of Union generals failed to win a single victory. The Confederate army won three: First Bull Run (or First Manassas) on July 21,1861; Seven Days – six major battles fought from June 25-July 1, 1862 during the Union army’s Peninsular Campaign that, in sum, amounted to a strategic Confederate victory when McClellan withdrew his army from the peninsula; and Second Bull Run (or Second Manassas) on August 29-30, 1862. Two battles were indecisive: Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks) on May 31-June 1, 1862, and Antietam (or Sharpsburg) on September 17, 1862. In the West, Grant took Fort Donelson on February 14, 1862 and captured 14,000 Confederate soldiers. But then he was caught by surprise in the battle of Shiloh (or Pittsburg Landing) on April 6-7, 1862 and lost 13,000 out of a total of 51,000 men that fought in this two-day battle. Sickened by the carnage, people in the North did not appreciate at the time that this battle was a strategic victory for the North. Then came Antietam on September 17, the bloodiest day in the entire war; the Union army lost more than 12,000 of its 60,000 troops engaged in the battle.
Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? The Confederates posed no military threat to the North. Perhaps it would be better to let the southern states go, along with their 4 million slaves. If it was going to win, the North needed a more compelling reason to continue the war than to preserve the Union. The North needed a cause for continuing the war, as Lincoln put the matter in his Second Inaugural Address, that was willed by God, where "the judgments of the Lord" determined the losses sustained and its outcome.
Five days after the Battle of Antietam, on September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a "war measure," as Lincoln put it. Foreign correspondents covering the war recognized it as a brilliant propaganda coup. Emancipation would take place only in rebel states not under Union control, their state sovereignty in the matter of slavery arguably forfeited as a result of their having seceded from the Union. The president could not abolish slavery; if not done at the state level, abolition would require a constitutional amendment. Slaveholders and their slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana occupied by Union troops were exempt from the edict. Slaves in the Confederacy would be "forever free" on January 1, 1863 – one hundred days after the Proclamation was issued – but only if a state remained in "rebellion" after that date. Rebel states that rejoined the Union and sent elected representatives to Congress before January 1, 1863 could keep their slaves. Such states would no longer be considered in rebellion and so their sovereignty regarding the peculiar institution would be restored. As the London Spectator put it, in its October 11, 1862 issue: "The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."
Regarding slaves in states loyal to the government or occupied by Union troops, Lincoln proposed three constitutional amendments in his December 1862 State of the Union message to Congress. The first was that slaves not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation be freed gradually over a 37-year period, to be completed by January 1, 1900. The second provided compensation to owners for the loss of their slave property. The third was that the government transport freed Blacks, at government expense, out of the country and relocate them in Latin America and Africa. Lincoln wrote that freed blacks need "new homes [to] be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race." For Lincoln, emancipation and deportation were inseparably connected. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells wrote in his diary that Lincoln "thought it essential to provide an asylum for a race which he had emancipated, but which could never be recognized or admitted to be our equals." As historian Leone Bennett Jr. puts it in his book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000), "It was an article of faith to him [Lincoln] that emancipation and deportation went together like firecrackers and July Fourth, and that you couldn’t have one without the other."
Congress refused to consider Lincoln’s proposals, which Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune labeled whales’ tubs of "gradualism, compensation, [and] exportation." None of the Confederate States took the opportunity to rejoin the Union in the 100-day window offered and the war continued for another two years and four months. Eight months later the 13th Amendment was ratified, and slavery ended everywhere in the United States (without gradualism, compensation, or exportation).
Black and White Americans sustained racial and political wounds from the war and the subsequent Reconstruction that proved deep and long lasting. Northern abolitionists wanted southern Black slaves to be freed, but certainly did not want them to move north and live alongside them. Indiana and Illinois, in particular, had laws that barred African-Americans from settling. The military occupation and "Reconstruction" the South was forced to endure after the war also slowed healing of the wounds. At a gathering of ex-confederate soldiers shortly before he died in 1870, Robert E. Lee said,
If I had foreseen the use those people [Yankees] designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.
Why were business and political leaders in the North so intent on keeping the southern states in the Union? It was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, solely a fiscal matter. The principal source of tax revenue for the federal government before the Civil War was a tariff on imports. There was no income tax, except for one declared unconstitutional after its enactment during the Civil War. Tariffs imposed by the federal government not only accounted for most of the federal budget, they also raised the price of imported goods to a level where the less-efficient manufacturers of the northeast could be competitive. The former Vice-President John C. Calhoun put it this way:
"The North had adopted a system of revenue and disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North… the South, as the great exporting portion of the Union, has in reality paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue."
In March 1861, the New York Evening Post editorialized on this point:
That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.
Given the serious financial difficulties the Union would face if the Southern states were a separate republic on its border engaging in duty-free trade with Britain, the Post urged the Union to hold on to its custom houses in the Southern ports and have them continue to collect duty. The Post goes on to say that incoming ships to the "rebel states" that try to evade the North’s custom houses should be considered as carrying contraband and be intercepted.
Observers in Britain looked beyond the rhetoric of "preserve the Union" and saw what was really at stake. Charles Dickens views on the subject were typical:
Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.
Karl Marx seconded this view:
The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.
The South fought the war for essentially the same reason that the American colonies fought the Revolutionary War. The central grievance of the American colonies in the 18th century was the taxes imposed on them by Britain. Colonists particularly objected to the Stamp Act, which required them to purchase an official British stamp and place it on all documents in order for them to be valid. The colonists also objected to the import tariff that Britain placed on sugar and other goods (the Sugar Act).
After the enactment of what was called the "Tariff of Abomination" in 1828, promoted by Henry Clay, the tax on imports ranged between 20-30%. It rose further in March 1861 when Lincoln, at the start of his presidency, signed the Morrill Tariff into law. This tax was far more onerous than the one forced on the American colonies by Britain in the 18th century.
Lincoln coerced the South to fire the first shots when, against the initial advice of most of his cabinet, he dispatched ships carrying troops and munitions to resupply Fort Sumter, site of the customs house at Charleston. Charleston militia took the bait and bombarded the fort on April 12, 1861. After those first shots were fired the pro-Union press branded Southern secession an "armed rebellion" and called for Lincoln to suppress it.
Congress was adjourned at the time and for the next three months, ignoring his constitutional duty to call this legislative branch of government back in session during a time of emergency, Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers and did things, like raise an army, that only Congress is supposed to do. He shut down newspapers that disagreed with his war policy, more than 300 of them. He ordered his military officers to lock up political opponents, thousands of them. Although the exact number is not known, Lincoln may well have arrested and imprisoned more than 20,000 political opponents, southern sympathizers, and people suspected of being disloyal to the Union, creating what one researcher has termed a 19th century "American gulag," a forerunner of the 20th century’s political prison and labor camps in the former Soviet Union. Lincoln denied these nonviolent dissenters their right of free speech and suspended the privilege of Habeas Corpus, something only Congress in a time of war has the power to do. Lincoln’s soldiers arrested civilians, often arbitrarily, without any charges being filed; and, if held at all, military commissions conducted trials. He permitted Union troops to arrest the Mayor of Baltimore (then the third largest city in the Union), its Chief of Police and a Maryland congressman, along with 31 state legislators. When Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote an opinion that said these actions were unlawful and violated the Constitution, Lincoln ignored the ruling.
Lincoln called up an army of 75,000 men to invade the seven southern states that had seceded and force them back into the Union. By unilaterally recruiting troops to invade these states, without first calling Congress into session to consider the matter and give its consent, Lincoln made an error in judgment that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. At the time, only seven states had seceded. But when Lincoln announced his intention to bring these states back into the Union by force, four additional states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – seceded and joined the Confederacy. Slavery was not the issue. The issue was the very nature of the American union. If the President of the United States intended to hold the Union together by force, they wanted out. When these four states seceded and joined the Confederacy rather than send troops to support Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions, the Confederacy became much more viable and the war much more horrible.
From the time Lincoln entered politics as a candidate for state legislature in 1832, he championed a political agenda known as the "American System." First advocated by his idol and mentor, Henry Clay, it was a three-part program of protective tariffs, internal improvements, and centralized banking. This program "tied economic development to strong centralized national authority," as Robert Johannsen puts it in Lincoln, the South, And Slavery. Lincoln believed that import tariffs were necessary, at the expense of consumers. He believed that American industries needed to be shielded from foreign competition and cheap imported goods. The "internal improvements" he advocated were simply subsidies for industry, i.e., corporate welfare. Abraham Lincoln was the first president to give us centralized banking, with paper money not backed by gold.
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America forbid protectionist tariffs, outlawed government subsidies to private businesses, and made congressional appropriations subject to approval by a two-thirds majority vote. It enjoined Congress from initiating constitutional amendments, leaving that power to the constituent states; and limited its president to a single six-year term. When the South lost, instead of a Jeffersonian republic of free trade and limited constitutional government, the stage was set for the United States to become an American Empire ruled by a central authority. In starting his war against the Confederate States, Lincoln was not seeking the "preservation of the Union" in its traditional sense. He sought the preservation of the Northern economy by means of transforming the federal government into a centralized welfare-warfare-police state.
The failure of the South to win the War for Southern Independence was a blow to liberty. The Confederate lyrics to the song "Battle Cry of Freedom" read:
Down with the eagle
And up with the cross!
We’ll rally ‘round the bonny flag
We’ll rally once again
Shout, shout the battle cry of freedom
Paroled from the prison camp at Johnson’s Island, Ohio shortly before the end of the war, my grandparent Louis Hicks walked, barefoot, back to North Carolina to his home named "Liberty Hall" in the town of Faison. But instead of enjoying a new birth of freedom, he and his family, along with other people in the South, had to endure a twelve-year military occupation and an oppressive Reconstruction instituted by radical republicans.
Reflecting on the War for Southern Independence let us hope that the Confederate Battle Flag that Louis Thomas Hicks’ North Carolina regiment carried with it into battle at Gettysburg, with the cross of Scotland’s patron saint emblazoned on it, will come to be viewed in the 21st century, not as an badge of slavery, which it is not, but as a symbol of opposition to centralized government power and tyranny.
Notes
The Confederate Battle Flag has 13 white stars superimposed on a blue Cross of St. Andrew, centered on a red backdrop. Each star represents a state that seceded from the Union, which includes Kentucky and Missouri, the last two states to be admitted into the Confederacy in late 1861. Throughout the war, however, they remained largely under Union control. St. Andrew was the younger brother of St. Peter and is the patron saint of Scotland.
The population of the United States in 1860 was 31,101,000, of which 21,244,000 lived in the North and 10,957,000 in the Confederacy. In the Confederate states 5,447,000 of these people were white, 133,000 free black, and 3,951,000 were slaves. There were 320,000 deaths in Union forces, 3.2 percent of the total male population; and 300,000 deaths in the Confederate forces, 9.7 percent of the (white) male population. This death rate, with the current population of the United States 284,050,000, would be equivalent to 6.5 million men being killed today. Most of those killed were teenagers and men in their 20s.
In his First Inaugural Address, for United States Lincoln uses the term Union. In his Gettysburg Address, however, instead of Union he uses the word nation, which implies a closer association of states under centralized control, as opposed to a looser association connoted by the word Union, of separate and sovereign states. Likewise, in his Second Inaugural Address Lincoln only uses the word Union when referring to the country as it was when he gave his First Inaugural Address four years earlier, before the war began; he uses the word nation for the country it had become in 1865. In these two later speeches he says that the war was fought to preserve the "nation," that the "nation" shall have a new birth of freedom, and that we must bind up the "nation’s wounds."
In a civil war the warring sides battle for control of the central government. The term "civil war" was coined in England in the 17th century to identify the war fought between supporters of Charles I and the Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell for control of the government. The South had no designs on the federal government of the North, headquartered in Washington, D. C. It did not want to run that government. The breakaway Southern States asserted their independence, like the American colonies did from Britain eighty-five years before, formed their own Confederate States of America and placed their seat of government in Richmond, Virginia.
The American Republic was founded on the concept that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and property. Black slaves, being sentient human beings, should therefore be as equally free and independent, with equality under the law, as White human beings; but, as slaves, they were also someone’s property and subject to the due process of law in that regard. Federalist Paper No. 54 addresses the problem of counting slaves in the population with regard to legislative representation, concluding that slaves are divested as "two-fifths of the MAN" and three-fifths as capital, or property.
After the war Robert E. Lee also wrote, "The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution [of slavery], and were quite willing to see it abolished. But with them in relation to this subject is a serious question today. Unless some humane course, based on wisdom and Christian principles, is adopted, you do them great injustice in setting them free." (Thomas Nelson Page, Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier [New York, 1911], page 38.) Lee did not own slaves (he freed his in the 1850s), nor did a number of his most trusted lieutenants, including generals A. P. Hill, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, J. E. Johnston, and J. E. B. Stuart.
