Civil War Dead in New Hampshire

RIDING by a cemetery, years ago, with our five year old in the back seat of our car we asked if he knew what a cemetery was. "Yes," he replied promptly, "It's where the dead people live."

I suppose that was not the first time a five year old has said something like that, but it amused his parents at the time.

Wandering through the cemeteries which are a feature of every New Hampshire town, the Phantom has been repeatedly impressed how many contain the markers of young men who died between the years 1861 and 1865. Some of these, like Pine Grove at Gilmanton, list the Civil War dead from the town on a plaque near the entrance. 

Every little town seems to have Civil War dead.  But this is the 21st century so the Phantom does not have to simply wonder--the internet tells him that 38,000 men from New Hampshire served during those four years and about 1/4 died.
The population of New Hampshire in 1860 was 326, 000.

What is really remarkable, when you scroll through the regiments is the proportion who died, not in battle or from hostile fire, but from disease. 

Most of the New Hampshire regiments had roughly 1,600 men and about 200 from each died of wounds and 200 of disease.  This was a relatively high proportion of death in battle; two thirds of the over 600,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War died not from bullets but from disease. 

There is a scene in the movie version of Gone with the Wind where Scarlet O'Hara receives the letter informing her of the death of her husband and when she gets down to the last sentence it tells her he died of measles, never having had the chance to strike a blow for the honor of the Confederacy.  I remember the audience laughing at that.  It did seem mordantly funny, having seen all the young men whooping it up, riding off to whip the Yankees, only to die in bed before they got to fire a single shot.

But Margaret Mitchell knew her Civil War--that was an accurate depiction. More died of disease than gunshot.

Which reminds us all of the folly of war.  In order to get men to join the ranks and march off to war, you've got to fill heads full of dreams of glory. 

After 9/11 Pat Tillman, a NFL football player signed up and joined the Army, only to be killed by friendly fire in the confusion of battle. He was a hero.  He was a fool. Or, as Rhett Butler would say, he was a gallant fool.  The War on Terror was more terror than war.

The Civil War has the distinction of being a sacred effort.  When, in the history of the world, has a war been waged by people who were not directly injured on behalf of a people who were enslaved?  There were wars of liberation in South America, throwing off colonial power, but then people were fighting for their own interests.  In the case of the American Civil War, those armies from New England and the north were formed of men who had not felt the lash of the slaver, had not had money taken out of their pockets by the plantation master. They were simply affronted by the cruelty and immorality of slavery.  To be sure, many if not most of the Union soldiers did not sign up to fight for abolition, in the beginning of the war, but the movement to arm them happened because abolitionists stirred the pot. And, ultimately, as the war ground on, it became clear to everyone, it was a war to end slavery. Even men who claimed they would quit the war if it became an abolitionist's war, changed their minds once they got South and saw what slavery was and once colored troops started fighting along side them.

So, I wander through cemeteries from Hollis, near lake Winnipesaukee, to Pine Grove at Gilmanton, and all around the Seacoast and I see the markers and I wonder what sort of men these were, and what sort of families sent them. 

Explain Statutory Rape to Me

A good friend sent me a link to some Tennessee news outlets about the reaction in that state to the displacement of Andrew Jackson from the $20 in favor of Harriet Tubman. As one wag noted, a Democratic Administration bumped a founding father of the Democratic party in favor of a gun toting, Evangelical, Republican woman. Go figure.

There were many thoughtful pieces exploring the duality problem.  It's the Jungian thing, I am told.  In "Full Metal Jacket"  Joker, the protagonist, wears a helmet with the words "Born to Kill" scrawled over its cover and a peace button attached and when the ultimate officious officer upbraids him for this, Joker explains, "It's the Jungian thing," about the dual nature of man, both killer and lover.  

So, I was much amused to see historians wax on about how Jackson was a slave owner and a racist, who signed the law which sent native Americans on the "Trail of Tears" march to the West, but he also tried to restore the government to the common people, won the battle of New Orleans and tried to limit the power of banking.

Thrown in jail for heinous offense

As I was reading through all this, I noticed a local Tennessee story about a 26 year old wife of an assistant high school football coach who had been arrested for having a sexual affair with a 16 year old high school student, who was on the team.  The whole brouhaha over this put the principal's job at risk and the football coach resigned for unstated, but easy to imagine reasons.

