Opinionator | Disunion: The Civil War’s Most Famous Clown

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

A clown ran for public office – and no, that's not the beginning of a joke. On Sept. 15, 1864, America's most famous circus clown, Dan Rice, accepted the Democratic nomination for the Pennsylvania State Senate. And it was just his first foray into politics: Even while continuing his career as a clown, a state convention later considered him as a candidate for Congress, and, in 1867, he made a brief but legitimate run for president.

Photo Dan Rice, ca. 1870.Credit David Carlyon

While the idea of a clown running for office sounds like a gimmick, in the 1860s it was taken seriously — because circus itself was taken seriously, as adult fare. Long before it was relegated to children's entertainment, early circus in this country combined what appealed to grown-up tastes: sex, violence, political commentary and, in a horse-based culture, top-notch horsemanship. George Washington attended the first circus in 1793 in Philadelphia not for family-friendly amusement — a notion that didn't emerge until the 1880s — but as a horseman keen to see animals and humans working together at a peak level.

Sex and violence enhanced the appeal. Like later burlesque comedians, talking clowns told dirty jokes in a titillating whirl of the scantily clad: Circus acrobats and riders showed more skin — or flesh-colored fabric that seemed to be skin — than could be seen anywhere else in public life.

Walt Whitman approved. Reviewing a circus in 1856 in Brooklyn, he wrote: "It can do no harm to boys to see a set of limbs display all their agility." (In a favorite mind-plus-body theme, Whitman added: "A circus performer is the other half of a college professor. The perfect Man has more than the professor's brain, and a good deal of the performer's legs.") Meanwhile, fights were a daily occurrence, drawing attention the way fights at soccer matches do now. Violence was so common that Rice's journal from 1856 noted the rare days when no fight occurred.

And while nostalgia portrays early circus as small and quaint, antebellum tents were some of the largest structures on the continent, seating thousands, while over the winter, circuses played major city theaters.

Dan Rice stood in the center of this lively public arena. Born in New York City in 1823, he burst onto the circus scene in the 1840s with a lightning-quick wit and sharp topical instincts that made him a national favorite. Proclaiming himself "the Great American Humorist," he combined ad-libs, jokes ancient and new, sexual allusions, comic and sentimental songs, clever parodies of Shakespeare and quips on current events. (He did little physical comedy, which was the specialty of knockabout clowns and acrobats.)

Scholars believe that Mark Twain, who later adopted that Great American Humorist label, used Rice as his model for the clown described in "Huckleberry Finn," "carrying on so it most killed the people," as "quick as a wink with the funniest things a body ever said." Though obscure when he died in 1900, Rice had probably been seen by more Americans than any other public figure. Nor was renown restricted to the United States: Imitators in England and Germany appropriated his famous name in their own acts.

As the country tumbled toward war, Rice expanded his "hits on the times." Instead of Bozo, think Jon Stewart or Rush Limbaugh. Or Robin Williams, who shared the same quick wit, verbal virtuosity, and sharp political humor. (In fact, Williams toyed with the idea of playing Rice in a movie.) Rice's expanded approach extended to his costumes, as he alternated between traditional clown garb decorated in stripes and stars, and a new look of tailcoat, vest, and pants, the Great American Humorist as respectable gentleman, a man with serious opinions on the events of the day.

Once the Civil War erupted, Rice pushed directly into politics, a Peace Democrat condemning Abraham Lincoln and "Black Republicans" from the circus ring. By 1864, it was a natural step for the Democrats of Erie, Pa.., near his winter quarters in Girard, to choose the nationally prominent "Col. Dan Rice" as their candidate for the state senate. (The title was self-granted, matching the times' martial mood.)

Writing from his tour on Sept. 15 to accept the nomination, Rice denied that he worshipped "at the shrine of any political dogma," but did declare that his "proclivities were formerly with the Whigs." He condemned Lincoln for violating the Constitution and creating an imperial presidency. Rice wrote: "When I see the great principles of personal liberty and the rights of property being cloven down by the men now running the machine of Government, 'the ancient landmarks' of the Constitution 'which our fathers set' removed, I feel like crying, in the language of the Holy Writ, 'cursed be he that removeth them.'"

Historians, adopting the later family-friendly image of circus, assumed that a clown's campaign for office had to be a publicity stunt. But Rice's nomination was no joke. Chicago newspapers took it seriously: On Sept. 23, the Republican Tribune opened a two-day attack in its headline, "Dan Rice and Disloyalty." It complained that Rice filled "his ring talk with disloyal utterances and flings at Lincoln and the war. A trimmer so cautious as this personage who once, it is said, actually gave a performance under the confederate flag, should understand that this style of thing will not pay in loyal communities." (The "Confederate flag" jab was political spin, because Rice presented his circus in New Orleans when Louisiana seceded.)

Next the Tribune claimed that no one laughed at Rice's "quips and pasquinades persistently leveled at the President, the war, the government, and the anti-slavery sentiment of the north." That Rice could make these jokes and still attract customers is another indication that late into 1864, discontent about the war remained strong. The Tribune, in an allusion to Southern sympathizers known as Copperheads, concluded by urging the press on his route to guard that his jokes did not "resemble a certain kind of soda — 'drawn from copper.'" (Rice, visiting his friend Morrison Foster, Stephen Foster's brother, apparently met the notorious Copperhead Clement Vallandigham there.)

Related

Civil War Timeline

An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors.

Even as criticism of abolitionists continued, the crucible of war was burning away belief that the nation's "peculiar institution" of slavery was acceptable. And as the country changed, so did Rice. In a July 4 speech in Elmira, N.Y., he had declared that blacks "are God's creatures, and shouldn't belong to Jeff. Davis, or any other man," for they "were not made for southern planters to vote on, nor northern fanatics to dote on." He added a folksy variation on Lincoln's theme of equality: "Let every tub stand on its own bottom."

