Two Generations Over

Wrapping up the summer, running a little late, I thought I'd make note of the fact that Ghulf genes stalwartly carry talent from one generation to the next and then on beyond—as illustrated by this sketch rendered by granddaughter Stella Paret of me. It was one of serveral artistic gifts she gave me for my birthday.

The text, for those handicapped by Gallic, is “A writer who doesn't smoke a cigar—that's a journalist.” The quote is attributed to Christophe la Pierre. That name is also an invention. It delights me to think that for Stella, who just turned sixteen—indeed we both celebrated our birthdays together—the year 1998 would seem to be reasonably far enough in the past to lend authenticity to the fake quote.

The spelling is spontaneous, showing that you don't have to be a perfect speller to be a skillful écrivain. It also pleases me that she accidentally rendered fume as pume but did not mar the sketch by erasing this little oversight.

Picture credit: Magee Prowess in Scanning Inc.

Feudal and Capitalist Economies

Early last year I wrote about “Types of Economies” (here) and contrasted what I called “marketshare economies” and “capitalist economies.” 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 use the word marketshare because any economy organized to secure and hold share in a market, very often at the cost of foregoing maximal profitability, tends on the whole to benefit its stakeholders—its employees and its suppliers. Marketshare 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.

I come back to this subject today thanks to Monique Magee’s nice hat tip. She sent me a link to a chart published initially by Deutsche Bank (here) and republished by Clusterstocks. It shows in striking overlay the performance of two different economies during two different recessions. The first is Japan’s which I’ve always considered to be the “good” kind; and the other one is ours, which I’ve viewed as the “defective” kind. My favorite scholar on this subject, the Frenchman Fernand Braudel, spends three volumes (see reference above) on showing that the word “capitalism,” strictly speaking, should only be applied to the “defective” kind of economic organization of the world. But let’s move on to the chart. A comment then follows.

Ignore, for a moment, Deutsche Bank’s laudatory characterization of the American economy above the chart. This graphic shows the unemployment rate, hence we can also view it through the eyes of the laboring masses—the members of the wider community. The years for Japan extend from 1989 through 1995; the years plotted for the United States are for 2006 through 2010. The recessionary period in both is marked by the grey bars. Now here is a striking snapshot of the two kinds of economies I have in mind. In one the culture powerfully motivates the economic sector to maintain jobs and thus to serve the entire community. In the other the unemployment rate is much higher to begin with, and at the first sign of a turn-down, it sheds jobs without, seemingly, even thinking about alternatives.

It’s the culture, stupid, as I keep repeating monotonously…

Marking Autumn

We make our farewell to the summer past and the autumn just arrived with this bouquet of “flowers,” perhaps the most spectacular product of our garden this season. The flowers are in quotes because it is the leaves of the Coleus that give it its perennial distinction. The flowers are lovely too, but they are delicate blues and pass rapidly in Spring.

This year’s passage from summer to fall had the unusual feature—we’re told that it takes place at twenty-year intervals. On the night of the autumnal equinox, the harvest moon is full. We were lucky: clear skies. We were out in the garden, near the Coleus in its half-barrel, and looking up saw the bright full moon with Jupiter marking a tiny but equally bright spot immeditately beneath it at the six o’clock spot.

The plaque above the Coleus is a favorite too. Here it is close enough up to make its meassage readable.

Picking on the Gypsies

The world-wide recession really must be serious—else Nicolas Sarkozy wouldn’t be picking on the gypsies in France and the NYT would not be bringing us stories echoing the European squabble. I note that it is now politically correct to refer to them as the Roma, a designation that, I confess, I haven’t actually heard used until the present happy times. It is technically correct, I assume, because Wikipedia tells me that the gypsies belong to the Romani people, originally from India. The French call them les bohémiens or les romanichels. In Hungary we used the word zigány, in Germany Zigeuner.

Born in Hungary, the gypsies were very much part of our lives, present as door-to-door fortune-tellers, admired for their music, suspected of thieving, and so on. You were supposed to avoid them as a child lest you be taken in secret to live a life on the fringes of society. Working on maneuver damage claims in Germany as a soldier in the Army, we often had to deal with the dislocation of gypsy camps. One of our most memorable experiences of gypsies, Brigitte’s and mine, took place on our one and only trip behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s. We were on the border with East Germany waiting hours and hours to be processed through to West Berlin—a very tense time it was too. In the midst of that a caravan of perhaps twenty cars and trucks arrived; they carried a large gypsy troupe. They too were crossing the border. To our absolute amazement, these people startled, baffled, and intimidated the East German authorities who, it seemed despite themselves, rapidly processed this little swarm to help them get out of the sacred system. And they were going in, not out of, commie-prudish East Germany. In the process most of us capable of reading and writing helped individual gypsies fill out their little forms. They didn’t know how to deal with that new-fangled whatsit, writing. They just came up to us to get some help, entirely unafraid, lively, and casually expecting help. I helped a young woman fill out hers. And they got the help they sought. Ask and you shall receive. They came hours after our arrival and left hours before our own departure. It left a big impression in my memory. They seemed to act out a claim to general humanity, transcending all this nonsense of borders and authorities.

Conflict with the gypsies, it seems to me, erupts when life’s conditions tighten and, in the process, humanity reaches out for handy scapegoats. Hence times must be tough. And in a knee-jerk reaction, the rest of us hit out at those who have a tough time hitting back. A shame that—whether in France or here.

Flurry of Construction

I noted on LaMarotte that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has at least managed to produce some road signs announcing that constructions will commence one of these days. That’s the public kind, of course. But we’ve noted quite a flurry of private construction in this neighborhood, and that kind is visibly taking place. The folks across the way have added a big chunk to the back of their house to accommodate four children who’ve suddenly turned into teenagers. Two other houses have had signs out. Workmen’s vans have been preempting daytime parking on the street. Now we too have weighed in with a project of our own—some long-delayed plaster work to spruce up several rooms. Still ahead are other projects, not least the replacement of a garage that used to look like this A but now looks like this A. Before it completely topples over, it must go. Talking to the contractor, I’ve learned that he and others are very busy. Housing starts are dead in the water, but no one indicator always tells the whole story. Instead of moving, people are making changes to the places where they live. I’m sorting out the garage bit by bit in what amounts to—in that crowded place used mostly for storage—exploratory surgery. I emerge from the place looking like a chimney sweep. It makes for a change—and my hands are beginning to feel like sand paper…

Ancient, Ambiguous, Odorous Words

“simplicity IS THE ULTIMATE SOPHISTICATION.” - L. DA VINCI

The above is from a Hyatt Hotels advertisement of their Visa card in today’s New York Times. I love the abbreviation L. for Leonardo. So sophisticated. Here is one of those wondrous ancient words; it has undergone so many cycles of use over time that quite contradictory meanings attach to it. The root is sophia, the Greek for wisdom—and I should really render it Sophia in honor of the Goddess of Wisdom. We find this root in philosophy, the love of wisdom; there its ancient meaning is preserved unsullied if also, perhaps, mostly unnoticed.

Precisely at the time when Greece emerged from its own religious (call it medieval) period—thus around the time of Socrates in the fifth century BC—the high arts began a descent into the world of commerce. Socrates was condemned to death by the state of Athens for supposedly corrupting the minds of the young—but the Oracle of Delphi considered him the wisest of men. In Socrates’ time emerged a profession of “teachers of wisdom,” the Sophists, who taught for a fee. Money and wisdom rarely mix well. Some of the sophists were, of course, genuine and serious teachers of philosophy; and far be it for me to deny the honest teacher his income. But many others—and they came, in the long run, to set the tone—“diversified” their product and began to teach cleverness in argument.

