1. In my judgment, when it comes to great men of American history, there is George Washington, there is Robert E. Lee, and there is everyone else.

2. My history class has finally gotten up to the Civil War (the second one), so I’ve been reading up on it to patch up my knowledge of the sequence of events. I’ve noticed that every source, when talking about slavery, uses the term ‘enslaver’ instead of ‘master’ or ‘owner’. Is this the new politically acceptable term? If so it’s stupid. ‘Enslaver’ is what you might call an active adjective; it implies activity on the part of the actor and a change in condition on the part of the patient, that he was not a slave before, but now is. But someone like Dred Scott was not made a slave by his owner. Scott was born into slavery, and his owner merely purchased him after the fact. If anything or anyone could be said have ‘made’ Scott a slave, it was the law, not his owner.

We as a society really need to get over this habit of changing preferred terms every few decades as a social-engineering experiment. It’s childish, silly, and damaging to language.

Besides which, it seems to me that the term ‘owner’, applied to a human being, conveys the peculiar evil of slavery much better than the heavy-handed and inaccurate ‘enslaver’.

3. On the list of ‘things I need to do more research on’: I want to do a more critical examination of Abraham Lincoln to decide what I think of him as a President and war leader. The narrative, of course, is that he was the greatest President since Washington, but I don’t really trust historical narratives that much, especially American ones. We, as a nation are far too apt to tell flattering stories about ourselves that don’t hold up to scrutiny. Right now my impression of Lincoln is of a naturally brilliant man hampered by inexperience. He definitely made a lot of canny moves (the Emancipation Proclamation, for instance, is notable chiefly as a brilliant PR coup more than anything else) and had the sense to keep his personal feelings out of his dealings with his generals.

On the other hand, he was often a pretty clumsy leader, such as cycling through generals after each defeat and panicking any time Lee took a step toward Washington. There’s also the question of whether calling for a military response to the secession crisis was a good idea in the first place, given that it resulted in the loss of even more states and required him to shred the Constitution just to prevent Washington DC from ending up on foreign soil. There’s also the fact that, given the enormous advantages of the North, the wonder is less that the rebellion was defeated than that it took four years and half-a-million deaths to do so.

More research is required.

4. To me, the really amazing part about our second Civil War is the fact that the nation actually managed to heal afterwards and return to a united and largely amicable commonwealth, and that within in a startlingly short amount of time (a little over a single generation later and the sons of Confederate and Union veterans were fighting side-by-side in Cuba). This in spite of some appallingly clumsy and abusive behavior by the Federal government.

If you’ve read enough of my work, you know that I’m not the sort who feels obligated to compliment my country. On the contrary, I’m often very critical of it. But this is one aspect of our history that is truly remarkable, rare, and worthy of praise.

5. Whatever I end up thinking of Lincoln, I suspect poor Jefferson Davis will still come off worse as a leader. My impression of him is as a fairly talented man (mid-upper level politician) tackling a job that maybe one man in a million could have pulled off. Only, the Confederacy already had its man-in-a-million in the form of Lee, and alas, they weren’t gonna get another.

I would say I have more sympathy for Davis, for all he was the weaker leader, since he had by far the harder task.

6. Apparently I’m not the only one who found the ending to My Hero Academia disappointing, because I found it has since put out an extra chapter wrapping up some points that were left unresolved in the original ending.

Without going into spoilers, I think MHA fell into what might be called the ‘important story’ trap. That’s when the author gets too caught up with his themes and messaging and thinks that’s what the readers are chiefly interested in, when really they consider all that a side-show and really care about the plot and characters. The final few chapters of MHA spent much too much time on how society is changing and far too little time on the cast dynamics, and I found what it did do with them to be by and large disappointing.

I’m glad to say that the new ‘final’ chapter fixes some of that by mostly focusing on the characters. It doesn’t fix everything (which probably wouldn’t be possible without simply re-doing the final chapters), but it’s definitely a welcome addition that makes the story feel more complete.

7. And I stumbled across this and thought it was cool: