On December Five-and-Twenty

Reposted from 15 and 10 years ago.

Well knock me over with a feather.

The commonly-told explanation for the early Christians choosing the date of Christmas - that it was piggybacked onto a gift-giving Roman holiday Saturnalia, in and effort to woo pagans over to celebrating the birth of Jesus? Turns out it's likely not true, according to Biblical Archaeology Review. It's a good example of how hearing a plausible theory that explains some of the data can cause you to forget what you already know. I had known that the very earliest Christians didn't pay much attention to Christmas at all. Easter was the big deal, as it should be. And if you'd asked the question in the right way, I would have answered that over the next few centuries, the Church were concerned with distancing itself from pagan customs, not embracing them and co-opting them. That came much later, when it was making a more concerted effort to convert my ancestors in northern Europe. But I breezed right by those known facts because the Saturnalia (plus a few other pagan celebrations) theory sounded so plausible.

The most loudly touted theory about the origins of the Christmas date(s) is that it was borrowed from pagan celebrations. The Romans had their mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 C.E., the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.

Despite its popularity today, this theory of Christmas’s origins has its problems. It is not found in any ancient Christian writings, for one thing. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth: The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. But early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly don’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.

(CWCID: First Things)

Post 9300 - Folk Songs

Republished from 2011, inspired by the comments about appropriateness for children under the "Train Songs" post.

I recall when Jonathan, and Ben after were in high school, being a little amused at their private Christian school's repeated stern warnings about the content of rock and other popular music. With me driving them to school, they were listening to folk music, especially Steeleye Span, and exposed constantly to themes of human sacrifice ("Tam Lin"), murder ("Edward," "Long Lankin," and "Lady Diamond"), rape ("Royal Forester"), abandonment (too many to list), infidelity (too many to list), drunkenness (too many to list), smoking ("Think On This"), witchcraft ("Alison Gross," and "King Henry"), grinding poverty, hideous disability, thievery, widowhood, forced labor and transportation, crows eating corpses, insanity, warfare, demons, shipwreck, and infanticide. And some very nice love songs and dance tunes.

Rockers and rappers are complete pikers when it comes to this stuff.

All in all, it may be one of the best parenting moves I ever made. Funny thing.

#24 - Arch Humor

There is a whole style of comic performance and writing that relies on snark, on archness. It is comic hipness. I won’t try to trace its history, but it includes Carlin more than Cosby, Newhart, or Pryor. You could sense it in Carson and Leno, but it is Letterman’s stock-in-trade. SNL seems to have retained the joys of silliness through its many incarnations, but the attitude of superiority has never been far below their surface. Al Franken breathed it. Monty Python, very little archness. There’s a touch in Steve Martin, and not so much as you’d think in Bill Murray or Will Smith. Very little in Robin Williams.

I must have liked it fairly well over the years – PJ O’Rourke has got plenty, Bryson moved increasingly in that direction. The tone is there in Dave Barry, in Garrison Keillor. But I find it quite tiring and irritating these days. That raising of the eyebrows and looking toward the audience with amusement at how stupid, how gauche, the particular object of ridicule is now provokes a desire to punch their slightly-lifted noses. Except if they can still laugh at themselves.


I have noted how much I value the ability to laugh at oneself as a measure of emotional health. I think some of that is in play here. Rick Reilly used to be able to laugh at himself, and was funny. Now he can’t and he sucks. Bill Simmons still can, for the time being. Barry laughs at himself easily; Keillor can laugh at his young self but less so at his adult self; O’Rourke can still skewer himself (though perhaps less…?), Bryson is a mixed bag on this and always has been. If you go back over the entries in the first paragraph, the pattern holds pretty strongly: those who can self-mock stay funny. Trudeau and Breathed started by being able to laugh at themselves, then lost this. Scott Adams’s pounding on the stupidity and meanness of management worked when Dilbert and Wally’s foibles were also a main focus. As that went, and they became only the hapless everyman observers of the lunacy, Dilbert became less funny.

Ben reads Chuck Klosterman and David Sedaris. I can tell they have this snarky humor - it may be the humor of the era, growing up slowly in the 70's, establishing dominance in the 90's. It is certainly the humor of the reader more than the viewer. I don't know if either of them have the ability to send themselves up, but I'm pretty sure that would be the dividing line whether I liked them.

