An Early Definition

I came across an interesting quote about degeneration today from a late nineteenth century book on biology:

Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world.

Sir E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism (1880), p.33. (link).

This paragraph is often quoted by replacing the words “an animal” by the words “a species” and then stopping at the word “Degeneration.” Thus in the Wikipedia article on Lankester. There the article’s author also adds the following: “Lankester extended the idea of degeneration to human societies, which carries little significance today, but it is a good example of a biological concept invading social science.” One would like to see why the definition does not apply to us. But, in any case, every author may interpret the past as he sees fit…

The general observation from history is that an expanding, energetic civilization tends toward decadence—not because it is fighting for survival but because it has achieved some form of lasting and extraordinary wealth. In our own case that wealth has taken the form of “energy slaves” traceable to fossil fuels. But the Roman case had its own parallel: living human slaves.  What that looked and felt like is rendered by Will Durant in Caesar and Christ, Simon and Schuster, 1944, pp. 111-112. The segment deals with an era known as the Agrarian Revolt in the Roman Republic, extending in time from 145 to 78 BC, thus the period immediately preceding the rise of Julius Caesar, who became the first emperor of Rome and thus closed the republican era of Roman history:

The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Conquered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with the latifundia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap corn from  the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promise, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.

Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery. In the city all domestic service, many handicrafts, most trade, much banking, nearly all factory labor, and labor on public works, were performed by slaves, reducing the wages of free workers to a point where it was almost as profitable to be idle as to toil. On the latifundia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, generation after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master’s vice. All the Mediterranean region was raided to produce living machines for these industrialized farms; to the war prisoners led in after every victorious campaign were added the victims of pirates who captured slaves or freemen on or near the coasts of Asia, or of Roman officials whose organized man hunts impressed into bondage any provincial whom the local authorities did not dare to protect. Every week slave dealers brought their human prey from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea….

I’ve quoted this passage years ago now in a by-now-vanished version of LaMarotte. It seemed to fit today’s notion that there is a reasonably ordinary (if very huge and collective) explanation for the growing disorder in a society. Thinkers have been calling that “decadence” beginning in the late nineteenth century.

Peace Requires Awe

Surveying the papers, at least half the time, brings to my mind one of Hobbes’ famous sayings, i.e. that the absence of what he calls “civil society,” an absence that he therefore labels “the state of nature,”  “is nothing else but a mere state of war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things.” This is from the Preface of De Cive.

Now that “state of nature” is one of those rather slippery notions. I’m not quite sure that such a state actually ever existed when humanity was actually what it is now. If it means the state of being an ordinary ape-like animal, surely the state was not one of war; orangutans are not always arming for combat. In his Leviathan, however, Hobbes offers a much more interesting qualifying conditions: it is the absence of “a common power to keep them [men] all in awe.” Herewith the entire quote, with material usually omitted this time included. I found this worth perusing today, particularly the first sentence and then that long listing in the last paragraph:

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

[Hobbes, Leviathan. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html#CHAPTERXIII]

Hobbes does not further define the “common power” that holds us in awe. But, clearly, it need not necessarily mean a political power as such. It certainly could be that. But better than some dictatorship or royal rule that keeps everybody trembling, it might also refer to a period (note Hobbes’ disquisition bout time, usually omitted from this quote) in which a meaningful belief system keeps people unified and in awe.

Now as for the content of newspapers—that often trigger my own reaction—that content is neatly depicted in the final sentence of the quote—in which we almost feel like we’re reading a paper ranging over every aspect of modern society. Hobbes, who saw the light in the sixteenth and died in the seventeenth century, pictured “the state of nature” as in the past. Little did he know that he was witnessing its rebirth. Since his time the State of Nature has genuinely matured all over.

Headliners: It’s Time to Reinvent

Here a headline that caught my eyes this morning, in the Wall Street Journal:

Auto Sales Zoom, Helped by Low Prices at the Pump

When two phenomena coincide in time, a relationship of cause and effect is not thereby established. Obviously. Ducks at Lake Wolverine are frequently honking their way south in V-formation just as I drive south to the only near TrueValue hardware store. The connection? None that I can detect. That handy store is closing now. The owner couldn’t find a buyer—hence I will have to drive farther away in the future, using more gas. Is that the reason I’m not in the market for a new car?

