As an American who was educated in Canada, I certainly appreciate
Germaine's perspective toward the drunken uncle.  It is as hard for many of
us to sever literature from the early modern morality which accompanies it
as it is to sever the study of literature from current events.  I watch my
own country's path with distress; although we did not elect our current
president, we foolishly missed a crucial opportunity to check his power in
the last congressional elections.  As with literature, current events are
more complicated than many would admit; many countries in the world would
support some military intervention in Iraq if it were clearly justified and
approached with more intelligence and respect for world  opinion than our
current president is capable of demonstrating.  Tragically, our national
pride seems to win out over any common sense, and this is a phenomenon
which our Canadian neighbors will find familiar.  I do not think that it is
fair to divide the Israeli settlers into 20% fanatics and 80% opportunists,
operating on the assumption that 100% are wrong.  The settlement of the
occupied territories is a complicated issue; as long as the authorities in
charge of Palestine maintain a commitment to the eradication of Israel, the
settlers can easily be seen as helping to maintain the security of Israel
in a complex situation -- far more easily than our US armies can be seen to
be maintaining our safety at the moment.  If literature is relevant to
current events, it is in my opinion more likely to be The Faerie Queene,
and the way that text encourages the perception of multiple perspectives
that change over time.


At 04:51 PM 3/19/2003 +0000, you wrote:

>What fascinating e-mails... and let us not forget the irony that many of
>Custer's soldiers were recent Irish immigrants, as well as Germans.  The
>revisionist historians and battlefield archaeologists are doing wonderful
>things with Little Big Horn, now, in debunking the myth of the "last
>stand" promulgated so effectively in 19th-century paintings and prints
>(what's the best poem on Custer, by the way?).  Instead, bullet traces
>reveal a gradual route and panicky break-down of discipline.  Custer's
>troops were dangerously forging ahead in any case to trap the women and
>children of the Sioux, thus forcing the men to surrender; hardly noble
>tactics but pragmatic.
>
>Miller wrote:  "His assignments left blood on his hands, but to Spenser
>and most of his contemporaries the military importance of Ireland was
>unquestioned: it was the avenue through which a Spanish invasion would
>almost certainly be mounted, and therefore a territory that England saw as
>essential to its self-defense."
>
>Maybe I can take issue with the phrase "most of his contemporaries" and
>even whether Ireland was a practical place of Spanish involvement through
>which to attack England.  Of interest is the regular lack in the 1580's of
>proper coastal defenses in Munster and elsewhere to defend against a
>Spanish invasion; Ireland, while threatening as the back-door into
>England, was not the ideal launching point of the Spanish, and the English
>admin. knew this, despite the regular protests of officers in Ireland that
>it needed better defenses.  The Spanish in any case mistrusted many of the
>Irish and considered most of them barbarians, those who didn't swear
>fealty to the English in any case; indeed the Armada tried to link up with
>the Netherlands forces and invade southern England; how much more
>difficult it would be to invade via Ireland!  Many of the Armada survivors
>in Ulster and Connaught were slaughtered by natives on the spot or handed
>over to English! authorities (as they were compelled to do). Only a few
>stood and rebelled with the Burkes (highly angry at Bingham) and later the
>O'Donnells and O'Neills.  Most tried to get home via Scotland.
>
>As for the intentional Spanish invasions, Smerwick was an expeditionary
>force of mostly Italians, which Desmond in their dire hour of need failed
>or refused to rescue; and even Kinsale, in 1601, occured only after
>intense begging by the Irish and the bold successes of O'Neill (including
>the sack of the Munster plantation).  Yet the fleet landed in one of the
>worst possible spots, probably because of the weather, a harbor far from
>O'Neill's power base and encircled by high hills convenient to besiegers,
>and the Spanish commander turned out to be extremely passive to the point
>of incompetence. O'Neill was forced to try to succor them with terrible
>results.  The Spanish were let go and never came back, unlike the French
>in later centuries.
