Reputation and Reality

Anyone who reads a lot of history, as I do, will frequently encounter assessments of historical figures, both in terms of their deeds and their characters. Historians will provide opinions as to whether a particular political or military leader was "good" in the sense that they fulfilled their role successfully, and whether they were "good" as far as their character was concerned, that is, whether they were humane and just or cruel and arbitrary. Even those who do not read much history will encounter such judgements regarding the reputation of historical figures; indeed many people will make such judgements themselves -- or more likely they will regurgitate judgements that they have learned from others. But, as should be obvious to anyone who spends a few moments' thought on the issue, historical reputations are usually based on a very narrow and often misleading set of facts, and are indeed often somewhat divorced from reality. The unreliability of many opinions regarding the reputations of historical figures is made clear by the fact that different sources can reach diametrically opposed conclusions about the same person. This can even be seen when the person in question is someone who is only recently dead, such as Ronald Reagan or (to take a pop culture example) Michael Jackson. Even cases where there seems to be a relative consensus among most sources, such as the Roman emperor Caligula, sometimes upon close examination are not that clear cut.

Many historical figures have wildly diverging reputations, with a number of different factors behind the variation. At the most basic level, the actual facts of a person's life are often unclear and sometimes end up being wildly distorted. For instance, the Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang almost certainly did not have a mountain painted red (the color worn by condemned criminals) because he was angry at the god of the mountain for impeding his progress, the claim that the emperor Caligula tried to have his horse made consul is dubious, and most of the more lurid stories about Edgar Allen Poe's personal life were invented by a rival who claimed to have been made his literary executor (and who was widely reputed to be a dishonest, unpleasant person). Regarding Caligula (whose real name was Gaius Caesar, Caligula being a nickname), he now has a very infamous reputation, and even many historians say that he was probably tyrannical or insane or both, but some others have suggested that he was in fact a fairly decent emperor whose biggest mistake was badly antagonizing Rome's senatorial class, the class from which the Roman historians who later wrote about him came, such that his deeds were distorted or even made up entirely to vilify him. Other examples abound, such as the Chinese emperor Wang Mang, who was vilified by the historians of the Later Han dynasty which replaced his regime, or Richard III of England, whose record was distorted by members of the court of the man who overthrew him, Henry VII, to the point that they invented fictions about his appearance, such as the claim that he was hunchbacked (an image which Shakespeare unfortunately popularized).

Then there are facts that are certainly or at least probably true but open to varying interpretations, such as the time when Alexander of Macedon (commonly called Alexander "the Great", a name which in itself carries subjective notions about the reputation he deserved) killed his friend Cleitus in a rage. The two were drunk and trading insults, but exactly what was said, who was being more aggressive, what motivated the quarrel, and whether there were underlying motives involved are all subject to some dispute. To take another example, I recently read a book about a Texas family (one that I happened to be descended from) during the period between Texas's declaration of independence from Mexico and the end of the US Civil War. Sam Houston, who was the victor in the battle which won Texan independence, as well as serving as the president of Texas, as a senator, and as governor of the state after it joined the US, is frequently mentioned in the book, as he lived nearby and was an acquaintance of a number of the people in the family. While most people today view Houston positively, this book takes a more negative view, citing among other things his frequent drunkenness and his ambition. Towards the end of his life, Houston lost most of his popularity in Texas due to his opposition to the state's secession from the Union before the Civil War. This account takes the view that his sole or at least primary reason for his position was that he had ambitions to run for US president, something which obviously couldn't happen if Texas left the Union. While Houston clearly was ambitious, it is also quite possible that he opposed secession out of principle or simply because, as he said himself, it was a bad idea that would result in a war that the South would lose. Without getting inside his head, we obviously can't know what his true motivation was, and so whether his motivation was positive or negative is clearly a matter of interpretation (even aside from the issue of whether one agrees with the position he took or not). Similarly, Abraham Lincoln's actions during the Civil War led him to be considered either a savior and liberator (by most Northerners and African-Americans) or an undemocratic tyrant (by many white Southerners). In this case, the same actions were being viewed from drastically different perspectives, leading to contrasting interpretations.

