This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

This poem was not published during Keats's lifetime.  It was found after his death, written or copied on the manuscript of another poem.  The last line is startling, as though the poet were trying to reach out from the page, emphasized by the shift from the expected “thee” to “you” in the last line.  In Keats's day “thee” was considered the loftier usage, more fitting for a poetic utterance — “you” brings the poem into the world of vernacular speech, like the hand trying to reach out into the reader's reality.  Keats holds his hand out not to thee, gentle reader of poetry, but to you — you, whoever you are.

Since this was one of the last poems Keats wrote, when he knew he was dying, we can read the reaching out as something directed at us, at posterity, from the grave he knew he would soon inhabit.  Perhaps it also embodies a cry of despair about the limits of poetry itself.  On a more literal level it may have been addressed to Fanny Brawne, his muse, from whom he knew he would soon be parting.

I've had many strange experiences in Las Vegas, but none stranger that seeing David Irving speak in a small banquet room at the Jokers Wild Casino, a little locals' joint on Boulder Highway, at the edge of town.

Irving is a very controversial historian of the Third Reich whom I've written about before, here and here.  The most prodigious researcher in the German archives pertaining to National Socialism, and in the archives of the Allies that house captured German documents on the subject, Irving has written a series of books which are essential compendia of facts about Hitler and his state.  But he has a bias — a desire to show that Hitler and the Nazis weren't as bad as everybody thinks, and that the Allied leaders were far worse than anybody thinks.

His motives in this are suspect, since he occasionally reveals anti-Semitic attitudes that offend the conscience, but his facts are always right, even if he marshals them to serve a twisted argument.  His books are respected, with reservations, by respectable historians, but he has been vilified mercilessly by just about everybody else.

He was imprisoned for over a year, in solitary confinement, in Austria for giving a speech in which he noted that the gas chambers at the Auschwitz historical site are reconstructions, which is true, and arguing that gassing was not in fact used systematically to kill prisoners there, which is hotly contested by other historians and by eyewitnesses.  His words were thought to violate Austrian laws against Holocaust denial.

Irving is not exactly a Holocaust denier — more of a Holocaust minimizer.  He admits that many bad things were done to Jews by the Nazis, just not as many bad things as historians have claimed.  And he insists that Hitler was out of the loop as far as the Final Solution was concerned — that Himmler instituted mass killings on his own hook, so that the “Messiah” of the German Reich would not be tainted by the policy.

This strains credulity, of course — imagining that a faithful lieutenant would do something so momentous on his own, something which Hitler would be held accountable for even if he knew nothing about it.  Still, Irving can point to the fact that no document recording Hitler's acquiescence in the mass extermination of Jews survives, and that Himmler regularly removed allusions to the policy from reports he passed on to the Führer.

It strikes me as more likely that Himmler simply had an understanding with Hitler that the policy of extermination would not be referenced in high-level documents of any kind, so that Hitler would never have to contend with opposition to it from his high-placed generals and ministers, and that Himmler would take the fall for it politically if it ever became generally known.  It wouldn't be the first time a politician used plausible deniability to try and cover his ass.

It's equally possible that documents recording Hitler's involvement in the Final Solution were destroyed before or during the apocalypse of Germany's collapse.

When I showed up at the Jokers Wild Casino I almost bumped into Irving as he wheeled a cart with boxes of his books into the place.  I greeted him but he hurried on gruffly, perhaps embarrassed by being seen in shorts and a sports-shirt hauling his own merchandise.

His talk was held after a buffet dinner, included in the price of the lecture, in a small private room off the casino's coffee shop.  The food was school cafeteria quality and barely warm.  There were about eleven other people in attendance.  I kept to myself, fearing what sort of conversations my fellow attendees might initiate.  I overheard one older guy railing against democracy — “It allows people to let off steam, to think they have some say over their government.  America isn't a government, anyway . . . it's a corporation.”

Irving's talk was generally reasonable.  He spoke at length about his imprisonment, and the tale was genuinely harrowing.  Irving reported to the outside world that the library of his prison contained several books he had written.  At this point, a high Austrian official ordered all books by Irving in all Austrian prisons to be removed and burned — “To show the world that we have moved beyond the Nazi era.”  The minister seemed to see no irony in using a book burning to demonstrate this point.

