Archive » July 2020 » Columns

This scribe is beginning to run out of stories from days gone by. The virus is hanging in there longer than the scribe thought it would. The scribe had hoped it would have been under control by now.

The scribe assumed (and all that does it make an ass out of u and me) that a variation of one of the vaccines already in use on a particular flu could be altered to combat this COVID-19. I guess that is not the case right now, but how about some people we occasionally hear about who are small potatoes and just like Preston Tucker (with his automobile that was way ahead of its time) the big guys won’t let them in because of the (you guessed it) money.

The OFs think there might be more than one “Tucker” in the wings.

As things begin to open up, with each phase giving more places the chance to open, restaurants and other businesses are also beginning to open to customers — with restrictions. It may be soon and the OMOTM will be able to get out and enjoy each other’s company and listen to events and adventures the OFs have had in the past few months.

Some of the OFs are still playing it safe. They are being careful where they go, to what places, and for what items. Willy-nilly travel is out.

Some are still waiting for the virus to be wiped out, or at least a pill to cover you if you get it, or maybe a workable vaccine to keep the OF from ever getting it.

A few OMOTM do not want to play games with their ages, and medical pre-conditions, like pacemakers, bypasses, stints, diabetes, thyroid problems, and other similar problems, plus some of the OFs just plain hurt. The only ones that hear them complain are the wives.

One OF mentioned about spacing when out and about, and wearing masks and asked how long does the scribe think this will go on. This scribe doesn’t know but he thinks quite awhile.

The two OFs discussed how people look with the masks and all we have to go by are the eyes. People behind the mask could have a serious overbite but now no one knows.

This could be a good thing. We get to know their eyes and their personalities and not so much their appearance. Some people are pretty clever on how they decorate their masks.

Sometimes the OFs find themselves out in the rain, a good hard rain, and the mask gets soaked. No one told the OFs these things are not waterproof.

Another thing the OFs have mentioned to the scribe is, “If the OFs start again and we are tables of four and spread out, how do we eat with a mask on? All the OFs will have their masks off. Is this acceptable?”

The scribe tells the OFs he does not know of any mask with a flap that the wearer is able to lift up and slide food into the wearer’s mouth. Now what if it is spaghetti? What a mess that would be, and then the wearer might possibly have to go out in the rain. One saving grace is that the OFs hardly ever order spaghetti for breakfast.

What about hot coffee? Now that would be a trick. We need one hand to lift the flap and the other hand to hold the cup of hot coffee.

“Boy,” the OF said, “better not slip up on that one!”

Fibbers

The OFs have a rule — discuss no politics, but on occasion that rule slips. It is not politics that is discussed; it is politicians.

The OFs harken back to the days when politicians were after funding to build the Thruway (late forties early fifties) and to obtain the funding we were told this Thruway was going to be run by an authority and no state funds were to be used. All debt was to be paid by tolls and fees, and at that time we were told this road would be toll-free by at least 1996.

We all know how that worked out, and what fibbers the politicians were, and now the situation is getting worse according to many of the OFs.

One OF said he has recently driven the Thruway and it is beginning to look rather worn and old. It is rough; the signs look faded by the weather; and, where he traveled, much of it wasn’t mowed. Some sections were mowed so maybe others will be taken care of soon.

The OF wondered where the tolls were going. One OF said, when he was working in Syracuse it was faster to use Route 20 home to Albany than use the Thruway.

Another OF asked what about all the small-town speed limits, and the OF answered, even with all the small towns, Route 20 was faster.

“The only thing for me,” the OF said, “were the rest areas on the Thruway because I did not really like stopping in a diner just to use the restroom without getting a cup of coffee or something.”

The scribe offered, “There is always McDonalds; they have considerately placed an outside door by the restrooms so you don’t have to use the dining area.”

This scribe is at the bottom of the notes that were taken last week from a few of the OGs.

The wife just commented, “I’m at the ‘what can I make with green beans and cake mix’ stage of needing groceries. Once again it’s time to don the masks and practice social distancing at the market.

News in the 1880s and ’90s that a traveling circus was stopping in town created an air of anticipation and excitement among all ages. Normally, the daily lives of that era’s country folks were monotonously routine, making the novelty and glamour of the circus’s arrival an event to remember.