Update 2011: Wow. I hadn't realised it had gotten this bad. I sense a Firesign Theater reunion right around the corner. So topical, so now!

Update 2019.  I had not included the late-night TV hosts in my original essay, but I think it applies to them as well.  I am not especially knowledgeable about the topic, but it is my impression that they started off being able to laugh at themselves but have become less able to over the years.

The Moth

Listening to The Moth Radio Hour on NPR. I never heard it before. I like it. Do you think they know that this is a secular version of Testimony Sunday?

99%

Since I'm not part of the 1%, I must be part of the 99%.  As such, does anyone think I would be welcomed by the 99% Declaration Working Groups for my state if I tried to enter the discussion?  I could be a real pill of course, and call them on it and encourage all sorts of people completely unsympathetic to their ideas to sign up to be part of the Working Group discussions.

Yet though this would indeed point up their logical error, it strikes me a juvenile tactic.

Reunion

Manchester HS Central, class of 1971, meets twice Saturday, for breakfast and then evening. We have about 100 from a class of 424. There are a few I am expecting, because they have been at previous reunions, and others I have wild hope for, even though they have never come. Probably only one person I am hoping is not there, and she lives over 1000 miles away now, so she's unlikely.

If you are visiting for the first time, I think you can get almost the whole sense of things with the last 30 days of posts. Except there are no ABBA, flamingo, or meerkat posts, all of which I threw in to drive up traffic over the years. Against all standards of proper late 60's freak coolness, I have become grudgingly fond of ABBA (no harm in being fond of Meerkats, I tdon't think). What started as irony has become affection.

Actually this sorta looks like meerkats at a reunion. That's me second from left.

New Harmony

New Harmony, Indiana, was founded by the Harmony Society, a German utopian, socialist, anarchist, pietist,,,well, you get the idea - group that got going around 1800. My favorite line from the description:

The experiment was established in 1825 and dissolved in 1829 due to constant quarrels.

Figures.

1969

Don't be alarmed if you don't get most of the references.  Neither did we, though we got the idea.


Actually, I still don't get most of the references, just the tone of them. I remember that classmate Marnie Joyce understood many and explained them to us. Marnie had other qualities that were far more impressive, but I, geek that I was, was most impressed with that.

It's Their Territory

Ben, this would have been a much better science project than squirrels.


We’re thinking the bird feeders got ripped down by a bear. We haven’t had a bear recently. It could be a raccoon, I suppose, which would be a relief.

It reminded me of my annoyance with the declaration by some, whenever there is danger to humans because of wild animals, that of course there is danger from coyotes/elk/bears/mountain lions. We are in their territory, and they are only doing what comes naturally. I can see some sense in the idea, but I think it bears thinking about.

Our town is celebrating our 250th anniversary this summer, and even our particular area has had human habitation (also sheep, cow, pig, chicken, and horse habitation) for more than 150. My house has been here 50 years. So if it’s their territory, these are bears with considerably enhanced abilities to do title searches – or keep genealogies, as they seldom live 20 years.

Come to think of it, I don’t know what inheritance rights among bears even are. How do we know that this isn’t some other bear’s territory that our bear is horning in on? Or do people mean that lands that bears used to live on before humans came – that would be 11,749 years this November – are theirs? That they belong to the bear community somehow?

I’m not just being cute here. If you try to pin down what people mean by a bear’s right to be in particular territory, you run into these questions. Are we saying that any environment which might conceivably support a bear, that she might wander into from an adjoining area, that has at some time in the past had a naturally-occurring bear in it, is therefore Bear Land, to be entered by humans at their peril?

As I said, there is some sense to this. If the naturally-occurring bear was kicked out a few weeks ago in order to put up the house you just built, then yes, I do grant that you are entering at your peril. But not, as we might think, because I believe the bear has the superior right to it, but because in my experience, it is hard to explain boundaries to bears, or indeed any mammals, including many humans. It would be rather a work in progress, I think.

That the animal is only doing what is natural to it is not a persuasive argument to me. Bears are naturally attracted to dumpsters, and alligators to small creatures near rivers, including toddlers. Doesn’t make it right. When you really press this idea, it turns out to be another one of those preferences that the whole region be made into a theme park dedicated to the speaker’s imagination of what things looked like in the year 1000 AD. Which ignores not only those successful exploiters of their environments, the Indians, but that change in nature is ongoing.

