The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country by Howard Fineman
Random House, 320 pp.

Americans love to argue. In fact, we would not be Americans if we didn’t.

So says journalist Howard Fineman in his new book, The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates that Define and Inspire Our Country. Arguing, Fineman says, is what we do and who we are. “We are the arguing country, born in and born to debate,” he writes. “We are an endless argument.”

Fineman is Newsweek’s senior Washington correspondent and columnist, and he’s a news analyst for NBC and MSNBC. By his own description, he has covered every presidential campaign and major candidate since 1983.

In The Thirteen American Arguments, Fineman taps into his decades of experience to find perspective on the American experiment. He looks not at petty partisan bickering and political posturing but rather at the larger, fundamental questions Americans have wrestled over since the country’s founding.

“To understand our nature, and to sustain it, we need to appreciate the lucky mix of accident and intention that made us who we are,” he writes. “We have been debating our very identity from the first days of our existence. Was this to be a Christian New Jerusalem, a Dutch speculation, or an English shire?” Those competing views in many ways still jockey for dominance, he says, but the most important thing is the tug-of-war balance that has resulted.

In that same way, America has defined itself through thirteen ongoing arguments that, in various combinations, pit the State, Church, Tribe, Market, and Academy against one another—with individuals caught in the middle. The tug-of-war balance that results from the arguments themselves “define, inspire, and ultimately unite us by bestowing legitimacy on hard-fought deals,” Fineman says. “Arguing keep us moving fitfully forward.”

Fineman arranges his arguments into what he calls “concentric circles” that ripple out from the individual to the world itself and, finally, to the abstract ideal.

For instance, who is a person, who is an American, and what responsibilities do Americans have toward each other? What can Americans be told to believe in matters of faith?

As a country, how do we define money and manage debt? How do we balance centralized versus decentralized government? What is the relative strength of the president “in a federal scheme dedicated to find the midpoint between monarch and mob”?

What is our place in the world and what is out relationship with other countries? What role do trade, diplomacy, and war play in those relationships?

Does the environment belong to the current generation to use and exploit or is the environment something we hold in trust for future generations?

And what does it mean to have—and what do we have to do to achieve—that “more perfect Union” our Founding Fathers envisioned?

Don’t expect to find the arguments articulated in a civics book. As packaged neatly here in a convenient and catchy list of thirteen, they are Fineman’s creations, but the debates themselves are certainly as old and as vital as Fineman suggests.

Fineman explores each question from historical as well as modern perspectives, taking great care to first ground each question by drawing on contemporary events. As he explores “Who is a person,” for instance, he starts on the steps of the Illinois state capital as Barack Obama launched his presidential bid. Fineman draws parallels between Obama and Lincoln, “the Great Emancipator,” and from there examines a number of facets to the question of personhood.

He looks at the old debate over slavery (were slaves people or property), the current debate over abortion (when does a fetus qualify for “personhood”) and the not-too-distant questions that will arise in the future over genetic experimentation.

If Fineman had his way, Americans would argue more. “Rather than argue too much, which is the conventional wisdom’s critique, we in fact do not argue enough about the fundamentals,” he says. The Thirteen American Arguments, he hopes, is one more way to encourage continued dialogue—a dialogue in which everyone has a role. 

“If arguing is our saving grace, everyone must feel they have a voice and a chance to be heard,” he writes. “Do they?”

And the argument goes on.

The Bloody Shirt
by Stephen Budiansky

Most Americans don’t realize that a large portion of our country was, once upon a time, overrun by barbarians.

That age of barbarians isn’t covered in most history texts, and when it is, it’s usually called the Era of Reconstruction. And as many Southerners resisted reconstruction, they resorted to acts of barbarism to impose their terrible will over the rule of law.

