Let’s Hear it for Bombina

If members of the Kingdom Animalia could communicate through the Media and, doing so, keep a sharp eye out for discriminatory treatment of their many kinds, be sure that one of the most vocal of the Orders would be the Anura, the classification that includes all of the species of Frog. So where does the toad belong? It turns out that, taxonomically, they are frogs, and the toad designation might be viewed, if you’re a frog, as scurrilous.

Let’s imagine a situation in which the Order of Anura took part in what is known as the Great Dialogue on Living Being Rights. And just so that we, the humans, would get the message right up front, face-to-face, and personally, the chief spokesperson chosen by Frogdom to represent it would no doubt be a European Fire-bellied Toad, a person of quick wit, sardonic temper, and stunning looks—and she would be known frequently to say to the press. “Linnaeus Schminaeus! look. Just tell me what I look like. Do I look like a frog or don’t I? Did I call myself a European Fire-Bellied Toad or did I call myself Bombina bombina? The latter, you will find. Look high and low in Linnaeus’ classification scheme. I urge you to do it. Dig, dig, dig. Nowhere—I assure you, nowhere—will you encounter the word ‘toad’ within the order of Anura. Yes, yes. I know. One of you will say that the Family Bufonidae are called the ‘true’ toads. You might say that. But we, in the Order of Anura, deny any such designations apparently based on your distorted aesthetic sense and well known color prejudices. Do I look brown to you? Only if you’re color-blind. But I’m a toad so far as you’re concerned. Nor will you find Bufonidae anywhere in my name. But I’m still a toad. Well, in defense of the Bufonidae—and the 500 species they represent—I must insist that none of them thinks itself a toad either! You point to special glands in the back of their heads that they use to squirt poisons? Well, my dears! What you call poison is a uniquely delightful chemical feature of all frog designs, in some more, in some less self-dramatized. Our research—and we’ve done it in depth—suggests that Linnaeus never used the word. Neither should you. There are no toads—only frogs. And tell them Bombina told you.”

Inspired by reading “I killed the Bufo Toad,” by Mark Derr in the New York Times (July 23, 2011). Pic thanks to Wikipedia here.

Nests of All Kinds

They rest, float, hang. They’re scraped, found, dug, hung. They’re formed of pebbles, sticks, living plants, horse-hair, reed, stalks, mud, anything at all. They are often reinforced, wedged between branches, carved out of living cactus plants, and suspended or glued using spider-silk. Most are hidden or carefully camouflaged; in some the bird seals itself in and is fed by its mate through a slit. Some are rudely appropriated from groundhogs—and some the most visible feature of the landscape as you look up—or of the urban skyline in a town, provided of course that its population tolerates birds. More on that in a moment. My subject is Avian Architecture, the title of a new book (June 2011) by Peter Goodfellow, just recently published by Princeton University Press. Brigitte saw a review of it intriguing enough so that we bought a copy then and there. It has given us great pleasure and we recommend it to anyone interested in the natural world—and as Sidney Lanier once put it, in the greatness of God:

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.
         Sidney Lanier, The Marshes of Glynn

Goodfellow is a retired English Teacher, birdwatcher, and author of other books on birds. Avian Architecture has wonderful pictures but is much more than a coffee-table book. First, it’s short, 160 pages. Then it is organized into twelve chapters—each one about one of the major categories of nests. Goodfellow divides his chapters into an introductory text with illustrations, a spread with “blueprints” that lay out the schematics of the nest-type under discussion. Next comes a spread on materials used and special features. Then follow case studies of different species, in all manner of environments, and how they deploy this type of nest. Fascinating stuff. And, indeed, one cannot help but wonder about the creation of such marvelous ways of hatching eggs and raising chicks.

We grew up in Europe in smaller towns and therefore grew up with stork nests. My first experience of one was in Tirschenreuth, in Germany, where a nest sat on top of Tirschenreuth’s famed church, Mariä Himmelfahrt (Mary’s Assumption). A stork nest was evidently continuously present on that church since the nineteenth century, although not always on the church’s roof. It now has its home on the roof of the vicarage, as shown in the photograph. You may have to click on the photo and then enlarge it to see the nest well. Sometimes humans participate in nest-building too. This particular stork’s nest has a steel platform installed there with some effort, using a fire-engine crane, in 2009, to give the storks (they arrive unfailingly in Spring) a better home.

To show another kind of highly visible nest, the picture on the left shows the suspended nests of the Crested Oropendolas. They are black birds, with blue eyes, yellow beaks, and have a long, vividly yellow tail. Goodfellow classifies such nests under the category of Hanging, Woven, and Stitched Nests and covers them in wondrous detail in Chapter Eight. The one I’m showing is a sub-category called the woven pendulous basket. It is three feet long and seven inches wide at the bottom. You will find a detailed blueprint in the book. The photograph I’m showing, however, comes courtesy of the Trinidad Birding website here.

Hot July

It’s blistering outside but cool in my basement. The head doesn’t work in the heat and must be distracted. I’ve distracted myself by looking for long-term temperature charts provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Mind, they don’t actually administer the oceans and the atmosphere; nor do they service the weather through the National Weather Service. But they measure and record things. Here, for instance, are charted data for two years, 2000 and 2010, showing both temperature and precipitation for the Detroit, MI metro area:




Of interest here is the dark blue quiver overlaying the green and topped and tailed by pink and blue. The dark blue indicates actual highs and lows. I’ve looked at a decade of such charts, and with one exception (2003, in which August looked hotter), July uniformly ranks as the hottest month. The inset is a legend to the graph above. Clicking it will make it easier to comprehend. The pink colors are all time highs, the blue the all time lows, and the green is an average of the highs and lows.

If we compare the two years, looking at July, we see that temperatures were generally lower in 2000 than in 2010. And looking at all of the annual plots (available here—and you can enter your own city to localize the display) shows a steady increase in temperature to the current time.

The graphic on the left shows July-only data for 2000, 2010, and 2011. I graphed the 2011 data myself from published figures through July 21, thus yesterday. 2011 looks like it is aiming for a record too…

Knowing which I pause for a moment to contemplate our fate. The dehumidifier is working hard in the background by the work bench, its sound rather calming, reassuring. It’s still working—and my screen is lit—but several very large communities are without power. The basement may still be cooler than the living room—and in those power-challenged communities you will enter the bedrooms upstairs at your own peril. The flashlight directed at the screen of the computer downstairs will show nothing but screen! Ah, the bennies and brownouts of a high tech society.

Illusions of Empowerment

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? Psalms 2:1

Why do the news enrage me? My best teachers have taught me that if I do—experience rage—I must look within, and in a hurry—thus not outside at the supposed outer triggers of that low emotion. Rage is a sign of not being grown up. At 75? Exactly. Time to look within.

The cause of rage, undoubtedly, is a sense of my own impotence. But if I feel impotence then surely I’m identified with a group in government. I am projected. I’m permitting myself to enjoy an illusory sort of power, and my rage comes because “my” power is not being wielded as “I” think that it should be.

