The View from St. Paul  

D. J. Tice

        D. J. Tice is an editorial page writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. These articles are reprinted from the Pioneer Press.

Lincoln’s Struggle puts Today’s Troubles in Perspective

        There’s a lot of talk today about the “red and blue” division of America — a metaphor adapted from the electoral maps in the 2000 presidential election. It has come to express the sense that a profound cultural and political schism has opened in the United States, separating the traditionalist, individualist heartland (George Bush’s “red” America) from the progressive, collectivist culture of the coasts and the large cities (Al Gore’s “blue” America).

        It is a real social and philosophical divide—complex, deep and potentially lasting. Yet Feb. 12 provides Americans an occasion for putting current troubles and differences in perspective.

        Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, the 194th anniversary of America’s most inspiring and characteristic hero. There may be comfort in recalling, through his story, that this nation has faced and overcome crises and internal conflicts that make today’s look almost imaginary.

        If the friction between “red and blue” America is unsettling, the collision of “Blue and Gray” America threatened the very survival of the country and the convictions about government at its core.

        The monstrous problem Lincoln confronted was that an entire section of the country had evolved an economic and social system built on an evil institution that could not and would not persist indefinitely. Like other moderate anti-slavery leaders, Lincoln hoped that gradual political processes could peacefully put slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” But the slave South chose another, desperate course, reacting to Lincoln’s election by abrogating the Constitution and attempting to break up the nation.

        Lincoln responded with war, but not because war was needed to destroy slavery. He knew that inexorable economic and social forces would lead to slavery’s demise before long, even if the South left the American Union.

        Lincoln went to war because the question his generation had to answer—perhaps once and for all—was whether free, constitutional government was real government. Were decisions made through open constitutional processes and elections genuine, binding decisions? Or could sufficiently dissatisfied citizens simply overthrow law and authority they disapproved?

        The question, as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, was whether a nation “conceived in liberty . . .  can long endure.” He called Americans to the costly mission of ensuring that “government . . . by the people . . . shall not perish from the earth.” Not without a fight, anyhow.

        It was of course a cruel irony—not for a moment lost on Lincoln—that to preserve free government he coerced rebellious citizens with a fierceness never matched before or since. Not only did he wage civil war with a grim determination, but he also suspended civil rights protections and ordered the jailing of suspected subversives.

        The parallel is obvious in worries about war-inspired restrictions on rights today. The dilemma caused even Lincoln to worry about the stability of free societies. “Is there,” he wondered,

 

. . . in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government . . . be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?  

        Lincoln answered that terrible question, in part, by recognizing that in the end even the cause of the Union had to be submitted to the will of the people. Lincoln made no effort to postpone or circumvent the requirement that he stand for re-election.

        In 1864, America conducted a full, hard-fought presidential campaign—with its central issue the worthiness of the war, almost the value of the nation—even as one of history’s bloodiest civil conflicts raged in full fury. It was arguably the ultimate American event.

        There are many other ingredients in Lincoln’s greatness, of course. But in the face of today’s stresses, suspicions and divisions, amid fears that some basic social consensus has been lost, it is well to remember Lincoln’s heroic conviction that devotion to free institutions and the rule of law could hold America together, no matter what forces worked to tear it apart.

        From where, Lincoln asked, in one of his first public speeches, could danger to America come? All the armies of the world combined, he said  

. . . could not by force take a drink from the Ohio . . . in a trial of a thousand years . . . If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author . . .  

        To protect America from itself, Lincoln had a simple recommendation: “To the support of the Constitution and the laws,” he said,

Let reverence be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling-books, and in almanacs . . . Let it become the political religion of the nation.  

The United States is still a young country—still almost an infant civilization. But it is an old republic, as republics go, a seasoned democracy. It has suffered and survived much.

        And if it keeps the one common faith Lincoln fought and died for, America will endure awhile longer.