What I cannot imagine, actually, is the harm done to the 16 year old boy, and I know, I know, as soon as I say this you will think: But this woman used her position of authority to maneuver this boy into a sexual relationship.  This is why we have statutory rape laws.

But no, and I know I will be accused of being a male chauvinist pig, but I really do believe we have statutory rape laws to prevent 26 year old male school teachers from having sex with 16 year old girl students.  And, in fact, 2 years later, when that girl gets to college, in many places, for reasons I'm not sure I understand, if she has an affair with a 26 year old college professor, that's okay. 

All I know is, if a reasonably good looking 26 year old woman had taken a sexual interest in me when I was 16 and offered to introduce me to the wonderful world of sex, I would not have felt violated or abused; I would have been delighted.  

But I am really asking here. I'm not being rhetorical, or snide. I really do not understand this kerfuffle. I understand I do not know all the circumstances. 

Sonny and the coach's wife

But think of "The Last Picture Show!" Nobody thought that coach's wife was guilty of statutory rape, because by the time she goes to bed with Sonny, you have great sympathy for her; you know more about her.  If anyone was hurt in that relationship, it was not Sonny, the high school boy, it was the older woman, as played achingly by Cloris Leachman.

It strikes me this is something of a piece with the Andrew Jackson problem: People are complicated, and if you have a certain sympathy for them, you might see their actions differently. It's the duality thing. 

This woman's husband made $15,000 a year as the assistant football coach at that Tennessee high school.  This may not have been "The Last Picture Show" kind of town, but I can imagine life might get pretty dreary and claustrophobic and the assistant coach's wife  may have been looking for something to help her deal with the ennui. 

As for the boy, I cannot speak for him. I supposed he might have been "damaged" by the experience. But I can't help but believe he may well have not been damaged at all and the only reason the woman was charged was because we want to be able to charge men for the same offense and we think we have to be consistent.

 Successful model, business woman.  It's the Jungian thing.

I can only speak for myself, and for about a hundred of my best high school friends--if we had that chance at age 16, we would have looked Heavenward and said, "Thank you!"

The duality of woman, thing. Serious journalist. Sex object.

Call the Midwife: A Quiet Masterpiece

Call the Midwife starts its sixth season with a story so intense and well crafted one can only admire the courage it must have taken to write, act and produce this masterpiece.

Time has progressed from the immediate post war 1950's to 1961, when the first stirrings of feminism and a faint hint of sexual revolution wafts through the house where midwife/nurses share a roof with midwife/nuns and tensions develop over the secular embrace of nascent feminism, a movement and set of ideas which didn't even have a name at the time,  and the buttoned down response of the nuns to any hint of sexuality among women. 

There is a subplot about a lesbian love affair, in which the emphasis is entirely on the emotional and this has the effect of only heightening the implied erotic part of the relationship. I cannot think of a more wrenching portrayal of the love of one woman for another than this. 

But, most important is the appearance of the first baby born to a mother who took thalidomide and the turmoil this causes among the midwives and nurses who have no training to prepare them for the deformity in the infant they deliver and struggle to decide how to tell the parents what they've got. 

Most artful of all is the epilogue,  given as the usual voice over spoken by a character who is not clearly identified, but this one summarizes the forces stirring in the lives of these humble midwives and doctors serving the folk of London's East End with the only tools they have in 1961:  a dollop of very rudimentary science but a huge scoop of simple presence and sympathy.  The voice over tells us that in 1961 science was thought to be an unmitigated blessing, the beacon of light and hope in a new age of better lives, but the explanation for the misfortune of what happened to the one couple arose out of the realization they were not just a random misfortune but the heralding of a scandal which rocked Britain and the world of science, and the word, "thalidomide" is never actually spoken, but you know what she is talking about, this wise voice.

 And that experience brought with it the news that while science might lead to untold wonders and progress, it could also bring grief and disaster. 