To withdraw these projections is to face reality. Reality is always sobering, indeed boring, quite banal, quite pedestrian. It is that I’ve no effective power to shape public life at all—not in the sense that I attach to the verb “shaping.” I’m shaping this log post, not that out there. The illusion arises from the very structure of news reporting. I can follow almost hour to hour what plans are ripening—or not—in a city about 1,000 miles from here. The huge machinery that brings this news suggests that it is “important.” It might be, for all I know, but is it important for me? The suggestion of such phrases as “the people’s right to know” is that I need to know because…? Because knowing things, and being well-informed, I can act appropriately. But here is where impotence begins to show itself. My one and only future act will be to vote, 15 months from now, for maximally 1 of 3 presidential candidates, one representative, and one senator. I live in a district gerrymandered so that it is overwhelmingly democratic; the Democrat will win. Therefore the vote is predetermined as I sit here—shaping this post. That election-outcome is not mine to shape.

The structure of our political life has lost its organic rootings. It is now the function of the fluidity of money, of communications, and of huge numbers. They produce a kind of delusional effect. The news produces a consciousness that what I’m reading is important, but in any realistic sense “important” can only mean that I can actually do something about unfolding events. In effect, and this is the lesson of the huge numbers, I actually cannot.

All of my actions, to be sure contribute to what are public outcomes. But any personal act is so tiny that it does not actually matter at the public scale. My spending produces jobs, GDP, affects the value of the dollar. My vote elects some of those on TV. To influence my infinitesimally tiny contribution a tsunami of communications difficult to avoid discharges its relentless waves over me. They cause a feeling of empowerment (knowledge is power), but while I have huge knowledge, I have no power at all. Not really. Therefore my expenditures of emotion are just wasteful. To be effectively informed, a monthly summary, if done well, would be more than enough. “Done well” would mean factual reporting of actual outcomes augmented by statistical reporting on the consequences of past actions.

News function in two ways. One of these is as education of a sort: here is humanity in its collective form. The other is as entertainment. Watch your heroes and villains. Experience the ecstasy of victory, the shame of defeat. But it’s rather poorly written fiction.

Organic forms of political organization would develop from the local level. The local would in turn be mirrored on ever higher levels in much the same way. The citizenry would only ever elect local officials, local officials the county officials, county the state, and so on. Money would have to be taken out of it. Keep it personal in order to maximize responsibility. The current system, which appears like bad fiction on the media, actually is a fiction based on abstract principles. It is the fiction that all people aged 18 and over are qualified to elect officials at every level of government. This system only works because money enables power seekers to reach the public by means of communications at essentially the emotional level only. Fluidity of money, of communications, huge numbers. Illusions of power. Chaos. Rage.

The Suspense…

The suspense began about a week, ten days ago when—in thrilled shock—we saw a Black Swallowtail butterfly fluttering energetically, erratically in our back yard and, sure enough, briefly pausing at every one of our dill plants. The lovely creature lingered, always moving, at least fifteen minutes and made several rounds of the whole domain, now disappearing behind the garage, now reappearing over the wooden fence. At Brigitte’s suggestion three days I ago I went and inspected our dill plants. On one of these I discovered three tiny black forms. There was just a hint of color in the center of at least one of them. Yesterday morning they all had the marking and had grown visibly in length. By afternoon we could discern them moving under a magnifying glass. Last evening Michelle, impatient at my hapless fumbling with the camera (and my fuzzy results) took it out of my hand and produced the first image in 2011 of Artisto’s Return. If the suspense is too much for you, look here. 

We noticed one caterpillar last year on the 27th of July, by then already quite big. This year we’ve counted nine separate tiny caterpillars at the stage shown in the photograph. Michelle took a very tight close-up. The little creature is barely visible to the naked eye. Today, almost by way of confirmation that, indeed, Black Swallowtail butterflies are in migration, we saw another one this morning. It visited—and fed on—the same plants where the tiny caterpillars are, communed with us for fifteen minutes, and then headed on north.

Garden in July

Hostas in bloom...

And tomatoes going crazy in confinement.

Stoutly Naive

Not a year passes but I read, usually in some philosophical context, the common man berated for his naiveté. But why do writers use that word? To signal nest odor? The word comes from just born, thus immature. It has connotations of native (“primitive”) or rustic (“stupid”). Thus to use the word is to claim superiority, sophistication, a certain elevation above the great unwashed.

The roots of this usage appear to rest on the notion that ordinary people, when they see an apple, think that they actually see an apple—and are too stupid to know that what is in the head is actually a representation of an apple, not the apple itself. But when people see an apple, they think of it out there, on the table, in the bowl, not in their heads at all. To be sure, what reaches the eyes is light reflected from the apple. It is then transformed into signal. The signal is translated by intellect, aided by memory, into a state of the brain that the mind then, if it needs to, can actually name using a concept. But the light must come from something. The machinery that translates it into a signal is naturally formed by a normal body. Description of the process—which I’d venture would take at least two or three months of very intensive study even mildly to grasp—in no way takes anything away from the concrete facts that something is out there. There is nothing immature, primitive, or stupid about the ordinary person’s naive realism. As ordinarily seen, people see an apple. When this act is painfully analyzed, we get a process—knowing which is not in the least necessary to get along in the ordinary world. So why else call people naive unless it is to shine in the eyes of those initiated into the “higher mysteries.”

Is Bertrand Russell right when he says:

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. [Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth]

When Bertrand Russell sees an apple, does he actually see uncountably many atomic cores surrounded by probability waves of electrons and enormous voids between these structures? Or does he just see an apple? Which is the true picture of reality? Must it be the voids and only mathematically accessible waves—or is it the shiny red thing there? Or both? Or the cellular structure, with its mitochondria? What scoffers call naive may just be an indication of scale.

This is a minor matter, to be sure. People tend to be silly and try to make themselves look bigger than they are. No big deal. But such charges of naiveté are also used to suggest that people naively believe themselves to have minds (whereas all they have is neurons) and that they have souls (whereas all they are is dissipative structures). That last is a little obscure. The phrase is Ilya Prigogine’s who suggests that life is just a certain kind of self-organizing natural system. When it comes to such extensions of the concept of human naiveté, one wonders who is lost and thus needs a stiff dose of amazing grace.

Incredible Diversity

This happens roughly every other year—whenever I have an unusually long wait at an airport and, as a consequence, see unusually large numbers of people. I suppose you have to be at a major city’s airport. Detroit certainly works, and I’ve seen the same both east and west and in Chicago too. One sees every race, age, and every conceivable body type, male and female—and for each of those categories, in addition, I also see them in quite ordinary American dress and in traditional garb from all over the world. It’s amazing. I first had this feeling—namely that humanity is extraordinarily—and physically—diverse when perusing one of Jared Diamond’s books (I think it was Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed); there I saw photographs of all kind of people from around the globe thickly clustered, and the impression was striking. Now airports are enough to bring the feeling back. Hasn’t always been so. In the heydays of my travelling (1970-80), the fabulous diversity was beginning to appear. Now in a community like Detroit it is the norm, especially in summertime, when families visit from all corners of the world. Reminds me of a fascinating discussion of human nature Mortimer Adler presents in Ten Philosophical Mistakes. He invites us to consider animal species. Looking at each, he says, you would note differences. But…

The dominant likeness of all members of the species would lead you to dismiss as relatively insignificant the differences you found, most of which can be explained as the result of slightly different environmental conditions.

He then invites us to make random drop-in visits to look at human societies.

You would come away [from such a venture] with the very opposite impression from the one you took away from your investigation of the populations that belonged to one or another animal species. You were there impressed by the overwhelming similitude that reigned among its members. Here, however, you would find that the differences were dominant rather than the similarities.

Adler was, of course, not talking about physical differences—but they’re also present. As above, so below.