Rice ran an abbreviated campaign. He was still a businessman with a show to troupe. He also knew he faced an uphill battle, running against a Republican incumbent, Morrow Lowry, in a heavily Republican district. Whatever advantage his national renown gave him was offset by the leading families of Girard, who harbored the distaste of small-town gentry for "the show business." That distaste increased when Rice married into one of those families against their objections, to a woman the same age as his daughters.

Photo A trading card advertising Dan Rice's circus in 1873.Credit David Carlyon

Despite such handicaps, in November Rice ran ahead of the Democratic ticket. He attracted 40 percent of the district's vote, while the presidential candidate Gen. George McClellan got only 36 percent.

Later, like others who had criticized the war, Rice sought to shore up his reputation for patriotism. In 1865 in Girard he erected what was said to be the first Civil War monument, with a ceremony featured on the front page of the Nov. 25 Harper's Weekly.

He also began peddling a claim that he'd been Abraham Lincoln's pal, dropping by the White House to cheer up war-weary Abe and advise him on the mood of the country. Blatantly false, the tale thrived thanks to Rice's national stature and the postwar urge to paper over the bitter divide of the war. The Lincoln fiction survived intact into the 20th century, as a bit of trivia about the president, because it fit a new sentimentality about clowns as sweetly innocuous. It was easier to believe in a clown consoling Lincoln than one attacking him as a tyrant.

Another claim, though one that Rice didn't make himself, said he'd been the model for Uncle Sam. At first glance it's unlikely. Thomas Nast, the cartoonist who completed the evolution of that image to the icon we know today, was a fervent Republican who wouldn't have knowingly based anything on a fervent Democrat like Rice. But it wouldn't have been unusual to be unconsciously influenced by one of the most famous Americans of the era. In any case Nast drew a cartoon that echoed Rice perfectly, combining the famous clown's democratic irreverence, his trademark goatee, the top hat he often wore, and a mash-up of his two primary costumes, a clown's stars and stripes and the fancy wardrobe of a middle-class gentleman. If anyone could be said to have been the model for Uncle Sam, it was Dan Rice, circus clown and political candidate.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

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Sources: David Carlyon, "Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of " and Carlyon, "Twain's 'Stretcher': The Circus Shapes Huckleberry Finn," South Atlantic Review, 72.4 (Fall 2007); Dan Rice, "Fourth of July Oration," "Dan Rice's Songs, Sentiments, Jests, and Stories"; Walter A. McDougall, "Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era: 1829-1877."

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David Carlyon is the author of "Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of."

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Opinionator | Fixes: A Chance to Go From Hard Lives to Healing

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

Like too many young men in his East Oakland neighborhood, 21-year-old Shaka Perdue spent the earlier part of his youth "living like I was becoming a statistic," as he put it. At 16, he landed in juvenile hall after robbing a pedestrian in broad daylight. Two years later a friend was shot right in front of him in a drive-by. "In Oakland, you run into all the people you have problems with," he explained.

Perdue still hangs out in the neighborhood — but he now wears a stethoscope around his neck. He is one of 90 or so graduates of EMS Corps, a pioneering five-month program spearheaded by the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency that trains young men of color to be qualified emergency medical technicians. "You are the first person to approach the patients," Perdue said of his future as an E.M.T. "The nurses and doctors get them after they're stabilized in the field."

Started in 2012, the corps is a novel effort to recruit, train and mentor a new generation of emergency medical professionals: young men growing up in communities in which concentrated poverty, violence and unemployment are well-documented barriers to health and longevity. Graduates like Perdue have a singular perspective on health disparities — they've lived them.

"The young men who are vilified as noncontributing members of society are not the problem," said Alex Briscoe, the agency's energetic director, who got his start as a dropout prevention counselor at a tough Oakland high school. "They're the solution."

A founding premise of the corps, which has received just over $1 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is to create a strong pool of professionals who reflect the neighborhoods they serve. Though participants are trained to save peoples' lives, the corps strives to transform the young men themselves, and influence others who see them, by training them to do meaningful and decently paid work.

"Many of these young men have experienced a significant amount of violence," said Marc Philpart, an associate director of PolicyLink, a national nonprofit research and advocacy group. "Yet they are now exposed to a profession where they become healers."

Jimmy Jordan, another recent graduate, never knew his father and met his mother only once, six months before she died. He had a rocky adolescence, lost his first job, grew alienated from the older woman who was his guardian, and spent a number of years bouncing from sofa to sofa, shelter to shelter, occasionally sleeping in his car. "I used to be outgoing," he said. "But once I hit the homeless part of my life I sort of shut down."

Through a friend, he heard about the EMS Corps, which not only teaches lifesaving care but also provides a kind of life support for its trainees: five weeks of mentoring and "manhood" development — designed to strengthen leadership skills and cultivate a healthy African-American identity — followed by life coaching, individual and group counseling, and tutoring. Graduates continue to have access to counseling and are matched with paramedic mentors on the job. Each of the 50 or so young men accepted each year receives an $800 monthly stipend during training.

For Jordan, 24, the combination of mastering a skill and understanding the social context of his struggles helped him rewrite his life's script. Today, he is a health coach at Highland Hospital in Oakland, a county medical center known for its trauma center. He has an easy bedside manner. "I'm a compassionate person, and I always felt I wanted to share emotions with people," Jordan explained. "But I didn't know how to work through my anger and depression and have it not affect my future.

"The corps has made me proud of myself," he continued. "Being with patients is a maturing, humbling kind of experience. I'm not going to be another homeless teenager not knowing what to do with myself."

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More From Fixes

Read previous contributions to this series.

Most young men learn about the program by word of mouth, as Jordan did. Applicants — about 250 a year — must have a high school diploma or G.E.D., a driver's license with no more than two points on it and have no arrests for the past three years. The course meets six days a week and includes a volunteer component in which young trainees serve as educators at health fairs, schools and churches.

"I felt it leave," Mohamed Diouf, 21, said of the sadness, tightness and anger that came from being physically abused as a child. "The EMS Corps teaches you about values. You go from the boy mind to the man mind."

