Inside stuff from the History gig: Why the biz is getting more superficial, and maybe why the kids seem to be getting more illiterate all the time.

An old friend of mine from Grad School days recently sent me an email pointing out an article in the New Republic, talking about how the study of military history is loosing ground these days. This is something that we've seen coming on for a while, knowing as we do that, for years, decades, the schools have been pushing social history over just about everything else. Women's studies programs don't usually produce long tracts on the use of the English longbow at Crecy. The article tried to look for a cause:

How can we explain the academy's odd neglect? One frequently mentioned reason is that few contemporary historians have any personal experience of the military. Today, a historian has to be in his mid-fifties (and male) ever to have faced the possibility of the draft, and most American historians come from the privileged strata of society that managed to avoid military service during Vietnam. But this answer doesn't really work. Historians routinely teach and write about a great many subjects absent from their own experience: slavery, plague, feudalism, industrial labor, human sacrifice. Why should war be different?

Another frequently given reason is that historians tend heavily toward pacifism, and this is probably true to some extent. For one thing, repeated surveys have shown that historians' political beliefs skew considerably to the left of the general electorate's. And, just this winter, the membership of the American Historical Association passed, by a three-to-one margin, a resolution urging historians "to do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion." But this explanation, too, is unsatisfactory, since historians routinely write and teach about many phenomena they detest.

A more important reason, I would argue, can be found in the development of the modern social sciences. As sociologists like Hans Joas and Michael Mann have observed, the origins of these sciences lie in liberal, Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational, and alien to modern civilization. Canonical thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant, believed fervently that, as human societies grew more rational, and as commerce bound nations closer together, war would disappear. "We have reached the age of commerce, which must necessarily replace the age of war," Constant wrote in 1813.

When I was an undergrad at UTA, back in the early 1980s, I signed up for a class on The Second World War. When I signed up, I thought I'd be spending my time looking at why the war happened, relating it back to World War One, and then getting insights on the war itself that I couldn't get from popular history. I was disappointed when the professor walked in the first day and told the class that we wouldn't be talking about battles and strategies. Several students openly expressed their relief, and I sat there wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into.

We spent the next 16 weeks looking at how the war had effected Women and various minority groups, and looking at how horrible the allied bombing was on German and Japanese civilians, and other such liberal drivel. I never took a class from that dude again (He now heads the History program at a big college in Arkansas). That was the standard situation back then. Most of my profs back then were New Left liberals who'd done their Grad school work in the '60s and early '70s, and whose attitudes were dictated by those times. Most of them hated presidents like Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, and Nixon, and loved FDR and Kennedy, and couched their lectures to impart those attitudes to their students. It seemed at the time that the study of history was basically designed to instill a huge guilt trip in the mostly white, middle class student body. It was amazing that I was able to wade through all that crud and eventually graduate.

I continued to read about the things that interested me after college, and when I went to grad school, I found that there was a much better environment. Still, not a lot of military topics came up, but I was used to it by then. I read lots of social history, but also some interesting stuff on other conventional topics. I was amazed, and originally horrified, at the number of people in my classes who, when asked by the prof, wanted to write their semester papers on religious topics. I walked out of my first grad school seminar lecture thinking I'd mistakenly signed up to a seminary school. Funny though, by the end of the semester, most of those folks had shifted their topics to more conventional things, on the margins of their original themes, and I was feeling a lot more at home. It turned out to be a huge amount of fun, and a time I miss sometimes. I think my thesis (as half assed as it was), was about the only one I was hearing about at the time that had any military aspect to it.

I still enjoy reading military history from time to time, and watch the History channel whenever they're not going on and on about UFOs, Bigfoot, and the da Vinci Code. There are some very interesting folks out there doing interesting things in Military history. One guy that I like a lot is Victor Davis Hanson, who tends to look at military history in the classical era (ancient Greece) and project it's lessons forward to our own time. I've always said that if we can't learn something that informs us about our own times, the study of History is wasted.