This Mare Has No Stallion

What mare do I have in mind? Let me get there slowly. Another word I chanced across this time caught my attention—although I’d seen it hundreds of times before: hagridden. I’d never looked it up before and assumed it meant an old man nagged to distraction by an old woman. Why, I wondered, don’t we have a word like, say, grump-ridden? Where is the masculine of hag? Boy! Let me tell you. Questions like that do open up the linguistic abyss. To get to the bottom quickly, hag originally comes from diviner or soothsayer, and, in European paganism, these were always and exclusively women. The root of the word is Old English hægtesse (witch, fury). The same word in Old Middle German was hagzusa, from which we get the German Hexe. Remembering Robert Graves (always fondly), it comes to mind that European paganism had a matriarchal background, hence divine males and grumpy old men did not have much standing. To be hagridden, therefore, means to have an old witch badly troubling your dreams.

“Of course!” I said to myself. “That’s why we have nightmares, not nightstallions.” But I was wrong again. The mare in the nightmare is not a member of the genus Equus which comes in female and male genders. No. The mare in nightmare comes from Old English mera or mære meaning goblin, the female kind. Not a horse in sight.

We have to go back to the resolutely masculine Latin culture before we discover the incubus, the masculine dream-entity that lies down and suffocates the sleeper. My favorite etymology dictionary dates it to 1200 as the evil protagonist of nightmares. We have to wait until the 1300s before he is joined by succubus, the female ghost that has sex with men in sleep—that word formed from the Late Latin succuba, a strumpet. Those familiar with Google’s Ngram Viewer† can easily discover that, whether ghost or flesh, males are always much more eager for sex than women:

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†Ngram viewer is a Google facility that scans digitized books accessible to Google from 1800 to 2000 and counts the frequency of words used in these sources. You enter two words or phrases separated by a comma. The address of the facility is here.

A Cultural Indicator?

I love this graphic! I first showed it, going all the way back to 1929, on the old LaMarotte here. This time I’ve updated it to 2010 but show it from 1951, the year I arrived in the United States. Of course this is an economic chart, taken from that very sanctuary of money wisdom, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, keeper of the Gross Domestic Product’s holy value. Nonetheless, I view this figure as a cultural indicator although it shows disposable income per capita in constant, thus inflation-free dollars. When I arrived on these shores (in New Orleans), the figure was $9,352 per living human; at the midpoint of my stay here, in 1980, the figure had more than doubled to $18,863. And now it stands at $33,010, nearly again double the 1980 figure. Since I arrived here the measurable purchasing power per person has increased three-and-a-half-fold!

Why is this a cultural indicator rather than a kind of capitalist’s version of Amazing Grace? I don’t need to point it out to likely readers of this blog. The chart came back into my memory as I contemplated times in which stopping Social Security payments (yes, to little old me)—and payments to the politicians’ most venerated subgroup, veterans (that’s me too) is now being used as a threat to avoid the country officially falling into technical bankruptcy. Back in 1951 there was no talk like that, no “drama” in high places along these silly lines. Back then real income was less than a third what it is today. And we were then in the middle of fighting the Korean War (36,516 dead versus 6,026 dead in Iraq/Afghanistan as of June 5, 2011). World War II with staggering costs in money and lives (416,800 dead) was still a recent memory then. The feel of the times back then was so very different; indeed energy, confidence, and public courtesies were all quite high.

Is sharply climbing wealth, therefore, a reliable cultural indicator—so that its every increase signals a step down in culture? Wealth as a contrarian indicator? If that is true our economic troubles these days may signal hope for the future—albeit our leading circles have not as yet discovered that.

Walking on My Own Floor

Retirement has benefits if you take advantage of it. From spring to late fall I wear simple sandals with firm rubber soles and Velcro straps—so that by now I have stripes of tanned and light skin on my feet where the straps expose or shield skin from the sun. Mine is an informal life so that wearing socks and shoes is an “occasion” usually tied to stress. It’s wonderfully simple to slip on sandals; Velcro provides a rapid, firm fastening. I love Velcro. We owe it to seeds of the kind that move from place to place by hooking on to living things—the burs. The Swiss electrical engineer Georges de Menstral, on a hunting trip in the Alps, noticed them clinging to his clothes and dogs and, curious, creative man, he looked at them under a magnifying glass. Inspiration came. In the 1950s. With the effort of putting on socks and shoes replaced by donning sandals almost without any effort at all—hey, these things become genuine issues with septuagenarians—I oddly lost the sensation of “wearing” shoes. The sensation has become another: “I prefer to walk on my own floor.”

Deep Memory of Quince

We planted a quince bush in our garden, a Father’s Day gift—one that surprised and specially delighted me. I encountered quince when I was five in the gardens of a vast, cold, impossible-to-heat old house we moved into on one of my Father’s frequent transfers. But summers there were like Paradise. The yellow, pear-shaped quince, and especially what Mother made of it, remained sharply imprinted on my memory. When Monique and John, entirely on their own, discovered quince and bought their own bush, my enthusiasm was evident. And they decided that I should have my own.

Soon after we planted ours, I went to the Village Market. It is a small but very potent store in walking distance of our house. I had a talk with the manager there—we often talk—and asked him if anyone produced quince jelly. Schmuckers had done so long ago, no longer. The Village Market’s manager had learned his trade at the knees of his grandfather. In my opinion he is the most knowledgeable grocer certainly in Detroit and environs. He said at once that the Trappist Monks in Massachusetts sold it; then he also found another outfit in his huge printouts. Trappist sounded good to me. Friday last I picked up our jars at the market. They’d arrived from St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, MA (founded in 1950; the order itself goes back to 1098 in France). Now I’ll tell you honestly: This was just a pious gesture because I know what a jelly is. But what I remember eating 70 years ago was not a jelly but something you could slice. But what it was and might be called was buried too deep in memory.

I had some of that jelly for breakfast today. “It’s all sugar, mostly,” I told Brigitte. “Lord. I wish I could remember what it was Mother used to make back in Cegléd. Too bad we can’t just call Heaven by cell phone.” Brigitte also remembered something you could cut and, just sitting there, she invented a recipe she thought would work when, finally, our bush produces fruit. I said: “I’ll just go and try to find out what quince is in Hungarian. We live in the age of the Internet now.” Before I went I made my second cup of coffee. As I was stirring the cup, suddenly into my mind came the word birsalma. (The s is sounded as sh, the a as in awl.) And no sooner had this thought arrived than came a combination: birsalma sajt. Sajt means cheese. I knew at once that now I had it! Yes! Birsalma meant quince. And the solid something I remembered eating was called a cheese. Just calmly stirring my coffee, my memory finally brought the words—or my Mother got the call in Heaven and whispered the answer; no need for cell phones in such communications.

The rest was easy. Soon I had a recipe for birsalma sajt in Hungarian. Then I discovered that the phrase translates into English directly. Quince cheese is a well-known product to those in the know. Therefore soon I had multiple recipes, Spanish-style, Turkish-style, Hungarian-style, all in English, too. And one site, this one, also brought me a picture that confirmed it all visually. Yes, sir! That’s what it looked like. Quince is yellow on the outside but red inside. And quince cheese is quite firm, easy to slice, and lasts for a long time. Seventy years ago…

Melting Pots Old and New

Back in the (mercifully brief) Nazi days in Hungary, all people employed by the state—beginning, I suppose, with a certain rank—had to present proof-positive using birth registry extracts, three generations back, that they had no Jewish blood. That gave the country’s registrars a bit of a work-out. By happenstance all of the papers my family had to file (my father being an officer in the army) eventually ended up in my hands. They filled a rather large box and turned out to be a treasure showing the lineage of my family. Some of these records were carefully notarized extracts from church registries—and in the earliest of these records I recognized no name at all. My father, of course, had to account for his wife as well: an officer married to a Jewess could not be trusted to be reliable. Therefore more than forty birth certificates were in this archive. Twenty-eight would have satisfied the strict requirements, but some of the people (like my grandfather) had married twice, and under the rules subsequent spouses, even if their “blood” had not entered the stream, had to be accounted for—presumably because their ideas and influence could nevertheless corrupt the succeeding generations. Insanity is not something we’ve invented recently.

