“I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk
not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did,
and Truman did.”—Sen. Barack Obama, 5/6/08I’ve been meaning to get around to commenting on this ridiculous case of historical malpractice. This might just be the single most wrongheaded political statement I’ve heard during this campaign (which, given this campaign, is saying something). I can’t think of a single enemy with whom either Roosevelt (either Roosevelt, come to that, though I presume he’s referring to the Democrat) or Truman had diplomatic conversations except the one with whom we were allied; as for JFK, it was talking to our enemies that got him into trouble. If he’d stood up to the shoe-pounder to begin with, we would all have been better off. (Then, of course, the Kennedy Administration’s misbehaviors in Vietnam are surely nothing Sen. Obama wants to hold up as a model.)RealClearPolitics’ Jack Kelly, in his helpful survey of the senator’s historical ridiculosity, suggests Neville Chamberlain as a better historical analogue, noting that Chamberlain’s declaration of peace “didn’t work out so well.” I might add that among American Presidents, the real appeasers are folks like Carter—or, if we want to include internal enemies, James Buchanan. I presume Sen. Obama wouldn’t have been in favor of continuing to negotiate with domestic slaveowners?
Category Archives: History
Cognitive surplus, Web 2.0, and the transformation of media
Clay Shirky, author of the recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has a fascinating piece up on his blog called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” An edited transcript of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, it’s the most remarkable analysis of societal transformations I think I’ve ever run across. He begins with the insight of a British historian
that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. . . .And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. . . . It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
The key insight here is that major societal shifts, if they happen quickly, require some sort of lubricant to get people over the hump until they can adjust to the change of circumstances. (When that lubricant is missing, we get relapses; the case of the USSR after the fall of the Communist Party might be taken as an example.) And for us?
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. . . .And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
He overstates the degree to which that free time went into TV; a lot of that time went into volunteer service organizations as well, especially among homemaking women. Still, the broader point holds, and I think his analysis of the current situation does as well. The shift we’re beginning to see, as he presents it, is this:
Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this [cognitive] surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer.
Media as triathlon—as an interactive activity rather than merely a consumptive activity. I think he’s on to something here. For example, how many people these days get their news surfing the Web, following links, blogging, commenting on blogs, and the like, not simply absorbing the news but participating (even if only on the fringes) in a conversation about the news? And perhaps most crucially, how many of our children are growing up with this as part of their mental framework?
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing—and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.
It’s a brilliant article, and I think offers a critical insight into what’s happening in Western culture, and what’s likely to happen next. I recommend you read the whole thing.HT: Heather McDougal
Martin Luther King Jr.: yad vashem
Forty years ago this evening, at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, America lost one of her great-souled sons when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by an assassin. The memorial at the hotel appositely cites Genesis, from the story of Joseph:
They said one to another, “Behold, here cometh the Dreamer. Let us slay him and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”—Genesis 37:19-20 (KJV)
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Rev. Dr. King’s death is that so much of his dream died with him. Too much of the church, too many of his brothers and sisters in Christ, have set aside his call, which is the call of Christ, that we are to be one in our Lord across all our divisions, racial no less than any other—and for what? For business as usual, and the easiest, most expedient ways to grow congregations. There’s no denying, the “homogeneous unit principle” serves the cause of numerical church growth; what it doesn’t serve is the cause of the gospel, the work of the kingdom of God on this earth. On this point, more people should listen to Markus Barth:
When no tensions are confronted and overcome, because insiders or outsiders of a certain class or group meet happily among themselves, then the one new thing, peace, and the one new man created by Christ, are missing; then no faith, no church, no Christ, is found or confessed. For if the attribute “Christian” can be given sense from Eph. 2, then it means reconciled and reconciling, triumphant over walls and removing the debris, showing solidarity with the “enemy” and promoting not one’s own peace of mind but “our peace.” . . . When this peace is deprived of its social, national, or economic dimensions, when it is distorted or emasculated so much that only “peace of mind” enjoyed by saintly individuals is left—then Jesus Christ is being flatly denied. To propose, in the name of Christianity, neutrality or unconcern on questions of international, racial, or economic peace—this amounts to using Christ’s name in vain.