The source references for these quotes can be found in Charles Adams’ book When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession.
Colonists also objected to the search and seizure of their property without a specific warrant, and to being denied the right of trial by jury, which the British instituted to help them more easily catch and imprison smugglers who avoided paying taxes on imported goods.
Suggested Reading
Books
Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
In this book Charles Adams does to our understanding of the Civil War what Copernicus did to our ancestors’ understanding of the solar system. The sun does not rotate around the Earth and slavery did not cause the Civil War. Adams presents a compelling case for the true, financial cause of the war. A must read.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996)
With extensive documentation and in an erudite fashion, the author shows how the Civil War was, indeed, a disaster for liberty. The bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter all alone are worth the price of the book.
Francis W. Springer, War for What? (Nashville: Bill Coats Ltd., 1990)
A little known but very insightful view of the Civil War published a year before the author died at the age of 92. He puts the African slave trade, import tariffs, the South’s two-crop economy, Lincoln, and the true nature of the war into clear focus, anticipating Adams’ groundbreaking work by a decade.
David Gordon (Editor), Secession, State & Liberty (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998)
Eleven articles on secession based on papers presented at a conference on this subject by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1995. Those by Donald Livingson, Steven Yates, Murray N. Rothbard, Thomas DiLorenzo, and James Ostrowski are particularly important.
Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson, 2000)
Bennett debunks the standard view of Lincoln as "the great emancipator." He shows that Lincoln believed Blacks to be an inferior race. Consequently, they could never have equal "political" rights with White people and be given the full prerogatives of citizenship. The author presents irrefutable evidence that Lincoln wanted to have freed Blacks transported, at government expense, out of the country and relocated somewhere else.
Articles
By Thomas J. DiLorenzo:
* "The Great Centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War Between the States" (Fall 1998)
* "Lincoln’s Economic Legacy" (February 9, 2001)
* "Trade and the Rise of Freedom" (January 31, 2000)
* "Henry Clay: National Socialist" (The Free Market, March 1998)
* "Libertarians and the Confederate Battle Flag"
* "Birth of an Empire" (The Free Market, July 1997)
By Joe Sobran
* "Slavery in Perspective" (May 31, 2001)
* "McCarthyism and Lincolnism" (April 26, 2001)
* "The Ultimate Lincoln" (April 5, 2001)
* "Lincoln with Fangs" (February 8, 2001)
* "Slavery, No; Secession, Yes" (January 16, 2001)
* "How Tyranny Came to America"
A Jeffersonian View of the Civil War
by Donald W. Miller, Jr.
In the schoolbook account of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln rose to the Presidency and took the steps needed to end slavery. He led the country in a great Civil War against the slaveholding states that seceded, restored these states to the Union, and ended slavery. Accordingly, historians rate Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents.
People in the South, like my great-great-grandfather Louis Thomas Hicks, had a different view of the war. Louis Hicks fought in the Battle of Gettysburg in the Army of Northern Virginia, commanding the 20th North Carolina Regiment (in Iverson’s Brigade of Rodes Division in Ewell’s Second Corps). He led his regiment into action on the first day of the battle and was forced to surrender after losing eighty percent of his men (238 out of 300) in two-and-a-half hours of fighting. In his personal account of the battle, he wrote, "[As a prisoner] I lied awake, thinking of my comrades and the great cause for which we were willing to shed our last drop of blood." His daughter, Mary Lyde Williams, echoed similar sentiments in her Presentation Address given at the Unveiling of the North Carolina Memorial on the Battlefield of Gettysburg on July 3, 1929. She began her address with the words, "They wrote a constitution in which each state should be free." Four children, including her granddaughter, my mother, who was then 10 years old, removed the veil that covered the statue.
Today American children are taught in the nation’s schools, both in the North and South, that it was wrong for people to support the Confederacy and to fight and die for it. Well-intentioned, "right thinking" people equate anyone today who thinks that the South did the right thing by seceding from the Union as secretly approving of slavery. Indeed, such thinking has now reached the point where groups from both sides of the political spectrum, notably the NAACP and Southern Poverty Law Center on the left and the Cato Institute on the right, want to have the Confederate Battle Flag eradicated from public spaces. These people argue that the Confederate flag is offensive to African-Americans because it commemorates slavery.
In the standard account, the Civil War was an outcome of our Founding Fathers failure to address the institution of slavery in a republic that proclaimed in its Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." But was it really necessary to wage a four-year war to abolish slavery in the United States, one that ravaged half of the country and destroyed a generation of American men? Only the United States and Haiti freed their slaves by war. Every other country in the New World that had slaves, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, freed them in the 19th century peacefully.
The war did enable Lincoln to "save" the Union, but only in a geographic sense. The country ceased being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign states. Instead, America became a "nation" with a powerful federal government. Although the war freed four million slaves into poverty, it did not bring about a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln and historians such as James McPherson and Henry Jaffa say. For the nation as a whole the war did just the opposite: It initiated a process of centralization of government that has substantially restricted liberty and freedom in America, as historians Charles Adams and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have argued – Adams in his book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (published in 2000); and Hummel in his book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996).
The term Civil War is a misnomer. The South did not instigate a rebellion. Thirteen southern states in 1860-61 simply chose to secede from the Union and go their own way, like the thirteen colonies did when they seceded from Britain. A more accurate name for the war that took place between the northern and southern American states is the War for Southern Independence. Mainstream historiography presents the victors’ view, an account that focuses on the issue of slavery and downplays other considerations.
Up until the 19th century slavery in human societies was considered to be a normal state of affairs. The Old Testament of the Bible affirms that slaves are a form of property and that the children of a slave couple are the property of the slaves’ owner (Exodus 21:4). Abraham and Jacob kept slaves, and the New Testament says nothing against slavery. Slaves built the pyramids of Egypt, the Acropolis of Athens, and the coliseums in the Roman Empire. Africans exported 11,000,000 Black slaves to the New World – 4,000,000 to Brazil, 3,600,000 to the British and French West Indies, and 2,500,000 to Spanish possessions in Central and South America. About 500,000 slaves, 5 per cent of the total number shipped to the New World, came to America. Today slavery still exists in some parts of Africa, notably in Sudan and Mauritania.
Britain heralded the end of slavery, in the Western world at least, with its Bill of Abolition, passed in 1807. This Bill made the African slave trade (but not slaveholding) illegal. Later that year the United States adopted a similar bill, called the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, which prohibited bringing slaves into any port in the country, including into the southern slaveholding states. Congress strengthened this prohibition in 1819 when it decreed the slave trade to be a form of piracy, punishable by death. In 1833, Britain enacted an Emancipation Law, ending slavery throughout the British Empire, and Parliament allocated twenty million pounds to buy slaves’ freedom from their owners. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer rightly described this action as one of the greatest acts of collective compassion in the history of humankind. This happened peacefully and without any serious slave uprisings or attacks on their former owners, even in Jamaica where a population of 30,000 whites owned 250,000 slaves.
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9). With no fugitive slave laws in neighboring states that would return fugitive slaves to their owners, the value of slaves as property drops owing to increased costs incurred to guard against their escape. With slaves having a place to escape to in the North and with the supply of new slaves restricted by its Constitution, slavery in the Confederate states would have ended without war. A slave’s decreasing property value, alone, would have soon made the institution unsustainable, irrespective of more moral and humanitarian considerations.
The rallying call in the North at the beginning of the war was "preserve the Union," not "free the slaves." Although certainly a contentious political issue and detested by abolitionists, in 1861 slavery nevertheless was not a major public issue. Protestant Americans in the North were more concerned about the growing number of Catholic immigrants than they were about slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.
After 17 months of war things were not going well for the North, especially in its closely watched Eastern Theater. In the five great battles fought there from July 1861 through September 17, 1862, the changing cast of Union generals failed to win a single victory. The Confederate army won three: First Bull Run (or First Manassas) on July 21,1861; Seven Days – six major battles fought from June 25-July 1, 1862 during the Union army’s Peninsular Campaign that, in sum, amounted to a strategic Confederate victory when McClellan withdrew his army from the peninsula; and Second Bull Run (or Second Manassas) on August 29-30, 1862. Two battles were indecisive: Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks) on May 31-June 1, 1862, and Antietam (or Sharpsburg) on September 17, 1862. In the West, Grant took Fort Donelson on February 14, 1862 and captured 14,000 Confederate soldiers. But then he was caught by surprise in the battle of Shiloh (or Pittsburg Landing) on April 6-7, 1862 and lost 13,000 out of a total of 51,000 men that fought in this two-day battle. Sickened by the carnage, people in the North did not appreciate at the time that this battle was a strategic victory for the North. Then came Antietam on September 17, the bloodiest day in the entire war; the Union army lost more than 12,000 of its 60,000 troops engaged in the battle.
Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? The Confederates posed no military threat to the North. Perhaps it would be better to let the southern states go, along with their 4 million slaves. If it was going to win, the North needed a more compelling reason to continue the war than to preserve the Union. The North needed a cause for continuing the war, as Lincoln put the matter in his Second Inaugural Address, that was willed by God, where "the judgments of the Lord" determined the losses sustained and its outcome.
Five days after the Battle of Antietam, on September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a "war measure," as Lincoln put it. Foreign correspondents covering the war recognized it as a brilliant propaganda coup. Emancipation would take place only in rebel states not under Union control, their state sovereignty in the matter of slavery arguably forfeited as a result of their having seceded from the Union. The president could not abolish slavery; if not done at the state level, abolition would require a constitutional amendment. Slaveholders and their slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana occupied by Union troops were exempt from the edict. Slaves in the Confederacy would be "forever free" on January 1, 1863 – one hundred days after the Proclamation was issued – but only if a state remained in "rebellion" after that date. Rebel states that rejoined the Union and sent elected representatives to Congress before January 1, 1863 could keep their slaves. Such states would no longer be considered in rebellion and so their sovereignty regarding the peculiar institution would be restored. As the London Spectator put it, in its October 11, 1862 issue: "The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."
Regarding slaves in states loyal to the government or occupied by Union troops, Lincoln proposed three constitutional amendments in his December 1862 State of the Union message to Congress. The first was that slaves not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation be freed gradually over a 37-year period, to be completed by January 1, 1900. The second provided compensation to owners for the loss of their slave property. The third was that the government transport freed Blacks, at government expense, out of the country and relocate them in Latin America and Africa. Lincoln wrote that freed blacks need "new homes [to] be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race." For Lincoln, emancipation and deportation were inseparably connected. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells wrote in his diary that Lincoln "thought it essential to provide an asylum for a race which he had emancipated, but which could never be recognized or admitted to be our equals." As historian Leone Bennett Jr. puts it in his book Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000), "It was an article of faith to him [Lincoln] that emancipation and deportation went together like firecrackers and July Fourth, and that you couldn’t have one without the other."
Congress refused to consider Lincoln’s proposals, which Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune labeled whales’ tubs of "gradualism, compensation, [and] exportation." None of the Confederate States took the opportunity to rejoin the Union in the 100-day window offered and the war continued for another two years and four months. Eight months later the 13th Amendment was ratified, and slavery ended everywhere in the United States (without gradualism, compensation, or exportation).
Black and White Americans sustained racial and political wounds from the war and the subsequent Reconstruction that proved deep and long lasting. Northern abolitionists wanted southern Black slaves to be freed, but certainly did not want them to move north and live alongside them. Indiana and Illinois, in particular, had laws that barred African-Americans from settling. The military occupation and "Reconstruction" the South was forced to endure after the war also slowed healing of the wounds. At a gathering of ex-confederate soldiers shortly before he died in 1870, Robert E. Lee said,
If I had foreseen the use those people [Yankees] designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.
Why were business and political leaders in the North so intent on keeping the southern states in the Union? It was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, solely a fiscal matter. The principal source of tax revenue for the federal government before the Civil War was a tariff on imports. There was no income tax, except for one declared unconstitutional after its enactment during the Civil War. Tariffs imposed by the federal government not only accounted for most of the federal budget, they also raised the price of imported goods to a level where the less-efficient manufacturers of the northeast could be competitive. The former Vice-President John C. Calhoun put it this way:
"The North had adopted a system of revenue and disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed upon the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the North… the South, as the great exporting portion of the Union, has in reality paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue."
In March 1861, the New York Evening Post editorialized on this point:
That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.
Given the serious financial difficulties the Union would face if the Southern states were a separate republic on its border engaging in duty-free trade with Britain, the Post urged the Union to hold on to its custom houses in the Southern ports and have them continue to collect duty. The Post goes on to say that incoming ships to the "rebel states" that try to evade the North’s custom houses should be considered as carrying contraband and be intercepted.
Observers in Britain looked beyond the rhetoric of "preserve the Union" and saw what was really at stake. Charles Dickens views on the subject were typical:
Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.