Another guy that I think a lot of is John Keegan. I read a book of his back in grad school, called Faces of Battle, that blew me away. He writes in a way that brings the history to life, which most history writers can't do. He also wrote maybe the definitive history of WW2, which I also have. Excellent stuff, if you're into it. There's a lot of this sort of stuff out there. As the article states, there's no shortage of popular history on military topics, but if scholars are staying away from it, and not looking at the lessons of the past, how will that effect the next generations ability to make the decisions they need to make in the world? I mean, if we're gonna be in the middle of everyone's shit, we should probably study plumbing, right?

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And here's another interesting thing to know. A buddy of mine who teaches at Austin Community College, tells us that there is a move on down there to "update" all the social sciences, to make them more interesting to Black and Latino students, who apparently are not passing ACC or UT history classes at the same rate as White students. The full time profs are supposedly horrified, but the administrative pols are determined to do it. Any institution that gets government money will use the new books and curricula. My buddy points out that they don't have too many minority students at ACC, so they are very sensitive to charges that they are not teaching courses that these students can pass. But we have a huge number of minority students at CTC and particularly on Ft. Hood, due to the army, and they do as well as anyone else.

The only problems I have are a few Asians, Latinos, and a few others who have issues some with the Kings English. Hell, most of my students, regardless of ethnicity, need to have a few longer words explained to them. Shit, that's my job. I'm there to challenge them and teach them. Most of them figure out a way to make it. I had a Korean student this time, wife of a soldier, who agonised over words on the exams and needed to get a Korean language history book to help her study. She worked her ass off, and used to go into fits when she made anything less than a perfect grade. She took both of my history classes at the same time, and made an A in both.

So, when I hear how hard it is for people to make a decent grade, and they were born here and speak the language fluently, I really don't have an easy time working up a lot of sympathy. The people who came here from somewhere else, work their asses off, and end up being you best students, those are the students I live for. They make you feel like you're doing a good job. It seems like the dumbing down that they've been seeing at the lower levels (like standardized testing in grade school) is finally spreading to the colleges.

Well, I won't stop talking about dead White guys. I think we owe them a lot, and we owe these kids a decent education. They can send me whatever book they want, but they can't control what I talk about in class. Eventually they'll force us to adopt standardized pretests and post tests, to test whether or not we are teaching the correct curriculum. They already want us to do this, allowing us to make them out ourselves, but most of us ignore it. So, I'll keep taking two and a half weeks to cover the Second World War, with pictures of planes and tanks included, and at least my students will know a thing or two in the end.

So, do we really have a "right" to vote in America?

First, go to this site and read the article fully. Come on, I know he's the big hucksters boy, and kind of a commie jackass, but I've seen him on C-Span talking about this issue, and I think, to a degree, he makes a very good point. Now, lets allow the Rantasaurus Rex to heave himself up on his haunches and give you his understanding of things.

Our political heritage begins in England, about 300 or 400 years ago, where voting was originally considered a privilege. It was a privilege of birth, property and social status. The government also required religious affiliation, thinking that they needed to promote the "true faith" and keep "heretics" from corrupting the society. The right to vote was thought to be so important that it had to be limited to men with property, from the right faith, who had something to lose if political instability developed. It couldn't be left to the poor, because they would shake up the system, out vote every other group in the population, and vote for the first demagogue to offer them a sandwich and a sturdy roof over their head. So, voting standards have always been set up partly to protect the vested interests of one group of people, the establishment, and reformers have always been trying to widen the voting standard to see that those privileges are extended to their group of people. So the fight over voting has spanned the history of Democracy itself.

In this country, huge changes began to happen in the 1800s, when the right to vote began to be extended to poor men. Our system was set up with each state allowed to make the determination for itself. The British colonies had always had their own voting standards for electing local colonial officials, and after the revolution, some newly independent states allowed free Blacks to vote, and one (New Jersey) granted women with property the right to vote when they ratified their original state constitution in 1777. Ben Franklin proposed a universal, national voting standard in the constitutional convention in Philly in 1787, but the States couldn't agree on a common standard. States like Virginia, which still had extensive property qualifications, refused to give them up, and the others refused to accept limits on their more open systems, so the delegates agreed to leave it to the individual states to decide. That's the magic of Federalism; each state doing it's own thing, to a degree. The religious standards of the old days were banished by the first amendment to the national bill of rights, adopted in the 1790s.