Advance news in The Enterprise in July 1885 that Frank A. Robbins Circus and Menagerie was about to appear not only stirred up interest in Knowersville (after 1887, the name was changed to Altamont), but in the surrounding hamlets as well. Knowersville, conveniently located on the busy D&H rail line, was the perfect spot for a one-ring circus to set up and attract paying customers from a wide area.

Using what was advanced technology of the time, the event was promoted with stereopticon views of the coming circus from the piazza of the Knowersville House. The exact location where the circuses that visited Knowersville/Altamont set up their tents and menageries was never specifically identified, but there was certainly much open land adjacent to the village at that time.

When the big day arrived, the village was packed with circus-goers “from near and far” filling village streets to view the circus parade. Circus parades were an American tradition acting as free come-ons, but the cost of admission of this or any of the other circuses over the years was never publicized in The Enterprise.

Following the Robbins’s circus parade were two performances, afternoon and evening, attended by large audiences. In the next week’s edition, The Enterprise editor commented approvingly that “it was the first time in our experience with a show of this kind in town, the program as advertised was carried out.”

Again in 1889, Frank A. Robbins Circus made a stop in Altamont, now with additional attractions including a Wild West hippodrome and a museum in addition to his circus and menagerie. Enterprise readers were advised, “Do not fail to visit this wonderful show … a good circus and an extensive collection of wild animals.”

With the arrival of the Robbins Circus, the village was described as “being in a flutter of excitement” with small boys as well as many of mature years out in force. The next week’s edition noted that the circus had come and gone except for a mound of earth in the shape of a ring … .”

Apparently the day they were leaving town, mention was made by departing circus workers that some reptiles had escaped. No one took it too seriously until one of Mrs. Wm. M. Lainhart’s family members encountered, what The Enterprise described, an “immense snake coiled up near the Old Schoharie Plank Road.”

After being alerted about this discovery, Jacob Van Auken dispatched the unfortunate serpent with an ax. When stretched out full length, it measured eight feet long, attracting many curious onlookers over the next few days.

Sad tale

Circus life in the small one-ring circuses that crossed rural America was fraught with insecurity and uncertainty. The expenses of feeding and paying performers and other workers, feeding animals, covering transportation costs, keeping up the conditions of equipment and tent, and providing a profit for the owner had to be met from ticket sales.

The visit of Rice’s Circus to Altamont proved to be one of the last chapters in the sad tale of a circus down on its luck.

The visit was scheduled for July 1887. The Enterprise announced that the advance car of J.H. Rice’s Circus and Menagerie had arrived, making preparations for a show later that week. The editor claimed, “The show is highly endorsed by the press and we have no hesitancy in speaking in its favor.”

The arrival of the Rice circus caused a stir in the village. Although the outfit had many wagons and other material, the condition of their tent was “torn and dilapidated.” Circus officials brushed it off, claiming the conditions were “due to being hit by a cyclone,” but The Enterprise’s snide comment was, “That gave them away.”

The performers carried on like troupers with the paper admitting many of the acts were “quite meritorious,” but unfortunately the audience attendance was rather small. Rice’s Circus moved on to Albany “where it was reported it was sold to Jacobs & Proctor, who give outdoor 10 cent shows.”

“The Circus Again” was an article appearing the next week continuing the sad saga and fate of Rice’s Circus after leaving Altamont. Setting up in Albany, the circus first suffered disaster when its elephant “Empress” nearly killed a circus-goer.

The circus, which had been operating at a loss, had hoped to “retrieve their fortune” on reaching Albany, but no luck. Manager J.O. O’Brien ordered a quiet street parade, no band playing, moving south out of the city, intending to head for Philadelphia.

Skipping town, leaving behind unpaid and angry creditors, the circus arrived in Coxsackie where the troupe gave a performance. They then, apparently on foot and in wagons, made it to Jersey City.

Here an employee named Edward Welch, went to court, seeking his unpaid salary and also charged “cruelty to dumb animals,” claiming the horses, camels, elephant, lion, and bulls had not been fed since they left Albany and that one of the camels died of starvation.

