Sherry Chandler

Adam Cohen in the NYTimes:

Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”

The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”

Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”

When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.

My “Day in History” sidebar tells me it was two years ago today that I last heard from Kelly Vinal.

I can only hope that he got bored with me and moved on. He was, at that time, a believer in the cause in Iraq as I have never been. Wherever he is, I wish him well. And I would be most glad to hear from him or to hear news of him.

On the recommendation of a friend, I have been reading Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (Alice James, 2005). Turner spent a year in Iraq with the infantry. Sample poems here.

I’m tempted to call him the Wilfred Owen of this war, but he is not that really. A culture can only have one Wilfred Owen experience, a zero-at-the-bone moment when poetry begins to reflect not the glories, but the horrors of war.

Though I am well aware that Homer did not flinch from the horrors and that the heroes of The Iliad are not all that glorious.

Turner seems to me a sadder, less angry poet than Owen. He had, perhaps, less innocence to lose. He is also fighting an enemy who is not a mirror image of himself. The poems in Here, Bullet try to show us many sides: the soldiers, the insurgents, the civilians.

These excellent poems give much clearer “news” of the war than that given by CNN et al. It should be required reading for every American citizen.

Postscript. “Kindness,” the Naomi Shahib Nye poem on The Writer’s Almanac today deserves special attention:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,…