Kirk Savage

This will, I hope, be the first and last post I write on a strictly personal subject.  But I do so to honor the memory of my sister Michele, who was struck down by brain cancer in the prime of her life.  Like her sublings she was an overachiever.  She poured her love and energy into her church, her husband, and her eight children, and they returned her love in kind.  She was strong physically and emotionally, but sweet and gentle in spirit.

Why she would be taken from us in this way no one can answer.  But losing her makes me think of all the other parents and children who are taken every day of the year, everywhere on the globe, victims of disease or war or poverty.  No one can explain or justify any of these losses, or any of the suffering they cause.

We plod ahead, one foot in front of the other, trying to give comfort to ourselves and to others who need it.  And we hope, somehow, that we can honor those who have died by working toward a more just and forgiving world.

“My heart is broken,” said a father in Kuba, Istanbul’s neighborhood of poor castaways.  “Let other hearts not be broken.”  What a simple, but profound, and tragically difficult, plea.

Goodbye Michele.  My heart is broken, but your smile and your spirit are with me, always.  I hope I can do honor to them and to you.

Twelve fascinating new designs for selected portions of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. were unveiled this week. The Trust for the National Mall and the National Park Service are sponsoring a design competition for three key sites: Union Square, at the foot of the Capitol building (where the Grant Memorial is located); the Washington Monument grounds, particularly its southern edge (where the now defunct Sylvan Theater is located); and Constitution Gardens (where the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is located). Four major design firms were invited to submit plans for each site, with a demanding technical program that emphasized sustainability, access, historical sensitivity, user-friendly amenities, and flexible spaces that can be utilized for democratic assembly and protest as well as cultural events and performances.

There is much to admire in virtually all of these proposals.  If any of them were implemented, they would go a long way toward restoring the biodiversity and human scale that once existed here before their eradication by the massive clearing operation, otherwise known as the “rape of the Mall,” that took place in the first several decades of the twentieth century.  But given the many competing demands of the program as well as the complexity of the sites themselves, it is hardly surprising that the designs disappoint as well.

First the winners, in my estimation:

•Andropogon’s entry for Constitution Gardens is phenomenally well thought out and presented.  It manages to reconnect the whole area to Constitution Avenue on the north and the Mall to the south, establish green infrastructure that creatively recalls the hydrological history on the site of Tiber Creek and the C&O canal, create new uses such as outdoor play spaces and indoor markets in zero-energy structures, all the while transforming a stagnant lake into a beautiful, ecologically diverse wetland park.

•Balmori’s entry for a “Sylvan Bowl” on the Washington Monument grounds is also very innovative,interweaving parkland and architecture like a mobius strip.  Its proposal for a spiralling, figure-8 shaped restaurant with green roof is the show-stopper of the design competition.  A grove of trees literally grows through the building, while the roof is designed to support a vegetable garden that supplies produce to the kitchen below.

•Two designs stand out for Union Square, in many ways the most intractable site in the competition.  With its disastrous reflecting pool (built in the 1970s) and huge shadeless expanse, this site fairly well sums up the worst problems of the whole Mall. Pei Cobb Fried’s solution is notable for its simplicity, elegantly connecting the formal landscape of the 20^th-century Mall to the picturesque 19^th-century landscape of the Capitol grounds by shrinking the pool into an oval and cutting two diagonal walkways through it, while also adding a spectacular arching fountain around the pool and gardens on the site’s perimeter.  Diller Scofidio & Renfro + Hood propose a more varied, complex program with a green infrastructure component and an audio system that transforms speech from the Congress and from visitors to the site into wave patterns on the reflecting pool; their theme is “multiple voices.”  Both designs have mechanisms to empty the reflecting pool to allow crowds to congregate there for special events.

So why the disappointment?

In a word, it’s about content.  None of the designs reexamines in a serious way our relationship to the monuments in these spaces, or, more broadly, to the democracy the Mall is supposed to represent.  The competition program did not exactly encourage this kind of work.  Its demand for “sensitivity to historical context” is more about highlighting the monuments already there, rather than than reinterpreting them, much less proposing new forms of public memory.  In Constitution Gardens for example, the program specifically asks the designers to “highlight and maintain” the memorial to the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.  But why do we even need a monument to the signers of the declaration, with a huge block for each name, when it is the words that have been so important and so bitterly contested in U.S. history? Why not try to reinvigorate this monument by creating a way to engage with the document’s meaning, the foundation of our democracy?

But I think the problem is deeper than the program. Last year I helped jury an ideas competition for the Washington Monument grounds which challenged entrants to confront its history and legacy.  The results in that respect were just as disappointing.