An arrest warrant went out for O’Brien, but, seemingly an expert on skipping town, he was nowhere to be found. The remains of his circus was moved on to Philadelphia, perhaps where it had originated.

Huge numbers of animals, both domestic and exotic, traveled with these circuses, and at that time their treatment was not an issue except among a very few. In 1907, a short article appeared in The Enterprise, illustrating concern for the poor treatment of circus animals. 

“Trained By Cruelty” claimed that “animals as a rule were taught tricks through torture,” adding that some members of the circus community “speak with horror of the methods of some trainers.” Animal welfare was not an issue for most circus-goers and it was unusual to see reference to this topic in those years.

Circuses grow

One-ring circuses continued to stop in Altamont on and off for the next few years.1892 brought Chas. Lee’s Monster London Circus with acrobats, gymnasts, trapeze artists, a clown, and performing dogs and horses.

The circus was described as “strictly first class” with a “splendid street parade,” and as being “entirely free from fakirs, gamblers or other objectionable features.” Chas. Lee’s circus returned the next year with a show “better than many that charge twice the admission.”

Disreputable hangers-on or dishonest circus employees often used the honest and naïve circus-goers encountered at these rural stops as chickens ready to be plucked.

In 1908, after a visit by Frank A. Robbins Circus, an Enterprise article titled “Robbery and Flim-Flam Game” mentioned one “aged and respected citizen lost $200 to a “slick individual,” while a young man was flim-flammed out of $56 by the ticket seller.

Others were robbed of smaller amounts, making the promise of respectable behavior by circus employees in advance publicity a plus for potential customers.

In all the promotion of visiting circuses, there is never a mention of the cost of admission whether for one of the small one-ring circuses that visited Altamont or the really big shows that appeared in Albany. Certainly not everyone could afford to go to the circus, though the street parades were free for the public.

While in 1893 Sautelle & Ewer’s Circus set up in Altamont, playing to large crowds, a decade later Sautelle’s Circus was described as a “mammoth affair,” bypassing Altamont to set up in Albany. Now expanded into a two-ring circus and traveling on 26 railroad cars, there were the usual circus acts and menagerie.

New additions included the royal Roman hippodrome and a historical Wild West Show. The acts were “all new and novel and original,” many being described as “highly sensational.”

Not only was there a 63 horse and pony act, but the unique “earth’s only pony riding lion named Nero performing wonderful feats.” A mile-long street parade promised to be a brilliant pageant of lustrous chariots, dens of wild beasts, bands, a steam calliope and “more big things than ever was witnessed before in a street procession.”

Competition between the two huge circuses Barnum & Bailey and Ringling Bros. that were traveling from one large city to another forced each of them to become more elaborate each year. In turn, their shows put pressure on smaller circuses to expand or like Rice’s, be pushed into bankruptcy.

Albany and occasionally Schenectady or Troy became the setting for an annual visit of one or both of these big circuses. Hoping to attract large audiences, the circuses put out detailed publicity notices describing their new and novel attractions for that year, inserted in all the newspapers while railroads put on special excursion trains for patrons to travel at reduced rates to attend the circus.

At this stage, smaller circuses were relegated to performing in more outlying rural areas.

Using the 1912 Barnum & Bailey Circus’s publicity announcing their appearance in Albany as an example, here are the details of their fabulous show for that year. Their performance was now expanded with a cast of 1,250 characters; a grand opera chorus of 100 voices; an orchestra of 100 musicians; a 350-dancing-girl ballet; 650 horses; five herds of elephants; caravans of camels; and an entire trainload of special scenery, costumes, and stage effects.

There was to be a lengthy parade and their spectacle “Cleopatra.” The circus traveled on a train more than a mile in length and would cover 14 acres when set up.

There were 110 cages in the menagerie and over 2,000 wagons and other vehicles. This circus has nearly 1,500 employees, 700 horses, and nearly two-thirds of all the elephants in America.

Barnum & Bailey promised what you saw in Albany would be the same as the performance the audience experienced in Madison Square Garden. They guaranteed, “This is the greatest spectacular theatrical and circus event in the history of amusements in America.”

