Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  The attack does, however, present the left with some rather exquisite problems of political correctness. After all, Columbus was an agent of Spain, and his most direct legacy is Hispanic America. The denunciation of the Spanish legacy as one of cruelty and greed has moved one Hispanic leader to call the NCC’s resolution “a racist depreciation of the heritages of most of today’s American peoples, especially Hispanics.”

  That same resolution opened an even more ancient debate between Protestants and Catholics over the colonization of the Americas. For Catholics like historian James Muldoon, the (Protestant) attack on Columbus and on the subsequent missionary work of the (Catholic) church in the Americas is little more than a resurrection, a few centuries late, of the Black Legend that was a staple of anti-Catholic propaganda during the Reformation.

  The crusade continues nonetheless. Kirkpatrick Sale kicked off the anti-celebration with his anti-Columbus tome, The Conquest of Paradise. The group Encounter plans to celebrate 1992 by sailing three ships full of Indians to “discover” Spain. Similar merriment is to be expected wherever a quorum gathers to honor 1492.

  The attack on 1492 has two parts. First, establishing the villainy of Columbus and his progeny (i.e., us). Columbus is “the deadest whitest male now offered for our detestation,” writes Garry Wills. “If any historical figure can appropriately be loaded up with all the heresies of our time—Eurocentrism, phallocentrism, imperialism, elitism and all-bad-things-generally-ism—Columbus is the man.”

  Therefore, good-bye Columbus? Balzac once suggested that all great fortunes are founded on a crime. So too all great civilizations. The European conquest of the Americas, like the conquest of other civilizations, was indeed accompanied by great cruelty. But that is to say nothing more than that the European conquest of America was, in this way, much like the rise of Islam, the Norman conquest of Britain and the widespread American Indian tradition of raiding, depopulating and appropriating neighboring lands.

  The real question is, What eventually grew on this bloodied soil? The answer is, The great modern civilizations of the Americas—a new world of individual rights, an ever-expanding circle of liberty and, twice in this century, a savior of the world from totalitarian barbarism.

  If we are to judge civilizations like individuals, they should all be hanged, because with individuals it takes but one murder to merit a hanging. But if one judges civilizations by what they have taken from and what they have given the world, a non-jaundiced observer—say, one of the millions in Central Europe and Asia whose eyes are turned with hope toward America—would surely bless the day Columbus set sail.

  Thus Part I of the anti-’92 crusade is calumny for Columbus and his legacy. Part II is hagiography, singing of the saintedness of the Indians in their pre-Columbian Eden, a land of virtue, empathy and ecological harmony. With Columbus, writes Sale, Europe “implanted its diseased and dangerous seeds in the soils of the continents that represented the last best hope for humankind—and destroyed them.”

  Last best hope? No doubt, some Indian tribes—the Hopis, for example—were tree-hugging pacifists. But the notion that pre-Columbian America was a hemisphere of noble savages is an adolescent fantasy (rather lushly, if ludicrously, animated in Dances with Wolves).

  Take the Incas. Inca civilization, writes Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, was a “pyramidal and theocratic society” of “totalitarian structure” in which “the individual had no importance and virtually no existence.” Its foundation? “A state religion that took away the individual’s free will and crowned the authority’s decision with the aura of a divine mandate turned the Tawantinsuyu [Incan empire] into a beehive.”

  True, the beehive was wantonly destroyed by “semiliterate, implacable and greedy swordsmen.” But they in turn represented a culture in which “a social space of human activities had evolved that was neither legislated nor controlled by those in power.” In other words, a culture of liberty that endowed the individual human being with dignity and sovereignty.

  Is it Eurocentric to believe the life of liberty is superior to the life of the beehive? That belief does not justify the cruelty of the conquest. But it does allow us to say that after 500 years the Columbian legacy has created a civilization that we ought not, in all humble piety and cultural relativism, declare to be no better or worse than that of the Incas. It turned out better.

