Founders and Destroyers
Editor's Column from LCV Summer 2011

It has been opined, not without justification judging from our elections and punditry, that politically speaking we are pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants. Yet, of all the Founding Fathers, the last one about whom I thought I wanted to read another word-especially after the unrestrained panegyrics of the United States Constitutional Bicentennial-was the bluff and stately George Washington. But where Parson Weems mythicized the Father of Our Country into unapproachable sterility, Ron Chernow, in his magisterial Washington: A Life, has restored not only a mighty measure of humanity to this extraordinary individual, but refreshingly a narrative devoid of presentism, the sin of judging and distorting the past by the smug retrospective values of the present moment. This is the mark of a great work of the humanities, in print much like one of Ken Burns' engaging documentaries, in that it informs, enlightens, and celebrates the complexity of being human.

If ever there were a person emblemizing his historical moment and all its tumultuous contradictions, from radical and original political thought to self-serving and contradictory hypocrisies, it was Washington. Full of enough ironies to satisfy the appetite of the most confirmed post-modernist, Washington was chosen to lead the revolutionary armies because of his militia service alongside the professional British army to which he so keenly desired to belong. Further, he was a slave owner painfully aware that slavery contradicted the principal of liberty at the root of the revolution itself, and was a man of privilege sensible of the lives and circumstances of common citizens. Washington, though himself apparently sterile, fathered a new nation at the expense of his own life and comfort.  But even more to the point, around him swirled the controversies that remain unresolved to this day, threatening to bring down the very political edifice for which he laid the foundation: federalism versus states rights, and taxes on behalf of the commonwealth and all its citizens versus strict individualistic self-sufficiency.

Inventing America and Destroying Louisiana

It was Washington's generation that had to invent America and all its institutions and envision what a great nation ought to be. It was Washington and his contemporaries, foremost among them Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who understood that a national government had to secure revenue for its institutions, and was obligated not only to provide for the national defense and the delivery of mail, but also to found libraries and universities, and to promote exploration, learning, and a civil society.

So how bitter is it for us to descend to the present political moment in Louisiana, of an infantile populism that imagines it can have a democracy and not have taxes adequate to provide for the commonwealth, that would savage by a loss of $300 million a year to a higher education system that had just barely gained the ranks of respectability, that incarcerates its own citizens at the highest rate in the free world, that has a high school graduation rate of 59 percent, that slashes its arts programs 60 percent in a single year and completely eliminates funding for the humanities? It is a barbarism we are imposing on ourselves, a dark that descends from the head of the stairs.

To put it in more colloquial terms, imagine that Louisiana was a football team in a 50-team league and finished perennially, year after year, in 49th or 50th place. Would we not be firing its coaches and running them out of town rather than even contemplating re-appointing them? Would the citizens really care that the tickets cost only a nickel and clamor to see such a team play? And yet politically, that is the low bar we have set for ourselves: in education, in health care, in literacy, in the humanities and culture. And it is not being imposed by Washington or people from New Jersey; we have done it to ourselves.

The complete loss of the state appropriation for the humanities, just recently at $2 million annually, will cost the state $14 million annually in economic impact, increase our illteracy ... and diminish the quality of life incalculably. I could delineate this in detail but I will suffice to illustrate the result as Laurence Sterne might have in his prescient post-modern novel Tristram Shandy:

 

as a black hole.
 

—Michael Sartisky, Ph.D., Editor-In-Chief