Both Barnum & Bailey and Ringling Bros. changed their spectacles annually plus added new exotic animals and acts to get audiences to return each year.

(Just an aside: With all those animals and all those people, can you imagine the unsanitary conditions left behind when the circus left town back in those days?)

Fair attractions

And what about the performers in the small fading or bankrupt circuses who didn’t have the talent or unusual act to be in the big-time circuses? By the turn of the 20 Century, county fairs were in their heyday and troupes of former circus performers found a new venue. 

In 1908, Altamont fair-goers could see several free attractions including the Ethiopian Black Birds, Bilyck’s Educated Sea Lions, The Trained Chimpanzee, The Four Famous Dieke Sisters, The Double Jointed Midget, and The Famous Gila Monsters. Each year, similar attractions traveled the county fair circuit, becoming part of each fair’s attractions.

Circus-going in the later 19th Century and during a large part of the 20th Century was a popular pastime for those who could afford admission. In those times, very few ever raised concerns about the treatment of the animals or the working conditions of performers and other workers employed setting up or breaking down the circus on arrival and departure.

The free and lengthy and elaborate street parades created a spectacle for everyone. With the excitement and glamour, is it any wonder so many kids wanted to run away to join the circus and a few adults secretly wished they had?

Anyone living in the United States who’s read a newspaper or been near a television in the past two months is well aware of the persistent and wide-scale chants for “systemic change” in American society, most recently instigated by the violence the American justice system has perpetrated against Black Americans.

A dozen years ago, people were calling for change in the way Washington worked; now, as biological and racial viruses eat at us, people are calling for fundamental changes in the way America works — systemic problems require systemic change.

I understand what people mean when they say “systemic” but I find the term too generic and linear so I use “structural.” Structural better gets at the depth of the problems at hand.

For example, we can talk about “structural violence,” that is, the violence that results from the way American institutions are structured whereby greater value is assigned to some while the needs of others are minimized or dismissed altogether. Whites are rated over Blacks, men over women, straights over gays, Christians over Muslims and Jews, and people over planet Earth.

And the system’s distribution outlets are set up to provide bounty for those assessed greater and to insure that the lesser get less: of pay, compensation, and all the goods and services that meet a person’s — to channel Abraham Maslow — “safety needs.”

We all know that the resources a person has available deeply affect his peace of mind. How sad then that a land of “amber waves of grain,” as Jordan Weissmann pointed out in a 2013 article in The Atlantic, is a system “Where the Poor Don’t Get Holidays Off.” Nor healthcare.

The ideology that underlies, and is used to justify, such a distribution is best described as “deservingness.” The rich say they deserve what they got because they worked hard for it, and those in power say they earned it — and most believe they did it on their own.

The Russian philosopher-geographer Peter Kropotkin found such a claim absurd. In his famed essay “Our Riches” he emphasized, “There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property”; everybody rises on the shoulders of others.

He said there were, “Thousands of inventors, known and unknown ... [who] died in poverty ... Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, [who] labored to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never have appeared.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of a “desserts-based” economy is that it inflicts debilitating lifestyles on millions and produces a stream of poor who never get out from under misery.

What do we tell a woman — who takes three buses to work each morning and three back home after chipping the morning toast off the toilets of the rich — when she overhears her “client” talking about a four-million-dollar house she just bought in Malibu and the thousand dollars her husband spent on dinner the night before?

And what do we tell a farm worker, who gave his life to a farm for 40 years, and was sent to retire without a penny of pension?

These souls might not understand the subtleties of Keynesian economics but are well aware of the resentment they feel about division.

As we continue to wrangle over who America is and will be, the first thing we need to do is stop the indiscriminate, random, violation of the human rights of American citizens sanctioned by law enforcement’s “‘I Can’t Breathe’ Handbook.”

What is needed is not a defunding of police but a serious and intensely systematic re-evaluation of the meaning of “protect and serve.” John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor David Kennedy says cops need to take a Hippocratic Oath.

And those cops who suffocate, or shoot in the back, unarmed Black men, are not a few bad apples because the barrel has rotted. Conspiratorialists say the methods police use to screen out racist applicants are not designed to weed out bad apples but to screen them in so their violence can “teach a lesson” to those intent on challenging the system.

