David Prashker's Book Of Days: December 17

1862, 1900, 1995,

1862

General Ulysses S. Grant issued "General Orders No 11", today in 1862, expelling and deporting all Jews from his command.

While President Lincoln was in Washington, polishing the last clauses of the "Emancipation Proclamation", due for public delivery just two weeks later, on New Year's day 1863, one of his senior generals was launching a minor pogrom in Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi.

Shocked, and terrified, the Jews under his command fought back, going over Grant's head, directly to the President:

And Lincoln hesitated... not even a moment. Three days after the "Emancipation Proclamation", Grant received the following:

And that was it. Done. Intelligent life prevailed over crass and ignorant stupidity. Grant learned too. Later, when he became the 19th President, one of his first appointments was the head of B'nei Brith, Simon Wolf, as Recorder of Deeds, the man in charge of all public records. A very public statement, that appointment. Followed by several more, as Wolf, in his other capacity as a member of the President's team of personal advisers, put forward Jewish name after Jewish name for key positions. And on June 9th, 1876, Grant became the first American President to attend the dedication of a synagogue, Washington DC's Adas Israel - and in doing so defined the moment at which Judaism became an officially co-equal religion in the United States. Redemption and Transformation.

There is, however, a hugely ironic afterlife to this tale. Grant expelled the Jews, not out of anti-Semitism per se, but because a number of those under his command had turned out to be swindlers, conmen and racketeers. When Grant finished his term as President, he went into business as an investment banker with a young man named Ferdinand Ward, at 28 already labelled "the Napoleon of Wall Street". Grant and Ward made millions - until it became apparent that Ward was a swindler, a conman and a racketeer, the Bernie Madoff of his epoch. Grant was left bankrupt. And no, Ward was not Jewish. His father, the Reverend Ferdinand De Wilton Ward, and his mother, Jane Shaw, had been Christian missionaries in India.

1900

Ah for some intelligent life, somewhere in the cosmos! Today in 1900, a prize was offered in France, worth 100,000 francs, for proven communication with any extraterrestrial beings. Given that, of the billions of species that have at any time inhabited this planet, let alone any other, only one has developed the sort of communications the prize-donors intended, the chances of there being another such being, anywhere, and of our being able to communicate with them, even if they proved against all odds to exist, must be infinitely remote.

I like to imagine that someone does find life-forms on another planet, somewhere beyond alpha centauri, in some point of space whose atmospheric conditions mirror ours, on which similar accidents of evolution have taken place, causing to emerge a highly sophisticated genus which, like us, is capable of intergalactic travel and exploration. This person makes primaeval contact, takes photographs, even records their grunts and grimaces, but is turned down for the prize by the French academy because he cannot prove that real communication has taken place, and this, not because the extraterrestrials speak their own language, and it is incomprehensible, but because they have learned only one of Earth-Man's languages, and it is the wrong one, perhaps English, perhaps Russian, perhaps Arabic, perhaps Chinese; but not French.

(Addendum: when the prize was offered, Martians were excluded, on the grounds that this would be too easy!)

Five years before I learned about the fatuous absurdity of this unwinnable prize, I read a newspaper article on a similar theme, and responded by writing a poem, later published in my collection "Coins", and later still in "Welcome To My World". It seems to me appropriate to re-print it here:

9th July 1995

I note that the first World Conference

of people in contact with Extra-Terrestrials

has been convened in Costa Rica

First, may I raise objection to my personal exclusion

I have tried repeatedly to talk to extra-terrestrial beings

and do not see why I should be disbarred

simply on the grounds that I have failed

where you claim to have succeeded

In my absence may I nonetheless request

that those of you who are in touch with ETs

pass on the following vital piece of information

that we are very keen to make friends with them

but only if they accept democracy

the absolute sanctity of Christian marriage

American goods guns films and pop music

a total ban on abortion and gay marriage

join the fight against pollution

allow us to mine their oil and other minerals

and boycott the State of Israel

Please can you also make it clear

to avoid any embarrassing misunderstanding

of these complex scientific and philosophical determiners

that we on Earth are an intelligent life-form

which is not by any means the same thing

as an intelligent species

And if, indeed, there is intelligent life out there in the cosmos, how splendid to have something that we ourselves could aspire to imitating, though I suspect that we should send our spaceships with a large warning banner attached at the front: "Beware. Humans approaching. You are about to become an endangered species".

Amber pages

Ford Madox Ford (Ford Hermann Hueffer), English novelist, born today in 1873

Willard Frank Libby, the man who invented "carbon dating", born today in 1908 (the jokes about the validity of this date are too obvious even for my low standards)

Lazarus died for the second time, today in 63 CE - that may actually be my favouritest historical record, ever (and so cool that it comes right after Libby)

[An] Aztec calendar discovered, today in 1790 (as I have stated many times, this process of "discovery", which is the key element of quality education, needs to be stated more clearly. Today, in 1790, somebody who had never seen one, who may not even have known that one existed, or thought to wonder if perhaps it might, that person, today in 1790, discovered what had been a commonplace and everyday item among the Aztecs for centuries, their calendar)

Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first airplane flight, today in 1903 (more on this in my novel "A Journey In Time")