It’s easy to blame the white church for this, of course, but it’s not only the white church that’s guilty of leaving the Rev. Dr. King’s vision behind; as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, one of his good friends and coworkers, writes, those who claimed the role of leadership of the black community did the same, and did so intentionally. Where the Rev. Dr. King preached the gospel of Jesus Christ for all people, many of those who would claim his mantle “were in no mood for reconciliation, and are not to this day.” The year after his death would see the beginning of black liberation theology with the publication of James Cone‘s book Black Theology and Black Power, which argued that
In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors. . . . Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation and against the white oppressors, or he is not.
The following year, Dr. Cone took his seat at Union Theological Seminary in New York and published his second book, A Black Theology of Liberation. In that book, he wrote,
The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience, or God is a God of racism. . . . The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition God’s own condition. This is the essence of the Biblical revelation.
That’s how we got from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.; and it’s why so many folks who looked at Barack Obama and thought they were getting the incarnation of the Rev. Dr. King’s dream are now wondering if they were sold a bill of goods. The good thing in all this, though, is that Sen. Obama is right—words do matter—and that however the name of Martin Luther King may be used or misused, and however his work and legacy may be invoked or distorted to whatever purpose, his words remain, and they ring with power. Whatever else he was, the Rev. Dr. King was a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he spoke the word of God to America—and when God sends out his word through one of his followers, that word will not return to him empty-handed, but it will accomplish the purpose for which he sent it. As such, it is not too great a thing to say, as Fr. Neuhaus does, that the Rev. Dr. King’s words will continue to echo until their purpose is fulfilled.
As long as the American experiment continues, people will listen and be inspired by his “I Have a Dream,” and will read and be instructed by his Letter from Birmingham Jail, and will once again believe that, black and white together, “We shall overcome.”
Amen. In the house of God and within its walls, he has a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off. May Jesus Christ be praised.
Hillary Clinton’s chickens coming home to roost
When the Antoin “Tony” Rezko story broke, followed by the ABC News report on the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr., a number of pundits responded by saying, “This is why Hillary Clinton is still in the race—if she hangs in long enough, something may come up that knocks Barack Obama out of it.” Now, however, it looks like that might have backfired on her. Having first undermined her own credibility (and taken some of the heat off Sen. Obama) with her Tuzla story, which gave the Obama campaign a wonderful opportunity to call her a liar who can’t be trusted, now she’s facing an accusation from the past along the same lines. As a 27-year-old lawyer, thanks to a recommendation from one of her former law professors, Hillary Rodham was given a job on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, working on the Watergate investigation, under the supervision of that committee’s chief of staff and general counsel, a lifelong Democrat named Jerry Zeifman. When President Nixon’s resignation ended the investigation, Zeifman unceremoniously fired her and refused to give her a recommendation.
Why?
“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”
The reason for her “unethical, dishonest” behavior was an attempt to deny President Nixon legal counsel during the investigation, a point which was ultimately rendered moot by his resignation. Whether it makes matters better or worse that her motives were political rather than personal, I’ll leave to others to decide; but as Ed Morrissey observes, “all of this forms a pattern of lies, obfuscations, deceit, and treachery.”And for anyone who might want to argue that it’s his word against hers, or that Zeifman is making stuff up, not so fast: he kept a diary at the time in which all this is recorded, and at the time, “he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.” Voters may well decide that this doesn’t really matter (especially since it was only Nixon, after all), and Sen. Clinton’s campaign may survive this; but there’s no honest way to pretend it didn’t happen, and to my way of thinking, it casts a truly ugly light on both her character and her judgment.HT: Power Line
The value of experience
The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to the rank as America’s worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow.
Thank you, George Will. (Though it should be noted, of course, that Lincoln was an extraordinary individual; it need scarcely be said that not every former one-term congressman would have done quite so well.)
Bumper-sticker geopolitics
I saw a bumper sticker today that caught my attention: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” It made me wish I had the person who owned that car there to talk with, to ask them one question: Why? This isn’t a truism, after all, something that can simply be presented as inarguable; and while I suppose it might be presented as a dictum that impresses by the force of its truth, I don’t find it so. Rather, this is an assertion which needs to be supported with logic and evidence; if it is so, it needs to be proven.