And it’s paramount to keep in mind that racists do not simply despise people of color, they denigrate all categories of people they deem less: They say women are inferior to men, they laugh at gays, they heap scorn on Jews.

Thus America’s Personal Value Index (PVI) not only defines Black people as less than whites but pays women on the job 81 cents for every dollar a man makes; it mocks LGBTQs who seek a seat at the table; and treats Jews like, well, what a sad night in American history it was when neo-Nazi sieg-heiling torch-carrying confederates in Charlottesville chanted “blut und boden” and “Jews will not replace us.”

Even the president of the United States got in on the act when he applied the PVI to the people of Mexico, calling them a band of drugged-up criminogenic rapists.

Any time we use words like “more” and “less,” “deserving” and “undeserving,” “value” and “worth,” we situate ourselves in the field of economics — which is essentially a science of human enjoyment. Economics measures the means we use to find enjoyment in life and who we allow to share in it.

Of course that a nation assigns value to people is not an oddity. We all do it in every relationship we have so we might get a better read on the “other.” You’re assessing me right now while you’re reading this.

But the ultimate purpose of assessment is to improve relationships, to relieve people of stress, and to allow the least to sit at table with the rest of us.

You can understand how all this turmoil is creating problems for “the American Dream.” James Truslow Adams was the first to use “American Dream” in the way we understand it today, in his 1931 “The Epic of America” where he describes America like a “city on a hill.”

Adams said the American Dream was a land “in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”

He said a new car and a promotion at work are fine but the essence of the dream is when “each man and each woman [is] able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and [are] recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Sigmund Freud was a specialist in dreams; he said people dream to get something reality will not allow them during the day; dreams fulfill wishes.

Thus at 3 a.m. a slumbering soul needs to go to the bathroom but instead dreams of a waterfall flowing into a beautiful ravine, and feels relief — but soon awakens and has to run to the loo; the dream accomplished nothing.

Freud also saw there was another level of consciousness that, instead of supporting dreams being fulfilled, rises up against it like a confederate nation.

Last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released the findings of a study of how much Medicare and Medicaid spend on seniors who get sick with the virus. The data say: If you’re Black and poor, you get the virus faster, you go to the hospital sooner, you say hello to death long before your white and well-off comrades do.

How do we deal with a system that’s ambushing the American Dream for all? How you respond to those 14 words says how just a person you are.

I was perusing the Enterprise website from Iraq in the fall of 2017 — one month after a solider in my unit had been killed by an enemy Improvised Explosive Device — when I encountered Rose Schneider’s Nov. 2, 2017 article about a Confederate flag flying in the yard of a Berne residence, per request of the teenager who lived there.

His mother had told the reporter that he’d “been upset about Confederate statues being torn down” in the wake of the Charlottesville fiasco earlier that year — acts that she depicted as “destroying history” — and had further characterized her son’s public display of the Confederate flag as his “right to say ‘heritage, not hate’.”

Writing as I am on the Fourth of July, overseas in a country in the midst of its own civil war, it seems important to acknowledge that America’s War of Independence secured that Berne teen’s right to say whatever he wants.

But it’s equally important to acknowledge that the significance of Independence Day — as breathtakingly portrayed in Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” — is subject to interpretation depending on the historical legacy that informs one’s American identity.

Like, I can understand harboring an embittered resentment if the heroes annually lionized on this day had similarly subjugated my ancestors to the nightmarish horrors of lifelong labor, torture, and chains. After all, it’s 2020, yet I still expect an apology from Egypt’s pharaohs. Can you imagine if, on Passover, someone told me to “get over it?”

Unsurprisingly, reactions to Schneider’s article in the following weeks indicted the Berne teenager for being racist. And, while I understood those sentiments, I suspected he’d simply been confused, however grossly. It was hard to imagine a neighbor’s heart harboring hate.

You can be insensitive, historically ignorant, and needlessly inflammatory without overtly hating someone for the color of their skin. And, in fairness, some people are simply unaware that the preservation of human slavery was identified as the justification for secession in each and every Declaration of Secession authored by the Confederate States. (That young Berne resident may be unclear as to what the Confederate flag represents, but Confederates in 1861 certainly weren’t.) 