Here I’d note a more modern instance of ambiguous labeling. In the seventeenth century the Jesuits were accused of similar “sophistication,” so that the word jesuitical has a bad smell for those who know about such things. But the Jesuits are an upstanding and respected order, and I count myself lucky in having had them as my teachers.

In Greece we had an early split between philosophy and sophism—and lucky for philosophers that the language managed to produce a word that has retained its purity. The word itself, philosophy, was apparently introduced by Pythagoras, another fifth century figure. Rhetoric, the very serious science of oratory and of communications generally, suffered from an ambiguous reputation throughout its long, long history—having only been freed of this taint in modern times when, finally, we have differentiated advertising and public relations as the honestly dishonest forms of paid public discourse.

Isn’t it delightful, therefore, to see an ad in the New York Times lauding sophistication—the child honoring its parent?

A Meaningful Coincidence

In light of the last entry, I experienced a very striking instance of a meaningful coincidence. Plasterers are coming tomorrow to do repairs on various rooms. In the afternoon, therefore, Brigitte and I got busy emptying rooms in preparation. This was very heavy work, and after hauling yet another huge bundle of coats from the hallway closet to the attic, I sank down in the upstairs “library”—which we refer to as Europe—and sat on the couch breathing hard. As I recovered, I found my eyes resting on the dark dustcover of a book called House of War. For some reason it had never drawn my attention. I couldn’t place its title or how it got into the house. The book was within reach, so I pried it loose and began to examine it. It was written by James Carroll, subtitled The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. It turns out that it was a birthday gift in 2006 which, for some reason, I had overlooked. I opened the book to taste its flavor and began to read the Prologue. Reading, it became obvious that I’d never opened this book before. Then, on page xi, the third page of the book, I saw this sentence—and, well, marveled:

The ceremonial groundbreaking for the Building’s construction, on September 11, 1941, took place sixty years, almost to the minute, before American Airlines flight 77 arrowed into the side of the Pentagon that faces Arlington Cemetery.

Now what are the odds of this happening by pure chance on a day like today, after writing the last post in the morning, especially its concluding paragraph?

Turk Louis

Herewith an extract from a family history I wrote in the 1990s — with the reason for my quoting it revealed only at the very end:

* * *

The city of Rastatt became for us, during this time, a sort of secondary center—and ultimately a point of departure [for America]…
     We were then all living in what had, until the end of World War I, been an independent country, the Grand Duchy of Baden, in the old days governed from what was now the city of Baden-Baden. The country had become divided in 1535 into two halves, Baden-Durlach to the south, an area that encompassed all of the Black Forest, and Baden-Baden to the north, where we were.
     The German states were all loosely stitched together then into what is now remembered as the Holy Roman Empire and, most recently, as The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, ruled by an elected monarch, the Kaiser. Nine of the greatest duchies of the realm elected the Kaiser, and their rulers were therefore known as “electors.”
     The Holy Roman Empire had initially been formed by the conquests of Charlemagne and had extended all the way from Italy to what is now Poland to the north.
     The Reformation first (16th) and then the Thirty Years War (early 17th century) had weakened this ancient structure over time. After World War I our part of the Duchy of Baden had become one of the Länder of the Weimar Republic (1919).
     How does Rastatt fit in? Well, one of the margraves of Baden-Baden, Louis William, born in Paris but the 21st descendant of the ruling family of Baden, the house of Zähringen, took office in 1677 and ruled until his death in 1707. He was the most distinguished of the margraves of Baden, having been a hero in the Austro-Turkish war of 1683-1699. He liked Rastatt and built a showy, ostentatious baroque palace there, known as the Schloss.
     The Schloss was an immensely long, multi-story building with statues of distinguished ancestors at regular intervals. They stood in the low spots between the palace’s many small towers. Dark, brown sandstone. In front of this structure extended a vast parade ground. A wall surrounded all this. A square stood outside and traffic ran along the wall. On the wall itself were yet more, almost countless, statues of princes and dukes and bishops and such.

The title, margrave, used to mean “count of the border.” This was a military title borne by a figure assigned to guard frontiers.
     The Germans call Louis William Ludwig Wilhelm, but in his times he was known as Louis and became famous as “Turk Louis.”
     He rose in rank from a regimental command in the Empire to become the supreme commander of the imperial army that fought in Hungary, Serbia, and Bosnia in the Turkish war. This war began when the French colluded with the Ottomans, and janissaries surrounded Vienna with an army of 300,000—an unprecedented number in those times. In 1683 a combined German, Austrian, and Polish army, under the command of Johan III Sobieski, the King of Poland, defeated the Turks and lifted the siege. Louis continued on, drove the Turks out of Hungary, and defeated them near Slankamen in Vojvodina, south of Subotica in 1691. With this action he freed Hungary of 160 years of Turkish rule.
     Not surprisingly, neither Hungarian nor Serb nor Bosnian history have much to say about “Türkenlouis,” preferring to applaud instead the local commanders who helped him.
     Perhaps an impulse of fairness moved the spirit that guides Hungarians to send us—alas unconsciously—to pay our last respects to Turk Louis on our way out of Europe.
     Louis’ wife came from Czechoslovakia. She was Sibylle August. She had nine children. Louis died at 52 weakened by the countless injuries he had collected in a life of active command.
     After his time Rastatt was Baden’s administrative center.
     Now we know.


* * *

And now for the reason for this quotation. I learned from Siris today (here) that the famous battle signalling the  ultimate retreat of the Ottomans took place on, ah, 9/11/1683. Didn’t know that. But the revelation certainly reverberated…

Grosse Pointe Wildlife

Uncle Aristarchus

In 1775 22-year-old Deborah Champion traveled from Westchester, Connecticut to Boston carrying a secret message sent by her father to General George Washington. She first carried the message under her bodice (corset) and later hidden under some food in a saddle-bag. I have this from a letter from a treasure house of letters referenced below. She managed to get through the British lines in the pre-dawn hours; she was taken for an old woman because she wore a calash. Reading eighteenth century letters is educational. A calash was a hood, a word that came from the French calèche.

Now, apart from the war-time tensions and the employment of young virgins to carry messages hidden on their bodies, something else left the most vivid impression on me reading this letter. Deborah traveled in company of an elderly slave named Aristarchus. Slaves in Connecticut? Yes. Learning about the relationships between slave owners’ children and slaves is also educational. Here is a quote from the letter Deborah wrote to a friend named Patience:

You remember Uncle Aristarchus; he has been devoted to me since my childhood, and particularly since I made a huge cask to grace his second marriage, and found a name for the dusky baby, which we call Sophranieta.

Deborah also refers to the slave’s wife as Aunt Chloe. On the trip itself she also encounters blood relatives—Uncle Jerry, Uncle Starkey, and Aunt Faith.

I got to thinking about Deborah and Uncle Aristarchus after reading this fascinating letter—and tried to internalize what it might have been like for a child, in those days, growing up in a household with slaves—and how that might have shaped a child’s the views of that wretched institution, especially under circumstances where the slaves were, as here they seemed to be, almost members of the family and addressed with honorifics children in those days, and in my own childhood too, used when talking or referring to elders. Regarding honorifics, I’ve had occasion to mention that subject tracing the Mma in Mma Ramotswe a while ago here.