I’m told that the average person uses 729 gallons of gas a year*. We’ve had five months of decreasing prices, from somewhere around $3.52 to $2.74 per gallon on December 1. That makes a drop of $0.78 per gallon in the period. Suppose that drop came on July 1—all in one fell swoop. That would have saved the average buyer $237 in those five months. The average price of a new vehicle is $32,086. So a $240 saving in five months “helped” to motivate people to spend $32,000? Honestly?

To write this took me roughly 12 minutes. Shouldn’t the headline writer have spent that much time to see if that headline made any sense? These days people don’t correct, refresh their knowledge, think, or more potently yet, reform. We are only ever reinventing everything. It’s time therefore for headline editors to do a little reinventing of their craft.
---------------
*Per person usage of gasoline ranges from a low of 281 to a high of 729 using different sources and different miles-per-gallon estimates. I am using the highest estimates. With the lowest, the savings would be $91.26.

A Sample of Originality

One of the most notable characteristics of G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 book entitled Orthodoxy is its originality. I’m now on my second reading of this book—and that because Chesterton’s style is also quite original, a kind of quick and bubbling flow of thought that, turns out, is highly systematic; but the underlying ideas shift with great speed. I expect to say more later, but now a quote that struck me:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. My Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race—because he is so human.

The Blatchford here mentioned was probably Robert Blatchford. Wikipedia’s article on  him (link) begins thus: “Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford (17 March 1851 – 17 December 1943) was a socialist campaigner, journalist and author in the United Kingdom. He was a prominent atheist and opponent of eugenics. He was also an English patriot. In the early 1920s, after the death of his wife, he turned towards spiritualism.”

Early Hints of Hell

A Wall Street Journal book review today (of Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels) says, in a prominent lift-out in big type: Renouncing oil and its byproducts would plunge civilization into a pre-industrial hell—a fact that developing countries keenly realize.

Now of course I love that word “renouncing”—as if as a collective we actually would or even could. But, sure enough, the rest of the statement has the smell of truth. When we run out of oil, we’ll certainly know it.

Perhaps Mother Nature, a bit irate about having her deep-lying blood sucked, is giving us early hints. What with global warming (or is it aging and unmaintained infrastructure), power failures are a whole lot common. As I think back over the last four decades or so, they were extremely rare earlier in that period and much more frequent in the last decade. At our old house we experienced a slew of them in the last five years—due to maintenance neglect by Detroit Edison. Having moved, we’ve already had one of those—due to weather.

Around here everybody is on wells—and the wells need electric power. Those who’re on the sewer system need electricity to send the waste to those pipes. Power failure means not only no water but, for the more advanced, also means no flushing. The work around, what with a lake next door or bordering the lot, is to haul water; and to go across the street to toilets that still empty into septic tanks. That still leaves sump pumps in those houses lucky to have basements. As for heating, furnaces don’t function without current either although they burn gas. A sensible but expensive solution is to invest in a full-sized generator, in effect a power plant for a single house only. Cost is around $10,000. These systems come on seconds after a power failure and everything stays on. They’re fueled by natural gas. Plans are firming up around here to have one of those babies installed in the near future.

Meanwhile we hope that our descents into pre-industrial hell won’t last but fractions of a day—and it isn’t raining heavily while they last—so that the sump pit in the basement doesn’t overflow. But after the gas runs out too, as inevitably it will, it will be time to rip that gas-fueled contraption (it looks like a stack of logs) out of the fireplace to see if it will actually burn wood which, by then, we’ll have to saw by hand. While the saw lasts…

Black Friday Blues

The National Retail Federation has done its survey of shopping this Black Friday weekend (link), and the papers are echoing the numbers. Retailers have experienced a drop in participation, measured in dollar sales per shopper ($380.95 this year), in four years of the last seven. In the same 2007-2014 period, retailers saw gains in four years as well. One might say that sales are fluctuating, year by year. Sometimes up and sometimes down:

07	08	08	10	11	12	13	14
down	up	down	up	up	up	down	down

This overall pattern doesn’t spell vigorous growth signaling that the imagined “normal” will return.

Some 133.7 million shoppers participated (down from 141.1 million last year). By my calculations, that number corresponds to nearly 55 percent of the U.S. adult population over 18. Viewed like that, Americans are still decidedly bargain hunters, by and large. By a majority. Therefore hand-wringing and eye-raised headshakes are inappropriate.