 Some people may not know that the claim the Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” is a deliberate fraud; in fact, it was the Southern states that appealed to the federal government to enforce the return from the North of those desperate humans who’d escaped their bondage.  Many Northern states had passed state laws extending safety and refuge to escaped slaves (who awaited lashes and physical mutilation if returned to their owners), but the South adamantly opposed states’ rights when the benefits thereof didn’t inure to slavers.

And, some people haven’t taken time to consider that, in flying the Confederate flag, they share association with nearly every white supremacist militia in America. The Fourth of July is as good a time as any to take stock of the company you keep, and whether it says anything about you.

The online version of this column embeds links to West Point’s Colonel Ty Seidule’s irrebuttable explanation of whether the Civil War was fought over slavery (spoiler: it was) or John Oliver’s intimate look at slavery as the exclusive cause of secession.

Or, google the dates that the various Confederate statues were erected in America, and the identities of their proponents; it’s hard to straight-facedly argue that Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee Monument — installed in 1924, fifty-nine years after his surrender — is intended to broadly honor Southern heritage, as opposed to that highly specific aspect of it which entailed the enslavement of human beings.

Yet that’s precisely what some people do argue, seduced as they are by the cynically self-serving architects of “Lost Cause” historical revisionism. And I therefore presume that lots of folks are mystified by: Mississippi’s decision to become the latest and final state to remove Confederate symbology from its state flag; or the decision by the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Navy, U.S. Forces Korea, and NASCAR to prohibit display of the Confederate flag; or the full-scale removal of Confederate statues in Richmond, Virginia (former heart of the Confederacy).

So on this Independence Day — and just in case the intervening three years haven’t afforded that Berne teen (perhaps now in his early 20s) the wisdom to which he didn’t have access when he first flew the Confederate flag — I want to explain why Confederate symbols so offend me personally. Because there’s nothing more American than making it all about me.

To begin with, what’s known today as the “Confederate flag” is not, in fact, the official flag of the Confederacy. That flag — the “Stars and Bars” — is an unimaginative budget rip-off of Old Glory’s stars and stripes. Meanwhile, the flag that caused so much consternation in a Berne yard three years ago derives from the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, known today as the Confederate Battle Flag. It is, in short, the flag of General Robert E. Lee.

No discussion of the Confederate flag is complete without reference to Lee — the man complicit in the deaths of more U.S. soldiers than anyone else in human history. (And when I say “U.S. soldier,” I’m referencing those who fought for the United States, not against it; who fought to preserve the Union, as opposed to tear it asunder in order to maintain the right to rip apart Black families at the auction block.)

Indeed, there isn’t much that separates Robert E. Lee from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, former leader of the Islamic State. They both caused the death of American soldiers; they both owned slaves; they both were vanquished by the United States; and they both had beards.

Yes, I’m being deliberately incendiary to make a point; of course there were stark differences between Lee and al-Baghdadi. For example, al-Baghdadi never swore an oath to defend the Constitution, his forces took longer than four years to defeat, and whereas al-Baghdadi was a foreign enemy against whom American soldiers swear to defend the Constitution, Robert E. Lee was a domestic one.

“I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

That’s the oath of commissioned officers. Today, an Army officer who follows in Lee’s footsteps by breaking his or her oath to the Nation (and God) would be tried for mutiny and sedition — a violation of Article 94 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the maximum punishment for which is death. The Army takes its oaths seriously.

Robert E. Lee, however, did not take his oaths seriously. He first swore an oath of allegiance upon graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1829 and being commissioned as a second lieutenant; he then swore another oath of allegiance upon his appointment as lieutenant colonel of the Second Cavalry in 1855. 

Yet when the South seceded from the Union in 1861, Robert E. Lee flouted his oaths, turned his back on the United States, and applied his elite military training against even his former soldiers in a bid to keep his several slaves in bondage.

Those are the irrefutable facts; I serve my country in defense of your right to deny them. But spare us both the indignity of contorting logic and history to suggest that Robert E. Lee is worthy of memorialization. 