Defies All Comment

Sponge-Headed Scienceman has two singing videos from 1978 about energy consumption. I defy anyone to listen to both all the way through.

I double dare ya.

Grandfather's Clock

I learned the song at YMCA day camp. I confess I didn't get why it ever became popular. I thought I'd post it here, just as a lark - a pointless song I happened to remember. It comes to mind because my office-mate retired, and the wall clock stopped the next day. There are dozens of versions of this, and people seem deeply moved by it. Sometimes creepily so. But then, I liked my grandfathers, but neither figured all that prominently in my childhood, so perhaps I just don't get it.



This next version is quite nice, actually.



After reading Hengeworld recently, the idea of honoring ancestors being a cultural universal has been rolling around in my head. CS Lewis included "duty to ancestors" in his Tao. Yet I wonder if it is fading. We went to a large cemetery on a day that wasn't Memorial Day twice this summer, and there was simply no one there. We are outliers in keeping this custom, usually the youngest ones there. My oldest son and his wife are going to be even odder if they persist in this. Perhaps it is different in other parts of the country - though one would think New England to be a holdout.

Post 3100 - Salt

Via Instapundit, salt is apparently not the killer we thought it was, according to Scientific American. I had, within the last year, modified my view of salt=bad to the belief that sodium had a powerful effect on the BP of some people. Perhaps even that is too strong.

There is an assumption, whether derived from a world-made-perfect Christianity or from a more modern Natural Living ethos, that there is some nearly perfect, or at least approximately excellent, diet for the human body. There is an idea that if you eat a,b,c, but not p,q,r, you are well on the road to living to be 80, 90, 100. I have written about this odd idea, and its lack of contact with historical reality before. This fantasy is in sharp contradistinction to both evolutionary and Christian thought, yet advocates of either embrace it happily.

Here's the reality: the human body doesn't have any overall plan to get us through to age 80. It wants to get us through to tomorrow, or at most, through the winter. The machine is approximate, not some finely-tuned secret whose mysteries we must divine. The human body is thrilled to have the main killers removed by our improvements in technology in the last hundred years (refrigeration, antibiotics), and we just keep on living, because of the several redundancies built into our flesh. OTOH, the human machine has no idea how to handle an overabundance of food. There are no checks and balances built into us, because no one had to face this wonderful problem until recently.

Paleo diets, Atkins diets, government-approved diets - these are all approximate, a noticing of what things tend to work to keep us from croaking off too quickly. All the new, great insights into great, over arching theories as to how the body works and how we should eat? They're crap. It's a piecemeal process, and the perfect diet will turn out to be a set of individual discoveries, not an application of a Bible diet, or a macrobiotic diet, or a natural foods insistence.

Culture Versus Law

Underneath Herman Cain's troubling comments - Volokh refers to Nine-and-a-Half Amendments in Some Copies of the Bill of Rights - there is a tension in American culture since the beginning that keeps showing up. Everyone is horrified by one side it when it goes against their cultural ideas, but supports it when it flows in their favor.

Every culture outside the Anglosphere defines what it will be with reference to the group more than the individual. New Guinea tribes define what marriage is, Uighurs define what membership is. Druze, and Roma, and Yupik define what inheritance, education, and drug-use shall be. It is the most natural thing in the world for a culture to define stuff whatever way it likes, and to resent it when some more powerful external force tries to make them speak another language or punish theft or celebrate holidays in a different way.

But the Anglosphere, especially the colonies, has bound itself into another method, where the group does not get to make all the cultural decisions. In America, someone can say "I think your definition of marriage restricts my rights, and I insist on that freedom." I chose my example to highlight a controversy where it is the traditionalists who are being group-right rather than individual-right oriented. But there are plenty of spots where it is group rights as defined by liberals - foods, fuel, taxes - carry the day over the protesting individual. And even the deep sentiment is heard as each election or controversial social legislation comes up. "I don't want to live in a society that..." well, there are many choices there.