  And mankind is the better for it. Infinitely better. Reason enough to honor Columbus and bless 1492.

  Time, May 27, 1991

  HERMANN LISCO: MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

  Hermann Lisco, a gifted scientist and legendary teacher, died last week. He was a quiet man from an unquiet place. Germanborn, he received his medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1936, came to the United States to teach pathology at Johns Hopkins University and was recruited to the Manhattan Project. In secret, he worked with a team of scientists at the University of Chicago studying the biological effects of a strange new human creation: plutonium.

  Later, he was flown to Los Alamos to study the first person to be killed by acute radiation poisoning. Lisco performed the autopsy and, later, those of eight other victims of accidents at Los Alamos. His findings were a scientific milestone, the first published account of the effects of acute radiation exposure on the human organism.

  A decade later, he was instrumental in producing a landmark United Nations report on the effects of radiation on humans and on the environment. But Dr. Lisco was more than a scientist. At Harvard Medical School, where he subsequently became a professor, he was the most beloved and influential mentor of an entire generation of students.

  His home was always alive with the sound of students. He and his wife, Lisa (a formidable intellect in her own right and daughter of James Franck, winner of the 1926 Nobel Prize in physics), ran a combination halfway house and salon.

  Medical school is not hard, but it is all-consuming. As our world got narrower, Hermann’s goal was to keep us human, in touch with a larger world and larger possibilities.

  He did so, in part, by example. He was a rare specimen of what used to be called a humanist: His mastery of science was complemented by deep knowledge of the humanities. With his supple and sophisticated mind, he discoursed easily on art, literature, politics, history.

  His belief in broad horizons was more than theoretical. He was instrumental in setting up a traveling scholarship for students to take a year off and see the world. He arranged for Michael Crichton to be given the freedom as a fourth-year medical student to research and write books.

  As for me, well, he made my career possible. Toward the end of my freshman year, I was paralyzed in a serious accident. Hermann, then associate dean of students, came to see me in intensive care. He asked what he could do for me. I told him that, to keep disaster from turning into ruin, I had decided to stay in school and with my class.

  If Hermann had doubts—I would not have blamed him: No one with my injury had ever gone through medical school—he never showed it. He told me he would do everything possible to make it happen.

  He did. Within a few days, a hematology professor, fresh from lecturing to my classmates on campus, showed up at my bedside and proceeded to give me the lecture, while projecting his slides on the ceiling above me. (I was flat on my back in traction, but I’m sure Hermann had instructed everybody to carry on as if such teaching techniques were entirely normal.)

  He then went to work behind the scenes: persuading professors to let me take their tests orally with a recording secretary (I did not learn to handwrite for another three years); getting me transferred for my 12 months of inpatient rehab to a Harvard teaching hospital so that I could catch up at night with my class’ second-year studies and rejoin it in third year; persuading (ordering?) skeptical attending physicians to allow their patients to be cared for by the student in the wheelchair with the exotic medical instruments (the extra-long stethoscope Hermann had made for me was a thing of beauty).

  Hermann did all this quietly, without
fanfare. At graduation, he took not only pride but a kind of mischievous delight in our unspoken conspiracy. We broke no rules, but we bent a few, especially the stupid ones. I’m sure he liked that.

  That was Hermann’s great gift: He was a man of orderly habits and orderly mind, but he never flinched from challenging the orderly. In Germany, he had seen order turned into malevolence. Mild mannered as he was—I never once heard him raise his voice—he was good at defiance. In Nazi Germany, Hermann married a Jew, the daughter of an early, very prominent anti-Nazi. Defiance ran in the family. Hermann’s father was fired as head of Göttingen’s elite high school for his opposition to the regime.

  Hermann did not much respect nature’s strictures, either. At age 70, he was still climbing mountains in his beloved Adirondacks. At 80, he was still taking miles-long walks in the woods.