But perhaps the most crucial deciding factor governing a historical figure's reputation is emphasis; that is to say, which events and actions one chooses to focus on when evaluating the person. In many cases, the way a person is generally regarded is based on how they acted with regard to a single event, with the result that someone with an otherwise solid record may be viewed negatively due to one major blunder, or someone who was highly flawed may be seen favorably due to success with regard to a particularly important event. An example of the latter is Winston Churchill, whose successful leadership of Britain in World War II is what is generally remembered about him. What is less remembered is that he was a diehard imperialist who called Gandhi a "half-naked fakir", and as British colonial secretary he was largely responsible for the creation of Iraq, a country with arbitrarily drawn borders containing three different ethnic groups who didn't get along, making him directly responsible for problems that plague the Middle East to this day. Often different people will focus on different events in the life of the same individual. Ronald Reagan is viewed by many conservatives as a great president due to his perceived victory in the Cold War (though how much credit he deserves for that is debatable) as well as his taxation and social policies. Of course those same policies are strongly criticized by liberals, who are also more likely to focus on events like the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan's support for dictators like Pinochet and Saddam Hussein, and his frequent ignorance of what was going on around him. Likewise, after the recent death if Michael Jackson, his fans focused on his musical legacy (though how great that is obviously remains subjective), while his detractors focused on his alleged pedophilia (though it should be remembered that he was found not guilty) and his eccentricity. And after Ted Kennedy died, while the majority of people talked about his achievements as a legislator and his long-time struggle for various liberal causes, some detractors chose to dwell on the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident, in which he drove a car into a tidal channel and left his young woman passenger behind to drown while he escaped. Though many of those who raise this incident wildly exaggerate in their criticism, some going so far as to call Kennedy a murderer when even the worst possible interpretation of the facts shows that the woman's death was accidental, he was still guilty of serious negligence at best. But this of course begs the question of how much good someone has to do to balance out one or more major mistakes or evil deeds.

This latter question is an extremely vital one when it comes to evaluating historical figures, but the answer is necessarily subjective. A close examination of any person's history will reveal both good and bad, even in the best and worst individuals. Obviously in some cases the evil deeds so far outweigh any good ones that a negative assessment is a given, with people like Hitler and Stalin being among the most obvious examples. For figures that are less prominent, a single egregiously evil deed will outweigh any positives, such as the unfortunately numerous cases of perpetrators of bloody massacres of innocent people, including Reginald Dyer (responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in India), Ernest Medina (the highest-ranking officer at the My Lai massacre), and the various white civilians and soldiers responsible for massacres of Native Americans. On the other hand, some individuals did sufficient good that, at least in most people's minds, their virtues clearly outweigh any faults. But in most cases, there are enough examples of both good and bad deeds that one could easily go either way in an overall assessment, depending as suggested above on the weight given to different deeds. Does Augustus Caesar's competent rulership and establishment of Pax Romana outweigh his utter ruthlessness and responsibility for numerous killings? Do Alexander's impressive military achievements and spread of Greek civilization outweigh his drunkenness, fits of rage, and occasional tyrannical behavior? Do Tang Empress Wu Zetian's able executive skills and defiance of patriarchal tradition outweigh her supposed cruelty and use of secret police against dissent? By modern standards, the answer would probably be no in all those cases, but nevertheless an objective assessment would have to acknowledge both the good and the bad, as well as the unfortunate fact that ruthlessness and cruelty were standard behavior for rulers and leaders in those times. Ultimately, when judging historical figures, we should remember that no one is perfect (or even perfectly bad), and we should try to get as much information as possible, both positive and negative, before reaching even a tentative conclusion.

Warped Politics

I'm thinking it's about time to address some of the political nonsense that has been going on recently in the two countries I've spent most of my life in, the US and Taiwan. Of course politics is always full of absurd characters and ridiculous statements, but we've reached some new lows lately.

