Public Nuisances
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
H istory is the greatest of the humanities. To remind us of its consequentiality it leaves specimens of itself around for later generations to discover to their amazement and edification. The other...
...The mullahs of the day remained tranquil, and no Hispanic theologian did more than pray for his swarthy neighbor's soul...
...Now he has to endure the matador's gang of banderilleros, picadores, and cuadrillas...
...Historical writing is very popular with British readers...
...The irritable, bigoted Truman that again now stands revealed brings to mind another truth: political commitment breeds anger and animosity...
...In the 1990s a president was caught in obvious ethical and legal violations...
...So where is a connoisseur of controversy to find fireworks...
...He was also a fiery partisan...
...Harry Truman is not the only politician made angry by politics...
...It is unfortunate that his spin doctors cannot do better...
...The important thing to remember is that the country has changed...
...Yet there are more reasons to teach history well in the schools than merely protecting American schoolchildren from ridicule and the citizenry from political charlatans...
...No Bull -SEVILLE, SPAINF or centuries here in Andalusia, Christian Spaniards cohabited peacefully with Muslim Moors, with only an occasional bout of mayhem...
...Such popular historians as Andrew Roberts, Paul Johnson, and Simon Schama are best-sellers and often invited to appear on British television...
...Fat picadores on padded horses...
...But I would have to mark Seville among the most pleasant cities I have visited: well-dressed, polite people...
...Nine members of his administration, including his appointments secretary, were convicted of criminal behavior...
...The bullfight is a grand affair of hot colors and surprisingly sedate audience participation...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs are as angry toward Republicans as were Truman's, and you can be sure if Newt Gingrich ever quiets down long enough to produce a memoir, he will match them both in spite...
...It features a live brass band, which struck me as extravagant, given that only two dancers really matter, the bull and the matador...
...Americans have come to admire Truman as a flinty defender of American interests...
...Roberts attended one a week ago and iterated the prince's concern that history be taught with an eye for facts, for chronology, and for lively narrative...
...Prince Charles is known for his campaigns to improve Britain as well as for his lady friend Camilla Parker Bowles...
...Politics breeds contempt...
...Opponents of a strong foreign policy can claim anything they want about, say,the war in Vietnam, and only a handful of Americans will know enough to refute them with the truth...
...The yellow-plastered stadium, about three stories tall, is the size of a minor-league baseball park...
...In the great palace of the Alcazar, the fourteenth-century Christian king Peter Iraised beautiful tiled walls and ceilings, emblazoned both with pious Catholic incantations to God's love and with the Koran's bellicose threats (such guff as "None conquers but Allah...
...Those were not easily implemented...
...I would caution that the activities at the Plaza De Toros De Sevilla are not to be recommended to vegetarians and probably not to Hindus...
...To be sure, when the Spaniards get their dander up they can be brutal...
...Obviously such history would not be dominated by the trendy PC enthusiasms that oppress young minds on both sides of the Atlantic...
...A ticket costs about the same as the entrée at a good American steak house...
...The 5,500-word diary was in the handwriting of President Harry Truman...
...And of course there was more...
...Years ago he went on a tear against modern architecture, disparaging its soullessness and the dehumanizing effect on the citizens that perambulate around it...
...Possibly, but from what I see he is mainly irascible and would have a lot better chance if he staggered around the ring for a few minutes, pleading mad cow disease...
...In fact there were many non-Spaniards in the audience, a surprising number of whom were young American women...
...The prince's plan is to conduct summer schools for the country's history teachers, led by distinguished historians...
...A fine matador has to be even braver than the bull, with a strong arm, good eye-hand coordination, and tight pants...
...Then the three horses used to lug the deceased bull from the ring, their attendants dressed in what appear to be butcher's coats...
...Instead he suffers the matador's faculty of pests until into the ring pops thematador himself, dressed in a costume that would sell well at Victoria's Secret...
...What is more, Truman's generation began an effort to mollify such prejudices and extend tolerance to all...
...The spectacle begins with a modest parade into the ring and across the albero, the dark orange expanse of dirt and sand...
...That irritated Truman...
...What saved him was the mutual contempt the political parties hold for each other...
...Truman's own public policies favored equal rights and statehood for Israel...
...To him most Republicans were reactionaries, and he was not any gentler toward parties on his left...
...When I read these outbursts I was startled, but then I thought back about the America of the early twentieth century, almost all of whose citizens had strong prejudices...
...The bullfight was not the gory horror I had expected...
...Perhaps he could do the princely thing and bring it to our shores...
...Al Sharpton can hold up almost any canard about race and it will go unchallenged...