  And now, just short of 90, he is gone. Those who were touched by this man, so wise and gracious and goodly, mourn him. I mourn a man who saved my life.

  The Washington Post, August 25, 2000

  CHAPTER 2

  MANNERS

  NO DANCING IN THE END ZONE

  ROUNDS: The ritual whereby a senior doctor goes from bed to bed seeing patients, trailed by a gaggle of students.

  ROUNDSMANSHIP: The art of distinguishing oneself from the gaggle with relentless displays of erudition.

  The roundsman is the guy who, with the class huddled at the bed of a patient who has developed a rash after taking penicillin, raises his hand to ask the professor—obnoxious ingratiation is best expressed in the form of a question—whether this might not instead be a case of Schmendrick’s Syndrome reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Ridiculously Obscure Tropical Diseases.

  None of the rest of us gathered around the bed has ever heard of Schmendrick’s. But that’s the point. The point is for the prof to remember this hyper-motivated stiff who stays up nights reading journals in preparation for rounds. That’s the upside. The downside, which the roundsman—let’s call him Oswald—ignores at his peril, is that this apple polishing does not endear him to his colleagues, a slovenly lot mostly hung over from a terrific night at the Blue Parrot.

  The general feeling among the rest of us is that we should have Oswald killed. A physiology major suggests a simple potassium injection that would stop his heart and leave no trace. We agree this is a splendid idea and entirely just. But it would not solve the problem. Kill him, and another Oswald will arise in his place.

  There’s always an Oswald. There’s always the husband who takes his wife to Paris for Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day? The rest of us schlubs can barely remember to come home with a single long-stemmed rose. What does he think he’s doing? And love is no defense. We don’t care how much you love her—you don’t do Paris. It’s bad for the team.

  Baseball has its own way of taking care of those who commit the capital offense of showing up another player. Drop your bat to admire the trajectory of your home run and, chances are, the next time up the unappreciative pitcher tries to take your head off with high cheese that whistles behind your skull.

  Now, you might take this the wrong way and think that I am making the case for mediocrity—what Australians call “the tall poppy syndrome” of unspoken bias against achievement, lest one presume to be elevated above one’s mates. No. There is a distinction between show and substance. It is the ostentation that rankles, not the achievement. I’m talking about dancing in the end zone. Find a cure for cancer and you deserve whatever honors and riches come your way. But the check-writer who wears blinding bling to the Cancer Ball is quite another matter.

  Americans abroad have long been accused of such blinging arrogance and display. I find the charge generally unfair. Arrogance is incorrectly ascribed to what is really the cultural clumsiness of an insular (if continental) people less exposed to foreign ways and languages than most other people on Earth.

  True, America as a nation is not very good at humility. But it would be completely unnatural for the dominant military, cultural and technological power on the planet to adopt the demeanor of, say, Liechtenstein. The ensuing criticism is particularly grating when it comes from the likes of the French, British, Spanish, Dutch (there are many others) who just yesterday claimed dominion over every land and people their Captain Cooks ever stumbled upon.

  My beef with American arrogance is not that we act like a traditional great power, occasionally knocking off foreign bad guys who richly deserve it. My problem is that we don’t know where to stop—the trivial victories we insist on having in arenas that are quite superfluous. Like that women’s hockey game in the 2002 Winter Olympics. Did the U.S. team really have to beat China 12–1? Can’t we get the coaches—there’s gotta be some provision in the Patriot Act authorizing the CIA to engineer this—to throw a game or two, or at least make it close? We’re trying to contain China. Why, then, gratuitously crush them in something Americans don’t even care about? Why not throw them a bone?

  I say we keep the big ones for ourselves—laser-guided munitions, Google, Warren Buffett—and let the rest of the world have ice hockey, ballroom dancing and every Nobel Peace Prize. And throw in the Ryder Cup. I always root for the Europeans in that one. They lost entire empires, for God’s sake; let them have golf supremacy for one weekend. No one likes an Oswald.

