0:04 [SPEAKER_00]: I think since the very beginning, America has struggled with the question of whether it was a turkey or an eagle. 0:13 [SPEAKER_00]: If that sounds like the dumbest sentence you've ever heard, bear with me. 0:17 [SPEAKER_00]: This question dates back to the founding of the country. 0:21 [SPEAKER_00]: When the first Americans were trying to decide just what kind of country they wanted America to be. 0:27 [SPEAKER_00]: They were leaving an imperialist bully, great Britain, behind, and trying to forge not only a new country, but a new kind of country. 0:38 [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to be powerful enough to be left alone, but not so powerful that they became the next Great Britain. 0:45 [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted enough power to sustain a little self-governing republic, far from the wars, and intrigue, and taxation of old Europe, along with drafting all of the formal documents for this new nation, like the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution. 1:04 [SPEAKER_00]: The founding fathers had to choose a national seal to appear on official documents representing the newly organized U.S. government. 1:14 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1782, they chose a circular image with a balled eagle at its center. 1:21 [SPEAKER_00]: One talon holds 13 arrows in the other holds an olive branch, and the beak of the eagle is a banner with the motto, e-plorabasunum, out of mini. 1:34 [SPEAKER_00]: One, a few years later, in 1789, Miss Eagle officially became the National Bird. 1:42 [SPEAKER_00]: And since that time, it's become the symbol, most synonymous with our national identity. 1:49 [SPEAKER_00]: When you see the border eagle, you think America, and vice versa. 1:54 [SPEAKER_00]: From an aesthetic standpoint, the great seal of the United States is hard to argue with. 2:00 [SPEAKER_00]: It's classic, it's cool, especially in monochrome, and most of us probably like it. 2:07 [SPEAKER_00]: No one founding father in particular, Benjamin Franklin, thought it was a terrible idea, and I happened to agree with him. 2:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The bald eagle might be the coolest looking bird in all of nature, and it's only indigenous to North America. 2:25 [SPEAKER_00]: If you've ever stood next to one, as I have a few times in larger zoos, you will probably odd by the size of it. 2:34 [SPEAKER_00]: They stand about three feet tall, have wingspan of between seven and eight feet, and they can dive at the speed of 100 miles per hour. 2:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Additionally, they build the largest nests of any animal species. 2:50 [SPEAKER_00]: These nests, and I'm not making this up, can be 13 feet deep, eight feet wide, and way over 2,000 pounds. 3:00 [SPEAKER_00]: These are the juggernauts of the avian world. 3:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Altogether, the bald eagle is as impressive and as intimidating as they come, but it's also kind of a dirt bag. 3:13 [SPEAKER_00]: The bald eagle is so big, it doesn't have to hunt for itself, so much as wait for a smaller bird to catch something and instill it from him. 3:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Just look this up sometime. 3:26 [SPEAKER_00]: There are plenty of videos online. 3:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The bald eagle is really good at stealing the fruit of other animal's labors, like smaller birds, foxes, and yes, even human beings. 3:41 [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, the bald eagle is basically a bully. 3:45 [SPEAKER_00]: So when Congress put this big, beautiful, bullying bird on America's greatest seal, Franklin was not a fan. 3:55 [SPEAKER_00]: I asked Mark if he was familiar with this criticism. 3:59 [SPEAKER_01]: I think the comet, and he actually makes the comet, it's in a letter that he wrote to a daughter, because I think he and Adams and Jefferson were commissioned shortly after the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to work on a national symbol and it's interesting, the one that Franklin actually 4:28 [SPEAKER_01]: something about Moses with an extended hand against the Pharaoh and the waters come crashing in and this is what happens to tyrants and if you're disobeying tyrants, all this is aimed at drugs of the third and English. 4:44 [SPEAKER_01]: If you're disobeying tyrants, you're obeying God and so interesting for Franklin the dearest here to have such a religious symbol of Moses but he wrote in a letter 4:57 [SPEAKER_01]: to a daughter about eight years later, something that he never thought was going to be public. 5:03 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think. 5:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's typical Franklin, it's kind of humorous. 5:08 [SPEAKER_01]: And he says these things about the ego being kind of a predatory bird and it waits on a certain kind of hawk to go in and get food. 5:16 [SPEAKER_01]: And then just steals it away from it. 5:19 [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a bully and it's a thief. 5:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Here's the passage, Mark is referring to. 5:28 [SPEAKER_00]: From my own part, I wish the bond equal had not been chosen, the representative of our country. 5:34 [SPEAKER_00]: He is a bird of bad, more character. 5:37 [SPEAKER_00]: He does not get his living honestly. 5:40 [SPEAKER_00]: You may have seen him perched on some dead tree near the river, where too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing heart. 5:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And when that diligent bird has out-rinked taken a fish and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him. 6:06 [SPEAKER_00]: With all this injustice, he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharpening and robbing, he is generally poor and often very lousy. 6:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Besides, he is a rank coward, the little king bird, not bigger than Aspera, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. 6:30 [SPEAKER_00]: He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all of the king's birds from our country. 6:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Franklin's preferred alternative, the wild turkey, which I don't have to describe because you probably eat one, everything's giving. 6:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The only possible way this bird will ever impress you, is by how good it tastes or how sleepy it makes you after you've eaten one. 7:01 [SPEAKER_00]: But Franklin preferred it to the ball to eagle, saying, 7:06 [SPEAKER_00]: For Intruth, the Turkey is in comparison in much more respectable bird. 7:11 [SPEAKER_00]: And with all, a true original native of America. 7:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Eagles have been found in all countries, where the Turkey was peculiar to ours. 7:21 [SPEAKER_00]: In the first of the species seen in Europe, being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, enserved up at the wedding table of Charles the 9th. 7:32 [SPEAKER_00]: He is besides the little faint in silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grittyer of the British guards, who should pursue to invade his farm yard with a red coat on. 7:48 [SPEAKER_00]: wild turkeys are native to North America, but they can't hunt or intimidate, or dive at 100 miles per hour. 7:57 [SPEAKER_00]: They can barely fly, their nest's are humble, and they get up every morning and work for their food. 8:05 [SPEAKER_00]: They eat what they can find for themselves, and nothing more. 8:09 [SPEAKER_00]: And this is what Franklin loved about them. 8:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Remember, Franklin was the author of poor Richards Almanac, in the corner of phrases, like no gains without pains, and early to bed, and early to rise, makes one healthy, wealthy, and wise. 8:28 [SPEAKER_00]: He was all about honesty, and the virtues of hard work and fair play. 8:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, he hated the bald eagle. 8:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, he loved the turkey. 8:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Franklin knew all about the privileged Alpha oppressor, who swoops in and confiscates the fruits of the laborers of others, that was King George III, and the kingdom of Great Britain circa 1782, that was the heart of the whole drama over taxation without representation, in the lowly American colonies. 8:59 [SPEAKER_00]: The tone of Franklin's letter is playful. 9:02 [SPEAKER_00]: but as the old saying goes, many each truth is hidden and just Franklin was well known for framing stinging criticisms and would be language. 9:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Even in joking, it's a great line that in a carry grant movie, the Bishop's wife and carry grants is angel A, it's a Christmas movie. 9:21 [SPEAKER_01]: He got this great line in this bishop who he's been sent to to help. 9:26 [SPEAKER_01]: The bishop says, I can never tell when you're serious 9:31 [SPEAKER_01]: and the angel carry grants has I'm never more serious than when I'm joking and I thought I think that's Franklin that he's kind of being lighthearted about this in joking and yet maybe he is making a serious point that's worth looking at and you think what other societies 9:58 [SPEAKER_01]: And so many people have seen that double-headed eagles, kind of two eagles looking at opposite directions, that was the symbol of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which we used to call the Byzantine Empire, you know, the Rome falls in the west and the 400s to the German barbarians, but the eastern half of the Roman Empire goes for another. 10:21 [SPEAKER_01]: Thousand years goes for another millennium down to the capture of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks. 10:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And their symbol is the eagle, and it's this double-headed eagle, which after the fall of Constantinople, it shows up in Russia, and it's adopted by the Zars. 10:38 [SPEAKER_01]: And the words, Zars, for people who used to spell Zars, C-Z-A-R, it's the Slavic word for Caesar. 