2010-06-28 14:22:34

PURPLE SIESTA: Senator Robert Byrd Is Gone, And We’re Taking A Break (Back In August!)

Filed under: Featured, Robert Byrd, politics
Posted by: John

Senator Robert Byrd, a legendary figure of the United States Congress, a man who had been in national elected office since the early days of the Cold War, who predated the Civil Rights movement and in many ways embodied a version of the South that resisted it, has passed away at the age of 92.

His death doesn’t qualify as the end of an era, because Byrd’s era ended long ago, but it’s a reminder that an epochal stretch of American history lies firmly behind us: the postwar era.

Now which war was that?

That’s how we know the era has passed. There used to be no doubt. I’m speaking of World War II, but we’ve been up to our neck in terrorism-spawned conflicts for the better part of a decade, and the centrality of that war to American experience can no longer be safely assumed. A generation is growing up with terror as their war, and the resonance of that strife will have more to do with our common future than our shared past.

Senator Byrd took his bearings from an even more distant past, an America that seems now as far away as the turn of the last century, and when he talked, you heard the rolling away of decades. You heard a different notion of what constituted an education and a politician. There was a time when every educated person had to know a little Shakespeare, a little Sophocles and a lot of Bible. Didn’t hurt to know a thing or two about opera, too. This was especially true for a child of poverty, which Byrd was.

To know and to speak in knowledge: these were the hallmarks of an educated man.

Byrd exemplified the principle long after it had ceased to be the norm. While he orated, others reached for sports metaphor. While he conjured with allusions so thick that they were sometimes impenetrable, most stumbled through tuneless cliche. The poetry of political language had become an anachronism. As the longest serving senator in United States history, he lived to see the reduction of discourse in the United States Congress to “You lie!”.

He must have been spinning in his grave even before he got there.

Seems like a good moment to fade back. We’ll return in August with more interviews, more movie and music reviews, more argument, more conversation.

In the meantime, a tip of the hat to Senator Byrd. “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.” Shakespears, Tempest(IV, i, 156-58)

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