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Women’s Letters, America from the Revolutionary War to the Present, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler. Dial Press, 2005.

The House is Back

Two children on a trampoline—it was the first thing they’d installed—
Bounced high and cried out in delight beneath the shade of grand old trees
Behind the house that had gone south a year and then some month ago;
But it had started going south two years before that time—as I’ve
Related in these random pages a while back one April eve.
The signs of life began to sprout about a week ago when lo,
Behold an SUV with KY plates appeared and soon a rash
Of carpenters and plasterers and landscape architects arrived
And soon whole mounds of trash announced that normalcy would soon prevail.

And that is now.

All things therefore are looking up on Charlesvoix where once, and now
Again perhaps, auto execs did and still do take residence.
Kentucky plates suggest a state where foreign makers sited plants—
Where now the finally reviving two of the Big Three recruit
Freshly minted, trained executives anticipating private
Ownership, Gov Motors just a nightmare the public will forget.
The house gone south, meanwhile, stood empty, still, and uninhabited
And lost net worth enough so it's become a bargain at discount
With this result: it can go north again; it has been turned around.

The children shout
In glee and fright!

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The prelude to this finale is here.

Who Wrote This?

The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.

A post on Siris yesterday titled “Maris Stella,” put up in commemoration of the feast day celebrating the birth of our Lady, instantly recalled the passage above to my memory. So who wrote this? Out of its native context this passage has one kind of sound, within its broader context quite another. I think it was a sardonically rendered imitation of the sound and flavor of romantic novels written for women, and it forms part of that wondrous structure of sublime decadence called Ulysses by James Joyce. I read this passage in the summer of 1961 while a soldier in Germany. It startled me at that time—as I’m sure it was intended to. I resolutely ignored the context, drew a line in the margin in pencil to mark it, and, on the flyleaf up front noted the passage using the words “Ode to Isis 329”; the number was the page in my John Lane The Bodley Head edition of 1947, the gift of a very bookish friend, now passed away, Alvin Coger, a fellow sergeant. I couldn’t stand the book, but in those days I chewed my way through things like that to form my own opinions. Monuments to decadence. Joyce and Dali are two of my great saints of cultural collapse.

The Store Will Rise Again

The other day I was remembering a great bookstore in St. Paul (in “Peacable Nature”). Today Brigitte discovered that the store had closed its doors in 2004 already after operating for thirty-four years. When we left the Twin Cities in 1989, that store was then still called, as it had originally been called, The Hungry Mind, but its owner-founder Dave Unowsky had sold that name to somebody and renamed his store Ruminator Books. Selling that name was one attempt to keep the place afloat. The story of the store is here, and worth reading by chroniclers of the never-ending saga of books. This is but a temporary bump in the road, I maintain. Books, and stores like The Hungry Mind, shall never entirely vanish, but we must cross the Desert of E before the great times dawn once again …

The Three Hundred Year Millennium

Societies are invariably layered. The small upper layer leaves its impression on history; the life of the vast supporting foundation is much less documented. What we see at the top is wondrous diversity of expression, the consequence of freedom from necessity. But in our blessed three-hundred year millennium, and what that means I’ll soon unpack, we’ve had the luxury of detailed historical research. Hence we have discovered that the brilliant flowers at the rising stems of societies are largely based on the exploitation of people who live on the edge of need. You might say that in the best societies the agricultural sector actually had some limited, recognized rights, in the better societies serfdom supported wealth and that slavery appeared only in civilizations fully in decay. Unfortunately for many, many people, civilizations can decay for hundreds of years; thus slavery played a dominant economic role in the Roman Empire virtually from its earliest times.

In theory majorities can overwhelm minorities, but to exert their power they must be organized. But when the majority is struggling to survive, it cannot develop and then organize. Humanity is also very adaptive—both to servitude and mastery. Once the masses are cowed, they will remain peaceful unless harshly provoked; and those above are quite adapted to their luxuries and able to stare injustice right in the face and ignore it stalwartly. Hence the existence of slavery in this very country; it was well-entrenched in a nominally Christian society and supported by a highly organized triangular trade—English manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to the New World, and raw materials back to England. We might call it globalization.

Now sometimes I picture myself unhappily as a kind of Cato the Elder. He was the fellow in Rome who never gave a speech without pronouncing, at the end of it, “Carthage must be destroyed.” Thus I find myself announcing—no matter what the subject—that “Oil is going to run out.” Yes. And it’s likely to run out in the current century. I call ours the three hundred year millennium because the Age of Oil (more precisely of Fossil Fuels) will have lasted no more than three centuries when it comes to its end. And in this time, and very temporarily indeed, we’ve enjoyed the blessings of millennium: we’ve managed to have energy slaves rather than the human kind. But as slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century illustrates, it’s not beneath a God-fearing and civilized nation—whose towering scribe of holy documents, Jefferson, enjoyed their services—to return to the traditional ways of humanity. You think it couldn’t happen? Now that’s naïveté.

People who speak savanarola, as I often do, are supposed to offer solutions to the problems that they raise. I don’t believe that the “problem-solution” pairing is relevant here. Vast collective phenomena cannot be fixed. But the insights of a few people in the generations before mine greatly helped me to cope with the rather minimal challenges of this rich millennium. Insight is valuable. And marching toward the future aware of what is in the offing, if passed on, will definitely help at least minorities to do what can be done.
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For a more detailed discussion of the timeline presented here, see this kick-off post on LaMarotte.

Behavior Under Stress

True character shows its colors in times of stress—the reason why we praise sang froid and grace under fire. I’d also extend this analogy to a body under stress of alcohol; some are then mean drunks, others carry their liquor, and the best become markedly benevolent. We’re undergoing double stress these days—the stress of an economy hitting rocks and an election. Elections produce a combination of conflict and of giddiness. Displays of “true character” are all too visible in such interesting times.

Pogácsa - You’ve Come a Long Ways

In virtually every Hungarian fairy tale, when the young protagonist sets out on the great adventure, he or she (always very poor, of course) carries a supply of ash-baked pogácsa as the way-bread that will sustain. Pogácsa is most closely related to the scone of the Anglo-Saxon world. It is short-bread, quite crumbly, and the shortening used, at least in the fairy tales, is bacon fat. The old-fashioned, the real thing, was quite grey in color and looked like the inserted picture (courtesy of a Hungarian blog here). Pogácsas just like that were baked in our house—in an oven, to be sure, rather than in hot ashes as in the tales. We actually loved to eat them. They had a layered feel and crumbled in the mouth, and carried memories of bacon.

I was trying to remember the name and expected it to be hidden away forever, but suddenly it was there, about a minute after the effort of remembering. Ashbaked pogácsa—hamubasült pogácsa. Today I discovered that the romantic associations I’ve always had with this scone or bisquit have remained alive and well in Hungary. Indeed it is a very popular food product. It recently even hosted a national festival. And humble ash-pogácsa has come a long, long ways.

Wikipedia even has an article on the subject and shows a nice picture of the modern style of this product, shown here above another picture equally glorious. The sources in turn are here and here. Pogácsa may be also be made with yeast dough and combined with all kinds of fillings—cheese, pork, cabbage—and seasoned in all sorts of ways. What surprised me most, however, is that the Hungarian pogácsa and the Italian foccacio are close relatives, at least in name. Wikipedia tells me that the Hungarian name came from the Latin panis focacius (bread baked on the hearth).