Stephen Budiansky’s new book, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox, explores this age of barbarism—for age of barbarism it was. No other word can suffice to explain the acts of terror and violence committed by large numbers of Southern whites in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Full Story »

With the downturn in the economy, the welfare reform Bill Clinton enacted during his presidency might not seem as politically prescient as it once did. In his New York Times article, “From Welfare Shift in ‘96, a Reminder for Clinton,” Peter S. Goodman reports on Peter Edelman, who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr. Clinton signed the measure. Not only Bill, but Hillary, doesn’t “‘acknowledge the number of people who were hurt,’ Mr. Edelman said. ‘It’s just not in their lens.’”

Once Hillary was in the Senate, Goodman reports, “When the overhaul bill came up for reauthorization, Sandra Chapin, a former welfare recipient affiliated with a coalition called Welfare Made a Difference, lobbied Congress to allow more women to attend college while they received aid. Mrs. Clinton ‘wouldn’t have anything to do with it,’ Ms. Chapin said.” Full Story »

I used to work with a HAL 9000. Back when I was at US West in the late ’90s we had a voice system into which we would record the day’s company news so that employees without Internet access could dial in and keep up with the latest events. As with any such system there was a dial-in sequence, buttons that had to be pressed in a certain order, etc.

One day, as I was working through the first stage of the sequence, our phone system apparently achieved sentience. For reasons that I still can’t explain, a decade later, and that nobody at the time had any clue about, the machine sort of … intuited what I was about to do. It performed an action or two that, put simply, it could not do. Full Story »

by Chris Mackowski

Sharp Teeth
by Toby Barlow
Harper, 312 pages

Toby Barlow’s new book is a novel. It’s also an epic poem. It’s a love story, a crime thriller, and a werewolf story, too,

Throw out everything you think you know about any of those things.

Barlow’s book, “Sharp Teeth,” is nothing less than a bold literary experiment that rewrites the rules into free-verse poetry. It’s evocative, ferocious, and frequently funny–a pop-culture fusion drink that’s jacked up on its own juices. It’s a dark, compelling nightmare that reads like a gritty dream. Full Story »

by Chris Mackowski

Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress
by Joseph Wheelan
PublicAffairs Publishing

Fewer families in America have had a greater influence on the country than the Adams family of Quincy, Massachusetts. After all, the family spawned two presidents, America’s most influential Founding Mother, a minister to England who helped saved the Union during the Civil War, and a turn-of-the-twentieth-century literary giant.

The family patriarch—America’s second president, John—has received a lot of attention in the past few years since the publication of David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography. Full Story »

The upcoming presidential election and the economy are pretty poor excuses for our inability to focus on Iraq. Especially since we’ve not only passed the 4,000 mark of American dead, but 25 were killed in a recent two-week span.

It’s frightening how comfortable we’ve learned to live with the war since the “surge” supposedly turned things around. The continuing carnage among those who were supposed to enjoy some of the fruits of our liberation isn’t even on our radar screens.

Not only aren’t most of us following Iraq in the news, we turn our backs on books and movies that dramatize it. Yet our veterans aren’t just returning with problems, but with a whole lore. You can’t help but conclude that their experiences need to be watered down to be made palatable. Full Story »

Scholars & Rogues has added a couple of new features to its lineup, and we hope the new additions will provide our readers with even more reason to check by each day to see what’s new. In addition, we’ve reshuffled the feature lineup a bit, so here’s what to look for.

• Monday: Nota Bene - Scholars & Rogues takes you around the Web for all kinds of interesting stories you may have missed.
• Tuesday: TunesDay - A new feature. Each Tuesday S&R’s team of music lovers will present an artist or band of the week (maybe more than one), or will perhaps examine a new development in the world of tuneage, or note an important historical landmark… The possibilities are endless. Tune in for the first installment tomorrow. Full Story »

Everyday life, supersaturated with images and jingles, makes intellectual life look hopelessly sluggish, burdensome, difficult. In a video-game world, the play of intellect — the search for validity, the willingness to entertain many hypotheses, the respect for difficulty, the resistance to hasty conclusions — has the look of retardation. - Todd Gitlin

Maybe it’s our name.