The program is part of a larger national movement to improve opportunities and health outcomes for boys and men of color, including President Obama's "My Brother's Keeper" initiative. In Oakland, homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men ages 15 to 34. It is a population disproportionately affected by inadequate schools, substandard housing, involvement in the criminal justice system and a lack of access to preventive care.

Rather than considering them "throwaway kids," the corps regards its young participants as community assets, said Junious Williams, the chief executive officer of the Oakland-based Urban Strategies Council, a research and advocacy organization. "Even if they decide an E.M.T. career is not for them, they leave the program with an understanding of health careers and confidence for the next stage of life," he said.

The $600,000 yearly tab for the program, which guarantees a job to all graduates who pass the National EMS Certification Exam, comes from a county sales tax for emergency health care.

Photo Antonio Grant, a participant in the EMS Corps program, performs a blood pressure screening during a health fair at Acts Full Gospel Baptist Church in East Oakland, Calif.Credit Lynsey Addario

Rachel Unruh, associate director of the National Skills Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based work force development group, said the corps incorporates many of the current best practices in what is known as "sectoral-focused employment training" — programs that tailor job training to the needs of local employers. Many programs focus on high schools: last year, for instance, the New York Alliance for Careers in Healthcare launched a program with a grant from the Heckscher Foundation for Children that is training 30 high school seniors and unemployed young adults to be certified as pharmacy technicians, "an occupation anticipated to have strong growth in New York City," said Shawna J. Trager, the executive director.

The EMS Corps began as a modest urban health initiative at Camp Wilmont Sweeney, a minimum-security residential program for adolescent males in San Leandro, Calif., run by the Alameda County probation department. The program didn't jell until the life coaching, mentoring and manhood development elements were added, said Michael Gibson, the EMS Corps director, who, himself, grew up in East Oakland, and whose parents both struggled with addiction. Gibson spent his youth in and out of juvenile hall for drug offenses. At 16, he was sentenced to eight and a half years in the California Youth Authority (now the California Division of Juvenile Justice).

He managed to break the cycle of self-destruction with the help of mentors from an African-American male transition program. "They pointed out what I was doing — the fake sense of manhood," he said. "They saw something in me that I didn't see."

He wound up with a full scholarship to Morehouse College. Now the EMS Corps members Gibson mentors mirror his younger self. "They have issues with low self-esteem, a negative attitude, and a lack of confidence due to trauma and family environments," he said. "They are young men ready for a second chance."

Much of the hands-on training for the Corps is provided by Bay Area EMT, a coed emergency medical worker program for 18- to 24-year-olds co-founded by two Oakland firefighters.

To date, about 75 percent of the graduates are working as E.M.T.s or in related positions. Some drop out for personal reasons and some are unprepared for the academic work. Dale Feldhauser, the chief operating officer of Paramedics Plus/California, which handles about 88 percent of the county's 911 calls with 62 ambulances, has hired five graduates and is expecting to hire three more. They are doing well on the job, he said, adding that he's only had to let go of one part-timer with an "attendance issue."

A challenge for the program is that there are now more graduates than jobs, so the health services department is scrambling to identify other opportunities, such as working with hospital health coaching programs or assisting at a local detox center.
More serious is a cautionary tale from Washington, D.C. A cadet program designed to train young firefighters fresh out of high school is currently under scrutiny after a 77-year-old man died of a heart attack across the street from a firehouse, where a rookie cadet at the station's watch desk was unclear how to respond, according to a Washington Post investigation. This program has a history of problems: in an earlier incarnation, a 19-year-old cadet was arrested and booked on a first-degree murder charge, one of a number of criminal incidents.

The corps goes to great lengths to avoid similar problems, screening its candidates carefully, said Dr. Jocelyn Freeman Garrick, deputy medical director for the Alameda County EMS Agency. The mentoring and coaching are essential, she added. "We can train all day, but if the young man's attitude, hope and vision is not re-directed, the same learned negative behaviors will continue," she said.

Teetering between his old life and his future one, Shaka Perdue asked himself a hard question: "Are you going to be the person who inspires the next generation to be good?"

Were it not for the corps — and "the support of 20 other guys who came from where you came from," he says that he would probably be earning minimum wage somewhere. Today, walking through his neighborhood, he often runs into the "O.G.s," or "older gangsters," who now treat him with respect. They don't resent his stable income or aspirations for a better life, he said. Instead they say: "I want you to talk to my son."

Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes. To receive e-mail alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here.

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Patricia Leigh Brown, a former staff reporter for The New York Times, writes regularly for The Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting from San Francisco. She was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has taught at UC Berkeley and Yale.

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Room for Debate: When Geeks Rule

A book of arcane questions by the creator of a bizarre comic strip beloved by scientists and tech workers recently debuted atop The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. The most heavily hyped new product has been Apple's version of a science-fiction totem, the gadget wristwatch. And "The Big Bang Theory" often leads the Nielsen ratings.

When fringe pleasures become popular, there can be consequences. So what does it mean when geek culture becomes mainstream?

Read the Discussion »

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Room for Debate: Does the U.S. Have the Allies It Needs to Fight ISIS?

A Military Campaign Alone Is Not the Solution

Ed Husain, Council on Foreign Relations

Political unity, free-market capitalism and religious pluralism can solve the deep problems of the Middle East, of which ISIS is just a symptom.

U.S. Must Lead, and Not Rely on Allies

Kimberly Kagan, Institute for the Study of War and Frederick W. Kagan, American Enterprise Institute

Allies can provide basing and support. But the U.S, a unique power, must be ready to commit even some ground forces if needed to face this threat.

Turkey Should Be the Strongest Ally, But It Won't Be

Gonul Tol, Middle East Institute

There are too many constrains -- concerns about hostages in Mosul, about Kurds, about Iraqi Shiites and the Assad government in Syria.

