The challenge of being the United States

 A few months ago I started a new historical project:  a study of controversies over slavery from the constitutional convention of 1787 until the outbreak of the Civil War.  I have already read through about half a dozen secondary works on various particular controversies--works that once again testify to the one-time strength of the American historical profession, now fallen on relatively barren times.  I am struck as I have been over the last few decades at how much technology has made research easier nowadays.  Nine times out of ten, when a secondary work that I am reading cites an article or even a primary source, I can have the original source on my screen within a few minutes.  Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are taking advantage of these opportunities because they haven't been trained to do serious historical research, and I am not sure that any publishers are willing to publish them, anyway.  In any case, such research has always been more pleasure than business for me and this is turning out to be no exception.  Boiling the material down to a reasonable length will be hard, but I have solved problems like that before.  Meanwhile, I am learning an enormous amount not simply about different views of slavery but also about the fundamental dilemma that we Americans have struggled with since 1787.

Our constitution reflected the values of the Enlightenment in many ways, some of which contemporary observers prefer to ignore.  Despite the actual difference in legal status between free people and slaves and men and women, the founders used "persons" throughout to refer to all the nation's inhabitants.  They began with a promise of a "more perfect union," and their ratification process allowed the people of the nation, acting in statewide conventions, to transfer ultimate sovereignty from the states to the new national government.  And, using their recently devised state constitutions as a model, they codified procedures designed to carry out all the major functions of a government.  The constitution immediately became the ultimate source of authority when conflicts over governmental power arose.  Almost immediately, however, the inescapable flaw of such a system emerged.  Words require people to interpret them--and our history shows that political partisanship continually leads men and women to argue that even the simple words of the constitution do not mean what they say.

The first crisis along these lines occurred during the administration of John Adams, when Congress passed and Adams signed the Sedition Act in 1798.  The Bill of Rights had been ratified only a few years earlier, but that act made criticism of the President and his administration a crime, and several opposition leaders were tried under it.  Fortunately Congress allowed it to expire in 1800.  I was even more struck, however, by what I have just read about John C. Calhoun and his theory of nullification, which South Carolina tried to deploy to invalidate federal tariffs in 1832.  I have discovered that my high school textbooks gave an inadequate account of that crisis.  While South Carolina bitterly opposed the tariff, the real issue involved was the possibility of federal action against slavery, which militant South Carolinians wanted to rule out. Calhoun laid out his argument at For Hill, South Carolina, on July 26, 1832, in an address you can easily find in full, as I did, on the web.

Now in point of fact, the founding fathers' overriding goal in Philadelphia in 1787 was to create a much stronger federal government as an alternative to the chaos they were living through thanks to the Articles of Confederation.  That document had given each state one vote in the confederation congress, and any important measure required the unanimity of all.  The founders instead created a bicameral legislature specifically designated to pass legislation relating to all the major functions of government.  It created an executive branch led by a president to enforce those laws.  A new federal judiciary was given original jurisdiction "all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority,"  And crucially, Article VI declared, in presumably unmistakable words,  "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."  Tariffs--the explicit source of the nullification controversy--were customarily part of the taxing power given to Congress, whose explicit authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations confirmed their legality.

Yet faced with the explicit issue of a high tariff and the threatened issue of national slavery controversies, Calhoun invented new constitutional meanings out of whole cloth.  First, without mentioning Article VI's supremacy clause, he denied that the people of the states had surrendered state sovereignty to the federal government.  They had, it is true, ratified the constitution--but he insisted that they reserved the right as states to call the federal government to account any time that they believed it had exceeded its powers.  He also denied the clear authority of the federal judiciary to decide cases under the constitution.  To maintain liberty, he claimed, the people must have means of defense against a hostile majority that might take control of the whole federal government. "By nature," he said, "every individual has the right to govern himself; and governments, whether founded on majorities or minorities, must derive their right from the assent, expressed or implied, of the governed, and be subject to such limitations as they may impose. Where the interests are the same, that is, where the laws that may benefit one will benefit all, or the reverse, it is just and proper to place them under the control of the majority; but where they are dissimilar, so that the law that may benefit one portion may be ruinous to another, it would be, on the contrary, unjust and absurd to subject them to its will; and such I conceive to be the theory on which our Constitution rests."  The only way to maintain the equality which Calhoun posited between the states on the one hand and the federal government on the other was to allow both to be the judge of their powers and exercise a veto on acts of excessive power by the other.  That specifically meant that a new state convention could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional and refuse to obey it--as a South Carolinian convention did in 1832, only to back down the next year after Calhoun, then Vice President of the United States, had helped arrange a tariff compromise.  This he called the power of "interposition" of a state between an unjust federal government and its citizens.

