For me there is nothing like a library for serendipity. To wander down a range of books is to buzz at the honeycombed portals of a thousand realms, each of them an unfathomed wonderland.
Even better, though, is when the simple act of picking up a book unleashes a chain of coincidences so profound as to plead divine intervention. This is not so much "seek, and ye shall find" as it is an innocent step into an inescapable floodtide the force of which is outside oneself.
Recently I wandered past the new nonfiction display shelf at my downtown public library. There, staring defiantly at me in complete ignorance of my recent folly, a précis of the current 2nd Amendment situation, was Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry, by Patrick J. Charles. By what miracle had this happened? The very presence of this book on the shelf meant that it was not inflammatory enough to be a "bestseller" and thus had not generated a spot on that curse of popularity, the hold list, which casts a cloak of invisibility over so many new books in libraries. So, thanking the minor deities of library book selection (Library Journal? American Libraries?), I checked it out and went on my way.
A couple of days later my wife, who is a teacher and who recently volunteered to chair a committee on security for the county's teachers' association--hoping, post-Parkland, to keep elected officiais away from knee-jerk, arm-the-teacher responses--met with a number of those elected officials (and others) in a non-smoky back room in a pizza restaurant called Machiavelli's.
Machiavelli's, right? Meeting with latter-day Princes to discuss gun violence in a place called Machiavelli's? Are you kidding me?
No, you're not. But read on.
So then, this happened: the following weekend I went to my second-favorite temple of Serendip, the annual Friends of the Library booksale, where I always place a strict limit on purchases of 750 books, give or take 747. This year it was a complete Les Miserables (the novel? Remember?) for a quarter, a collection of essays by bellettrist Jacques Barzun (who called out the worldwide virus of "racial thinking" in 1936 and who, as a bellettrist, is a lot like certain bloggers of your acquaintance in that he never footnotes; rather, he bestows.) for another quarter, and a plain-brown-wrapper publication of the U.S. Army's Center for Military History called A Guide to the Study and Use of Military History, for another quarter. Times ten.
What? $2.50? Why so much for a plain brown wrapper of a book? I suspect that whoever priced it for the Friends sale was a librarian who looked at the cataloging info on the verso of the title page and saw the word "historiography," a magic word that you will never find in the WalMart world of low, low prices.
So there I was, settled into the flow in my inner tube of reading-directed consciousness, first with Armed in America, which I will eventually review for my own aide-memoire purposes but which for now let me just say that, as intellectual history written by a lawyer, it is the opposite of footnote-free belles-lettres. And for a reason: it is pointing in the direction of an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of whatever case takes on the task of reversing the finding in Heller v. D.C. that the 2nd Amendment guarantees a right to a firearm for the purpose of self-defense. That is to say, practically every assertion in the book is supported by a textual reference. These quite often far outstrip the root statement in ink-volume, e.g. when he writes, "[In the early 20th century] The habitual or indiscriminate carrying of concealable firearms … was denounced with particular force. Public calls for enhanced enforcement and harsher penalties were routine, and the constitutionality of armed carriage restrictions was virtually without question" (p. 173), the annotation takes the reader to a full page-and-a-half of supporting, primary documentation.
One of these notes tags a brief sentence that attributes to Machiavelli "the earliest conception of a right to arms." The note supports the assertion with references to writings by American historians who discuss Machiavelli's "impact" on "the American militia system," as well as to a list of "prominent writings of seventeenth-century writers on the subject of the militia" that goes on for a full half-page.
Machiavelli, huh? (file under "Interesting.")
While there is much, much more to say about Charles's book (including "every American should read it") for now let us proceed down the rapids--not that they are leaving us much choice--to the Army historiography, which for someone whose boyhood was populated by Greek hoplites and Roman legionnaires starts out well enough ("you know, one of these days I might actually read Peloponnesian Wars") when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the horizon clears and damned if it isn't a waterfall: mention of a treatise on war written by none other than Machiavelli in which he laid out military power as the foundation for civil society and called for a "citizen army" that would serve as a cure for the decadence of his (Machiavelli's) time by becoming "an instrument for restoring civic virtues lost to society."
The circle now closes in the inner tube, and it all becomes clear in the engulfing roar of the waterfall. This is what the 2nd Amendment means and to interpret it away through a process of legal casuistry is to leave it as a hollow shell that won't survive the wimpy wavelets of Russian election meddling much less the Niagara of a hyper-partisan electorate with no common values. The 2nd Amendment isn't about the guns. It's about why you have them.
And it's about why the why is no longer there in the good old US of A that meant to enshrine it. Why the why, in fact, all but disappeared after the War of 1812. Because most Americans, in fact, don't want to be bothered with civic virtues. They cannot be bothered to vote and will go out of their way to avoid taxes. They will gladly alienate their duty--especially to fight and die for the country--so that their time and money are their own. Alexander Hamilton saw it coming: civic republican rhetoric (and Machiavelli ) notwithstanding, the "great body of the yeomanry" would suffer a "grievance" from militia service, which would in effect impose "an annual deduction from the productive labor of the country." But isn't that part of the point of duty and sacrifice? Not, apparently, when it comes to money.
If some on the Left--most recently Chris Hedges--explain away gun violence by reflexively parroting D.H. Lawrence's statement that "the essential American should is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer" without examining the gibberish from which it springs, they miss an opportunity one would imagine a leftist would all but die for: to find the deeper, truer source of the rot in market-driven acquisitiveness, for it is this that has turned "the gun" from an instrument of civic virtue into little more than a fetish, a militarily useless vessel that has lost the purpose it had at the nation's founding, as proclaimed by the 2nd Amendment. "The gun" is now, civically speaking, just a collectible. Americans are so caught up in their own "productive labor" that they cannot be bothered--unless forced by Germans, Japanese, or Commies--with the common defense. Acquisitiveness is in fact the very means by which to slaughter the sacred cow of civic duty. How better to fight than to pay someone else to do it, if at all possible? Freedom isn't free, we proclaim--because, yeah, you have to pay somebody else to do the killing on your behalf. Because, fellow citizens, we refuse to do it our damn selves.
The ultimate in hilarious comedy comes from those comic-book fantasists who believe that "the gun" equips them to take on their own government. If some splinter group ever does take on the 1% in a serious way, "bloodbath" doesn't begin to describe the fate that will meet an unorganized, ill-disciplined rabble at the hands of a professional army that not only already occupies the ground, the air, and the sea, but that--unlike the British in America or the Americans in Vietnam--acts at the bidding of a governing minority that is already solidly in place.
What violence there will be will accomplish only mayhem and the continuing deaths of innocents. The present, NRA-ruled government has no solution for this, because the very amendment they purport to support means something so very different from what they say it does. This is intellectual bankruptcy with a vengeance. It's tragic to realize--particularly as the waterfall delivers us into the grip of a hydraulic--that the survival of the republic is in the hands of people like those state legislators at a pizza restaurant called Machiavelli's. Will they do something to restore those "civic virtues that have been lost to society"?
They won't. They can't. Their ideas of civic virtue are tantamount to anarchy: an unregulated, unorganized, random pile of what-the-fuck in a society lost to marketing and propaganda. So are we all what the Founders predicted we would become, without the flotation of any virtue-in-common: galley slaves and partisan hacks.
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