December 30

 Last Monday of 2024 and two days from the end of another year I am glad to see recede into the past. However, having read a lot of history I have come to realize that the past is never really past. Its tendrils weave into the events we experience in every present we live through. Listening to the news recounting the long life of Former President Jimmy Carter I am reminded of that.

Bill Astore on his substack blog today echoes that notion (that the past is in the present). There is also a Biblical idea that a "prophet is without honor in his own country" and in his own time. Dwight Eisenhower's reputation as President under went a serious reappraisal about 25 years after he left the White House. Early evaluations cast him as a somewhat slow witted (or senile) old man who didn't do much. Later historians thought he was greatly underestimated and was in fact a canny player on the world stage and set up the conditions for an American economic explosion. Carter was dismissed in much the same way.

Stray thought: Some years ago I read Vera Britain's memoir A TESTAMENT OF YOUTH which covered her life in pre-WWI England through her service in as a nurse during the war and her efforts to build a life after. Before the war she was studying English at Oxford and after she decided to go back to Study. The head of the women's college wasn't very enthusiastic because Britain had been considered barely qualified for the English program and not at all for History. When Britain said she wanted to study History to find out why the nations of Europe went to war in 1914 she was told that the program didn't cover recent events defined as anything within the last 50 years. They thought that a space of time was necessary to provide perspective. That might not be a bad notion.

Stray thought: during a couple of the cheating scandals that engulfed a couple of the military academies and the part of the service that mans the nuclear missile sites I was surprised--not by the scandals themselves but by the commentary on them. The commentators were shocked the behavior of people they somehow thought were more "honorable" than the population from which they came.