American civil war

As the world stumbles through the fog of war following the savage attacks on Israel by Hamas last week, I thought it might be worth pondering two things.  First, since the news is full of headlines warning against Israel’s conducting a “disproportionate” response, I wonder what a “proportionate” response to the wholesale murder and mayhem perpetrated by Hamas would look like?  Second, I know that I am not alone in sensing that the attack, though brutal, was but the opening gambit of a plan whose origin and course is, as of this writing, still unknown to the public. As to the first, this was the strophe: on October 7, hundreds of Hamas terrorists suddenly and without warning swarmed across the border separating the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Easton, Maryland Three weeks before the election, I went to an event here in Easton where writers of various kinds — journalists, historians, speechwriters — read texts about political rhetoric and discussed them around a seminar table. Is rhetoric a set of tricks, as Socrates said, or an art, as Aristotle would have it? Lately politicians seem so constrained by propriety that they cannot say anything at all. Barack Obama ended his speech to the Democratic National Convention in August with ‘God bless.’ Sorry, God bless what? America? Joe Biden? Or did someone sneeze? In front of the Talbot County Courthouse in Easton is a beautiful monument to the 85 ‘Talbot Boys’ who fought in the Civil War.

Batavia, New York On a brutally hot and wasp-swarming late summer mid-afternoon I walk our town’s old cemetery, as is my wont — hey, if I’m gonna live here for eternity I may as well get to know the neighbors. Walt Whitman swooned over one of this boneyard’s residents, and I have come to read the relevant passages to the boy who rests under the sod. His name was Stewart Glover, and he appears in Whitman’s diaristic Specimen Days to illustrate ‘the terrible and tender realities’ of war-death. Glover, Whitman tells us, grew up in Batavia with his father, John Glover, ‘an aged and feeble man’. (I dunno: his gravestone says Pop lived to the ripe age of 83, dying in 1873.

Since 2016 there’s been a great deal of irony-free discussion about a second American Civil War. This ongoing commentary is not merely another symptom of Trump derangement syndrome. It has appeared in the form of serious thought experiments, popular novels, clickbait punditry, in interviews of academics, by authors on the Left, the Right, and even The New Yorker. When Thomas E. Ricks asked a group of national security thinkers what the chances were of conflict breaking out in the next 10 to 15 years, the rough consensus was that there was a 35 percent chance it would happen. Nearly a third of Americans polled believe a Civil War will break out before 2023. Everybody, it seems, is a young boy playing with regiments of tin soldiers.