Karl Marx seconded this view:
The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.
The South fought the war for essentially the same reason that the American colonies fought the Revolutionary War. The central grievance of the American colonies in the 18th century was the taxes imposed on them by Britain. Colonists particularly objected to the Stamp Act, which required them to purchase an official British stamp and place it on all documents in order for them to be valid. The colonists also objected to the import tariff that Britain placed on sugar and other goods (the Sugar Act).
After the enactment of what was called the "Tariff of Abomination" in 1828, promoted by Henry Clay, the tax on imports ranged between 20-30%. It rose further in March 1861 when Lincoln, at the start of his presidency, signed the Morrill Tariff into law. This tax was far more onerous than the one forced on the American colonies by Britain in the 18th century.
Lincoln coerced the South to fire the first shots when, against the initial advice of most of his cabinet, he dispatched ships carrying troops and munitions to resupply Fort Sumter, site of the customs house at Charleston. Charleston militia took the bait and bombarded the fort on April 12, 1861. After those first shots were fired the pro-Union press branded Southern secession an "armed rebellion" and called for Lincoln to suppress it.
Congress was adjourned at the time and for the next three months, ignoring his constitutional duty to call this legislative branch of government back in session during a time of emergency, Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers and did things, like raise an army, that only Congress is supposed to do. He shut down newspapers that disagreed with his war policy, more than 300 of them. He ordered his military officers to lock up political opponents, thousands of them. Although the exact number is not known, Lincoln may well have arrested and imprisoned more than 20,000 political opponents, southern sympathizers, and people suspected of being disloyal to the Union, creating what one researcher has termed a 19th century "American gulag," a forerunner of the 20th century’s political prison and labor camps in the former Soviet Union. Lincoln denied these nonviolent dissenters their right of free speech and suspended the privilege of Habeas Corpus, something only Congress in a time of war has the power to do. Lincoln’s soldiers arrested civilians, often arbitrarily, without any charges being filed; and, if held at all, military commissions conducted trials. He permitted Union troops to arrest the Mayor of Baltimore (then the third largest city in the Union), its Chief of Police and a Maryland congressman, along with 31 state legislators. When Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote an opinion that said these actions were unlawful and violated the Constitution, Lincoln ignored the ruling.
Lincoln called up an army of 75,000 men to invade the seven southern states that had seceded and force them back into the Union. By unilaterally recruiting troops to invade these states, without first calling Congress into session to consider the matter and give its consent, Lincoln made an error in judgment that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. At the time, only seven states had seceded. But when Lincoln announced his intention to bring these states back into the Union by force, four additional states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – seceded and joined the Confederacy. Slavery was not the issue. The issue was the very nature of the American union. If the President of the United States intended to hold the Union together by force, they wanted out. When these four states seceded and joined the Confederacy rather than send troops to support Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions, the Confederacy became much more viable and the war much more horrible.
From the time Lincoln entered politics as a candidate for state legislature in 1832, he championed a political agenda known as the "American System." First advocated by his idol and mentor, Henry Clay, it was a three-part program of protective tariffs, internal improvements, and centralized banking. This program "tied economic development to strong centralized national authority," as Robert Johannsen puts it in Lincoln, the South, And Slavery. Lincoln believed that import tariffs were necessary, at the expense of consumers. He believed that American industries needed to be shielded from foreign competition and cheap imported goods. The "internal improvements" he advocated were simply subsidies for industry, i.e., corporate welfare. Abraham Lincoln was the first president to give us centralized banking, with paper money not backed by gold.
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America forbid protectionist tariffs, outlawed government subsidies to private businesses, and made congressional appropriations subject to approval by a two-thirds majority vote. It enjoined Congress from initiating constitutional amendments, leaving that power to the constituent states; and limited its president to a single six-year term. When the South lost, instead of a Jeffersonian republic of free trade and limited constitutional government, the stage was set for the United States to become an American Empire ruled by a central authority. In starting his war against the Confederate States, Lincoln was not seeking the "preservation of the Union" in its traditional sense. He sought the preservation of the Northern economy by means of transforming the federal government into a centralized welfare-warfare-police state.
The failure of the South to win the War for Southern Independence was a blow to liberty. The Confederate lyrics to the song "Battle Cry of Freedom" read:
Down with the eagle
And up with the cross!
We’ll rally ‘round the bonny flag
We’ll rally once again
Shout, shout the battle cry of freedom
Paroled from the prison camp at Johnson’s Island, Ohio shortly before the end of the war, my grandparent Louis Hicks walked, barefoot, back to North Carolina to his home named "Liberty Hall" in the town of Faison. But instead of enjoying a new birth of freedom, he and his family, along with other people in the South, had to endure a twelve-year military occupation and an oppressive Reconstruction instituted by radical republicans.
Reflecting on the War for Southern Independence let us hope that the Confederate Battle Flag that Louis Thomas Hicks’ North Carolina regiment carried with it into battle at Gettysburg, with the cross of Scotland’s patron saint emblazoned on it, will come to be viewed in the 21st century, not as an badge of slavery, which it is not, but as a symbol of opposition to centralized government power and tyranny.
Notes
The Confederate Battle Flag has 13 white stars superimposed on a blue Cross of St. Andrew, centered on a red backdrop. Each star represents a state that seceded from the Union, which includes Kentucky and Missouri, the last two states to be admitted into the Confederacy in late 1861. Throughout the war, however, they remained largely under Union control. St. Andrew was the younger brother of St. Peter and is the patron saint of Scotland.
The population of the United States in 1860 was 31,101,000, of which 21,244,000 lived in the North and 10,957,000 in the Confederacy. In the Confederate states 5,447,000 of these people were white, 133,000 free black, and 3,951,000 were slaves. There were 320,000 deaths in Union forces, 3.2 percent of the total male population; and 300,000 deaths in the Confederate forces, 9.7 percent of the (white) male population. This death rate, with the current population of the United States 284,050,000, would be equivalent to 6.5 million men being killed today. Most of those killed were teenagers and men in their 20s.
In his First Inaugural Address, for United States Lincoln uses the term Union. In his Gettysburg Address, however, instead of Union he uses the word nation, which implies a closer association of states under centralized control, as opposed to a looser association connoted by the word Union, of separate and sovereign states. Likewise, in his Second Inaugural Address Lincoln only uses the word Union when referring to the country as it was when he gave his First Inaugural Address four years earlier, before the war began; he uses the word nation for the country it had become in 1865. In these two later speeches he says that the war was fought to preserve the "nation," that the "nation" shall have a new birth of freedom, and that we must bind up the "nation’s wounds."
In a civil war the warring sides battle for control of the central government. The term "civil war" was coined in England in the 17th century to identify the war fought between supporters of Charles I and the Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell for control of the government. The South had no designs on the federal government of the North, headquartered in Washington, D. C. It did not want to run that government. The breakaway Southern States asserted their independence, like the American colonies did from Britain eighty-five years before, formed their own Confederate States of America and placed their seat of government in Richmond, Virginia.
The American Republic was founded on the concept that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and property. Black slaves, being sentient human beings, should therefore be as equally free and independent, with equality under the law, as White human beings; but, as slaves, they were also someone’s property and subject to the due process of law in that regard. Federalist Paper No. 54 addresses the problem of counting slaves in the population with regard to legislative representation, concluding that slaves are divested as "two-fifths of the MAN" and three-fifths as capital, or property.
After the war Robert E. Lee also wrote, "The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution [of slavery], and were quite willing to see it abolished. But with them in relation to this subject is a serious question today. Unless some humane course, based on wisdom and Christian principles, is adopted, you do them great injustice in setting them free." (Thomas Nelson Page, Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier [New York, 1911], page 38.) Lee did not own slaves (he freed his in the 1850s), nor did a number of his most trusted lieutenants, including generals A. P. Hill, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, J. E. Johnston, and J. E. B. Stuart.
The source references for these quotes can be found in Charles Adams’ book When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession.
Colonists also objected to the search and seizure of their property without a specific warrant, and to being denied the right of trial by jury, which the British instituted to help them more easily catch and imprison smugglers who avoided paying taxes on imported goods.
Suggested Reading
Books
Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
In this book Charles Adams does to our understanding of the Civil War what Copernicus did to our ancestors’ understanding of the solar system. The sun does not rotate around the Earth and slavery did not cause the Civil War. Adams presents a compelling case for the true, financial cause of the war. A must read.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996)
With extensive documentation and in an erudite fashion, the author shows how the Civil War was, indeed, a disaster for liberty. The bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter all alone are worth the price of the book.
Francis W. Springer, War for What? (Nashville: Bill Coats Ltd., 1990)
A little known but very insightful view of the Civil War published a year before the author died at the age of 92. He puts the African slave trade, import tariffs, the South’s two-crop economy, Lincoln, and the true nature of the war into clear focus, anticipating Adams’ groundbreaking work by a decade.
David Gordon (Editor), Secession, State & Liberty (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998)
Eleven articles on secession based on papers presented at a conference on this subject by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1995. Those by Donald Livingson, Steven Yates, Murray N. Rothbard, Thomas DiLorenzo, and James Ostrowski are particularly important.
Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson, 2000)
Bennett debunks the standard view of Lincoln as "the great emancipator." He shows that Lincoln believed Blacks to be an inferior race. Consequently, they could never have equal "political" rights with White people and be given the full prerogatives of citizenship. The author presents irrefutable evidence that Lincoln wanted to have freed Blacks transported, at government expense, out of the country and relocated somewhere else.
Articles
By Thomas J. DiLorenzo:
* "The Great Centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War Between the States" (Fall 1998)
* "Lincoln’s Economic Legacy" (February 9, 2001)
* "Trade and the Rise of Freedom" (January 31, 2000)
* "Henry Clay: National Socialist" (The Free Market, March 1998)
* "Libertarians and the Confederate Battle Flag"
* "Birth of an Empire" (The Free Market, July 1997)
By Joe Sobran
* "Slavery in Perspective" (May 31, 2001)
* "McCarthyism and Lincolnism" (April 26, 2001)
* "The Ultimate Lincoln" (April 5, 2001)
* "Lincoln with Fangs" (February 8, 2001)
* "Slavery, No; Secession, Yes" (January 16, 2001)
* "How Tyranny Came to America"
woody wilco and bragg and dylan - just in case you missed the mermaid avenue volumes
Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics
Folksinger, Wordslinger, Start Me a Song
It's a credit to the mythmakers of the Woody Guthrie revival that they've never claimed their hero was the proletarian everyman he sold himself as. Not that they had much choice--by the time Guthrie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Joe Klein's thorough and brilliant Woody Guthrie: A Life had fondly but firmly debunked the thank-God-I'm-a-country boy aw-shucksism the folksinger had put forth as an image-conscious man of the people. The son of a small-time Oklahoma real estate man whose luck ran out long before the Depression, Guthrie fit a downwardly mobile mold that turns out misfits like child abuse. He had the gift of optimism, but he knew more spiritual darkness than he let on, and he never resolved his internal conflict between principled collectivism and ragged individualism. He drank too much, he was always chasing skirt, he hit the road at the drop of a hint, and he was possessed by a creative drive so feverish that he left what Dave Marsh estimates as 750,000 unpublished words, including hundreds of lyrics--mostly from the '40s, when his second wife Marjorie was tracking his outpourings, with many more gone. But for all their eagerness to promulgate Guthrie's political vision, the likes of Marsh and Billy Bragg--the driving force behind the most miraculous of the Guthrie revivals, Mermaid Avenue, now into an improbably spirited second volume of new music fitted to old words--are decent and aware enough to understand that there's no future for a politics that ignores unseemly complexities.
Still, canonization invites exaggeration. So it's significant that the biggest overstatements in the uncommonly consistent Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, a book based on a 1996 symposium at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, involve music--the Hall of Fame guy stuck with specifying Woody's impact on rock and roll (John Lennon? Bob Marley? please), the Smithsonian guy who can't resist ranking him with Armstrong, Dylan, and Presley (what about James Brown and Dr. Dre?). It's even more significant that although the 13 contributors chip in two excellent essays on his leftism and a sharply sympathetic survey of his 600 surviving drawings, none devotes more than a few passing references to Woody's music per se--not even ace compiler Jeff Place, who details Guthrie's recording history while barely mentioning his singing or playing. Nor does his life story feature that signal moment when the hero obtains his first guitar and isn't seen again for three months, so obsessed is he with learning chords. For Guthrie, music was one interest among many. He was deeper into art, supporting himself as a sign painter. And when he performed around town with his Corncob Trio he was a comedian first. The adolescent author of a lost psychology treatise who somehow managed to turn out daily columns for the Communist press while pursuing his musical career in L.A. and New York, Woody Guthrie loved language above all else.