People like me who dream of a genuine change in public behavior must not feel encouraged. A downturn in consumption, however desirable, also signals, in our system, unemployment or growing under-employment. What the Great Recession has done is to shake public confidence enough so that big-time shopping sprees are, say, only done every other year.

The retail business has reason to feel the Black Friday blues—but it may be doing it to itself. Every year, the period of the sale is extended both backward and forward in time. People know this. They also know that an industry, beset by panic, will keep prices at abnormal lows right up to Christmas and beyond—to get rid of the inventory still left over.

Any year now, the next year’s Black Friday Sale may begin as early as December 1 of the year before. Why, come to think of it, today may be the first day of Black Friday 2015.

Our Butterfly Gallery

This time of year, in recent years, we like to remember the brighter season when butterflies are visiting. With that I thought I’d end November on that same note. To be sure, with the move now well behind us, we have also left behind our Butterfly Ranch (Rancho Mariposa). But we are at least mentally preparing to see our friends at this new location too—and to make it welcoming to Order Lepidoptera.

Meanwhile, of course, butterflies are still in motion—constant motion, you might say—on the ceiling of our sunniest upstairs room. As a mobile. Air heated by our floor-hugging radiators keeps them turning, turning near the ceiling, and what with the fascinating design of this genre of sculpture, kinetic sculpture as it is called, our paper creatures exhibit a quite life-like behavior. They move so much that it was quite a labor to find one photograph of a dozen that showed them all fully.

We got to wondering about mobiles. We’re very fond of them. Another, with swallows, hangs downstairs. Who made the first of these? I was dubious of discovering a single inventor, but Brigitte had a name in mind if only it would come up with it. With that encouragement, I went on a search and discovered Alexander Calder (1898-1976), an American sculptor, and the originator of this genre. The first mobiles of the sort shown here, thus moved by currents of air, date to 1931. They were named “mobiles” by Marcel Duchamp, a fellow artist, in 1932; thereafter Calder classed his immobile sculptures “stabiles.” Mobiles took the world by storm after a 1946 showing in the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris.

We live in a world of mobility—and mobile device. Ours, sure enough, go back to about the time of our birth. The kind you carry around with you, to make you mobile, are a bit too complicated for such as us entirely to master.

Fata Morgana

We’re late in the fourth year of the Media-named Arab Spring as it touched Egypt. The popular uprising that resulted in Hosni Mubarak’s resignation began on January 25, 2011, in Tahrir square in Cairo. Since then Mubarak resigned  (February 11, 2011), Mohammed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency (June 30, 2012); he was ousted from office after a year (July 3, 2013), replaced by Abdul Fattah al-Sisi (June 8, 2014) who, like Mubarak, is a general. Today the Egyptian court trying Mubarak for his crimes as a ruler dropped all charges against him, members of his family, and his top associates. The demonstrations that immediately erupted appear to have been put down promptly. And we’ve still nearly two months to go before the fourth year is over.

When Arab Spring began, The Guardian, in a February 5, 2011 story, had this to say (link):

25 January is a date that will be forever remembered in Egypt. That was the day when the Egyptian people decided to end the country’s last pharaonic dynasty with a people’s revolution. 

I genuinely wonder if that date will really be remembered—considering that this revolution withered on the vine—this despite the fact that for a brief spell the Muslim Brotherhood, which is at least in part representative of Egypt’s Muslim population (94.7% of total), succeeded in gaining but not in holding on to power. The “people’s revolution,” to use The Guardian’s words, represented a small portion of the 5.3 percent, with perhaps a few percent of secular Muslims thrown in.

The Guardian’s lead is the sort of thing that caught my eyes early on and caused me to keep following the twists and turns of this story since. I am no more fond of military dictatorship than the next guy, but what interests me is our own Western faith in the inevitability of Progress. It is that faith that labeled this whole affair an Arab Spring. It has turned out to be a kind of a mirage. And living now in what looks like the slow-motion shatter of democracy here—or its transmutation into something quite alien—makes the whole notion of “exporting democracy” to other totally unsuitable realms, like Afghanistan, seem so benighted. 

Old Soldiers and Old Habits

Brigitte was clipping papers this morning early when two thoughts occurred to her. The first was: “I’m such an inveterate clipper.” The second—which is quite natural with her—was to wonder about the etymology of that word, inveterate.