Beware of Blowback From Forces Being Fought

Khalid Al-Shatti, Former Kuwaiti legislator

Kuwait faced an invasion of extremism after the U.S. liberated it from Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. Can't Count on Regional Support

Dalia Dassa Kaye, Center for Middle East Public Policy

The Arab states could pay a severe price if expanded military action further exacerbates instability and displacement in the region.

ISIS Won't Be Defeated, Until the Syrian War Ends

Anja Manuel, Stanford University

Obama and Kerry are trying to do the right thing, but much difficult and diplomatic effort lies ahead.

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Opinionator | Menagerie: Useless Creatures

Menagerie: Just between us species.

This article contains no useful information. Zero. Nada. Nothing. If usefulness is your criterion for reading, thank you very much for your time and goodbye, we have nothing more to say. The truth is that I am bored to tears by usefulness. I am bored, more precisely, of pretending usefulness is the thing that really matters.

I mostly write about wildlife. So here is how it typically happens for me: A study comes out indicating that species x, y and z are in imminent danger of extinction, or that some major bioregion of the planet is being sucked down into the abyss. And it's my job to convince people that they should care, even as they are racing to catch the 7:10 train, or wondering if they'll be able to pay this month's (or last month's) rent.

My usual strategy is to trot out a list of ways even the most obscure species can prove unexpectedly, yes, useful. The first effective treatment that turned H.I.V. from a death sentence into a manageable condition? Inspired by the biochemistry of a nondescript Caribbean sponge. The ACE inhibitors that are currently among our most effective treatments for cardiovascular disease (and which have lately been proposed as a treatment for Ebola)? Developed by studying the venom of the fer-de-lance, a deadly snake found from Mexico to northern South America. The new medical bandage that's gentle enough for the delicate skin of newborns and the elderly? Modeled on the silk of spider webs.

Every time I begin this line of argument, though, I get the queasy feeling that I am perpetuating a fallacy. It's not that I'm telling lies; these examples are entirely real. But given, for instance, that three-quarters of our farm crops depend on insect pollinators, or that more than 2.6 billion people rely directly on seafood for protein, it seems a little obvious to be reminding people that wildlife can be useful, or, more to the point, that human survival depends on wildlife. Without saying so out loud, the argument also implies that animals matter only because they benefit humans, or because just possibly, at some unknowable point in the future, they might benefit humans.

You don't have to look too far to see how silly this can get. In truth, I don't have to look at all, because university press offices fill my inbox with examples every day: The Harvard scientists who hope their study of cuttlefish skin will "inspire improved protective camouflage for soldiers on the battlefield." The Berkeley team that thinks studying the genetics of blubber-eating polar bears could help us learn to live with our bacon-wrapped, wide-load lifestyle. And the wonderful folks at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, who believe "Squid sucker ring teeth material could aid reconstructive surgery, serve as eco-packaging." (And you thought they were good only for calamari.)

I don't entirely blame the scientists. Their research often depends on taxpayer funding, and their dreams are haunted by the ghost of United States Senator William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. That award garnered headlines by ridiculing outlandish-seeming items in the federal budget, and animal behavior studies were a juicy target. So now people doing that kind of research all feel obliged to imply that they are two steps away from a cure for the common cold. No basic research here, Senator, sir, no idle curiosity. Useful "R" Us. (They also delight in pointing out that one of Mr. Proxmire's targets — a $250,000 investigation into the sex life of the screwworm fly — has yielded $20 billion in benefits to American cattle farmers by enabling control of a major insect pest.)

Photo Credit Chloé Poizat

Improbably, wildlife conservationists now also often hear the call of the useful. Along with a large contingent of eco-finance bureaucrats, they try to save threatened habitats by reminding nearby communities of all the benefits they derive from keeping these habitats intact. Forests, meadows and marshes prevent floods, supply clean water, provide habitat for species that pollinate crops, put oxygen into the atmosphere and take carbon out, and otherwise make themselves useful. In some cases, conservation groups or other interested parties actually put down cash for these ecosystem services — paying countries, for instance, to maintain forests as a form of carbon sequestration. The argument, in essence, is that we can persuade people to save nature by making it possible for them to sell it. They can take nature to the bank, or at least to the local grocery. They can monetize it. (The new revised version of Genesis now says, "God made the wild animals according to their kinds, and he said, 'Let them be fungible.' ")

I understand the logic, or at least the desperation, that drives conservationists to this horrible idea. It may seem like the only way to keep what's left of the natural world from being plowed under by unstoppable human expansion and by our insatiable appetite for what appears to be useful. But usefulness is precisely the argument other people put forward to justify destroying or displacing wildlife, and they generally bring a larger and more persuasive kind of green to the argument. Nothing you can say about 100 acres in the New Jersey Meadowlands will ever add up for a politician who thinks a new shopping mall will mean more jobs for local voters (and contributions to his campaign war chest). Nothing you can say about the value of rhinos for ecotourism in South Africa will ever matter to a wildlife trafficker who can sell their horns for $30,000 a pound in Vietnam.

Finally, there is the unavoidable problem that most wildlife species — honey badgers, blobfish, blue-footed boobies, red-tailed hawks, monarch butterflies, hellbenders — are always going to be "useless," or occasionally annoying, from a human perspective. And even when they do turn out, by some quirk, to be useful, that's typically incidental to what makes them interesting. Cuttlefish do not fascinate because their skin may suggest new forms of military camouflage, but because of the fantastic light shows that sometimes play across their flanks. Spider web silk doesn't intrigue because somebody can turn it into bandages, but because of the astonishing things spiders can do with it — stringing a line across a stream and running trotlines down the surface to catch water striders, for instance, or (in the case of the species named mastophora dizzydeani) flinging a ball of silk on a thread like a spitball to snag moths out of the air.

Wildlife is and should be useless in the same way art, music, poetry and even sports are useless. They are useless in the sense that they do nothing more than raise our spirits, make us laugh or cry, frighten, disturb and delight us. They connect us not just to what's weird, different, other, but to a world where we humans do not matter nearly as much as we like to think.