We don’t “remember history” by erecting monuments to that other notorious slaver, Adolf Hitler, and we need not expend oxygen discussing whether removal of Robert E. Lee statues erases history.

History happened; it can’t be destroyed. It can only be forgotten (by people who don’t read) or reinterpreted (by people who read Facebook).

If a statue really is the only way you can orient yourself in the linear progression of time, here’s a compromise: Let’s modify the offending “Emancipation Memorial” statue by substituting the Black slave on bended knee beneath Abraham Lincoln’s paternalistically outstretched hand with a subjugated Robert E. Lee in the same posture, evoking the latter’s gratitude to our 16th president for mercifully declining to court-martial him for treason.

Or we can replace the many statues of Robert E. Lee standing proud in military uniform with ones of him in a nightgown on his deathbed, contemplating the awkward conversation awaiting him when St. Peter scrutinizes the oaths he betrayed and the blood of four-hundred-thousand American soldiers still dripping from his hands.

Why subject Robert E. Lee to such dishonorable treatment? Because his Army service was, by literal definition, dishonorable. That’s the legal characterization of treason; the Confederate flag is its shorthand.

Given the American South’s rich and expansive history, it’s hard to understand why anyone would celebrate with Lee’s flag a heritage focused solely on a specific four-year period comprised of the South’s twin shames: slavery, and unqualified military defeat.

Treason-apologists claim the Confederate flag represents the “rebel spirit.” Nonsense.

A conductor on the Underground Railroad better typifies the rebel spirit than the sulking slavers who took up arms against their countrymen merely because they preferred not to plant their own crops. And don’t even get me started on how reverence for the antebellum South is an affront to all red-blooded American farmers whose soil is tilled with their own blood, sweat, and tears.

In 2017, my fellow soldier’s remains were draped in the same flag as were the remains of the two soldiers in my current unit who were killed this past February, just six weeks after we arrived in Afghanistan.

That flag was the American flag, which represents the freedom of all human beings; the fallen were American soldiers, like the ones Robert E. Lee martyred on a Gettysburg battlefield; my comrades’ remains were transported by C-130 back to an America that Robert E. Lee endeavored to destroy.

And the promise of today — Independence Day — means something uniquely special in spite of Robert E. Lee.

I said some pretty crazy [censored] when I was a teenager, so I can forgive a neighbor possessed of the attention-seeking contrarianism that defines adolescence. But what of the adults who would stand arm-in-arm with Lee beneath that Confederate flag? Do they lay claim to today’s fireworks?

True: That Berne teen has every right to personally redefine the Confederate flag’s significance, and to give it some personally-contrived meaning divorced from its origins as the flag that flew in triumph over the graves of real patriots.

But so, too, do I have every right to view that decision with disappointment. For there’s no defensible justification for flying colors that rallied traitors to the cause of killing United States soldiers.

I followed in the footsteps of those fallen young men — heroes who fulfilled their oaths to the Constitution, who gave their lives in defense of our country — so as to advance a cause that the Confederacy sought to deny: freedom.

Their uniforms were blue, whereas mine is camouflage — but both serve the colors of the only flag, for all the faults of its history, that’s worth saluting in the perennial struggle for liberty.

This is the second time I’ll return home with fewer soldiers in my unit than when we deployed.  Through their ultimate sacrifice, their names join a venerable roster of those who gave their lives for a star-spangled banner that yet waves o’er the land of the free, irrespective of creed or color.  Their memory is the everlasting legacy of Independence Day.

So God bless the American soldier who lays his life down for his country; it is your place in history that I honor. And may God have mercy on Robert E. Lee. He is not my heritage, and his is not my flag.

Captain Jesse Sommer is a lifelong resident of Albany County, currently deployed to Afghanistan with the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He welcomes your thoughts at [email protected].

Thank you, Class of 2020, for offering me the opportunity to speak to you on this most important day. You climbed a mountain, you reached the peak, and here you sit before me, victors all; I’m thrilled to share your joy.

Your next step will be to take a short breath and consider the mountains to come.   