But my topic is melting pots, not collective aberrations. These record showed that a phenomenon we associate with America is and has been alive and well in Europe—and everywhere else, for that matter, as far back as memory can be traced. My family originated in the Duchy of Württemberg in the southwestern part of Germany. My forebears, called Dorner, were immigrants to the Austrian Empire, which then encompassed Hungary. This happened sometime in the nineteenth century. They were enticed by incentives. Austria was attempting to attract industry, and we were in the iron business (foundries and the like)—indeed, parts of my family still were, even in my day, although the rich part of the family had long since diversified into all kinds of other businesses as well.

Now what I found fascinating, studying the deposit of documents from the bad-old Nazi days, was how persistently my family, extending backwards, had always and only married into other German families. Every name was German until the twentieth century. The family was evidently too wealthy to mingle with the lower orders of the native population—but not rich enough to marry into the nobility. That finally happened when my great-grandfather married into a genuinely Hungarian family—not in trade, they, no! Landed aristocracy—to be sure of the lower sort. But they were the real thing: lots and lots of land and going back lots of generations too! And my father, in turn, married a woman who came from a Slavic line (Gluzek, they were called—but renamed themselves Gyulafia (“Son of Gyula”) to erase the Slavic traces as Nationalism rose but before it married Socialism). That line had reached prominence through the professions—and a great uncle of mine, the towering figure in that family, had had charge of all psychiatric hospitals in a country unapologetically operating a centralized, state-run medical system.

Melting pots all over the place—just less obviously visible. And here I hasten to note that Brigitte’s family has an identical history, different only in minor details. Her family had settled in Poland, attracted there by Poland’s own desire for industry. And the industry was textiles, not iron. Her family’s was a somewhat later exodus. Like Swedish Finns, they didn’t speak Polish much—whereas my family, longer in residence, spoke Hungarian. They too were all expanding by marrying into other German families, also all resident in Poland. But had mayhem and war not unpleasantly intruded, and thus caused some more bubbling in that pot, Brigitte might have ended up marrying a stalwart Polish duke rather than me.

Reification

When I first came across this curious word I understood it right away—and that because my little Latin sufficed to tell me that the re stood for the Latin res, thing. Therefore the word meant thingification—and signals the process whereby something that isn’t is turned into something that is—a thing. The word comes from German, Verdinglichung. It was coined by Marx, but for German readers it is as immediately understandable as thingification is in English, but with a lesser feel of awkwardness, the reason being that both parts of Verdinglichung come from West Germanic roots, but in thingification the thing is West Germanic but the -ification comes from Latin; the smell of a mongrel is in the air. Not surprisingly, therefore, translators rendered that German word in Latin. A variant is Versachlichung, rendered as objectification, and that English word is much less awkward because object comes from Latin too. Germans are less inclined to form neologisms from Latin—one reason why it is relatively easier to read philosophical works in that language. That Norman invasion has done strange things to English.

What Marx had in mind was turning living labor into gold, thus into a lifeless, tradable good. I came across the word in a more philosophical context and discovered, only this morning, that Marx and economics loomed behind it. In the philosophical context it stands for turning spiritual values into the material. Hence this word is a terrific single sound for characterizing cultural decline. It’s everywhere. Life is just a species of chemical reactions. Mind’s just the firing of neurons.

The 2011 Welcome Sign

While celebrating the achievements of the Paret branch of the family, I thought I’d bring here the Welcome sign marking our reserved parking spot at Wolverine Lake ahead of the July 3rd fireworks. Most of these signs over the years have been drawn by Stella, Michelle’s second child, whose many gifts include a penchant for design. Indeed the only image on this blog of me is one that she drew and I presented here. The signs are different every year, always hiding behind what looks like ink-work, from a distance, images that arise from Stella thoughts from the paper at the movement of inspiration. In this family, so far as I know, several people write their dreams down—but only one paints hers…

Max Passed Le Bac!

To know the feeling of immense gratitude, pride, and relief we feel in Ghulfdom today, you have to know something about the horrors that surround European education. Words want to fail. The tension was enormous. But we’re wiping tears after having danced up and down the stairs. Max, for the record, is Michelle’s oldest, thus the first to meet this trial—and he made it on the first try!!!  Jubilation! Jubilation!

Talking to Ads

“Does your money cross borders as easily as you do?”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Well, stop reading this ad.”

Tiki Night 2011

The date and time of this post exactly match the time when these pictures were taken at Wolverine Lake, Michigan, the occasion being Tiki Night, always held on July 3. Looking back more than a decade now, we note with gratitude that the weather has always been perfect! Tradition, tradition! Thank you, again, Magees! Your hospitality, community spirit! Splendid! They light up the summer. And note in low voice that, for them, Tiki Night means mountains and mountains of Tiki Work in advance and in arrears...

And God said...

Clawing around trying to find my password notebook, I just came across an ancient slip Brigitte had chanced across and had put on my desk the other day with an annotation. Her note says: “Too bad I did not indicate where this came from. But it is so perfect for your most recent research effort on LOGARITHMS!” The slip, courtesy of my little Kodak and some painstaking efforts to camouflage coffee stains using Paint, is shown here. It is, indeed, the perfect—and possibly the earliest—version of this cartoon. Try as I might, I could not find a copy on the Internet, hence my efforts. One usually sees a much simplified version on T-Shirts, showing only Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism. The T-shirt photo I am showing comes from this Zazzle site.

One Song Does Not an Opera Make

This was our conclusion after seeing Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, and the song within it, which certainly has had and will have a long life, was Barcarolle, in this YouTube version sung by the sisters Iordachescu, Irina (soprano) and Cristina (mezzo-soprano). We went on an opera marathon here recently and saw two versions of Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Godspell. Andrew Lloyd Webber composed Superstar in 1970 and Joseph in 1968. Superstar is much better; in Joseph a few songs call attention to themselves, but the work as a whole appears to be a loose stitch-together of the songs. We found Godspell weak—but filled with memories: Monique had played in a version produced at Eisenhower (that used to be a high school in Hopkins, Minnesota).

We noted, this time around, that Superstar and Godspell, both of which trace Jesus’ final days, both stop short of the resurrection—which gave us things to talk and think about beyond opera and music …

The older a thing, the more we approach it with awe—at least in anticipation—hence we waited for the first strains of The Tales of Hoffmann in appropriate awe. In its final, finished version the opera was first produced in 1879, one of the last works of Jacques Offenbach, widely celebrated by that time as the composer of fifty some odd operettas, among these Orpheus in the Underworld. Well. We were not very impressed by Tales. Perhaps romanticism is too far in the past, perhaps we’re tired of recycled Mephistopheles, and the music, here and there almost achieving beat and melody, invariable fell apart, distracted as we were by the kitchy baroque of the production-values of this 1951 film.

