How Do You Parody This Society, Anyway?

Earlier I said

For all I know, there is a Bandit Sign Association, with a Washington lobbyist. I bet California requires a professional license.

Looks like I wasn’t that far off.

Fn: And sure enough, I have a Google Ad for an outdoor sign company.

Welcome

Well, I just did what any ordinary blogger would do when he needed a definition of the word "hoochie." I popped over to Urban Dictionary. Under "hoochie mama," at #3, with 53 positive votes (and, okay, 53 negative), I find:

hoochie mama is a lady/girl who is really hot...she got everythin and she gets anythin she wants. she's not necessarily a slut, she just flirts around and teases and dresses provactively.

Uh, say again -- "provactively"--? A mix of "provocative" and "proactive." Hey, there's a word we've all been waiting for.

Another Leading Indicator

I wonder if this is an index of (anything) in the real estate market.

I’m just back from the Marketing Real Estate Forum at Thecreativeinvestor.com. There are 250 “post groups,” – i.e., messages, not counting answers. As of a moment ago, 13 of these 250 included the term “bandit signs.”

I confess, I didn’t even know what a “bandit sign” is. In the context of real estate, I assumed it was a sign saying that the foreclosing bank was a, well, a bandit.

But no. Wiki sets me straight:

Flyposting is the act of placing advertising posters or flyers in illegal places. In the US, these posters are known as bandit signs or street spam.

In most areas, it is illegal to place such posters on private property without the consent of the property owner or on public property without a sign permit from the local government.

It is an advertising tactic mostly used by small businesses promoting concerts and political activist groups, but there have been occasions where international companies subcontracted local advertising agencies for flyposting jobs in order to not get caught in illegal behavior.

Flyposting is commonly seen as a nuisance due to issues with property rights, visual appearance and littering and is a misdemeanor in many countries.

And they might have added: a highly developed sales technique in a sliding real estate market. “Language on Bandit Signs,” is Post #2. “Who’s Putting Out Your Bandit Signs?” is #8. I particularly enjoyed #43, from BoboTheKing:

Does anyone have some good color combinations for bandit signs and car magnets (lettering and background) that produces the best results? I have heard black lettering on yellow is good, but wanting to get all the input I can on what has worked well for other investors. Thanks in advance.

For all I know, there is a Bandit Sign Association, with a Washington lobbyist. I bet California requires a professional license.

Ahead of his Time (aka The Old, Old Story)

Where have you heard this before:

The increasingly frequent adoption of gang-terrorism as a mode of attaining political ends in the modern world should perhaps cause us to overhaul our methods of colonial defense … The Irish, and now the Palestinian rebellion … have shown that regular armiesw are ill adapted to cope with gang warfare, which carries on its activities by the intimidation of private citizens. The only way yet discovered to cope with terrorism is more terrorism [i.e., counter-terrorism] … Will this soon become an inevitable development in the British Empire also – Navy, Army, Air Force, and – anti-gangster services [i.e., counter-terrorism units] [?].

Glubb Pasha, British Commander of the Arab Legion, as quoted by Benny Morris in The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews 50-51 (I. B. Tauris 2003) (all brackets are from the book).

Afterthought: Wait a minute, who you callin’ “ahead of his time”? Isn’t this the kind of thing the Spanish did to Napoleon in the Peninsular War?

Response: Well, um, ah—okay, yes it is. But it is a lesson that conventional military bureaucracies don’t seem to learn quickly or well. Or, even after they learn it, they forget it. Until they get a chance to learn it again.

But What About Night-Shift Taxi Drivers?

Senator Conrad Burns, (R-Mont.) on terrorism:

BELGRADE, Mont. (AP) - Republican Sen. Conrad Burns ... says the United States is up against a faceless enemy of terrorists who ``drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night.''

Source: here.

Vietnam Myths (and Realities)

The always readable Sic Semper Tyrannis says: “Someone said in a recent comment that we should thrash it out about Vietnam. OK. Start here.”

Okay, I will. The “comments” below are by Buce. Everything else is from the Vietnam myths webpage.

Myth:

The domino theory was proved false.

The domino theory was accurate. The ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand stayed free of Communism because of the U.S. commitment to Vietnam. The Indonesians threw the Soviets out in 1966 because of America's commitment in Vietnam. Without that commitment, Communism would have swept all the way to the Malacca Straits that is south of Singapore and of great strategic importance to the free world. If you ask people who live in these countries that won the war in Vietnam, they have a different opinion from the American news media. The Vietnam War was the turning point for Communism.

Comment: the metaphysics of this one are obscure. Are you assuming we “won” in VN? And that no dominos fell? But how do you know what would have happened if we had not “won?” And of course, the more common view is that we lost Vietnam. If that is true—and still nobobdy dominoed—then the theory looks pretty shabby. [But for more on “who won,” see infra.]

Myth:

Most Vietnam veterans were drafted.

2/3 of the men who served in Vietnam were volunteers. 2/3 of the men who served in World War II were drafted. Approximately 70% of those killed were volunteers.

Comment: who ever thought this one to be true? The point of they college kids was that they didn’t want to be drafted, whether others were or not.

Myth:

The war was fought largely by the poor and uneducated.

Servicemen who went to Vietnam from well-to-do areas had a slightly elevated risk of dying because they were more likely to be pilots or infantry officers.

Comment: Objection, your honor, not responsive! Quite possible for both these statements to be true at once.

Myth:

The United States lost the war in Vietnam.

The American military was not defeated in Vietnam. The American military did not lose a battle of any consequence. From a military standpoint, it was almost an unprecedented performance. (Westmoreland quoting Douglas Pike, a professor at the University of California, Berkley a renowned expert on the Vietnam War) [Westmoreland] This included Tet 68, which was a major military defeat for the VC and NVA.

Comment: But remember the NVN response: true but irrelevant. The whole point of Fourth-Generation Warfare theory is that winning battles doesn’t win wars.

Myth:

Kim Phuc, the little nine year old Vietnamese girl running naked from the napalm strike near Trang Bang on 8 June 1972, was burned by Americans bombing Trang Bang.

No American had involvement in this incident near Trang Bang that burned Phan Thi Kim Phuc. The planes doing the bombing near the village were VNAF (Vietnam Air Force) and were being flown by Vietnamese pilots in support of South Vietnamese troops on the ground. . . . There were no Americans involved in any capacity.

Comment: This one wins the irrelevance grand prix. By 1972 it was America’s war, pure and simple.

Blood Will Tell

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

In some ways, George Nathaniel Curzon is the model of the British Imperial aristo. Eton. Oxford. Viceroy of India. Foreign Secretary. Should have been Prime Minister. And with a blood line that stretches back into the mists of time.

And, as Curzon himself almost said, almost entirely worthless.

My ancestors were a feeble lot. No family could have remained in possession of the same estate since the twelfth century had they manifested the very slightest energy or courage.

To find anything noteworthy at all, David Gilmore in his biography (from which all this is quoted this is quoted) had to hoik up a couple of illegitimates and one younger son who took up careers in the military. Aside from these, however, Nineteenth Century Curzons

...remained on their estates except for brief appearances at Westminster, their immobility and lack of adventure symbolized by the family’s strikingly unambitious motto, ‘Let Curzon holde what Curzon helde.’

Except for the Great Man Himself, the Curzon’s almost notorious lack of achievement extended even into his own generation:

Blanche Scarsdale [Curzon’s mother] had eleven children in all, one of whom did not survive, before she died in 1875 at the age of 37 [!!!—Buce] Most of them belonged to that unambitious family strain so dramatically challenged by their eldest brother. ‘Albert does nothing but is an excellent fellow,’ George remarked when his brother was 34. Sophy, his eldest sister, was married to an ‘excellent clergyman, while young Blanche kept house for [their father].

Curzon and his brother Frank

...were several times forced to bail out their other brothers, especially the youngest one, Assheton, who earned himself a reputation as the family’s ‘black sheep’. In 1914, after various other transgressions, Assheton was caught stealing securities from his office … . The only solution for Assheton, declared his eldest brother, was the classic remedy for black sheep: exile to the colonies.

Evidently the habits and customs extend beyond the great man himself. Many years after his death, his widow

...damaged her husband’s reputation by publishing her Reminiscences, the sort of book that makes people wonder why Britain never experienced a revolution: it describes inspections of the wrists of aspirant footmen to appraise their elegance when holding plates, and recounts how in her widowhood she canvassed for her Conservative son in East London accoutredf with fur coat, French maid, Rolls-Royce and hampers from Fortnum and Mason.

I will spare you the People-Magazine dope on their three daughters, but if you care, look here. As my friend Larry would say, they are descended form A Long Line of Dead People.

All quotations are from David Gilmour, Curzon xiii, 1-7 (1994).

Annals of Post-Modernist Self-Promotion

Last, I would like to thank Jeff Abel for his help in preparing this book for publication, for trying unfailingly (with scant success) to drag me into this digital age, for our friendship over the past thirty odd years, and for writing these words."

--Benny Morris, The Road to Jerusalem:
Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews (Tauris 2003)

Sawicky Discovers Johnson

Max Sawicky has discovered Chalmers Johnson (here). This can only be good news. Johnson deserves all the press he can get. Sawicky is reading Blowback but he would just as much enjoy Sorrows of Empire. Encountering Amazon reviews, as usual follow Buce's browsing rule of reading the one-star reviews first: "Overdone nonsense!" "Utter, nonsensical, braindead, illliterate HOGWASH!" "Recommended by Janeane Garafalo!!"

Sawicky says "There's a fair amount of overlap with Chomsky," which is true in a superficial sense, but there is a world of difference. Chomsky is a messianic paranoid. Johnson is an old fashioned gent who kept careful notes on what he was taught in Sunday School. There's a tiny genre of these guys who extrude out of the mainstream--Clyde Prestowitz would be another, or Andrew Bacevich, maybe James Webb (and just in general, it is remarkable how the list of conservative dissidents grows longer every day).

Sawicky does find one interesting point of disagreement with Johnson—on the place of money in imperial overstretch. Says Sawicky:

I tend to discount the money aspect -- what's $450 billion in a $13 trillion economy? To me the ideology -- the thirst for influence, control, and dominance -- is most important.

Sawicky’s view is curious pendant to the view of another with whom he would have little in common: TigerHawk, who just a few days ago was exulting in the fact that the military was “only”3.9 percent of GDP (link here). Sawicky seems closer to right, but both miss the central point: 3.9 percent of a GDP as large as ours may be plenty enough to enhance, rather than to reduce, insecurity in the world.

Oh, I Wish...

Carpetbagger (channeling Yglesias) is certainly right to suggest that Rumsfeld lost it in his fit of table-pounding. But he segues from there to “most voters agree with the Dems that we should get out of Iraq” (I quote myself).

He may be right in fact but it sidesteps the issue. From the fact that the GOP has screwed up in Iraq, it does not follow that we can walk away. Indeed, a large part of the calamity is precisely that we cannot walk away: that the Frat Boy has created a mess that the rest of us will be unraveling for the rest of our lives.

I must say I don’t profess to hold any glib answers here. But the defect with “get out” is that it is simply not possible. We can, of course, pack the troops up and send them back to Fort Hood, or wherever. But that doesn’t mean we are “out.” It’s a small world and one way or another, we remain entangled. The useful debate is: okay, so we ship the troops home, then what? Can we in fact expect a Shi’ite takeover of Iraq? Can we live with that? Can we expect a Shi’ite-Sunni conflagration? Can we live with that? Can we expect a Turko-Iranian takeover of Kurdistan? Are we ready to live with that? And are we ready to live with the consequences that each of these may bring in turn?

I hope it is obvious that these questions are rhetorical. One way or another, the Middle East will set off reverberations to which we will have to respond (and a good many of them will be more difficult or intractable as a result of what we have done since 2003). How will we respond to them? This is the debate that we must have now, as much (or even more) if we "go home" as if we don't.

Cut and run? Oh, I wish…

Fn: For a far more subtle exploration of the implications of withdrawal, see Abu Aardvark.

Why Sweden?

One of the more curious rhetorical ploys of American right-wing thought is what you might call “the Sweden maneuver.” No, this is not a move in the game of Mornington Crescent. It’s the device of hoiking up a set of (alleged) data on (something) in Sweden, and marshalling it to prove that our “system” is better than their “system. The standard structure is: don’t be misled by the appearance of stability, prosperity and security—this is a frozen swamp where orchids die and toads live long.