...The diary section can be read as a personal confession from the president to his conscience, or perhaps to a sympathetic friend seated with him at the end of a bar...
...The evening's three matadors and their aides, all dressed in ornate, tightfitting couture...
...Still, not all outsiders comprehend its full significance...
...He lumped isolationists in with Ku Kluxers and members of the far-right...
...Niall Ferguson, also there, went so far as to urge that the stories taught in British schools be exciting...
...Yes, there were occasional lapses into unspeakable slaughter, and eventually the Moors were given the heave-ho...
...Jay Leno or David Letterman can always astound his audience by reading the result of some study that shows a paucity of high schoolers knowing the identity of America's first president or the century in which World War I was fought or some other fact that seems obvious to literate grownups...
...The thirty-third president was, for all his faults, a decent man, but like most politically committed people he came to dislike and distrust those who opposed him...
...Visiting historians long dismissed it as an old reference book, devoid of value...
...the local cuisine, first-rate...
...The three young matadors I watched the other night had only tight pants...
...A more intriguing point for me would be to know how many members of the political class enter politics free of anger...
...His interest in architecture and history suggests as much...
...Spaniards tell me that the bull is brave...
...Silver Shirts...
...Few people hold such strong beliefs today, even in private...
...They were thunderously wrong...
...Prince Charles's public relations experts have made heavy weather of it over the past decade...
...The bullfight is for meat eaters, and after watching one even a meat eater might have second thoughts...
...Recall their civil war of the 1930s...
...Americans' ignorance of history is alternately amusing and alarming...
...clean public spaces...
...History proceeds slowly...
...The other day Americans discovered a specimen of the last century, when the contents of a hitherto undiscovered diary was made public by the National Archives...
...He had been provoked by a call from his Jewish former secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau, seeking Truman's assistance on behalf of Jewish refugees from Hitler's Europe...
...Yet for long periods all sides in Andalusia lived in peace...
...He speeds across the ring with terrific acceleration as the matador's colleagues goad him into frenzy—then into a state of premature filet mignon...
...Admiring it fully does seem to take acculturation, probably acculturation in Spain, where I am having a most agreeable time, but Spain is not my home...
...I wish him luck in this latest campaign...
...Is it possible that the commonweal is the product not of benevolence but of malice...
...Not surprisingly we have forgotten just how much controversy his administration found itself in...
...Press credentials dangling from my neck, I betook myself to the Plaza De Toros De Sevilla, in the heart of town...
...To the denizens of computer civilization it might be perceived as a mere virtual butcher shop...
...café life, sedate...
...To the bull it is a dreadful inconvenience...
...The ring falls silent, save for the solo trumpet that will be heard throughout the evening to announce some momentous occurrence...
...The book's cover says: The Real Estate Board of New York, Inc., Diary and Manual 1947...
...There a well-mannered crowd was streaming in to watch Sunday evening's bullfights...
...For instance, he urged the British students again be taught the history of the British empire, discontinued in the 1960s out of concern that it was too Anglocentric...
...Without a knowledge of history, Americans are always susceptible to the deceptions of passing demagogues...
...At the time no one seemed to mind...
...They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslays, or Greeks get murdered or mistreated...
...One fell in front of his bull, his prostrate leg luckily fit precisely between the animal's grounded horns...
...Into the ring stomps a black bull, the first of six, understandably irritable that his plush life on the beautiful Spanish countryside has been interrupted for this inscrutable evening at the focal point for thousands of human eyeballs...
...Hurray for Prince Charles -LONDONT he historical illiteracy of American schoolboys and girls is always a rich source of jokes for the late night television shows...
...The New York Sun has published specimens of his prejudices against, for instance, the Chinese and laps" whom he told his wife he "hate [d] ." Blacks, "wops," and others come off no better...
...and manners impeccable...
...He has been living the life of Sad-dam's sons complete with the bovine equivalent of pornography...
...I doubt it will take a decade for his new campaign to gain an important following...
...And naturally Republicans had the same view of him...
...He is the Prince of Wales, and he may have the ear of Charles Clarke, Britain's education minister...
...Right here in London there is a fellow intent on improving the teaching of history in Britain, and do you know who he is...
...The beast was quickly distracted by a cuadrilla, and soon the horses were dragging him off to the butcher's block...
...In smoldering dudgeon the thirty-third president opined, "The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment on world affairs...
...It had been gathering dust in the Truman Library for decades, and rightly so...
...Friends of mine who know him tell me the Prince of Wales is bright and thoughtful...
...His campaign against modern architecture now has an important following, and the day may come when steel and glass will be replaced by stone and the ornamentation that makes buildings civilized...
...The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