One song does not an opera make. We did enjoy Barcarolle. But it only consumed 3 of 128 minutes of this seemingly endless confusion.

A Reluctant Conclusion

Despite their entertainment value, I’ve decided to delete two earlier postings this morning highlighting the Strauss-Kahn affair and a rash of stories that marked cultural meltdown in the papers this morning. The thought came that such efforts at critique have virtually no value—and interfere with those who have wisely decided to avoid the media in order to avoid the untreated sewage that reaches them in that fashion. Hereafter, I’ll constrain myself—and consequently postings may thin out. But that’s all right. It’s summertime.

Geologic Ages: Some Footnotes

The oldest blogger on the web, more or less, except perhaps for Jerry Pournelle, is Brandon Watson on Siris—and here’s a post from Brandon to prove it. In that most informative note Brandon makes use of geologic ages to communicate just exactly how old a blogger he really is—but being a great teacher, he is actually pulling a fast one. Most of us have no idea that we are denizens of the Holocene, the most recent segment of the Quaternary—or, like me, knew once but had forgotten long ago. Brandon secretly hopes that we shall “look it up.” But the effort may be too great for some. Therefore, to help those struggling with Brandon’s post (Cenozoic? Mesozoic?) I present three graphics from ever-helpful Wikipedia here:

The first presents all geologic time. The second shows the last block of the first expanded to show more detail. The third shows the last block of the second, ditto. You will find Brandon in the second graphic, on the right, right on that line that separates the Cretaceuous from the Paleogene. Jerry Pournelle? He is left of the Cretaceous.

Blogging is a great educator if you have a guide like Brandon and able assistants like yours truly—albeit in actual physical age, I am an Upper Tarantian to Brandon’s Holocene.

The Video in Question

Let us consider a video game and describe it in the ponderous language of law. Consider a game—

“in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being, if those acts are depicted” in a manner that “[a] reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors,” that is “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors,” and that “causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”
     [Text from the California Assembly Bill 1179, quoted in the recently decided Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association et al. reachable here.]

California has prohibited sale of such games to minors. The Supreme Court has just held that such a prohibition is a violation of the First Amendment. The only pertinent words in that amendment are: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” Since that amendment’s enactment, we’ve discovered that everything is speech, including expenditure of money. Haven’t we? No. Not quite. The Supreme Court holds that—

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.
     [Text of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942). The emphasis is mine.]

Chaplinsky, indeed, upheld the fighting words aspect of this “dispensation.” In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants, the Supreme Court cites Chaplinsky as well as Roth v. United States (1954) in which obscenity is defined as material whose “dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest” to the “average person, applying contemporary community standards.” It’s okay to prohibit obscenity as well, evidently, for the same reasons I’ve italicized in the quote above. The Court also cites Brandenburg v. Ohio (1959) in which the court defined incitement that may be prohibited in these words:

… the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
     [Brandenburg v. Ohio, emphasis mine.]

Now it strikes me that emphasized phrases in all of the above might very easily be applied to video games of the sort defined by the State of California. They are (1) certainly not any exposition of ideas, (2) steps to truth, and (3) certainly operate against social interest in order and morality. Or is it a good thing to let teenaged boys experience, even if only virtually, torturing and raping people? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. No need to enlighten me.

Get Rid of the Black Navbar Google

The navigation bar on Google’s search engine has now been changed—and if it offends you, you can’t get rid of it if you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Users of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera can use a work-around, but it is—a work-around.

This reminds me of New Coke. Eventually all of us who promptly switched to drinking Pepsi, Royal Crown, and other soft drinks made Coca Cola see the light, and New Coke bubbled away. I hope the same thing happens to Google’s black navbar—hard to read and a disfigurement, like a huge and ugly wart on a likeable face.

The Crows are Back

In October 1999 the USGS Wildlife Health Center issued a health alert to notify natural resource agencies “of the emergence of the West Nile virus in both free ranging and captive birds in the New York City area.” West Nile virus is transmitted by mosquitoes and affects some eighteen species of birds, most notably American crows, but blue jays, mallards, and several kinds of hawks were also affected if in low numbers (link). The experts did not know whether the virus would spread but thought not—because crows are not migratory birds.

Migratory or not, the disease arrived in our area by the fall of 2001. The Associated Press announced the fact in an August 29 story titled “Detroit Crows Have West Nile Virus,” citing the Michigan Department of Community Health, Lansing. Down on the ground, we noticed a sharp drop in numbers about six years ago—and later crows just about disappeared. I mentioned that in a tribute to crows and their kin on this blog last year here.

Well! Late this Spring Brigitte comes in from outside and says, full of wonder and a hint of pleasure. “I think I heard some crows. I may have even seen one.” — And, yes! They’re back. I’ve since both heard and seen them, in good numbers, flying and settling, wonderful, sleek black forms, sharp, unsettling sounds—that strike our ears quite pleasantly now.

This brings to mind an old poem about crows. Here the first verse of it:

Two old crows sat on a fence rail.
Two old crows sat on a fence rail,
Thinking of effect and cause,
Of weeds and flowers,
And nature’s laws.
One of them muttered, one of them stuttered,
One of them stuttered, one of them muttered.
Each of them thought far more than he uttered.
One crow asked the other crow a riddle.
One crow asked the other crow a riddle:
The muttering crow
Asked the stuttering crow,
“Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?
Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?”
“Bee-cause,” said the other crow,
“Bee-cause,
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.”
     [From Two Old Crows by Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)]

The verse, of course, needs modernizing. Around here, anyway, it should be titled “Two Young Crows.”

Not Last Year’s June

It startled me to realize that it’s already the 27th of the month. This isn’t simply a consequence of another well-known phenomenon—but one that Einstein, despite his love of relativity, entirely overlooked in his equations—namely that as you age the flow of time speeds up. No. My surprise now came because the real June is still, oddly, ahead. What we had this month was a late, weary, and bedraggled May. Just to make sure, I stepped back into 2010, at least as noted on this blog. Sure enough, in midmonth last year I noted flowers beginning to fade—the same ones just now beginning to emerge! Everything’s late. By now the rainy season should be over—but isn’t. The fish fly season started weeks late—and the numbers are drastically down. Nature is adaptive and takes all this in stride, but if the fish flies are an indication, populations pay or garner the price for all those up, down swings.

Un Départ by Invitation

Train Ride to Detroit
by Michelle Darnay

«Le trafic sur la ligne B est fortement perturbé.
Traffic on the B line is highly unpredictable.
El trafico en la liña B esta muy perturbado. »

People worry. People read. People type.
People sit, ears sprouting wire, white and black,
Ears hidden beneath mushroom-shaped growths.
People sleep, heads resting on 
Glass leaving greasy spots.
Men in white shirts knot ties,
Wipe pant legs, shine shoes,
Preparing for service.

Train jiggles, jostles, rushes.
Black clouds lean across grey skies
Yet willow fronds hang still;
Sparse yellow flowers push up between
Rock and rail;
Lush ivy drapes thickly over
Concrete walls, broken buildings;
Lively graffiti peeks through
Green masses, dazzles on
Heavy highway pillars.

Hearts race, too fast,
Caffeine driven, stress stimulated;
Breath comes short, chests rise and fall,
Fall and rise, too quickly;
A feeling of pressure between
Ribs, lungs never fully, fully full.
Eyes search for beauty.
Out the window, cars inch in lines between
High, high trucks.

«Ce train a pour terminus l’aéroport Charles de Gaulle.
The terminus of this train is Charles de Gaulle airport.
El final del tren esta el aéropuetro Charles de Gaulle.»