It’s not clear to me just how long this has been going on. Certainly to the early days of the Cold War; perhaps all the way to the first publication of Marquis Childs’ seminal Sweden: The Middle Way in 1936 (look here). Childs was “moderate” in the classic sense of the term: temperate, skeptical, curious, hospitable to the unexpected. It’s not a pose that sits well with terrible simplificateurs, and so it seems to have prompted an ever-renewing determination to prove that the Swedes are slatternly, suicidal, promioscuous (and crypto-Nazi to boot).

[An interesting but not particularly simplistic instance of the genre can be found here.]

A remarkable new instance emerges from, unsurprisingly, TCS Daily, the talking-shop of James K. (Dow 36,000) Glassman and his crew. The TCS money shot is this: forget about the rich getting richer. The data shows that the poor in Sweden are just as poor as the United States. That for you, Leif Erikson!

But TCS is not content to let the numbers speak for themselves. No:

If we accept (as I do) that we do, indeed, need to have a social safety net, and that we have a duty to provide for those incapable or unlucky enough to be unable to do so for themselves, we need to set some level at which such help is offered. The standard of living of the poor in a redistributionist paradise like Finland (or Sweden) seems a fair enough number to use and the USA provides exactly that. Good, the problem's solved. We've provided -- both through the structure of the economy and the various forms of taxation and benefits precisely what we should be -- an acceptable baseline income for the poor. No further redistribution is necessary and we can carry on with the current tax rates and policies which seem, as this report shows, to be increasing US incomes faster than those in other countries and boosting productivity faster as well.

The internet still makes my head spin. The TCS piece is dated August 28. The same day, we have one of the authors of the study in question (Max Sawicky), here, responding that “this [analysis] should take an Olympic gold medal for missing the point” (think of Marshall McCluhan, coming to the aid of Woody Allen in Annie Hall). Point being that TCS has simply assumed away the issue of social services, dealt with at length in the original study. Look here to see Matt Yglesias explaining Sawicky, better than Sawicky explains himself.

This is all good fun, but my question persists: why Sweden? What is it about (apparent) security and stability that drives the simplificateurs so wild? As TCS itself inadvertently acknowledges, it isn’t even the “middle way” paradise of democratic socialism that it was in Childs’ day—it has school vouchers and no inheritance tax. Is it that they were too chummy with the Nazis? That they gave us Bergman? Strindberg? Alfred Nobel? Hans Blix?[1] But they can’t even keep control of their own auto industry. Okay, bad example…

Biblio Note: Preparing this note, I ran across this link, which provides a more extensive analysis of Sweden and of meta-Sweden.

---

[1] Actually, these days maybe it is Hans Blix. Tis said that one reason the Bush admin wouldn’t go along with the weapons inspectors is that Rove is Norwegian and thought that Rove, a Swede, could not be trusted.

War Is About Winning, Not About Killing

Not being a regular reader of the New York Post, I don’t think I had ever heard of Ralph Peters until I stumbled onto this intriguing review by TigerHawk. I’ve now had a chance to explore a bit of Peters’ work with (qualified) pleasure and (qualified) profit. Without pretending to be present a fully developed review of my own, let me see if I can make one basic point.

But first, background. It may help to have earplugs. Peters is a romantic with a gushy, hand-wringing over-the-top style that assures you the world will end on Thursday if you don’t listen to him. His primary theme is something on the order of “the beleaguered virtue of the soldier” versus “the fecklessness and corruption of”—well, of just about everybody else. (quoted words are mine, not his) As a literary trope, this is pretty well worn. Still, as a rule of thumb for life, it probably has more truth than a lot of literary tropes. There’s no escaping the fact that the organized military is a behemoth organization and as such, is vulnerable not just accidentally, but systematically and predictably, to the kinds of ailments that beset behemoths everywhere. As TigerHawk says:

Peters['] sharpest observations turn on the relationship between weapons procurement and America's likely warfighting requirements. In short, he believes that the defense industry, the Pentagon brass, and the Congress have, through a combination of stupidity and self interest, seduced the rest of us into believing that small numbers of extraordinarily expensive and technologically advanced weapons systems can both achieve American military objectives and substitute for quantity.

Myself having almost as little military experience as our President, this kind of stuff gets beyond my pay grade fairly fast, but I’m generally persuaded that there is something to it: the chances are very good to excellent that the structure of the military enterprise will guarantee that it spends tons of money on the wrong things.

Now, take this as context for what seems to me to be Peters’ central error: he seems to believe that war is about killing. He doesn’t say so in so many words—at least not in what I’ve read. But he does seem to say that “war is about winning” and that “winning involves annihilation of the enemy (my quotes again).

If this is, in fact, his point, he is wrong. War is about winning. Sometimes, this involves a lot of killing, and sometimes it does not. There was probably no way for the Russians to beat back the Germans than with wholesale slaughter. But (to take just one example among many possible), consider General Sherman: a great warrior and a great victor—but not a great killer. The South remembers him bitterly for having achieved almost total dominance over them. They forget that he did it with only modest loss of life.

By contrast, consider that most useless of all modern battlefields: the Western Front where two sides hammered away at each other savagely because neither could think of a good reason to stop—the cream of ironies was that they never had a good reason to start in the first place.

That, of course, is the lesson of the modern “people’s wars” that we seem so determined to misunderstand. As may have said, we won it twice and lost it twice. As Ho Chi Minh liked to say, it didn’t matter because we didn’t understand the war we were fighting. So also the Israelis with an even more dramatic record of success on the battlefield and disappointment after the battle is over.

We do a bit better these days. No American seems to have understood the Vietnam War while it was going on. A few seem to understand Iraq today. On issues of operation and management, Peters is probably one of them: he certainly merits attention. On articulating strategic goals, he is not to be trusted.

[Peters’ book is: Never Quit the Fight available here, and do your best to ignore the fact that Amazon offers it as a companion piece to Ann Coulter.]

No Wonder He's Grumpy

The Financial Times, via Grumpy Old Bookman, reports that 175,000 new blogs are being created every day; Technorati recently tracked its 50 millionth. GOB also links (here) a (London) Times story on kids of politicians whose blogs embarrass their parents. The Times story is great but GOB is better:

I was going to say that none of this is remotely surprising. Why should we expect, I was going to say, that politicians' kids would be any different from anyone else's? But actually, when you think about it, there are quite good reasons why politicians' kids should be whackier than average.

For a start, Dad is never there. He's far too busy being an important mover and shaker. Secondly, when he is there, the kids hear him sounding off about this and that in forthright terms, only to see him on TV the next day saying the exact opposite, or making a statement which, when examined closely, says absolutely nothing at all. Such close exposure to the political process is pretty much guaranteed, one might think, to engender a more than usually high level of disgust, distrust, and contempt. Hence the habit of some daughters of dancing on bar tops and posting the pictures on the net. Fuck all that, you can practically hear them saying, this is what life is really all about.

I wonder if my kids are embarrassed by my blog? My grandkids? Heck, they’re probably too busy creating their own blogs. I’m just as glad I don’t know.

Annals of Cross-Cultural Understanding

"With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City."

--Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, 1940.

Or maybe just like Slough.

Toldja

But then, so did a lot of other people. Anyway, link here and here.

Afterthought: Guy I wouldn't want to be -- the guy who hired him to teach in a private school in Bangkok, just a nanosecond before he was arrested.

First Ever Underbelly Soccer Post

Thanks to Joel for a piece from the London Evening Standard on where to eat and drink with your landsmen in London during the World Cup (link here, but the link seems unreliable). The food notes are interesting but even more fun is the info on who and how many. No surprise that United States and Australia weigh in with 200,000 each, or Paraguay with 150 (try Fiesta Havana on Fulham Broadway). But what nation leads the field with twice as many homies as US and Australia ech (or as many as the two combined)? Answer later, if I remember.

Pensées Sauvages

The macaca circus is turning into a pile-on and it is hard to find anything left unsaid (see here, here, here and heaven knows how many others). But let me offer a point which I (at least) haven’t noticed elsewhere.

Among the macacistas, much is made of the fact that young Mr. Sidarth is a native Virginian and that Allen is not. This is thought to be an irony.

It seems to me that this gets things backwards. Recall that macaca turns out to be an imperialist slur for the natives. In that sense, Allen has it precisely right. Allen helicopters in from Palos Verdes, uses and abuses the locals, and then fires of a blast at them for being shiftless and irresponsible (and, in the habit of the time, ungrateful).

"I do apologize if [they're] offended that," he might say.

There now, is that so hard? If Hillary had said it about a New Yorker, I’ll bet even The Corner could have figured it out.

Now this (from Sepiamutiny -- thanks, Anupam):

What Harry Said about Barry

The Jewish Daily Forward has decided that George (Macaca) Allen is, well Jewish. Max Sawicky adds him to a long list of pols who were Jewish before they weren't: "James Schlesinger, Casper Weinberger, Lawrence Kudlow, Bob Novak, and Harry Reems would understand. Maybe he should make Madeleine Albright his running mate," says Max.

George (and Max) might want to recall another great conservative hero who wasn't so coy: Barry Goldwater, grandson of "Big Mike" Goldwasser, an immigrant from Poland. Of Goldwater, Harry Golden quipped: "I always said that the first Jewish president would be an Episcopalian."

Fn.: Carpetbagger remarked on Goldwater's Jewishness in a piece of ironic nostalgia just a couple of days ago. What we may see is a variant of the old rule: the job of every Republican president (candidate) is to make the last guy look good.

Found in the Bin : Generation of Leaves

Lytle hwile leaf beoth grene;

Thonne hie fealewiath, feallath on eorthan

and forweorniath, weorthath to duste.

My notes say: ...found in an Old Eng. text, cited as from "Solomon and Saturn.”

A little while the leaves are green,

then they yellow, fall to earth

and perish, turn to dust.

The author must have been channeling this:

The generation of mankind is like the generation of leaves. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the living tree burgeons with leaves again in the spring.

Homer, Iliad 6.146-148

Richmond Lattimore trans. (slightly revised)

Alabama Democrats: A Big Tent, Or...

My friend Ivan is grumpy. Living in Alabama might be reason enough, but today he has to cope with this (link expires at midnight 8/30):

By BOB JOHNSON

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Democratic Party leaders want a former candidate for attorney general who denies the Holocaust occurred to stay out of their future primaries.

The party's executive committee passed a resolution Saturday informing Larry Darby that "he is not welcome in the Alabama Democratic Party."

Darby, the founder of the Atheist Law Center, responded by saying the vote shows that the state party's leadership is "intellectually and morally bankrupt."

Apparently Darby got 43 percent of the vote in a primary for attorney general. Ivan says:

The AP should have made clear that most Alabamians didnt know Darby's racist, anti-semitic positions, or that he then headed [the atheist center].. … Darby got 99 percent of his vote because Democrats didn’t know what he stood for, not because they knew what he stood for.

Haven’t heard from Ivan yet on this (from the NYT):

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: August 27, 2006

A woman who stands to become Alabama’s first openly gay elected official is back on the November ballot after the Democratic Party’s state committee on Saturday overturned a decision to disqualify her.

The candidate, Patricia Todd, who won a runoff to become the Democratic nominee for state legislator in a central Birmingham district, was disqualified Thursday on the grounds that she had failed to file a campaign finance report with the state party chairman, even though candidates have not done so since 1988.

The subcommittee that met Thursday disqualified her opponent in the primary, Gaynell Hendricks, for the same reason. There is no Republican candidate in the district, whose registered voters are majority black by a slim margin. Ms. Todd is white; Ms. Hendricks, whose mother-in-law brought the challenge, is black.

The subcommittee that disqualified the candidates was controlled by Joe Reed, a powerful black Democrat, who had urged voters to support Ms. Hendricks and warned that if they did not, the district could be redrawn to be majority white.

But the disqualification was met with disapproval. The party’s chairman, Joseph Turnham, said he was disappointed, and an editorial in The Birmingham News asked if the party had a “death wish.”

Knot Lady Law

Will someone please tell me what I've done to deserve

Knot Lady Law

In my snapshirts word cloud:

A Google "lucky" search for "knot lady law" yields this.

Geovisitors

Just scanning my Geovisitors locations. Welcome, Hong Kong, whoever you are. And Barcelona: I wouldn't mind being there myself.