"I ain't a writer. I want that understood. I'm just a little one-cylinder guitar picker," Woody once wrote, but note that this was a man who signed his letters "True as the average" and was about to churn out the less-true-than-average autobiography Bound for Glory. For sure he warn't much of a musician. His singing was famously unassertive, he never claimed to pick on two cylinders, his recordings benefited inordinately when his negligible sidekick Cisco Houston pitched in, and although Guthrie liked to argue that the simple old tunes were best because they were the ones folks wanted to hear, he showed small ability to concoct a simple new tune out of them, as has always been folk and pop practice. This is why there's no equating him with Dylan, who's taken his ideas so much further--it's like equating King Oliver with Louis Armstrong because Armstrong comes out of Oliver. By all means invest in Smithsonian Folkways' The Asch Recordings, which collects all four of Place's meticulous reissues in one box. The first volume's much the most listenable, but throughout it's a fascinating and well-conceived overview of an American artist who surpasses, say, his mutual appreciator John Steinbeck. Just don't imagine it's this year's Anthology of American Folk Music.
Sure Guthrie was influenced by Jimmie Rodgers and Blind Lemon Jefferson and all the songs his crazy doomed mama knew. And when he hit the road, damn right he took his guitar. But I say we see him clearer when we look beyond music for an immediate forebear: fellow Okie Will Rogers. This deeply affable part-Cherokee, who like Guthrie was a newspaper columnist as well as a performer, became a superstar saying things like "I never met a man I didn't like," "This country is here on account of the real common sense of the Big Normal Majority," and "Don't gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it." Guthrie loved him, as he loved Charlie Chaplin, whose impishness he also absorbed; the goofy hayseed he played on the L.A. radio shows where he first made his name was based on Rogers's shtick. And though many other '30s entertainers--including Bing Crosby, chief among the "sissy-voiced" jukebox lotharios Guthrie railed against--also drew on Rogers, none of them told friends that the men they most admired were Jesus and Will Rogers, much less named their firstborn sons Will Rogers Guthrie.
In part because Guthrie carried that guitar, he was never circumscribed by Rogers's model, and he obviously outgrew it. Rogers was no conservative, but his folksy humanism was pretty soft--Guthrie met plenty of men he didn't like, most of them moneyed. Soon the trouble he saw--and suffered--on his escapes from the Dust Bowl had planted in him a radicalism brought to fruition by the analysis and community of the Communist Party's Popular Front. And that wasn't all the CP provided. It also gave Guthrie an outlet and an audience for language the way he wanted to use it, language that honored the actually existing plainspeak of the folks whose voices he knew so much better than such perceived rivals as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, touched unpredictably with a fanciful wordplay so extreme at times that it seems to prefigure the dementia of the disease that soon destroyed his mind and body. But--like Whitman and Sandburg, like Joe Hill and Robert Frost too, but also like all the matinee idols and pop stars he considered enemies of the people--Guthrie chose to project those words through a cunningly fabricated public persona.
No one understood this more profoundly than Bob Dylan, which is why that shape-shifting fame-gamer was as moved by Bound for Glory as by any of Guthrie's recordings. It's probably fair to say that without Dylan, Guthrie would have had no impact on rock and roll, and that as it stands he's had plenty. Although some of his ideas would have lived on because they weren't exclusive to him--the recycled folk melody above all, and also the vocal deadpan, what Wilfred Mellers called his "monody of deprivation," which has lots of relatives in folk and country--it was Dylan who proved once and for all how musical logocentrism could be. Guthrie was a page writer of distinction--Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait, which Marsh and Harold Leventhal constructed from the file drawers circa 1990, has the same unvarnished magic he cultivated in Bound for Glory. But it was in song--in rhymed doggerel shot through with the ordinary, often literally tuneless yet touched by the natural rhythms and casual eloquence that will rise to the surface of people's speech for as long as they talk to each other--that he found his artistic inspiration and his artistic calling. And it was Dylan who took that calling to the next level, convincing rock and roll that popular song's immemorial tradition of ambitious dreamers scribbling verses could go anywhere it wanted. It was Dylan who opened the floodgates to species of poetry good and bad that had more precedents in Guthrie's wilder flights than in the well-honed bon mots of Broadway's highest brows.
So please don't suspect me of disrespect aforethought when I get better message from Bruce Springsteen's revved-up "Riding in My Car" and Ramblin' Jack Elliott's wobbly "1913 Massacre" on the new Righteous Babe tribute 'Til We Outnumber 'Em than from Guthrie's originals, or when I point out that James Talley's calm, faithful Woody Guthrie and Songs of My Oklahoma Home has a warm spiritual clarity Guthrie lacks. And please don't think I'm being mean when I declare the two Mermaid Avenues the finest Guthrie albums there are. The new one's rougher and more garage, with none of the debut's instant grace, but it's far more than the outtakes you may first hear. The rancor Jeff Tweedy works up on "Feed of Man" packs a sharper political jolt than anything on the first volume, or anything I can recall from the Smithsonian box either; the long love ballad "Remember the Mountain Bed" is simply gorgeous; for grace there's Corey Harris and Natalie Merchant; and on it goes. Really, folks--the gawky Bragg and the aimless Wilco, outdoing themselves yet again. Is it Guthrie's myth that turns them into something like great artists? Or is it simply his words, within which is concealed the secret of a music he himself rarely unlocked? Volume three should be all union songs. We could use a bunch of good ones.
Village Voice, June 6, 2000
Folksinger, Wordslinger, Start Me a Song
It's a credit to the mythmakers of the Woody Guthrie revival that they've never claimed their hero was the proletarian everyman he sold himself as. Not that they had much choice--by the time Guthrie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Joe Klein's thorough and brilliant Woody Guthrie: A Life had fondly but firmly debunked the thank-God-I'm-a-country boy aw-shucksism the folksinger had put forth as an image-conscious man of the people. The son of a small-time Oklahoma real estate man whose luck ran out long before the Depression, Guthrie fit a downwardly mobile mold that turns out misfits like child abuse. He had the gift of optimism, but he knew more spiritual darkness than he let on, and he never resolved his internal conflict between principled collectivism and ragged individualism. He drank too much, he was always chasing skirt, he hit the road at the drop of a hint, and he was possessed by a creative drive so feverish that he left what Dave Marsh estimates as 750,000 unpublished words, including hundreds of lyrics--mostly from the '40s, when his second wife Marjorie was tracking his outpourings, with many more gone. But for all their eagerness to promulgate Guthrie's political vision, the likes of Marsh and Billy Bragg--the driving force behind the most miraculous of the Guthrie revivals, Mermaid Avenue, now into an improbably spirited second volume of new music fitted to old words--are decent and aware enough to understand that there's no future for a politics that ignores unseemly complexities.
Still, canonization invites exaggeration. So it's significant that the biggest overstatements in the uncommonly consistent Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, a book based on a 1996 symposium at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, involve music--the Hall of Fame guy stuck with specifying Woody's impact on rock and roll (John Lennon? Bob Marley? please), the Smithsonian guy who can't resist ranking him with Armstrong, Dylan, and Presley (what about James Brown and Dr. Dre?). It's even more significant that although the 13 contributors chip in two excellent essays on his leftism and a sharply sympathetic survey of his 600 surviving drawings, none devotes more than a few passing references to Woody's music per se--not even ace compiler Jeff Place, who details Guthrie's recording history while barely mentioning his singing or playing. Nor does his life story feature that signal moment when the hero obtains his first guitar and isn't seen again for three months, so obsessed is he with learning chords. For Guthrie, music was one interest among many. He was deeper into art, supporting himself as a sign painter. And when he performed around town with his Corncob Trio he was a comedian first. The adolescent author of a lost psychology treatise who somehow managed to turn out daily columns for the Communist press while pursuing his musical career in L.A. and New York, Woody Guthrie loved language above all else.
"I ain't a writer. I want that understood. I'm just a little one-cylinder guitar picker," Woody once wrote, but note that this was a man who signed his letters "True as the average" and was about to churn out the less-true-than-average autobiography Bound for Glory. For sure he warn't much of a musician. His singing was famously unassertive, he never claimed to pick on two cylinders, his recordings benefited inordinately when his negligible sidekick Cisco Houston pitched in, and although Guthrie liked to argue that the simple old tunes were best because they were the ones folks wanted to hear, he showed small ability to concoct a simple new tune out of them, as has always been folk and pop practice. This is why there's no equating him with Dylan, who's taken his ideas so much further--it's like equating King Oliver with Louis Armstrong because Armstrong comes out of Oliver. By all means invest in Smithsonian Folkways' The Asch Recordings, which collects all four of Place's meticulous reissues in one box. The first volume's much the most listenable, but throughout it's a fascinating and well-conceived overview of an American artist who surpasses, say, his mutual appreciator John Steinbeck. Just don't imagine it's this year's Anthology of American Folk Music.
Sure Guthrie was influenced by Jimmie Rodgers and Blind Lemon Jefferson and all the songs his crazy doomed mama knew. And when he hit the road, damn right he took his guitar. But I say we see him clearer when we look beyond music for an immediate forebear: fellow Okie Will Rogers. This deeply affable part-Cherokee, who like Guthrie was a newspaper columnist as well as a performer, became a superstar saying things like "I never met a man I didn't like," "This country is here on account of the real common sense of the Big Normal Majority," and "Don't gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it." Guthrie loved him, as he loved Charlie Chaplin, whose impishness he also absorbed; the goofy hayseed he played on the L.A. radio shows where he first made his name was based on Rogers's shtick. And though many other '30s entertainers--including Bing Crosby, chief among the "sissy-voiced" jukebox lotharios Guthrie railed against--also drew on Rogers, none of them told friends that the men they most admired were Jesus and Will Rogers, much less named their firstborn sons Will Rogers Guthrie.
In part because Guthrie carried that guitar, he was never circumscribed by Rogers's model, and he obviously outgrew it. Rogers was no conservative, but his folksy humanism was pretty soft--Guthrie met plenty of men he didn't like, most of them moneyed. Soon the trouble he saw--and suffered--on his escapes from the Dust Bowl had planted in him a radicalism brought to fruition by the analysis and community of the Communist Party's Popular Front. And that wasn't all the CP provided. It also gave Guthrie an outlet and an audience for language the way he wanted to use it, language that honored the actually existing plainspeak of the folks whose voices he knew so much better than such perceived rivals as Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, touched unpredictably with a fanciful wordplay so extreme at times that it seems to prefigure the dementia of the disease that soon destroyed his mind and body. But--like Whitman and Sandburg, like Joe Hill and Robert Frost too, but also like all the matinee idols and pop stars he considered enemies of the people--Guthrie chose to project those words through a cunningly fabricated public persona.
No one understood this more profoundly than Bob Dylan, which is why that shape-shifting fame-gamer was as moved by Bound for Glory as by any of Guthrie's recordings. It's probably fair to say that without Dylan, Guthrie would have had no impact on rock and roll, and that as it stands he's had plenty. Although some of his ideas would have lived on because they weren't exclusive to him--the recycled folk melody above all, and also the vocal deadpan, what Wilfred Mellers called his "monody of deprivation," which has lots of relatives in folk and country--it was Dylan who proved once and for all how musical logocentrism could be. Guthrie was a page writer of distinction--Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait, which Marsh and Harold Leventhal constructed from the file drawers circa 1990, has the same unvarnished magic he cultivated in Bound for Glory. But it was in song--in rhymed doggerel shot through with the ordinary, often literally tuneless yet touched by the natural rhythms and casual eloquence that will rise to the surface of people's speech for as long as they talk to each other--that he found his artistic inspiration and his artistic calling. And it was Dylan who took that calling to the next level, convincing rock and roll that popular song's immemorial tradition of ambitious dreamers scribbling verses could go anywhere it wanted. It was Dylan who opened the floodgates to species of poetry good and bad that had more precedents in Guthrie's wilder flights than in the well-honed bon mots of Broadway's highest brows.
So please don't suspect me of disrespect aforethought when I get better message from Bruce Springsteen's revved-up "Riding in My Car" and Ramblin' Jack Elliott's wobbly "1913 Massacre" on the new Righteous Babe tribute 'Til We Outnumber 'Em than from Guthrie's originals, or when I point out that James Talley's calm, faithful Woody Guthrie and Songs of My Oklahoma Home has a warm spiritual clarity Guthrie lacks. And please don't think I'm being mean when I declare the two Mermaid Avenues the finest Guthrie albums there are. The new one's rougher and more garage, with none of the debut's instant grace, but it's far more than the outtakes you may first hear. The rancor Jeff Tweedy works up on "Feed of Man" packs a sharper political jolt than anything on the first volume, or anything I can recall from the Smithsonian box either; the long love ballad "Remember the Mountain Bed" is simply gorgeous; for grace there's Corey Harris and Natalie Merchant; and on it goes. Really, folks--the gawky Bragg and the aimless Wilco, outdoing themselves yet again. Is it Guthrie's myth that turns them into something like great artists? Or is it simply his words, within which is concealed the secret of a music he himself rarely unlocked? Volume three should be all union songs. We could use a bunch of good ones.