After all, this blog called Scholars and Rogues contains in its moniker two terms against which certain types of Americans react: Rogues are, after all, known law questioners, rascals, generally naughty types; Scholars are, in all probability, intellectuals, know-it-alls, all around smart asses. Both of these are groups that some here in the land of Deciders deem, if not outright outlaws, at the least needing (preferably warrentless) surveillance.

Full Story »

I’ve been in hibernation for the last few months, barely surviving another bleak Bushy winter, but today the intimations of spring in California—and of hopeful Obamamania throughout this fair land—have drawn me out of my lair to join the fun here at S&R. I do want to start again with something easy, and fortunately I found an amusing blog meme at Crooked Timber that looks like just the ticket. Now I know you’re not supposed to pick a meme randomly out of the digital ether, and Eszter Hargittai did not actually tag me, but I’m going to carry on anyway, as though all the webby proprieties had been observed.

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Full Story »

The second in our “Cult of Crime” series
(Part 1: Foxy Knoxy and the case of the honorary Missing White Woman)

Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion
by Mark Ames
Soft Skull Press, 2005
360 pages, $15.95

In April 2007, when a Virginia Tech student killed 32, it was one of the worst ever, to coin a phrase, “social shootings.” Earlier, in February, five were killed in a Salt Lake mall and then, in December, nine in an Omaha mall.

Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion by Mark Ames was published by Soft Skull Press back in 2005. But the continued popularity of school, mall, and workplace shootings as a practical solution for troubled souls obligates us to revisit this essential work.

When social shootings first burst upon the scene, they seared the national psyche like a wildfire. Though since overshadowed by 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina, the regularity with which they flare up keeps them from slipping off our radar. Full Story »

I realised today it has been more than 21 years since I first came across Terry Pratchett. I was only 12 at the time; young, gawky, bookish.

His books were like the opening of a window.

Pratchett is the creator of the epic Discworld fantasy series. They started off as a light-hearted send-up of the swords-and-sandals fantasy epics of Beowulf and Tolkien. Then they became an original world.

It is one of my annual joys. This year, when Making Money came out I chortled with joy and phoned one of my best mates to gloat that I’d got it first. Instead he turned the tables on me to say how much he’d already enjoyed it. Full Story »

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, first published October 2007, 128 pages, ISBN 978-0439895293

The dividing line between comic books and graphic novels - for many - seems to lie in the question: “Would I show this to a kid?”

Maus, by Art Spiegelman, or When the Wind Blows, by Raymond Briggs, are astonishing reinventions of the art, claiming a space in literature that defies either category. Both opened up the creation of artworks that tell human stories; allowing emotion and empathy with the images to fill the space left by the absence of words.

Taking four years to research and produce, The Arrival stands alone - not just amongst graphic novels - but amongst all art. It is like stumbling across The Kiss by Auguste Renoir placed inconsequentially at the base of the stairs in London’s Tate Modern, or hearing Pachelbel’s Canon played in the midst of a mix of faded pop-songs. Full Story »

To ban a book is to ban an idea. Some ideas are good; some are bad. But good and bad are judgments each of us must be free to make — and learn to make.

At S&R — as do so many people in diverse media everywhere — we discuss ideas and express our opinions about them. We try to not suppress the ideas with which we disagree. Rather, we point out what we see as flaws and attempt to persuade others by providing better ideas.

The current flap diverting our attention from more pressing matters involves “The Golden Compass,” a movie derived from the first book in a trilogy called “His Dark Materials” written by Philip Pullman. His novels and the movie (review) have irritated the Catholic Church, which alleges a secularist agenda and fears the film would drive children toward Pullman’s books.
Full Story »

I’m an avid reader and movie watcher, and I enjoy the occasional escape into things that aren’t hard to read or understand. This is why I’ve enjoyed the Harry Potter novels and why, when it was suggested to me a number of years ago, I read the entire His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. The first novel, The Golden Compass, has been made into a movie that officially hits the theaters this Friday. And, if the sheer volume of news about the movie is any indication, it will be the blockbuster of the 2007 holiday season.