Mucking it up even further is that the individual's ability to insist creates a culture that some others don't like - and they don't have the freedom to move to a culture where they can have it their way. In America, people keep trying to move off together with the like-minded, so they don't have to have any dark people, or non-Green people, or gay people, or poor people, or Wal-Marts, or people with children, around. Everyone wants to define their culture, because that's what people do. So we resent it when we can't do that, and some person who is different in the wrong way gets to be in our lives and we can't kick them out.

The distinction between the annoyance of a neighbor playing music too loud and playing music we can hear and don't like is not solid philosophically. It annoys Jim that his neighbors are gay. It annoys the neighbors that Jim says that out loud. We try to capture some distinctions in law, with but moderate success.

Herman Cain is worried that the extension of freedom of religion to a group that unifies church and state (in his eyes) will be incompatible with American values, and ultimately American stability. The same argument was advanced about Catholics and Mormons and they seemed to work out okay, so everyone is jumping on Cain as some regressive force. America has had a history of being forced into accepting what no culture wishes to accept - a large majority being overruled and made to do what someone else thinks is better. The current culture refuses to see any problem with further changes, being quite sure that all of them are progress, tolerance, and good.

I tend to agree. But I am not absolutely sure of it. Just because we have absorbed changes A-N doesn't guarantee that change O will go down similarly well. it's always new territory, and one of them may indeed reveal itself to be the suicide pact, the change which undoes all others. It is not knowledge, but faith, that says otherwise. Secondly, there is no neutral culture. Each change is in the direction of someone's preference, making them the powerful ones who do get to have the culture they like, whether others like it or not. The reason for the preference is not always solid, either. We have been legislating in the direction of sexual permission trumping group safety (think disease, think increased crime from illegitimacy, think higher educational cost), while group safety trumps individual freedom in environmental affairs.

We have already seen in the last fifty years how that can go to some folk's heads...

Fight The Fare Increase

I grew up on the song "Charlie on the MTA," of course, because it was local, and my mother was a big Kingston Trio fan. It's one of those things you just roll with in life, paying more attention to where old Scollay Square was than any of the politics involved. Whoever the candidates were, it was old - maybe even ten years old! - and it wasn't likely to have any impact on those of us in the modern 1960's.

So it rather took me aback when I actually listened to the words

Now ye citizens of Boston if you think it's a scandal
How the people have to pay and pay!
Fight the fare increase, vote for George O'Brien
Get poor Charlie off the MTA.

A fare increase means that those who are using the service have to pay a greater share of the cost. As opposed to "someone else" paying. Someone Else, as any Tea Partier can tell you, is only The Government as a sort of middleman. Someone Else means the citizens in general. It means people who aren't using the service will pay for it. So the line "the people" have to pay and pay is the old socialist sleight of hand.

If you follow the link, the candidate the song was written for was a Progressive Party candidate Walter O'Brien, who was indeed rather socialist. It pays to remember that these were still the days when most American socialists were were well-meaning idealists who had some fine ideas, but just couldn't see that the Soviet Union, and communism in general, were not moderately flawed experiments that were on the verge of working with a few more tries, but nightmarish oppressive tyrannies, not by accident, but of necessity. Just a sidebar there, as O'Brien actually did have some decent ideas, one of which was simplifying the fare structure on the MTA. And making sure that the private investors didn't make any more money, too.

This may be part of why city politics have been Democratic politics have been class-warfare politics for a long time. The variance in incomes is greater in cities, and there were lots of wealthy Bostonians who never rode the subways who might be soaked for some coin. Small towns have more equality of income, and fortunes rise and fall together rather more. In a small town, it's a lot easier to see that a public library, or snow removal, or a new park comes out of your pocket and mine. In a city, all that cost is distributed over more people, many of whom are rich, if the newspaper stories are true. The City just has a lot of money to throw around. It comes from somewhere.

Nowadays the various states and especially the federal government have bamboozled us into the same idea. People assume the federal government just has money somehow, so if our town gets some grant to do something we wouldn't have shelled out for ourselves, it's free money somehow.

And here you thought I was going to give you some nice folksinger.



(Lyrics)

Tribes-Related

Paul Zrimsek, commenting over at Ann Althouse:

Every NYT columnist is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first sneer.

(Related to David Carr's reference to Missourians and Kansans as "slope-headed," which everyone on Bill Maher's show laughed at nervously, and no one objected to.)

