Lindbergh gets a little more attention than he deserves; the fate of the pop
celebrity, I suppose. Many more deserving intellectuals espoused isolationism,
though they are long-forgotten now.

Lindbergh's fate is, however, a reminder of how dangerous it can be to go
against the political tides.
Another, more significant and serious example of this is the poet Robinson
Jeffers, once vastly popular, but condemned to obscurity by his opposition to
US foreign policy. He could write about incest and bestiality and make the
cover of Time magazine, but once he wrote, in his poem "Pearl Harbor," such
lines as, ".... The men who have conspired and labored to embroil this republic
in the wreck of Europe have got their bargain--and a bushel more...." and
"....The war that we have carefully for years provoked Catches us unprepared,
amazed and indignant. Our warships are shot Like sitting ducks and our planes
like nest-birds, both our coasts ridiculously panicked, And our leaders make
orations...." he was professionally dead and his popularity crashed, never to
fully recover.
Like Lindbergh, he hovered around the edges of the culture after the war, a
figure from a past era whose continued presence seems to have made people
uncomfortable.

Jeffers was compared by Freeman Dyson to Einstein, not just because of his
political and social vision but also his desire to discover a broader, truer
sense of the universe and our place in it. Environmentalists like David Brower
were drawn to him, and scientists like Loren Eisley; great historians of
religion like Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith were avid students of Jeffers;
and the photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston rooted their understanding
of the sublime in nature, which they tried to capture in their art, in their
reading of Jeffers. Of Tor House, the home in Carmel that Jeffers built for his
strikingly beautiful wife Una with his own hands, stone by stone, incorporating
such things as a meteor fragment and a stone from Ossian's grave, Stewart
Brand, who wrote the classic "How Buildings Learn," said it was "the most
intelligent building per square inch ever built in America."

None of that mattered once Jeffers raised his voice against US foreign policy.
I don't expect A&E, that citadel of intellectualism, to ever run a story on
Robinson Jeffers, but he and Lindbergh seem to have had a lot in common, at
least in their political views (I believe Lindbergh was also a
proto-environmentalist like Jeffers). And they shared a common fate as losers
in a vastly important debate on the position the US should play in the world.

None of this is ancient history as the US is at a strikingly similar crossroads
as it redefines its place in the world post 9-11. In Lindbergh's time, the
opposition was a branch of the Republican party. This time the opposition is a
branch of the Democratic party. That's about all that has changed.


Chris Mark