Wow! That goes back a long ways. But then, come to think of it, Hungary was once Pannonia, a Roman possession, and St. Martin of Tours, the family patron, as it were, was once a Roman soldier who went west from Pannonia when a higher calling came. I bet that he carried a cloth full of pogácsa as he set off more or less bound for very distant Gallia.

Last Night I Saw the Stars

In this old creaky senile corner of Detroit
Of late the wires behind the residences smoke
Or display fireworks and we are told, “Avoid
Getting too near because if that there cable broke
It’ll come flying and it could electrocute
The careless stander by. And our ambulances
Can’t get here fast in this here time of the commute.”

After three, four such vivid events—sparks at night
Smoke by day—loss of power has now been organized.
Outages are timed, at ten a.m. or at midnight,
They’re unannounced so that we may still be surprised
Unless we’ve learned to note and mark a subtle sign;
It’s the appearance of a little red Honda generator.
Chained to a pole it feeds a box from its turbine.

A little Honda generator? Thanks Japan,
We needed that. Edison needs power too
To feed a panel there to read, record, and scan
The progress of its contractors as these aspire
To find the ancient flaw, transform the transformer,
Cut the branches, string new black and unfrayed wire—
And this as cooling fails and it’s just getting warmer.

Last night the power failed right at the witching hour
(The little Honda had arrived; saw it today.)
Flashlights guided us to bed without a shower,
But never mind, it’d been an almost frigid day.
Outside in the silent dark I saw the planet Mars
And lots and lots of strange white shiny glimmers.
In time I realized that I was seeing stars.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane!

Having stayed out of the water for quite a while, at least two months—meaning that I’ve watched SyFy, cartoons, or Light Classical Music instead of wading in the stream of news commentary—listening to a perfectly sensible pundits’ circle like Washington Week, presided over these days by Gwen Ifill, produced a brief, temporary shock—until my old habits kicked in and the whole thing sounded normal again. The program last night focused on the President’s televised speech about Iraq; thus the talk was all about the President and how now, having “turned the page” on Iraq, he was bending all of his attention onto the economy. And there was more along these lines.

I knew the answers in advance, but I looked at the U.S. Constitution anyway to see if what I’d heard the pundits say had any relationship to the founding document—fully expecting to be in quite another world. I was right, of course—because memory serves, as they say. The word “economy” does not appear in the Constitution. To be sure, that word did not mean what it does today; it was applied to the household; “political economy,” meaning political arrangements, existed at the time, but isn’t used in the document either. The closest word in the eighteenth century to describe the reality we now call an economy was “commonwealth”; it signified public welfare and the general good. That word does not appear in the Constitution either. And it makes sense that it did not. The founding document was practical and down-to-earth. The last thing our founders imagined was that the executive power, which they vested in the President (Art. II, Section 1), was of such a nature as to manage the vast range of private exchanges between individuals. The President’s duties, as spelled out in the referenced article and section, include being commander in chief of the Army and the Navy, the power to make treaties (limited by advice and consent), powers to appoint officials and judges (advice and consent at the highest levels only), the power to make recess appointments, the duty to make a State of the Union report, the power to convene Congress in cases of emergency; and he “shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers.” His general duties are stated in this oft repeated but totally ignored sentence: “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.” And that’s it.

The original president, carrying these duties, was also chosen by elected officials by means of a curious mixture of elections, appointments, and elections. Elected state legislatures appointed electors; electors so chosen would vote for presidential candidates; the candidate getting the majority of the electors’ votes became the president. The twelfth amendment changed all this, and with that change we set out on the road to the present. Elected officials were presumably smart enough to know that a man with the powers assigned to him, and these have never been changed, could not possibly be Superman. But the general voting public—and today that means anybody 18 or over—cannot be so presumed to think and—thus—that public will exercise its punitive powers on anyone who fails to be the Caped Crusader. Oh, look: It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman.

This development, all in the name of empowering the citizenry, has produced—by means of vast public communications which are not, themselves, under any kind of constraint—a vast fantasy of what is possible. We act as if this fantasy had real grounding in powers. It does not. But we are so very sophisticated that we can make all this sound deadly serious. Presidential powers as they are versus what they are perceived to be—and the change in how presidents are chosen—are the factual underpinnings for saying the sorts of things I said yesterday, namely that politics is more like weather than human endeavors. That probably sounded airy-fairy, but you can trace it backward to actual changes in the Constitution.

Washington Week used to be called Washington Week in Review. Remember? I said yesterday that in the Media the trend is toward contraction, greater speed, less reading, for Zeus’s sake. This is a tiny example of that.

Synthetic Nature

One of the consequences of the television age is that a democratic duty that once required effort and concentration—copious reading at a minimum—has been oddly “naturalized.” By that I mean that news from very distant places—and on extraordinarily complex matters—now reach us as sounds and pictures—just like all of the things that reach us in our ordinary daily life. Watching news has a certain kinship to watching leaves moving in the wind; observing the leaves we see which way the wind is blowing.

We can and mostly do live our ordinary lives without much reasoning (unless our work requires it). Under a democratic rule, we could not perform our duties as citizens like that, with nary a thought. To be well-informed and responsible citizens demanded something more than casual, habit-based spontaneity. That’s still true, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to be. Television news coverage, running 24/7 these days, produces the illusion that we are well informed—not by arduous reading of long, structured, printed accounts, including in-depth articles that grapple with complexity but by a kind of highly selective condensate of news rendered by catch-phrases, rapidly-moving images, and the entertaining real-time clash of opposing views.

There is no golden age I’m longing to recover. The well-informed, responsible citizenry has largely always been a myth—and the wider the franchise and lower the age limit the more mythic it has become. Over against this is the pleasing fact that many eligible voters do not bother voting. My intent, instead, is to note the interesting fact that matters inaccessible to our senses have now become a kind of synthetic nature we can monitor quite casually while doing something else—much like we might monitor the approach of a thunderstorm. In earlier times we had to make deliberate efforts. We had to rely on reports to see into the distance, and judging the credibility of those who brought us news was very much part of the job.

The very nature of the institutions creating this synthetic nature skews and bends the message we receive. They fiercely compete for eyeballs, and the mere presence of a pair will do. The motivation is commercial. News has taken on intense sensory forms; it’s more compressed; more brief; images flicker to hold our wayward attention; it's more and more embedded in implicitly emotional clusters. This entertains, and entertainment draws more eyeballs than thought or duty. These tendencies, of course, deform the theoretical aims of journalism—to inform a responsible public. The paradox is that we feel informed but we are not. The general movements of public opinion more and more resemble weather—somewhat predictable and somewhat chancy—and less and less reflect distinctly conscious, responsible human intentions.

Picking up a Chronometer

One of the most striking features of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War is how modern that account sounds to our ears. That war—I think of it as akin to our own world war—took place 431-404 BC, and Thucidides wrote his history in the waning years of the fourth century BC. He died in 400 at age of 60. Now unless one’s college studies are still as fresh as a daisy—and assuming that one actually had a course on Greek history detailed enough to look at this period closely, the clash between Athens and Sparta is one thing, and philosophy quite another; the ordinary modern mind does not link the two. We have pictures of Socrates surrounded by disciples suspended in a kind of philosophical fairy land; and there is Aristotle filling thick volumes. The linkage between history and philosophy is a little vague in most minds except those of experts. To make some links, I thought I’d take a look.