So, the system we have now is based on the practice of allowing each state to decide their own voting standard, which allowed each new state, like Tennessee or Kentucky (set up in the 1790s) to open up their standard by getting rid of property qualifications, leaving them with gender, race, residence and age (21 was the age of adulthood everywhere). Of course, it was mostly poor people who went west, and they got rid of property qualifications as they went, reestablishing old institutions on more democratic lines as time went by. Eventually, as the political parties were established, the eastern states were pressured to adopt the more open systems of the west. That's how things went. Different standards led to the adoption of wider standards.

When the political parties began to be set up in the early 1800s, the parties had a vested interest in seeing to it that a level of rights existed to allow them to get as many voters to the polls as they could round up. As poor white men steadily became the dominant voting block, the system changed to reflect their interests and prejudices. Politics went from being a realm of rich men to being a populist game of kissing babies and shaking hands. Rich men had always wanted people in power to be reluctant to have it, so they looked for the ideal of the statesman. This is a major reason why Washington was so revered. But by the 1820s or 30s, guys like Andrew Jackson were the ideal; self made men who had risen up from poverty to become rich land owners and Indian fighters. Poor men looked up to that ideal, and wanted rich guys like Jackson to stand in the muddy street with them, toe to toe, look them eye to eye and embrace them as political equals. people like Jackson, who had no problem doing that, rose to the top. The Federalists couldn't adjust themselves to this changing reality, viewing it as appealing to the passions of the mob, so they slowly became more and more marginalized in the country until they almost completely ceased to exist. The Democrats embraced the change, and steadily turned into the dominant faction/party in the nation.

By the time of the Civil War, the unofficial voting standard in the nation had developed into "universal adult white male suffrage". Black men could still vote in a few New England states, but New Jersey had abolished the right to vote for woman by state statute in about 1787 or 88. Anyone who got in the way of poor white men running everything was disenfranchised or outnumbered and rendered harmless through some official mechanism. Then, in the wake of the war, the 14th and 15th amendments are drafted and passed, granting each citizen at the state level a protection for the privileges and/or immunities of national citizenship, including voting, and an equal protection of the laws of the United States (the due process provision was nullified in a supreme court decision in the 1870s). These protections were originally designed to protect former slaves (now referred to as "Freedmen") from the restriction of their rights by their state governments. But the 20th century will see them extended to all American citizens regardless of "previous condition of servitude", and the late 18th century concept that "the constitution follows the flag" will see them extended to anyone else who falls into our hands (debate still rages on that one).

During Radical Reconstruction, Black men were allowed to register and vote in the south, but there were loopholes in these provisions that allowed states to still control voter registration systems. So eventually, as the Reconstruction system broke down, states could use these loopholes to begin to restrict voting rights by restricting who had the right to register to vote. Grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, and other provisions are set up to allow local majorities to protect their own power by restricting other peoples rights to register to vote, and the KKK was always there to deal with anyone who was too persistent in trying. The next time there was a significant challenge to the control Democrats had over southern states came in 1892, when farmers and urban workers joined to set up a third party called the Peoples Party. More people were lynched in the south in that year than in any other year in American history, and miraculously, the Democratic candidate won the national election for President.

By the 1870s, women were gaining the right to vote on a state by state basis. Having been shut out of the 14th and 15th amendments, they began working for their own inclusion, and the "Suffragette" movement got rolling. The new national standards or the 14th and 15th amendments didn't mean that the standards couldn't be expanded. By the time the 19th amendment was ratified in 1920, women had been granted the right to vote in about 6 or 8 western states, including in Texas, where women got the right in 1918.

The next change comes, of course in the Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 60s. The 24th amendment got rid of the poll tax in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 got rid of the other shenanigans that were set up to prohibit the right to register from being exercised. Then, due to Vietnam and the hope that the kids out there would all vote for McGovern in 1972, the Democrats pushed through an amendment lowering the minimum age to 18. Turns out most of the kids didn't bother to vote (and still don't), and those that did mostly voted for Nixon, like their parents. Each state still establishes voting registration requirements, but the feds oversee them and can intervene if the states try to set something up that looks like it's designed to infringe on peoples rights. So, today you do have a "right to vote" so long as you live up to the registration qualifications laid out in your state, overseen by the national government. After all this history, and all these changes, the system is now set up to allow the vast majority of people to go ahead and vote, and yet many of those who are qualified don't even register. Voting has gone from a privilege, to a right, to an option that many people completely blow off.