10:45 [SPEAKER_01]: And so the Russians are solving cells as the successors of the Romans, and the Caesar's, and after 10:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Constantinople fell, and is a Muslim city of Istanbul, Moscow starts to refer to itself as the third Rome. 11:01 [SPEAKER_01]: And so now they're the air of the first Rome, which was Rome, the second Rome, which was Constantine's city. 11:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Constantinople, and now Moscow is the third Rome, and there will never be a fourth, they say, and it's Christian Russia, but it's just powerful. 11:18 [SPEAKER_01]: air to imperial Rome that the Roman odds have as they're symbol until the collapse of the monarchy. 11:26 [SPEAKER_01]: And I believe the double ego is even back as the symbol of the modern Russian Federation. 11:33 [SPEAKER_01]: You see the double-headed eagle in the Holy Roman Empire, and various Germanic states. 11:39 [SPEAKER_00]: This list of sprawling militaristic empires is not the kind of company the founding fathers ever intended to keep. 11:47 [SPEAKER_00]: The eagle has been a go-to symbol throughout history for kings, dictators, and zars. 11:54 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a beautiful bird for sure, but in one sense it fails to represent the type of country 12:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's an interesting symbol of what empire and power and conquest, and I find Frank Lund's humor and hesitancy about that kind of interesting. 12:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Do we want to be again, they love classical history, see like all the founding fathers, what they read, 12:22 [SPEAKER_01]: is classical literature or classical philosophy, they read Homer, they read Virgil, many of them read it in Latin, you know, they know Greek, and so you have this great influence of the classical world on the founding fathers, and they saw this new American experiment also as a new Rome, but they saw it as the Roman Republic, and not as the Roman Empire. 12:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Because Rome was a small republic for 500 years before it became the empire with the civil wars and a clash of Octavian and Mark Antony and Julius Caesar and all those guys. 13:01 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the most obvious places this has manifested itself is in the size of our standing army. 13:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Up until the last 75 years, the U.S. has had one of the smallest armies in the world. 13:15 [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of army you would expect from a small isolationist republic. 13:20 [SPEAKER_00]: When World War I broke out, the U.S. military was relatively tiny, smaller than nations like Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria. 13:30 [SPEAKER_00]: And following that war, we promptly demilitarized, so that when World War II came around 20 years later, our army was once again one of the smallest of any of the so-called great powers. 13:43 [SPEAKER_01]: War II, breaks out. 13:46 [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you hear, these states has the 19th largest army in the world, somewhere behind the army of Czechoslovakia, let alone Britain and France and Russia and Germany and all these other powers pollin but it had a much larger army. 14:00 [SPEAKER_01]: So the United States reluctantly it seems. 14:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Certainly in the world wars 14:16 [SPEAKER_01]: I wonder if that's partly what Franklin, you know, is hinting at, do we want to be one of these imperial powers with a predatory bird as our symbol or something that's on the Thanksgiving table that will put us to sleep? 14:35 [SPEAKER_01]: It was just jarring when I- there may have been put in the form of a question. 14:39 [SPEAKER_01]: What is the second largest 14:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Air Force in the world after the United States Air Force. 14:46 [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm trying to think, and I'm taking, okay, Zabrasha is a bread and they said the United States Navy. 14:52 [SPEAKER_01]: And I thought, wow, that is truly amazing that we have the two largest Air Forces in the world. 15:00 [SPEAKER_01]: The Air Force and the Navy, and that's different than so much of American history. 15:06 [SPEAKER_01]: When we didn't have a global president, 15:09 [SPEAKER_01]: like it or not, that's the world that we, in some ways, have to create in 1941 to 1945 and to retreat from that would be irresponsible. 15:22 [SPEAKER_00]: All of this is very complicated, of course. 15:25 [SPEAKER_00]: The world has changed and so has America's place within it. 15:30 [SPEAKER_01]: have we become, or are we responsible for a Pax Americana, when you have the Pax Romana and the ancient world, and Rome appears to be a stabilizing force, but it's an eagle, it's an imperial power that exerts its will on other people, and so you have that tension in American history, you know, at the beginning of the movie patent, 15:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Jersey Scott gives this famous monologue at the beginning and he says something about real Americans love the sting of battle, you know Americans love war that their stuff being written about American being pacifist and isolation and all that's nonsense and it really isn't because America it seems is both of those things. 