Hi there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about history. America’s war in Afghanistan— our longest military operation ever— just ended in grim fashion, and it feels necessary to look to the past to understand how we arrived here, if only to figure out where to place blame. There was Donald Trump’s ill-advised negotiations with the Taliban, which included the release of thousands of Taliban troops from imprisonment in Pakistan. But of course, the problems predated the Trump Administration. The Obama Administration, for example, repeatedly overstated the progress we had made in Afghanistan. But they, too, were simply trying to keep the plates they’d inherited spinning. The Bush Administration rightly receives the brunt of the blame from most sensible observers. As the New York Times points out, just months after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Taliban tried to surrender to American troops in exchange for amnesty. Bush and his merry band of warmongers turned down the deal, leaving us to ponder, twenty years later, how things might have been different if our leaders had chosen peace.
But allowing the buck to stop at Bush is still reductionist, of course. It’s a betrayal of thousands of American lives to understate the role of Osama Bin Laden, his Al Qaeda network, and the Taliban that empowered them to carry out the 9/11 attacks.
Yet even acknowledging all of that still doesn’t grant us a clear picture of how we got here— we’d have to go back at least to the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan supported the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union. Those jihadists included bin Laden, and America’s backing of the group led directly to the formation of Al Qaeda, which ultimately led to our twenty-year war.
But with all of that in mind, do we now understand what happened? We’re still left with the need to know why the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the first place— a question that necessitates study of the Cold War, Stalinism, the fractured post-World War II partnerships, the Russian Revolution, and on and on, back to the dawn of man. At a certain point, it becomes easier to blame John F. Kennedy for the war in Afghanistan, because if he hadn’t prevailed in keeping the peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps none of us would be here today, and thus the war would have never happened.
My point in all of this is that if we acknowledge that it’s impossible to understand all of history from the Big Bang to the present, then perhaps nobody can claim to truly understand any history.
In fact, my very first foray into nonfiction after a lifetime dedicated to fiction was in the form of a history podcast, ostensibly about a 19th century prizefighter but really an excuse to dive into the plight of Irish-Americans and the bizarre assassination of James Garfield. But I found the format I chose— ten episodes limited to no more than twenty minutes each— hopelessly limiting. I couldn’t possibly convey the material differences between Ulysses Grant and James Blaine in the 1880 Republican National Convention in such a compressed time. In truth, I’m not sure I’d know how to properly explain it if I had twelve hours to do so— because, of course, I’d have to explain Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan, and thus the Civil War, and thus the antebellum period, and thus the American Founders’ views on slavery and white supremacy, and thus the Enlightenment that inspired them, and thus the centuries of monarchy that predated the Enlightenment.
But it’s still worth at least trying to understand history, because some understanding— however limited— is better than none at all as we contemplate how society should move forward. We just have to be aware of our own limitations, and of the interconnectedness of all history.
For instance, I recently read a feature from The Atlantic on some often unstated details of Emmett Till’s brutal lynching in 1955. Shouldn’t I contemplate the ways that story relates to an essay from the New Yorker on the cruel treatment of Chinese immigrants during the California gold rush? In both cases, they’re the result of viewing ethnic minorities as less than human, and that’s a tradition with a very long history. And then, shouldn’t I consider how they both relate to 2020, when we saw a Movement for Black Lives and an American President referring to a global pandemic as “China virus” and “kung flu?” And then, shouldn’t I trace the latter back to Andrew Jackson, the foul-mouthed anti-immigrant populist?
But of course, I have to end this newsletter eventually. So I’ll draw all of this back to a few essays I’ve read recently on America’s founding. Last week, I shared an essay from the New Yorker on Lafayette, the French officer who participated in both the French and American revolutions. I highly recommend it.
The thing is, we so often hear our nation’s leaders invoke the mythology of our founders, but much of it is just that— a myth. As impossible as it is to make sense of history, we’re much better off making an effort to do so than to simply plug our ears and repeat the same comforting myths to ourselves. Myths like “This is what our founders intended” when the truth, as a recent column from Jamelle Bouie makes clear, is that the founders could never imagine the nation we now inhabit. At the time of the first census, New York, even then America’s largest city, was tiny compared to Paris. Today, it’s the largest city in the world. When we think of things like the Senate and electoral college, we have to remember that in 1790, our most populous state (Virginia) was twelve times times the size of the least populous state (Delaware). Today, California has more than sixty-nine times the population of Wyoming.
More importantly, we have to remember that, as a deep dive from The New Republic demonstrates, this nation’s founding wasn’t nearly as pure and idealistic as we like to imagine. In truth, it was less about pursuit of democracy and more about greed— not to mention white supremacy— Washington himself led a massacre of Native Americans, and the treatment of indigenous peoples in the 18th century informed the manifest destiny mindset that dominated the 19th century. And modern Republicans would be horrified to realize that the rebel colonists were big fans of cancel culture. As the essay notes, John Adams was delighted to have achieved a culture that suppressed and shamed colonists who remained loyal to the monarchy.
It wasn’t all bad, of course, and we should study the good with the bad. After all, however impure the intentions of many of our founders, and however hypocritical the nation’s founding was (citizenship was narrowly applied to white men; and for all the talk of liberty, slavery was constitutionally protected), it did serve as the world’s first modern liberal democracy, and that’s important.
Aren’t we better for knowing these things? Even if we know nothing of King Phillip’s War or, for that matter, the formation of the British monarchy, doesn’t it help to have just a little more context? Even if it’s still not nearly enough?
That is why, despite the unbearable weight of history, we should strive to learn more of it every day. We’ll never achieve mastery, but that doesn’t mean we should settle for ignorance.
And on that note, the NYT runs down exciting September book releases— including some explorations of history. Cheers to that.
Thank you for caring enough to read.
Be safe. Drink water. You are loved.
Talk to you Thursday.