The reason is that a number of Christian groups (mostly Catholic) have demanded that their adherents boycott the movie, and in so doing have given it a massive amount of free news publicity. Have these people learned nothing?

Seriously, the best way to guarantee that people expose themselves to something is to ban, boycott, or otherwise protest it. The more people who hate something and want you to hate it too, the more other people want to figure out what all the fuss is about. It’s human nature. Full Story »

My fellow Scrogue Denny Wilkins (Dr. Denny to you) passed along a great essay by Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review on the gradual disappearance of book reviews and book news coverage from newspapers that appears in the latest issue of Columbia Journalism Review. Wasserman’s essay hits on some points near and dear to my heart as a writer, professor, and pedantic bastard (as a friend once addressed me in a high school yearbook salutation) so I figured you (and I address this affectionately, as my high school friend addressed me) pedantic bastards who read S&R might find those points of interest, too. Full Story »

Once upon a time there were great children’s books

If you’ve never read Neverending Story, or the Narnia series, or the Tripods series by John Christopher, or anything by Terry Pratchett (most especially the Tiffany Aching series), or … or …

There are lots, and more are being written all the time but: move over kiddies, it’s Harry Potter time.

There is only one guarantee about this (hopefully) final instalment in the series. It’ll be the thickest book of the lot. JK Rowling is of the school of business that believes you can trick people into believing they’re having a great experience by increasing the amount of it available.

Full Story »

Old Man: “What are you rebelling against?”

Johnny Stabler (Marlon Brando): “What you got?” -The Wild One (1954)

2007 is a year filled with Boomer anniversaries - the 40th anniversary of Monterrey Pop, the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

And there’s an ongoing anniversary celebration this year for a book that influenced Boomers as profoundly as perhaps any other this side of Siddhartha or The Catcher in the Rye - we’re in the midst of the 50th anniversary celebration of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation opus, On The Road. And that raises a question - for me, anyway:

What is it about the 1950’s that makes some of the artists from that decade, like Kerouac, feel overrated? Full Story »

Scholars & Rogues is pleased to present our first Guest Scrogue. Russ Wellen is an editor at Freezerbox and OpEdNews and a frequent blogger at AlterNet.

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“FDR is a model presidential biography,” writes ubiquitous book reviewer Jonathan Yardley of Jean Edward Smith’s new book. He also wrote a 2001 biography that completed the rehabilitation of Ulysses S. Grant’s reputation—basing presidential decisions on principles: what a concept! Between those two books, Smith has had almost as many “magisterials” (one of a book reviewer’s most supreme—and hackneyed—plaudits) thrown his way as Robert Caro with his biographies of Robert Moses and LBJ.

Turns out Smith also Full Story »

Michael Pollan’s delectable new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, examines the wretched state of modern agriculture—and the unhealthy relationship most of us have with what we eat—by tracing the origin and consumption of four very different meals. He concludes that Americans now live in a wasteland of bland, interchangeable commodities, dominated by monocultured corn and fueled by imported oil. It’s not a pretty sight, but Pollan writes with such verve and insight that the book is hard to put down.

For the first meal, Pollen takes his family to McDonald’s; like 19 percent of all meals in the US, this one is eaten in the car. Next, he prepares a meal from ingredients labeled “organic,” a feel-good label that is now often applied to food produced in industrialized, energy-wasteful ways. He then visits a farm in western Virginia where sustainable multicrops, free-range animals, and ecological reuse create a happily updated version of the traditional family farm. And finally, he turns hunter-gatherer to create a meal with ingredients from the gardens and forests of Northern California: he shoots a feral pig, hunts mushrooms, picks cherries and lettuce, and even captures wild yeast for his bread.

Full Story »