Sure enough, telling me about it, and asking what my guess was—“And just tell me, don’t look it up yet!”—she provided her own guess at an etymology. It was that that veterate portion might have something to do with veterans. My own clumsy attempt is not worth wasting time on. She was quite right.

And that is because the word veteran comes from vetus (generic veteris) meaning “old, aged, advanced in years; of a former time.” This much courtesy of Online Etymology Dictionary. By a slight twist and turn, the root is used in inveterate as meaning “of long standing” and therefore “chronic.” The “in” here means “of.” Brigitte is a paper clipper going way, way back. Old clippers never die, you might say, they just snip away…

Which made me wonder about that phrase. Here is what seems to be its origin. I found it here. General Douglas MacArthur used the phrase and made it newly famous. As always with true wisdom, it had is roots in everyday life, here of soldiering. The text follows:

Old Soldiers Never Die

There is an old cookhouse, far far away

Where we get pork and beans, three times a day.

Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our tea

And we are gradually fading away.

cho: Old soldiers never die,

        Never die, never die,

        Old soldiers never die

        They just fade away.

Privates they love their beer, ’most every day.

Corporals, they love their stripes, that’s what they say.

Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always will

So we drill and drill until we fade away.

Another and perhaps more authentic version (it dates from 1900 and was written by an anonymous soldier) is to be found here.

It Was a Feudal Vote

The business news today was OPEC’s decision to keep producing oil—rather than curbing production to force the price of oil back up. Nor surprisingly investors fled the oil producers and shifted their money to the oil users. Investors belong to one camp, OPEC to another: Investors are the flag-bearers of “capitalist economies,” OPEC is one member of another aggregation, that of the “market share economies.”

I last had occasion to comment on this subject back four years ago (here) when I contrasted “Feudal and Capitalist Economies.” That time I was contrasting Japan and the United States and said: “I characterized the first as ‘feudal’ because it tends on the whole to optimize in favor of large ‘tribal’ aggregates, communities—and the other as ‘detached from the community.’” I also said: “Market share economies aim at control and stability. Capitalist economies aim at maximum profit; they enter and leave markets based on gains to be realized, not to produce values in the long run.”

It’s not as if I favored tribalism. My emphasis is on community. The detached nature of capitalism, meaning its absolute focus on profit, makes it entirely unaware of community, large or small; and in those situations even tribalism is better.

OPEC is focused on maintaining its share of the market—and never mind the profits of its individual producers.

The odd thing about this entire phenomenon (the last fill-up at COSTCO cost me $2.73 per gallon) is that consumption has managed to drop enough across the world for such a thing to happen at all. The world’s public, at least in the aggregate, has been holding back on its consumption—not least driving less after losing a job. But oil so interpenetrates modern life that even a small refusal to consume can cause oil to plummet—and investors to scramble for more profitable stocks.

First the Stoics...

Brigitte sent me a link to an article, titled “The rise of modern Stoicism” by Joe Gelonesi. It is part of The Philosopher’s Zone here. The subject has been in the air around here for a while now—ever since Brigitte bought Martha C. Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire back in the Spring of 2013 and then we both read and discussed it over a period of months, with particular focus on the Stoics. The book is subtitled Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics.

The strong impression I carried away from that experience, particularly from the study of late Roman Stoicism, is how the decaying Roman civilization embraced that philosophy, how widely it spread, and how it laid the foundation for the very smooth acceptance of Catholic Christianity in those realms. Christianity gave that rational, if also transcendental, philosophy a genuine life. The subject is worth pursuing as an antidote to the chaos that now seems to be spreading almost virally.

When things go too far, the answer is almost always already present. Thus, while selfie sticks rise into the air, the (call it) re-moralization of society is also taking place. Concerning that last phrase, it occured naturally: we both also read a book, around about the same time, titled The De-Moralization of Society, From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, by Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Lifts the mood on a gloomy if warmer November day dark with a low pressure system and half-hearted rain.

A Grand Canyon Moment

When looking for pictures of a selfie stick yesterday, it seemed to me that a preponderance of photos showed Asians. That in turn reminded me of a Grand Canyon Moment in the 1960s. Of that in a moment. But first, let me say a little more about the selfie stick and all those Asian faces.

It turns out that the device I featured in yesterday’s post was invented in the United States, perhaps in Buffalo, NY. Buffalo is the address of Fromm Works Inc., the corporate entity that produces the QuickPod. That product appears to be the original selfie stick, invented by the company’s president, Wayne Fromm. It dates from 2004. Fromm Works is also the originator of many other very clever products, mostly aimed at children. So why is that product, and its look-alikes, so popular with Asians? One possible answer is that Alibaba, the Chinese Google-Amazon, promoted them heavily.