The Peloponnesian war had been underway two years when a woman called Perictione gave birth to a little baby boy (427). She and her husband, Ariston, named him Plato—and you can be sure they discussed it and agreed, because this was a decidedly upper class family. Ariston traced his lines of descent back to two kings; and Perictione traced hers back to the famed lawyer and poet Solon. At this time the man who would later become little Plato’s teacher, a man called Socrates, had just turned 40. That war took quite a while to end; it lasted 27 years. Plato was a young man of 25 when it finally wound down. And Thucydides was 56. It was twenty years after this—and another war, the Corinthian, was still raging—when Aristotle first cried out as a baby after being born in 384 BC. Plato was then 45; baby Aristotle had become a man of 37 when Plato died at the ripe old age of 82 in 347 BC. And in that year a major future political and military figure, Alexander, later dubbed The Great, was just a boy of nine. Aristotle would soon be engaged to be his teacher.

Sometimes it is worth consciously pondering that all these famous people were once babies and had to have their nappies changed.

I link these people chronologically here by way of underlining that the philosophical works we place at the core of Western civilization emerged in a political, technological, and militarily advanced stage of Greek civilization, as documented in Thucydides' work. And this age had a tendency, a direction—thus toward the expansive, the materialistic. It was a culturally modern time, the transition between what is called the classical period in Greece and the Hellenistic—the latter an overflow of Greek culture to a much wider region, the consequence of Alexander’s conquests. The classical period followed a deeply religious age from which very few “great names” survive. Why? Because we only value figures who’re like us. If we were drawing parallels to our own stage of culture, we’d be looking at a period extending roughly from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II, call that classical, and the period of global Americanization that followed and is our own time now; call it Hellenistic. What I’m after is the feel of things, and this, I think, properly captures that feel.

Why did I do this? I tried to answer a question. And it was this: How could it come about that a person brought up in a Catholic tradition and exposed to philosophy by the Jesuits, thus to a philosophy firmly centered on Thomism, would have developed a great distaste for the Aristotelian view of reality? The fault is largely mine, of course. It is true, of course, that Thomas Aquinas was a staunch, loyal, persistent Aristotelian, but he Christianized that philosophy by brilliant innovations. My fault—because what stuck to me was the Aristotelian foundation. Something in me clashed with it—and therefore I never did manage to advance to the brilliant innovations. I had problems with the base.

It has always seemed to me that Aristotle’s natural leanings were materialistic—and I was born into an age where—almost undetectable although it is—the spiritual focus is once more increasing; and it is this new, faint something that attracts me. Thus, in later times, I felt much more drawn to Aristotle’s predecessors, thus the Platonic, and what emerged later from it, the neo-platonic and mystical schools that developed from it across the board as the Graeco-Roman world slowly decayed. And this foray into chronology took place by way of getting a better feel for the times, the tempora. And, I would submit, the times then match the times now. And that explains my drawing back from the Aristotelian, however modified. I’m more poet than thinker; the content is less important to me than the smell.

Notice the interesting “materialization” of philosophy in this chronology. Socrates, a deeply spiritual figure, is the teacher of Plato, a metaphysician who taught by dialogue; he is the teacher of Aristotle, the logician and physicist, who, most significantly, rejects Plato’s eternal forms; and Aristotle is the teacher of a warrior and conqueror whose world was decidedly the here and now.
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I try always to promote this great edition of The Peloponnesian War: The Landmark Thucydides.

The Soul Aloft

As Harriet followed Miss Lydgate across the lawn, she was visited by an enormous nostalgia. If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-hunters, and competitors; abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal jealousies; getting one’s teeth into something dull and durable; maturing into solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches—then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-had struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things. [Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night]

Harriet Vane, the heroine of this novel, is herself a writer of detective novels. This brief quotation records her thought as she returns to her old college and the ambiance of the place comes to surround her in a conversation with an old teacher. I marked this passage a long time ago. Oddly enough it came to mind when I read recently this passage in Plato’s Phaedo. The voice is that Socrates:

     And were we not saying long ago that the soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say, when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense (for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses)—were we not saying that the soul too is dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, and wanders and is confused; the world spins round her, and she is like a drunkard, when she touches change?
     Very true.
     But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, the region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.

Good Night, Sleep Tight...

...and don’t let the bed-bugs bite. In the last century, as it advanced, people on either side of the Atlantic came to think that modern ways had really managed to rid humanity of certain evils, once and for all. Semmelweis had taught doctors to wash their hands and banished puerperal fever. Koch discovered the cause of tuberculosis in 1882, a graduate student, Albert Schatz, isolated streptomycin in 1943, and it was shown to cure TB by 1947. DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) had been synthesized in 1847; its insecticidal properties were discovered in 1939 when I was three; we were virtually covered with the white powder during World War II to rid us of head-lice, if present; and it did for bed-bugs too. When we arrived in the United States in 1951, infantile paralysis, polio, was still a curse, and we frequently saw those it had afflicted. A year later Salk developed a vaccine, and mass immunizations were underway by 1955. No. It wasn’t difficult to believe in progress in the twentieth century. Signs of it manifested everywhere.

A few years ago, working on a multi-volume essay series at ECDI, we became aware of some strange developments. Among these were isolated outbreaks of TB again, and even documented but fortunately tiny outbreaks of the bubonic plague in Peru in 1994. (Checking on this fact today, I discovered that another outbreak had been noted this year.) We learned that the pharmaceutical industry was not investing much, if anything, into the continued control of diseases that have been “dealt with” once and for all—but variants of the causing bacteria have evolved. DDT was banned in agricultural use; it produces cancer. And the bedbug is back. What goes around...comes back? Curves that rise...also go down? I wonder. Are doctors still washing their hands?

Seasonal Contrast

Spring and late summer. The girl decked out, the matron. Going on walks with a little camera and a good memory...

Intimations?

Another power failure quite early in the morning—I’ve mentioned a series of these that took place three weeks ago with literal fireworks—caused one of our neighbors to mutter: “Just like the third world.” To which I responded saying, “Welcome to Iraq, Betty.” But the sun was out, the sky was a deep blue, a cool, a lovely Indian summer day, which prompted me to pen, literally, a blog for LaMarotte out back. Done with it I read it to Brigitte saying: “No power, no Internet, no blogs. But posts can still be written.” And she: “Yes, but how are we going to post it?” This led to some bemused speculation.

We still have a typewriter, but it’s electric—and the F key doesn’t work (which might please linguistic puritans). The answer therefore was to use the daylight while it lasted to make neatly legible hand-written copies. Brigitte could make two, I could make three. The telephone still worked, thus while lunching on home-harvested tomatoes (we wouldn't dare open refrigerator doors) we might attempt to locate the physical mailing address of the two of five blog readers whose whereabouts we only vaguely know. The Post Office near us might still have power—although the stop lights on Mac had gone blind—and while I was out I might still find a functioning restaurant where thermos bottles might be filled with real hot coffee.

If you’ve wondered why some of my posts are so doomy, it’s because, from time to time, we’re getting intimations of cultural mortality.