To be honest, I don’t think it can be—I think the study of history is very much against this proposition. To be sure, there are times when efforts to prepare for war undermine or even negate efforts to prevent it (World War I would be the classic case in point); but given the reality throughout history of aggressive expansionistic powers which tend to treat countries unprepared for war as hors d’oeuvres—which does at least make for short wars, I’ll grant—there are clearly many cases in which failing to prepare for war makes war inevitable. (Just ask Neville Chamberlain.)
The bottom line here, I think, is that war (like most major human undertakings) is complex, and neither the factors that cause it nor the strategies for preventing it can be summarized and dismissed in a bumper sticker. That sort of simplistic thinking does no one any good.
Anniversary of a miracle
Today marks the 67th anniversary of a miracle—one which Michael Linton, writing in First Things some time ago, suggested is “the greatest artistic miracle of our times.” On January 15, 1941, in the Nazi POW camp Stalag VIII-A at Görlitz in Silesia, the great French Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen, a prisoner in the camp, premiered his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (“Quartet for the end of time”). Messiaen, who had been given time, space, and resources by the camp commandant to enable him to write, composed the quartet for himself (on piano) and three other musicians among the prisoners, a violinist, a cellist, and a clarinetist.
What makes the work miraculous is not only the place and time in which it was written, but its character. As Linton writes:
In the midst of chaos, Messiaen wrote about the apocalypse in a completely “unapocalyptic” manner. In the previous century, the sequence from the Requiem Mass had given composers the opportunity to unleash all the thunder they could muster to depict the horrific details of God’s day of accounting. Berlioz and Verdi had both written depictions that chill—or more honestly perhaps, thrill—us to this day. And not too long after Messiaen’s quartet was completed, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Britten, and Penderecki would write pieces expressive of the horrors of the Nazis and their war, music full of screams, howls, and cries for righteous justice against the oppressor.
But Messiaen has no place for such neo-pagan hysterics. In the middle of a prison camp, a prisoner unsure if he would ever again see his family or home again, Messiaen composed a vision of heaven where anger, violence, vengeance, and despair are not so much repressed as irrelevant. This work has nothing to do with war, or prison, or “man’s inhumanity to man.” This piece is entirely about the work of God and the glory of Jesus. There is no darkness here. There is no bitterness. There is no rage. Instead there is power, light, transcendence, ecstasy, and joy eternal.
Messiaen’s music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, by any means—it’s modern music, for one thing, and then it’s modern in a different way from most of the music of this past century; but this is a beautiful and powerful piece that deserves to be appreciated. I’m not going to put all of it up (it’s a fairly long composition, in eight movements), but here’s a taste or two. This is a video of the first movement, “Liturgie de cristal”:
Here’s the fourth movement, “Intermède”:
And the fifth, “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus”:
It’s great music, even if it isn’t to everyone’s taste; but just as much, and something we can all appreciate, it’s a powerful testimony to the way in which the love and the grace of God can overcome human evil.
The Great Counter-Attack
Even people who couldn’t tell George Santayana from Carlos Santana are familiar with some form of his dictum that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Like most famous comments, it’s been overplayed, and many people tend to quote it glibly, without thinking about it; but it’s still an important warning of the consequences of failing to understand our history. To this, we might add that those who don’t remember the past will have no sense of perspective about the present.
I was reminded of that truth recently in reading the novelist Sandra Dallas’ review of the book Verne Sankey: America’s First Public Enemy, by South Dakota circuit judge Timothy Bjorkman. As the title indicates, Sankey was the first person ever to be named Public Enemy #1 by the FBI, “because he was the first to realize that in the wake of the Lindbergh baby abduction, kidnapping could be a lucrative gig”; he’s little remembered today because he wasn’t flashy, while so many of his criminal contemporaries were. As Ms. Dallas writes, “This was the Great Depression, when the rich were held in low esteem and the robbers and others who preyed on them were rock stars, glorified by the press. It was the era of Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger and Machine-Gun Kelly.” That set me thinking, because there’s much complaint in certain quarters about the glorification of street thugs by segments of American culture—which I certainly agree is a bad thing; but it’s often joined to the assumption that America is in decline from some past golden age when these things didn’t happen, and that just isn’t true. One might, I suppose, argue that the thugs some people glorify these days lack the style of past generations of celebrity criminals; but if we’re honest, we have to admit they’re really very little different.