Diller Scofidio Renfro + Hood is the one firm in the competition that did try to engage democracy in a serious way.  Its proposal to convert political speech into “speaking waves” in the water on Union Square is a clever take on the idea of “making waves,” suggesting the unruly, roisterous debate that is the heart of any real democracy.  But in the end it is just a clever visualization, no substitute for the real thing.  It is discourse without content, which we already have in abundance on radio, TV, and the internet.  We have more media than ever but precious little content, less real debate, and even less listening.

Is it really asking too much to demand that our nation’s “democratic stage” (as the competition program calls it) actually function as such?  I keep wondering what an artist like Krzysztof Wodiczko would do here. He has dedicated his career to giving voice to the voiceless, to “making waves” in public space.  Whatever he attempted, real words would be spoken and people would listen.  It wouldn’t be easy though.

Today I published an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on a topic that has nothing to do with my scholarship: Pennsylvania’s exemption of pension income from state taxation.

Like many other states Pennsylvania faces a huge revenue shortfall, and the governor’s budget cuts disproportionately target education.  As an educator, I thought I should enter this debate with a constructive proposal for raising revenue: ending the state’s pension exemption.

So why did I float this politically suicidal idea?   I got the idea when I learned to my surprise that my mother-in-law’s federal pension, which had been taxed in Virginia, became tax-free in Pennsylvania when she moved in with us.

Before anyone complains that I am using my Pitt website to advocate a political position, let me emphasize that this is a nonpartisan issue.  No elected official of either party would dare to make this suggestion or to support my position.

Predictably, the hate mail is already starting to arrive.  To those of you who have expressed your disagreement without venom, a big thank you.  There are thoughtful arguments for treating pension income differently from regular income.  I disagree with those arguments, but I respect them.

Unfortunately I made a factual error in my opening.  Pennsylvania is an outlier state when it comes to taxing pension income, but not as much of an outlier as I claimed there.  Pennsylvania does appear to have the most sweeping exemption for pension income of any state, but there are two other states that effectively exempt almost all pension income, and an additional six states that exempt federal pensions like my mother-in-law’s.  Many other states allow extra credits or exemptions for age or low income.  Nevertheless, in most states with an income tax, my mother-in-law would pay a pension tax roughly similar to what she paid in Virginia.

My own proposal would expand tax protections for low-income pensioners, but would extend these same protections to all low-income households regardless of their source of income.  I argue in the editorial that income should be treated equally, and that certain groups struggling economically should not be favored at the expense of others.

Some people have written me that I am proposing in effect a double tax on some pensions.  For those (like me) who have defined contribution plans, we pay state tax (not federal tax) on the income that we contribute to our plans, so the argument is that this money has already been taxed by the state. Of course if those contributions have grown through investment, that investment income is not currently taxed.  Nor are the matching contributions that employers make. Double taxation could be avoided by exempting employee contributions on the front end, as the federal government does; for those who have already had their contributions taxed on the front end, that portion of their annuity could be made exempt from state tax.  These measures would of course reduce the revenue raised by my proposal.  I’ll have to leave it to the accountants to estimate how much.

One thing I am certain of: the issue of pension taxation is not going to go away. Unfunded public pension liabilities are a ticking time bomb.  Sooner or later, if we keep on the same track, we will find ourselves in a situation where we are forced to choose between funding pensions and funding classrooms, just as we are now having to cut transit routes to pay for pensions.  One of the main goals of my proposal was to avoid punishing public pensioners and to spread the costs more equitably.  It is morally wrong, in my view, to punish or blame public pensioners simply because they are drawing pensions that the government agreed to and that their own job contracts guaranteed.

If my editorial can help start a rational conversation on more equitable ways of taxing (and funding) pension income, I will feel that my act of hara-kiri was worth it.

Lately I have been reading a very particular 19^th-century genre, which has no counterpart today: the memorial volumes published to record the dedication of local soldier monuments after the Civil War.  Everyone of these volumes has its share of pathos, but one stands out as especially gut-wrenching.  The volume produced by Hingham, Massachusetts took six years to produce and mushroomed to well over 400 pages.  The committee in charge did something no other town attempted, to my knowledge; it compiled a biographical sketch of the life and death of every fallen soldier whose name was inscribed on the town’s monument. The impulse to personalize the war dead in this way belongs more to our time than theirs.  The committee clearly didn’t know what it was getting itself into, and for good reason the experiment wasn’t repeated elsewhere.