And that should be enough.

Richard Conniff is a contributing opinion writer and the author of "The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth."

A version of this article appears in print on 09/14/2014, on page SR8 of the National edition with the headline: Useless Creatures.

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Opinionator | The Conversation: Our Reluctant National Security President

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

David Brooks: Gail, I'd like to start by asking you about embarrassing omissions. Are there books you haven't read or places you haven't been that you really should have in your cultural repertoire?

Gail Collins: Good grief, David. I'm not going to compare cultural repertoire defects with you. You've read half the books in the world.

David: Actually, my gaps are glaring. Pretty much everything by Dickens is a void for me — I just can't get into the guy. And every epic poem ever written except "The Divine Comedy." If I'm going to read a story, I need paragraphs.

Gail: O.K, that makes me feel better. There's nobody I love better than Charles Dickens. "Bleak House" was my inspiration as a pundit. Also, since you don't read epic poetry I am going to pretend that I do. Yes! "Orlando Furioso" is my favorite.

David: As for places, I have never been to Norway, which you just visited, but I don't feel any moral obligation to see Scandinavia again. I should have visited Greece, Turkey and Japan, though.

Gail: David, are you suggesting that I attempted to raise questions about your geographic well-roundedness by telling you I've been to Norway? Honestly, you don't have to go. It's all right.

David: I raise this question for grand strategic reasons, naturally. Over the past few years the United States has been guilty of an embarrassing glaring omission. A succession of presidents has neglected to shore up the global state system.

Gail: Stop a second. When people bring up terms like "global state system," I tend to blank out. Perhaps it's like you with Dickens. But please, rephrase. Do you mean the United Nations and NATO or just a general working-together by countries of good will?

David: I'd put it this way. In the past, maintaining the global state system was almost instinctual for presidents. From Franklin Roosevelt through George H.W. Bush, we've had a series of leaders whose foreign policy visions were formed by the conflicts against fascism and communism. These leaders had a reflexive commitment to global institutions that contributed to global regularity and order. Leaders of this generation know how much effort it took to tend to these institutions.

But baby boomers — yes, this is another thing people can blame our generation for — did not grow up with that consciousness.

Gail: I should have known. Nothing bad exists that was not the fruit of the boomers. Do you remember all those years when we ruled? First the older generation worried about why we were so ticked off and asked themselves how they failed us. Then every company in the world asked what it would take to make us buy their stuff. I should have known there'd be payback.

Now we're just the dumping ground for every problem from rising health costs to declining productivity.

And we've also screwed up the global state system? I warn you David, it's just a matter of minutes before somebody starts talking about building ice floes to put us on. Despite global warming, which is undoubtedly our fault too.

David: Well yes, you make a good point, but let me continue on this theme. The decline in the management of this global system came from the right: George W. Bush's weak coalition building skills —and from the left: President Obama's tendency to withdraw to attend to nation-building at home.

Gail: That's a nice way of putting it. By "attend to nation-building at home," I presume you mean "wrestling with the crazed domestic right wing."

I'm not sure I'm going to agree with your theory, but finish it before I say something unsupportive.

David: America's leadership problems have been compounded by the fact that Europe has not been able to coordinate an effective military or foreign policy apparatus. And a new superpower, China, has failed to accept any responsibility for maintaining the system by which it rose.

The result is like when the normal teacher is off sick and the substitute teacher takes over. Do you remember those days? Every student started off a little more rambunctious. The class clowns and bullies picked and probed to see what they could get away with.

Gail: You're looking at a decline of presidential leadership since World War II. I see a western world that has learned painfully, over and over again, how impossible it is to fight a ground war in other people's countries. Particularly on a planet where your friends aren't the only ones with weapons of mass destruction.

So maybe it's not the presidents who have changed, but the world they confront.

David: In the Middle East the decline of the state system has created a vacuum that religious armies have filled. Conflict in the region is no longer defined by the Arab-Israeli dispute. That's now a sideshow to the Arab vs. Arab war that is taking place on about four levels at once. It's amazing. Since 1648 religion has been largely neutralized as a force in foreign affairs, but now ISIS wants to replace state system rules with religious war rules. Arab identities will be defined by the Sunni/Shiite rivalry and by fealty to jihadism.

Gail: You're right, it is amazing, although I don't think it's unique to the Arabs. Having spent a little part of my younger days in Northern Ireland, I do kind of understand people's capacity to use religion as an all-purpose cover for fights that are really about historic grievances.

David: All of this brings us home to President Obama.

Gail: I knew you were going to bring us back to President Obama.

David: It's funny, but I don't think his problem is conceptual. Occasionally he will say something unfortunate, like the time he told donors that the world is always messy. That is a completely inadequate diagnosis of the degradation of the global state system.

Gail: I agree it was unfortunate, but I heard it a different way. That it's harder for the developed world to just go in there and bang heads because people who are all connected through the Internet can no longer close their eyes and shrug about the collateral damage. It made him sound as if he regretted those good old days, although I'm sure he didn't mean it that way.

I do wonder if we would have bombed Japan if we knew everybody in Hiroshima had a smart phone.

David: In general, President Obama's descriptions of the threats to the global order are robust and accurate. Yet there is a yawning chasm between his comments and his policies. He says ISIS is a cancer that can't be tolerated anywhere. Yet his policies, at least so far, don't lead to the destruction of ISIS, especially inside Syria. He understands that Vladimir Putin threatens the norm that big nations don't gobble up little ones, and yet he is against giving Ukrainians the weapons they need to deter attack.

Gail: Without getting into Ukraine I do want to question the idea that the answer to all the problems of the world is to give the other side a whole bunch of weapons. How did ISIS get to be such a huge threat? In part because it was able to capture weaponry that we gave to Iraq.

David: What do you think the president should say tonight and do afterward?

Gail: Well, I am pretty sure that you'll get your wish about the global state system. He'll talk about his plans in the context of an international alliance of some sort.

