A Millennium is 1,000 years long

There's been a lot already written about Trump's inaugural address. (Here's a good piece by James Fallows.) I'm a little surprised not to have found any comments so far on a line that struck me:

We stand at the birth of a new millennium...

"Millennium" isn't one of the "first time in an inaugural" words that Trump used yesterday.

It occurs in two earlier addresses, Nixon's first, where he refers to the upcoming bicentennial and observes that some alive at that time would live to see "the beginning of the third millennium"; and Clinton's second, where he notes that they were "at the edge of a new century, in a new millennium." (Interestingly George W. Bush, sworn in at the start of the new millennium, didn't mention it at all, preferring to refer to the "new century.")

The idea of "ages" of civilization is a pretty old one. The Greek poet Hesiod described the now conventional "metal" ages (γένεα) of gold, silver, bronze, and iron (with some demigods thrown in for good measure) with their continual decline. The Romans too, perhaps taking their lead from the Etruscans, had their ages, saecula, which were more like centuries (the Latin word saeculum means a literal "century" as well as a less precise "age" and gives us the English "secular"). The idea was picked up by some at the beginning of the United States and, in a lightly adapted line from Vergil's fourth Eclogue, appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, and thence on our money: Novus ordo seclorum ("a new order of the ages").

This phrase also plays a role in some of the "new world order" conspiracies, but we'll leave that alone here and get back to Trump's phrase.

Both earlier inaugural uses of "millennium" make some sense in that they were referring to an actual start of a millennium. But that's a bit of a stretch for us here in 2017. While in relative terms it's now pretty early in the current millennium—and maybe it seems more so to those of us who've spent most of our lives in the 20th century—the millennium has been "born" for a while now (in its "infancy"?). But it strikes me that there is a precedent or declaring the start of a new thousand-year period, and that unfortunately is to be found in Hitler's notion of a "tausendjähriges Reich," referred to, for example, in Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will. This is sadly not the only bit of Nazi-related rhetoric in the speech. As has been noted repeatedly (see this March 2016 letter to the NYT), the Trump campaign's "America First" slogan, repeated in the address yesterday, has its origins in the isolationist America First movement associated with anti-Semitism.

In something apparently mostly written by Steve Bannon, former executive chair of Breitbart news, which he called "the platform for the alt-right," this is not surprising and continues the dangerous pattern of Trump's dog whistles—and worse—to the intolerant right.

Election 2012: What if the House were bigger?

As usual after a presidential election, there have been a lot of maps showing how the vote went in the US electoral college. One thing that I haven't seen get much discussion is the effect of limiting the size of the college itself.

Thanks to Nate Silver, lots of people now know the number of votes in the US electoral college (whether they realize it or not): 538. With the exception of the three given to Washington, DC, the electors are distributed to each state according to the number of congressmen it has. (DC's total is equal to the number it would have were it a state, not to exceed the number held by the least populous state.) This formula sets a minimum of three electors for each state, equal to its two senators and one House representative. Currently the seven least populous states have three electors. This minimum perpetuates the equality of states' voting power in the senate, where population is irrelevant and every state gets two votes. It's also the case that every state must have at least one representative, no matter how few citizens it has. In other words, the smallest states have more voting power than their populations would warrant otherwise. (There's also an inherent inequality in that there needs to be a whole number of electors, which means there will be other inequalities due to rounding.)

So what would happen if the House were bigger and there were therefore more electors and also a more proportionate relationship between a state's population and the number of its electors? In effect this would give more influence to the more populous states.

To check this out, I made a little spreadsheet to recreate the distribution of electors. The tricky part is assigning members to the House of Representatives. This assignment isn't quite straightforward (here's a nice little paper on alternatives to the current method), and my reconstruction spreadsheet of the current situation (435 members total) doesn't quite get it right (MN and RI are missing one member each), so my projection of what the House would look with more members is likely a tiny bit off too. (I could spend some more time on this, but I think I'm close enough and a little internet searching hasn't helped me out. Suggestions welcome in the comments.)

So what happens? In this election, Obama with 50.5% of the national vote got 332 electoral votes to Romney's 48% and 206. Had the House 485 members (an average of one more per state), Obama would have gotten 364 and Romney 224. Throw in another 50 and Obama's at 396 and Romney 243 (you'll note that my model is one over the real total of 638). In all cases, Obama wins a rounded-off 62% of the electoral college, so no change in that metric.

That doesn't mean that there would no changes at all in the way the election might go. For example, it might be possible to put together a different collection of states to win, or to neglect more of the smaller states and still win. It does however look like the picture wouldn't change much even with a much bigger House.

(It would be interesting to consider what would happen to the split between the parties in a bigger House, but given all the complications with drawing districts, that's far from straightforward to work out.)