I looked up Zrimsek, and he doesn't have his own site, but his comments and numerous sites are marvelous. If there were an award for commenters. I would nominate him for it.

Glutenfree

A friend with celiac disease mentioned that some restaurants get it WRT gluten, and others don't. The latter say they have gluten-free dishes, but they don't, really. They have gluten-reduced dishes. I have puzzled over this, read up on cheap restaurants claiming gluten-free dishes around the country (rather random), and am down to three possible conclusions. Either they have no idea what they are talking about but want to stay in business somehow, rather like this Monty Python sketch.


Or they have substituted a gluten-free ingredient for a major ingredient that is ordinarily wheat-gluten based - rather a "Well it hasn't got much gluten in it" reminiscent of this Monty Python routine



Or they have included something which has the phrase "gluten-free" on the outside, as if glutenfree were some magical ingredient like pixie dust, which gives a dish that special something.

More like this.

Thoughts Reading Links

Humans become pets.

Our ancestors from 1700, observing us, would say that this has already happened. Most of our daily activities are for entertainment, including the self-improving, intellectual pursuits of reading about the world on those little computer-thingies and talking to each other about them. We have two, or even three sets of clothes. We eat a variety of foods we have not produced ourselves and more than we need for survival; we travel and communicate for pleasure not necessity, live in houses five times the size we need. Much of the "useful" work of the society for which people get paid handsomely is little more than providing education not strictly necessary (unless you are going on to provide more advanced versions of these entertainments of travel and technology), or better ways to provide these entertainments to each other. We delay even this "productive" labor until well into our twenties, and are allowed to cease productivity around 60. Were we able to be satisfied with the food, clothing, warmth, and shelter of even 1800, we would probably only have to work an hour or so a day. That is, if we allowed each other that freedom to live that modestly without looking down on those who do and pitying their children.

We used to have arts to express meaning, usually religious. Now we attempt to use them to provide meaning, which they cannot do. So become house pets of machines, with little meaning in our lives, happened without our noticing it.

Our military is a lefty-socialist example for us all.

Wow. So the stereotypical right-wing institution actually accomplishes what lefties promise, and Kristof concludes that it was because it was left-wing all along. The military led in desegregation; it has camaraderie even though it is hierarchical; it provides health insurance, just like most other businesses; it is more meritocratic than other institutions; it owns your ass in virtually slavery for four years when you sign up and subjects you to great risk. You have to work hard or you get in big trouble. Its pay scales are much lower than other industries and certainly than other government sectors. The thing which seems to make Nick happiest about the whole deal is that the generals don't make huge amounts of money, as the top people in entertainment, law, industry, or financial services. Because they are government employees.

Apparently Kristof believes that right-wingers actually like poverty, racial prejudice, and health care, so that when anyone actually solves these things they must have come from a lefty, somehow, somewhere. (Note: I actually like a lot of Kristof's human-rights reporting. His heart is in the right place. His head, however, is consistently seeking his rectum.)

I think we have, in a nutshell, the cause of our current political divide.

100% Jul

Listening to my semi-modern Norwegian Christmas music today on a whim, and heard an odd track come up. (Yeah, I know, what are the odds, right?) Why would Norwegians think the PPM version of "Stewball" was a Christmas song? I'm not seeing the connection here.

It was actually John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)." I didn't know he had stolen the tune, and couldn't recognise that until I heard it in Norwegian. They sang the newer version, BTW. I wanted to hear them singing the Hare Krshna of the older version in their Norsk accents, but no such luck. Yep, run those tunes in your head, and you'll see they're the same. George Harrison wasn't the only one to steal tunes.

Now off to one of my favorite exercises, tracing a song back to earlier versions. As it is both an Irish and an American song, but seems to have no Scottish connection, it is more likely to have come over in the 1840's than with the Scots-Irish 60-120 years earlier. But songs are funny, and such guesses don't always hold up.

Here's the version you are probably familiar with. Joan Baez did it, and the Hollies as well.



It's likely that their source was Woody Guthrie, or something close to whoever Woody got it from.



You can hear pieces of that version in the Leadbelly recording, but it's clear Hudie is drawing from a whole different line here. Woody's and Hudie's versions were sundered decades earlier.



You might think the Chad Mitchell Trio would come in on the Guthrie line, but it's closer to Leadbelly's. Yet the Irishness is overwhelming in this one, and in fact, they did not get it from Ledbetter, but from American Irish sources much older. Their version is a cousin of Hudie's. Second cousin.



The Steeleye Span version owes nothing to any American versions, and is drawn from Irish sources. You can read about those here.



Well, you'd think we were done now, except that the link relates it to another set of songs, the old bluegrass standard Molly and Tenbrooks - I had never looked that one up with all its variant spellings, and had never made the connection to the Stewball/Skewball songs. Here's Alison Kraus updating the old Bill Monroe version. So maybe we're in Scots-Irish territory after all, though I doubt it.



and the related Run Molly Run, by the Kingston Trio. I had made that connection, at least.



But that whole competition thing, with the contestants speaking to each other throughout, plus parts of the melody, always reminded me of a different American folk classic. I even mentioned the connection in a high-school paper in 1970, when I was in the height of old-folkie fascination. I thought "Run Mollie Run" must be related to "John Henry" somehow. The teacher should have red-marked that, because that was an unjustified overshoot on my part. That dialogue form is common to the British Isles.

Here's John Henry anyway, two versions you hadn't heard.





We're pretty far from Norwegian Christmas at this point.

Changes in NPR

Tracy listens while washing the dishes, and we catch some of it.

You can feel the discomfort of some of them as they report more market-friendly ideas than they ordinarily would - because they are reporting world events, and all those Europeans and Canadians - who used to be such reliable contrasts to us cowboy, materialistic Americans - are increasingly contrasts in the other direction: kicking out socialists, cutting back on the safety net, trying to contain (gasp) left wing mobs. In world events, NPR is being dragged where it does not want to go. But some of them are honest, if misguided liberals, and follow where the facts lead. Others can barely get a sentence out without having to undercut it in the next breath. We shall see.

To compensate, I think their American reporting is burrowing ever deeper into comfort territory. [UPDATE: Or Not. See Fresh Air.] Tonight there was a longish interview with Bradley Cooper (did I get the name right?). Before I knew who they were talking to, I was bolt upright listening to them falling into form. They spent ten minutes talking about whether he was one of the cool kids in high school and college or whether he was somehow apart - one of those artsy intellectuals who was a bit of a loner, you know?* (For those new here, I have been mentioning for years that this question is a dominant one for liberals. They are unable to let it go, somehow. As a nostalgic person I understand somewhat, but people, we have to move on. I thought it was just Boomers, but I am finding it is more general.)

Who the hell cares? Such things sometimes come up in conversation in an adult's life and some analysis of self is instructive. But this is a national radio program, supposedly discussing artistic development, recent and important work, or other grownup ideas. Sports interviewers don't spend that much time asking friggin' athletes about their high school careers. Even while they're still in their 20's.

I swear that culture is dominated by people who spend their lives trying to prove that they really were cooler when they were young, but the benighted fools just couldn't see that.

*Yes he was distant, even from the theater people, because he was more into film.

Gandhi and Malcolm X

I wasn't surprised at the Gandhi biographies starting to see through the fraud at this point, but I admit that I was surprised and saddened about the same happening to Malcolm X. It hadn't occurred to me to doubt that his Autobiography was anything but mostly true (I don't expect anyone's to be entirely true), and the book had been influential for me. Somehow it had escaped the general destruction of my 60's radicalism. Perhaps if I had paid attention to the Alex Haley connection, I would have. I recalled that Malcolm's autobiography had actually been put together from interviews by another writer, and knew that Haley's Roots had been clobbered for both plagiarism and inaccuracy, but I had never put the two things together - likely because I never reread it after 1970.

MLK remains standing for his primary work, I suppose - the sensing that the time for justice was right, and could be forced, should be forced, in the 50's and 60's. The negatives against him are real enough - the affairs, the arrogance that allowed him to be manipulated by communist associates into preaching on topics on which he knew little - but these recede in the face of the One Great Thing. Many others saw the injustice; many others sensed the time was right; many others had the courage; many others were gifted communicators in written and spoken word. Martin was all four.

But Kennedy - hmm, both Kennedy's are rather tarnished now. Not fully discredited or contemptible, but tarnished. What liberal icons remain standing, now that the data is in? Who is left?