Summer Reading Notes

Some summer reading notes: I read Steven Mithen, After the Ice (2003), by mistake. Somehow I thought it was about the development of the human species (homo this and homo that). Silly me: the development of the species takes place before the ice, while Mithen covers the period from about 20,000 to about 5,000 B.C. I particularly enjoyed the stuff about Western Asia, where I hope to spend some time later this Autumn, and in particular about Çatalhöyük in Turkey—a chilling story about a place . Mithen also introduced me to the “Younger Dryas,” a concept I had never heard of before. Prodigious piece of research, smoothly presented.

The read-aloud book for the summer at Chez Buce is T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, (Anchor Reissue 1991) supplemented by John J. Mack’s A Prince of Our Disorder (Harvard UP Paperback 1998), a superb biography of Lawrence, worthwhile in its own right. I still can’t make up my mind about Lawrence: he is obviously some kind of head case, but it’s hard to put your finger on just what kind of head case it might be. Perhaps the best way to read it is as a study in leadership, and also on popular conceptions of the hero; Mack’s treatment of the “heroism” issue is particularly fine. Caution: Lawrence does wander on a bit. The style is a kind of mannered Edwardian, and there is at least one passage of really gruesome torture.

I also reread (or so I thought) David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace (2d Reprint ed. 2001), about the Middle East and the Imperial Powers during and after World War I. I said “so I thought,” because I’m sure I read this book back around that fabled trip to Turkey 15 years ago—but an awful lot of it seems brand new this time. Perhaps the dominant theme here is the ignorant arrogance and presumption of the British, focused around the notion that the Arabs would just naturally welcome British rule. Not least interesting of many fascinating points is the insight on the relationship between T.E. Lawrence (again) and Winston Churchill. It has eerie resonance with the relationship in World War II between Churchill and the Scottish adventurer, Fitzroy MacLean. MacLean's Eastern Approaches (Reprint ed. 2003) is another imperial swashbuckler, fit to be bracketed with (but really not at all like) Seven Pillars.

I bought and started, and lost, and promptly bought again, Nicholas Oster’s extraordinary Empires of the World: A Language History of the World (2005). The jacket says that Ostler has “a working knowledge of twenty-six languages” along with “degrees from Oxford in University in Greek, Latin, philosophy and economics.” Aside from the sheer quiz-kid aspect, the practical relevance is that Ostler does better than anybody I ever knew in relating language and power: showing low language patterns shift, or do not shift, with patterns of politics.

My own language skills are derisory by comparison but I try to hack away at them. This summer I read Simenon’s Coup de Lune (2003) in French, and Silone’s Fontamara (Manchester UP n.d.) in Italian. In each case, the point is that the language is pretty simple (my copy of Fontamara is a school edition with nice notes). My late friend John, may he rest in peace, used to say that the problem with Simenon is that there is too much outmoded gangster argot. Could be: my French is weak enough I wouldn’t know.

For the exercise bike, I have a copy of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers New Testament Greek: A Reader, (2001). Once again, this is not as challenging as it might sound. The whole point of New Testament Greek is that it is easier than Classical Greek. And JACT has a ton of vocab notes. So I can limp through a good deal of with at least minimal success. I do keep a $10 King James Bible at the ready, and I must say it turns out to be a pretty serviceable trot. Got to be careful about flashing this stuff in coffee shops, though: can lead to unwanted conversations.

I’m not sure it counts as “reading” or not, but I must say I have been mesmerized by Will Eisner’s A Contract With God (2000), the hard-bound comic book epic of life in the Bronx in the 1930s. The pictures are riveting. I knew virtually nothing about comics before, but I can see why this guy is recognized as a master.

[My Amazon ad links at the moment include two other books I don’t discuss here: Van Creveld’s Rise and Decline of the State (1999), and Hammes’ Sling and the Stone (2004). They aren’t summertime reading because I read them last Spring. I’m hoping to pull together some thoughts on them for a separate post.]

Organization of Hatreds Redux

Politics as the organization of hatreds again:[1]

Entire political parties and media networks are embarked on an explicit program to make us afraid, in order to gain power and status thereby. This is the very definition of terrorism, and they are terrorists, who deserve to be treated as such with all due diligence of public sentiment and the law.

And let’s hear it for “opportunofascists” (in the comments).

Update. Yes, yes, fear ≠ hatred, but the linkage is close enough.

---

[1] Earlier I thought I was quoting Michael Oakeshott. My bad: apparently it was Henry Adams. See, e.g., here.

Another Mind Virus

My knowledge of boxing is zero, perhaps negative, but I found myself sucked in by this gripping account of the career of Sonny Liston, from Nick Tosches, via Grumpy Old Bookman. Somewhat defensively, GOB asks "Sonny who?" but that is because he is writing in Britain. Americans, I suspect, even doofuses like myself, remember Liston, but I doubt if even good boxing fans knew some of the stuff that Tosches seems to have brought together.

I also liked (from the comments):

I once saw [Ingemar Johansson] in his old age, handing out free tastes of prefab meatballs in a grocery store in Stockholm.

If you still have unexhausted brain cells, pop over to Ancecdotal Evidence and read this fine account of D'Arcy Thompson's classic, On Growth and Form (1917). My friend Steve tells me that computer-assisted design has made Thompson's lessons practically irrelevant, but the book is a wonder nonetheless.

Is This a Parody?

No, I think not.

Plan C

A morning-after pill for men.

Hitler Dead Again

And getting deader: Hitler’s Restaurant in Mumbai has apparently thrown in the swastika; look here. But the Café Mao chain continues to do business in Dublin and Glasgow. That picture in the website? It is apparently not a fat old dictator in a Mao suit, but just a fat little kid in a fat-old-dictator costume. Apparently there used to be a picture of the old swimming champ himself; if you believe what you read here (scroll down) the pictures went down after a publicity kerfuffle back in 2005. But it looks like somebody forgot to read the mission statement; look here for a more up to date report.

Maybe only fair; after all Mao still maintains a clear lead in the democide sweepstakes with an estimated 77 million kills, while Hitler trails at a poor third with 21 million, well behind Joseph Stalin (43 million) and not far ahead of Kublai Khan (19 million). Google doesn’t turn up a Café Stalin, but if you are in Newcastle, you can pop over to the Kublai Khan “specialty restaurant” for the all-you-can-eat buffet. And there was something about a Stately Pleasure Dome.

Although he has taken down the sign, Hitler’s proprietor says “This is one name that will stay in people’s minds.” Our bet is that the old mass murderer is lying low in Argentina.

Update: comment thread here is far less snarky and more instructive than this post.

"It's Something New, They Call it Tandoori..."

The Syed brothers opened Durbar in 1956 when there were fewer than 20 Indian restaurants in London and Winston Churchill had just resigned as prime minister in favour of Anthony Eden.

Fifty years on, there are about 8,500 Indian restaurants in the UK, more people are employed in the preparation and serving of Indian food than in the shipbuilding, coal mining and steel industries put together and someone who should be resigning is dragging his feet.

--Fay Maschler in the London Evening Standard, here
(and thanks, Joel)

Fn. In one of her many volumes of memoirs, Doris Lessing tells about going down to Leicester Square on New Year's Eve 1950 (I guess), to see the action. No one was there.

Somehow I Missed Polygamy Day

Somehow I missed “Polygamy Day 6” but the folks over at Pro-Polygamy.com are happy to bring me up to date:

Over the ... year leading up to the current “Polygamy Day 6,” many events accelerated the polygamy rights movement. A government study in Canada recommended de-criminalizing polygamy. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided “Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita,” putting two burdens of proof on the government to prove, first, why all polygamy should supposedly be completely banned and, second, why making an exemption for specific benevolent forms of polygamy would undermine such a complete ban – impossibilities for the government to ever prove. A new show on HBO’s pay-TV network, called “Big Love,” was the very first of its kind to portray normal consenting-adult polygamists. That generated enormous media coverage on the polygamy movement and its renowned battle-cry, “Polygamy Rights is the next civil rights battle.” And both houses of the U.S. Congress - again - failed to pass a big government marriage amendment.

Okay, okay, I enjoy the prurience as much as the next guy (name available on request). But there is a real issue here for anybody interested in social order. My own not very well tutored guess is that along with a rising incidence of warlordism, polygamy is bound to be on the rise as well (for a good overview, see Philip Longman on “Why Men Rule,” here).

Among those who pay attention to polygamy, there’s been a lot of attention directed to issues of morality, propriety sexual equality, and general existential angst. Somewhat less noticed is an issue that may be even more important: surplus males.

It seems to be a mantra of mine: a society with too many unattached males is society that is dangerous and disruptive a nuisance to itself and others. Polygamy coupled with sex selection and the evident “male imbalance” through large chunks of the world (particularly the Muslim world) is an explosive combination. Martin Walker did an admirable job of showcasing the “sex-selection” aspect here. For a suggestion of what a world looks like with too many men and not enough brides, consider Jonathan Spence on the rural village of Daoyi in 18^th-Century China:

Because of childhood illnesses, a less-than-adequate diet, even infanticide in time of famine—and because wealthy men tended to keep several female consorts—there were many fewer marriageable women than men in Daoyi, as in so many other areas of China. … The Chinese idealization of the family, the attention paid to children, and the insistence that descendants practice ancestor worship to keep forbears from suffering in the afterworld—all these deeply held beliefs must have seemed a cruel jest to these millions of men. For women, any attempt to avoid marriage must have been out of the question. This was just one more of the many areas in which sourcces of social discontent were always present, and yet could seldom be articulated because of China’s prevailing social beliefs.”

--Jonathan D. Spence, The Emergence of Modern China 94 (1990).

Current News Angle: It’s fascinating to watch how this issue plays itself out in Republican politics, particularly as it relates to the candidacy of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and the question whether a Mormon can secure himself with the religious right. The National Review fires a shot across his bow here, including the imperishable one-liner from Kate O’Beirne:

Should Mitt Romney join a 2008 race that included John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and George Allen, the only guy in the GOP field with only one wife would be the Mormon.

Fn.: And yes, I realize the issue is not as simple as I make it sound. Look here.

Some Questions for TigerHawk

TigerHawk is hands down one of the most interesting military/security blogs around. All the more reason to call him when he says something fatuous. Specifically here, where he remarks that defense spending is “only” 3.9 percent of GDP, in contrast to what he calls the “real fiscal outrage” of entitlement spending. Tiger (may I call you Tiger?), remember you are on your honor as a gentleman. Answer candidly:

• Tiger, you are a business exec, I believe?Do you ever control the budgets of subordinates? If a subordinate tells you that you shouldn’t worry about his costs because he is only a small part of the whole, are you impressed?

• As a business exec, I suspect you entertain skepticism of the power of government to solve problems, yes? Have you ever said “you can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it”--?

• Do you think returns to defense spending are linear? Would we twice as safe if we spent twice as much?

• Framing the previous question differently, in The New American Militarism, Andrew Bacevich argues that extra military spending actually makes us less safe, rather than more. Setting aside the question whether you think this to be the case now, do you think it ever could be the case? Is it, in other words, an issue worth pondering?

• You fulminate against “The shocking pattern … in the growth of social welfare spending for the middle class.” Is there any government program that you favor that does not entail the use of explosives?

• As an executive, I assume you are interested in cost controls? Do you know any principles of cost control that you might think relevant to the Pentagon? For extra credit, would you like to offer thoughts on how to apply them to the health care establishment, so as to reduce the pain of the entitlement transfers that you so disparage?

Technorati Profile

The Jihadi version of D&D

I just now caught up with TigerHawk’s estimable post where he points to the “preconfessions” of the London jihadis. TigerHawk suggests putting them on the web to “discredit these idiots.” As he says: “we should be mocking and humiliating them at every opportunity. [If we set them up] for distributed pillory at the hands of every blogger and comedian who wants to win this war, so be it.”

A commentor cautions: “Releasing the videos now would certainly wreck the case. The suspects would probably have to be released as a fair trial would be impossible. You have to be very careful with juries.”

Very likely. But so what? Let me be clear, I have no beef with the London investigators who did a fine job of tracking and monitoring these buffoons. But let’s face it: these jihadis are not serious terrorists, they are wannabees. They were writing a collaborative on-line fantasy novel; they were playing a jihadi version Dungeons & Dragons. They certainly had all kinds of evil intent. But they had their shoelaces tied together. The chances that they could pull off an act of serious murder or mayhem is just about zero. As a threat to good order, they were about as dangerous as that judge who got caught masturbating with a penis pump.[1] Turning them loose to deafening hoots of derision would—in each case—be the appropriate penalty. Remember, you can’t run with the big dogs if you spray ammonia like a puppy.

[1] Okay, the judge got four years, which doesn’t really help my argument. But my heavens, where are the libertarians when you need them?