Calhoun, it seems to me, was trying to keep the spirit of the Articles of Confederation alive, even though the constitution had created a completely different system, and even though, in my opinion, there is nothing in the constitution that remotely justifies his view.  Yet under the constitution all Americans remained free to debate its meaning, and ideas like Calhoun's were sufficiently common in the South as to bring about secession and the Civil War after his death.  Even in our own time southerners like the historian Shelby Foote have claimed that the founding fathers assumed a right of secession which, as Lincoln properly pointed out, cannot be justified by the words that they wrote.  And 122 years after the nullification crisis some leading southern politicians revived the doctrine of "interposition" to argue that states did not have to comply with Brown vs. Board of Education because the Supreme Court had overstepped its authority.  They did not prevail.

So far I have mentioned three instances, in 1798, 1832, and 1954, when Congress or state governments have refused to recognize the plain language of the constitution and its traditionally accepted meaning.  Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has at times done so as well.  Perhaps the most notorious case of this was the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which Chief Justice Taney claimed that black people could never be citizens, even though there was nothing to suggest that in the constitution and they had in fact been citizens all over the country since its founding.  In 2008 I argued in a post here that Justice Scalia's 2010 opinion in Heller vs. District of Columbia, which first defined an individual right to bear arms not stated in the Second Amendment, was almost as dubious--and yet its argument has now been extended in a subsequent decision that could take away the rights to regulate gun ownership that states have exercised for most of our history.  Income taxes had been regarded as part of the taxing power since the founding of the Republic and the government had imposed one during the Civil War, but the Supreme Court suddenly defined them as unconstitutional in 1894, leading twenty years later to a constitutional amendment.  The present Supreme Court has eroded the first amendment's prohibition of an establishment of religion beyond recognition.  

The Trump administration is making many absurd claims about the meaning of the constitution, starting with the explicit denial of birthright citizenship, which is stated in the fourteenth amendment as clearly as anything could be.  Its idea of the "unitary executive," bound in all things to obey the president, is equally dubious in light of history.  The administration has now put these issues squarely before our court system now on many fronts.  I think it is likely to prevail on most immigration issues--although not on birthright citizenship--because the rights of aliens have been severely limited throughout our history.  Perhaps its most consequential steps so far relate to the elimination of various parts of the federal government that have been established and funded by acts of Congress, as well as President Trump's assertion of absolute authority over all federal civil servants.  The question is whether, to paraphrase Orwell, the court in at least sum of these cases will conclude that 2 + 2 can equal 5, if the chief executive so insists. In the past, the Supreme Court has corrected some of its worst decisions, but the demography of the current court suggests that its more recent mistakes will lst for quite a while.

When one reads the writings and speeches of 19th-century Americans, as I have been doing, one recognizes men and women to whom language meant a very great deal.  Since sounds and images could not yet be transmitted, the words the only way in which they could convey thoughts and experience, and reading was by far the most common form of entertainment.  I think that a successful democracy needs a society and a leadership that respect the actual meaning of words.  Such respect has diminished in recent decades, partly because my own profession has increasingly denied that words have any fixed meaning at all.  In so doing they, like demagogic politicians, have opened the door to authoritarianism.  Our functioning democracy depends, I think, on allegiance to something beyond ourselves.  Truth is such a thing.  We need it.