The reason Santayana’s comment is largely correct is that if we don’t understand our past, we really can’t understand our present, either—which leaves us vulnerable to those who would use a skewed picture of the past against us. Granted, a truly unbiased understanding of history is probably beyond our grasp, but we need to get as close as we can in order to defend ourselves against those who interpret it to serve their own agendas (whatever those might be).
Perhaps the most significant example of this nowadays is in regard to Islam, where the Crusades are often presented as a great crime by Christendom against an unoffending Moslem world, launched for no apparent reason. The truth of the matter is far different. As Hugh Kennedy shows in his book The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, the early 7th century AD saw a new propulsive force break into world history: the conquering armies of Islam. Within the first hundred years, they had spread across most of the Christian world, and as Dr. Philip Jenkins notes in his excellent review in Christianity Today, “Before the Crusades”, this “tore Christianity from its roots, cultural, geographical, and linguistic.” The Islamic conquests essentially created the Western Christianity we now know, as the church was forcibly disconnected from its Asian heritage and character; and the Muslim armies didn’t stop there, occupying most of Spain, invading Italy and the Balkans, and even reaching as far as the gates of Vienna.
However wrong the Crusades went over time (such as the Fourth Crusade, which conquered and sacked not Muslim Jerusalem but Orthodox Constantinople, in whose defense the First Crusade had been launched), they began as a defensive action, a grand counter-attack intended to roll back the Muslim armies before they conquered all of Europe. In the end, they didn’t succeed; it would not be until the breaking of Ottoman power at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 that the tide of Islamic conquest would finally turn for good. Still, though we must never gloss over all the wrongs committed by Crusaders, it’s important to understand that the Crusades as such were an eminently justifiable military and cultural response to Islamic military aggression; they were a counter-attack launched in a great war begun by the other side.
Thank God for God (a Thanksgiving meditation)
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there;
the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” —Job 1:21
During the time of Napoleon’s reign in France, there was a political prisoner by the name of Charnet. That is to say, there was a man named Charnet who had unintentionally offended the emperor by some remark or another and been thrown in prison to rot. As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”
But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight. Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow. Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower. Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”
The guards saw what was happening; they talked about it amongst themselves, they told their wives, and the story spread, until finally somehow it came to the ears of the Empress Josephine. The story moved her, and she became so convinced that no man who loved a flower in this way could be dangerous that she appealed to Napoleon, and persuaded her husband to relent and set Charnet free. When he left his cell, he took the little flower with him in a little flowerpot, and on the pot he wrote Matthew 6:30: “If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith?”
There’s a lesson in Charnet’s story—the lesson of Job, I think. I struggled for years to make sense of that verse, until I found the key in an observation made by Rev. Wayne Brouwer, a Christian Reformed pastor in Holland, Michigan. Rev. Brouwer, writing on Psalm 22, muses, “Maybe it’s not that believers are grateful to God but that those who are grateful to God are the ones who truly believe him. Only those of us who are truly thankful are able to ride out the storms of life which might otherwise destroy us. Only those who have an attitude of gratitude know what it means to believe.” In other words, the root of our faith is gratitude.
We talk about the patience of Job, but in reality Job showed very little patience; what he did show was great faith, and that faith was firmly rooted in his determination to remain grateful for all the Lord had given him despite his losses. Thus he can say here, “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”; thus he can affirm at another point, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth . . . in my flesh I shall see God.” In the same way, once Charnet found something for which to be thankful, that little plant struggling through the hard, dry earth, he found Someone to thank, and his faith grew back along with that little plant. Before that point, faith was impossible for him, because there was no root to sustain it.
If our gratitude depends on the number of our gifts exceeding a certain critical mass, if we miss the Giver for the gifts, then we have a shallow faith indeed. The example of Job calls us to a deeper gratitude, and a deeper faith, a faith that is able to see God and give thanks even when things aren’t going well. This is the faith the poet Joyce Kilmer expressed when he wrote, “Thank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife . . ./Thank God for the stress and the pain of life./And, oh, thank God for God.” That’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? Thank God for God. Thank God, as Psalm 23 does, that even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he is there with us. Thank God, as Psalm 22 does, that he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted. Thank God, as Job teaches us, that we don’t have to bury our grief and anger, but can bring them to God honestly; for Job challenges God fiercely, but his challenge is rooted in his faith, and so at the end God says of him, “He is my servant, and he has spoken of me what is right.” Thank God for God, because that is the root and beginning of faith; to quote Wayne Brouwer again, “Only the grateful believe, and faith itself which seems to soar in times of prosperity needs the strength of thankfulness to carry it through the dark night of the soul.”