The Natives are Restless

Carpetbagger is having a merry old time with our President’s newly-disclosed passion for reading. Commentators are quick to leap on the obvious (blah blah classic comics blah blah My Pet Goat blah blah). But nobody so far seems to have hit upon a more insidious possibility. Could it be that the White House staff is abandoning ship and that this is a piece of not-so-subtle mockery? On the order of Freud saying "I can recommend the Gestapo to anybody"--?

Fn: Let me add that it didn’t strike me as particularly odd when it was disclosed last week that he was reading Camus’ Stranger. Recall that this is the book they give you in French class to start you off on the genuine article. Lots of simple words.

Afterthought: I gave my young friend Daniel a copy of "Animal Farm" for his Bar Mitzvah. "He liked it," his father told me. "He thought it was about pigs."

Awww...

"A Negro and a Jew Decide the Destiny of Humanity"





Thanks, Larry...


Fn: But perhaps not here.

Life in the Waffen SS

Patrick Lang, who is becoming a must-read on military matters, has some fascinating stuff up on what it must have meant for Gunter Grass to serve in the Waffen SS. Link here, and root around the rest of his stuff; all good.

Fn.: Did not know that a German army unit is under "operational control" of the American V Corps. So Lt. Gen. Ricardo (Abu Ghraib) Sanchez is effectively the commander of a Panzer Division.

The Competition to Provide Services---Phase II

A generation ago, George Stigler conditioned us all to think of the government as a participant in a competitive market for services. You see this no more clearly than in “revolutionary situations”--guys in bandoliers running day-care centers in the mountains, while trying to blow the brains out of ministers in the capital. Or, last week, as Hezbollah undertook the rebuilding of Lebanon.

But that is only part of the story. For Phase I, Bruce Wallace caught the full implications last week in the LA Times:

AITA SHAAB, Lebanon — To enter southern Lebanon these days, you drive down roads where traffic is directed by young men in gray Hezbollah civil defense corps T-shirts and past bulldozers from the Holy War Reconstruction Co.

Days after guns fell silent, Hezbollah has emerged as the lead player in the cleanup of towns and villages in southern Lebanon. It has the volunteers, owns the equipment and has spent years burnishing its image as the champion of ordinary people, from poor tobacco farmers to doctors and lawyers, who see Hezbollah as much more than a militia.

Men fighting Israeli troops a few days ago are working alongside the Lebanese Red Cross to pull bodies from the rubble.

Nowhere across this blasted, pitted landscape is there any sign of the Lebanese government, or its authority.

"There is no government here," said an agitated Abdul Muhsen Husseini, president of the Union of Municipalities in the Tyre region — the man who is supposed to be in charge — as he handled requests from a stream of petitioners asking for money to buy medicine and what to do with the dead.

"We asked the government in Beirut to accompany the returning people to their villages, to repair water and prepare the roads," he said. "They said to me, 'God willing, we will come.' And they didn't come." . . .

In Beirut, the Cabinet issued a statement Wednesday saying it would "prevent the establishment of any authority outside the state" in southern Lebanon, and it pledged to restrict to the government the right to bear arms.

But on the ground in southern Lebanon, it is Hezbollah, emerging from a month of ferocious fighting with its health, education and civil services apparently intact, that calls the shots. . . .

[Hezbollah’s effort presents] a serious challenge to the central government in Beirut and the Bush administration, which is scrambling to launch its own rebuilding effort and deny Hezbollah a public relations dividend.. . .

In his office in Tyre, Husseini, the regional government official, begrudgingly credited Hezbollah and its Shiite allies in the Amal militia.

"At least they are on the ground helping," he said. "If you call them at midnight, they come out to help. They are the government."

So in competiton between “the government” and Hezbollah, seems to win the first round on points. But today we have Phase II—more competition. Here is Zeina Karam, for the Associated Press (in the New York Sun):

Arab League foreign ministers convened for an emergency meeting in Cairo to discuss a plan to create a fund to rebuild Lebanon.The meeting ended with no plan, but foreign ministers said a social and economic council would convene to discuss how to fund the rebuilding.

Diplomats said Arabs want to counter the flood of money that is believed to be coming to Hezbollah from Iran to finance reconstruction projects. An estimated 15,000 apartments were destroyed and 140 bridges hit by Israeli bombardment in Lebanon, along with power and desalination plants and other key infrastructure.

"This is a war over the hearts and mind of the Lebanese, which Arabs should not lose to the Iranians this time," a senior Arab League official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the press.

Takes me back to a wonderful old Soviet-era cartoon, where the savage in the jungle tells his buddy:

“I’ve got an idea. First we threaten to go communist and the Americans send us advisers. Then we threaten to go capitalist and the Russians send advisers. Then we eat ‘em.”

For Valuable Prizes

As it happened, I was in an airport security queue when I first heard about the new London bombing plot. My first thought was “it will be a fizzle.” Hey, as a first try, it was not a bad guess: most of the other trumpeted busts so far have been, to put it mildly, vastly overhyped.

Ten days later, I’m a little less certain that it is a fizzle, but I’m still on the fence. It does sound like we have a bunch of guys who like to say rude things in chat rooms; how much farther it goes--that remains, I think, to be seen.

But I can’t take much reassurance from reports of today’s first court appearance. BBC says:

“Two were accused of failing to disclose information and a 17-year-old was charged with possessing articles useful to a person preparing terrorism acts.”

Two points here. One, when was it, exactly, that “failing to disclose information” became a crime? And two, “articles useful to a person preparing terrorism acts.” In one of several previous incarnations, I was a police reporter for the old Louisville Times. I remember reading a hundred warrants that charged “possession of burglary tools.” Imagine my chagrin when someone explained to me that this meant they had a screwdriver in the trunk.

For valuable prizes, is there any reader who can affirm that s/he does not possess “articles useful to a person preparing terrorism acts”?

A Mini-Leno Moment

This is not quite the Jay Leno effect, but it is worth noting anyway. My friend John favors me with the news of the discovery of “a new element, governmenterium (GV)”. He reports:

Governmentium (Gv) has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

I spare you the remainder. Well, har de har, but he’s pulling my chain. As John knows perfectly well, this one has been around since the McKinley Administration—another proof that the internet offers avenues for an exponential expansion of time-wasting and mindless diversion.

The interesting thing is that it is circulating now, in the sixth year of a Republican administration—the framework was a few snide cracks about Hurricane Katrina. They say that when Leno starts mocking you, you are in trouble. This doesn’t have the same heft. But if the time-wasters are circulating about a Republican administration, then I’d say we’ve got one more log on the fire.

From the Bin: I Knew There was Something

A couple of weeks ago I was nattering on about the dispensability of men. Perhaps I overdid it:

“It was then,” Amalia went on, “that La Lucienne began to make trouble. She began to adopt all the mean ways of love: there were affairs broken off without reason, there were reconciliations, but conditional, and separations, and unnecessary flights, tearful scenes, and I don’t know what all…An obsession…Loulou, a pretty young blonde, she had with her, well, she threw her out one night half naked into the garden to teach her a lesson and make her decide what she wanted, that is to choose between her, Lucienne, and Loulou’s husband. Before dawn, Lucienne leaned over the balcony. ¨’Have you thought it over?’ she says. ‘Yes,’ says the girl, who was sniffing with the cold. ‘Well?’ says Lucienne. ‘Well,’ says the girl, ‘I’m going back to Hector. I’ve just realized he can do something you can’t. ‘Oh, naturally!’ says Lucienne, spitefully. ‘No,’ says Loulou, ‘it’s not what you think. I’m not all that crazy about you know what. But I’m going to tell you something. When you and I go out together everyone takes you for a man, that’s understood. But for my part, I feel humiliated to be with a man who can’t do pipi against a wall.’”

Colette, The Pure and the Impure.

Fn: I see my Google ad supra is from www.catchhimandkeephim.com.

Read The First Part Last

Sorting through some old notes, I find an old newspaper clip suggesting the names of “unpopular classics”—books that people know about, but that remain unread and, well, unreadable. Most I can’t judge because I haven’t read them (Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness just never made it onto my list). Some, I have to say, not knowing they were unreadable, I actually read and enjoyed. George’ Eliot’s Romola, to take one example, is not as good as Middlemarch, but it’s still a pretty good book. And Addison’s Essays are wonderful (can’t say the same for his play, Cato, though).

One item gives me a bad conscience. It’s Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. Someone gave me a copy for Christmas 50 years ago and it’s been on the shelf ever since. My friend Gudrun encourages me to read it, She says “just skip the Prelude.”

Ah, yes. “Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless? Bottomless indeed, if”--? Yawn, clunk. Hello? Hey, wake up, I’m talking here. But I guess I can understand why I never stayed awake past the first page.

And there may be a general principle here. Seems to me there a lot of books where you ought to skip the intro. “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Recognize that? Course you do. It’s the first sentence of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” It’s familiar to a lot of people because it’s the only sentence of Proust they ever read. Indeed, the first 40 pages, the invocation of the “petit morceau de madeleine,” is enough to persuade them that Proust is just not their tasse de thé.

Well, I can testify that Proust is wonderful, but you can read that part last. It’s full of anticipations that just don’t make any sense until you’ve read the rest of the book, and can be a big turnoff otherwise. Read it last.

Same goes for Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury. “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” Yawn. Look, I don’t want to do any plot spoiling here, bu there are four parts to Sound and the Fury. Try it this way: try the second or the third part first—your taste. Then do the other one. Then do the first part. Then do the fourth part fourth. I don’t know, this may spoil some grand artistic design. But at least you will have read the book—and a very good book it is, too good to go back on the shelf.

Hegel’s Phenomenology belongs here, too. As I recall, Hegel wrote the Preface last, as if to explain it all to himself.

There must be more, but this is enough to make the point (now that I think about it, I suspect somebody has written a dissertation on in it). Still, rule of thumb: when in doubt, read the first part last.

Man, I Must Have Been Really Wasted in the 60s...

I don't remember anything like this.

From the Bin: Croce on Torture as Sovereignty

Here's "the power to torture" treated as a mark of sovereignty. Note to self, get hold of a copy and read more.

Indeed, the concessions which the barons obtained, by persuasion or force, from the sovereigns brought about the gradual dissolution of the feudal system of property, through the transformation of the fief into the alod, a form of ownership which seemed to foster social and economic progress, and in the long run did so, but at the time caused a weakening of the whole political structure. The capitulary promulgated in 1283 in the Plain of San Martino, a short time after the Sicilian rebellion, freed baronial marriages, which Frederick II had made subject to royal approval, and allowed the gift in dowry of fiefs and feudal possessions after a consent which a court had to accord within the term of eight days. And the capitulary of 1285, proposed by Pope Honorius IV, did away with the necessity of this consent altogether and permitted collateral inheritance to the third generation. . . . Finally, Alphonso I of Aragon not only conferred merum mixtumque imperium but also granted the barons the so-called four letters of judgment, which King Robert had given only to officials of the crown, by whose virtue they could torture a prisoner for an unlimited time, proceed on their own initiative to punish certain serious crimes, and impose sentences more severe than those laid down by law.

--Benedetto Croce
History of the Kingdom of Naples (1970)
originally published as Storia del regno di Napoli (1925)

Eliot's Blog

This device isn't really new, except to me, but it's new to me, so...

My friend Eliot has a companion, Enrique. Evidently Enrique has thyroid cancer.

They have a zillion friends and well wishers who will want to keep up on the news. So El has started a blog. Eliot explains:

The idea is we easily let folks know what's going on without sending out emails that you may or may not want to get.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin[1] offers advice on what to do when you hear a siren: pray that it gets there on time. He says:

[I]magine how encouraging it would be for those being rushed to a hospital to know that hundreds of people who hear the ambulance sirens are praying for their recovery.

There must be a blog version of this rule.

====

[1] In The Book of Jewish Values (2000). Actually, Telushkin credits it to his friend, Reb Zelman. The quotation is from page 1.

Entertainer of the Week: John Karr

Groucho Marx said it’s got to the point where you can’t make fun of anybody except man-eating sharks. He forgot about one other class: victims of prison rape. California Attorney General got his five minutes of fame back in 2001 when he said of Enron’s Ken Lay: “I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey.'" Lockyer issued the predictable half-hearted apology (but high marks to Tom G. Palmer for calling him on it).