My own thought associations, linking the selfie stick to a Grand Canyon memory, seem to be reflecting some genuine process. Back many decades ago, when I first got into studying technology, I came across a saw to the effect that the French come up with the ideas, in the abstract, the Americans commercialize them, and the Japanese flood the market with them. Things have changed since then, but some such process is still going on.

Now my Grand Canyon Moment is told in a few words. I was travelling with an Austrian Engineer, a client of a company I worked for, J.F. Pritchard Co. We were doing a big job for an Austrian conglomerate, cleaning natural gas. The engineer and I travelled from Kansas City to the West Coast. On the way we stopped at the Grand Canyon for part of an afternoon. One of the places we visited was the gift shop. It was filled with Japanese tourists. They were rushing about picking up souvenirs, turning them over and looking at them, laughing madly, and then talking up a storm with further laughter. I got curious. Carefully I picked up one of the souvenirs too, turned it over as they had—and saw the cause of the Japanese amusement. Virtually every object commemorating the Grand Canyon carried the following message: Made in Japan.

Selfie Stick

If you haven’t heard of this product (we had not until this morning) it is high time to get with Modernity and invest in a Selfie Stick. The illustration I’m showing is from Wikipedia creative commons (here). The image was taken by Petar Milošević in Prague. The selfie stick is widely available from Amazon to Walmart, you might say. I saw one discounted from $21.81 to $4.19 (plus shipping) at Amazon.

The big banks all over the world are desperately trying to cause economic growth by printing more money and such. Growth is already here, if only we could promote desperately needed new products so that the public could know to acquire them.

Here is our attempt to grow the economy by making publicity waves. We shall, of course, acquire a pair of sticks ourselves, a Hers and a His, as soon as we have acquired some brand of iPhone to fit into their maws.

In the future—no doubt from Amazon, which already uses little robots to fill our many orders for books and such—will come the Selfie Bot. It will roll ahead of the user and take a constant stream of selfies as that person is doing his or her shopping. Stay alert, NSA. Here is yet another way to keep track of potential terrorists. We all are, after all, especially after seeing such products on sale…

My Mother on Inertia

My Mother understood the fundamental problem of this dimension—which she voiced around about the time when she had reached my age. She used to say, but only sotto voce and in private, that eating was disgusting. But eating was just her standing-in for anything to do with ordinary physical life; she chose that activity to make the point more sharply; because, no matter when, eating remains a pleasure and a need. She meant life-in-matter. The problem only appears when life in the valley is viewed from a point of view above it, thus from awareness, intelligence. Viewed through a materialist monism, thus from below, what you see is simply what you get, matter and matter all over again: the endless catch-as-catch-can and tawdriness of everything made temporarily neat and tidy only by massive expenditures of energy and effort; even then the daily functions of intake and elimination provide sufficient instances of grossness so that we cannot avoid eventually noticing that something is amiss.

Fighting the fundamental chaos that surrounds us—and it seems to have a powerful will of its own we call Inertia—is the principal occupation of daily life. Extraordinarily high levels of collective coordination and cooperation are required to keep that chaos at bay in the best of times. Life-in-matter is by definition conflict—of the soul against the random. Any ideology that embraces it, e.g., a free market ideology, invariably increases chaos by increasing conflict and directing energy from cooperation.

Not what God actually created. This world here is what we rightly call The Fall.

Ideological Shift

An interesting article in The American Conservative (Nov/Dec 2014), titled “‘Duck Dynasty’ vs Dante,” reminded me again that no really decent statistics on politics are available to the general public. Economic statistics are available; but you have to pay real dollars for political statistics. Therefore it is difficult to check, using numbers, opinions, as those in this article, that the shift in ideology in the United States represents a movement from urban to rural. I always marvel at the detail that CNN, for instance is able to show in its coverage. Such data must cost a ton of money—but the people’s right to know does not extend to a right easily to analyze those numbers.

