Amazing Amuse

Terry Teachout is right that Amuse is an amazingly good restaurant for Ashland, Oregon, and would do itself proud in any city.

(Even Fresno? Yep, even Fresno).

What Waterboarding Looks Like

I really have nothing to add to this but I think it deserves the widest possible distribution. Link.

"Winter's Tale" at Ashland

A word now about the Ashland festival performance of of Winter’s Tale, which prompted my little jeu d’esprit about Shakespearean creativity, infra. I said earlier that in its presentation of King John, Ashland did a fine job with an unpromising play. In Winter’s Tale, they did a lot less with a lot more.

I’ve got great affection for this play, and in fact, Ashland did a really satisfying job on it just a few years back. But this year, they fell victim to the Ashland vice: they weren’t willing to trust the text.

You got this almost from the opening note in William Langan’s Leontes. Langan knew he was jealous, alright, and he wanted to tell us about it: he pranced, he waved his arms, he scuttered across the stage, and most of all, he shouted—oh, dear, how he shouted, in a part, that cries out to be played with cold fury and restraint. At first I thought he was trying to play Richard III; by the end I wondered if he was stretching for Groucho Marx.

Leontes pretty much dominates the first half of the play, so the presence of other creditable performances (there were several) wasn’t really enough to distract attention from him. Something harder to anticipate occurred in the second half. Ashland usually does better with the lighter stuff, and at low comedy, they can do really well. And indeed, Christopher DuVal as Autolycos could pull tricks out of the script as fast as his character could pull goodies out of a mark’s pocket.

The trouble is, Autolycos is not supposed to be the main event. He’s a change of pace, a foil, a sly and wry critique of the pastoral world around him. Here, they let him run away with the whole thing. The great sheep-shearing, which should be the centerpiece, ended up being a kind of side show (and as an aside, the odd little “folk ballet” looked for all the world like a Thomas Hart Benton painting of a slave auction).

The giveaway was the performance of the young lover Perdita, played by Nell Geisslinger. She has some of the best lines in the play (not to say the entire Shakespeare canon). She didn’t seem perfect for the part, but she seemed to give it a good shot. Or so it was until what I take to be the high point of her role. She speaks of:

Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes

Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses

That die unmarried ere they can behold

Bright Phoebus in his strength.

To my taste, this is breathtaking: the perfect combination of lyricism and black irony that gives Shakespeare his particular tang. Yet for some reason, god knows why, they had her sing them—and not all that well, either, to a not particularly memorable tune. Why in heavens’ name one would want to stamp on one of the grandest of all Shakespearean lyrics is beyond me—unless, as I suggested before, they just don’t get the point.

What It Is About "Winter's Tale"

Shakespeare was the world’s greatest rewrite man. This is no secret. And it is not a put-down. The point is that he had an almost uncanny knack for responding to possibilities: to look at another person’s play, or poem, or whatever and say—hm, I can do something with this.

In this vein, it is fun and instructive to study, say, Shakespeare’s use of North’s Plutarch, or Arthur Golding’s Ovid. But I think there is never more point to the inquiry than with Shakespeare’s sad, spooky, penultimate play, the Winter’s Tale. This is the one about Leontes, King of Sicily, and his paranoid conviction that his wife has been unfaithful with his best friend. His son dies; his wife dies (or so he believes) and he consigns his daughter to the elements. Years pass, and then all is made whole again.

This is a plot, as they might say, sufficient to give absurd plots a bad name. The play also contains some of the best poetry Shakespeare ever wrote. And for all its manifold imperfections, it leaves an aftertaste as memorable as any Shakespeare ever achieved.

How to account for these jangling inconsistencies? Here more than anywhere, I think it is important to look to the source. In particular, that would be a little potboiler called Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, published in 1588, some 23 years before the first recorded production of WT. Evidently it was popular: it seems to have gone through five editions before Shakespeare brought it to the stage.

Pandosto may be hackwork in a way, yet it is oddly compelling. And here is an odd fact: the structural problems that give so much grief in WT—in Pandosto, they really aren’t a problem. Example: the jealosy of Leontes. It’s a problem in the play. It seems to come from nowhere, and near-300 years of critical ink cannot blot out its utter absence of motive. Now compare the story (and ignore the name changes):

…he called to mind the beauty of his wife Bellaria, the comeliness and bravery of his friend Egistus, thinking that love was above all laws, and therefore to be stayed by no law; that it was hard to put fire and flax together without burning; that their open pleasure might breed his secret displeasure. He considered with himself that Egistus was a man, and must needs love; that his wife was a woman and therefore subject to love; and that where fancy forced, friendship was of no force.