Under God

Back in January, Kevin Kruse penned an op-ed for the Gray Lady on the 20th-century rise in American usage of "under God" with various prefixed words. It's an idea I'm generally sympathetic to (i.e., that many things that pass under the mantle of tradition aren't really traditional and in particular this emphasis on America as a Godly nation), but is the language part true? Kruse has written a book on the general subject, so I'm not going to try to tackle the whole thing, but what about some of these factual claims on usage? I think there might be some data the uninitiated among us could look at.

What exactly does Kruse claim in the NYT piece? First:

After Lincoln, however, the phrase ["this nation, under God"] disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century...

and this:

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Fifield and his allies advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Mr. Fifield distilled his ideology into a simple but powerful phrase — “freedom under God.”

then this:

Indeed, in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over the first presidential prayer breakfast on a “government under God” theme

and finally:

In 1954, as this “under-God consciousness” swept the nation

So where could we go to check up on all this? Google n-grams! This is a nice little service from the king of data mining himself (corporately speaking) that let's you look for phrases in book corpora. This won't get us everything, but it will get us a lot. So what is there?

First let's look at Ike's phrase of "government under God." Not one I was familiar with, but I wasn't around in 1953 either, so perhaps no surprise. I'm going to look in the corpus of American (not British) books for the entire period Google makes available. Here's the result at right.

Hmmm. Those early years give large results, but since there's nothing in between that and the later occurrences, I'm going to cut those years out of the next one. Now what do we have? Well, clearly a rise around 1953, as Kruse suggests, but the rise actually begins a bit earlier (which you can see by zooming in on the n-gram), and not just in spurious hits that this service sometimes finds, like "government under God's..." (because it pays attention to capitalization, but not punctuation, for some reason): there's even a book called, yep, Government Under God. So, sure, that's a phrase we might reasonably associate with Ike's usage, but it sure wasn't original to him.

How about "freedom under God," another phrase tied with a particular person? The first search shows nothing before the late 19th century, so let's zoom in on the period after 1850. Now there's a clear rise in 1941, following some decades of fairly minimal usage. Here too there's a book entitled with the phrase, this time by Bishop Sheen. Since books might take a little time to write and publish, this suggests increasing popularity, starting in the 1930s, consistent with what Kruse writes.

And that most famous of phrases, Lincoln's "this nation, under God"? I've taken out the smoothing in this plot to show the spikiness of the trend. The first peak back in the early 19th century is actually not a good one; it's got an apostrophe following "God," so all we have in the 19th century is the Gettysburg Address. Clicking through the later references, they too are mainly quotations of Lincoln. And once again there's a book by that title, this time from 1923. Overall though there isn't really an obvious increase in references to the speech in the early to middle 20th century. In fact if anything references die off a bit in the 1930s and 1940s. The n-grams therefore don't support Kruse's argument at all.

Finally what about the simplest, unprefixed form of the phrase: "under God"? The first run shows that it's a fairly popular phrase, on its way out in the 1900s after a peak in the middle of the previous century. At the same time there is definitely a little hump there, so let's zoom in (right). In the plot we can clearly see a resurgence in the phrase around 1940, though the increase seems smaller than the underlying trend. That's the sort of thing Kruse talks about, but it doesn't seem very impressive. Naturally there are a bunch of books with this phrase in their title, especially after the change to the Pledge of Allegiance, which seems more the consequence of what Kruse discusses.

In conclusion? The n-grams don't seem to offer much support for Kruse's contention. In particular the simple phrase "under God"—which dwarfs the more complex phrases in frequency—shows only a minor increase in usage after 1940, and a lot of that has to be attributed to the Pledge in 1954. But Google's just looking at books. How about the NYTimes itself?

Well, "government under God" gets us one hit, in 1957, which suggests this wasn't a big success. The Pledge's "one nation under God" first appears in an article about the Pledge itself, also no help for the theory. "Freedom under God" does seem to appear numerous times in the 1940s, including not a few by Catholic leaders. In fact Sheen's book, already mentioned above, seems to be the first reference in the newspaper. This seems consistent with the n-gram results in which the phrase appears in several Catholic sources from the 1920s.

As for the simple "under God," that appears a whole bunch of times even in the earliest years available in the search engine (1851-). For example, here's President Harding in his proclamation of Thanksgiving Day, 1921, which was subsequently quoted by the American ambassador to England, George Harvey.:

Under God, our responsibility is great; to our own first; to all men afterward, to all mankind in God's justice.