Half-heartedly looking for some, I found at least a few numbers looking backward provided by the Brookings Institution (link). These show the shift in dominance of the House and Senate, between 1991 and 2013—thus excluding the results of the most recent election—by regions of the country.  Here is the tabulation:

Democratic Strength, in Percent, in House and Senate, in 1991 and 2013
	House		Senate
	1991-1992	2013-2014	1991-1992	2013-2014
	102nd	103rd	102nd	103rd
South	66.4	29.0	68.2	27.3
Border	67.4	36.6	60.0	50.0
New England	66.7	100.0	58.3	66.6
Mid-Atlantic	56.9	60.3	50.0	90.0
Midwest	61.2	38.4	70.0	60.0
Plains	54.2	33.3	58.3	41.7
Rocky Mountains	45.8	41.9	37.5	43.8
Pacific	60.6	70.4	40.0	90.0
Democratic regions	8	3	5	4

This tabulation still identifies the border states as a separate region. They are Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Delaware. Note the dominance of the Democrats in the 1991-1992 Congress (8 of 8 regions) and near dominance in the Senate (5 of 8 regions). Twenty-three years later, the dominance has swung to the other side—but four regions are still hanging on to the Democratic view of things. I show them in bold type.

I’ll look some more. One of the great puzzles, for Brigitte and me, is this general trend. People are getting poorer—and more Republican. Something’s oddly askew. Perhaps it is those gerrymandered districts. Or could it all be just Fox News?

Marescence

To keep Alzheimer’s at bay, learn a new word every day. Or perhaps one every month. This month’s word is marescence. It stems from the Latin for marescere, to wither or to shrivel. The subject presents itself every fall, but the energy to dig up the facts is not present every autumn. This time I went on a search to discover why it is that virtually all deciduous trees loose their leaves more or less on schedule—thus, hereabouts in the Midwest, they are mostly down by today. But some hang on for dear life. And some keep them until well into the coming spring. Such species, among them Oaks, Witch-hazel, Hornbeam (musclewood), Hophornbeam (ironwood), some species of Willow, and American Beech display marescence, meaning that their leaves turn color but remain attached to the branches until new budding pushes them off. The evolutionary value of this tactic is debated but not resolved.

To get this list I had to find a helpful post (link) at Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Endless blogs and chat rooms go on and on about leaves, but all are incomplete and rarely roam farther than the nearest oak.

Well, in the center of our large back yard rises a rather young American Beech. It still has all its leaves although, at the tip, they are beginning to turn brown. Finding the name of a tree merely by looking at its leaves is very time-consuming. You have to be retired to do it. One step leads to another. The images you see displayed above are the leaves of some of these species, in the order listed above. They suggest that my Fall raking will have its Spring complement as well. My images are courtesy of Wikipedia commons.

The Leaves at Wolverine Lake

Their Huddled Masses

The 1 Percent

The occasion here is tomorrow’s second, and last, leaf-pickup by the Village of Wolverine Lake (I actually typed Wolverine Rake, so intense had been the effort). As for the 1 percent, we owe that to Monique’s careful collection of leaves when walking Katie.

Brigitte suggests that I label these pictures—particularly in the context of today’s first post—“Detroit” and “Downton Abbey.”

Home at Last

The Manners of Celebrity demands, for males at least, that the person be precisely three days unshaven, the hair artfully uncombed but not quite pasty on one side (as having just arisen from disordered sleep). The shirt must be open at the collar, the suit jacket must simply be seen to be expensive, and a ragged pair of jeans must be worn beneath.

But the above is mere celebrity—painful as it must be to live that life. The real aristocracy today lives virtually at Downton Abbey. For us, of course, the obligatory study is The Manners of Downton Abbey, available for $19.99 on DVD; it only takes an hour to master the arts; it might take longer to read Downton Abbey Rules for Household Staff ($14.99) and to teach its contents to our virtual servitors.

PBS, this time of year, well ahead of Christmas, sends us shopPBS.org, its magazine, where our virtual aristocracy may be physically spruced up by buying all kinds of products. All Seasons of DA now available may be purchased alongside Christmas at Downton Abbey ($16.99), a raft of books to start our own DA Library (A Year in the Life of Downtown Abbey ($29.99), Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey (ditto), The Chronicles of Downton Abbey ($19.99), and The World of Downton Abbey (ditto)).

The newest addition to our growing collection is Downton Abbey Teas, 30 bags for $12.99. The categories are “Bates’ Brambleberry Tea,” “Mrs. Patmore’s Pudding Tea,” “Christmas Tea,” “Lady Cora’s Evening Tea,” “Grantham Breakfast Blend Tea,” and “English Rose Tea.” For a mere $77.94 (shipping may be free), we can have all six flavors.  The savvy buyer, however, may obtain a free sampler by buying Season Five first. Oh. These teas are a “PBS Exclusive”;  don’t waste time trying to buy these tea products at Kroger.