And now for something completely different

 Confession time:   since the tv show Survivor premiered around 2000, I doubt that I have missed half a dozen episodes.  I enjoy competition and strategy, and the show at different times has been a bond between me and both of my sons.  There are things about the show that have driven me crazy.  In particular, when one person is obviously the outstanding contestant physically and as a person, he almost never wins, because other contenders are so desperate not to have to compete against him at the end.   On the other hand, there are few more dramatic scenes on television than when a contestant who thinks he is on top of the Survivor world is blindsided and voted out.  Wokeness hurt the show for a while around 2020, but that era seems to be over.  And this season, which ended last Wednesday with the victory of young lawyer Kyle Fraser, featured some very interesting new departures that might, repeat might, say something good about where our society is heading.  There are obviously spoilers coming, but I would be amazed if I had any readers who 1) haven't watched the show AND 2) still have plans to do so.

The changes involved two relationships--not romantic ones this time--between two pairs of characters: firefighter Joe Hunter and Ph.D. candidate Eva Erikson--the other two members, with Kyle Fraser, of the final three--and Fraser and software engineer Kamilla Karthigesu, the last of the final five, who lost the fire challenge to Eva.  Eva described herself throughout the show as autistic.  I don't know a lot about autism and I'm not going do dispute her self-diagnosis, but she did not show what I think is a common symptom of autism, a lack of empathy--she had a keen sense of what made other people tick.  She has however a tendency towards emotional meltdown that was very much on display on the show especially in one of the first and the last episodes.  In the midst of one of the first episodes--maybe even the first, I'm too lazy to check--she collapsed and began sobbing uncontrollably.  

Joe, the fire captain, stood out from the beginning not only as a physically strong person, but as the kind of rock-solid guy you would want as your army sergeant.  And when Eva collapsed, Joe, who was not even on her tribe, walked over to her and began comforting her.  She eventually snapped out of it.  In the second, post-merge phase of the game, they became the core of the alliance that dominated the proceedings, and which also included Kyle.  They trusted each other completely and rewarded one another's trust.

Eventually--although no one ever said this in so many words--we learned what had moved Joe to help Eva in her distress.  Joe told the audience and some of his fellow players that several years ago, his sister had been killed by her domestic partner.  He had fought with his sister on the telephone on the night before she died, and he felt tremendous guilt over that and over his failure to protect her.  I think he must have seen his sister in Eva's distress, although he never said so.  And in the last episode, he came to her help again.  Kyle had won the last challenge among the last four contestants, which gave him the right to pick which of the other three would automatically go to the end with him.  The other two would face off in a fire making challenge, which has become one of the most dramatic events of every season.  He picked Joe, because, he said, he had told Joe that he would do so if he won that last challenge.  Keeping one's word, needless to say, is not often a priority among Survivor contestants.  That left Eva to face that challenge with Kamilla.  Using their permitted tools--a machete and a piece of flint, which seems actually to be magnesium--they both began practicing their fire building, and Eva melted down again.  This time her emotional collapse was complete--sobbing and writhing on the ground (which the producers unfortunately did not show.)   Drawn by her cries, both Joe and Kyle went to her and offered to surrender their automatic spots in the last three to her and enter the fire challenge themselves. She steadfastly refused, and eventually got a grip on herself and managed to make a practice fire.

The second relationship between Kyle and Kamilla was fascinating in a different way--it was a secret.  They formed an early alliance but spent as little time together as possible.  All these contestants, it seemed, had been watching the show since childhood and had learned a lot about it.  Tight couples usually become targets because the emotional support they give each other is so valuable.  Kyle and Kamilla provided each other with a lot of key intelligence and also orchestrated a clever coup against another contender in one of the last weeks.  And then, on the eve of the final immunity challenge that would put one person in charge of the game, they had an amazing conversation.  Kyle told Kamilla that if he won, he would NOT select her as the second automatic final three contestant, because in the final jury vote (the jury is composed of the last 8 people to be eliminated), the same people would want to vote for both of them, their votes would split, and the third contestant--either Joe or Eva--would win.  And Kamilla, to my amazement, didn't complain at all--she said she completely understood and implied, I think, that she would have done the same thing.  

The fire challenge did not disappoint.  Kamilla, who entered it as a favorite, could not get a fire going at all, while Eva progressed rapidly and soon had a real blaze going that seemed certain to reach the string suspended a few feet above the fire, burn through it, and win her the challenge.  But on the verge of victory, her fire was checked by gusts of wind, and fell way back.  Suddenly Eva began to melt down hysterically again--but everyone, even Kamilla, encouraged her to hang in there.  Kamilla did get a fire going but it never really took off, and Eva managed to build hers back up and burn through the string.  Kamilla became the eighth and last jury member.