Fine, this is enough. We are in a folk tale, and by the stipulations of the game, this is more than sufficient to justify or explain the conduct of the king.

So also with the time gap. Shakespeare has to bring on time personified; the storyteller can ease us through the years so smoothly that we barely them. And so again (I will not labor the point) with the statue. The point is that things that may seem odd or out of place in the play work just fine in the story.

And this, I think, helps us to get a handle on what Shakespeare I up to here. He’s old in his career, if not in life: he has tried tragedy, comedy, history, farce. He reads Pandosto: he knows he has a problem but he says: I think I can turn this into a play.

And either he did or he didn’t. Either way, my point is that this is one play for which knowledge of the source may really enhance our understanding. Not that Pandosto is a better piece of work than WT. Only that our understanding of WT is richer, more nuanced, more three-dimensional, if we take it in context.

Readers may recall that there is yet one more zinger in this history: authorship. Pandosto was the work of Robert Greene—university wit, general mischief-maker and (most important for our purpose) the man who introduced Shakespeare into the arena of history. Recall that it was Greene, washed up and dying, who wrote Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, his testament and parting shot. Recall:

..there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes that he is able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

Recall, in short, what appears to be the first-ever mention of William Shakespeare in the world of the London theatre.

I think that Shakespeare’s use of Greene’s plot is a kindness to Greene: a recognition, from a great artist at the end of his life, to another who died at the beginning of his. One more reason why such a strange and ill-formed masterpiece can still tug at our attention.

A Convincing King John

For the second time this year, we’ve had the good fortune to stumble on a really good production of an, ahem, unconvincing Shakespeare play. The first was a stunning presentation of All’s Well that Ends Well, at the Duke on 42^nd Street in New York last spring (link). The second was this afternoon’s performance of King John at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (link).

It’s an imperfect play, but that is hardly dispositive: every Shakespeare play, even the best of them, is imperfect in some way or other. It is full of neat prefigurings—half-mad Constance anticipates half-mad Lady Macbeth; bastard Faulconbridge anticipates bastard Edmund, and so forth—but this is hardly sufficient to carry it. What makes King John really worthy of attention is that it does have a consistent theme: power, and the search for power, and the mean motives of the contenders. The trouble is that this is a pretty cheerless business, and the play offers virtually no relief: no Touchstone, no Autolycos, not even a mad fool akin to the companion of King Lear. It’s so unrelievedly bleak that the stirring peroration, so much quoted in moments of (British) patriotic excess, appears almost as an affront.

In respect of its tone, one is tempted to group it with Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens. Troilus is perhaps more complex and thus more arresting than the other two; Timon comes as near to being unwatchable as anything in the Shakespeare canon (I guess I have to except Titus Andronicus, which I’ve never actually seen). King John isn’t as arresting as Troilus and not nearly so unwatchable as Timon; with good direction and a competent cast, it can carry conviction and hold the viewer’s attention. Kudos to Ashlandfor suggesting its possibilities.

The Dude Abides

As a proud graduate of the University of Louisville, I just naturally take delight in this. Thanks, Cappy, and let's think about organizing a caravan for next year.

London Radical Watch: The Birth of the Bolsheviks

Discussing Arab radicals in London, I promised myself to retrieve a favorite passage from Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, on Russian radicals in London a century ago. Good, I found the book. No, wait, the passage doesn’t seem to be there – did I make it up, or is it a different book? Hard to say, but in default of what I planned, I do find this account of a pivotal moment in Russian revolutionary history—the point where Lenin’s faction hived off to become the “Bolsheviks:”

The crucial division took place at the Second Congress of the Social Democrats in the summer of 1903. The congress began in Brussels in a flour mill, infested within by rats and surrounded by Russian and Belgian detectives; and continued, after two of the delegates had been arrested by police and deported, in the dirt and August heat of the Tottenham Court Road in London.

The atmosphere was terribly strained: political conflicts were wrecking personal relations. Lenin himself was so keyed up that he could hardly sleep or eat. It is difficult for us, with our parliamentary habits, to understand an assembly like this, in which the chairman, Plekhánov, the father of the movement, was unable to refrain from interrupting those we of the speakers with whom he did not agree, with such gibes as … “Horses don’t talk; only asses do.” One of the younger delegates begged Krupskaya to get Vladímir Ilyich to take the chair before Plekhánov had made everything worse. … When the congress was over, he collapsed.’