Peacable Nature

Back in the early 1980s we still lived in Minneapolis, and we frequently visited St. Paul where daughter Monique had a rather unique apartment—the bottom floor of a sprawling old mansion, in what had once been one of the most fashionable neighborhoods, almost walking distance from the Capitol. Near there, about two blocks away, was a splendidly large and eccentric bookshop where, on many an afternoon, I’d wander to find strange and wonderful books. Quite a few from my collection come from there. I chanced across one of these in an almost hidden half-aisle at the back. It was titled Peaceable Nature, by Stephan Lackner; it came out in 1984. The title alone brought instant affirmation. The theme of the book had many times come into my own thoughts as I’d avidly studied biology down to its very foundations and discovered there something quite other than “Nature, red in tooth and claw” as per Lord Tennyson. Lackner’s observation, in a phrase, was that nature is cooperative and symbiotic, by and large; it’s peaceable and, furthermore, all of one piece—and so is, hold on now, humanity.

I’d also had had that same thought often when looking at the world as a whole rather than through the distorting lens of the Media, the first time many years before, in Washington, DC. I was working late downtown, alone in an empty office suite. It was after dark already—it was Spring—when I descended into the grubby underground to drive our little blue VW up and out in a spiraling course and then, down 18th Street, then headed west to cross into Arlington by the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, aiming further for the suburbs. I discovered the next morning that at that very time, about two blocks from the office that I had occupied, the largest protest march in all of U.S. history up to that time had taken place. The cause was the Vietnam War; the year was 1970. I’d seen nothing, nothing whatsoever, to signal that something really big was going down. The big picture was quiet.

To this picture I must link what Brigitte and I call “the virtues of modernity,” namely that so many, many things—indeed most things—work so wonderfully well and last so long. We never fail to note this when we’re on a trip and hurtling through some urban area on a well-made freeway at seventy miles an hour in dense traffic, with huge truck roaring as we pass them and other vans and cars pass us, even at that speed. “The noble ball-bearing,” I always think—thousands and thousands and thousands of them—and never a one failing. And that’s just the transport system. But this general virtue—which depends on discipline, care, consistency—and each system, social and physical, properly interlocking—touches virtually every aspect of modern life. To be sure, a cynical take might be that what we call virtue isn’t. It’s simply adaptive behavior; those who violate it will feel the lash of sanctions. All right, all right. That’s true enough. But here, this morning, I take the wider view. I look down upon all this from a great height. I think of the workmen who poured the concrete of what is now our new neighbors’ drive; I watched them working, carefully, thoughtfully, returning several times to one spot that wouldn’t behave. And what I saw was care, commitment, virtue. And these were ordinary people, a real random sample of American humanity. I prefer to think of it was virtue. It’s there, and overwhelmingly present.

It’s good to remind ourselves, occasionally, of this, the bigger picture, in nature and in man—because by our very biological design we’re much more inclined to see those things that fail, that threaten, than the overwhelming mass of things that function with exceeding excellence.

Gargoyle

I have a pet theory that in Western culture everything starts with the French. They invent it, think it first—but they don’t get the credit. Commercial exploitation of the thing is by the Americans. And the Japanese finally figure out how to make it properly. In this context, the other day—and the impetus for this was a post by Montag here—it tickled me no end that that, to me, most favorite architectural feature, the gargoyle, comes from the French word gargouille, which means spout or, more specifically, water-spout. That word, in turn, comes from the Latin gurgulio, gullet, throat, or windpipe. It’s an onomatopoetic word because swallowing has a kind of sound, most pronounced in gargling.

Gargoyles and I go a long way back. I spent much of my vacation time in the U.S. Army, in Europe, visiting gothic cathedrals, and there a bond never to be broken was established—but so heedless is true love, I never really bothered to research the subject. The genuine gargoyle, you see, is not merely a decoration. No. It has functional purpose. Function always comes first where money is involved. To make the most of something necessarily there—now that’s a sign of high civilization. And so the middle ages turned the necessary water spout into an object of art.

Now it turns out that a true gargoyle must spout water, led to it by hidden guttering, whereas, strictly speaking, a purely decorative gargoyle is known as a grotesque. And I learned this because Montag’s post, on the broader subject of “Grotesque” caused me to look deeper into the subject—and there it was, again, my old friend, the gargoyle.

Now that word, grotesque, turns out to have come from the Latin grotto, meaning cave or hollow. Here too the derivation of the concept is convoluted. After the fall of the Roman Empire, its old buried buildings were rediscovered and dug out, hollowed out. Inside these “grottos” people found ancient decadent arts that looked very strange to them. They named them for the type of places in which they had been found. But by one of those wondrous linguistic transformations, what the finders thought about these works of art, namely that they struck them as excessive, extravagant, and weird, came to be attached to name of the location. Grotto-esque, in other words.

A gargoyle that don’t spout water is a kind of decadent gargoyle, folks, and hence belongs with that weird art of the past, the grotesque. Enough said. Let’s look at pictures.

Herewith a genuine gargoyle. It resides on the Mausoleum for Queen Louise-Marie, Sint-Petrus-en-Pauluskerk, in Ostend, Belgium. The source is here.

And here is what I take to be a decorative gargoyle, thus a grotesque, from the roof of Notre Dame de Paris. The source is here.

Missed by Euphemism

The human mind endlessly fascinates. Our ability to ignore that which we do not choose to see is an instance of a power. But mostly we don’t notice that we have it. Three weeks ago or thereabouts, the electric power lines in our neighborhood suddenly began to stage quite fantastic fireworks. By nights we saw the strangest of sharp, multi-colored lights, whole showers of sparks, and we heard huge booming and/or crackling sounds. Anxious crowds collected to watch this magic display on side-walks and in yards, hands touching faces: would those garages go up in flame? When the problem recurred by day, we saw white flashes and black clouds of smoke rise high into the air. These displays rapidly led to power failures that lasted many hours. My point in all this? The point is that, until this happened, we did not really see those power lines. But for some days after these events, we saw the amazing complexity of wire mazes above us, paralleling our streets, transecting our trees behind our houses—in our neighborhood and others. We had become aware of a kind of utilitarian ugliness that, until then, had been entirely filtered out.

Now the other day, as I was walking, a DEAD END sign came into view. Behind it lay a rather charming little street with well-kept, lovely homes. But now, sensitized by power-outage, it occurred to me that the people who lived there surely did not see that sign any more. In this day and age, to live in a street boldly labeled a “dead end” would surely have, long since, resulted in an explosion of that most modern of emotions, Outrage. How can they do that? How can they label us that way. We’re not dead-enders—no we’re not. We can change that—yes we can. The mind’s power to ignore occurred to me as an explanation why thus far Euphemism hadn’t tamed this yellow diamond. I wandered on, thinking about that sign.

The French call it the bottom of the sack—and living there does little more for property values than “dead end.” In Hungarian these are “sack streets,” in German “sack alleys”; both Spanish and Italian suggest that totally cheerless play by Sartre, No Exit.

I walked for an hour or so, and by the time I glimpsed a new sign on another street, the subject had been replaced by others. But there, right there before me, was a hint that Euphemism may have been stirred up after all. This sign, still yellow, was small, oblong, and affixed demurely just underneath the street's name. It said NO OUTLET. Well, well, well, I thought. And then I thought again. To live in a “no outlet” street might not exactly cheer the overly sensitive. Those words also provide at the least the germ of victimhood. Suppose your marriage is a little rocky. No outlet. Suppose your emotions are bottled up. Dear City Administration! I suggest you go back to the drawing board. What about something hip? DRIVE THROUGH. NOT. Wouldn’t that be better? Any suggestions?

If I had to Pick One

If I had to pick one picture out of the many score taken on our brief vacation trip up north, this would be the one. Two of our three daughters, Michelle and Monique, morning, Traverse City, Michigan.