Train flies and stops, flies and stops.
In a tunnel, blackness flashes,
Electric light is then isn’t rhythmically,
Pure sound howls then whistles as
Train exits tunnel.

Eyes find beauty,
Nose finds pleasure :
African women wrap chubby babies
On to backs with
Cloth of exuberant shades;
Butterfly head-dresses stand alert,
One round, black shoulder bared,
Panther-soft skin visible,
Exotic perfume spices the air.
With bags and babies ready, they alight.

«Je ne parlerai à personne là-bas, pendant les deux mois !
I won’t speak to anyone for two months straight!»

Daughter vomits. Daughter drinks,
Pees, whines, smiles, hugs,
Zigzags away toward
Bluer landscapes.
Waves once more,
Eyes bright over
Narrowed shoulders, hair shiny,
My tall, tall, little girl off
To Detroit.

A Certain Weakness…

A certain weakness in democracy is that, functionally, the only real qualification of an elected official is the ability to persuade a majority of ordinary people to vote for him or her. Popularity, one might say, is thus a constant (as in a mathematical context); it was thus in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and still is in the twenty-first century. But effective rule then becomes the function of at least two variables that can and do change over time. One of these is the size of the electorate that votes for any one representative. The other is the quality of the electors measured in education, wisdom, and sense of responsibility.

When the number of electors is relatively small, the candidates are better known; as that number increases, the electors’ knowledge of the individual thins out and therefore becomes more and more abstract. The costs of learning about the candidate mount—for the individual voter; knowledge certainly requires, minimally, expenditure of much more time. More and more mechanical means of communications (beyond personal contact and word-of-mouth reputation) must be used; money becomes ever more necessary to use the new means. Natural candidates—who emerge quite, ah, naturally in day-to-day contacts (and this still happens at the village level)—may not even come close to running. Huge competitions precede even the first stage, that of achieving the status of candidacy!

The quality of the electorate changes as the franchise is granted to people of ever less “natural” (that word again) qualification. The minimum is that of a householder, male or female, to be sure. To this one might add—of a certain age. In our history the age qualification was moved downward; it should have been moved up. Property qualifications have been removed—whereas they should have been retained but modernized: must pay a mortgage or pay rent. The combination of extending the franchise to anyone—and removing the candidate from direct contact with the public by increasing size, produces a new kind of representative who, quite evidently, is no longer capable of effective rule.

This came to mind today when Brigitte read me an editorial in New York Times titled “Dangerous Imports,” reporting on Congressional efforts to cut the FDA’s budget—despite the fact that two-thirds of fruits and vegetables, 80 percent of seafood, half of the medical devices, and 80 percent of active ingredients in medications are imported. We have, alas, far too many legislators who believe that regulation (not least of food safety) is some kind of arbitrary malevolence directed by the Left against the corporate sector—rather than a by now traditional process of protecting public health.

Empires of Empiricism

I got to thinking about the meaning of empirical in the context of contemplating the paranormal, more specifically the subject of precognitive dreams. The word is very closely linked to science in such combinations as “empirical method” and “empirical research.” Now it turns out that the word itself derives from the Greek empeiria, meaning experience. Curious, therefore, that the paranormal falls beyond the pale of modern science—considering that such study is entirely and solely dependent on the examination of experience, accessible only, therefore, to empirical investigation.

The reasons for this stand-off are traceable to the drift in the meaning of the word as well as its deeper roots. Empeiria itself derives from the Greek word meaning skilled, which derives from the words en and peira, thus in and trial or experiment. From Greek the word emigrated to Latin as empiricus, meaning a physician who worked from experience—as opposed to a physician who worked from philosophical principles such as a dogmatic, theoretical knowledge that the imbalance of humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) were entirely responsible for disease.

Thus empirical first served to separate the skilled artisan from the thinker, then the skilled professional from the philosopher. The trial-and-error in that root (applied with an open mind of course) became foundational for science—despite the fact that some sciences don’t permit trial and error (e.g., astronomy, geology). In modern times the qualitative approach to using observation yielded to the dominance of the quantitative approach. (The greedy manufacturers of instruments got the upper hand and caused all this—as arms manufacturers cause war.) And therefore the empirical approach, if deprived of trial-and-error, replication, and precise measurement, is no longer an acceptable avenue to the gathering of insight into the darkest shadows of reality.

I hope this exposition is a helpful nudge back to a more comprehensive approach to genuine science. But now you wonder about empire, don’t you. Is that connected here somewhere, or was I once more yielding to linguistic urges in framing the title of this post? The latter. Empire comes from the Latin imperium, meaning rule or command. Its root is once more im-, meaning in, and parare, to order.

The above composed by a financial contributor to Online Etymology Dictionary.

More Notes on Collectives

I noted the other day: “Human collectives behave quite unlike rational individuals.” This, for me, is perhaps the most valuable lesson of history. If the lesson is not internalized, temptations arise to make mistakes in other realms of reality. One is the belief that inorganic matter can yield life or that collectives of conscious beings are in some way superior to individuals.

I think it is wise to view public events as if they were natural events, thus to ignore the fact that rational individuals make decisions and thus shape history. Those are invariably collective decisions, thus a fusion of contradictions. The individuals who make them almost never have adequate knowledge to foresee or the power to shape the outcomes, and the greater the scope of the events, thus the more “collective” they are, the less predictable.

Here Secretary Gates’ muted remark the other day about the differences between wars of necessity and wars of choice is a good illustration. Wars of necessity may be defined as wars imposed on us as organized, large-scale physical attacks on our territories intended minimally to seize them, maximally to take control of the entire collective that we represent. If the aggressor is not a state, with a definable territory of its own, going to war makes no sense. After the 9/11 attacks, a full-scale war on Afghanistan was an overreaction. Afghanistan was the hiding place of a terrorist group—not the attacker. And once the Taliban government had been replaced by another, that over-reaction should have ended—in 2004. Indeed Al Qaida had intended neither to seize our territory nor to replace our government when it destroyed the towers and damaged the Pentagon. The War on Terror that mushroomed out of this was thus irrational, a natural event, in other words—although its raw materials were the collective emotions of a public that, at election time, might have displaced the Bush administration if that administration had merely reacted to 9/11 as it should have—by narrowly-shaped raids on Al Qaida’s camp. It was precisely such raids that President Clinton had staged in 1998, using cruise missiles, when he retaliated for embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Writing this, and remembering Clinton’s limited actions, it occurs to me that irrationality in public life is not necessary. Not necessary but certainly likely—and likely roughly in proportion to the emotional turmoil an event produces in the public as a whole. Now, let us note, irrational impulses in the public can be exploited or tamped down by the administration in power. And the temptation to exploit them will in some way be stimulated by the needs and ambitions of those in power.

Once irrationality takes over—once the horse has the bit in its teeth—it is difficult to bring it under control again. In an open society, rational reasons must be trotted out to explain and justify actions that were, on second thought, altogether wrong. The new product, the new narrative, will then be, again, an incoherent fusion of contradictions, producing yet other irrational decisions.