In the US, the big debate is over health care, but for the moment I don't intend to address this particular issue at length, but rather some of the rhetoric the extreme right wing has been directing at President Obama and his administration. Of course the latest example of this to make the news was the Republican from South Carolina actually loudly accusing Obama of lying when the latter was making a speech to a joint session of Congress. Now there are a couple of issues involved here. The first is of course whether Wilson's accusation (namely that Obama's statement that the reform he supported would not provide care for illegal immigrants) was true. The facts seem to indicate that it was not, as the current bills specifically exclude require proof of legal status. Of course some illegal immigrants may manage to take advantage of the system, but that is quite different from having a bill which would purposely encompass them. But then there is the second issue involved -- even if it was true that Obama's statement was not accurate, was the time and place appropriate from calling him on it? On this issue there is the greatest amount of agreement among reasonable people of both parties, who generally acknowledge that it is not considered good form for legislators to heckle the president in this kind of setting. So why does Rep. Wilson suddenly think it's acceptable for him to do so, abandoning civil discourse for the type of shouting that's been seeing lately at town hall meetings across the US? In my view, it is symptomatic of the bizarre, deep seated hatred the extreme right has for Obama, something that's surfaced again and again in the past few months.

First you had the idiotic birthers, who claimed that there was some doubt that Obama was born in the US, which was the intellectual equivalent of questioning whether humans landed on the Moon, whether the Holocaust happened, or even whether WWII was a real historical event. What was ridiculous was that a few conservative media figures seemed to give credence to this nonsense, though to be fair it must be noted that even some of the most extreme ones (such as Limbaugh and Coulter) dismissed the birthers' claims out of hand, as any sane person should.

Then there was Glenn Beck, who made the bizarre claim that Obama hated white people, despite the fact that his mother and the grandmother he was closest to were both white, he grew up more among white people than among blacks, and he himself is half white. Of course his borderline slander was strongly criticized, so seemingly partly out of revenge, he targeted one of Obama's advisors, Van Jones. Jones was accused of being a communist, of insulting Republicans, and of supporting a petition regarding 9/11 which asserted the government was responsible. Now I can't claim to have investigated these claims in detail, but from what I've seen they were frankly no big deal (certainly no worse than Beck's own ridiculous statement about Obama). First off, if Jones did ever say he was a "communist", I suspect he meant in the general sense, that is to say he considered a society where most property and capital was owned by the community rather than corporations and individuals (Jones is a community activist, after all). This type of "communism", while not popular among libertarians and the wealthy, is hardly sinister. Jones did call Republicans axxholes in a speech, but frankly many of them are, and in any case he said he himself was one in the same speech. As for the 9/11 petition, my understanding is that it simply called for an investigation on whether government officials might have known an attack was imminent. While I personally doubt this was the case, the idea is not completely absurd (as opposed to actually claiming the government was behind it, which is ludicrous); after all, to this day there are credible historians who suspect the Roosevelt administration may have had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In any event, Jones has said he disagreed with the contents of the petition. So Beck himself is allowed to make ridiculous attacks on Obama but Obama's advisors are not permitted to have opinions that are basically reasonable, if slightly controversial? Give me a break.

Yet another recent incident was Obama's recent speech to school children. Without apparently having any knowledge of the content of the planned speech, rightwingers asserted that Obama planned to "indoctrinate" American school children with "socialist" ideas. Leaving aside the fact that socialism is not necessarily a bad thing, and that American children are already indoctrinated with questionable ideas that rightwingers support, such as nationalism (and if they had their way, they'd be indoctrinated with others such as Christianity and "intelligent design"), these paranoid claims revealed once again a bizarre fear and hatred of Obama, as if he could somehow poison children just by talking to them -- and talking to them only once. The idea that it's terrible for the US president to give a speech to school children is disturbingly strange; presidents have given this type of speech before, and no one got excited about it. And the actual speech, from what I've seen, was the noncontroversial type you'd expect to be given in this context. So what are these people getting excited about?

I generally try not to be like some liberals who manage to find racism as a subtext in almost everything, but in this case I'm beginning to wonder if it might be a factor in all the vitriol. Certainly many of the people we've heard the worst sorts of attacks from are mostly of the type whose racial sensitivity is somewhat questionable. Wilson of South Carolina, for instance, though I don't think he's truly representative of the average person of his state, unfortunately may typify a certain segment of the population (after all, South Carolina is not exactly known for liberals or for racial harmony). Beck of course actually accused Obama of being a racist, but an observant person will be aware that people who are particularly quick to make this type of accusation against others are often guilty of it themselves.

