Teddy Roosevelt, Then and Now

I've been reading both the biography of, and the works of, Theodore Roosevelt. A friend of mine was moved to recommend The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt to me after I described the difficulties I had in reconciling many of the sometimes vague and seemingly contradictory conclusions I had reached about my nature and my spiritual journey. Since reaching the halfway point of the book, I have more questions than answers. I read the first chapter of Roosevelt's own account of the Spanish-American war, I can only conclude that Roosevelt was a one-of-a-kind hyperdynamic intellectual peripatectic who believed that a quiet, intellectual life was unmanly, and although nature had fitted him with a body suitable only to the library, by sheer force of will he daily forced it to grow into a powerful suit of muscle and grit that he occupied as comfortably as a human being can.

He was also, in the best sense of the word, a Republican. Roosevelt created his masculinity by moving to South Dakota and founding a cattle ranch in a disorganized territory. He was there long enough to see it incorporated, and gave speeches at the town's first election for mayor, although he didn't run himself. He approved of the winner's sentiment, however: "We hang any man who claims the public coffers for public improvement."

It's curious too see that Roosevelt confront the Roosevelt of the presidency:

Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money - getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses — whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country.

"Because she died on TV."

I recently said that Roger Waters' last studio album, Amused to Death was not aging well. Listening to it again, I listened to his song, "Watching TV," where he sings:

She is different from the Aztec
And from the Cherokee
She's everybody's sister
She's symbolic of our failure
She's the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free
Because she died on TV

It's a song of hope in the middle of a world of tragedy: it's a sign that finally, finally, we see what governments do to other people, and finally we are moved to respond.

It doesn't seem to have made a difference. Here we are, twenty years after Amused to Death, and we can watch live human tragedy on YouTube or some other rebroadcast mechanism more or less at will. Torture from Syria, drive-by murder in Iran, soldiers shooting pregnant women in Palestine and rebels killing their former leaders in Libya and Iraq. If you want slightly less tragic, you can watch rubber bullets being used on students in Egypt, and American kids getting pepper spray in the face.

It really hasn't made that much difference. A scary number of people treat this as entertainment. Some even Rule 34 the stuff. And the toture, suffering, and death goes on.