But he won: “Of such stuff are Robespierres made,” said Plekhánov to one of the minority. … He carried a majority for his program. His adherents came to be known thereafter as “Bolshevíki, or members of the majority, and his adversaries as “Menshevíki,” or members of the minority … .

Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station 464-6

(Paperback ed.1972)

Wilson also recounts an episode that gives remarkable insight into Lenin’s revolutionary conviction. It occurred in 1902 just after Trotsky arrived in London, having escaped from a Tsarist prison:

Lenin took him for a walk around London. Trotsky tells of an impression he received on this occasion in a passage so remarkable that it must be given direct in his own words: “From a bridge, Lenin pointed out Westminster and some other famous buildings. I don’t remember the exact words he used but what he conveyed was: ‘This is their famous Westminster,’ and ‘their’ referred, of course, not to the English but to the ruling classes [corrected, but see the Crank infra]. This implication, which was not in the least emphasized but, coming as it did from the very innermost depths of the man and expressed more by the tone of his voice than by anything else, was always present, whether Lenin was speaking of the treasures of culture, of new achievements, of the wealth of books in the British Museum, of the information in the larger European newspapers or, years later, of German artillery or French aviation. They know this or they have that, they have made this or achieved that—but what enemies they are! To his eyes, the invisible shadow of the ruling class always overlay the whole of human culture—a shadow that was as real to him as daylight.

Id., 485-6

An odd slip: a page later, Wilson says that Lenin had the habit “in London, of making excursions to Primrose Hill because it was near the grave of Marx.” (Id., 487). In fact, Primrose Hill is nowhere near the grave of Marx, which is in Highgate Cemetery, several miles away. Primrose Hill is, however, a very pretty place to walk, and not all that far from Tottenham Court Road.

Vikings Sweep the Series

A few weeks ago I puzzled over the right’s persistent head case over the Swedes (link). Apparently somebody else who hasn’t been reading the script is the World Economic Forum, which places Sweden third in its Global Competitiveness Index [GCI, trailing Switzerland and Finland, but ahead of Denmark, Singapore and (envelope!) the United States (pdf here). Says the WEF:

The Scandinavian countries … share with Switzerland a broadly similar institutional and structural profile.The Nordic countries have better ranks on the macroeconomy pillar of the GCI, since they are all running budget surpluses and have lower levels of public indebtedness than Switzerland and, indeed, much of the rest of Europe. Finland and Sweden have the best institutions in the world (ranked 1 and 2, respectively) and occupy places in the top ten ranks in health and primary education.

Of the United States, the WEF says:

The United States … remains a world leader in a number of key categories assessed by the GCI, such as market efficiency, innovation, higher education and training, and business sophistication. However, growing imbalances have dented a number of macroeconomic indicators, and the levels of efficiency and transparency underpinning its public institutions do not match those of the most developed industrial countries.

[Emphasis added]

Elaborating, the report continues:

The United States remains in the leading position in competitiveness, ahead of Germany and Finland.The United States’ strength is greatest in the business environment, including domestic rivalry (rank 1 on “intensity of local competition” and “effectiveness of antitrust policy”), financial markets (rank 1 on “venture capital availability,” “local equity market access,” and “financial market sophistication”), and innovative capacity (rank 1 on “university/industry research collaboration,”“company R&D spending,”“local availability of specialized research and training services,” and “quality of scientific research institutions”).

And further:

The United States, the World’s center of technological innovation, with extremely well developed financial markets, produces secure, high-yielding financial assets that attract a reasonable share of global world savings and foreign official investment, equivalent to the current account deficit, which can thus be sustained for many years.What is unsustainable is the present growth of the US deficit as a share of GDP. Maintaining a constant share deficit may require some depreciation of the dollar and a reduction in the trade deficit. It will also require greater effort on the part of the United States to reduce fiscal imbalances. For Rogoff, the US deficit represents government borrowing and no longer supports high real investment. The United States is presently consuming 70 percent of the world’s net savings. Historically, current account deficits have tended to collapse at relatively low levels. A housing slump would slow the US economy, while

other countries are growing, reducing the US deficit. The overvalued dollar could drop up to 40 percent on a trade-weighted basis, reducing global output and precipitating a financial market crisis, soaring interest rates, with a concomitant severe impact on Europe and Japan. Budget deficits are ballooning, with rising costs for the elderly and for security. High government debt to GDP ratios and rising interest rates could precipitate emerging market debt crises and defaults.Accumulating global imbalances are now a substantial risk to the world economy, which only multilateral policy consultations could reduce.There has to be a massive appreciation in emerging Asia, and an immediate effort to balance the US budget.