As the authors tell it, the biographical sketches were intended to give voice to the dead and to “thrill and inspire us at the mention of their acts of heroism and valor.”  In reality the straightforward honesty of these accounts disarms the heroic project and overwhelms the reader with tragedy after tragedy.  We are confronted with a series of painful, lonely deaths, mostly disconnected from any conventional story of battlefield valor.

Countless men died of disease, chronic diarrhea the most commonly named cause of death. Many were transferred repeatedly from hospital to hospital, while some were discharged when they were so sick they couldn’t stand up. Daniel Hersey was one such case, discharged from Fort Monroe in Virginia after only seven months in the army. Too weak to walk, he was so determined to return home that he crawled on his hands and knees toward the train station, until “a negro kindly bore him on his shoulders to the place of destination.” He did finally reach home in Hingham, a “mere skeleton,” unable to relate his war experience, and died a few days later.

Daniel Bell was attacked with night blindness and diarrhea in May 1864 but could not get proper hospital treatment for many weeks.  By the time he finally reached the ladies of the Sanitary Commission, he was in a steep decline, dying soon after in the hospital. The authors conclude, based on the dead man’s diary, that a combination of callousness and incompetence probably drove him to his early death.  “There was a lack of needed attention, want of proper treatment, and, at an earlier date, a degree of laborious service demanded which he had not the strength to perform.”

Some of the sick fell behind in marches and were then captured by the enemy. They ended up in prisoner of war camps where conditions were miserable and death was rampant.  James Churchill ended his life in Andersonville, the most notorious of the Confederate camps. He had a “delicate constitution” and did not last long. Told that he was about to die, he was still “full of faith that he should live to reach home, and enjoy the society of his relatives and friends.” But he never saw Hingham again, and left a widow there.

A dentist named Don Pedro Wilson, drafted in August 1863, was put to work in a surgical department administering medicine.  In Hingham he had been a respected practitioner, who in his free time loved horticulture and “rural occupations.” But out on the front, he quickly became ill.  While the army was retreating from Culpeper, Virginia, he fell behind and was apparently captured.  He died a prisoner of war in October, barely two months after being pressed into service. The contrast between his abrupt, anonymous death in the theater of war and his richly rewarding life in Hingham made his case, as the authors said, “doubly sad.”

Henry French also landed tired and sick in a POW camp. This was the ironically named Belle Isle, in the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia.  One day as he was returning to his “miserable quarters,” he was ordered to hurry up.  Unable to drag his body along any faster, he was shot and killed by an unhinged Confederate sentry. “War in its best aspect is horrible enough,” the authors wrote.  But the murder of an unarmed, feeble prisoner “furnishes an instance of human depravity which must be condemned throughout the civilized world.”

For Hingham, and most other communities, far fewer of their soldiers were killed in action. David Cushing was one of these unlucky ones.  Mustered into service on August 19, 1862, he was struck by a shell at Antietam less than a month later, leaving a widow and two children.  Most men killed in action died of wounds that would be easily treated today; a bullet in the leg or even the foot was enough to end some lives.

Even though most men volunteered for duty, there were some who did not want to serve and face these hellish prospects. The Hingham volume actually lists the men in town who avoided military service by paying for substitutes, and what they paid. A few men who couldn’t afford to buy their way out openly admitted their reservations. Sewall Pugsley was in poor health when he was drafted but he couldn’t persuade the authorities to exempt him, and he didn’t have the means to buy a substitute.  Shortly after mustering in, he landed in a hospital and a few weeks later was dead of chronic diarrhea.  His was one of a few cases of “coerced service,” as the authors explained; the “melancholy results, must be generally deplored.” Horatio Willard, a harness maker by trade, enlisted relatively early in the war thinking that his service would be limited to garrison duty. Before long, though, his regiment was needed on the front.  He managed to escape harm on the battlefield, but the long marches and constant exposure to the elements “soon broke down a somewhat enfeebled constitution,” and he died of chronic diarrhea in a Virginia hospital about a year after joining the army.

Of course the volume did include some sketches that struck the right chords of courage and valor, which the authors no doubt had in mind when they started the project.  A few men died at Gettysburg, for example, while others endured years of battle before finally succumbing late in the war. Wherever possible the authors included testimonials from comrades or commanding officers. Even these reports of Christian virtue and masculine fortitude, however, were sometimes double-edged.  Peter Ourish, who died of a battle wound, was not only a brave soldier but “a youth of pure character, one upon whom the vices and bad habits of camp-life made no impression.”  The trope of the soldier who avoided camp temptations was flattering to the individual but rather disparaging for the rest, who by contrast merged into a backdrop of widespread vice.