This episode is written with such restraint it becomes almost magical, as you see and know so much more than the characters in their particular moment can possibly know.  It puts the viewer in a position of a god, looking down on the lives of these people, struggling with forces they cannot possibly yet connect to bigger tides which will carry them along--environmental toxins, including thalidomide and others which would poison whole rivers and landscapes, the emergence of women from the repression of restricted lives, in which women dared not even speak the word "vagina" and did not seek medical care for problems, "down below" out of shame, to the emergence of women like Trixie who began to consider, then to believe that women did not need to be ashamed of their bodies or of their sexuality.  Everyone, from doctors to nurses to pregnant women still smoked--the evils of tobacco were still vigorously denied by the manufacturers and in every scene we see things we want to scream out warnings against--don't smoke when you're pregnant; don't smoke at all;don't take thalidomide; don't be ashamed of exercising and improving your bodies; don't consider female anatomy shameful or embarrassing.

And the characters!  

Still, by far the most complex and engaging person, one of the most astonishing characters I've ever run across,  is the head nun, who is deeply conservative, but so thoroughly decent and thoughtful, that she can see when she might be clinging to beliefs which need to be reconsidered and possibly amended. 

When she upbraids Trixie for allowing herself to be photographed in her leotard, leading an exercise class, which scandalizes the older nuns, Trixie replies that a new generation of woman is emerging, and maybe this new generation will be a better generation in its openness to new ideas. Trixie tells the tale of a woman in the exercise class who had a prolapsed uterus and fled the class in shame and hid in a toilet and could not even name the part which was affected because those parts down below were "unmentionable." That was the result of the severe modesty of the generation for which the head nun spoke.

And the head nun realizes Trixie is right. 

It's all done with such civility you almost miss the deep passion behind it, but you feel it somehow.  

This series is not as easy or as fun to watch as Downton Abbey, but it's not meant to be escapism.  It's meant to open your eyes, to make you feel and it somehow shakes you into realizing, as you watch these people who were doing the best they could, muddling through when they could not see what we can now see, that we too, today, are likely doing the same thing and someday people looking back at us will say, well, they were doing the best they could given what they knew then, and what they didn't know.

This is the power of "period pieces,"  stories told in times when even the most sophisticated and powerful people did not know what an adolescent knows today: Smoking is bad for you; certain drugs taken during pregnancy can cause horrible deformities;  women should not apologize for wanting to vote, or to work or to learn more about their own bodies or to exercise; doctors ought to wash their hands before doing surgery on patients; insulin can treat diabetes;  vaccines can protect against polio, which is caused by a virus.  

"Call the Midwife" will never be as popular as "Downton," but its rewards are far greater.

The Dying Oceans

Coral reef

There is something scary about the new.  Not so much for children, for whom everything is new, but as some point in life, once we feel we have our feet on the ground, and we know how things are supposed to be, what's normal, what's right, then challenges to what we know become, well, uncomfortable.

Certainly, there is something disruptive about the new.  I cannot go to a medical conference any more without hearing about the genetic code underlying disease and normal physiology and I know next to nothing about the molecular biology, so I just have to take the word of the speaker that the smudge he's showing on his power point really does show the gene for whatever it is he's talking about.

Coral reef polyps

In genetic code there is power, and it may help save the environment. In the April 18th issue of the New Yorker the intrepid Elizabeth Kolbert reports on two efforts to insert or replace genes in efforts to make organisms resistant to environmental stresses.  She first travels to Hawaii, where a marine biologist named Ruth Gates is trying to breed coral reef organisms which can withstand the warming and acidification of the oceans between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, where the coral reefs live. And these reefs are, in fact, alive, at least some of them remain alive and they sustain life in the oceans and without them, Kolbert tells us, the seas would return to their slimy state of Precambrian times. I'm not exactly sure what Precambrian times were or what a slimy ocean would be like, but it doesn't sound good. Anyway, Klobert hung out with Dr. Gates, who is trying to breed a "super coral reef" with genetic manipulation, but there are obstacles of scale and of technology.

Elizabeth Kolbert

(Wouldn't you love to have Elizabeth Kolbert over for dinner? She must have great travel tales.)

Spreading Chestnut tree

Chestnut trees, once a dominant species in North America, were wiped out by an Asian fungus, but Kolbert tells us, there may be hope for creating a tree resistant to this scourge of chestnuts. An entirely new kind of chestnut tree, in some ways, but different from past chestnut trees in just single gene, introduced by something called a "promoter." 

The mosquito which carries Zika virus may ultimately be controlled not by DDT, but by genetic manipulation:  Make the mosquito sterile, by changing its genome and releasing the sterile mosquitoes into affect areas, and the population of mosquitoes collapses. 