I’m personally much attracted by the Miniature Downton Abbey Snow Globe ($12.95), complete with a Downton Abbey Quote book titled Wise Words. And if you’re feeling contrarian, I’ll accept, with equal pleasure, the Miniature Downton Abbey Light-up Castle with sound track and Quote Book.

But, surprise, we aren’t even close to being done yet! There are in addition 26 other purchasable reminders that Downton Abbey is physically real. Of these the most expensive (unless that’s a typo) is Downton Abbey Fragrance ($244.99), the least expensive is a Round Jute/Polypropylene Storage Basket ($10.99). There is jewelry, lace, gloves, towels, and even a Downton Life Cotton Oven Kit (also $10.99); I could use one in making our croutons around here. The Downton Life Cotton Apron carries the following slogan: “My second HOME is Downton Abbey.” Well, they have our number at PBS. Obviously.

Finally, there is a kind of show stopper. It is a DVD, priced at $19.99. It is displayed right next to another DVD titled Secrets of the Manor House; the two are related. The show stopper is titled Secrets of Highclere Castle. What? Highclere Castle? What is that? Well, it turns out to be the actual setting of Downton Abbey, the actual physical place. It turns out to be a real location with a real lord and lady (Lord and Lady Carnarvon) who, mostly, expend their energies keeping it intact (link). And what a great achievement it was, for them, to get BBC to turn it into Downton Abbey. We’ll have to visit there, visit our second home, as soon as it becomes safe enough to fly again in the unreal world where we’re obliged to live in actuality.

Fides in Fido and Further Flotsam

The leaves are mostly down and raked—in quantities fearfully greater than at our old house. Here it is the maples that dominate the landscape in yellow. Transitions, we hope are transitory, and a settling down should slowly set in. In any case, posts to this log have virtually vanished, what with mile-long to-do lists still to be worked. But some old habits are returning, among them reading out-loud. The book we recommend is James Galbraith’s The End of Normal. It ought to resonate with those who follow economics. Its most curious thematic—not stated so much as implied—is that the transition (yet another one), this time to the Post-Oil Age, actually began already in the early 1970s. Which brings echoes of my surprises when I realized, over the decades, reading authors who’ve been most influential in forming my own views of modernity, that the current decadence was fully alive and well in the 1930s already, before I was even born. Galbraith’s “normal” is the unbending faith of our culture in the unfailing growth in the economy, the reliable certainty of endless new waves of technological change that will continue to generate it, and a consumption culture, therefore, that will never end.

Brigitte yesterday found a rather fantastic book review, “The Creepy New Wave of the Internet,” by Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books (11-20-2014) (here). It describes the next wave said to be rising, ready to make life worth living in the immediate future ahead. Worth reading if you have the stomach for it. I did not manage it—but then, of late, I’ve been suffering from (stress-related) irritable bowels. The wave is described as the Internet of Things (IoT), thus objects communicating with each other. Hold on to something firm please: it is projected as a $14.4 trillion industry by 2020.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, sure enough—no doubt to correct my total lack of faith in the future—comes an article proving that Halpern may have a real thumb on the pulse of things—comes an article on dog collars and whistles linked into the Internet so that uptodate pet owners can track their animals and measure their caloric expenditures on walks. This sort of thing—still in early stages—is sure to give new life and growth to the Pet industry, now measured at $58 billion. Our faith in Fido will get a lift from the growth of three fiercely competing companies—no doubt just the first of a whole swarm—in the dog-tracking segment of this market. Bowls that will signal when they have been licked entirely empty will follow—joining the reinvention of eggs, in the grocery business. We have, if you believe Sue Halpern, eggs in a future that will count themselves in the refrigerator and let you know, via your iPhone, when it is time to buy more eggs.

All this came crashing down on me today—when, with the lawn fully raked, my escape into the old normal was denied me. Besides that, the temperature out there is not yet entirely controllable by devices trafficking inside my blood stream informing my Internet-enabled hoodie to turn on the heat using a battery pack that doubles as my zipper and is, of course, rechargeable entirely by a wireless energy transfer that Tesla once saw in his wildest dreams.