Casual Is King, But Maybe It’s Time to Rebel

        These opinion pages recently reprinted an editorial from the Chicago Tribune. Its battle cry deserves a hearty echo. Here was an argument that rose above fleeting crises of war and peace, prosperity and economic stress.

        The Tribune proclaimed that the era of casual attire has gone too far. It blamed the slipshod recklessness of the high-tech investment bubble, along with all the “ruin” and “degradation” of this season of corporate corruption, on the fact that too many men have stopped wearing suits.

        “Suit and tie,” wrote the Tribune, “was like ball and chain” under the contemporary casual ethos. But having discarded those symbolic and psychic sartorial shackles, the editorial added, a few overly free-spirited business executives may soon be donning real prison accessories.

        There is something to this—more, perhaps, than the Tribune editorialists realize. There was a facetious, just-kidding air about the editorial. Yet it didn’t seem a mere joke. One got the sense the editorialists were determined to make a heretical point, but wanted to be able to retreat if necessary.

        Allow me to charge heedlessly forward. The extravagantly casual dress code of our era is bad not only for business, but for society generally. Uniform informality is one of the innumerable methods the modern mindset has found for stripping life of ceremony, symbolism and expressiveness. In exchange for setting modern people free from yet another set of standards, conformist casualness makes life a bit more bland and inarticulate.

        Consider the case of Randy Moss, the Vikings’ (of late) blundering star receiver. He wisely came forward last year to offer apologies for his latest off-field error. But whatever the merits or shortcomings of his remarks, his clothes sent the wrong signals.

        Moss appeared wearing a sleeveless sweatshirt and a baseball cap turned backwards on his head—the uniform of carefree adolescence. One wouldn’t have expected pinstripes. But had the penitent taken the trouble to dress even slightly more conservatively before the court of public opinion, he might have better communicated, in a way his words couldn’t, that he took the situation seriously and was making a special effort.

        The way one dresses is a statement—to others and to oneself—about the meaning of an event. Yet increasingly, today, it often would be hard to guess from people’s attire whether they are headed to a wedding, a critical business negotiation, a neighborhood barbecue or a barn raising. The only thing expressed is a kind of numb sameness.

        I attended a wake this year where I was one of only two or three men in coat and tie. Sweatshirts and golf shirts were so common one might have thought the mourners were planning to dig the grave themselves after paying their respects.

        The laid-back look isn’t triumphant everywhere. Lawyers, politicians, salespeople and others with a special need to make a good impression generally resist it. Women, on the whole, haven’t gone so far as we men have. They rarely do.

        It might also fairly be said that if dress is monotonously casual today, it was monotonously formal and uncomfortable in the past. But in the past, all but rich people owned far fewer clothes than is common today. People had dress clothes and work clothes, and little in between. Today, nearly everyone has, or could have, a widely varied wardrobe.

        Something is lost by not using this opportunity to vary attire with the various occasions of life. The modern mind seems to have misplaced the knowledge that we humans are physical beings, and that what we do with our bodies changes things.

        It’s a knowledge preserved in our species’ infinitely nuanced range of physical signs of affection—from the handshake to the shoulder clasp to a dozen different kinds of kisses. We are all exquisitely sensitive to the different degrees of good will and intimacy expressed in such gestures.

        Different clothes for different situations—one sort of dress for a graduation ceremony, another for a poker game—should similarly enrich our communication, affirming and in part creating the different significances of events. The trouble is not just that perpetual informality diminishes the seriousness of serious encounters. The trouble is that when no occasion is formal, no occasion can really be casual, either.

        To appear at a friend’s door in sweats and tennis shoes should express that you are especially at ease in your friend’s presence, and hope the feeling is mutual. It can’t do that if you dress the same way in church.

        Like so many traditional possessions the modern age has discarded, the social function of dress codes is hard to describe. But the Chicago editorialists are not alone in imagining that it might matter.

Opponents of New Gun Law Are Slinging Smaller Caliber Arguments

        I was recently reading a rival editorial page—an influential voice in these parts that has long opposed any liberalization of Minnesota’s rules for giving citizens permits to carry concealed pistols.

