A Few Shiny Pebbles

In 2004, historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in the Los Angeles Times about presidential vision in times of crisis. He quoted FDR: “All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified."

I believe that this is one of those times. We are going to elect a new president in 2008, and that means we are going to elect a specific future for America and for the world. This coming election and its aftermath will be studied for generations to come with the intensity that the decade before World War II and the war itself commands. Just as with the 1930s and 1940s, our future promises to get a great deal worse before it gets better. How much worse, and for how long, will be determined by our votes. It would help if we tried to get it right.

I looked for the Schlesinger article because it was quoted in a piece by Steven Warshawsky on May 7, “Where Is The Republican Vision?” (American Thinker Blog). Warshawsky’s excellent complaint was that the Republican presidential debate shows that the candidates lack vision, and that since the American people both left and right want change, then, (emphasis mine):

The candidate who is best able to harness this mood and attach it to a coherent political program is going to be our next president. [. . . ] No one is proposing a "Contract with America" or an "ownership society"—a bold, principled plan for moving our country in a direction other than the same broadly liberal trajectory in which we have been heading for the last 40 years.

In a political campaign, it is important to devise a powerful model, a vivid metaphor to bring the contest to each mind and eye. This coming presidential campaign is an important time for a detailed analysis of visions, and for a striking, revelatory metaphor for where we are going and what we are trying to do. It is most definitely a moment when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation have to be clarified.

Warshawsky quoted from Schlesinger:

The president of the United States, wrote Henry Adams, the most brilliant of American historians, "resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek." The Constitution awards presidents the helm, but creative presidents must possess and communicate the direction in which they propose to take the country. The port they seek is what the first President Bush dismissively called "the vision thing."

Schlesinger’s is the image of a President steering the Ship of State toward a glorious visionary port. This is a venerated image, and both political parties have used it to their advantage. A Ship of State carries the imprimatur of risk and adventure: Each nation setting forth upon the seas of Time. Now, a metaphor is a powerful enchanter of the mind. It captures worlds of thought into the framing of an image. How easily we take the that surface metaphor for what it seems, and rarely look to its implications and details.

Is the Ship of State part of the GOP vision for the future? It has occurred to me that there is a second universe of meaning in the term the Ship of State, and I believe that this second meaning is the perfect metaphor to clarify why the Democrats, the Left, should not be elected to guide us into our future. Ironically enough, it carries with it the same negative characteristics as a metaphor to display the fundamental reasons why an Islamofascist state is wrong.

THE COLLECTIVIST SHIPS OF STATE

If we look closer, we can see that all ships have a common form that dictates their use: They‘re self-contained and limited. I believe that the great Ideologies, the Utopias, of the Leftists and the Islamofascists fit perfectly into the closed metaphor of a ship at sea. Whether it is one of the collectivist states of the Left in Europe, or the extremists like China, North Korea, Vietnam, the old USSR, and Cuba, or an all-encompassing theocracy of the Islamofascists, each is the image of one single, mammoth Craft, the whole State on the Ship, the Captain at the Helm, the vast Crew at various tasks set by internal mandates of their Ideology, the Passengers along to survive the best they can—and Pay. This is no pleasure cruise.

I believe these Utopian ideologies must see the world this way. Their basic philosophical stand demands a zerosum Ship where everything is politicized. (At its extreme, there is no way out. It is a prison, disguised as a State. There is no private property, except for the fact that the ship itself belongs to the leadership.) The Passengers are separated according to Identity Politics into collective groups of race, sex, economic class, and religion. The ship’s Ideology is the final arbiter, the legislator and judge, the jailor and executioner. It sets up the barriers that people face, not nature. There is no free movement between the decks. The rules—social engineering, micro-managing, centralize all power. Needs are defined and limited. Those grudgingly allowed to ply a private trade—pay more and more of the cost of “services” for everyone.

And though some passengers look longingly at the shore, wishing for space to stretch their spirits, to create a vaster world, the State keep them all on “onboard” the Ideology. (At its extreme, with a the Berlin Wall or North Korean border, and jumping ship is often penalized by death.) No matter what they promise about human rights, it is only the small number of leadership members who soar to the skies on occasion.