David: I suspect tonight's address will be the defining talk of his last two years. He's learned that, especially in foreign affairs, presidents don't get to choose their policies. A guy who came amid promises of withdrawal, amid talk of a pivot to Asia, vowing to do nation building at home, and arguing that military force is usually not the answer, is now going to be pivoting to the Middle East and using military force.

We are playthings of fate.

Gail: Here's the thing we're going to see with every post-9/11 president: They come in with principled theories about what they're going to do, and then they read the intelligence and listen to their advisers spin the most horrific projections possible about what could happen. What terrorists are trying to do. And they imagine the awful things that could happen under their watch.

Barack Obama isn't going to be the only expert in constitutional law who comes into office and tolerates unconstitutional wiretaps. I think history will judge he was wrong on that point. But there's an excellent chance that history will also find that rather being slow on the war with ISIS, he was generally very smart in erring on the side of caution.

David: I suspect President Obama will be forced by circumstances to go against his inclinations and goals. He simply cannot leave office with ISIS in good shape. He wasn't elected to democratize Iraq. He was elected amid promises that he would destroy Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

Gail: He was elected as the guy who promised not to get us involved in any more stupid wars. And that's still an excellent goal.

David: One hard part, I'd say, is that Obama is governing at a time of low legitimacy, when people don't really believe America can be an effective player in the world. I suspect Obama shares this belief to some extent. And he's got to persuade current voters, in a way the WWII generation never needed to be persuaded, that the democratic community can be effective at defeating tyranny.

To do this he somehow has to set more realistic goals. Obviously George W. Bush's goals of spreading freedom and defeating evil were too lofty, but that doesn't mean we need to flip over and fatalistically assume we can do nothing. President Obama's assaults on ISIS have so far borne enormous fruit. Sometimes force works. Sometimes war is the answer.

Gail: So I think you're saying that Obama's doing pretty darned well.

Let's go back to where we started. Which was you mourning the loss of the global state system. Well, first you dissed Charles Dickens and Norway. But then it was the global state system.

And I still hate that phrase. Can't we just say something like "working effectively with our allies?" And if so, do you really think a President Romney or McCain could have done it better?

David: The hard part is explaining to the American people what the system is. You can barely see it or feel it. But it is the unconscious background for everybody's behavior, the good guys as well as the bad guys.

Gail: True, but I think it's in better shape now than it would have been with a different president.

And I hope it's a really good speech. I want Obama to take on all the jerks who are yelling about how we need to go in there and squash the enemy like a bug, or fight like men, or just blow the bad guys to smithereens.

We've long discovered he's not the magic wordsmith we thought he was during his first run for office. But I hope he explains his plans tonight in a way that makes people feel like we can be strong and sensible at the same time.

David: None of the individual problems we face is going to threaten American interests. It wouldn't be worth expending significant resources, even on the horrific Syrian civil war, if that was all that was at stake. But those kinds of conflicts are undermining the whole system of shared assumptions that kept everybody in line.

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Room for Debate: Who Owns Fashion?

It's Fashion Week in New York City and insiders and fans alike have flocked to witness the season's new designs. Many of the "fast fashion" retailers are present as well, ready to manufacture similar styles at a mass-market scale.

But where is the difference between mimicking a trend and theft? Some advocate for better legal protection for original designs. Do fashion designers need better copyright protection?

Giselle Defares, a writer in Amsterdam, suggested this discussion.

Read the Discussion »

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Opinionator | Bedside: When It’s the Doctor Who Can’t Let Go

Bedside is a series about health care from a nurse's-eye view.

Sometimes it's the doctors, not the families, who can't let a patient go.

My elderly patient had lived much longer than seemed possible at the time of his cancer diagnosis. Ten years later, though, his relapsed lymphoma had become medically unstoppable.

The palliative care team was called in to manage his growing confusion and discomfort, and to discuss what we call "goals of care." That's what palliative care does: It focuses on keeping symptoms under control for the seriously ill and, for patients who can't be cured, addressing how they want to die, including the option of hospice care. Now that this patient's disease could not be restrained, what did he want? He could no longer answer, but his wife and son, sad but cleareyed, chose to stop all treatment aimed at curing his cancer.

Hearing this, his oncologist, standing beside me at the nurse's station, cried, heartbroken that her patient of so many years would not rally one more time.

That evening, though, the patient's primary care doctor came to the hospital, seeing himself, it seemed, as the cavalry. There was hope yet, he said: The patient needed rehab to make him strong enough for more chemotherapy, not palliative care and hospice. So the patient — disoriented and unable to speak — went to an inpatient rehabilitation unit. He died there, a few weeks later.

I'm sure the primary care doctor meant well, but there's no question that his actions made the situation worse because he deprived the patient and his family of comfort at the man's life's end. And this was far from the first time I've seen something like this happen. Such situations arise in part because modern health care still embraces a false dichotomy between curative treatment and palliation, between making a patient healthy and relieving his or her pain.

Photo Credit Sanya Kantarovsky

Palliative care itself suffers from an identity problem, in that many people equate palliation with hospice — i.e., end of life. This mistaken association can make a palliative care consultation feel like a death sentence to even the most open-minded clinicians, patients and family members. Striving for a cure is historically seen as a unique pathway that restores health; easing suffering is a separate, non-curative path that ends with the patient dying.

And it's true that palliative care does offer symptom management to patients who are expected to die soon, as my lymphoma patient was. But it is more than that: It also helps patients with long-term illnesses like congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, people who are expected to live with their illness, but need careful managing of their symptoms. If it becomes clear that a patient receiving palliation along with curative treatment will not survive her illness, then the palliative care group works with the medical team to help her make the transition to hospice and help her decide how to spend the last of her time on earth.

Palliative care can extend life, too. A well-known 2010 New England Journal of Medicine paper co-written by Jennifer S. Temel, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, established that patients with a certain type of lung cancer who received early palliative care not only reported better quality of life and reduced symptoms of depression, but also lived longer than patients who received only traditional oncology care — a result that has since been found with other forms of cancer.