But that is ancient history. One of the many distasteful facts about this week's new uproar over JonBenet Ramsey is that it occasions a new round of prison-rape self-indulgence. As John Karr wings his way home from Bangkok (we can assume he carries no liquids?), a troll of the blogosphere produces this:

Mem, commenting at Drezner, says: “If it is true what he's saying he'll get his justice in prison as a child molester...” (followed by my response)

Possum says: “Welcome home, Mr. Karr. I’m sure a federal prison won’t be half as bad as some Thai holding pen.”

The Monkey Lab says: “This guy deserves a lot worst than he's going to get I'm sure.”

Low Rollin’ says: “Like I said, I hope he ends up on death row. It's the next best thing to what should really happen.”

Put aside the fact that the poor sod appears not even to be guilty, let’s repeat: prison rape is not entertainment. It violates long and deeply-held principles of common decency. It is (okay, it should be) cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment (look here and here).

This shouldn’t be news. Stop Prison Rape is a 501(c)(3) dedicated to spotlighting the problem. The Justice Departments released a useful study last year. Dan Bell from the Nation has the detailed goods here.

Wrong War

Last night's post is called "The War Between Men and Women." Beep, wrong. It is nothing of the sort. It's "The War Between Men and Men," in which women are at best a kind of pawn. But this does raise a question: at what point in human history do women develop sufficient agency that we truly can speak of a war between men and women? Whenever it is, it's a milestone.

War Between Men and Women

Steven Mithin summarizes research (by Napoleon Chagnon) on the Yanomano people who lived in the Amazonian forest, “believed to be the most primitive, culturally intact people in existence in the world.”[1]:

Duels often start when one man catches another in flagrante with his wife. In Chagnon’s words, ‘the enraged husband challenges his opponent to strike him on the head with a club. He holds his own club vertically, leans against it, and exposes his head for the opponent to strike. After he has sustained as blow on the head, he can then deliver one on the culprit’s skull. But as soon as the blood starts to flow, almost everybody rips a pole out of the house frame and joins in the fighting, supporting one or other of the contestants.’ The tops of most men’s heads are covered with deep, ugly scars of which they are immensely proud. In fact, some men display their scars by shaving and rubbing red pigments to ensure these are clearly defined.

Many raids between villages were in order to abduct women, even if it was claimed that their purpose was to end sorcery being undertaken by members of one village against another. Chagnon describes extremely violent conflicts, especially those that involve nomohori—treachery—in which people visit another village on false pretences and then brutally kill the welcoming residents and flee with their women. A captured woman is typically raped by all members of the raiding party, and then by any other man in the village who so chooses. One of the men then takes her as a wife.

--Steven Mithin, After the Ice: A Global Human History 175-6 (Harvard UP 2003)

[1] Link here.

Now I Know Why He Seems So Creepy

Now I know why this guy seems so creepy.

Fn: No, I mean the subject of the post, not the author.

Horses and Men

The grandkids’ riding instructor offers three rules for managing a horse:

1) Try to get inside the horse’s head;

2) Lots of petting; and

3) Stay out of their face.

Seems to me these should work pretty well for men, also.

Postscript: My friend Kenny started out as a kindergarten teacher, and then went onto some fairly gnarly management jobs. He said it was true that “all he ever knew he learned in kindergarten”—but that he learned it not as a student, but as a teacher.

They're a Barrel of Laughs

A fascinating post up at Marginal Revolution allows me to follow up on two favorite themes:

1) Academics aren’t very nice people; and

2) Economists don’t have much sense of humor.

I’ll take them in reverse order. For starters, here is Alex Tabarrok:

Call me a masochist but one of the great pleasures of being at George Mason is that I am regularly insulted by Gordon Tullock.

Tabarrok offers examples and invites others. Here are a few:

• "Gordon," I asked, "do you think we should ban child labor?" "No, keep working."
• "You Austrian guys are nuts, but at least you're enthusiastic!"
• Every day (we are both in) Gordon passes my door and barks out "Work harder!" That's just one of many...

Uh, this stuff is funny? “Funny” is “I never forget a face, but in your case, I’ll make an exception.” Funny is “You are as rheumatic as two dry toasts.” Funny is “You mama so black she go to night school they mark her absent.” “Work harder!” is just stupid. Indeed, nothing here rises above the level of 11-year-old schoolyard stuff. If this is what passes for comedy in the economics department, I think I’ll check out the anthropologists.

There is some instructive discussion in the commentary, but what catches me is how much of the stuff is dedicated to certifying that Tullock is really wonderful—not just in spite but because of his gratuitous rudness. Says Tabarrok: “[O]ne of the great pleasures of being at George Mason is that I am regularly insulted by Gordon Tullock.” Many of the commentators seem to agree.

Needless to say, I’m not impressed, but I want to consider a different point. That is: surely there are pompous twits in any field--as a wise man has said, the number of horses' asses in general exceeds the number of horses. But can it be that there is something about academic life that positively encourages this sort of thing? I’m not saying we should hire for courtesy and civility—life would be pretty dull if we did. But there does seem to be a tendency to infer that, if an academic is rude, arrogant, self-absorbed and combatative, then he ought to be fast-tracked for the Nobel Prize.

Afterthought: I’m not I psychologist and I’ve never met Tullock, but I don’t see why that should inhibit me from messing with his head. My guess is that it’s all a cover. Here is a guy with a reasonable shot at a Nobel Prize, but apparently also with a mortal fear of not getting it. If you don’t get it, then it may be a consolation to say that it is the malice of your enemies.

Technical Afterthought: A comment says that “Tullock and Krueger” are due the Nobel for rent-seeking. Why not Bhagwati?

Parting Shot: Here is a real insult:

“"Sir, your wife, under pretense of keeping a bawdy-house, is a

receiver of stolen goods." 

                                                                --Samuel Johnson

Friedman for More and Better War

There’s a reason why I’m coming so late to the party and linking the same Tom Friedman column as this one which generated so much buzz today—even to the point of reprinting the oft-reprinted central paragraphs:

If we're in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you "tough guys" fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine — just enough troops to lose — and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?

Mr. Cheney, if we're in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why have you and President Bush resisted any serious effort to get Americans to conserve energy? Why do you refuse to push higher mileage standards for U.S. automakers or a gasoline tax that would curb our imports of oil? Here we are in the biggest struggle of our lives and we are funding both sides — the U.S. military with our tax dollars and the radical Islamists and the governments and charities that support them with our gasoline purchases — and you won't lift a finger to change that. Why? Because it might impose pain on the oil companies and auto lobbies that fund the G.O.P., or require some sacrifice by Americans.

Mr. Cheney, if we're in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why do you constantly use the "war on terrorism" as a wedge issue in domestic politics to frighten voters away from Democrats. How are we going to sustain such a large, long-term struggle if we are a divided country?

And his punchline:

Please, Mr. Cheney, spare us your flag-waving rhetoric about the titanic struggle we are in and how Democrats just don't understand it. It is just so phony — such a patent ploy to divert Americans from the fact that you have never risen to the challenge of this war. You will the ends, but you won't will the means. What a fraud!

Friends, we are on a losing trajectory in Iraq, and, as the latest London plot underscores, the wider war with radical Islam is only getting wider. We need to reassess everything we are doing in this "war on terrorism" and figure out what is worth continuing, what needs changing and what sacrifice we need to demand from every American to match our means with our ends. Yes, the Democrats could help by presenting a serious alternative. But unless the party in power for the next two and half years shakes free of its denial, we are in really, really big trouble.

Look, I love this stuff. Call him a pompous little twit with a silly mustache and no chin (go ahead, call him that), but this is exhilarating. Still, I wonder if people are missing the point here. Which is: Friedman is calling for more war--maybe "more and better war," but still more war. This is not cut-and-run stuff. This is about rising “to the challenge of this war.” In short, “stay the course.”

Now, I happen to think this is the right take. My candidate is the guy who says: look the Bushies have made a terrible cock-up here, and a large part of the tragedy is that we cannot simply walk away from their mess. This is not what I hear any candidate saying just now—it emphatically is not what Joe Lieberman was saying. But somebody say it, please: you’ve got my vote if you do.

Bring 'em On

The usually reliable Steve Clemons declares that "Dems Should Really, Really Want to Run Against George Allen"--go here. Right, just as they so shrewdly decoyed the fringy radical Ronald Reagan into running for governor of California, and then for president of the United States.

More 10-Year-Old Wisdom

The grandchild says that he likes his fourth grade human growth and development class because it helps him to understand Dave Barry.

Beetle Bailey on Signaling

I don’t always look to EconLog for prudential wisdom, but I must say I enjoyed Bryan Caplan’s post on signaling in education –aka, because these are economists “the signaling model.” A bit of care is required in definition here because standard accounts usually get it wrong. Caplan describes it, conventionally enough, as the view that “education does not increase a worker’s productivity. Instead, the fact that you obtain an education shows that you were productive all along, which makes employers want to hire you.”

This is, as I say, conventional, but as the post makes clear, Caplan understands that this is not quite the issue. The point is not whether you were educated in school, but rather what you learn. In Caplan’s telling thought-experiment: “Which would do more for your career: a Princeton education, but no diploma, or a Princeton diploma, but no education?”

Very well put. Who is it that has a Princeton education, but no diploma? My guess is that you might inquire after Plato in Beetle Bailey who, in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer, “brings a book to every meal.” Chubby (okay, tubby), slovenly, but not hostile, the point is that Plato just isn’t interested: he has his own agenda and he intends to pursue it (I suspect another may be the proprietor of the excellent Laudator Temporis Acti—see his instructive post on his dating habits here). I can’t think of anyone in Beetle Bailey who really does have a Princeton education, but Lt. Fuzz probably has his commission via a goodish university, and sooner or later he will get an MBA from a goodish business school, certifying his capacity to sit still and keep his nose clean (well—maybe a bit brown, but you get my meaning).

I’ve had the privilege of observing a lot of lawyers over the years. What are the marks of a successful lawyer? One quality would be “prudential wisdom” (where have I seen that phrase before?)—the kind of practical good sense that finds constructive solutions to human problems. But if we are measuring “success,” another quality would be sociopathy—the temperamental willingness to do anything, say anything, no matter how vile or disgusting, to get your way. The interesting point, I think, is that universities don’t really teach either of these in any substantial or consistent way. Which suggest one reason why there is such a poor fit between success in life and success in the classroom.

We used to have a saying around the law school (do they still?) that they A students make the professors, the B students make the judges, and the C students make the lawyers—and the D students, we would say, make the Vassar girls, which just goes to show you how old I am. I don’t think it was ever very true. My guess is that the B students make the lawyers; the C students are too distracted or distractible to make much of anything. But the A students do make the professors – at least the A students at the A list schools. Maybe success in the academy does, indeed, measure, well, measure success in the academy. Which brings up an intriguing possibility. To what extent does academic life reward precisely those qualities that might be disapprobated in other places—eccentricity, febrile imagination, an eagerness not to be part of the team? I’m not sure how far to push this one. I guess my point is that Caplan is onto a good issue here, though it may be more complicated than it seems.

Annals of Cross Cultural Understanding

I commented on this over at TPM (Yglesias), but I’m in a saucy mood so I will elaborate on the point here.Matt considers the assertion by a Sunni cleric that "lesbianism is not as bad as homosexuality, in practical terms."

Echoing many others, I can observe that it would be interesting to see the cleric’s field notes on that one. But set it aside. The more general point is that his attitude, whatever its merit, has been pretty much conventional wisdom in the United States for a long time. Proper Victorian ladies were permitted to have “companions” as long as they didn’t frighten the horses (one advantage of being held in contempt is that you can do pretty much what you want when the contemnor isn’t looking). Details are here. In many circles, for a man to have a lover known as a former lesbian imputed a certain cachet. It suggested a woman who takes sex seriously and is willing to take some risks for it—together, of course, with the suggestion that she’d finally met the guy who could escort her onto the true path.

On a parallel path, it is said that lesbian content offers attractive opportunities for the porn industry, because some women will watch it, and men will watch anything. Lesbian prison flics count as a genre all their own.

So the cleric doesn't need to worry about taking that people-to-people visit to Omaha. He'll feel right at home.

Boughten Friendship

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has initiated a remarkable thread on canned hunting, under the irresistible tagline, “That dead deer really liked me; couldn’t you see her smiling?” (I picked it up at Making Light as Pretend Tough. Good fun in its own right and I must say I am impressed by the intensity of the response—at the moment, 54 comments at Making Light and 50 at Pandagon. Some of this reads like just unseemly pile-on—attacking canned hunting is a little bit like, well, a little bit like dynamiting whales in a barrel.