So where are we then? Well, this quick look at easily available data hasn't really allowed us to look closely at the context for a lot of the usage, though it does seem clear that

• "under God" was a phrase Americans would have been familiar with and 
• it enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in the 1940s and after, though did not see even a doubling is usage
• Lincoln's phrase was pretty much his invention and was (and is?) quoted, but hardly re-used
• "Government under God" went nowhere
• "Freedom under God" seems to have been popular in Catholic circles from the 1920s on

In conclusion, it's not unfair to say that the 20th century was a popular time for connecting God with the nation in a linguistic way, but it's not clear from what we've looked at here that the resurgence didn't start a bit earlier than Kruse seems to talk about, and didn't ride over a strong substratum of "under God"-liness. It also might have its origins not in the Protestant Fifield, but among Catholics (who may also have been allies of Fifield), something that might not be too surprising in today's political climate.

MLK, jr., Colossus

The new statue of Martin Luther King, jr., being dedicated this weekend is properly called a colossus, basically a really big statue. The most famous early example of the type was the Colossus of Rhodes, which represented a Greek divinity and stood for a fairly brief period by the harbor of that Greek island until knocked down by an earthquake in the third century BC. Perhaps better known—at least to students in my archaeology class—was the colossus of Nero, which stood in his equally oversized villa complex inside the city of Rome, and survived the destruction of that complex to stand next to the appropriately immense Flavian Amphitheater, which later borrowed its name from the statue to become the Colosseum. We actually have a few colossus-type statues in the United States, which has always seemed odd to me, given our apparent dislike of statues in general, at least out of a religious context. It's not that we don't have any statues, but we tend to put up monuments of other types, especially for people or events of recent date. For example, 9-11 memorials seem to be almost studiously aniconic, often made, like the one just put up in my town of Maplewood, NJ, from a piece of steel beam recovered from the site, which was actually  obtained via a program designed to help create such memorials. The statues we do have tend to be either generic, like the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, or of very famous men, long gone, like Lincoln.
But back to those colossi, our most famous example is probably the giant bronze statue of the Roman goddess that stands in New York Harbor. We got it as a gift, of course, but still, it's ours now. Then there's the seated colossus of Lincoln at his memorial in DC, and the partial colossi of the four presidents carved into a mountain in South Dakota (which also gives an example of a fairly recent person being memorialized, as Teddy Roosevelt had been president less than 20 years before the project was started and had died less than 10 years before). There's another, much less well known mountain relief carving of three Confederate heroes in Georgia, begun shortly before the Mt. Rushmore project, by the same sculptor, but not finished until the early 70s. (The early 20th century seems to have been a good time for colossal sculpture in America.) So the MLK colossus is a bit unusual for us, since it's been a while since we've had one of these, but not without its precedents, and rather firmly in the tradition of honoring great men who have been dead for a while. (I'm going to leave aside the whole genre of colossal roadside monuments, which is nevertheless worth thinking about in this context. And who knew how many colossal religious statues there were world-wide? Holy Cow.)
So what about the MLK monument? Well, while we haven't been building a lot of serious colossi for recent leadership in the US, some other countries have, and they tend to be the kind of countries we invade or don't/didn't get along terribly well with. Most people probably remember the statue of Saddam Hussein that we helped pull down in Baghdad back in 2003, and more recently there's Gaddafi's colossal fist with American warplane. But there are several others, from our more traditional rivals.
For comparison, here's the MLK statue (which seems to be a bit redder in most photos I've seen):

He's emerging from the rock, a bit stern, with lots of sharp edges (check out the crease in his pants). Here's a better shot of his face (AP photo):

Now here's the statue of Mao by the same sculptor (Lei Yixin):

Same tailor? Then there's this big Lenin:

And the Immortal Statue of Kim Il Sung:

In the end, it's hard for me to look at the MLK statue and not think of these other ones. Maybe state-sponsored architecture is always going to have some of that uncomfortable aura of official propaganda, but I'm sure another genre would not have evoked the same awkward (to my mind anyway) comparisons. I haven't been there yet, so it might be that this is all moderated in the context of the Mall, with Lincoln sitting not far away. (BTW, MLK is slightly taller than Lincoln would be if he stood up, so they're more or less made to the same scale.) I'll keep you posted.

(I'm of course not the first one to comment on this. Here's a NYTimes article from 2008 and you can easily search for some blog entries here and there.)

Just keeping track

2011-03-11

But let me emphasize that we anticipate this transition to take place in a matter of days and not a matter of weeks. And so I would expect that over the next several days we'll have more information, and the Pentagon will be fully briefing the American people, as well as the press on that issue.

2011-03-18

The United States is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya. And we are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal.

2011-03-30

The Obama administration has sent teams of CIA operatives into Libya in a rush to gather intelligence on the identity, goals and progress of rebel forces opposed to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, according to U.S. officials.

2011-04-21

 President Obama has authorized the use of armed Predator drones to attack Libya government forces fighting the rebellion against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi

2011-05-19
Tomorrow marks 60 days of US non-war in Libya, which would mark the end of the War Powers Act authorization if, you know, it existed.