At the final tribal council Eva announced that she was not simply a hockey referee, but a Ph.D. candidate at Brown, and Kyle admitted that he was a lawyer, not  a teacher.  This implied that Joe, a 45-year old fire captain from Sacramento with a wife and family, would in the long run need the $1 million first prize more than either of them.  (AI tells me that Sacramento fire captains can make as much as $140,000 a year, but average $81,000.)  Such people usually get voted off before the end because the other contestants fear their appeal, but Joe had not.  Yet in the final vote, Kyle got 5 votes, Eva 2, and Joe only 1.  I think that more than anything else, that vote was generational.  Most of the contestants were Millennials or Gen Z, and Joe was only one of two late-wave Gen Xers, the second of whom provided his only vote. 

Survivor is, above all, a high-stakes game, and no one makes it onto it without understanding that winning is the goal.  This year, however, winning was not the only thing that mattered.  Joe in particular made that point by helping Eva, and Kyle and Kamilla understood that there tight bond could only go so far.  In general the contestants showed more mutual respect than I ever remember seeing before.  The sample is much too small to conclude that values are changing in society at large--but I hope that that might turn out to be the case.  I am sorry that Joe didn't win, but the others were worthy.

A podcast interview

 Several weeks ago I was contacted by a young man named Eddie Carson, a dean at a private school in Vermont.  Somehow he had come across my autobiography, A Life in History, and had also become a fan of historyunfolding.  He invited me for an episode of his podcast and we taped it last week.  Here it is!

More thoughts on how we got here

 Testifying before the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair in 1987, Secretary of State George Schultz repeatedly declared, "Nothing is ever settled in this town."  History suggests that humanity has a deep yearning for certainty, for a resolution of certain fundamental questions, and for a guarantee of a stable future.  Yet history also shows how illusory all that is.  Somehow my life has prepared me for what is happening to the United States now.  By 1983, when I wrote a 20th anniversary piece in The New Republic looking back at the Kennedy years, I felt that our political system had been on a wrong track for over a decade.  In the next thirty years I saw the decline of my own profession and intellectual life in general, and now a near-contemporary of mine, backed by battalions of eager ideological warriors, is undoing the government and many parts of the world that I grew up in.  That, I am convinced, reflects another cornerstone of human nature--a tendency of certain younger generations to rebel against conventional wisdom, regardless of how wise it was.  And last but not least, every human institution, no matter how praiseworthy and inspiring at the moment of its birth, seems to grow old, lose its vitality, and become easy prey to those who can imagine a world without it.

I have pointed out here several times in the last 20 years that the historian Henry Adams made a related point well over a century ago in his presidential address to the American Historical Review dealing with the future of history as a science.  Historical science, he argued, could reach one of three obvious conclusions about the future of humanity.  First, it might decide that mankind would adopt socialism.  Secondly, it might eventually conclude that earlier generations were right and adopt a religious view of the past, present, and future.  And lastly, it might conclude that mankind would not change, and that evils like war and economic exploitation would continue.  Yet any one of those conclusions, he thought, would arouse determined opposition among powerful elements of our society.  I think that is a good analysis of what has happened over the last sixty years or so, not only in the historical profession but in society as a whole.  And increasingly, new forces are not merely attacking the conclusions of the historical profession, but the whole idea of science as a guide to politics and life.

Under Trump this seems to be clearest with respect to public health.  My maternal grandmother died in 1923, when my mother was ten, of postpartum strep, then known as childbed fever.  Within ten years, sulfa drugs could cure that frequently fatal illness, and penicillin followed within another decade.  As a child I read several books about the great medical discoveries of the past century, and I was in the first cohort of kids to receive the Salk vaccine---although I acquired my immunity to mumps, measles and German measles naturally.  I lived to see the end of smallpox.  Now more than three generations of younger Americans have grown up under the intellectual authority of the medical profession, and enough of them have rebelled to lead to the appointment of our most prominent vaccine skeptic as Secretary of HHS.  Significant numbers of parents refuse to vaccinate their children, and we are experiencing a measles epidemic that has killed three children so far.  