16:19 [SPEAKER_01]: And we lit with that kind of tension that when it became necessary, we stepped up and then and where we're too, we went from having an army of not even 200,000 to an army, well, to all the armed services that have been over 15 million people in uniform. 16:36 [SPEAKER_01]: But then, even after the Second World War, there was such a de-escalation, and that we were kind of unprepared for 16:49 [SPEAKER_00]: We fought a number of global wars in the 20th century, and we turned out to be pretty good at them. 16:56 [SPEAKER_00]: At some point, the historical balance between the de-militarized republic and the wartime jargonat became tilted dramatically in the direction of the bald eagle. 17:07 [SPEAKER_00]: But some of this is just a product of our time in history. 17:11 [SPEAKER_00]: in which America can no longer operate as an isolated superpower on the opposite side of the world. 17:19 [SPEAKER_01]: The world's a lot smaller than it was. 17:20 [SPEAKER_01]: The oceans are no longer a protection against planes and ships and submarines and ballistic missiles and maybe that's a 17:35 [SPEAKER_01]: America. 17:37 [SPEAKER_01]: We were both of those things. 17:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we should have a double-headed bird and one heads and turkey and one heads and eagle. 17:45 [SPEAKER_01]: And I wonder if that was Franklin's maybe cleat or concern of what this symbol may come to represent? 17:54 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what do you think. 17:56 [SPEAKER_00]: I like it. 17:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The Romans had a double-headed eagle. 17:59 [SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to see this two-headed beast 18:04 [SPEAKER_00]: with the head of a turkey on one side in the head of a bald eagle on the other. 18:11 [SPEAKER_00]: At this point in history, America is both a warlike empire and an isolationist republic. 18:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The empire, when it needs to be, and the republic, when it can be. 18:23 [SPEAKER_00]: And the eagle only communicates, one of those things. 18:27 [SPEAKER_00]: As I've been thinking about Franklin and his contempt for America's national bird, I've started to wonder if the way of the bald eagle has become the American way of life, even beyond the scope of our gigantic military. 18:42 [SPEAKER_00]: In early American history, this country really did view itself as more of a wild turkey, a humble hardworking society full of blue-collar people who are economically free and live with a realistic pursuit of happiness. 18:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously there were social problems with the country, terrible ones, like slavery, sexism, and bigotry of all kinds, but the way of the turkey was at least the ideal. 19:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Today it seems that so many of our aspirations and our problems as a society are of the bald eagle variety. 19:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Giant hedge funds lurk and higher rises over Wall Street. 19:25 [SPEAKER_00]: waiting to swoop in on smaller businesses that actually produce things, and then they destroy them. 19:32 [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, just listen again to Franklin's description of the bald eagle's hunting tactics. 19:38 [SPEAKER_00]: He might as well be describing the great financial bullies and predators of our own time. 19:44 [SPEAKER_00]: You may have seen him perched on some dead tree near the river, where too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing hall. 19:54 [SPEAKER_00]: And when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him. 20:08 [SPEAKER_00]: big businesses and big banks have found ways to control the economy for their benefit by doing this sort of thing in increasingly creative ways and all of this has come to be known as part of life, the American way. 20:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Franklin would hate this and I think he'd say in his inimitable tongue-in-cheek way, I told you so. 20:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course people think this is an acceptable 20:39 [SPEAKER_00]: but I like Mark's idea of balancing this symbol with something humblur, more commonplace, a more representative of our peace-time ideals. 20:50 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy wrote in a letter to the Audubon society. 20:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The fierce beauty and proud independence of the bold equal, aply symbolizes the strength and freedom of America. 21:08 [SPEAKER_00]: The founding fathers made an appropriate choice when they selected this great bird as the emblem of the nation. 21:16 [SPEAKER_00]: With all due respect to JFK, I'm not so sure. 21:20 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm siding with Franklin on this one. 21:24 [SPEAKER_00]: If you have any thoughts on the eagle, turkey dilemma, feel free to reach out and share the
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