I suspect that the extremists' vitriol comes from a combination of factors. First, they are generally prone to this kind of thing, especially if someone they consider even slightly liberal is in the White House (after all, Clinton didn't escape this kind of attack). Second, they particularly fear Obama because of his popularity and his obvious rhetorical skills. Finally, they consider his background unusually threatening, because aside from being part African (the racism factor), he spent a lot of time abroad (horror of horrors!) and he used to be (shudder) a community activist (run for your lives!). Levity aside, though, this type of warped thinking seems to be far to prevalent in the US nowadays.

In Taiwan, meanwhile, the former president Chen Shuibian, the only non-KMT president in the nation's history, was convicted along with his wife, his children and several close confidants of graft by a district court. So what kind of sentence did he and his wife get? A life sentence. That's right, a life sentence for graft. Now don't get me wrong, I think corruption is bad and should be punished, especially if the guilty party is a national leader. What's more, I think Chen was probably guilty of something. But life? Normally people get life sentences for rape and attempted murder. I've never heard of anyone getting a life sentence for corruption, outside of countries like China, where they execute people for graft among many other things (actually in the case of corrupt officials, they are really executed for being unlucky enough to picked out as an example when the government decides to make people think they are doing something about corruption, and for belonging to the wrong political faction). No Taiwanese politician has ever gotten anything close to a life sentence for corruption. The notoriously corrupt KMT ran the country for 50 years, treating all of Taiwan like party property (or the property of the dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his family, which was also guilty of far worse crimes than corruption), and no KMT politician has received a sentence like this. What's more, Chen had his civil rights annulled for life, meaning he can't vote or run for office. By contrast, a few years ago a known gangster was able to run as an independent for the legislature from prison while serving a brief sentence (not a life sentence, of course) and won. A Taidong politician from the KMT who won the election for county commissioner was forced to surrender his position due to a conviction for corruption (again, the sentence he received was much milder than Chen's), he turned the office over to his wife (actually his ex-wife, as he divorced to get around a law forbidding him to appoint a family member to take his place). She in turn was accused of using county funds to take frequent trips abroad, but just a day after Chen was convicted, the prosecutor's office declined to indict her. Anyone aware of such cases or with even a basic knowledge of Taiwan's political situation and history can't help but see Chen's sentence as a blatantly political one. The irony is this will allow Chen to legitimately claim to be a martyr, a role he has already been overly eager to see himself in.

All this nonsense is almost enough to make one of those people who tries to ignore politics entirely. Unfortunately, I'm very aware of the truth of the statement which goes "you can ignore politics, but politics won't ignore you". So I'll continue to concern myself with what's happening, as bad as it may get.

One Day in China -- A Traveler's Tale

Way back in the mid 1990s, I took a long trip to China. I spent close to 3 months traveling all around the country. The following is an account I wrote some years later (but still close to a decade ago) of one relatively eventful day during that trip.

The sky was overcast as I stepped out of the hotel and walked to the bus station. This was a small, rather unimpressive building next to the train station. I managed to find my bus among the various vehicles that were scattered about the parking lot behind the station. It was properly speaking a minibus, and it was not blessed with leg room suitable for a foreign devil, especially one loaded with bags. Though fortunately it wasn't stuffed to its roof with passengers like buses in and around bigger cities, I didn't anticipate a particularly comfortable ride. On other hand, for the price I was paying I had no right to expect luxury, and, anyway, a little discomfort once in a while keeps life interesting.

Safely (more or less) crammed into my seat, I watched as the bus driver piloted us through the streets of Kaifeng. It was rush hour and the streets were filled with bicycles. They took up the whole road, so the occasional larger vehicles (generally buses and trucks, though there were also a fair number of private cars) had to push their way through, driving right in the center of the road. Though most Western drivers would no doubt have quickly lost their tempers trying to drive in such conditions, our driver was not perturbed in the least, though he used his horn more often than necessary.

Despite the slow pace, we eventually managed to make it out of the city into the less crowded countryside. Here the main obstruction, other than the less then perfect condition of the roads themselves, was grain. In villages all along the way, locals had spread their grain out on the road to sort and dry in the sun. Fortunately they always left enough space for vehicles to get by, though as in the city it was often necessary to drive in the middle of the road.

Throughout our journey we took on and off loaded passengers on the side of the road deep in the countryside. Most people seemed to take the bus for fairly short distances; in fact I believe I was the only one on the bus who traveled all the way from Kaifeng to its final destination. I was also one of the only passengers with a printed ticket, since all the people we picked up on the side of the road just paid the driver whatever he told them was the price for wherever they wanted to go. One or two did argue briefly about prices they considered too high, but they paid up in the end rather than stay on the roadside waiting for the next bus.