That might involve school, a job, or blocking out extended time to ponder what you’re meant to do in life, to find your calling as they say. I do not mean to be exclusive but I have a special place in my heart for those called to be poets and contemplatives.

When I think of life as climbing mountains, the “Purgatorio” of Dante Alighieri comes to mind, the second part of the “Divine Comedy.”

In grand poetic style, Dante says the struggle a person faces to find his true self involves not one but seven mountains. And each mountain represents a type of suffering we must go through to rid ourselves of the sin, vices, peccadillos, the falsity that keeps us confined.

Like the Desert Fathers, he called those barriers-to-selfhood “seven deadly sins,” each an attitude-cum-behavior that turns us against ourselves.

Among them are: being envious of what other people have or do (envy); acting with rage in our interactions with others (wrath); seeking more than we need in life (greed); and using power like a god to protect our possessions (pride).

In his classic work “Fear and Trembling,” the Danish philosopher-poet Søren Kierkegaard says the purgatory experience involves a scrubbing away of the rust of falsity so a person can be “that self which one truly is.” Refusing to do so, he says, is a sign of despair.

The 20th-Century psychoanalyst Carl Rogers highlighted Kierkegaard’s assessment this way: (1) the most common form of despair is “not choosing,” that is, avoiding the risk “to be oneself;” and (2) the most deadly form of despair is to choose to become someone else.

Kierkegaard and Rogers both saw that scaling the mountains to become one’s true self is the greatest responsibility we have to ourselves.

And Dante said that, when a person faces up to the transformations purgatory exacts, he becomes a spiritual being, that is, he lives with an equanimity close to happiness.

And “spiritual” does not mean something wispy and ethereal but the life of a body grounded in purpose, a body in communion with others, when political and economic realities align with justice.

In the third part of his trilogy, the “Paradiso,” Dante says no one gets to heaven who’s at odds with himself; heaven is for those who answer their calling. Such people treat others like they want to be treated, what Christians call being “Christ-like.”

The Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), forever interested in human growth, saw what Dante, Kierkegaard, and Rogers saw but through a different lens.

He said, as he walked down the street, he could see in people’s faces “unlived lines,” signs of emptiness.

In the 12th poem of Book II of “The Book of Hours,” he says every forfitter’s “true face never speaks” wrapped as it is in a mask, a mask that thickens as faces are put on and cast off like old clothes.

“Somewhere there must be storehouses,” Rilke says, “where all these lives are laid away/like suits of armor or old carriages/or clothes hanging limply on the walls./Maybe all the paths lead there/to the repository of unlived things.”

Lived things have no falsity because they reflect the realized dreams Sigmund Freud spoke of in “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

We hardly hear the word “calling” anymore because long ago the Catholic Church took it over and limited its meaning to when a person becomes a priest or a nun — and, of course, the only voice worth hearing is the voice of God. Thus, all the revelations that come from the conversations we have with ourselves, deep in consciousness, are written off.

And, when we say “having a conversation with ourselves,” who is that other voice? Who are we talking to? Whatever you say, it’s certain that that voice, at its deepest, offers radical insights into our destiny and, like an empathetic friend, encourages us to persevere.

In “The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life,” the noted New York Times columnist David Brooks says he is well aware of the pains of purgatory, and that there’s always another mountain.

And he may have added a new sin to Dante’s list: that of being an abstracted person, living an unlived life in personal relationships with others.

Brooks says that, although he achieved great fame as a journalist and thinker, the climb up the mountain-of-success rendered him “aloof, invulnerable and uncommunicative, at least when it came to my private life.” Sounding like Augustine of Hippo he confesses, “I sidestepped the responsibilities of relationship.

Dear Graduates, I beg your pardon for raising such weighty issues as you, your family, and friends are aching to go out for a bite and hoist a glass in your honor.

Take your time, enjoy the day, these questions will be here tomorrow: Who will you be in public? Who will you be in private? Will you live an unlived life and sport a face of unlived lines?

And remember, only Walt Whitman-like candor can move a person from purgatory home.

The rock musician Eddie Money used to sing a line: “I’ve got two tickets to paradise.”

I’ve got two too, one for me and the other for, well, what are you doing for the rest of your life?