Reading through the stories of these individual men is a profoundly sobering experience. The more we learn of their personal histories, the less they conform to the generic rhetoric of heroic sacrifice.  The lesson from Hingham is that when a community takes the time and trouble to recover some of the voices of their war dead, they turn out to be a cacaphony.  They turn out, in other words, to be human.

Four prisoners, naked, arms bound behind their backs, chained to a pedestal: these are the so-called “Four Moors,” sculpted by Pietro Tacca, which decorate the four corners of a monument to the Medici nobleman, Grand Duke Ferdinando.  Finished in 1626, this extraordinary monument still stands facing the harbor of Livorno, an important Tuscan seaport until the late nineteenth century.

As a recent paper by the art historian Mark Rosen makes clear, however, the title “Moor” did not attach to these figures until well after the monument was completed. Like any label, Moor is a generic term that erases significant distinctions.  In reality these four are a polyglot group, diverse by age, facial feature, hairstyle, and likely homeland.  As bad as it was to be a mere prisoner, they were probably destined for an even harsher fate: galley slavery.  Livorno at that time, Rosen observes, was a major supplier of galley slaves.  Within sight of the monument was an elaborate stone holding pen for these unfortunate men, typically captured at sea by Tuscan ships. Here they would be confined until transferred to the even more desperate hold of a huge vessel, chained to a bench and oar below deck, and condemned to row endlessly until they died of exhaustion or disease, usually within a couple of years.

Why were these miserable condemned men immortalized in such a grand, expensive, and conspicuous monument?  The standard answer, which I gave in my book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, is that their very misery and powerlessness enhance the glory of the commander standing above them. His majesty is buttressed by their subjection.

But after reading Rosen’s paper I’m not so sure that this answer does justice to an amazing work of art.  These remarkable figures are not mere foils.  In the extremity of their circumstances and their likely fate, they are fully and tragically human. They slide down the pedestal into our space, while the great man above stands remote, stiff and unengaging. The slaves twist and strain, their heads turned one way and another, their faces animated by individualized expressions.  The official hero of this monument is a stick figure, a thoroughly conventionalized commander, while the doomed men below his feet burst into life and individuality.

How could this be?  I got an unexpected insight while reading the exasperating but always interesting 19^th-century Scottish author Thomas Carlyle. The pertinent passage is from his 1842 book On Heroes, on his poet-hero Dante’s struggle with Hell:

“Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind; – true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is Thought. In all ways we are ‘to become perfect through suffering.’”

What a remarkable idea: that thought itself originates in something like a state of captivity, in the struggle to break free and escape the darkness of pain. Carlyle takes the stigma of slavery and turns it on its head. Rather than degrading man to brute, slavery here becomes the very condition through which we fulfill our highest humanity.

True, Carlyle may be romanticizing suffering and the ideal of Christian sacrifice (his quotation comes from Hebrews 2:10).  But despite that common language, his point here is rather different. It is one thing for a nation or a commander to achieve glory through the pain and blood of others (see my earlier post). It is quite another thing to take that pain seriously and to find in the sufferer the universal basis of our humanity. Carlyle is doing just that, suggesting that what makes people human – their capacity for thought – springs from a heroic effort to escape the binds of existence.

Viewed through this lens, the true noblemen in this monument are its slaves, whose plight is the plight of all humanity aspiring to something beyond mere survival.

Before we get too enamored of Carlyle, though, it is important to note that he was an elitist and a reactionary, a proud anti-democrat. Ultimately, for him, only a few godlike men like Dante could break free of the constraints of ordinary experience. Carlyle famously argued that the abolition of slavery was misguided; he would likely have had little sympathy for actual galley slaves.

In the real world, far from the reflections of philosophy, the prejudices of men like Carlyle have always stacked the deck against disadvantaged groups of people and made it much harder for them to undertake the “true labor” that constitutes a thoughtful life.  As the tragically downcast figure at one corner of the monument reminds us, these men were destined for a hard, futile death.  Their suffering would not be redeemed. No honored grave awaited them, no witness to pray for their salvation in the hereafter. If the figures on this monument were modeled from life, which seems plausible, then their suffering was “perfected” in one sense only, through the medium of art.

In their suffering, in their confinement, we recognize – as Carlyle’s better nature did – a fundamentally human condition.  That is why they come across as more human than the so-called “hero” above, who is without thought, feeling, or interior life of any kind. Yet like captives everywhere they also testify to human capacities that are trapped within them, waiting for release. Ultimately we all hope, with them, to be more than mere vessels of thought, to become empowered people who can step out into the world and act wisely and justly on our thoughts.