One of the hallmarks of a Utopia is the need for harmony, for stasis, for everyone keeping to an assigned place in the Whole. (A hat-tip to Bruce and Ferdy, the Conservative Cat, for pointing out to me this crucial need that a Utopia has for stasis.) The deck and section you are born into defines you, “authenticates” you, puts you in “harmony” with others in your group. The “inauthentic” becomes a danger.

Their catch-phrase is equality of results. (Except for the leadership group, who of course need more because of the arduous work in running the ship.) All who dare to excel are punished, because “It isn’t fair.” (Except of course for those the leadership choose to elevate because of a talent in an area recognized by the State as appropriate.)

“You’re only entitled to your fair share,” they say, although they never quite define just what this “fair share” means. They call each deviation from their norms a moral crime to all. They create categories such as “hate crimes”, “speech codes”, “acts that offend”, and institute thought police. Any wish for private gain by individuals is sinful selfishness. And any desire to spend the funds you earn yourself on causes self-defined by you is also selfishness, and is, of course, unfair.

They turn one labeled-group against another with the politics of envy and resentment. They call the favored Passenger groups “the People” and “the Victims”—allowing them to label the rest as undeserving and unfair, who deserve to be forced to surrender their individuality, to conform to the Ideology.

The Utopians are trapped by their Ideological Metaphor of Life, their Ships of State all eventually Titanics—however different their outward form, they all share the inner structure of the tyranny. Throughout the world those who have patterned thusly their Ships of State—those who have made a single Ideological Ship of vast complexity—are striking Icebergs set there by Truths they can’t escape.

I believe that more and more the United States is growing into such a single PC Ship of State. As Warshawsky wrote in his complaint about the candidates, no one has “a bold, principled plan for moving our country in a direction other than the same broadly liberal trajectory in which we have been heading for the last 40 years.” That Leftist trajectory is busy shaping the United States with the contour of a ship. But is this America? Surely America cannot be encompassed within the confinements of the concept of a single Ship! The largest imagined ship on Earth is much too small to span the giant that lives in any one of us, let alone to span the vast unbounded mental frontier that is America.

A DIFFERENT SHIP OF STATE

When I was a child I learned a famous poem about an American Ship of State, written when the North had won the Civil War and Lincoln had been assassinated—“Oh Captain! My Captain” by Walt Whitman. The image Whitman gave was somehow different from the others I’ve quoted here. It spoke of the poet crying to the president, dead on the deck, that: “the prize we sought is won”, “for you the shores a-crowding” and, “The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;” . . . .

Now, Schlesinger, spoke of the ship as though it carried us all within its frame, aimed at some future visionary state. The difference between this Leftist or Islamofascist ship and that of Walt Whitman is important and revealing. Whitman spoke of the ship as though it had been a battleship, out upon the mission of the Civil War, Captained by Lincoln, and now that the war was won the ship had returned to port to the cheering population who lived onshore.

The Leftist and Islamofascist ships of state would both form closed boundaries to our scope and limit all our dreams to those of an obedience to tyranny, a future of mediocrity and dust. Whitman’s Ship of State is a metaphor that speaks to us of adaptability, of a creation out of the moment’s need. We on the right must find a new and leaner metaphor that will allow the rest of us to shape our own small vessels, our own crafts, individual and free to roam the seas and shores and skies that lure us with their unknown wealth. With home ports, families and communities built by a person’s own volition, it won’t be a centralized giant, where only the top leadership can soar. We need a world of open-end, providing a thousand million crafts—that each may sail through life with a chosen navigation and a goal of our own. For those who need help with their craft, there must be basic blueprints to be fashioned for their use. But with all, freedom is the key.

We still need a new conception of the American past, present, and future, a new metaphor of what America is and can be, but it has to be an image that can provide the scope for all the individuality and achievement that could be ours. A vision that can carry us through the difficult years to come.

But it is not as a single Ship of State.

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