But there seems to be a more pervasive theme there, that you might call “Boughten friendship.”[1] Amanda says:

Men who go on canned hunts … remind me of nothing so much as guys who go to strip clubs and convince themselves that the stripper really liked him and he could totally get with her if he wasn’t paying her.

(Amanda might enjoy—or perhaps she has already read—“One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding,” a grim comedy about a white college boy and a black prostitute, and a $100 bill.)

But I think you can generalize here. We all, or most of us, tend to think well of ourselves: we can’t imagine that others do not do the same. I suspect that Confederate plantation owners really believed that their slaves looked up to them with with gratitude and affection. I’ve been reading stuff lately about the peace settlement in the Middle East after World War I: I’m struck by how much the Brits just take it for granted that the Arabs will want to be governed by Westerners. Marx might have called it “bourgeois incomprehension,” but it’s broader than that. Indeed, Thomas Szasz, the now-mostly-forgotten psychotherapist, built a whole school of renegade psychotherapy on the proposition that “I am only your friend for the money.”

And most of all, I guess it reminds me of my favorite passage in Tolstoi’s War and Peace (I riff from memory here), where young Count Rostov, having disported himself in the ballrooms and dining-halls of the great metropolis, goes for the first time into battle.

“My God,” he gasps, “they’re shooting at me, whom everyone loves.”

[1] Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

--Robert Frost

Hitler's Watercolors

Culturegrrl sputters over new attention addressed to watercolors painted by Adolph Hitler as he eked out a miserable living while a young unknown in Vienna (he also enjoyed the opera--look here and here). There's surely a market for this stuff, but I undertake to press the envelope: Hitler porn. Straitened as he was, I say the chances are pretty good he would have taken a fee for sketching something maybe a teeny bit naughty. Put that on the market and listen to the cash register ka-ching. Or if there isn't, I should think there ought to be a halfway decent forger, skilled enough to fake Hitler's forays into the less-than-halfway decent. I do, of course, expect my cut.

Had Hiter been a better painter, would we have escaped the holocaust? That one is above my paygrade, but she might want to recall James McNeill Whistler, who flunked out of West Point when he flunked chemistery.

"Had silicon been a gas," he mused, "I would have been a major general."

Found in the Bin: Two Jews on a Train

The opening of “The Ring,” one of 22 stories in Adam Biro, “Two Jews on a Train:"

At the Baghdad Market, a long time ago, right after the birth of duodecimal Shi’ism, in the time of the Abbassids, during the reign of Harun al-Rachid, before Saddam Hussein (“the People’s Benefactor”), before Hasan al Bakr (“the Good”), before Marshall Aref (“the Gentle”), before General Kassem {“the Lover of Peace”), before Abd Allah (“the Wise”), before Rashid’Ali (“the Beloved”), before Faysal II (‘the Friendly”), before Rhazi I (‘the Merciful”), before Ghazi (“the Friend of the Oppressed”), and before Aysal I (“the Shield of the Weak”), there were two shopkeepers …

Hey, Watch Your Step, Buddy

Is it just me or is this interesting? It’s now six days since the New York Times published Adam Liptak’s story reporting that in the past year, 15 states have adopted “stand your ground” laws, allowing victims to use deadly force in cases where they might otherwise have been required to retreat. I saw the story the day it came out, but I had other fish to fry so I let it pass. It occurred to me tonight (six days later) that I hadn’t seen much commentary. A Google Blog Search assured me that others had weighed in—but wait. My search calls for “15 states” and “self defense.” I limited myself to stories after August 6 (the story came out in the paper dated August 7). As of 10:04 pm tonight (August 13), the search command yields 203 hits.

Say what? Only 203 hits? This is gun control we’re talkin’ here, one of (I would have thought) the hottest of hot button issues, ripe to yield talking points from either side at the scratch of an itchy trigger finger. People, this isn’t very much. Is there just too much else going on? Or the dog day doldrums? Or--? (I reject the suggestion of “nothing new to say”—it hasn’t ever stopped anybody yet).

A desultory skim suggests the predictable responses on each side. Volokh perhaps gets the prize, not for their ultimate stance (Guess what? They think the Times got it wrong)—but for “giggle test” argumentation:

[A]t most 15 states have adopted what was already the rule in most states.

(I say "at most 15 states" because it is quite possible that some of those states never had the retreat rule and only adopted the FL statute because they liked other aspects of it, not to make a substantive change in the law of homicide. … )

Well, sure. But it at least as likely that legislators adopted the rule without the least notion whether it altered existing law or not, but out of supine subservience to the gun lobby. But think twice before you step on my toe in the airport security line. I may be packin’ heat.

Best Jon Stewart Clip Ever

I suppose I'm just joining the gaggle, but this has got to be the best Jon Stewart clip ever. I got it here.

Discovery

New to me:

The Neglected Books Page

By its own account:

"Here you'll find lists of thousands of books that have been neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste."

As a sample, a reader recommendation for Will Eisner's A Contract With God:

…the first graphic novel and the one that paved the way for that new literary form[.] Reading a graphic novel is a different experience from reading pure text, but the same parts of the brain are exercised, unlike watching videos, which utilizes fewer. And graphic novels re-engage reluctant readers and hone their reading and comprehension skills.

I’ll second that. I discovered Contract with God about the same time that I read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shadow on the Hudson.They sketch different but overlapping portraits of a lost New York City.

Johnson and Hard Work

"Anecdotal Evidence" has an admirable post up about Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and the (asserted?) similarity between Johnson and W. H. Auden. I have nothing to add about the Auden connection, but let me offer a couple of thoughts about Johnson.

First, the book. AE admires the new Oxford edition, but laments the “formidable price tag: $595.” “Without the library,” he laments, “ I would never have been able to read it.”

Comment: you got it, baby. Oxford didn’t fall off the turnip truck. They know that every library (worthy of the name) has to have the “definitive edition,” and that Oxford is, well, Oxford, so they are way up the sloped demand curve. Twill be interesting to see if they find a way to repackage it as an accessible paperback later.

[But hey, be fair: it wasn’t that cheap to produce, and somebody has to pick up the tab. And did you notice that an Amazon marketplace seller has it for a paltry $450?]

Second, AE remarks on Johnson’s commitment to hard work. “Johnson … accepted what is called, often dismissively, the Protestant work ethic. To many contemporary sensibilities, that must seem impossibly square, repressed, bourgeois…”

Comment: Even with the qualifiers, this doesn’t seem to me entirely fair. Recall that Johnson was nobody from nowhere. He arrived in London with no bankroll, no patron, no connections—nothing except his wits, or his wit. He had to work hard, or starve. At last he got his modest government pension, but even then, there was no ostentatious display. He continued to subsist at a level of austerity that would drive the average untenured university lecturer into the arms of the union business agent. And he wasn’t hoarding—a good deal of the money, he spent on others. There may be writers who pass as “impossibly square, repressed, bourgeois” (Trollope leads with his chin here). But even at the level of vulgar misunderstanding, Johnson isn’t even a contender.

Oh, and a third point. AE, channeling Anthony Hecht, says that Johnson “held cleanliness in ‘utter disregard.’” Perhaps he is thinking of Johnson on the (allegedly) mad poet, Christopher Smart:

He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it."

The Devil's Playground

Ah, now here is a meme worth supporting: PowerPoint is the work of the devil. It's part of the great MBA takeover. Time was you could pick a guy as from the business school if he showed up with his laptop and started flashing slides but no, these days everybody does it and it can only get worse (or maybe it has gotten worse, and nobody has told me--is there a PowerPoint novel?). These days, I see "teaching evaluation forms" (so-called) that rate and rank on "effective use of PowerPoint." PhD programs should issue the stuff to grad students going on the job market, as part of a survival kit.

None of this is remotely new. Edward Tufte deserves recognition as one loud and coherent critic of PowerPoint. Wiki includes a useful summary of the critiques of Tufte and others, in an instructive general account of the whole PowerPoint phenomenon--noting, perhaps most tellingly,"its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience."

I try to resist this stuff, but the ocean rolls over me. At least when I do put together a PowerPoint presentation, I try to make sure that every third bullet point says: Jennifer Lopez, please call Buce.

Back from the Opera

Back from the Santa Fe Opera. We walked into the airport just in time for the great liquid embargo, so I had to say goodbye to a jar of sun lotion that has followed me across several continents (and don’t get me started about Frontier Airlines). I’ll offer a few thoughts on the opera below (see here and here and here). But meanwhile re security: I guess I give the powers credit for trying, but I have to wonder: if I bring in a packet of ketchup, I assume they will take it away? But what if I spray it on my burger? They’ll take the orange juice, but can I keep (and squeeze) the whole orange? If the mother’s milk is in the bottle, someone has to taste it—what if it is still in the mother? I suppose only a lawyer would think this way…

Santa Fe Opera: Carmen

“Richard, baby? Sid here. The good news is I’ve got you Anne Sofie Von Otter. But you need to know, she wants to sing “Carmen.” Sure, Carmen, just like she did in Glyndebourne in 2002. Richard? Richard? Hello, operator, I think I’ve been cut off…”

Okay, I wasn’t there, but it must have happened that way. I’m a great Anne Sofie fan, but it must be that she gets to sing Carmen only as a deal-maker: I’ll come to Santa Fe if I get to sing what I want to sing. She should remember what Jack Warner: “Ronald Reagan for governor? No, no, Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronald Reagan for best friend!” When Escamillio says, “Carmen, it is you I love!” you can see with your own eyes that there are a half a dozen popsies in the chorus more likely to attract the lustful advances of your garden-variety toreodor. She’s attractive, of course, but you can’t get by the notion that she is a ski instructor who stopped off here on her wanderjahr. For consistency in casting, she might as well play the bull.

Odd thing though, it works anyway No, she never really gets into character, or even into the show—she always seems to interact with the rest of the cast as if through the wall of an aquarium. But she has a marvelous voice, and she’s such a disciplined pro—every note thought out, always doing just what she feels she is supposed to do. You forgive her this little indulgence and you let her do with what she has. And the Santa Fe company is such a well-oiled repertory machine (more on that infra). Just imagine you’re watching a dual-screen TV, with one really first rate concert recital, side by side with a dandy little potboiler. Two for the price of one.

Santa Fe Opera: Magic Flute

Roger Ebert says somewhere that if a movie has more than one big star, you know they can’t afford a script. Something of this sort seems to be at work at Santa Fe. Carmen had Anne Sofie von Otter, and it didn’t really work. Magic Flute has Natalie Dessay and the results are surprisingly different. As my wife pointed out shrewdly, she’s the kind of actress who makes other people on the same stage better. She was singing Pamina: in character with Tamino and again with the Queen of the Night, she teases, goads, challenges and just generally wheedles her partner into a more entertaining performance than they would have staged without her.

Note: Pamina, not the Queen of the Night, which one might expect She’s done Queen of the Night more than once; so far as I can tell, this is her first Pamina—one assumes she was ready for a change. We’ve never seen her as Queen of the Night, but we did see her a couple of years ago in Vienna, in another showpiece, Bellini’s La Sonnambula She did her showpiece number pacing along some kind of railing above the orchestra pit. I kept worrying that she would fall in. Of course she didn’t—no coluratoras were harmed in staging this performance. But she did it all so effortlessly that you forgot she was singing one of the most challenging bravura show-stoppers in the business.

So Queen of the Night is the inevitable expectation. And by taking the “easier” role is is making, ironically, a bit of a stretch. But she certainly seems to have known what she was doing: she made Pamina more interesting than we had ever seen her before. But I do feel sorry for the poor dear who had to play Queen of the Night.

Footnote: I had never before noticed how tiny Natalie Dessay is. When she flails out in passion, she looks (but does not sound) like an angry 12-year-old. Is there a way to cast her against Jane Eaglin?

Santa Fe Opera: Cinderella

We’d never seen the Massenet Cinderella before. Now we know why: it really isn’t a very good opera. “Meltingly beautiful,” said the lady behind us on the way out of the theater, but that’s hogwash. It’s a good-natured, undemanding piece of fluff that never quite comes up with a single memorable vocal line.

This left the Santa Fe production company free to do what they seem to do pretty well anyway: performance, byplay, general horsing around. There really is something to be said in favor of a repertory company out here in the middle of nowhere, with time enough to get the ensemble right. Santa Fe did it in all three of the shows we saw, but in Carmen and Magic Flute it didn’t matter: they were good to begin with. Without a good production, Cinderella would be a big yawn. With one, it is a lot of inoffensive good fun.