Village Voice, June 6, 2000
Friday, September 14, 2007
want to know the future of Iraq? Follow the Oil
After our longest break yet, DGR is back recycling essential stories you might otherwise miss.
This one was a particularly fascinating glimpse into the the plutocratic world of the extended bush crime syndicate:
A Surge, and Then a Stab
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 14 September 2007
To understand what's really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced."
Near the top of his list was the promise that "to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq's G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.
What's particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.
Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn't all that surprising, given this administration's history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the "axis of evil."
No, what's interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad's disapproval, he's essentially betting that the Iraqi government - which hasn't met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January - won't get its act together. Indeed, he's effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration - maybe even Mr. Bush himself - know this, too.
After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.
And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible - not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.
All in all, Mr. Bush's actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you'd expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.
In fact, that's my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush's decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.
Here's how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq - and prevent the country's breakup from turning into a regional war - will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.
This one was a particularly fascinating glimpse into the the plutocratic world of the extended bush crime syndicate:
A Surge, and Then a Stab
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Friday 14 September 2007
To understand what's really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money, which already knows that the surge has failed.
Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, President Bush declared that "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced."
Near the top of his list was the promise that "to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis."
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq's G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.
What's particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.
Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn't all that surprising, given this administration's history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the "axis of evil."
No, what's interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad's disapproval, he's essentially betting that the Iraqi government - which hasn't met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January - won't get its act together. Indeed, he's effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.
The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration - maybe even Mr. Bush himself - know this, too.
After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.
And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible - not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.
All in all, Mr. Bush's actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you'd expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.
In fact, that's my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush's decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.
Here's how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq - and prevent the country's breakup from turning into a regional war - will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
A patient discovers real medicine after a decade of 'the best medicine in the world' i.e. Western Med.
This is a great intro article to Homeopathy and how it saved the health and sanity of one smart and attentive fellow. Enjoy.
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A Painful Road to Homeopathic Cure
by K.J.
I HAD ALWAYS felt that I understood disease. If you came down with an illness, you called up your doctor who prescribed an antibiotic; within 48 hours, it cured you. Feel bad, take pill, feel better.
But by the time I had my first meeting with my homeopath, David Kramer, my belief in the infallibility of the medical system had crashed. I was in pain, I was angry and extremely depressed. Nine years of chronic joint pain, degenerative disc disease, torn cartilage, and a host of other physical problems were severely limiting how I used my body. I couldn't even throw a ball around with my son in our backyard, or make a simple repair around the house without suffering debilitating neck, back, and shoulder pain for days.
I felt as if I was going into a deep physical decline. I no longer worried whether I could take care of my family after the age of 60; I was worried about taking care of them after the age of 40. As I described to David, I felt as if something was "eating me from the inside out."
The Progression of Physical Woes
My physical symptoms could be traced back to 1985, when I first started feeling an odd tingling around the right side of my abdomen. My brother years ago had suffered a debilitating case of shingles, and I instinctively knew that this was one of the first symptoms. I called my doctor who had me in the next day, pronounced my diagnosis correct, and put me on massive doses of Zovirax. It never progressed beyond minor irritation.
About a year later, while in the gym bench-pressing on my lunch hour, I felt as if a fuse blew in my back. By the time I returned to my office, not only did I have a sore neck, but I was having trouble using my hands.
I went to an orthopedist who, after X-rays and CAT scans, told me I had herniated two disks in my cervical spine. He passed me on to a surgeon who thankfully declined to operate, told me my weight-lifting days were over, and sent me on to physical therapy. Unfortunately my neck pain became chronic, and I began having what would be many years of muscle spasm and pain along my upper back.
Then one morning in 1988, while taking a shower, I seemed to be getting soap in my right eye no matter how hard I squeezed it shut. Ignoring it, I got out of the shower, toweled off, and started to brush my teeth. But toothpaste and water just came bubbling out of the right side of my mouth. I looked in the mirror and saw a slight droop in my right eye and on the right side of my mouth. I had developed symptoms of Bell's Palsy.
Over the next few days, I was treated with decreasing doses of Prednisone and went back to the doctor for follow-up. I was passed along to a physical therapist, who prescribed a hand-held electrical stimulation gun that, like a cattle prod, I was to use to stimulate the affected side of my face with short, electrical shocks. But muscular function did not begin to return until about a month later and, up to now, only about 80 percent of the function has returned.
My bouts with neck pain continued and I tried returning to the gym. But using weights badly aggravated my back and neck. I was beginning to get frustrated, because my feeling of well-being was deeply tied into my sense of physical strength and appearance. Along with the disfigurement of the Bell's, I began to feel a little depressed.
Because I needed some kind of hard exercise (not only was I competitive, I loved to sweat!), I picked up the game of racquetball. But after only a few months, in April 1991, while reaching for a ball, I felt as if my whole right shoulder had popped in and out, complete with sound effects. I excused myself, changed, and headed home.
The next morning, I had trouble moving my right shoulder and arm, and I was in intense pain. I was recommended to a local orthopedic surgeon, who offered me either surgery, where they would scrape away part of my offending acromioclavicular joint, or physical therapy to strengthen the area. I opted for physical therapy.
Now along with chronic neck pain, I had a shoulder that felt weakened and prone to further injury. Where once physically I felt invulnerable, I suddenly started to feel as if I was beginning to break down.
If I had any doubts that there was something deeply wrong, the point was made again the following month, May 1991, when upon standing up from a kneeling position, I heard the rip of cartilage in my left knee. After X-rays and MRIs, the marvel of technology where you are slipped into a claustrophobia-inducing tube for up to 45 minutes while huge magnets give the atoms of your body their marching orders, the doctor again offered me either surgery or physical therapy. I had already done my homework, was convinced that torn cartilage left alone would lead to early arthritis, and opted for surgery. Following the surgery, I went into physical therapy. I got back the use of the knee, a little stiffer and a little older.
Then, two months later, July 1991, I had my first major lower back episode. Walking back home one Sunday morning with the newspapers under my arm, I felt a dull pain beginning in my lower back. By the time I reached home, I felt as if someone was digging a fist into my back and I was sent sprawling onto the floor. Diagnosis: lumbar disc herniation; recommendation: two days of bed rest, anti-inflammatory medications, and physical therapy. Although the pain would eventually subside, it always reminded me it was there.
Then, in December 1991, I had a major flare-up of neck pain along with tingling in my hands. Back into physical therapy.
One month later, January 1992, the cartilage in my right knee tore. Again, first X-rays, then MRI, then surgery. But this time the knee didn't heal. So, exactly one year later, in December 1992, after telling my tale of woe to another surgeon, the right knee was operated on again, fresh tears were found, and more cartilage was removed.
About seven months later, in August 1993, I herniated a thoracic disc. Pain around my right side sent me back to my doctor, who sent me back to the neurologist for tests then back into physical therapy. "There must be something really wrong here," I remember telling him. "Are all of these injuries just coincidental?"
Then in November 1993, I had a major flare-up of neck pain with hand numbness and tingling. Again more tests, more MRIs. Again more physical therapy. My depression was growing and I was becoming obsessed not only with the pain, but in doing everything I could to avoid it.
By June of 1994, since I could no longer work out in a gym, I took up cycling. I could at least work up a sweat and burn off some of the weight I had gained from lengthening periods of inactivity because of injury. But chronic pain had turned me into an Advil junkie. I began taking them habitually in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Then, when the Advil didn't seem to work anymore, I started taking huge doses of aspirin, which seemed to help.
Then one Saturday evening, my right toe started to hurt as if I had stubbed it on a wall. I thought maybe I had tightened my cycling shoes too much, shrugged it off, and went to dinner with my wife and friends. The next morning, the toe started to swell and pain began in the joint. I called the doctor's office and my call was returned the next morning. By then the swelling started to involve the entire right foot and the joint in my big toe began to feel as if it was filled with sand.
The doctor told me I had gout, prescribed an anti-inflammatory and told me to stay off the foot. By that evening I couldn't take the pain anymore. The whole foot was now involved and I felt I was going to lose my mind over the pain. I called a doctor friend of ours, who after hearing the symptoms immediately put me on Colchicine. The next morning, he confirmed the diagnosis, put me on a vegetarian diet, and told me I had to wait it out.
The next day the pain started to subside. But that evening, I awoke in the middle of the night with a slicing pain back to front, around my right side along my rib cage. I got out of bed, now drenched in sweat and in enough pain that I was debating whether I should go to the emergency room. I instead opted for an ice pack, which seemed to help, and called the orthopedic surgeon the next morning. He told me it sounded like I had herniated another thoracic disk. Injury after injury had become more frightening to me. "Why is this happening to me?" I asked him. He looked at me and said, "I guess it's just bad luck."
Prior to going back into physical therapy for my back, I returned to my neurologist for further testing, including a second EMG and blood tests. I had given him my history and told him there must be something deeply wrong. To me, this growing string of injuries and chronic pain was a warning. But after additional blood testing for diabetes, there were no systemic causes to be found. There was something wrong that nobody was seeing. I felt as if I was dying, part by part, at an ever-accelerating rate.
And I also felt as if nobody was really listening to me.
Finding Homeopathy
About a month later, at a birthday party, I met a woman who seemed acutely aware of the pain I was in. I walked in a contorted position, could not sit still for any length of time, felt completely isolated and depressed, and was barely joining in any conversations. She was studying homeopathy and asked me if I knew anything about it. I said no, but basically gave her a rundown of everything modern medicine had done to me.
She told me to go down to my local health food store and search out three remedies, Arnica montana, Ruta graveolens, and Rhus toxicodenron. She also gave me the name of a homeopath she respected, David Kramer.
Before I went to see him, he had let me know that we would spend at least two hours together. We actually spent close to three. After listening to my physical complaints, he started asking me more penetrating questions, about my likes and dislikes, and "where" was I and "who" was I when I first started having these medical problems. Who was surrounding me, friends, family, job situation? He asked me about pressures in my life and specifically about my feelings about things. He asked me about losses and their significance to me (I had recently lost a close childhood friend to kidney cancer).
Someone was asking me how I felt and was actually listening!
As I talked to David, I felt that I was finally giving someone the entire picture of a deep sadness that I had been carrying around for many years. There were times when just the passing thought of my friend and the years that we shared would cause me to cry, something that I was not accustomed to doing. He was a touchstone for me, and even though as time went on we went down our separate paths, we had talked every day on the phone. This was something I missed terribly.
This also brought up other losses for me, particularly the loss of my father whom I understood only as I approached the age at which he died. The loss had even greater meaning when I would sit with my children and show them pictures of their grandfather. I would point to him and say, "This is my father like I am your father." To them it was only a picture. To me, it was someone's hand that I would never hold again.
I went further and deeper with David. The session seemed to pick up speed as we talked about friends and family. I felt I had no choice. David was a stranger, but I also considered him a last hope.
After close to three hours, I was pretty much spent. There was nothing left to say. I had given him everything that I could see at that time. David put his pen down and considered me for a few moments, asking a few questions about some of the things I said. Then he began to explain a bit about how homeopathy affects the patient. Not about the laws of similars, but because he saw how deeply I was hurting, he began to explain about the cure taking place on all levels, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
My Introduction to the Remedy
David used the analogy of a train moving down a track. At some point, the train became sidetracked onto a diseased pathway. The job that we faced was to stop the train. Then, as he explained, we have to get the train to reverse itself to the spot where it became mis-routed and then get it back on the right track.
David explained that throughout the cure, since we were backtracking over old ground, I might begin to experience old injuries and emotional upsets as I moved back through them again. I might have recurrences and shouldn't be upset by them. He explained how the disease moves through the body, from the inside out, and said I might experience this as skin problems. Rather than try to treat them topically, I was to call him with any changes that I noticed.
He did another curious thing. He chose a bottle out of a case, held it in his hand and looked at me. He then stopped, considered for a moment, and said, "No, let's try something that's a little more aggressive." I asked him what he meant and he explained that ordinarily he might give just a single dose of the remedy in the office. But he was going to approach this differently.
He took out another vial and had me stand up in front of him. "Hold the vial in your fist," he said, "and then raise your arm stiffly to your side."
I took the vial in my hand, closed my hand, made a fist and then raised my arm up. David came up to me and then, as if playing an old schoolyard trick, he tried to push my arm down as though it were a pump handle. But my arm stayed where it was.
"Oh, come on," I thought. "I've just spilled my heart out to someone who's behaving like a storefront tarot-card reader."