I don't think there is any legitimate excuse for this particular rebellion, but I do see plenty of evidence that we can't trust our highly educated population to do the right thing.  American medical care is now organized for profit, not simply to cure disease and save lives.  That is why big pharma has failed to develop desperately needed new antibiotics, preferring to research drugs that people will have to take for much longer periods of time.  And good science constantly encounters powerful enemies.  We all know that the processed food industry is poisoning us, but even Michelle Obama essentially caved in to the industry when she tried to make school lunches healthier.  It also seems that the fossil fuel industry has succeeded--and not only under Trump--in committing us to a continued, major role for it in energy production.  I keep wondering if that industry has secretly concluded that global warming is something that we will all just have to live with.  

Industry however is not the only institution to abandon the use of knowledge for the common good.  The same thing has happened in universities.  Identity-based ideologues have joyfully transformed literature and history over the last few decades, crippling their university enrollments and leaving themselves vulnerable to the counterattack that the Trump administration has begun.  Administrators have replaced scholars as the most numerous and influential university officials.   And K-12 education has apparently slipped even further, valuing students' self-esteem more highly than the pursuit of truth.

The modern bureaucratic state bases its power on superior knowledge of what we need.  Human nature being what it is, millions inevitably resent those claims even when the knowledge they rely on is true, and even more when it does not intuitively make sense.  Donald Trump, who has never shown much respect for anyone else's opinion, has exploited that resentment brilliantly.  The Democratic Party seems trapped in a defense of a status quo which obviously has serious problems.  Eventually, I am sure, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction and we shall begin restoring respect for truth--but for the time being, to paraphrase Orwell, millions are so sick of  hearing that 2 + 2 = 4 that they are willing to believe they equal 5, if only for a change.  That is part of the rhythm of history.

Elon Musk

 Over the past few weeks I have read Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk.  History has been moving fast lately, and when this book appeared in late in 2023 Isaacson had no idea that Musk would endorse Donald Trump for President, much less that he would receive a mandate to reshape the federal government.  In another sense, however, that was fortunate, since the book deals with other more interesting and probably more important aspects of Musk and his career.  I learned a great deal and indeed am surprised by my ignorance of various key developments.

Born into an abusive family in South Africa in 1971, Musk appears to be severely autistic , as he freely acknowledges. That may be why he allowed Isaacson to follow him around for weeks at a time and apparently authorized anyone close to him--professionally or personally--to talk to him.  Musk sleeps very little, eats irregularly, and ingests huge quantities of Red Bull to keep him going.  He has little or no EQ, although he can be very needy himself.  He has an extraordinary personal history, recently documented at length in the Wall Street Journal, including at least fourteen children, many of them conceived in vitrio. And like Napoleon as a general and political leader or John D. Rockefeller as an industrialist, he is the most striking example of a new type that has transformed a key sector of society--in his case, the tech-based innovator.  And like Rockefeller, probably, he is now the richest man in the world.

Musk has now led three major enterprises, and Isaacson details each of their histories in great detail. The most important, probably, is his rocket company, SpaceX, which now occupies the position in the aerospace industry that NASA used to occupy.  Second is the Tesla car company, the world's leading producer of electric vehicles, and third is Twitter, which he acquired just a few years ago and renamed X.  While many liberals now argue that Musk depended from the beginning on help from the federal government, Isaacson argues that such help did not become truly significant until after he had built functioning rockets.  Based on other sources, I am not sure if Isaacson got this right or not.   Interestingly enough, Musk has pursued these interests with the conscious purpose of transforming how and where we live.  The goal of Space X is to increase our capacity for space travel sufficiently to allow us to establish colonies on Mars, which he thinks will prolong the survival of the human race. (Oddly, Isaacson gives  no indication that Musk has addressed the even greater problem of making it possible for large numbers of human beings to live there.)  Tesla was designed to free us from fossil fuels and the threat of climate change, and he acquired Twitter/X, he claims, to protect free speech--the least convincing of these three claims.  