We crossed into Shandong province a couple of hours out of Kaifeng. In Heze, the first major town we came to, I moved up to a seat at the front of the bus at the driver's insistence. He, and the woman who took turns driving with him and was presumably his wife, appeared to be in his fifties. Both of them were friendly and talkative, though unfortunately I couldn't understand much of what they said, in part due to their accents and in part to due to my own language deficiencies.

My new seat was decidedly more comfortable than my old one, since there was more room to put my bags, though the road conditions sometimes negated any comfort gained by the move. At one point we left the paved road we had been following and drove along a dirt road which stretched along a ridge overlooking farm houses. Children playing in front of the houses stopped to gaze at our bus as it passed, but it was impossible to gauge from their reactions how often buses passed this way. It was presumably a short cut of some sort, though not surprisingly we didn't travel along at a great speed, and even at the speed we were going my teeth rattled and my bones shook. Fortunately we got back on a paved road before long.

Towards the end of our journey the bus broke down. As the driver and his wife worked to get it started again, I had visions of spending the night sitting there in a bus on the side of a country road in the middle of rural China. In the space between my seat and the driver's was a hatch of sorts which could be lifted to work on the engine, so it wasn't necessary to get out of the bus to do whatever repairs were necessary. The driver and his wife took turns trying to get the engine started while the other one fiddled with it. Apparently the oil wasn't flowing properly, because while one of them worked the gas pedal, the other sucked on a tube to try to get the oil flowing. Whatever they were doing, it was effective -- after ten minutes or so they got the bus started again.

We pulled into Qufu, the hometown of Confucius, at around four o'clock, some eight hours after our departure from Kaifeng. As soon as I exited the bus station I was accosted by a middle aged woman who offered to take me to a cheap hotel. It was cheap all right, the room was a stuffy (but reasonably roomy) cell in the basement furnished with a bed, a little wooden table and a fan, and the toilet was an outhouse. Despite the less than luxurious accommodations, I decided to take it, on the general principal that as long as there was a bed to sleep in and no obvious signs of rat or insect infestations, it would do for a night (though I would have preferred nicer toilets).

Though it was late afternoon, I hadn't had anything to eat all day other than some bread I had had for breakfast before leaving Kaifeng, so I decided to get a very late lunch. I found a small restaurant where I got some fried rice. As I ate the woman who ran the place talked to me, for the most part asking the standard questions ("Where are you from?", "What do you do?", "Are you married?") . At one point she suddenly asked me how many millions of dollars I had. I tried to explain that I didn't even have one million, that in fact the appropriate question would be how many thousands of dollars I had, but she didn't seem to believe me (perhaps she meant renminbi, the Chinese currency, but even one million renminbi is more than US$100,000). This was borne out by the fact that she charged me the outrageous sum of 25 RMB for my plate of fried rice -- well over ten times what I'd paid for a large bowl of noodles in Kaifeng the night before.

Upon my return to the hotel I met the landlady, who told me her last name was Kong, i.e. that she was a member of Confucius's extensive clan, and warned me to watch out for rip-offs, a warning I hardly needed after my experience at lunch. Nevertheless I survived the rest of the day without any significant holes being made in my wallet.

Sometime after midnight I was awakened by a knock on the door. Two uniformed men came into my room. One asked if I could understand Chinese and I indicated that I could, though I refrained from revealing that I could speak it as well, not wishing to prolong the conversation. They lectured me on the safety (or rather lack of the same) of cheap hotels such as the one I was in, and said I should stay in better hotels. I was tempted to point out that the only disturbance I had thus far encountered in this type of hotel was them but I thought better of it. After they had finished dispensing advice on accommodation choices, they left and knocked on other doors. Several hours later I was awakened once more by a hotel employee who took my passport to be checked (by whom I never found out). It was not clear whether this second disturbance was related to the first (though I presume it was) nor whether this was a random inspection, one inspired by word of a foreign devil in the hotel, or rather inspired by an overindulgence in Qingdao (Tsingtao) beer by the policemen on the night shift. In any case, I was left undisturbed for the rest of the night.