The points Jackson makes about individual election irregularities are quite valid. Irregularities still take place, and both sides still try to rig things in their favor from time to time, trying to protect what they have or ensure their people a leg up. Elections are human things, and we know what human beings are like. Jackson makes valid points, but what he wants is basically to establish a national standard that says people have a "right" to vote regardless of state provisions. He wants the system of Federalism to be set aside and a centralized national system set up to force every citizen to get a chance to cast a ballot and have every ballot counted, no matter what. So, if you showed up to vote a day after the polls close, they'd have to reopen them so you could vote, because you have a "right" to and they can't stop you from exercising it.

So, elections would never end, or take months and months to decide, as Jackson and his minions go out in buses to round up unregistered homeless, poor or elderly people who have no idea who to vote for, other than who Jackson's people will tell them to vote for. He wants a purely majoritarian system, where all the poor people in the cities and countryside will theoretically join in a new majority to out vote the rest of us, and create his idea of a true democracy. Thing is, He'll need the votes of the rest of us to get it passed, and it ain't happenin'. A purely majoritarian system is NOT what our constitution provides for. They debated such a system in Philly in 1787, and they decided against it. Too much fear of the "mob", and what they might do if empowered. Today, he's got to show me how my life will be bettered by such a change, and I don't think he can.

Personally, I have NO PROBLEM with the idea of keeping the hordes of the unwashed and their ever expanding sense of entitlement from getting their hands fully on our government and tax structure. As a person who regularly votes and pays a good deal of taxes, I can't see why it is that others find it hard to register, or make the trip to the voting booth on time, or fill out their ballot correctly. I don't feel our system is somehow diminished because people who are ether too stupid, too lazy, or too politically cynical to show up and cast their vote don't like the results they get. That's how the system works. Democracy doesn't promise good government, but only the odds of maybe having a better government through the right to participate. Those who participate the most, or the most intelligently, get the most out of it. So, if you can find the line for the government hand-out, don't try to tell me that you can't find the line at the voting booth.

As far as not having an expressly stated "right" to vote is concerned, it's perfectly true. It doesn't say it clearly in there anywhere. We don't have an expressly stated right to privacy ether, but that doesn't stop us from exercising it. Don't tell abortion rights activists we don't have it. They'll tell you otherwise. It doesn't say "one person, one vote" in there anywhere ether, or "separation of church and state". It turns out that much of the constitution is written ambiguously, and that a lot of our rights (or our perceptions of what our rights are) are based on some judges interpretations of the grey areas in the document, rather than clearly written provisions. That's the way it always been, and there's no getting away from it. I guess we could have a new constitutional convention, but the last time we did that (1787) the delegates closed themselves off from the public and produced a radically different document than the one everyone was expecting. Do you trust our current leaders to do that?

Personally, I'd like to see various new qualifications set up for voting, like a new literacy test, or maybe a higher age requirement. Voting SHOULD be a privilege of citizenship, and people SHOULD have to qualify for it somehow. You have to take a test to drive, for Christs sake. But then, I also think people should have to take a test to qualify to have babies. The last thing we need is to allow the teaming masses to get their hands on our wallets. It's bad enough that we've built our modern political system based on welfare dependency, and that every segment of our society has drunk the Kool Aid and developed it's own sense of entitlement for the benefits it gets (especially the middle-class). It's another thing to down the whole jug of Kool Aid and turn our constitution over to the people who know and care the least about it, or who only care about the system so long as it gives them what they want. Of course, mine is not the popular view, but there you go.

Holy crap...

Here's one out of the blue. Well, maybe not, but it's still a shocker. She was a train wreck watin' to happen, but I'll miss the hell out of her. A true Texas beauty. Rest in piece baby. Sad, sad, sad.



After all that time in court, she'll never get to spend it. Maybe there'll be some left over when the kid gets old enough. Karma? Maybe so. A world class dumbass? Fer sure. I'll still miss her.

