Statue of Thomas Paine at Burnam Park in, Morristown, New Jersey
Yesterday marked the 215th anniversary of the death of Thomas Paine.
So I thought that it would be good to dedicate a blog entry to Paine and his writings. As long ago as his time was, and as irrelevant as it might seem to us now, some of his writings and quotes are, in fact, surprisingly relevant to us today.
For an example of this, take a look at that first quote which I selected above. It feels incredibly relevant today. I had this quote in a previous blog entry about Trump, which I felt then - and still feel now - is relevant. However, it also feels relevant for the elite politicians on the other side of the political aisle. Frankly, I never felt that the Bidens or Obamas or Clintons are particularly in tune with what Americans are actually going through, or that they necessarily care, either.
Today, it seems that both of the two major parties are so fixated on trying to build up skepticism and distrust towards the other party, that the dominant climate is fear. I am not so sure that Trump's followers love him, so much as they are convinced that he is the last line of defense against those they perceive as traitors and elites on the other side. Namely, the Democratic Party leadership. Ditto with the Democrats and Trump, and before him, George W. Bush, and so on and so forth.
It seems that the dominant political climate is fear, and this gives rise to disinformation. So you figure you have only two choices, and if you feel one is just purely evil, you of course go with the other. Enough time goes by like this, and you start believing anything bad about the other side, true or not. I have seen blatantly wrong information on social media from both sides. Things that would easily be discredited with even a brief search on the internet, just to double-check if this or that person actually did or said what a post or a blog claims that they said.
During the entirety of my life, at least as long as I remember following politics, it seems that every election - particularly the presidential elections - comes down to a choice between the lesser of two evils. Or as Michael Moore once suggested, the evil of two lessers. That was never as relevant as it is today, as we find ourselves seeing the two major (and apparently only viable) options for Americans being the elderly and seemingly feeble Joe Biden, or the authoritarianism and, frankly, the insanity of Donald Trump.
Already, some people voiced the opinion that the 2016 election was an insult to our collective intelligence. That felt just as relevant, and maybe more relevant, in 2020, when nobody seemed excited by the prospect of Trump versus Biden. Now, a rematch between those two underscores just how bad things have gotten in this country, and how uninspiring our elections have become.
Yet, you might not know that by the panicked sense of urgent excitement by both sides. Trump supporters will never concede any flaws of their candidates, and systematically dismiss any news that is less than flattering as "fake news." Biden fans also quickly dismiss anything about their candidate that seems compromising, although they might not quite go to the same extremes as Trump fans. They were the same way with Obama, or with the Clintons.
Of course, the major problem with this is that the obvious flaws in each are obvious to the rest of us, who do not subscribe to this strange hero worship. When I heard, for example, about how Hillary Clinton was the most qualified candidate for the presidency in 2016, and how she was almost a hero, I weighed that against what I know. The Clinton family, frankly, has a long and obvious (at least if you're objective) history of lying and misleading people. Without even going into the presidency of her husband Bill Clinton, there were obvious reasons for why people would view her with skepticism and serious distrust. She received a lot of huge fees from Wall Street firms, who had a vested interest in her presidential campaign. That could be regarded as taking money from special interests, and frankly, she had no good answers when questioned about that. Also, she seems to have a false sense of entitlement that it was her turn to be president. Everyone assumed that she would win, and so no other major Democrats even bothered to run. Then, the message of a previously little known Democrat, Bernie Sanders, began to resonate, and he became a serious challenge to her, even pulling even in the polls at one point. The media showed how slanted they were, adding to this sense that we are collectively being lied to, as they systematically dismissed him as a "fringe candidate" lacking seriousness, and ignored the thousands who attended his rallies, and how enthusiastic this grassroots following seemed to be about him. Hillary illegally asked for assistance by the Democratic Party leadership, which was supposed to remain neutral. And the Democratic leadership provided that assistance for her, adding to the sense that she has powerful allies who were determined to see her reach the White House. Then, a day after her former president husband met with then Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac of a Phoenix airport (briefly closing that airport and inconveniencing thousands of people), an investigation into Hillary Clinton was officially suspended. As if all of that was not enough, it was later discovered that she got one question to prepare for the then upcoming debate against Trump, getting that question from Donna Brazile, one of the leaders in the Democratic Party. Mainstream Democrats tried to quickly sweep these stories, and the doubts about Hillary that they would cause, and to make it seem like anyone focusing on these things was crazy or a Trump supporter. But I was not a Trump supporter, and would never vote for Trump. That did not mean that these stories were irrelevant, or that their denial of them made Hillary more likable or seemingly honest. Given the election results, and the almost shocking fact that Hillary was the least trusted of the two major party candidates, despite Trump being well-known as a liar and a manipulator, the results certainly suggest that all of this actually worked against Hillary and her campaign.
My point is this: we need to get back to common sense. Thomas Paine's most famous work uses those two words: Common Sense. And maybe we could benefit by going back and understanding what it is he, and some of the other Founding Fathers, were actually saying back then. Perhaps despite the passage of time, the situations, and their arguments, are in fact far more relevant to our own realities today than we give them credit for.
At the very least, we can do worse than examine these examples from our past history in order to understand our present - and frankly, unfortunate - political realities today.
The Statue of Thomas Paine at Burnam Park in, Morristown, New Jersey
(originally published on May 2, 2021)
When I was younger, between childhood and being a teenager, perhaps even into young adulthood, I had a fascination with American history during the colonial era, and particularly to the American Revolution and the war for independence. Anything, particularly any building, that dated back to that era was on my list of places to visit. I appreciated that nearby Ringwood Manor, in a park that we visited fairly frequently, dated back to this era. I found some tourist brochures on New Jersey (yes, there were some back then, in the days of then Governor Tom Kean saying his famous line: "New Jersey and you, still perfect together"), and read about all of the historical places scattered throughout the state, and wanted to visit some.
My family visited Morristown, which is a really cool, historical town. It has Washington's headquarters, which is exactly as it sounds: it was his headquarters during a particularly brutal winter that was worse than the one he experienced at Mount Vernon. It was exciting for me, a living piece of history that stimulated my overactive imagination.
There was one place in Morristown that I had only heard of and seen maybe one or two pictures of. This was a statue of Thomas Paine, one of the most famous and controversial of the Founding Fathers. He, of course, had written Common Sense, and had also gone to France and participated in the French Revolution on a certain level. I remember hearing somewhere, somehow, that it was the only known statue of Thomas Paine.
The thing was, I had no idea where it was. I had figured - wrongly - that it was likely near Washington's Headquarters, or at least in the downtown district that we had visited, but which we had somehow missed. But I kind of shrugged and left it at that.
Until many years later, no longer myself a kid, but with a kid in the car with me. Yes, my son, who was just entering his teenage years himself, was in the car, when I decided to take a back way home that we usually do not take. Perhaps I just happened to be looking the right way (or the wrong way, if you suggest that my eyes should have been squarely on the road), and suddenly, just like that and without any warning, there was the statue of Thomas Paine, which I had wanted to see ever since my childhood days.
Naturally, I took some pictures. Yet, even then, they proved elusive, because I put them in a blog entry and promptly forgot about them. But I have been trying to go through some of my old, unpublished posts, and came across these pictures, which I figured were worth publishing, finally. So, here they are.
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