America and the "tragic sense"

"My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live." Miguel de Unamuno

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The above quote is from one of Spain's greatest literary and intellectual figures, Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno is perhaps best known for his book, "Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida" (The Tragic Sense of Life).

Richard L. Rubens, Ph.D. wrote of Unamuno's philosophy,

The central, defining characteristic of the tragic sense of life is its insistence on the balance between the striving for rationality on the one hand, and the recognition of the underlying irrationality of existence on the other.

Nothing is more foreign to most Americans than the idea that we struggle in vain and that the struggle itself is the meaning of life. Another great Spanish poet and contemporary of Unamuno's, Antonio Machado wrote and I'll make a clumsy attempt to translate,

Caminante son tus huellas
Traveler the path is your footprints and nothing more
El camino nada más;
caminante no hay camino
Traveller, there is no path
se hace camino al andar.
You make the path by walking
Al andar se hace camino
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
When walking you make the path
And when you turn to look back
You see the path that you will never trod again
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas sobre el mar.
Traveler, there is no path
Only sparkling reflections on the sea
¿Para que llamar caminos
A los surcos del azar...?
Why call paths,
That which are only the furrows of fortune
Todo el que camina anda,
Como Jesús sobre el mar.
Every traveler walks,
Like Jesus on the sea

I put this under a photo of LBJ and MLK because I think that somehow they illustrate both Unamuno and Machado's philosophy. The tragedy of the American left: how justice defeated justice... how basic decency and democratic values condemned millions of Americans of all colors to poverty and illness.

Hegel wrote:

"The heroes of ancient classical tragedy encounter situations in which, if they firmly decide in favor of the one ethical pathos that alone suits their finished character, they must necessarily come into conflict with the equally justified ethical power that confronts them."

Making equal citizens of the descendants of slavery: descendants of both master and slave, was the inescapable duty, dharma, of American progressives. This situation made and still makes a mockery of the Declaration of Independence, which was written by a slaveholder and seconded by slaveholders... This injustice could not be allowed to stand

Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the closest thing to a man of the left that has ever sat in the White House, knew that this was his duty and although a southerner carried out that duty unflinchingly.

Master politician that he was, I'm sure he knew what was to follow: Nixon's "Southern Strategy", that opened the door to Reagan, Bush-I and Bush-II, a movement that strived mightily to undo all that Johnson tried to achieve with his "Great Society"... and largely succeeded in destroying it and gave a political base to all those whose philosophy has deprived generations of Americans of decent public health care and decent public schools.

This contradiction is America's original sin and its tragedy, its eternal fate. DS

Iraq versus Vietnam... LBJ and Dubya

President Lyndon Johnson listens to a tape recording from his son-in-law Capt. Charles Robb, who was a Marine Corps company commander in Vietnam. By Jack Kightlinger, Washington, DC, July 31, 1968

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People are always comparing Iraq to Vietnam and the photograph above does the job very well... better than any I've ever seen.

The candid photograph above shows the President of the United States bent in sorrowful concentration listening to a recorded message from his son in law, a US Marine serving in Vietnam. Can you imagine George W. Bush - who also has two daughters - having a son in law in the US Marines, much less one serving in Iraq? In fact I can't even imagine Bush ever sitting in such a tragic pose in all his life... unless he was hungover.

The man in the photograph is Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, a man whose presidency was destroyed by the war in Vietnam. If it hadn't been for Vietnam, I believe that LBJ's would have been one of history's great presidencies: certainly one of the greatest from a progressive point of view.

The centerpiece of Johnson's administration was the "Great Society's" social programs, and most of what little social democracy the United States possesses today we owe to LBJ. Medicare, Medicaid, and federal education funding, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the National Public Radio are just a few of the programs we owe to Johnson. The Wikipedia article states that, "The two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice". As the Bible's shortest sentence puts it, "Jesus wept". All in all it was the most fertile period of social legislation in American history after FDR's "New Deal". African-Americans probably owe Johnson more than any other president after Lincoln.

FDR was Lyndon Johnson's hero... funnily enough Roosevelt was also Ronald Reagan's hero too. Many consider that Ronald Reagan's main achievement was defeating the "evil empire" - which probably collapsed under its own dead weight - when in fact Reagan's principal goal, one could call it his life's work, was to destroy as much as he could of Johnson's "Great Society". Bush's hero of course is Ronald Reagan.

A man of prodigious, practical energy, an impassioned defender of the underprivileged and the excluded, with all his faults, LBJ was "a man in full"... nothing like the autistic and incompetent little twerp that sits in the Oval Office today. DS