Irving then talked about his forthcoming biography of Himmler, which he promised would put to rest once and for all the idea that Hitler knew about the Holocaust.  He said he expected to endure further persecution upon its publication.

Irving said a few troubling things.  He said he told the Austrian press when he was finally released from prison that “Mel Gibson was right.”  He didn't elaborate on this in Austria, but to us he explained, “You know, about who started all the world's wars.”  In other words, the Jews.  He said that Churchill did not become anti-Nazi until after he was paid 48 thousand pounds by a Jewish organization in 1936 — an amount, Irving said, worth about 3 million dollars in today's currency.  The implication was that all of Churchill's fine rhetoric was bought and paid for by Jews.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:


There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,


Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —


That ever with a frolic welcome took


The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed


Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;


Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;


Death closes all: but something ere the end,


Some work of noble note, may yet be done,


Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.


The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:


The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep


Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,


'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.


Push off, and sitting well in order smite


The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds


To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths


Of all the western stars, until I die.


It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:


It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,


And see the great Achilles, whom we knew




Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though


We are not now that strength which in old days


Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;


One equal temper of heroic hearts,


Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will


To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I commend to all my fellow citizens of this republic David McCullough's wonderful biography John Adams. 
(That's Adams, bald and slightly pot-bellied, standing in the exact
center of John Trumbull's painting of the signing of the Declaration Of
Independence, above.)  Erudite and sagacious the book is also
compulsively readable, magically evoking the physical world of the 18th
and early 19th Centuries but also bringing the men of the Revolutionary
era to vivid life.

The founders of the United States Of America were certainly the
God-damnedest collection of characters who ever collaborated on a great
enterprise.  They seem mysteriously modern, perhaps because they
remain so recognizably American
— frank, down-to-earth, open-minded, industrious, optimistic . . . also pig-headed, venal and hypocritical 
There were scoundrels and rakes among them, men of faith and skeptics,
simple farmers and grand seigneurs — but they were all so unaccountably radical in their devotion to the ideas (if not always to the practical realities) of liberty and equality, of self-government.

And they were brave.  All the men above seen signing the
Declaration, many of them men of great wealth and position, would have
been hung as traitors by the English if their improbable revolution had
failed.  They don't seem to have had the slightest doubt that it
was a risk worth taking, and merely joked about the jeopardy — as
Franklin did when he said, “We must hang together or hang separately.”

It can't really be explained, except as a result of something that had
evolved over many generations in the experience of living in the new
world, habits of self-reliance and independence which the Founding
Fathers explicated and guided but did not invent.  Adams himself
knew this.  “The Revolution,” he wrote, “was in the minds and
hearts of the people.”

Adams may have been the oddest of all the “indispensable men” of that
time — neither a soldier nor a politician of any particular skill, not
a great writer or thinker but possessed of an orderly mind and endless
energy, he had a personal independence of thought and an an
incorruptible integrity which made him the go-to guy in any crisis.

It was Adams who ensured the appointment of George Washington as
commander in chief of the Continental Army, Adams who procured loans
from the Dutch to keep the government afloat in the early days of the
Confederation, Adams who, in drafting the Constitution of the
Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, created a key model for the American
Constitution.

The whole tale is surreal, unbelievable, but one loves Adams because he
didn't see it that way.  He seems always to have believed that the
seeds of liberty, once planted in good soil, would bear fruit — just
as the seeds he sowed on his Massachusetts farm brought forth peas and
corn.  At the end he was proud of what he had done for his
country, but he was just as proud of his farm.

Adams became President of course, for one term, after serving as George
Washington's Vice-President for two terms.  He lost his bid for
reelection to his then arch-rival Thomas Jefferson, and became the
first President to hand over the reigns of power unwillingly, convinced
that Jefferson would ruin the new nation before it could fairly get
going.  He groused about it, then jumped into a public stagecoach
and rode home, back to his farm, his peas and his corn.  He bowed
to the will of the people without further complaint.

In that moment, the American experiment justified itself to itself and to the whole world.

Perhaps the strangest thing about looking at these old
revolutionaries today is that they always seem to be staring right back at us, at the American future we
now inhabit.  In their regard there's hardly more than a trace of
self-satisfaction in what they accomplised, not a lot of sentiment, and
more than a little impatience.  “We started this business well enough,” they seem to
be saying, “now get on with it.”