Yesterday’s presidential announcement to the effect that we’ve now pretty much accomplished our goals in Afghanistan is a consequence of an irrational process, introducing further irrationalities. In wars of necessity, things are simple. In World War II Germany invaded France; Germany had to be pushed out of France. The “goal” was simple, measurable. The German government had to be removed. It was removed. No ambiguities. What our “goals” in Afghanistan might be is as much of a mystery as the location of the territorial lines of “Terror,” whatever terror is. It has no place, it has no organization, no reality, as such—no tangible, visible reality at a scale any great Collective can see. Sad business, listening to the President. He too is reacting to collective emotion; this time the collective emotion is disgust with war. And so he is cooking up a brew of contradictory confusions. He means well. He is a rational being—caught in a kind of storm produced decades ago, because the TV screens in 2001 brought us clouds of smoke surrounding two towers in New York. We barely noted the deaths of 224 people in the embassy bombings of 1998; and only 12 of them had been Americans…

Wal-Mart, the Movie

On LaMarotte this morning I present some sober thoughts on the recently decided discrimination case against Wal-Mart. Writing that post my irreverent impulses produced the outlines of a plot, science fiction, to be sure (the science here being Economics): Wal-Mart, the Movie. What I had in mind was something along the lines of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—and this being SF, why couldn’t time-travelling James Stewart arrive in 2011 for a guest appearance in our time in Wal-Mart, the Movie? Innocent but big-hearted Jimmy, a stock-clerk at Wal-Mart, starts the huge ball rolling when he listens to Wolf Blitzer on CNN announcing the Supreme Court’s decision on Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Dukes et al. He starts organizing, first his mother, then his sisters. From tiny beginnings outward spreads the greatest ever boycott of Wal-Mart. First a few women, at one store, Jimmy Stewart’s own, then many but still not all, refuse to buy anything at all, at every Wal-Mart. There are hold-outs, but eventually, around every Wal-Mart in America, masses of women—and a few sensitive men, as well, of course—surround the stores. At the same time—a few, then all, women who work for Wal-Mart quit—one of them being an extremely fetching VP of Finance at the very store where Jimmy works—a woman whom the stock clerk secretly loves (established early in the movie, while Jimmy still struggles against doubts, fearing to lose his job). Fetching VP joins the protest. She gives it her all, working with Jimmy little shoulder to his big, in events that reach from small to national heights. And in the end of course, when Wal-Mart stores are everywhere empty, indeed being attacked with sledge hammers and front-end loaders by suddenly muscular but still sensitive males in hard hats, the blessed denouement arrives, and ex-VP of Finance is in the arms of ex-stock clerk of Wal-Mart, stream of tears running down their faces as they breathlessly kiss each other while the crowd—it’s all of us, folks, all of America—give a mighty cheer.

And after watching that movie, we all feel much better about things. As we did back in 1939 as well when Jimmy first, as Mr. Smith, did his number on us.

No More Newspeak at the Reservation's Gates

For a free country where we permit all sorts of vile things in the name of Free Speech, we’re peculiarly welded to an Orwellian tradition. The shortest description of it is “staying on message,” meaning to mouth (indeed to think) the Administration’s current policy—if the Administration pays our salary. Another is the phrase I first heard during the Nixon era from the lips of John Ehrlichman—who had been told to tell John Dean, Nixon’s lawyer, to “stay on the reservation.” If you don’t talk the talk, the Thought Police will come and make you issue corrective statements to the effect that you misspoke, and when you said that War opposes Peace, you really meant that War was Peace.

When prominent, disciplined, loyal servants of the people—or is it of Administrations?—at last retire, Newspeak drops away and startling phrases in plain English issue from their mouths. Thus we hear Robert Gates, approaching the gates of the reservation now, making the statement:

If we were about to be attacked or had been attacked or something happened that threatened a vital U.S. national interest, I would be the first in line to say, ‘Let’s go.’ I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice. [Quoted in the New York Times today, emphasis added.]

That distinction—wars of necessity, wars of choice—should have been made loudly and clearly by audible, credible, visible leaders of a certain gravitas years and years ago. But we hear it, always, only ever in the twilight of retrospect.

It’s a dilemma. Cabinet secretaries are chosen by the President but are confirmed by the Senate. That confirmation gives them a certain independent stature. But no. They are required to adopt the message and to stay on the reservation lest strange tensions arise in the public’s mind. Who’s really in charge around here? The same dilemma arises, to be sure, when Mom and Dad disagree but keep their mouths shut in the children’s presence. And when they don’t...

Montaigne and Moctezuma

It occurred to me by some untraceable set of associations that the erudite, reasonable, Michael Montaigne, a man who influenced such figures as Descartes on the one hand and Isaac Asimov on the other, coincided on the map of time with the Aztec Empire more or less—roughly as my life coincided with that of Victorian England: as one disappeared the other began. In 1519, fourteen years before Montaigne saw sunlight, Hernándo Cortés arrived at the gates of Tenochtitlan; a year later, with his allies, the Tlaxcala Confederacy, he conquered the city. Twenty-five years later, when Montaigne was twelve (1545), the second wave of smallpox began the process of destroying the Aztec population in earnest. Such are the gifts of higher civilization to the lower as they roll benevolently across the world. The Aztecs are remembered chiefly for emperor Moctezuma and practicing human sacrifice—the Spanish for “discovering America,” the Inquisition, and that famous Spanish fly. Fate’s whip bestows its cruel blows on collective reputations without mercy, as it were. The destruction of enemy armies by ritual methods, as the Aztecs practiced it, is shameful; we assign the functionally identical activity, when it takes place as collateral damage, to the fog of war and glitches in technology.  

Honor, Capitalism

Asked to provide an antonym to the word capitalism, most web dictionaries return communism. Some instead suggest socialism; they don’t mention communism, probably because their editors think that communism is now dead as the Dodo. The word’s origins go back to (where else) late Latin, capitale, meaning property, from which we get such interesting secondary meanings as chattel and cattle. That capitale goes back to Latin caput, head. Do I infer correctly that it was the head man who had property, possessions…hence the word’s extensions? Caput is good. Reminds me of the German kaputt, meaning worn out, dead, and the phrase that goes with it: Alles ist kaputt! But (too bad) that word derives from a French card game, capot, meaning a bonnet.

Now with a word having deep roots like that, the tendency is to say that capitalism goes way back. But in the sense in which we use the word, it really harks back to Marx’s Das Kapital, thus the nineteenth century—and indeed Marx’s success in seeding communism, hence the antonym. The fervent embrace of capitalism by a subset of Americans must have its roots in this modern ideological form of it, arising from the blessed Now, Today—thus signifying a kind of loss of tradition, historical sense, a lack of depth, indeed a lack of thought.

Cartoonists retain the distinctions. Capitalists are always pictured as extraordinarily fat, oppressive, and wearing tall hats. The blessed chattel-cattle are drawn as emaciated, thin, threadbare and groaning under enormous burdens.

George Orwell, to whom we owe so many things, failed us in one regard. He gave us Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace—but he failed to mention Capitalism is Honor. It was in the post-1984 period that we’ve had to invent the phrase and introduce it, and try to teach it to the chattel in popular cable talk intended to suggest that if you work for capital, subject to release at any time, you are a capitalist.

Interesting contrast there. Honor and Capitalism. I suggest it to the thoughtful as a subject of meditation on those long, boring commutes. The modern mind (my impression) feels a kind of mild but sad nostalgia when contemplating Honor—as something that harks back to childhood, the olden days, the days that (really) never actually held sway. Capitalism (my impression once again) has a not quite pleasant taste but signals power, smarts, sophistication, and a kind of realistic indifference to anything but self—but, Facebook Friend, it has a kind of scientific magic, doesn’t it? That very sophistication, that realism, that hard-nosed drive, baby, that’s what magically transmutes—doesn’t it?—into the American Dream?