Isaacson describes the creation of SpaceX and Tesla in great detail, revealing, it seems to me, what has made Musk a uniquely successful individual.  Musk has a remarkably quick mind, and he refuses to accept anything on faith.  (I must admit that I have that problem--or is it an asset?--as well.)  He was never simply interested in getting a NASA contract, he wanted to make enough rockets quickly and cheaply to support a continuing presence of Mars.  That meant, first of all, that rockets had to be re-useable, something that as far as I know the NASA pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s never dreamed of.  He has done that: his rockets now return to earth and make soft landings.  He achieved this by refusing to take no from an answer from his engineers and insisting that every part and process be re-evaluated to see if it could be simplified and cheapened.  Whenever that led to a brief setback, he told his subordinates not to worry:  if they did not occasionally try ideas that did not work out and had to be abandoned, they were not being creative enough.  Musk often sets seemingly impossible deadlines for his engineers, who at times manage to meet them.  Tesla has used the same philosophy.  He has also pushed the use of robots, although they have sometimes proven to be unable to do what humans do, and have had to be scaled back.  He apparently expects a heavily robotic economy to emerge in which everyone would be given a universal basic incomes--once again without thinking about the social and emotional consequences of such a scheme.  Keeping to my usual rule here, I am not welcoming or endorsing all this, simply recognizing that, yes, it is happening.   And it is happening because Musk identified the weaknesses of the civilization that we have all inherited.

That civilization was at least as transformative as Musk could ever be in its early stages, from the late 19th century until the late 20th.  Industrial manufacturing, new forms of energy, and revolutionary transportation advances completely altered our way of life.  Many of their advances, however, became legacies, which institutions kept alive without thinking or, at times, even understanding why.  Redundancies accumulated in both production, regulation, and administration.  Helped by our own revolution in data processing, Musk and others have begun clearing those redundancies away.  And Musk, it seems to me, is very unusual in his emphasis on making manufacturing as cheap as possible. (I do wonder if he has Japanese and South Korean counterparts in this respect--I do not know.)  Reading this book, it occurred to me that Musk's approach could also lead to much-needed reforms in higher education, which could use reductions in administrators comparable to the ones he imposed on Twitter, and some reductions in faculty as well.  The K-12 educational system might benefit from root and branch re-evaluations as well.  Such changes would have to be carried out by people who really cared about education, but the could do a lot of good.  And I am not prepared to argue that every bureaucrat in our federal, state and local governments is truly essential, either.  

Unfortunately, in my view, these changes are taking place through privatization, of which SpaceX is the most striking example.  And SpaceX is so important for the Ukrainian war effort--for which it supplies and maintains essential communications satellites--that Musk himself, according to Isaacson, stopped a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet at one point during the war by turning off key satellites that controlled the drones.  Like the industrial revolution, today's changes are creating a new aristocracy, of which he is exhibit A.  That is not entirely the fault of Republicans.  Barack Obama  decided that SpaceX would take over the production of rockets from NASA.

In short interviews in the last few months, Isaacson has suggested that there is a certain logic to Musk's new alliance with Trump, even though he did not predict it in the book.  Musk had begun moving rightward on key issues during the 2010s, becoming very anti-woke, partly, according to Isaacson, because of the gender transition of his oldest biological son, from whom he became completely estranged.  The book does include one extraordinary story of Musk having dinner with his four oldest sons in April 2022, on the evening after he had bought Twitter.  They did not understand this decision, and he tried to explain it.  I quote from the book:

       "'I think it's important to have a digital public square space that's inclusive and trusted,' he replied. Then, after a pause, he asked, 'How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?'
        "It was a joke.  But with Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell, even for his kids.  Maybe even for himself.  They were aghast.  He reassured them that he was just kidding."

         That might have been a tactical family move.

         Musk's alliance with Trump, however, raises one huge question that I have not seen addressed.  Musk has built up Tesla to take over the world's car market and stop climate change--but Trump has clearly adopted the fossil fuel industry's view that climate change is something that we can live with, and seems to be doing away with the electric vehicle incentives that Biden put in place.  At times I wonder whether Musk is about to announced a gasoline-powered Tesla.   Only time will tell.

          I put down the book convinced that Musk is a world-historical figure like Carnegie or Rockefeller or the inventor of television, whom I cannot even identify.  Like them, he will have a very great impact.  That does not inspire me, but as I have said before, I am through arguing with history.