The report adds that “The United States and Japan are notable as high-wage economies that still provide good value given their competitiveness.”

Let’s hope Sweden’s new center-right government doesn’t screw things up (uncalled-for snark: from what I read, the chances are that they will not).

Fox Takes Its Best Shot

The hills are alive with the sound of laptops clicking, as just about everyone but Julie Andrews tries to spin the Bill Clinton/Chris Wallace faceoff. Who is winning?

Oh, silly question. Fights like this never end; they just get replaced by more fights like this. Still, here is a clue: a Google news search just now turned up 83 hits for “Clinton Wallace Monica.” John Dickerson at Slate explains:

If you are a right-winger, [you are] likely to react to his criticisms about the Bush administration by rushing to the inevitable safe ground: sex jokes. A Fox News anchor helpfully pointed out that he hadn't seen Clinton that angry since he denied having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

We must be grateful to Fox for putting our news in a larger historical context. For my audition tape, I will offer a few more possibilities along the same vein.

Clinton faced down Wallace with the vigor of a young Jack Kennedy facing down Nikita Krushchev.

Clinton evinced the controlled outrage of Boston Lawyer Joe Welch unmasking Demagogue Joe McCarthy.

Clinton drove the hack interviewer from the arena with the celerity of Jesus driving the moneychangers from the temple.

Meanwhile, if this is Fox's best shot...

‘

Another Crony Gets a Blog

My friend Nancy has join what looks like the most complicated blog team in America (link). On hallowed principles of cronyism, she goes on the link list (it's "Moneylaw"). Collect them all!

There's a Blog For

every taste (link).

This Just In: Torture is Wrong

I've been waiting for this. For weeks we've been discussing the instrumental status of torture: Does it get good information? Does it diminish our prestige? --yadda yadda.

At last comes Ariel Dorfman with the Elephant-in-the-room point: Torture is wrong. It is wrong whether or not is instrumental, and it corrupts us to ignore or elide the point.

Here is Dorfman in a WP op ed yesterday:

I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress ... are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way.

I find these arguments -- and there are many more -- to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?

Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? ...

Exactly right. And way overdue. Dan Froomkin showcased his comments in "White House Briefing" today. Dorfman is on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" even now as I type. Would be nice to see him do an hour at Larry King.

Note on the History of Londonistan

This is probably old stuff to cognoscenti, but I’m slow, so I had to read Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East. One reason there are so many Muslim radicals in Europe is that the repressive regimes of the Middle East chased them abroad:

“Britain’s reputation as a haven of tolerance for foreign opposition groups and its lax asylum laws … made it an attractive destination. … [M]any mujahideen had grave misgivings about resorting to infidels to salvage their Islamic mission. In the summer of 1993, twelve jihadi scholars, including the Jordanian spiritual mentor of radical Islam, Abu Qatada, met in Peshawar to debate the question of whether Islamic law permitted a Muslim to seek asylum in a non-Muslim land. … ‘There’s no difference between British and the Arab governments,’ Abu Qatada is said to have argued. ‘None of them are Islamic governments. As a Muslim, you must go where you feel secure.’

Following their fatwa, or legal opinion, Arab Afghans flocked to Britain … . To the fury of Arab leaders, Britain dismissed Egyptian, Saudi, Yemeni, Tunisian and Algerian requests for extradition as interference in its liberal traditions of asylum.

A curious corollary is the way in which Western exile reshaped Arab radicalism:

[The London exiles] saw individual Arab rules not as towering Pharoahs, but as American puppets, and their rampant repression and corruption as a symptom of a larger evil, namely Western neo-imperialism. Their target audience was not a nation state but the worldwide umma, or nation, of one billion Muslims, and their goal was to spark a global Islamic rebellion. The new ideology sparked a bitter doctrinal rift between the nationalist jihadis and Bin Laden’s ‘cosmopolitans.’ … The ideological conflict raged with all the passion of Stalinists disputing with Trotskyites. Former borthers-in-arms denounced him as a renegade jihadi, and one group tired to assassinate him.

Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East 385-6

Revised and Updated by Nicolas Pelham

(Paperback ed. 2004)

Soon as I can rustle up a copy of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, I will see if I can retrieve a wonderful passage about what happened when the Russian revolutionaries washed up in London after the failed Revolution of 1905.

Buffalo Ghosts

I have a lot of garbage in my head. No, not just that, I mean junk, detritus, mental lumber. That last buffalo post triggered a mind virus from, I think, Walt Kelly's "Pogo" comic strip circa 1955 (though Google draws a blank here). As I remember, there was a vaudeville riff:

Hear that whistle puff and blow
As the train pulls out of Kokomo--
Hello, Joe, whaddya know,
I just got back from Buffalo.

Except in the last panel, the last line is transmogrified into

Poltergeists are the principal form of spontaneous manisfestations.

Hilarious. Okay, so maybe you had to have been there.

It Turns Out That

This is a sentence:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

(Note the caps)

So says Pete Bevin, with a hat tip to David, who also offers up the Edge Question of the Year for 2005 here.

Ron Mann on Credit Cards, Moore's Law and the Wal-Mart Bank

Most interesting post I’ve read all week is by Ron Mann, guest blogging at Credit Slips, on the Wal-Mart bank and the possibility of competition with Mastercard and Visa. Money shot:

The market for consumer payment systems in our country is dominated by a pair of national networks, whose market shares have grown rapidly over the past 30 years. During those thirty years, the price of the product -- which is at its core a sophisticated information processing service -- has remained stable even as Moore's Law has halved the cost of information processing time after time after time after time.

For obvious reasons, it is enormously difficult to challenge Visa and MasterCard. … If we were to look for a challenger, and if we look past the possibilities of Google and PayPal (who essentially piggyback on Visa/MC), Wal-Mart certainly would be the most formidable competitor. Wal-Mart has a network of almost 4000 locations in the United States, with tens of millions of devoted customers. Wal-Mart is highly skilled at designing products to meet the desires of mainstream American consumers. A payment system designed by Wal-Mart, accepted at all of its stores, could penetrate the consumer consciousness more effectively than any product since the credit card.

And if the purpose of Sam-Pay was to lower the costs of payments -- cost-cutting being Wal-Mart's core competency -- then it presumably would shift spending from credit cards, which would slow the financial distress associated with credit card use. To be sure, there is always the possibility that Wal-Mart could follow the lead of Target and transform itself into a consumer-credit operation with an in-house retailing arm. Wal-Mart's efforts to open full-service banks in Mexico show that this is at least a possibility. But, my prediction is that Wal-Mart will focus on cost, as it has with the check-cashing services and money orders that are offered in its stores in most states.

More in the blog here, and in his forthcoming book.

From The Bin: The Death of Rozzie

On the road today, visiting grandkids. But just to show that I'm still connected, here is one from the bin:

I could not believe my eyes when I saw my poor Rozzie in the hospital, gone to skin and bones. She was not sixty, and she might have been eighty, with a folded face like an old worn-out shoe.

She had been knocked down by a lorry, and lost her leg at the thigh. “And the same day,” she said, “I heard that all my money was gone in the Mortimer Hotels crash. I heard at breakfast and the lorry got me at half-past ten, going over to the Three Crowns for my morning drop, and when I woke up in hospital, I had my best laugh in years.”

“Nothing to laugh at,” I said, for I was almost crying. But Rozzie gave a heave and a kind of laugh and said: “You wouldn’t, Sall—it wasn’t your money and your best leg. I’ve still got the bad one.”

The end of Rozzie was very sad. For when they got her well enough to go on crutches, she was still not fit to be about; and she had no money left. There was no place for her but the workhouse infirmary. Her only relation was her brother-in-law and he was in India and had his own wife and family. Besides Rozzie would never be a burden on anyone. So there she was and there I went to see her three more times, before the leg broke out again and she died of blood poisoning.

“A good thing, too,” she said, when they told her she was going. “I’ve been a fat lot of good, haven’t I? If I wonder why I was ever born—but I expect I was an accident—one at the start and one at the finish.”

Joyce Cary, Herself Surprised (NYRB Paperback ed. 1999)

Hotspot!