        I was not surprised to find those editorialists again taking aim at “hidden gun” legislation. A bill under consideration at the Legislature—for the third or fourth time—would basically guarantee a concealed firearm permit to any Minnesotan who has no record of crime or mental illness.

        What did surprise me and intrigue me was what the rival editorialists revealed about the latest scientific research on gun laws. A recent Brookings Institution study, they wrote, “found that concealed carry laws do not reduce crime and may even increase it.”

        I had to read that sentence several times. More guns “don’t reduce crime”? More guns “may even increase” crime?

        These struck me as startlingly small claims—compared with what we’ve routinely heard in recent years.

        Opponents of concealed carry reform have in the past predicted a massacre if more Minnesotans are allowed to carry guns. Life in our state will become one long “shootout at the OK Corral,” we have been repeatedly told. Traffic disputes will be settled by an exchange of lead rather than an exchange of dirty looks.

        As for the argument of concealed carry proponents that a better-armed population can deter criminals and actually reduce violence—well, it has gotten less respect than a Sunday driver in the fast lane.

        You think I exaggerate? Just two years ago, the same prominent editorialists quoted above raised a much more dramatic alarm, explaining that guns have a way of coming out of pockets . . .

. . . In the middle of arguments, in moments of groundless fear, in times of fleeting despair. They leap from the handbags of wary women into the hands of their unarmed attackers, into the hands of irked partners, into the hands of children.  

        Has something happened to undermine the confidence of concealed carry opponents?

        Two years ago, guns were jumping out of purses at the slightest provocation, putting deadly force in the hands of the homicidally “irked.” Now, gun opponents merely insist that more guns don’t make society safer.

        All this interests me because for years I have responded to the concealed carry debate by searching for sound evidence supporting the doomsday predictions of anti-gun advocates. I am no gunslinger myself. I have never owned a firearm and have no wish for one. Instinctively, emotionally, I don’t much like the idea of more people packing heat.

        Yet the notion that law-abiding citizens have a right to arm themselves for self-defense if they choose has justice in it—unless there is real evidence that a relaxed permitting law would have broadly harmful effects.

        I haven’t been able to find solid evidence of guns leaping from handbags. The new Brookings Institution study noted above apparently won’t provide it.

        It seems legal scholars from Stanford and Yale have compared crime rates in states with and without liberalized concealed-carry laws. Their calculations contradict the much discussed work of researcher John Lott, who has claimed for years that concealed carry laws lead to a drop in crime.

        The new study says Lott was wrong. But one report notes that Stanford professor John Donahue “credits Lott . . . for demonstrating that concealed carry laws ‘have not led to [a] massive bloodbath’ . . .”

        Elsewhere, Donahue is quoted as saying:

If somebody had to say which way is the evidence stronger, I’d say that it’s probably stronger that the [concealed-carry] laws are increasing crime, rather than decreasing crime. But the stronger thing I could say is that I don’t see any strong evidence that they are reducing crime.  

        What’s really “strong” in all this is the aroma of ambiguity—and no wonder. Crime is an immensely complex social phenomenon. Crime is caused (and prevented) by more social, legal, economic and moral factors than we could ever measure. For that reason, the claim that more guns can be proven to reduce crime rates has always seemed overconfident.

        But statistics aren’t the whole of life. No one carries a gun in order to reduce statistical crime rates. People carry guns to protect themselves and those around them. A more open permitting process could allow many people to feel more secure in their daily lives, and could equip a few to actually defend themselves in the unlikely event of an attack—even though there was no provable effect (one way or another) on crime statistics.

        It’s also true that some innocent people might get shot who otherwise wouldn’t because of more guns in society—even though, once again, there was no measurable change in crime statistics.

        This issue may come down to whether the few victims concealed carry reform could produce are more important than the few would-be victims it might protect.

        Meanwhile, evidence remains elusive that concealed carry laws lead to “massive bloodbaths.”     Ω