That Voice in the Wilderness

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Isaiah 40:3.

The phrase occurred to me because I noted the death of Matthew R. Simmons this morning on LaMarotte. Simmons was one of the prominent figures promoting awareness of an issue that has been, curiously, tokenized as Peak Oil. The phrase refers to peak oil production in any country, inevitably followed by decline and, ultimately, the stop of the last pump. Thus “peak” really refers to oil running out. Now unless our geologists are entirely mistaken and the core of the planet turns out to be oil rather than molten iron, oil will certainly run out. Peak Oil marks the beginning of the end. The world peak may be happening right now. The last prominent report, as I note here on LaMarotte, puts the peak into the 2011-2013 time frame. Given that oil consumption has reached an all-time high and is still growing, descent from peak to virtually nothing will take place much more rapidly than it took to reach the peak. Therefore it looks like the Age of Oil may well end in this century yet.

This is a recurring subject I touch upon because, over many, many years of studying technology, I’m perhaps excessively aware of the role petroleum plays in everything we do. Therefore the wind-down promises an exceedingly dangerous period in human history. And, as I’ve also noted more than once on LaMarotte (see for instance, “Fusion Footnote” here) the alternatives available to humanity do not promise a smooth transition first to so-called renewable energy and then, perhaps to fusion. No. It’s not in the cards—and least so if the transition to the post-oil future is disordered. For all of these reasons, prominent expert voices like Simmons’ are valuable in warning the public that such matters as conservation are not “symbolic” or “do-gooder” gestures but genuine actions for the common good. The longer we can delay global meltdown, the slower the process of transition, the more likelihood of saving actual lives, indeed millions of lives. I find it very difficult to imagine humanity able to support nearly 6.9 billion people without oil.

Now of course, if we look around, we discover that Simmons’ was a voice crying in the wilderness. Far too few are listening. What I hear instead, going on my walks, is the roar of leaf-blowers and mowers wasting gas—and that’s the least of the waste prominently on view. Alas, oil is cheaper than human labor.

Now in looking up the verse in Isaiah, I noted that it is also quoted in each of the gospels of the New Testament. And my mind calculated how long ago those words were first written and then approvingly repeated. Which suggests to me that deafness to the cries of prophets, religious or secular, is the rule and not the exception. After all, two thousand plus years later, the same phrase spontaneously springs to my mind too. But some do hear. And those who do actually do make a difference. It’s a small consolation.

Pumpkin's Progress

In this post I am keeping up with our 2010 pumpkin, the one growing out of our compost heap. This is the third appearance of this plant on Ghulf Genes, each picture one month apart. Here you see the plant’s development as recorded on June, July, and August 10th.

The plant began to flower in August, but the photograph does not show the yellow blooms.

Our very casual and eccentric “nature’s perserve,” in part hugging a narrow piece of ground against a fence, in part occupying strange towers built of bricks harvested years ago from a modernized driveway, provide us with continuous enjoyment, and the pumpkin is now a recurring phenomenon.

Now that the summer’s highlight—the visit of members of our French family to the New World—is over, we may yet proceed to do the long-postponed uproar—the replacement of our backyard apron and garage. If that process does not cause the ultimate disruption, namely the dislocation of our compost heap, we may yet be able to show you additional changes in this pumpkin’s progress, not least the fruit it will eventually bear. If the worst happens, perhaps we shall continue this story next year ...

Pumpkin, pumpkin, growing green,
In the compost’s subterrain,
If the builders break your frame,
That would be a crying shame.

Maybe we can find a place
In some shaded safer space
Where we can save your roundish fruits
From jack-the-hammer-wielding brutes.

Another Piece Breaks Loose

My subject is a powerful, persistent tendency in American culture, but the occasion is a particular event announced today, the “privatization” of Nightly Business Review by its owner, the public TV station in Miami, WPBT-TV. Another particle of a public something has broken off in a relentless process of erosion. The Public Broadcasting Service is the successor of National Educational Television; NET came into being in 1954, thus three years after my family’s arrival in the United States from Europe. It’s not really surprising that people with our background would have found in NET and in PBS later a welcome sign of something that we understood and valued. We found—and let me restrict that “we” to my mother, father, and their children—the relentless commercialism of America something rather alien by contrast. We came from a world where transportation, not least the railroads, communications—including telephone, postal services, radio, and television—were publicly operated and, further, a realm where the public sector dominated, with the widest possible public approval, virtually all aspects of social life. Let me put it like this to you: the notion that “starting your own business” could possibly be a desirable goal in life would never have occurred to anybody in our extended family—but I hasten to add that we are, really, but a random sample of the European population.

This is an example at the micro, the personal level of a genuine culture clash. You never actually loose this sort of feeling once you have grown up with it and experienced its operations in real life. You cannot simply choose another cultural form as you can opt for another brand of something. Life in a commercial culture, with its idealization of the half-truth of individualism, its instinctive revulsion from the “public” retains an irritating quality for someone who has internalized another system of values.

To be sure, the European cultural feeling—and its associated value system—is a minority phenomenon in the United States as well. If it were not, PBS would never have been founded. We ourselves—and in this “we” I now include my wife and children too—have found this system of values nobly represented in many public institutions, not least free education up to and including the university level, in the GI-bill and, generally, in the U.S. military culture, in the intentions behind the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), in the FDA, in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, in the U.S. Coast Guard, in the U.S. Postal Service, in Unemployment Insurance, in Social Security, and in much else.

Some of these institutions predate the Great Depression, others were greatly influenced by it. The constituency behind these programs and initiatives is substantial and, by its existence, works as a brake on the dominant tendency of this culture, which is to fly apart into a thousand pieces. What are these pieces? I think of them as quasi-communities, narrow, self-centered, blinkered interests. They are so blind and stupid that they are able to relate to one another only by means of a market and the brutal and repeating battles of so-called democratic politics. They share no value except greed for money and for power.

In my time I’ve seen the gradual weakening, the piece-by-piece erosion, of virtually every institution that we value. PBS has become the Begging Channel with still limited but more and more explicit advertising. Free university education went the way of the Dodo long ago. The GI-bill has lost its outlines. The U.S. Postal Service was partially privatized and now trembles on the brink of the real thing if we will let it happen. We’ve deregulated the airlines and, but for the saving collapse of Enron, might have completely ruined public utilities too. Freddie has taken to drink, Fannie to prostitution, and the Good Lord save the FDIC. The Good Lord save the Interstate Highway System, too, and all those other things that still make life civilized around here. Oh. There is the National Park System, another endangered species. It does not surprise me, therefore, that we have contrarians among us who secretly pray that things will get worse—so that at least some of the good will remain.

It is curious how in some cultures what seems to me a destructive tendency always seems to have the edge (and, yes, it has some benefits as well) whereas in others (e.g. in Russia) the tendency is always in the other direction (and, yes, that way lie some real evils too). I’m sorry to see NBR go private. It has served us for thirty-one year, but now—you may be sure of it—it will undergo deformations caused by the change. Why did it go private? For lack of sufficient corporate sponsorship. Corporate? Of course. The kind that PBS was founded on was public. But public, in this culture, is a nasty word. It’s something mysterious, I think; it’s something in the air.