"David," I said, "how do I know that this wouldn't happen with any remedy in that box?" David grinned and brought his case over to me. "Pick any vial," he said. I chose one and he again told me to make a fist and hold my arm out. He easily pushed my arm down to my side. "Do it again," I said and deliberately tried to hold my arm up. But once again, my arm gave way and he easily pushed it down to my side. "Let me hold the first vial again" I said. He gave me the vial, I made a fist and raised my arm. David couldn't push my arm down. "OK," I said, "what's in this stuff?"
He explained that it was a remedy called Carcinosin and that it would help to cure me. He gave me explicit, written instructions on how to handle it and on what to avoid, for example, caffeine, mint, and so forth.
The Journey to Cure
That afternoon, I prepared my first bottle of Carcinosin, in an LM/1 potency. Since I was already feeling better, having tried some Rhus tox, I looked forward to even more improvement.
But the next morning, I woke up, got out of bed, and suddenly felt like the Tin Man. My whole body momentarily stiffened. For some reason, I wasn't frightened and gradually, within a half hour, I began to loosen up.
Over the next few weeks, I gradually began to feel better. The pain in my neck and back continued to subside, and my energy level actually started to increase. More interesting were the emotional changes that began taking place. My depression began to lift and I didn't feel burdened anymore. Where I once had an explosive temper at work, I became much more reasonable and focused. My sense of humor began to return and I was no longer snapping at everyone around me.
Over the next few months, my dreams became more vivid. Old experiences, things I hadn't thought about in years began coming back to me. I let them reveal themselves to me, watched in wonder as they literally unfolded in front of me in movie fashion. Then, they evaporated, as dreams do, leaving me with a sense of calm and what I can only describe as revelation.
There seemed to be so many things that I had lost touch with, so many memories and people that I had buried down deep over the years. Now they were coming back to visit, old friends that I had missed, memories that I should never have tried to forget. I realized that any experience was important, any event, any person. To deny them was to deny what you are made of. To forget them was to diminish yourself.
As I began feeling better, I started to take more responsibility for my cure. I began to read what I could about homeopathy, but didn't limit myself to just one alternative path. Since I was still having muscular spasms across my neck and back, I began investigating massage and came across a book by Bonnie Prudden on trigger point therapy. It also gave me some background in muscular structure and mechanics.
As the homeopathy worked on me at deeper levels, I began working more at the surogram of stretching and strengthening to help with my back pain. I invested in something called a Thera-Cane, a self massage tool that helped me get to those trigger points in my back to release the muscle spasms.
The more control I took, the more self-success I encountered, and the more encouraged I was to continue on an alternate path. I began looking more deeply into homeopathy. What interested me most was not necessarily the physical cure, but the deeper emotional and spiritual relief it seemed to offer. I gained a greater understanding of "disease" and how the disease cannot be separated from the patient. It is this lack of individuality, this lack of looking at the whole person, that allopathic medicine is most guilty of. What my previous doctors seemed to miss, and what I now understand, is that my disease had affected me not only physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. I had been declining on all levels. But they insisted on treating only those things that they could X-ray or scan or grow in petri dishes. They were missing "me."
Although I didn't experience any typical aggravations on the remedy, I did go through a healing crisis in March of 1995. A sudden high temperature sent me home from work. I had left a message for David that I was heading home feeling really sick, although fever seemed to be the main problem.
I got back home and immediately went to bed and slept for the next few hours. During that period, David had called and told my wife that the best thing was to let me sleep. He also asked her to pick up a bottle of Echinacea and gave her directions on how I should take it.
I remember one other significant thing: Along with the fever, my lower back started to hurt and began "bunching up." It had been months since I had experienced lower back pain. But in the middle of one night, I woke up suddenly to feel my lower back "release," as if two hands that had been tightly intertwined were now loosening up and sliding past each other. Within 24 hours of coming down with the high fever (103 degrees), it was gone. To this day, my lower back no longer hurts the way it once did.
It's been about a year and a half now since I began my journey into alternative cure. Back in September, about a year after I had started it, I told David I wanted to try to go off of the remedy. He said I should go with my instincts, that although he felt it might be too early, I should at least try.
Unfortunately, I had a precipitous drop in energy almost immediately. All I wanted to do was sleep and I was catching naps wherever I could. I began to lose motivation. After about a month of this, I called David and told him what was happening. He told me not to restart the remedy but to come in to talk. He felt that we should reconsider the remedy and possibly add another or switch completely.
After some analysis, David felt I was still on the right path with Carcinosin, but he thought I should cut the dosage to once a day. The deciding factor was that although my energy level was down, he felt I was still clearly focused and stable and had come a long way. The drop in energy he felt was just my system beginning to devote all its resources towards cure.
I am back on Carcinosin, once a day, at an LM/15 potency right now. David feels that by this summer, I should be able to dispense with the remedy and I tend to believe him.
So many things have come back to me now. I'm writing again, involved with my family, and much more focused at work. Where I was once highly confrontational, physically and emotionally, I'm now a much better listener. I've begun to see how rich life is and how important people are to me.
Most important, I've begun to understand the meaning of taking responsibility for your cure and not leaving it up to modern technology to tell you whether you are healthy or sick. The one thing that the "modern" medical industry seems to have done is to have taken away "hope." The lack of hope has become, for so many people with chronic illness, a part of their disease. Once that has happened, there is nothing much left.
I hope to begin formal study of homeopathy this fall with David at his recently founded Hudson Valley School of Classical Homeopathy. I look forward to the time when I can begin bringing to other people what has been returned to me: hope.
-*/-*/-/-*/-/-*/-/-/*-/-/-/-/*-/*-*/-*/-/*-/*-/*-/*-/*-/*-/*-/-/*-/*-/*-/-/-/-/*-*/-/*
A Painful Road to Homeopathic Cure
by K.J.
I HAD ALWAYS felt that I understood disease. If you came down with an illness, you called up your doctor who prescribed an antibiotic; within 48 hours, it cured you. Feel bad, take pill, feel better.
But by the time I had my first meeting with my homeopath, David Kramer, my belief in the infallibility of the medical system had crashed. I was in pain, I was angry and extremely depressed. Nine years of chronic joint pain, degenerative disc disease, torn cartilage, and a host of other physical problems were severely limiting how I used my body. I couldn't even throw a ball around with my son in our backyard, or make a simple repair around the house without suffering debilitating neck, back, and shoulder pain for days.
I felt as if I was going into a deep physical decline. I no longer worried whether I could take care of my family after the age of 60; I was worried about taking care of them after the age of 40. As I described to David, I felt as if something was "eating me from the inside out."
The Progression of Physical Woes
My physical symptoms could be traced back to 1985, when I first started feeling an odd tingling around the right side of my abdomen. My brother years ago had suffered a debilitating case of shingles, and I instinctively knew that this was one of the first symptoms. I called my doctor who had me in the next day, pronounced my diagnosis correct, and put me on massive doses of Zovirax. It never progressed beyond minor irritation.
About a year later, while in the gym bench-pressing on my lunch hour, I felt as if a fuse blew in my back. By the time I returned to my office, not only did I have a sore neck, but I was having trouble using my hands.
I went to an orthopedist who, after X-rays and CAT scans, told me I had herniated two disks in my cervical spine. He passed me on to a surgeon who thankfully declined to operate, told me my weight-lifting days were over, and sent me on to physical therapy. Unfortunately my neck pain became chronic, and I began having what would be many years of muscle spasm and pain along my upper back.
Then one morning in 1988, while taking a shower, I seemed to be getting soap in my right eye no matter how hard I squeezed it shut. Ignoring it, I got out of the shower, toweled off, and started to brush my teeth. But toothpaste and water just came bubbling out of the right side of my mouth. I looked in the mirror and saw a slight droop in my right eye and on the right side of my mouth. I had developed symptoms of Bell's Palsy.
Over the next few days, I was treated with decreasing doses of Prednisone and went back to the doctor for follow-up. I was passed along to a physical therapist, who prescribed a hand-held electrical stimulation gun that, like a cattle prod, I was to use to stimulate the affected side of my face with short, electrical shocks. But muscular function did not begin to return until about a month later and, up to now, only about 80 percent of the function has returned.
My bouts with neck pain continued and I tried returning to the gym. But using weights badly aggravated my back and neck. I was beginning to get frustrated, because my feeling of well-being was deeply tied into my sense of physical strength and appearance. Along with the disfigurement of the Bell's, I began to feel a little depressed.
Because I needed some kind of hard exercise (not only was I competitive, I loved to sweat!), I picked up the game of racquetball. But after only a few months, in April 1991, while reaching for a ball, I felt as if my whole right shoulder had popped in and out, complete with sound effects. I excused myself, changed, and headed home.
The next morning, I had trouble moving my right shoulder and arm, and I was in intense pain. I was recommended to a local orthopedic surgeon, who offered me either surgery, where they would scrape away part of my offending acromioclavicular joint, or physical therapy to strengthen the area. I opted for physical therapy.
Now along with chronic neck pain, I had a shoulder that felt weakened and prone to further injury. Where once physically I felt invulnerable, I suddenly started to feel as if I was beginning to break down.
If I had any doubts that there was something deeply wrong, the point was made again the following month, May 1991, when upon standing up from a kneeling position, I heard the rip of cartilage in my left knee. After X-rays and MRIs, the marvel of technology where you are slipped into a claustrophobia-inducing tube for up to 45 minutes while huge magnets give the atoms of your body their marching orders, the doctor again offered me either surgery or physical therapy. I had already done my homework, was convinced that torn cartilage left alone would lead to early arthritis, and opted for surgery. Following the surgery, I went into physical therapy. I got back the use of the knee, a little stiffer and a little older.
Then, two months later, July 1991, I had my first major lower back episode. Walking back home one Sunday morning with the newspapers under my arm, I felt a dull pain beginning in my lower back. By the time I reached home, I felt as if someone was digging a fist into my back and I was sent sprawling onto the floor. Diagnosis: lumbar disc herniation; recommendation: two days of bed rest, anti-inflammatory medications, and physical therapy. Although the pain would eventually subside, it always reminded me it was there.
Then, in December 1991, I had a major flare-up of neck pain along with tingling in my hands. Back into physical therapy.
One month later, January 1992, the cartilage in my right knee tore. Again, first X-rays, then MRI, then surgery. But this time the knee didn't heal. So, exactly one year later, in December 1992, after telling my tale of woe to another surgeon, the right knee was operated on again, fresh tears were found, and more cartilage was removed.
About seven months later, in August 1993, I herniated a thoracic disc. Pain around my right side sent me back to my doctor, who sent me back to the neurologist for tests then back into physical therapy. "There must be something really wrong here," I remember telling him. "Are all of these injuries just coincidental?"
Then in November 1993, I had a major flare-up of neck pain with hand numbness and tingling. Again more tests, more MRIs. Again more physical therapy. My depression was growing and I was becoming obsessed not only with the pain, but in doing everything I could to avoid it.
By June of 1994, since I could no longer work out in a gym, I took up cycling. I could at least work up a sweat and burn off some of the weight I had gained from lengthening periods of inactivity because of injury. But chronic pain had turned me into an Advil junkie. I began taking them habitually in the morning, afternoon, and evening. Then, when the Advil didn't seem to work anymore, I started taking huge doses of aspirin, which seemed to help.
Then one Saturday evening, my right toe started to hurt as if I had stubbed it on a wall. I thought maybe I had tightened my cycling shoes too much, shrugged it off, and went to dinner with my wife and friends. The next morning, the toe started to swell and pain began in the joint. I called the doctor's office and my call was returned the next morning. By then the swelling started to involve the entire right foot and the joint in my big toe began to feel as if it was filled with sand.
The doctor told me I had gout, prescribed an anti-inflammatory and told me to stay off the foot. By that evening I couldn't take the pain anymore. The whole foot was now involved and I felt I was going to lose my mind over the pain. I called a doctor friend of ours, who after hearing the symptoms immediately put me on Colchicine. The next morning, he confirmed the diagnosis, put me on a vegetarian diet, and told me I had to wait it out.
The next day the pain started to subside. But that evening, I awoke in the middle of the night with a slicing pain back to front, around my right side along my rib cage. I got out of bed, now drenched in sweat and in enough pain that I was debating whether I should go to the emergency room. I instead opted for an ice pack, which seemed to help, and called the orthopedic surgeon the next morning. He told me it sounded like I had herniated another thoracic disk. Injury after injury had become more frightening to me. "Why is this happening to me?" I asked him. He looked at me and said, "I guess it's just bad luck."
Prior to going back into physical therapy for my back, I returned to my neurologist for further testing, including a second EMG and blood tests. I had given him my history and told him there must be something deeply wrong. To me, this growing string of injuries and chronic pain was a warning. But after additional blood testing for diabetes, there were no systemic causes to be found. There was something wrong that nobody was seeing. I felt as if I was dying, part by part, at an ever-accelerating rate.