Afterthought: you’ve got to think Massenet for one resoundingly good artistic decision: he wrote “Prince Charming” as a mezzo. I can only guess at the context in which he made the choice Was it a stretch? Was he being deliberately saucy? No matter. The point is that it worked.

Off to the Opera

We're off to Santa Fe for the opera. We've been to Santa Fe before--we honeymooned there in 1990-but never to see the show. We'll be seeing Carmen, Magic Flute and Cinderalla. We've seen our share of Carmens and Magic Flutes. The Cinderella is a new one on us: not the standard Rossini, but a version by Jules Massenet, which doesn't even seem to make it to the standard guidebooks.

Unless I want to leave myself open to serious maiming, I figure I'd better leave the laptop at home. So I will be offline until Thursday or Friday.

4GW comes to Hizbullah

Thanks to Steve Clemons for pointing me to "Sic Semper Tyrannis," a faacinating military/security weblog. Today's post--on "An Arab Guerilla Army"-- is not exactly radical: it folds neatly stuff that others have written about "new" (or not quite new) techniques of warfare. It dovetails with Thomas X. Hammes "The Sling and the Stone," a more comprehensive account of "Fourth Generation Warfare"--"4GW" in Hammes' jargon. Hammes does a fine job of setting the background to explain why, e.g., the Israelis have one so many wars and find themselves still so far behind the line of scrimmage. Sic Semper (the proprietor is one W. Patrick Lang, otherwise unknown to me) does a good job of stitching Hammes-type ideas into today's headlines.

Hammes and Lang deserve to be read with "The Rise and Decline of the State," a much more ambitious accout of state disintegration, from Martin van Creveld, an extaordinarily original and thought-provoking military historian (and an Israeli to boot).

Researching this note, I ran across a Frontline transcript of Hammes discussing "Private Warriors"--a topic that seems to link van Creveld's work with his own. I hasten to read it now.

Henbane

More today from the NYT on the problem of surplus men. And more from Rebecca West on what to do about it:

“I do not think, I know, I absolutely know, that most men do not die a natural death but are poisoned by their wives.” Now my husband knew, and I knew, and Constantine knew that such a statement was stark nonsense, but we also knew that it was the prelude to a good story. But my husband said, “Indeed?” And I said, “Do you really think so?” And Constantine began to tell us how after he had worked for some time in Russia as an official under the Bolsheviks, to save his life, he could bear it no longer and he decided to escape. First he had to lose his identity and this he did by picking up as gipsy girl and traveling with her for two months from fair to fair as a palmist, till he got down to the Roumanian border. Again and again while he was reading women’s hands they asked him if he could supply them with poison for the purpose of murdering their husbands. Nature, it is well known, always supplies its own antidote, and if it is natural for men to feel superior to women it is also natural for women to feed them with henbane when this superiority is carried past a joke. The story is borne out by the number of women who have been tried in Hungary during recent years for supplying poison to peasant women. Whatever Constantine wished to tell us in ths connexion we did not hear, for Gerda said crisply, “Dear me, I am glad that I am in the company of clever people who can believe such things as that most women poison their husbands.” “But it is true,” began poor Constantine. “Is it?” said Gerda. “I am only a simple woman, and I do not write books, but such things seem to me too foolish.” There was then a wrangle in Serbian which left Constantine red and silent.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 692 (1940).

Peak Oil

Juan Cole is presiding over an interesting discussion of "Peak Oil theory"--whether, and to what extent, and how, the matter of oil is motivating the current uproar. It's somewhat open-ended and there is an inevitable thread of wingnuttery in the comments. But it is refreshing in the extent to which it is not committed to any tight conspiracy theory. Here's an side from Cole himself that caught my eye:

Since it is already coming up in the comments, I should note that the "fungibility" (easy exchange) of oil is less important in the new environment than it used to be. US petroleum companies would like to go back to actually owning fields in the Middle East, since there are big profits to be made if you get to decide when you take it out of the ground. As Chinese and Indian competition for the increasingly scarce resource heats up, exclusive contracts will be struck. When I floated the fungibility of petroleum as a reason for which the Iraq War could not be only about oil, at a talk at Columbia's Earth Institute last year, Jeffrey Sachs surprised me by disagreeing with me. In our new environment, oil is becoming a commodity over which it really does make sense to fight for control.

Cole adds a comment from “an informed reader” (Cole’s label):

Jeffrey Sachs is right. Oil is fungible only after its out of the ground. The name of today's game is control of reserves, not markets. Example: china's deals in Latin America, US development of non-Nigerian African resource, etc.

A full review of the Cole thread will take patience and tolerance, but it’s worth the effort.

I Need Language Advice

In my last post, I wrote felt the need to denote a rimshot, so I wrote (ka-voom).

But that isn't what a rimshot sounds like. And so my question is: what does a rimshot sound like? I know I could have written (rimshot), but that somehow seemed too direct. I almost wrote (ka-ching)--but that is the sound of a cash register.

Oddly enough, Wiki does not seem to have the answer.

Is it True?

Just in case somebody famous dies (nudge, nudge), let me be the first to recycle the grand old story that I first heard about Stalin (but chances are it goes back to Hammurabi). I mean the one about the guy who kept calling the newspaper saying "is it true that Comrade Stalin died?"

--Yes, yes, we told you so before, why do you keep calling us?

--I just like to hear you say it! (Ka-voom)

Free Markets for Thee and not for Me

Economist’s View is becoming my one-stop shop for economics—Brad DeLong without the rants, Greg Mankiew without the catty asides, EconLog or Marginal Revolution without the wingnuttery. Today again, a nifty little item I wouldn’t have spotted otherwise—libertarian Jeff Miron with a gentle skewering of those who think the academy is run by lefties. I won’t repeat Miron (or EV) here, except for this final paragraph:

Perhaps the truth is that many conservatives do not really believe in competition; instead they want conservative ideas imposed because these ideas are not doing well in the marketplace.

Say, what? You’re just figuring that out? Listen very carefully: competition is for thee but not for me. Everybody wants free markets for the other guy, and nobody wants them for themselves. Why would they? By definition, a free market is one where everyone is running as fast as they can, and nobody makes it a profit.

Sheesh, there are grownup “libertarians” who are just figuring that out? This ought to be old news. But to remove any doubt, we turn to Albert O. Hirschmann. The “model of perfect competition,” he says, “contains [a] basic paradox:”

[S]ociety as a whole produces a comfortable and perhaps steadily increasing surplus, but every individual firm considered in isolation is barely getting by, so that a single false step will be its undoing. As a result, everyone is constantly made to perform at the top of his form and society as a whole is operating on its –forever expanding—“production frontier,” with economically useful resources fully occupied.

So Exit, Voice, and Loyalty 15 (1970). Or as Hirschmann continues (in a triumph of concision) “There’s a slacker born every minute.” Id. At 15.

This is news to anybody? It needs to be a meme.

Fn:Only two Amazon reviews? Two? This is a classic. But then, Amazon...

Against Hate Crime Laws

My beloved friend and colleague Anupam spotlights a dreadful encounter where a young man—surely deluded, though just how may remain unknown—stabbed a “Santa Clara grandfather” while [the victim] was in his own garage with a two-year granddaughter (the victim apparently survived, at least so far). Per the original newspaper account, the victim evidently “wears both a turban and a beard,” and was on his way to a service at a Sikh house of worship.

By any measure, as reported this is a lose-lose situation. “There are indications,” the report said, that the assailiant “believed Singh was a member of the Taliban,” In fact, it appears, he was a Sikh. We’ll set aside the question of how it helps to stab a Talibani in his carport, even if he is one. We will note the irony that Sikhism is, in the context of politics, one of the most pacific of religions--founded “in an attempt to reconcile Muslim and Hindu” (I had to go to my old one-volume Columbia Encyclopaedia for this one—Wiki was no help at all). Indeed, that may have been the newspaper was trying to make when it added this bit of explanatory incoherence:

“The religion, like others, promotes peace and understanding.”

Um, I guess. But it's a distraction. Anupam uses the cases as a vehicle to explore the nature of “hate crimes” law, and he comes up with an elegant riff: “If one hates group A and attacks someone who is not a member of group A, but on the mistaken belief that the person is a member of that group, is that a hate crime?”

Actually, there may be an answer to that one. California Penal Code § 422.6 makes it an offense, inter alia, to for one to take a prohibited action "because he or she perceives that the other person” has the protected characteristic —Federal legislation appears to be narrower.

But this is inside baseball. Anupam, here is a better suggestion: use this case as an occasion to denounce hate crime legislation, root and branch. Politics, says Michael Oakeshott (somewhere, I think) is the organization of hatreds. Hate crime laws are a mischief that do more to aggravate than to ameliorate the offense they seek to punish. Anupam, you are a superb dialectician, and no slouch at rhetoric. Law professors who favor hate crime laws are a dime a dozen. Get on the right side of this one and you will astonish your friends and confuse your enemies.

Rebecca West on Men and Women

Last week I was harrumphing about the irrelevance of men. Looks like I was channeling Rebecca West:

Even when the men of the community derive an adequate amount of strength from the suppression of their women, the situation is ultimately unsatisfactory; for it undoes itself, to the confusion of both parties. When men are successful in defending their community they engender a condition of general peace, in which people attempt to live by reason. Then women use their full capacities of mind and body, not because they want to prove their equality with men, for that is a point in which it is difficult to feel interest for more than a minute or two unless one has an unusually competitive mind, but because in such use lies pleasure. In such a world the young woman and the young man dash together out of adolescence into adult life like a couple of cults. But presently the woman looks round and sees that the man is not with her. He is some considerable distance behind her, not feeling very well. There has been drained from him the strength which his forefathers derived from the subjection of women; and the woman is amazed, because tradition has taught her that to be a man is to be strong. There is no known remedy for this disharmony.

Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 679 (1940). She is reflecting on her experience at Skopska Tserna Gora, in Macedonia. “Nowhere,” she says, “have I seen such settled and hopeless despair, such resentment doubled by its knowledge that it might not express itself, as on the faces of the women of the Skopska Tserna Gora.” Id. 680.

Hereditary Succession

DeLong has an interesting thread on hereditary succession in politics, but I think the issue is more pervasive than has been noticed so far. Aside from Clintons and Bushes (and Adamses and Harrisons and Roosevelts), a moment's reflection should remind us of Kennedys and Sununus, Romneys, Murkowskis, etc. etc.. Less well known, perhaps (except I assume on home turf), combing through the Barone Almanac of American Politics, I find, e.g., that Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius is the daughter of former Ohio governor John Gilligan (and that her father-in-law is a former Congressman).

I don't mean to kick around a governor here. My point is that there must be something going on here besides crude dynasticism. I assume that the Gilligan name does not have any of the national celebrity of even, e.g., a Romney. Surely the Gilligan political network cannot have offered a lot of clout in Kansas (maybe it hurt?)? Is just that she learned this stuff at the kitchen table? What about money? My friend Ann asks: did daddy have a war chest to transfer? Or a phone list? Or--?

And it's certainly not just her. I suspect a careful read of Barone would turn up a hundred such examples. Is this hereditarty succession? A "political class?" Or something vaguer on the lines of "politics is in my blood?"

What Trade Deficit?

I really should wait to hear what the grownups have to say, but I'm fascinated by this.

On Destroying Great Empires

Alex Tabarrok, the sage of GMU, considers the current cl*sterf*ck in the Middle East and concludes—surprise—it is all the fault of big government. Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber says that’s no excuse.

[Update: Alex responds here.]

Advantage Henry on points, but there are more basic issues here that they both miss,. First: the relative inevitability of this kind of screwup is one very good reason for treading lightly in the first place. I’m still immured in David Fromkin’s wonderful "Peace to End All Peace," about the Middle East in World War I. Today’s lesson is the Gallipoli campaign. And it is hard to imagine an endeavor more blighted with incompetence and mismanagement (on both sides). Churchill normally carries the can for the failure at Gallipoli. Fromkin makes it clear that there is plenty of blame to go around and that Churchill’s shortcomings may have been fairly small beer by comparison with others. If Churchill is culpable, it may be that his real vice was his can-do spirit: his willingness to try anything, even at risk to himself, but not least at risk to others.

The root problem here is a familiar kind of blindness among libertarians: government can’t work, except when you come to some favored project (usually involving high explosives); then all the critical sensors go mute, and we assume that government works just fine. Tabarrok (whose blog is an always-interesting must-read) kicks it up a notch: government can’t get it right, but since it’s a war, we shouldn’t care.