Often, though, the palliative care team is consulted late in the illness, as was the case with my patient. One reason is money: To put it in the crass language of hospital accounting, palliative care is de-incentivized. It saves hospitals money by reducing costly and often futile care at the end of patients' lives, but earns little compared with the expensive drugs and scans used in curative treatment.

But another barrier is the attitude of physicians themselves. Many oncologists, focused on keeping patients alive for as long as possible and hoping, always, to beat the odds, find it hard to discuss what might happen if they don't.

It was the same with my patient's oncologist. Hearing about the move away from palliation to rehabilitation, she sounded relieved. "Well, if he goes to hospice he'll just die," she said — as if there were another alternative. She knew better than anyone that our bag of chemotherapy tricks was empty, but facing that reality proved too hard.

Had the palliative care team been consulted earlier, it could have worked with the primary care doctor, the nurses on the floor and the oncologist to understand and communicate the patient's wishes over a period of time, perhaps even when the patient could still speak for himself. Instead, the patient got lost in the back and forth, as did his family, caught between the rock of his imminent death and the hard place of arranging for rehabilitation that was presented as his salvation, but offered no real help or comfort.

Doctors face a difficult paradox: Their job is to keep patients alive, but part of that means keeping at bay the dark awareness that everyone dies. Because doctors are supposed to cure, efforts directed elsewhere, even palliative care, can feel like a surrender. But their job might actually be easier if they found a way to better use what palliative care can achieve for patients, and not only at the end of life.

Physicians also need to recognize that there are occasions when the patient's fate is not, in the end, the doctor's work. Every patient deserves care on his own terms, for each patient's life, and death, is his own.

Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse and the author of "Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between."

A version of this article appears in print on 09/07/2014, on page SR4 of the National edition with the headline: When It's the Doctor Who Can't Let Go.

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Room for Debate: Tax Break for Sports

End the N.F.L. Tax Breaks

Ryan Alexander, Taxpayers for Common Sense

Sports leagues like the N.F.L. help teams make money through business ventures – a fine goal for teams, but not one taxpayers need to subsidize.

Nonprofit Status Is Irrelevant

Andrew Zimbalist, economist, Smith College

The tax exemption does not apply to the individual teams, but to the leagues, which operate as pass-through entities.

It Might Not Bring In Any More Money

Judith Grant Long, Professor of Sports Management

Focusing on the nonprofit issue detracts from the more substantial burdens placed on taxpayers in the building and taxing of sports stadiums and arenas.

Sports Leagues Do Not Need Taxpayer Help

Patrick Hruby, Journalist

The N.F.L. as a whole takes in over $9 billion in annual revenue, more than the reported 2013 GDP of 49 countries.

Nonprofit Teams Rather Than Leagues?

Richard Steinberg, professor of economics

Many commercial organizations are nonprofits, as billion-dollar universities sell education and hospitals sell healthcare.

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Opinionator | Menagerie: Sympathy for a Desert Dog

Menagerie: Just between us species.

Photo Dogs in Namibia's Kalahari desert live among the people in the village, not in their homes.Credit James Suzman

Dog adopted me in 1995, six months or so into my first spell of ethnographic fieldwork among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen in Namibia's Kalahari Desert. I was living in the village of Skoonheid, named after an Afrikaner farm. He was the bravest of all the village dogs in seeking affection. The others loped around, their tails between their legs, trying to be invisible. They shied from physical contact with people but would respond with surprised and simpering gratitude if it was offered. Most of their physical interactions with people came in the form of kicks or flying stones.

The village dogs' only real joy came when they joined a foraging or hunting party or when they would assemble as a pack to tear around the village and the surrounding bush. Then their tails would wag and they would briefly forget their hunger.

Photo The dogs shied from physical contact with people but would respond with surprised and simpering gratitude if it was offered.Credit James Suzman

Each dog loosely belonged to someone in the village, but they were not considered objects of affection or "part of the family." The Ju/'hoansi were the direct descendants of people that had hunted and gathered continuously in this part of the Kalahari for tens of thousands of years but had recently been dispossessed of most of their lands by Afrikaner cattle ranchers. There was now rarely enough food to go around and dogs were expected to take care of themselves. So they scavenged for scraps around fires at night, and if these were inadequate they hunted lizards, mice, insects and all manner of other desert creatures. One man claimed his dogs had learned to hunt and eat snakes, although they did so less since one was killed by a cobra.

Dog adopted me because I had food to share and was happy to give him affection. In return Dog offered me companionship in a place that was, back then at least, often alien and unsettling. Out of sight of others, I slipped Dog leftovers from my plate and later gave him his own bowl. I would also scratch his ears and chest and he'd sit curled at my feet by the fire. Dog would have accompanied me everywhere if I let him. But the one time I took him in my truck he panicked, so I left him to fend for himself whenever I had to travel elsewhere.

Dog was a typical Africanis, a distinctive breed believed by some to be descended from the dogs pictured in Egyptian hieroglyphs. His ancestors slowly worked their way through human settlements across Africa around two millennia ago. And wherever the breed became established, it evolved over successive generations into sub-breeds better adapted to their particular environments. Fossil remains suggest that these dogs first arrived in the Kalahari 700 years ago. Here the environment selected the fast and the stealthy — those that could hunt independently, scavenge from predators and humans and get away quickly when they needed to. Standing only a foot and a half at the shoulder, Dog was more a whippet than a muscled lion hunter like his cousin the ridgeback.

Photo This dog in the village looked a lot like Dog.Credit James Suzman

My relationship with Dog was short-lived. Several months after adopting him I returned from a trip to find him cowering deep in a thicket of swaarthaak acacia — a place where no one could reach him without getting shredded by thorns. His tail thumped the ground when I called, but some primal fear would not let him draw close enough for me to grab him. Through the lattice of thorns I could see the problem. There were several patches on his back where his hair, skin and flesh had dissolved. The white of his ribs was visible as if they had been bleached and the flesh was black and scalded. A little investigation revealed the cause of his suffering. Some of the children had found a bottle of industrial acid that I had purchased to clean a pipe and carelessly left out. They had experimented with its corrosive powers. First on various objects, then on another dog and finally on Dog.