And I also felt as if nobody was really listening to me.
Finding Homeopathy
About a month later, at a birthday party, I met a woman who seemed acutely aware of the pain I was in. I walked in a contorted position, could not sit still for any length of time, felt completely isolated and depressed, and was barely joining in any conversations. She was studying homeopathy and asked me if I knew anything about it. I said no, but basically gave her a rundown of everything modern medicine had done to me.
She told me to go down to my local health food store and search out three remedies, Arnica montana, Ruta graveolens, and Rhus toxicodenron. She also gave me the name of a homeopath she respected, David Kramer.
Before I went to see him, he had let me know that we would spend at least two hours together. We actually spent close to three. After listening to my physical complaints, he started asking me more penetrating questions, about my likes and dislikes, and "where" was I and "who" was I when I first started having these medical problems. Who was surrounding me, friends, family, job situation? He asked me about pressures in my life and specifically about my feelings about things. He asked me about losses and their significance to me (I had recently lost a close childhood friend to kidney cancer).
Someone was asking me how I felt and was actually listening!
As I talked to David, I felt that I was finally giving someone the entire picture of a deep sadness that I had been carrying around for many years. There were times when just the passing thought of my friend and the years that we shared would cause me to cry, something that I was not accustomed to doing. He was a touchstone for me, and even though as time went on we went down our separate paths, we had talked every day on the phone. This was something I missed terribly.
This also brought up other losses for me, particularly the loss of my father whom I understood only as I approached the age at which he died. The loss had even greater meaning when I would sit with my children and show them pictures of their grandfather. I would point to him and say, "This is my father like I am your father." To them it was only a picture. To me, it was someone's hand that I would never hold again.
I went further and deeper with David. The session seemed to pick up speed as we talked about friends and family. I felt I had no choice. David was a stranger, but I also considered him a last hope.
After close to three hours, I was pretty much spent. There was nothing left to say. I had given him everything that I could see at that time. David put his pen down and considered me for a few moments, asking a few questions about some of the things I said. Then he began to explain a bit about how homeopathy affects the patient. Not about the laws of similars, but because he saw how deeply I was hurting, he began to explain about the cure taking place on all levels, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
My Introduction to the Remedy
David used the analogy of a train moving down a track. At some point, the train became sidetracked onto a diseased pathway. The job that we faced was to stop the train. Then, as he explained, we have to get the train to reverse itself to the spot where it became mis-routed and then get it back on the right track.
David explained that throughout the cure, since we were backtracking over old ground, I might begin to experience old injuries and emotional upsets as I moved back through them again. I might have recurrences and shouldn't be upset by them. He explained how the disease moves through the body, from the inside out, and said I might experience this as skin problems. Rather than try to treat them topically, I was to call him with any changes that I noticed.
He did another curious thing. He chose a bottle out of a case, held it in his hand and looked at me. He then stopped, considered for a moment, and said, "No, let's try something that's a little more aggressive." I asked him what he meant and he explained that ordinarily he might give just a single dose of the remedy in the office. But he was going to approach this differently.
He took out another vial and had me stand up in front of him. "Hold the vial in your fist," he said, "and then raise your arm stiffly to your side."
I took the vial in my hand, closed my hand, made a fist and then raised my arm up. David came up to me and then, as if playing an old schoolyard trick, he tried to push my arm down as though it were a pump handle. But my arm stayed where it was.
"Oh, come on," I thought. "I've just spilled my heart out to someone who's behaving like a storefront tarot-card reader."
"David," I said, "how do I know that this wouldn't happen with any remedy in that box?" David grinned and brought his case over to me. "Pick any vial," he said. I chose one and he again told me to make a fist and hold my arm out. He easily pushed my arm down to my side. "Do it again," I said and deliberately tried to hold my arm up. But once again, my arm gave way and he easily pushed it down to my side. "Let me hold the first vial again" I said. He gave me the vial, I made a fist and raised my arm. David couldn't push my arm down. "OK," I said, "what's in this stuff?"
He explained that it was a remedy called Carcinosin and that it would help to cure me. He gave me explicit, written instructions on how to handle it and on what to avoid, for example, caffeine, mint, and so forth.
The Journey to Cure
That afternoon, I prepared my first bottle of Carcinosin, in an LM/1 potency. Since I was already feeling better, having tried some Rhus tox, I looked forward to even more improvement.
But the next morning, I woke up, got out of bed, and suddenly felt like the Tin Man. My whole body momentarily stiffened. For some reason, I wasn't frightened and gradually, within a half hour, I began to loosen up.
Over the next few weeks, I gradually began to feel better. The pain in my neck and back continued to subside, and my energy level actually started to increase. More interesting were the emotional changes that began taking place. My depression began to lift and I didn't feel burdened anymore. Where I once had an explosive temper at work, I became much more reasonable and focused. My sense of humor began to return and I was no longer snapping at everyone around me.
Over the next few months, my dreams became more vivid. Old experiences, things I hadn't thought about in years began coming back to me. I let them reveal themselves to me, watched in wonder as they literally unfolded in front of me in movie fashion. Then, they evaporated, as dreams do, leaving me with a sense of calm and what I can only describe as revelation.
There seemed to be so many things that I had lost touch with, so many memories and people that I had buried down deep over the years. Now they were coming back to visit, old friends that I had missed, memories that I should never have tried to forget. I realized that any experience was important, any event, any person. To deny them was to deny what you are made of. To forget them was to diminish yourself.
As I began feeling better, I started to take more responsibility for my cure. I began to read what I could about homeopathy, but didn't limit myself to just one alternative path. Since I was still having muscular spasms across my neck and back, I began investigating massage and came across a book by Bonnie Prudden on trigger point therapy. It also gave me some background in muscular structure and mechanics.
As the homeopathy worked on me at deeper levels, I began working more at the surogram of stretching and strengthening to help with my back pain. I invested in something called a Thera-Cane, a self massage tool that helped me get to those trigger points in my back to release the muscle spasms.
The more control I took, the more self-success I encountered, and the more encouraged I was to continue on an alternate path. I began looking more deeply into homeopathy. What interested me most was not necessarily the physical cure, but the deeper emotional and spiritual relief it seemed to offer. I gained a greater understanding of "disease" and how the disease cannot be separated from the patient. It is this lack of individuality, this lack of looking at the whole person, that allopathic medicine is most guilty of. What my previous doctors seemed to miss, and what I now understand, is that my disease had affected me not only physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. I had been declining on all levels. But they insisted on treating only those things that they could X-ray or scan or grow in petri dishes. They were missing "me."
Although I didn't experience any typical aggravations on the remedy, I did go through a healing crisis in March of 1995. A sudden high temperature sent me home from work. I had left a message for David that I was heading home feeling really sick, although fever seemed to be the main problem.
I got back home and immediately went to bed and slept for the next few hours. During that period, David had called and told my wife that the best thing was to let me sleep. He also asked her to pick up a bottle of Echinacea and gave her directions on how I should take it.
I remember one other significant thing: Along with the fever, my lower back started to hurt and began "bunching up." It had been months since I had experienced lower back pain. But in the middle of one night, I woke up suddenly to feel my lower back "release," as if two hands that had been tightly intertwined were now loosening up and sliding past each other. Within 24 hours of coming down with the high fever (103 degrees), it was gone. To this day, my lower back no longer hurts the way it once did.
It's been about a year and a half now since I began my journey into alternative cure. Back in September, about a year after I had started it, I told David I wanted to try to go off of the remedy. He said I should go with my instincts, that although he felt it might be too early, I should at least try.
Unfortunately, I had a precipitous drop in energy almost immediately. All I wanted to do was sleep and I was catching naps wherever I could. I began to lose motivation. After about a month of this, I called David and told him what was happening. He told me not to restart the remedy but to come in to talk. He felt that we should reconsider the remedy and possibly add another or switch completely.
After some analysis, David felt I was still on the right path with Carcinosin, but he thought I should cut the dosage to once a day. The deciding factor was that although my energy level was down, he felt I was still clearly focused and stable and had come a long way. The drop in energy he felt was just my system beginning to devote all its resources towards cure.
I am back on Carcinosin, once a day, at an LM/15 potency right now. David feels that by this summer, I should be able to dispense with the remedy and I tend to believe him.
So many things have come back to me now. I'm writing again, involved with my family, and much more focused at work. Where I was once highly confrontational, physically and emotionally, I'm now a much better listener. I've begun to see how rich life is and how important people are to me.
Most important, I've begun to understand the meaning of taking responsibility for your cure and not leaving it up to modern technology to tell you whether you are healthy or sick. The one thing that the "modern" medical industry seems to have done is to have taken away "hope." The lack of hope has become, for so many people with chronic illness, a part of their disease. Once that has happened, there is nothing much left.
I hope to begin formal study of homeopathy this fall with David at his recently founded Hudson Valley School of Classical Homeopathy. I look forward to the time when I can begin bringing to other people what has been returned to me: hope.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Pelosi or Sheehan - there is no choice
It's About More Than Getting into Congress
A Vision for Cindy Sheehan's Campaign
By DANIEL ELLSBERG
I don't speak for Cindy Sheehan—whom I admire unreservedly—or for her campaign. When I say "we" in what follows, I'm really just giving my own perspective on this campaign, as one of her supporters.
I see this campaign as aiming much higher than putting Cindy Sheehan in Congress in 2009. Well before that time, we aim to help restore our Constitution, to end a war and avert starting a new one, and to remove from power two officials—George W. Bush and Richard Cheney--who block those objectives before they can do more harm in their remaining months in office.
That's an ambitious project; but there's a clear path to achieving it. We will work to change public awareness and, as a result, Nancy Pelosi's policies as Speaker of the House well before the election, by revealing to the public real alternatives to the courses she and the Democrats have followed so far, and demonstrating the breadth and strength of public support for those alternatives.
The truth is that Democrats, and even Republicans, can do much better than they have been doing, under Pelosi's leadership in the House, to protect our freedoms and our security. In this campaign we will publicize specifics of what can and should be done, and let the public tell the politicians which approach they want.
One essential demand is for Pelosi to encourage, rather than to block, Congressional investigations of past and ongoing administration deception, unwisdom, illegality and unconstitutionality in pursuing an aggressive war and in curtailing our rights. Such investigations, calling forth testimony under oath of current and former officials many of whom are eager to tell the truth at last, as well as demonstrating continued administration stonewalling, will almost surely lead to what does not yet exist: irresistible pressure from a belatedly-informed public for the impeachment and removal of Bush and Cheney.
Further, we need Pelosi's leadership in rescinding the unconstitutional parts—which will not leave much—of the Patriot Acts, the Military Commisions Act and the recent, outrageous legislation purporting to legalize warrantless wiretaps and data mining. And—absolutely essential to ending our war in Iraq, ever—public pressure is needed to demand that Congress defund our indefinite occupation, providing funds only for the orderly, safe withdrawal of all our troops, contractors and bases on an announced time-table.
If this campaign can help bring about even the first of these, it will also, almost incidentally, put Cindy Sheehan within reach of success in the election. This is, in fact, a historic campaign opportunity, exploiting an opening unique in American politics. At this moment, Cindy appears to face insuperable odds, opposing without party support a powerful, heavily-funded incumbent. But we aim to change that. All we are asking is for Nancy Pelosi to do what she should: to uphold her oath of office, which is not to obey a Commander-in-Chief or to enlarge a Democratic majority but to uphold and defend the Constitution.
If we can induce her to do that, then a year from now Cindy Sheehan should be running for an open seat, or against a brand-new incumbent appointed by our Republican governor. Nancy Pelosi, third in line for succession when Bush and Cheney are impeached and removed, will be in the White House. That will, as it happens, leave an open field for Cindy.
So you see, it's nothing personal for us. After all, as representatives of big business go, Nancy Pelosi is better than most. We don't aim to kick her out of politics, we aim to kick her upstairs. And there's a bonus: President Pelosi as a write-in candidate in November. She's far from ideal, from the point of view of members of this campaign, but for a Democrats we could do a lot worse. Off the record, some of us see this as the best strategy for keeping Hillary out of the White House without letting a Republican in.
So there it is: a vision for 2009 that can evoke some real enthusiasm: Cindy in the House, Pelosi in the White House, the US out of Iraq. Our Constitution back, and Bush and Cheney under criminal indictment.
[Remarks of Daniel Ellsberg at a press conference August 9, 2007 at which Cindy Sheehan announced her independent candidacy for the 8th Congressional District of California, an office now held by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.]
Daniel Ellsburg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
A Vision for Cindy Sheehan's Campaign
By DANIEL ELLSBERG
I don't speak for Cindy Sheehan—whom I admire unreservedly—or for her campaign. When I say "we" in what follows, I'm really just giving my own perspective on this campaign, as one of her supporters.