Lake Michigan

Our annual visit to northern Michigan again brought to mind that we live adjoining the largest fresh water sea on the planet. The photo shows Lake Michigan viewed from the state’s west coast some miles below a point known as the Sleeping Bear Dunes. Looking at this scene reminded Brigitte of the Baltic, where she spent her summers as a child. You stand at such lookouts without saying much between occasional remarks of wonder. It seemed to us that a sea is a sea, whether salty or sweet, and from a coastline, looking outward, no land in sight anywhere beyond the water, a sea might as well be an ocean.

The Metrics Won't Save Us

The other day I listened, if only briefly, to a C-SPAN broadcast of a conference. Participants were all in some way linked to an analytical element of the State Department focused on Afghanistan and much concerned with metrics, thus the measurement of how we are achieving desirable goals there, among which participants listed market systems and electoral politics. The discourse was extraordinarily sophisticated, the participants glitteringly bright, young, and strikingly articulate: insiders addressing their own kind, entirely relaxed. Both the staring herd of cattle, the great unwashed, and the howling packs of punditry—were on the screen’s other side.

The intensity of the presentation, the brittleness of abstract concepts applied here to a tribal region where paved roads are rare and animals still serve as transport simply startled me and, breaking away to seek the shade outdoors, I allowed the dark prophetic waves of reaction to wash over me as I watched the bees, deeply rooted nature all about me. The bright disquisition still running faintly on the kitchen’s TV set represented the opposite, an unanchored floating in air on clouds of spent petroleum. It was the balsamic distillate of the same mode of thought that, in coarser form, directs not only the mechanical forces on the ground in Afghanistan but, indeed, our entire civilization. And the thought in my mind was simple: secular societies do not survive a conflict with the organic after a certain stage is reached—however primitive the latter, however rich the former. That stage, I think, is here now. A time of shatter, of disassociation, is clearly upon us now and manifesting everywhere. Nor is it, I would propose, a temporary phenomenon to be set right at the next election. How did Yeats put it? Didn’t he say that the metrics do not hold?

My own metrics would begin with the application of the command, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I’d put myself in the Afghans’ place to start my measurement, and here’s what I would discover. If I were an Afghan—and never mind the category—I would view the invading forces, no matter what kind, American, NATO, wouldn’t matter—as aggressors, and never mind how hard my fate might be or how much I might oppose domestic enemies. Out, out, damned invaders. That’d be my stance. I wouldn’t want their market system, their electoral politics, their ways of doing this, their ways of doing that. I would have no respect whatever for those who, for personal gain, cooperated. I’d bide my time until the foreigners relaxed their hold. And then I’d try to set things right.

This reminds me of something my brother-in-law once said, a saying famous in our family. Rex is a genuine Ozarks farmer, hunter, and fisherman who knows things about woods, rivers, lakes, and land the rest of us can’t even dream of. He once said, “I wouldn’t like bridge—even if I knew how to play it.”

Aristo

A Black Swallowtail Caterpillar discovered on one of our dill plants. This variety of butterfly likes carrot-type plants, thus including dill and parsely. For those seeking hard knowledge, this creature's Latin name is Papilio polyxenes.

Brigitte named him Aristo, based entirely on his heraldic appearance, transferred him to a pot, placed him under glass, and anticipated a genuine biological experience watching a real metamorphosis unfold. Aristo ate like champion; Brigitte fed him parsely and dill. He preferred dill but consumed the parsely too. 

After about a week of feeding, the huge catepillar then transformed himself overnight into this much smaller chrysalis. The structure hangs from the stem arched above it by the tiniest (and here invisible) pairs of white tendrils.

Another week passed. Suddenly, sometime between noon and three-thirty in the afternoon, unobserved by human eyes, Aristo escaped from its small green hull and unfolded its glorious plumage as shown here. Note the two eyes, Here's Looking at You, that no doubt make birds hesitate before disturbing this magnificence. The photograph is through the plastic container that then still held Aristo.

Here is another view. In this one the top portion of his hull is visible at the top.

We transported Aristo fifty miles to the Magee Domain on the Shores of Lake Wolverine. Here is Aristo less than a minute after his release into the wilds resting on a Black Eyed Susan.

By the way, we called him "he" without good rhyme or reason. It might have been a Lady. Aristo became a caterpillar in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. As a chrysalis he travelled to Stratford, Ontario. We dared not leave him alone. Back home again, he turned butterfly—but then travelled another goodly distance before at last he was, as we say around here, "born free."

The View from There

The alarm spread thro’ the Country, so that before daybreak the people in general were in Arms & on their March to Concord. About Daybreak a number of the People appeared before the Troops near Lexington. They were called to, to disperse, when they fired on the Troops & ran off, Upon which the Light Infantry pursued them & brought down about fifteen of them. The Troops went on to Concord & executed the business they were sent on [the destruction of a warehouse], & on their return found two or three of their people Lying in the Agonies of Death, scalp’d & their Noses & ears cut off & Eyes bored out—Which exasperated the Soldiers exceedingly—a prodigious number of the People now occupying the Hills, woods, & Stone Walls along the road. The Light Troops drove some parties from the hills, but all the road being inclosed with Stone Walls Served as a cover to the Rebels, from whence they fired on the Troops still running off whenever they had fired, but still supplied by fresh Numbers who came from many parts of the Country. In this manner were the Troops harassed in thier return for Seven or eight Miles, they were almost exhausted & had expended near the whole of their Ammunition when to their great joy they were relieved by a Brigade of Troops under the command of Lord Percy with two pieces of Artillery…. Several officers are wounded & about 100 Soldiers. The killed amount to near 50, as to the Enemy we can have no exact acc^t but it is said there was about ten times the Number of them engaged, & that near 1000 of ’em have fallen.
     [Letter from Anne Hulton to Elizabeth Lightbody, April 22, 1775]

The People, Rebels, and Enemy are, of course, the future citizens of the United States of America. The writer, the Troops, the Light Infantry were part of the British Loyalist elements of an American population that had become polarized. Loyalists were between 15 and 35 percent of the white colonial population. Interesting and instructive, isn’t it? The barbarity is always on the other side. Not stated but implied is that the People were cowardly in daring to hide behind walls and running away. And, of course, their casualties are always higher.

This from a wondrous book titled Women’s Letters, America from the Revolutionary War to the Present, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler. Dial Press, 2005.

Marginalia...

…or reactions to events and news reports about them.

• A NYT story today reports that hard-line Islamic groups are helping flood victims in Pakistan, distributing food and aid where the government fails. They have acted, says the article, “much as the Islamists did during the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005, which helped them lure new recruits to banned militant groups through the charity wings that front them.” Two reactions. One is that the same ambiguous charges are occasionally leveled in the West against Hezbollah and Hamas. Anything these groups might do for their constituencies—emergency assistance, education, welfare—is labeled as “front” activity for terrorism. The Taliban are whipped with the same lash. Presumably they stopped the opium trade in Afghanistan briefly, while they had power, as a “front” gesture. They are the only power that ever did that. My other reaction: The war on terror really is a religious conflict, Islam clashing with Western secularism and vice versa.

• I note with pleased bemusement that this same paper, for the second month in a row now, shows the same chart, with its story about the employment situation, that I’ve been posting on LaMarotte ever since December of 2009. This month the Times’ graphics designer has also highlighted, for the first time, the last data point in the series, as I’ve been doing since January. My chart appeared yesterday. Yeah. It’s a nice way of showing the reality of the situation…

• Regarding events, I note here that yesterday’s temperature was finally tolerable after a month or more of horrid heat—and humidity was down to 41 percent, believe it or not. The temperature dropped to 59 degrees F during the night.