The truth is (my conviction) that in a genuinely healthy society, one that must confront reality—and the time for that is now approaching—honor will turn out to be the actual antonym to capitalism. It means, at minimum, returning to comprehensive human values: cultivating character, loving our neighbors not keeping up with them, doing unto others as we would be done by, honoring our parents rather than fawning before the powerful, the celebrated, honest dealings, defense of our shores not of “interests,” firm handshakes, straight talk, aiding the weak, visiting the sick, and building foundations before raising structures—never mind Towers of Babel.

Accidental Useful News

This morning’s New York Times brought a story people like me value. The essence of it is in this sentence: “The Pakistani Army is essentially run by consensus among 11 top commanders, known as the Corps Commanders.” The story deals with unrest in the Pakistani military, evidently an up-welling of lower ranks of the officer corps. The army’s leadership is unhappy about General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the top general for, let us say, cooperating a bit too much with the United States. Memories of Pervez Musharraf surface (r. 2001-2008)—one of the more able top generals, who got in trouble too. Problems, problems. On the one hand lavish military support from America. And then you have to regurgitate the price. I know exactly how the colonel-and-lower officer corps feels. Compromised. The lower in rank you are, the closer to the actually human.

I call this accidental news because we rely on small-readership magazines for genuine insights into the structural arrangements underlying all of the chaos newspapers actually report—making sense of which without knowing the deeper foundations is very difficult. Articles in Harpers’, in the American Conservative, sometimes in The Atlantic have occasionally been the source of genuine insight—be it into the Iraqi quagmire, Yemen, Somali, or Afghanistan. Sometimes foreign language papers open your eyes—if you happen to be able to read, say, Hungarian. Not many people do! Our latest gem is Nordamerikanische Wochen-Post, a German-language American weekly—with a quite useful and sometimes startlingly insightful view of the world.

Astonishing!

I was squatting in our garden patch weeding when Brigitte came out with a printout in her hand. “How many military bases do you think we have in Germany?” she asked. She sat down on a garden chair. Her question suggested that the figure was bigger than I had imagined, so I said, going over the top: “Thirty?” She smiled. “Would you believe 227?”

Now in the background here, for me, was remembering Grafenwöhr firing range just a few days ago—and remembering it, looking it up—and looking it up being amazed that it was still a U.S. Army installation! Still? Today? Even in my own days in U.S. Army Europe, I would have been astonished at that number—despite the fact that I actually served at three different bases in Germany when I was there and had been to at least six others, one being Grafenwöhr.

The numbers are there—but tough to find. Brigitte was quoting a story in The Nation. That story, in turn, referenced a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Bulletin, finally, linked to a FY 2007 Base Structure Report issued by the Department of Defense (link). In that report itself I discovered that the number was 287 bases; sixty of them were evidently typographical casualties. In FY 2007, DOD had 823 bases the world over, the majority in Germany, in Japan (130), and in South Korea (106). Three hundred others were strewn across 36 other countries, according to the DOD—although other sources report a U.S. military presence in 150 countries all told. If the bases in Iraq and Afghanistan were included, according to The Nation (they were not, in this report), the total would be more than 1,000.

A later story in the Huffington Post, publishing comments by Senator Jon Tester of Montana (here), provides what seem to be updated numbers: 268 bases in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. The numbers are still in the same ballpark.

So when, again, did World War II end? It ended in August 1945. Sixty-six years later we still have nearly 270 bases in Germany and more than a hundred in Japan. The cost of maintaining these and the other bases, per The Nation, runs $102 billion a year.

My oddly ricocheting conclusion from all this—a couple of more hours of weeding and another day of hard outdoor work later? It is that human collectives behave quite unlike rational individuals. I’ve got to believe, indeed I’ve no reason not to, that the vast majority of our public officials are well-meaning, honest, and reasonably intelligent. Nevertheless, the great public outcomes that we see all around us present something strangely and alarmingly mad. And when I myself served as a little cell in the body of the great Military Industrial Complex, I was just doing my duty. Wasn’t I?

Queen Anne's Lace

It’s that time of year again—or, perhaps, just a few days past absolute peak for this hardy ground-cover, so royally named. Last year’s post on this subject has more of the naming conventions for those who wish to know. The link is here.

The Arts of War

The gods of oil and capital began to change the arts of war
Soon after I was born and saw my first, last global Death Dance Star.
When she began, no single land could yet boast its sole dominance.
Participants could not yet hedge all of their bets well in advance
Because they knew how things would wend long before the first bomb went
Off in lovely shocks and awes at war’s thrillful commencement.

Economies were puny things and one among them had not yet,
Like ours, mushroomed out and then ascended, like a silver jet
Into the skies and, if you like, beyond—right to the blessed moon.
And with that rise, and no surprise, came satellites and soon
We’d also conquer planet Mars and there at once we’d make our mark,
Near-visibly to naked eye, with bases each with baseball park.

The shadow of that great economy, which rose and grew so great,
Made outcomes of all wars predictable, indeed as sure as fate—
Provided that we started them or took a hand—and with that came
Changes even in the name of war; war ceased, became a game.
Money-bound and anchored deeply in oil-wells distant, very far,
All changed, the pulse, the beat, the flavor, yes, even the smell of war.

Righteous Indignation

Reading the news of departing Defense Secretary Gates’ comments concerning NATO members this morning, oddly perhaps, produced associations in me of a Wolf Blitzer interview with former President Carter some years ago. Gates criticized NATO countries of lack of enthusiasm in supporting the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The most quoted part of his speech follows:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.

The NATO defensive alliance came to be formed, largely at U.S. initiative, to prevent Europe falling into the hands of the Communists. Thus it was de facto an anti-Russian alliance, but legally requires members to come to the aid of any other member nation that is attacked. Now a cold and sober view of today’s situation makes European reluctance to spend heavily on the Afghan war, be it bodies or money, quite understandable. The 9/11 attack on the United States was not by a state actor but by a terrorist group, it took place just shy of ten years ago. In that attack approximately 3,000 people lost their lives and several buildings were destroyed. The American response to this event has been way, way too excessive. It has spawned two costly wars of which Iraq was never linked to the 9/11 attack; the second began as an invasion of a country where the terrorists were located and trained their operatives. That war went far beyond destroying training camps and killing or dispersing the terrorists; it has morphed into a neo-imperialist venture under the new name of nation building.

At minimum Gates’ demands for heavy European participation in the Afghan war stretches the meaning of military alliance to unrecognizable shape. It has come to mean supporting U.S. military efforts, wherever they might take place and for whatever reason—just because, for reasons of our own, not out of any gratitude, we put airfields and troops all over Europe once to keep Europe from going communist.

So why does the Blitzer-Carter interview pop into my mind? Turns out that Gates’ speech and that interview have a common feature. They both represent distortions in reality. The New York Times positions the Gates’ story as righteous and appropriate. Blitzer displayed the same aggressive righteousness in using, back then, what struck me as an almost insulting tone when he interviewed President Carter. The occasion was Carter’s publication of a book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book came out on November 14, 2006. The interview in CNN’s so-called Situation Room, took place on November 28. Carter had dared to look at Israeli behavior realistically and soberly rather than politically correctly. That last stance requires that Israeli behavior must always be presented as justified and right, whether it is or is not. Similarly the U.S. position and view of reality must always be seen as correct and right even when it has drifted into collective insanity.