I see this campaign as aiming much higher than putting Cindy Sheehan in Congress in 2009. Well before that time, we aim to help restore our Constitution, to end a war and avert starting a new one, and to remove from power two officials—George W. Bush and Richard Cheney--who block those objectives before they can do more harm in their remaining months in office.
That's an ambitious project; but there's a clear path to achieving it. We will work to change public awareness and, as a result, Nancy Pelosi's policies as Speaker of the House well before the election, by revealing to the public real alternatives to the courses she and the Democrats have followed so far, and demonstrating the breadth and strength of public support for those alternatives.
The truth is that Democrats, and even Republicans, can do much better than they have been doing, under Pelosi's leadership in the House, to protect our freedoms and our security. In this campaign we will publicize specifics of what can and should be done, and let the public tell the politicians which approach they want.
One essential demand is for Pelosi to encourage, rather than to block, Congressional investigations of past and ongoing administration deception, unwisdom, illegality and unconstitutionality in pursuing an aggressive war and in curtailing our rights. Such investigations, calling forth testimony under oath of current and former officials many of whom are eager to tell the truth at last, as well as demonstrating continued administration stonewalling, will almost surely lead to what does not yet exist: irresistible pressure from a belatedly-informed public for the impeachment and removal of Bush and Cheney.
Further, we need Pelosi's leadership in rescinding the unconstitutional parts—which will not leave much—of the Patriot Acts, the Military Commisions Act and the recent, outrageous legislation purporting to legalize warrantless wiretaps and data mining. And—absolutely essential to ending our war in Iraq, ever—public pressure is needed to demand that Congress defund our indefinite occupation, providing funds only for the orderly, safe withdrawal of all our troops, contractors and bases on an announced time-table.
If this campaign can help bring about even the first of these, it will also, almost incidentally, put Cindy Sheehan within reach of success in the election. This is, in fact, a historic campaign opportunity, exploiting an opening unique in American politics. At this moment, Cindy appears to face insuperable odds, opposing without party support a powerful, heavily-funded incumbent. But we aim to change that. All we are asking is for Nancy Pelosi to do what she should: to uphold her oath of office, which is not to obey a Commander-in-Chief or to enlarge a Democratic majority but to uphold and defend the Constitution.
If we can induce her to do that, then a year from now Cindy Sheehan should be running for an open seat, or against a brand-new incumbent appointed by our Republican governor. Nancy Pelosi, third in line for succession when Bush and Cheney are impeached and removed, will be in the White House. That will, as it happens, leave an open field for Cindy.
So you see, it's nothing personal for us. After all, as representatives of big business go, Nancy Pelosi is better than most. We don't aim to kick her out of politics, we aim to kick her upstairs. And there's a bonus: President Pelosi as a write-in candidate in November. She's far from ideal, from the point of view of members of this campaign, but for a Democrats we could do a lot worse. Off the record, some of us see this as the best strategy for keeping Hillary out of the White House without letting a Republican in.
So there it is: a vision for 2009 that can evoke some real enthusiasm: Cindy in the House, Pelosi in the White House, the US out of Iraq. Our Constitution back, and Bush and Cheney under criminal indictment.
[Remarks of Daniel Ellsberg at a press conference August 9, 2007 at which Cindy Sheehan announced her independent candidacy for the 8th Congressional District of California, an office now held by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.]
Daniel Ellsburg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Is it already a done deal?
Congress, Bush and the Real Constitutional Crisis
By Glenn W. Smith
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Tuesday 31 July 2007
America is in the midst of an authentic constitutional crisis, as the Bush administration moves to reduce Congress to little more than an irrelevant focus group and achieve what no US president has ever achieved: a true above-the-law presidency.
These are the stakes: Will the United States save what is left of its constitutional democracy by restoring checks and balances among the three branches of government?
When the US Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush to the White House by calling off the Florida recount in 2000, many pundits applauded the action because it allegedly headed off a constitutional crisis. That phony rationalization disguised what is now apparent: the real post-Florida 2000 constitutional crisis is the Bush administration's unprecedented, Constitution-destroying lust for power.
The fight should not be measured against partisan positioning for the 2008 elections. Democratic and Republican political consultants will view the crisis that way because that is their job. Consultants are hired to win elections, not save the Constitution. Congressional Democrats must look past the PowerPoints of their consultants. So should Republicans, who are struggling to distance themselves from Bush's negatives without asking the White House for a divorce.
But, there is now no other choice. Bush's drive to place permanent barriers between the people and their government, to lift the presidency above all laws, must be stopped.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the dangerous cultural narrative that frames Congress as an inept community. Our hero myths often include an inept community that must be saved by the lone hero. This cultural narrative has led to a broadly held view that Congress is just such a community.
For those Democrats and Republicans in Congress who remain captive to consultant myopia, I offer this observation. Political experts criticize Senator John Kerry for failing to adequately counter-attack the Swift Boaters. Kerry's mistake, however, was that his campaign behavior undermined his own mythic narrative - the narrative of a courageous Vietnam War hero. Voters who rejected Kerry did so not because they believed the Swift Boaters and were suspicious of his Vietnam valor, but because of the apparent lack of valor that was happening right before their eyes.
Congress is now being Swift Boated by the Bush administration. Americans will judge the valor of Congress, not as presented in ads in 2008, but as witnessed in real time, right now. Polls are no doubt suggesting that voters want Congress to address health care reform and the deteriorating economy. A political fight with Bush over the constitutional balance of power will look like a distraction, like politics as usual, like so much partisan squabbling. Today, it seems that Congress is overcoming that fear and preparing for the fight. They are moving in the right direction with the subpoena of Karl Rove and the opening of a perjury investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. We should applaud these actions, and pray for more.
The Bush gambit is to permanently derail progressive policy goals by building an impenetrable wall between the people and their government and by asserting ultimate and absolute presidential authority. These ambitions are made obvious by the administration's actions: Bush's unprecedented veto threats; the obvious "we-don't-really-care-what-you-think" attitude of Gonzales during his committee testimony; the administration questioning Senator Hillary Clinton's patriotism when she asked for details of Bush's Iraq plans; the refusal to disclose details of the administration's emergency government plan.
Even a temporary eviction from the White House beginning in 2009 would not deter the neoconservatives and their anti-democratic allies. A Democratic president will have her/his hands full cleaning up the Bush garbage. While a Democratic president would probably resist further steps along the above-the-law path, it's unlikely a president will willingly give up any power that has accrued to the presidency during the Bush reign. So, the right wing reasons, we'll just pick up in 2012 where we left off in 2008.
The federal courts, packed with conservative appointments, will also do what they can to establish permanent barriers between the American people and their government.
Congress has no choice but to destroy those barriers now. The crisis cannot be reduced to a messy or selfish partisan confrontation. Truth is, many Republicans are as interested as Democrats in saving our constitutional democracy. The further truth is, the stakes matter much, much more than any potential partisan consequences for either major party.
In the end, the battle for the future of America may make necessary the impeachment of a president who is very publicly moving to destroy our constitutional form of government. It may not seem the politically prudent thing to do. But this is a president who lied us into a war, who uses his pen to make laws (constitutionally reserved for Congress) through signing statements, who commutes the sentence of a convicted criminal to protect himself from scrutiny, who believes he has the right to declare anyone he wants an enemy combatant and then "disappear" that person the way we taught our tyrannical and thuggish client-state dictators to do during the Cold War. If these are not sufficient to justify a legal and constitutional challenge to the legitimacy of the Bush presidency, exactly what would a president have to do before we would impeach him?
Republicans and Democrats in Congress can look at our predicament and decide to save their own asses; Democrats running against Bush; Republicans running from Bush. That would be politics as usual.
Or, they can act fearlessly to save the country, and, despite what today's polls might tell them, earn the gratitude of voters who today might be wishing the nightmare will just come to an end. But the best way to end a nightmare is to wake up.
Congress can interrupt the narrative of its own ineptitude and restore the dignity and power of a people who are willing to govern themselves. But to do so, we must be awake to the real constitutional crisis that is at hand.
--------
Glenn W. Smith is a Senior Fellow with The Rockridge Institute.
By Glenn W. Smith
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Tuesday 31 July 2007
America is in the midst of an authentic constitutional crisis, as the Bush administration moves to reduce Congress to little more than an irrelevant focus group and achieve what no US president has ever achieved: a true above-the-law presidency.
These are the stakes: Will the United States save what is left of its constitutional democracy by restoring checks and balances among the three branches of government?
When the US Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush to the White House by calling off the Florida recount in 2000, many pundits applauded the action because it allegedly headed off a constitutional crisis. That phony rationalization disguised what is now apparent: the real post-Florida 2000 constitutional crisis is the Bush administration's unprecedented, Constitution-destroying lust for power.
The fight should not be measured against partisan positioning for the 2008 elections. Democratic and Republican political consultants will view the crisis that way because that is their job. Consultants are hired to win elections, not save the Constitution. Congressional Democrats must look past the PowerPoints of their consultants. So should Republicans, who are struggling to distance themselves from Bush's negatives without asking the White House for a divorce.
But, there is now no other choice. Bush's drive to place permanent barriers between the people and their government, to lift the presidency above all laws, must be stopped.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the dangerous cultural narrative that frames Congress as an inept community. Our hero myths often include an inept community that must be saved by the lone hero. This cultural narrative has led to a broadly held view that Congress is just such a community.
For those Democrats and Republicans in Congress who remain captive to consultant myopia, I offer this observation. Political experts criticize Senator John Kerry for failing to adequately counter-attack the Swift Boaters. Kerry's mistake, however, was that his campaign behavior undermined his own mythic narrative - the narrative of a courageous Vietnam War hero. Voters who rejected Kerry did so not because they believed the Swift Boaters and were suspicious of his Vietnam valor, but because of the apparent lack of valor that was happening right before their eyes.
Congress is now being Swift Boated by the Bush administration. Americans will judge the valor of Congress, not as presented in ads in 2008, but as witnessed in real time, right now. Polls are no doubt suggesting that voters want Congress to address health care reform and the deteriorating economy. A political fight with Bush over the constitutional balance of power will look like a distraction, like politics as usual, like so much partisan squabbling. Today, it seems that Congress is overcoming that fear and preparing for the fight. They are moving in the right direction with the subpoena of Karl Rove and the opening of a perjury investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. We should applaud these actions, and pray for more.
The Bush gambit is to permanently derail progressive policy goals by building an impenetrable wall between the people and their government and by asserting ultimate and absolute presidential authority. These ambitions are made obvious by the administration's actions: Bush's unprecedented veto threats; the obvious "we-don't-really-care-what-you-think" attitude of Gonzales during his committee testimony; the administration questioning Senator Hillary Clinton's patriotism when she asked for details of Bush's Iraq plans; the refusal to disclose details of the administration's emergency government plan.
Even a temporary eviction from the White House beginning in 2009 would not deter the neoconservatives and their anti-democratic allies. A Democratic president will have her/his hands full cleaning up the Bush garbage. While a Democratic president would probably resist further steps along the above-the-law path, it's unlikely a president will willingly give up any power that has accrued to the presidency during the Bush reign. So, the right wing reasons, we'll just pick up in 2012 where we left off in 2008.
The federal courts, packed with conservative appointments, will also do what they can to establish permanent barriers between the American people and their government.
Congress has no choice but to destroy those barriers now. The crisis cannot be reduced to a messy or selfish partisan confrontation. Truth is, many Republicans are as interested as Democrats in saving our constitutional democracy. The further truth is, the stakes matter much, much more than any potential partisan consequences for either major party.
In the end, the battle for the future of America may make necessary the impeachment of a president who is very publicly moving to destroy our constitutional form of government. It may not seem the politically prudent thing to do. But this is a president who lied us into a war, who uses his pen to make laws (constitutionally reserved for Congress) through signing statements, who commutes the sentence of a convicted criminal to protect himself from scrutiny, who believes he has the right to declare anyone he wants an enemy combatant and then "disappear" that person the way we taught our tyrannical and thuggish client-state dictators to do during the Cold War. If these are not sufficient to justify a legal and constitutional challenge to the legitimacy of the Bush presidency, exactly what would a president have to do before we would impeach him?
Republicans and Democrats in Congress can look at our predicament and decide to save their own asses; Democrats running against Bush; Republicans running from Bush. That would be politics as usual.
Or, they can act fearlessly to save the country, and, despite what today's polls might tell them, earn the gratitude of voters who today might be wishing the nightmare will just come to an end. But the best way to end a nightmare is to wake up.
Congress can interrupt the narrative of its own ineptitude and restore the dignity and power of a people who are willing to govern themselves. But to do so, we must be awake to the real constitutional crisis that is at hand.
--------
Glenn W. Smith is a Senior Fellow with The Rockridge Institute.
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