  The Washington Post, December 22, 2006

  “WOMEN AND CHILDREN.” STILL?

  You’re on the Titanic II. It has just hit an iceberg and is sinking. And, as last time, there are not enough lifeboats. The captain shouts, “Women and children first!” But this time, another voice is heard: “Why women?”

  Why, indeed? Part of the charm of the cosmically successful movie Titanic is the period costume, period extravagance, period class prejudice. An audience can enjoy these at a distance. Oddly, however, of all the period mores in the film, the old maritime tradition of “women and children first” enjoys total acceptance by modern audiences. Listen to the booing and hissing at the on-screen heavies who try to sneak on with—or ahead of—the ladies.

  But is not grouping women with children a raging anachronism? Should not any self-respecting modern person, let alone feminist, object to it as patronizing and demeaning to women? Yet its usage is as common today as it was in 1912. Consider these examples taken almost at random from recent newspapers:

  Dateline Mexico: “Members of a paramilitary group gunned down the Indians, most of them women and children.”

  Dateline Burundi: “As many as 200 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed.”

  Dateline Croatia: “Kupreskic was named in an open indictment … for the massacre in Ahmici in which 103 Muslims, including 33 women and children, were killed.”

  At a time when women fly combat aircraft, how can one not wince when adult women are routinely classed with children? In Ahmici, it seems, 70 adult men were killed. Adult women? Not clear. When things get serious, when blood starts to flow or ships start to sink, you’ll find them with the children.

  Now, children are entitled to special consideration for two reasons: helplessness and innocence. They have not yet acquired either the faculty of reason or the wisdom of experience. Consequently, they are defenseless (incapable of fending for themselves) and blameless (incapable of real sin).

  That is why we grant them special protection. In an emergency, it is our duty to save them first because they, helpless, have put their lives in our hands. And in wartime, they are supposed to enjoy special immunity because they, blameless, can have threatened or offended no one.

  “Women and children” attributes to women the same pitiable dependence and moral simplicity we find in five-year-olds. Such an attitude made sense perhaps in an era of male suffrage and “Help Wanted: Female” classifieds. Given the disabilities attached to womanhood in 1912, it was only fair and right that a new standard of gender equality not suddenly be proclaimed just as lifeboat seats were being handed out. That deference—a somewhat more urgent variant of giving up y
our seat on the bus to a woman—complemented and perhaps compensated for the legal and social constraints placed on women at the time.

  But in this day of the most extensive societal restructuring to grant women equality in education, in employment, in government, in athletics, in citizenship writ large, what entitles women to the privileges—and reduces them to the status—of children?

  The evolutionary psychologists might say that ladies-to-the-lifeboats is an instinct that developed to perpetuate the species: Women are indispensable child bearers. You can repopulate a village if the women survive and only a few of the men, but you cannot repopulate a village if the men survive and only a few of the women. Women being more precious, biologically speaking, than men, evolution has conditioned us to give them the kind of life-protecting deference we give to that other seed of the future, kids.

  The problem with this kind of logic, however, is its depressing reductionism. It recapitulates in all seriousness the geneticist’s old witticism that a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg.

  But humans are more than just egg layers. And chivalrous traditions are more than just disguised survival strategies. So why do we say “women and children”? Perhaps it’s really “women for children.” The most basic parental bond is maternal. Equal parenting is great—it has forced men to get off their duffs—but women, from breast to cradle to cuddle, can nurture in ways that men cannot. And thus, because we value children—who would deny them first crack at the lifeboats?—women should go second. The children need them.

  But kiddie-centrism gets you only so far. What if there are no children on board? You are on the Titanic III, a singles cruise. No kids, no moms, no dads. Now: Iceberg! Lifeboats! Action!

  Here’s my scenario. The men, out of sheer irrational gallantry, should let the women go first. And the women, out of sheer feminist self-respect, should refuse.