Found something interesting on YouTube.

The Mexican military on maneuvers in Northern Mexico, showing a mix of western and Soviet/Russian weapons, all feverishly preparing in the event of an invasion from the north. Now, I realize that such as thing has happened in the past (1840s), but what's the likelihood that it would ever happen again? I mean, that whole Manifest Destiny thing is a bit played out, isn't it?



All countries have plans and maneuvers to train for different contingencies, but did you make out the Generals comment there near the end? He insinuates that they are preparing for a spread out, Iraq style insurgent resistance in case of a US invasion. What the Hell? What exactly do you think they are preparing for? I guess we've shown everyone what our weaknesses are over there. Maybe he was just coming up with an answer to some journalists question concerning the obvious superiority in firepower north of the border. He's gotta come up with something right? Postscript - Looking at it again, I think he's just saying that the Mexican Army has to be prepared for the same sort of fighting we're dealing with in Iraq, I guess.

Thing is, from what we hear, the drug gangs in the north of Mexico are about as well armed as the Mexican army, so maybe they should be preparing for that and stop thinking about re-fighting the battle of Buena Vista. Grab a big hunk of reality hombre. The person who posted the video claims in the blurb that Mexico is about to take possession of new Russian Su-27 fighters. Those will come in handy when they have to bomb the Zapatista rebels again some day, right?

Ok, I did it again.

Someone is always posting something interesting, setting off the Rantosaurus Rex, and then I end up filling their comments page with astoundingly well thought out brilliance, when I really should just direct them here and post the rant in the comfort of my own venue.

Some people get pissed about it, the way some people get pissed easily about a lot of stupid shit. Who'd a thought there'd be rules and Rule Nazis in the bloggosphere? So ok, I'm, slowly learning. So I worked for a little while on this beotch. I might as well re-post it here too. Are there rules about re-posting? Oh yea, eat shit and die motherfucker. This is my crib. I sets the rules, and I HATE fuckin' rules. So here goes nothin'.

Big Dick over there posted something, commenting about a post this guy put up about some group in Virginia, calling out on MLK day for reparations for Black people. That's what set it all off.

I'm of two minds on this subject. I can see why they want them, but I can also see why I and a lot of other hard working White people don't want to have to pony up the money. And don't tell me that they just want to get the money from the corporations or the government, because who the fuck do you think will end up paying the real Bill then? Here's my rant, as it appeared over at Dicks place. I added a few bits to the end. So shoot me. Here we go:

If you listen carefully to the rhetoric of the reparations crowd, what they really want isn't a payback for slavery. It's a payback and apology for both slavery and the hundred years of lynching and discrimination that followed slavery. They want something for the generations since 1865 who couldn't buy a home and then later pass that accumulated wealth on to their kids, and jobs and educations they couldn't get, and the beatings they took, and worse, when they tried to vote. But they make the mistake of calling it reparations for slavery, which allows most white folks, me included, to think and say stuff like "Hey, fuck you man. I never owned a slave in my life". They also want a free and open national discussion of how they were fucked over for 400 years, which most of us (White folks) would like to avoid. It's like getting today's German or Japanese populations to have a frank and open discussion of the atrocities their fathers and grandfathers committed. Good luck on that one. Who wants to be the subject or target of an endless guilt trip for things you personally didn't do?

Thing is, we all (White men), in one way or another, still benefit from the advantage our predecessors had, the "affirmative action" boost that being White gave them, allowing them to get somewhere without having to compete with Blacks, or Women, in the process of making it in this country (lets not even start talking about reparations for women!). Whether they had anything to do with setting up the system or not, they benefited from it, and that's what they want us to pay them for. My point, and my answer to them is simple; every group in the world, at one time or another in history, has ether been fucked over or fucked some other group over in order to make it in the world. That shit is as old as time itself, and the crap you went through back in the day was just your turn. We've all been through it. It ain't gonna change, so you might as well get over it.

Bringing it up in this day and age, with Black people seeing greater and greater success in America, leaves their "leaders" sounding more and more like wining little bitches, living in the richest country in the history of the world, crying about the past as they show off all the "bling" and shit that they've been able to accumulate since. We've all got problems today, so get over it. Tell little wet footed Ramon about yer problems, 'cause he wants our shitty little jobs, and he works harder than ether of us, and he's a hell of a lot easier to put up with a lot of the time.