Dog cowered under that bush for another day or so as his organs gave in. I pushed some food and water into the thicket but he did not respond. In then end we hacked into the bush to retrieve him. By then he was barely alive and in great pain. Once he was out, my friend Kaice quickly clubbed Dog's head with a spade, which I then used to dig Dog a small grave that I marked solemnly with his bowl and an unspecific prayer.

My demands that the children should be punished and made to be aware of the pain they had inflicted confused my Ju/'hoan neighbors. I was informed that "Dog was a dog" and that the children should not be punished for demonstrating curiosity.

To empathize with an animal you couldn't think like a human and project your mind-set into it; you had to "be" the animal.

They had found my habits of feeding and petting Dog odd enough, but the idea of giving it a human burial just seemed absurd. But it was not completely without reference. The Ju/'hoansi considered the white ranchers that had "stolen" much of the land here tended to have "peculiar" relationships with their pet dogs. Dogs usually were offered the passenger seats in ranchers' trucks while Bushman workers were confined to the bed. Dogs were fed meat and lavished with affection when Bushmen workers were given maize porridge and complained of being beaten regularly. Ju/'hoansi were rarely if ever allowed into a farmer's house, whereas dogs were known to sleep in farmers' beds — a cause of general hilarity among the Ju/'hoansi.

Eventually Kaice broached the uneasy topic with me.

"/Kunta," he said addressing me by my Bushman name, "the problem with you whites is that you think dogs behave like humans or even that your dogs think that they are humans. They are not humans. They are dogs. Their ways are different."

It took me a while to understand Kaice's point and the apparent indifference of the Ju/'hoansi to the suffering of dogs. It seemed at odds with the idea that Ju/'hoansi and other hunter-gatherers had deeply empathetic relationships with the animals they lived among. But in time I learned that this is precisely what justifies the indifference.

Ju/'hoansi insisted that animals were people. Not humans but people. They asserted that each species of animal had its own physical forms, customs, habits and ways of experiencing and interacting with the world. Ju/'hoansi claimed to know this because they observed, engaged with and empathized with the animals with whom they shared their world.

Most pet owners claim that the sympathy they offer their pets is based on an empathetic relationship with them built on traits our species and their species have in common — in the case of dogs their sociability, their loyalty, their gratitude.

But this is a different understanding of empathy than that which hunter-gatherers like the Ju/'hoansi had for their animal neighbors.

For them animal empathy was not a question of focusing on an animal's human-like characteristics, but of assuming the whole perspective of the animal. Their animal empathy defied verbalization. To empathize with an animal you couldn't think like a human and project your mind-set into it; you had to "be" the animal.

Photo There was rarely enough food to go around and dogs were expected to take care of themselves.Credit James Suzman

This view of empathy was the product of millennia of living among the wild animals of the Kalahari as "neighbors" and hunting them. Where other peoples defined themselves by reference to other tribes or nations, Ju/'hoansi defined themselves in terms of the their differences from the lions, elephants, aardvarks, elands and many other desert creatures they lived among. Their animal neighbors were a constant source of fascination. Any interesting or unusual animal behaviors, habits and interactions would generate considerable discussion. Their knowledge of the animals was such that they were able to establish an animal's apparent motives and actions from a few scuffs in the sand, sometimes a day or two old, and accurately predict its movements or behavior on this basis. But their success as hunters, after all, depended on their ability to accurately anticipate the behavior of their prey. And this, they insisted, required empathy.

Typically Ju/'hoansi hunted with small poison arrows that lacked fletching. It took great skill and knowledge to get close enough to an animal to shoot it and even greater skill to able to track the animal down as the poison did its work, which could take between six and 48 hours depending on the size of the animal. After shooting a large animal like an oryx or a giraffe, a hunter would memorize the individual animal's spoor and return the following morning to track it down.

When a hunter found and followed his prey's spoor he would not merely read it but surrender himself into it, living each footfall that scuffed the sand. In doing so he plunged into his prey's consciousness, dissolving the boundary between the hunter and the hunted. Finally, by consuming their prey, the hunter and the prey's relationship would move from an empathetic union to a physical one as they literally became of one body.

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Read previous contributions to this series.

But this kind of empathy did not persuade Ju/'hoansi and other hunter-gatherers to feel sympathy for animals or assume a duty of care for them. Rather it made people focus more on the non-human behaviors of animals rather than what they had in common. Among people who considered themselves to be just one of many different kinds of animal-people in a wild environment, hunting, death and pain were parts of everyday life. Human compassion did not extend to other species.

My relationship with Dog, as the Ju/'hoansi reminded me, was an artifact of the Neolithic Revolution. The domestication of the wolf was but a small part of a transition that fundamentally reconfigured how humans related to their environments. Where they once saw themselves as one of many creatures sharing environments, they now placed themselves at its center and sought mastery over it. Accordingly animals were divided into a series of new categories based on how they fit into the human world. Some were designated pets or "livestock" – and a duty of care was extended to them. Others were designated pests or vermin. Animals ceased to be considered different kinds of "people," and those like dogs were selected and bred, for human-like traits, among other things, that we could easily empathize with without displacing our sense of ourselves as humans.

My and Dog's lives intersected momentarily. And I am glad they did. We were both Neolithic orphans stranded in a Paleolithic world. The Ju/'hoansi's sense of interspecies relations and their extraordinary empathy was right for the wild animals that shared their world, and there is much we can learn from it. But when it comes to dogs, and other creatures that have evolved to crave our affection, I am glad to be a child of the Neolithic.

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James Suzman is an anthropologist who has spent most of his adult life working with and writing about Kalahari and its peoples. He is the founder of the research organization Anthropos.org, based in Cambridge, England.

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