All this, I would submit, sounds like progress, or hope for progress.  There are likely unknown unknowns, but the known dangers facing coral reefs, chestnut trees and pregnant women with Zika strike me as scary enough to take a chance here and there.

kelp forest

Some environmental catastrophes occur for complex reasons: Kelp forests are not visible to most of us, but, apparently, without kelp forests we are in big trouble.  And the kelp forests have all sorts of problems. The ocean temperatures are warming, which the kelp hate and things eat kelp.  The things which eat the things that eat kelp are essential to save the kelp.  

Sea otter with urchin (which eats kelp)

This comes down to otters.  Otters east sea urchins, which ravage kelp. But when things start killing off otters, the urchins mow down the kelp. 

Sharks eat otters, but in the past, not so many as to damage the population. But when killer whales found their supply of seals diminished, they shifted to otters and that spelled trouble for kelp forests. Killer whales do no eat sea urchins.

So far as I know there is no genetic fix for Killer whales eating otters.

The Lost Girls of China

Posters looking for her biological parents

This morning on NPR a woman named Jenna Cook told her story. She was born in China and apparently left as a foundling near a bus station in a Chinese city, was adopted by an American couple, raised here. 

For her senior thesis at Yale, she decided to try to find her biologic parents and she went to China and posted posters about the town where she was found, asking if anyone knew who her parents were. 

A long shot, to say the least. 

More than One Child in this rural family

What was surprising in her report is that despite the "One Child" law in China, she discovered some rural families have 8,  even 12 kids. But the "One Child" law often played a role in abandonment of girls. If you can have only one child, you wanted it to be a boy, for some reason.  It's the girls who wind up in a bundle outside the bus station.  There is no law about abandoning infants in China, apparently, but there is that "One Child" law.

She expected to meet guilt-wracked mothers, but fathers of the abandoned showed up, often dissolved into tears, desperate to be told the infants they had abandoned had survived and prospered.

You'd think if this is a well established practice, the culture and the people would be so different from us, they would not have these feelings for the daughters they rejected. Colin Turnbull, the anthropologist, wrote a book called "The Mountain People" who lived a barely subsistence life, who laughed when an infant crawled into an open fire--one less mouth to feed. One might assume infant girls would be regarded in this way in China, if they are abandoned. 
 But no. 
Apparently, these Chinese parents did not give up their children without torment.  One mother knitted a gown for her daughter before she abandoned her,  but she kept part of the fabric, in hopes some day to be able to match the fabric to her long lost daughter who might keep part of the gown,  in hopes of finding her mother. Mothers who abandoned their daughters convinced themselves they would some day find them again, and devised various strategies to facilitate an eventual reunion.

The reasons these parents left their daughters out as foundlings were either financial-they simply did not think they could afford them--or legal, the One Child law. Second children could find themselves "non persons" in China, unable to register to go to school, unable to get a passport, officially considered to not exist.

Got room for me?

In "Freakonomics"  the authors examined a theory which explained the precipitate drop in the murder rate across the  United States in the 1990's by pointing to the legalization of abortion.  Just about 20 years after abortion became legal the murder rate plummeted across America. The theory was that a whole generation of unwanted babies, who would have become rejected, alienated young men,  never materialized and all those murders they would have committed never happened.  This is conjecture which contains in it an explosive level of race and class denigration, but the implications ought not prevent the exploration of the idea. 

When I was growing up, I certainly heard a lot of talk about big families and parents who had too many babies, so many kids they could not afford to  pay enough attention to them, to educate, to support all these kids.  Coming from a family with only two children, I somehow instinctively doubted this talk. It was often aimed at Catholic families, and the big Catholic families I knew cared for and educated their kids just fine--usually the older sisters acted as deputy mothers, riding herd on their younger siblings and these families seemed very functional. If the mother was too busy to pay attention, an older sibling did a fine job stepping in.

But the Chinese story suggests in certain circumstances, in certain cultures, children become a burden, an unsustainable burden.  Decades ago there was talk of the "population bomb" and great concern about unsustainable population, the danger posed to society by large families. Now, with the birth rates falling in developed nations and among the upper classes in the United States, we are hearing concerns about career women not having kids, or having too few.

One wonders whether one solution might be to transport the children from societies where they are a burden to societies where they are needed and wanted.