>
>Spenser, then, was arguably exaggerating the threat in his View and his
>poetry (via the Souldan, Grantorto, etc), as served his turn:  when
>enemies are everywhere the govt. must give the settlers more arms and
>trust them with martial law, wich they then used for highly local
>purposes. (Nonetheless, the 9-Years War had begun by the time of Book V's
>publication and Kinsale did eventually occur as a result.)
>
>I agree with the insight that a modern analogy for Spenser's life would be
>as an Israeli, esp. as a settler and administrator in the occupied
>Palestinian territories.  Only %20 of these are religious fanatics,
>apparently (I have this from some vague source), and the other %80
>opportunists.  These %80 seem happy to couch behind the rhetoric of the
>religiosos, or are cowered by it, including Christian conservatives in
>this country (USA), to serve their own security needs.  --TH
> >From: dmiller
> >Reply-To: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >Subject: nations and persons
> >Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 08:56:53 -0500
> >
> >The recent outpouring of comment on Spenser and Ireland (and the
> >U.S.
> >Cavalry), politics and poetry, has struck me as about the most
> >interesting
> >thread we've seen on the Spenser list.
> >
> >Among so many thoughtful and shrewd responses it seems almost
> >invidious to
> >single out one or two, but the contributions this morning by
> >Grossman and
> >Willett have really got me thinking, or trying to. The examples of
> >Yeats
> >and Eliot are a reminder that we have so many fascists and near
> >fascists
> >among the modernists, whose work we nevertheless admire. Or if we
> >don't,
> >as Grossman suggests, the reasons are aesthetic, not purely
> >political.
> >
> >I'm far less settled than most of you seem to be in my thoughts
> >about
> >Spenser the colonialist. Perhaps this is why Zurcher's comments
> >strike
> >such a chord with me. I don't understand how to link the ethical
> >behavior
> >of individuals with the military and diplomatic behavior of nations,
> >either
> >in the sixteenth century or the twenty-first--let alone whether they
> >can be
> >linked in the same way for two such different worlds. Are the
> >individuals
> >in the US military now stationed in Kuwait about to become war
> >criminals? How about third-tier policy wonks in the State
> >department? Major contributors to the Republican party? Spineless
> >Democrats in Congress? Where does anyone's complicity begin or end?
> > Do we
> >achieve some sort of ethical purity with a candle-light vigil and an
> >e-mail
> >petition?
> >
> >Spenser came from a poor family and sought, through the paths that
> >were
> >open to him, to gain land and status in a social system that awarded
> >full
> >personhood only to those with land and status. His assignments left
> >blood
> >on his hands, but to Spenser and most of his contemporaries the
> >military
> >importance of Ireland was unquestioned: it was the avenue through
> >which a
> >Spanish invasion would almost certainly be mounted, and therefore a
> >territory that England saw as essential to its self-defense. (If
> >I've got
> >this wrong, there are clearly many on the list with the expertise to
> >correct me.) And in the end, whatever we think Spenser to have
> >been
> >"complicit" in or "culpable" of, he paid the full price for his
> >place in
> >the history of colonialism, driven from the land he acquired, his
> >house and
> >possessions burned, perhaps a child killed, perhaps any number of
> >manuscripts destroyed. He died at 46 or 47 under conditions of
> >enormous
> >distress. I would compare him less to Hitler or Custer than to the
> >citizens of modern Israel, caught in the vice of history and
> >international
> >politics.
> >
> >The suffering of the Palestinians today is hard to witness. But I
> >do not
> >feel quite entitled, from the comfort of my study, to pronounce
> >judgment in
> >highly moral terms on people who live every day waiting for the next
> >bomb
> >to go off, wondering whether their children are safe.
> >
> >
> >David Lee Miller
> >Department of English 543 Boonesboro Avenue
> >University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40508-1953
> >Lexington, KY 40506-0027
> >(859) 257-6965 (859) 252-3680
>
>
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Michael Baird Saenger, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of English
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