One man who well knew the truth of this was Martin Rinkard, a Lutheran who was the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. This was the time of the Thirty Years’ War, and in that year Eilenberg was attacked three different times. When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees. Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkard’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day. Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster. But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinker wrote these words:
Now Thank We All Our GodNow thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms,
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.O may this bounteous God
Through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts
And blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in his grace,
And guide us when perplexed,
And free us from all ills
In this world and the next.All praise and thanks to God
The Father now be given,
The Son, and Him who reigns
With them in highest heaven,
The one eternal God,
Whom earth and heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
And shall be evermore.Words: Martin Rinkart; translated by Catherine Winkworth
Music: Johann Crüger
NUN DANKET, 6.7.6.7.6.6.6.6.
Thank God for God. Only the grateful believe.
Midway between luck and skill
I’m not sure what this world is coming to (admittedly not an infrequent observation on my part), but the best book on military history I’ve read this year was written by a lawyer. Dallas Woodbury Isom is a retired law professor from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon who decided to explore the reasons for the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway because he found the existing explanations insufficient; the result was the book Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway. I haven’t finished it yet, but I can already say it’s an excellent piece of work, as his lawyerly standards for evidence and inquiry match the standards required to do good history—and he’s a good writer, to boot. The book’s critical contribution, and the reason it will almost certainly be a major landmark in WWII history, is the significant amount of primary research Dr. Isom conducted in Japan, both in official Japanese sources and through interviews with survivors of the battle. He notes that as a result of his research, “many of my findings will be surprising to devotees of the battle, and some are bound to be controversial in the military history community”—but though his argumentation is marred somewhat by faulty assumptions (he does not, after all, have any first-hand experience of carrier operations in specific, or military operations in general), his evidence is so solid and his conclusions so carefully marshaled that I expect his work will stand whatever scrutiny it receives.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Dr. Isom’s work to me is the number of times he uses words and phrases like “fortuitous,” “miraculous,” “bizarre twist of fate,” “sheerest accident,” and “incredibly bad luck” in describing the events of the battle. At one point he notes that “the luckiest break of the entire day for the Americans came out of what could have been a disastrous blunder: an inaccurately plotted ‘interception point’ based on the erroneous PBY sighting report.” Luck plays a significant role in most battles, but at Midway, that was true to a remarkable degree. If you tried to write this in a novel, critics would complain that you were stretching the reader’s credulity beyond the breaking point; and yet, it happened in real life. The crowning irony here, though, comes in Dr. Isom’s conclusion, after he has constructed an alternate-history scenario based on a Japanese victory at Midway:
In a chronicle replete with ironies and paradoxes, the final irony is that Japan’s defeat would almost certainly have been much more horrible had it won the Battle of Midway than it was having lost it. All in all, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Japan was lucky to lose at Midway. Such are the vagaries of war.
The reason I find this all very interesting is that Dr. Isom has no stronger word to describe all this than “luck,” which is why he must repeatedly add adjectives like “incredible” and “bizarre”; though he does at one point use the epithet “miraculous,” he shows no sign of actually believing in miracles. From a Christian point of view, however, I’d call this something else: divine providence. If “coincidence is God acting incognito,” this many remarkable and improbable coincidences constitute a place where God is visible through the disguise, at least to those who have eyes to see. And as Dr. Isom carefully argues, this wasn’t merely to America’s benefit; as I would say, it wasn’t just God acting on behalf of America to ensure the US won the war because we were the good guys. Rather, in the long run, it was just as much to the good of the Japanese, given how things likely would have unfolded with a Japanese win at Midway; God was at work to bring about what was best for both sides. Such are the vagaries of war? Yes, from a human perspective; but more than that, more meaningfully than that, such is the providence of God—who is ever redemptively at work in human history, even when his hand is hard to see. So I believe, and so I affirm—and so Dr. Isom shows me in his account of the Battle of Midway, even if he doesn’t see it himself.