But Farrell sidesteps in another direction. Face it, through all of human history, most people, most of the time, have suffered under governments that range from mediocre to awful. The surprise is not that government works badly—the surprise is that it ever works well. We need to know a whole lot more about why and how the miracle of good government ever occurs at all.

Meantime, this is as good an opportunity as any to recall the story of how Croesus asked the oracle if he should go to war. He who crosses the Halys, said the oracle, will destroy a great empire. And he did, and he did. His own.

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf

Among CDs and DVDs, I don’t have two of much, but I have two versions Così Fan Tutte featuring Elizabeth Schwarzkopf—the von Karajan from 1954 and the Karl Böhm from 1962, both produced by her husband , Walter Legge. Serious opera buffs will debate the relative merits but I like them both and will play either, more or less indiscriminately (and her Donna Elvira, and her Countess Almaviva, and her “champagne operettas”). For me, Schwarzkopf has always been the talisman of a kind of ersatz nostalgia—my pining for a lost youth I never really experienced. In the afterglow, Schwarzkophf’s heyday seems like a kind of a Golden Age, Europe with the War behind it and alive with inimitable talent. Bummer that she had that Nazi rap on her resume, but sadder still, it didn’t seem entirely out of character. She seemed to be a lady who knew she was and what she was here for, and wasn’t terribly interested in anything or anybody that stood in her way. It may not always have been the most attractive personality but it was a personality, and an age of marketing where every flavor seems to be vanilla, you’ve got to cherish an artist so much herself and so coherent.

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, died August 2, 2006, aged 90. RIP.

Update: Terry Teachout has a good take here.

Who is a Scandinavian?

Kottke has a nice discussion of the question of "Who is a Scandinavian"? -- does it include the Icelanders, who live a long way away? Or the Finns, who speak a funny language? Kottke has a lot of good fun with it, but he might of noticed that the issue is in no way limited to Scandinavians. It's the kind of muddiness you just have to expect when you consider any culture. Was Cleopatra an Egyptian? Are the Tasmanians British? What did the Byzanatines have in mind when they described themselves as "The Romans" while fighting wars against, well, Rome?

Wiki has an interesting discussion of the definition of "Arab:"

Most people who consider themselves Arabs do so on the basis of the overlap of the political and linguistic definitions. However, some members of groups which fulfill both criteria reject the identity on the basis of the genealogical definition; Lebanese Maronites, for example, may reject the Arab label in favor of a narrower Phoenician-Lebanese national identity (although Maronites originate from the Syrian interior and Phonecians lived on the coasts of Syria and Lebanon), as do many Coptic and Muslim Egyptians who embrace the continuation of their ancient heritage. Groups using a non-Arabic liturgical language are especially likely to consider themselves non-Arab. Not many people consider themselves Arab on the basis of the political definition without the linguistic one—thus, Kurds or Berbers do not usually identify themselves as Arab—but some do (for instance, some Berbers do consider themselves Arabs, and Kurds are cousins of the Persians).

Kottke does overlook one essential point. The Moomins are definitely Scandinavian.

Another Hoo Boy Moment

I don’t even know why I bother blogging this. The big guys probably already have him down in the locker room outside the sightline of the security cameras, giving him such a pummeling as he’ll never forget. But it’s just too easy. Morton Kondrake, trying to be statesmanlike, says:

It’s not certain that Saddam Hussein’s regime was part of the war on terrorism when the U.S. invaded in 2003.

Yeh, well it is not certain that I ever played boinky boink with the Queen Marie of Rumania. But that is how the smart money is betting.

Kevin Drum's Calculator Finger is Sticky

Kevin Drum, discussing the estate tax exemption, says:

"Think of it: in terms of actual purchasing power, that $10 million exemption could easily decline to $9.5 million, or even $9 million" over the next nine years.

Hoo boy, in your dreams, Kevin. At an inflation rate of 5 percent per year, the purchasing power value of $10 million falls to $6.5 million in nine years. At 3 percent, about $7.7 million. At 10 percent, about $4.2 million.

Okay, so we've never had inflation of 10 percent a year over a 10-year period. But If the value falls only to $9.5 million, we have an implied annual rate of about six tenths of one percent. And pigs will fly before we have that one, too.

Bitching

My good friend the Skeptic doesn't like Bitches Brew. She's annoyed that Amazon calls it an "essential recording."

Fair enough; I've got no dog in this fight. But help is on the way. Remember Underbelly's rule of Amazon reviews: sort from lowest rating first, and read the negatives. "Drivel," says Heitham. "Bad acid trip!" says the Doctor of Rock. "Just Noise, Don't Bother," says Brian.

I would dearly love to claim IP rights in the Underbelly rule, so I could stomp the stuffing out of anyone who might use it without forking over a fat fee. Unfortunately, I cannot. It's an old journalistic technique. James Reston used it (if memory serves me rightly) to win his Pulitzer Prize for covering the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. "Just find the people who are unhappy," he says (I quote from memory). In Reston's case, I think it was the Chinese nationalists. I don't know what they think of Bitches Brew, but the rule still works.

Shame is our Game

My friend John says I should blog this.


I mean, we are, like, in the same business.

Like.

Grumpy Old Bookman Buys His Own Comics

I had a nice (well, actually, pretty crappy) old '65 Mustang once, that got ripped off from the Fruitvale BART station and left stripped a few blocks away. To get it moving again, I had to seek out a Mustang parts dealer. I found just the thing: he was a moonlighting junior high school teacher, with a contented grin. Grumpy Old Bookman has a similar experience, with the assistance of Her Majesty's Customs.

Afterthought: Grumpy Old Bookman really has to meet my pal, The New York Crank. They could make beautiful music together.

One More Buchan Bit

I've been obsessing about John Buchan and his arch-villain, Dominic Medina. I'll give it up, but only after this curious footnote: Medina may be mostly forgotten but he has at lteast modern day fictional analog. Consider: Dominic Medina has

1. the first name of a saint, and
   
2. the second name of an exotic faraway place—and
   
3. it ends in a vowel.
   

Now consider the most successful fictional villain ever.

Buchan and the Napoleons of Crime

I suggested in an earlier post that you could learn a lot about British ignorance and blindness in and around World War I by considering the career of John Buchan. As a followup, I went looking for a copy of his “great game” novel, Greenmantle. I didn’t find one. But for $3 and change, I got a copy of The Three Hostages, hitherto unknown to me, which expands the inquiry.

TH is not a great novel, but it has great atmospherics: a nostalgia for the old verities, and high anxiety by a new world that seems hard to comprehend. It also has the one great essential of a good adventure novel: an arch-fiend, in this case Dominic Medina, schemer extraordinaire. Here is the world-view, as filtered through the narrator's friend Macgillvray:

A large part of the world had gone mad, and that involved the growth of inexplicable and unpredictable crime. All the old sanctities had become weakened, and men had grown too well accustomed to death and pain. This meant that the criminal had far greater resources at his command, and, if he were an able man, could mobilize a vast amount of utter recklessness and depraved ingenuity. The moral imbecile, he said, had been more or less a sport before the War; now he was a terribly common product, and throve in batches and battalions. Cruel, humourless, hard, utterly wanting in a sense of proportion, but often full of a perverted poetry and drunk with rhetoric—a hideous, untamable breed had been engendered. (TH 15-16)

(Published in 1924)

On the surface, he is an appealing guy:

He is the only fellow I ever heard of who was adored by women and also liked by men. He’s a first-class sportsman and said to be the best shot in England after His Majesty. He’s a coming man in politics, too, and a most finished speaker. I once heard him, and, though I take very little stock in oratory, he almost had me on my feet. He has knocked a bit about the world, and he is also a very pretty poet, though that wouldn’t interest you. (TH 39)

But one shouldn’t be misled:

I know of no word to describe how he impressed me except ‘wickedness.’ He seemed to annihilate the world of ordinary moral standards, all the little rags of honest impulse and stumbling kindness with which we try to shelter ourselves from the winds of space. His consuming egotism made life a bare cosmos in which his spirit scorched like a flame. … Medina made an atmosphere which was like a cold bright air in which nothing can live. He was utterly and consumedly wicked, with no standard which could be remotely related to ordinary life. (TH 183)

I’d like to say there’s a lot more. ‘In fact, I can’t: the plot more or less unravels about halfway through. Buchan never really specifies in detail just how Medina is going to destroy the world and the whole gang goes for a vacation in Scotland. Still it is wonderful to see replayed in this context the enduring conviction: that if the world is a bad place, then it must be some bad guy who is pulling all the strings. Heaven knows, Western fiction has known any number of arch fiends, is heavy on arch-fiends. Holmes’ Professor Moriarty; Chesterton’s Sunday; heck, the Napoleon of Crime himself, McCavity the Cat. Osama Bin Laden. Oh, wait…

I Lied about Men and Women

I said I didn’t know what to say about the “men not working” story from the NY Times. I lied. I know perfectly well what to say.

Men are superfluous. For a long time, women had to keep men in line by flattering them with illusions of indispensability. As a strategy, it worked well enough in its time, but in an age of controlled sex selection, there is simply no need for it. Men are left to drink milk out of a carton, or wear torn underwear, or watch the White Sox.

It may be that a few will continue to bestride the earth as alphas with harems: think Genghis Kahn, think Clan Donald, think Augustus the Strong—hey, think Lucian Freud. But they are technologically unnecessary. There is nothing they need to do that cannot be done by a good turkey baster

Tribes of surplus males afflicted with testosterone poisoning are a disruptive nuisance. Tribes of males who have survived testosterone poisoning are simply a nuisance. In 100 years, they will be gone.

Comment: Who writes this tripe? Anyway, get over it. Women like men perfectly fine. They just want them to behave once in a while.

Response: Point taken. They should behave, but it doesn’t seem to come easily. Meanwhile, it is amazing what some women will put up with, rather than say good night to the weatherman.

Froomkin Connects the Dots

I promised myself not to idle away time and space on my blog by random reposting of other people's stuff. Only good stuff.

This is good stuff.

This Man Needs a Blog

I gotta tellya, I simply do not to do with this, the fourth most blogged story at the NYT Website this morning. I can’t say I envy these guys, but I don’t exactly disapprove. I mean, it’s just that I am still part of the generation where you got a job or you went to jail (or so you were taught to believe). Oh dear, I don’t know what to think.

I guess I do have to take note of the (not very typical) story of Alan Beggerow:

Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill. The trappings of this new life surround Mr. Beggerow in the cluttered living room of his one-story bungalow-style home in this half-rural, half-industrial prairie town west of Chicago. A bookcase covers an entire wall, and the books that Mr. Beggerow is reading are stacked on a glass coffee table in front of a comfortable sofa where he reads late into the night — consuming two or three books a week — many more than in his working years.

He also gets more sleep, regularly more than nine hours, a characteristic of men without work. . . .

Very few of the books Mr. Beggerow reads are novels, and certainly not the escapist Westerns that he himself writes (two in the last five years), his hope being that someday he will interest a publisher and earn some money. His own catholic tastes range over history — currently the Bolshevik revolution and a biography of Charlemagne — as well as music and the origins of Christianity.

He often has strong views about what he has just read, which he expresses in reviews that he posts on Amazon.com: 124 so far, he said.

Obviously, this man needs a blog.

Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job

Before Global Warming

"Glory t'God in a shift!" exclaimed the broguey Countess Madge. "A queue in this perishin' cowld mornin', is it? What with the snow stacked fair up t'the tits on the Statute uv Liberty?"

From James McCourt, Mawrdew Czgowchwz 67 (1971). Elsewhere, one Paranoy remarks that "The end of the Old Met marked the decisive end of Gotham as it was, when it was truly fabulous" (71). But I wouldn't know, I wasn't there.

"How I Loath These New Manners in Foreign Policy"

Overheard at “the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervyn Street:”

Sandy was furious about the muddle in the Near East and the mishandling of Turkey. His view was that we were doing our best to hammer a much-divided Orient into a hostile unanimity.

“Lord!” he cried, “how I loath these new manners in foreign policy. The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish and rather idiotic, and ourselves as the only grownups in a kindergarten world. That meant that we had a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic justice. But now we have got into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor.

From John Buchan, The Three Hostages (1924) . The speaker is Sandy Arbuthnot, the author’s companion in adventure. I’ll have more to say about this fascinating novel later.

Fn: apparently the Grumpy Old Bookman found it before I did.