That's what history is all about. Read a history book sometime. It's all about little groups of people, viewing themselves narrowly as being part of a separate group from everyone else, screwing over their neighbors in a mad dash to keep from being subsumed in the struggle by all the other little groups. Slavery is as old as prostitution, and as hard to get rid of. There are experts out there now who say that more people are enslaved today around the world than were back in the 19 century. That's a fact, and Africa is still the center of it all, and Arabs still run it.

It wasn't till the 18th century that Europeans began to see themselves and others in a different way. The Age Of Reason taught all of us about our humanity, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", and all that shit. Within a hundred years or so of that slavery in America was over, and being actively suppressed in Africa by the same European powers who'd run it for 300 years. We all got scruples about it in time, and it took another hundred years to get over the legacy of it and end legal segregation.

So it's over and done with right? Naaa, That shit will never be over. It's too deeply set as a part of who we are as a people. And it's still too easy to blame other successful people for your own lack of success, and objectify other people, whether you have any power over them or not. That's human nature. Period. Maybe in a hundred more years we'll see the end of it here, as we slowly turn, ethnically at least, into a country more like Brazil, and it becomes harder and harder to tell the difference between the ancestors of the lynchers and the lynched. Who knows?

And if ya don't beleive me, here's Dave Chappelle's take on it.

Ok, when will this rediculous bullshit end?

Is there ever gonna be a tipping point at which we all as a society say "Ok, this is bullshit! Lets let the kids be kids and shoot all the fuckin' lawyers"? Dig this...


Lawsuit fears close two Omaha sled slopes

Omaha is banning sledding at the Zorinsky and Cunningham Lake dams, which are both popular sledding spots. It is also banning ice skating and ice fishing on frozen ponds and lagoons in city parks. The move is in response to a court decision that resulted in public entities being liable for injuries that occur at public parks and other recreation facilities.

It's spreading all over the country. Look here to see for yourself, and check out this weak assed mother fucker. Guys like him are screamin' for a beatin'. Ruin everyones fun and tell yerself, while swimmin' in lawsuit money, the taxpayers money, that you're doin' everyone a favor. Safety, after all, is more important than fun, right. Pissants!

You know, I don't think I'd want to be a kid in this country in this day and age. I grew up in a better time, before lawyers and gutless politicians ruined everything and the NANNY STATE took over completely like the fuckin' BORG! I played with lethal fucking weapons when I was a kid (some store bought and some we made ourselves), with no parental observation, and aside from a few bruises and minimal wounds, came out of it wiser and better able to make good decisions in a dangerous world.

My buddies and I knew, from experience, that there were consequences to our actions. It was ether gonna be a bloody arm and knee from sliding out in a turn on our bikes after going down a hill at top speed, or it was gonna be an ass wuppin' from our dad for fuckin' up our school clothes. I don't know what kids today know. What do they learn from being banned from sliding down a fuckin' hillside on a sled? Maybe that all grownups are assholes? Maybe, lets hope, they learn that government fuckheads should mind their own business and leave kids alone.? Lets hope. By God, lets hope.

Oh hell, maybe I'm wrong after all. Maybe we should all just give up those old notions and accept the idea that safety is more important than liberty...

... Pilgrim!

And on a MUCH lighter note, check this out. Hilarious!

Here's a damn good idea.

Click on this so you can read it. Makes sense to me.

Man, I'm tryin' for friggin' HOURS to post a video from YouTube but it aint workin'.

I switched over to Beta and now It's all hosed up. I even reregistered with them with my new info. No bueno por caca, so click on this for a trip down memory lane with the late James Brown, bless him. Enjoy.

Here's a cool idea that won't go anywhere, I betcha.

Everyone knows one reason why the year 1492 is a big deal. We have it drummed into us in school, as well we should. Columbus sailed off looking for China and bumped into the western hemisphere, setting off a process that ultimately leads to me sitting here typing this in Texas, rather than England or France or Germany, or some other friggin' place. The other reason that year is a big deal is that it's the same year the combined forces of Aragon and Castile conquered Granada, the last holdout Moorish kingdom in Spain, ending a 700 year religious war between Catholics and Muslims called the Reconquista, or Reconquest.

Arab Muslim armies conquered East and North Africa in their expansion from Arabia in the 7th century, and then, in 711, they crossed over into Europe at Gibraltar (Gabral al Tariq, or "The Rock of Tariq", named for the general who led them). Over the next few years they steadily conquered all of the Iberian peninsula from the Visigoths, who had settled there after the Roman Empire fell, until they were stopped in what is now southern France in 732 by a sausage eating kraut (kinda French) named Charles Martel. At the battle of Poitiers, the Muslim conquest of Europe was stopped, and Charles was dubbed "The Hammer" for his victory.

Anyway, the Moors set up a huge Muslim kingdom in Spain that eventually broke up into several smaller ones, and these were eventually reconquered, one by one, over 700 years, until Granada fell in 1492. In the process of that, the Spanish became Spanish as we would recognise them today, Spain became a centralized nation-state, and the Catholic faith became synonymous with Spanish nationality and identity.The veterans of this process were then sent to conquer and settle the new world, which they did with much violence and gusto.

So, there is a significant Muslim influence in much of the architecture and DNA of modern Spain, and today, Spain is experiencing a rise in Muslim immigration from north Africa and an expansion of its Muslim population. Also, we all remember the Spanish born Muslims who blew up the trains a few years ago, which led to the fall of the conservative government and the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. Supposedly, their motivation in the bombings was NOT Iraq, but the idea of recreating that great Muslim kingdom in Spain.

Now, check out this story. Muslim leaders in Spain are proposing that the Cathedral in Cordoba be made a place where all faiths can worship together.

Spanish Muslims Ask Pope's Permission to Worship in Mosque Turned Cathedral
By VOA News 28 December 2006

Spanish Muslims have appealed to Pope Benedict seeking permission to worship inside a landmark southern Spanish cathedral that was a mosque more than 800 years ago.

Spain's Islamic Board says it is not trying to take over the Cathedral of Cordoba, but wants to turn it into a place where believers of all faiths can worship in the spirit of peace and humanity.

The board says Spain's Catholic Church leaders have turned down its request, and that cathedral guards often use force to stop Muslims from praying inside the church.

The Cordoba cathedral was built as a mosque when the Moors ruled Spain starting in the 8th century.

The building was converted to a Catholic church in the 13th century when Christians reconquered Cordoba.

This cathedral is amazing to behold. You can easily see the Muslim influences, and the sort of pasted on Catholic features. Check it out.

You might be thinking, how lame it was for the Spanish to turn such a beautiful Muslim holy site into a Catholic cathedral. Well, these folks had 700 years worth of issues, and only a hundred years after Cordoba was converted, the Muslim Turks conquered Byzantium, renamed it Istanbul, and turned the largest, most spectacular Christian cathedral in Europe, the Hagia Sophia ("Church of the Holy Wisdom"), into a mosque. So, turn around is fair play right? War is hell, someone said. Dig these pictures of the Hagia. Today it's a museum. Of course, the Turks added the minarets.



And they plastered over the Byzantine images of Christ and added the Islamic calligraphy. Beautiful stuff. I'd love to see it in person, but never had the chance... yet.



My point with all this is that I think this new idea for a multi faith use of these old sites is great, and I hope it happens, but I won't hold my breath. Both sides have convinced themselves that they're downtrodden and under attack, which is ludicrous on both cases. So very few people are willing to make such a huge gesture. Remember when the Pope went to Turkey a while back? Muslim activists were mad at him for his earlier statements about Islam, and said that if the Pope made even the slightest gesture as if he were praying in the Hagia Sophia they'd riot. This is the Popes turn to make a huge positive gesture towards the Islamic world, but who's to say that Catholic lunatics wouldn't riot in Spain if Muslims were allowed to pray in Cordoba?

Wouldn't it be cool if the level headed folks could find a way to finally shout down the idiots and put this crap behind us? What are the odds?

Oh, and I realize it's really, really late in the day to be talkin' about this...

but you've GOT to click on this and watch this guys rant. Hilarious. Enjoy.