Sacramento Airport now has free WiFi! It even extends to the lobby of the Host International Hotel across from Terminal A. Why the hotel itself doesn't have it, heaven knows--WSJ reports that it is now standard at all Motel 8s.

Anyway, it's nice not to have to run a 20-mile orange utility cord from my office. . .

How Can They Be So Stupid?

Thirty-seven percent of Americans still think George Bush is doing a good job. How can they be so dumb?

I offer a theory. In fact, they are not that dumb, although it doesn’t mean they are smart (who among us is?). But think of it this way: an awful lot of that 37 percent are people who are fighting just to get by. They’ve got crap jobs that don’t pay very well. They’re juggling creepy bosses, crabby spouses, dodgy day care. From the time the alarm goes off in the morning, they are in a rush: pop tarts and coffee, into the van, off to school, on to the job (still there?) back from the job, back from school, soccer practice, in and out at the fast food, bed time, and do it all over again.

They’re stressed out. They aren’t really at risk of a terrorist attack (in truth, it’s about the last thing they need to worry about). But they are insecure: the job may vanish in a heartbeat, heaven knows what the kids are up to, what’s that lump in the belly, can’t even guess what kind of problem will come up next.

In a world like this, they’re desperate for some security somewhere. The last thing they want to think is that their President might be a doofus. They do not like to be told that he’s got his shoelaces tied together, and that he really thinks torture is kinda cool. In truth, they kinda know: they haven’t seen body bags on TV, but they see more and more prosthetics in the mall. They kinda know the ranch is a pig farm, but precisely because they do know and do not want to know—precisely for this reason, when someone tells them he is a doofus, they get really shrill.

There now, everything clear? And thanks to Margaret for channeling me down this train of thought.

Fn: CBS/NYT says 37 percent. LAT/Bloomberg says 45. Link.

Zippy?

Does it unsettle anyone but me that Israel has a foreign minister named Zippy?

God Bless Google (Lillian Russell Wrestle div.)

God bless Google. I don’t remember my mother ever singing a lullaby—maybe I was too young, or already asleep. But she was topnotch at an inventory of saucy patter songs which she had learned in her free-spirited youth (she didn’t marry until she was 26—positively superannuated for her generation). I suppose I was six when she taught me

A capital ship for an ocean trip
Was the walloping window blind

And

Father swam under a
U-Need-a Biscuit
Just as the son went down.

Imagine my delight, then, when I stumbled on “The Billboard Song,” long lost to me, but still out there in cyberspace, albeit with no more than 16 Google hits. Angelfire calls it “Trad. and Anon.” Gunther Anderson says it has “long since passed into the folk domain,” but he credits it to Cy Coben and Charles Grean. This doesn’t seem quite right to me. Answers.com says Coben was born in 1918, and my mother’s singlehood ended in 1929: I doubt that this is the work of an 11-year-old. Answers credits the Coben/Grean version to Homer & Jethro who, per Answers, came together in 1932—so again, the dates don’t seem quite to match—unless, of course, my mother continued to absorb silly songs after she became absorbed with spouse and children.

There seem to be a lot of folky variants on “The Billboard Song,” but here is some stuff that I remember from, oh, say, around 1944:

As I was walking down the street a billboard met my eye
The advertising that was there would make you laugh or cry
The wind and rain had almost washed that old billboard away
But the advertising painted there would have that billboard say

Bay Rum is good for horses, it is the best in town
Castoria cures the measles, if you pay ten dollars down
Have a smoke of Coca-Cola, chew catsup cigarettes
Watch Lillian Russell wrestle with a box of Cascarets

Fuller lyrics are here, here, here, and here.

PS: Sorry, I just can't seem to get the fonts right on this one.

How Many School Buses?

How many illegal immigrants[1] can you pack into a school bus? No, this is not a new-age elephant joke. But how many does a school bus hold, really? Maybe 60? Then if there are 12 million immigrants, deportation would require 200,000 bus trips. Uh, to where, exactly?

Fn: A dinner companion points out that we can use the leftover school buses from New Orleans.

---

[1] I almost wrote “aliens,” but so far as I know, there is no plan to repatriate to Krypton.

TigerHawk Picks the Wrong Issue

TigerHawk has a remarkable capacity for being clear-eyed and insightful one moment, boneheaded the next. He’s in phase II this morning, wringing his hands over the Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s remarkable WP piece on cronyism and nepotism in the Iraqi Proconsulship of Paul Bremer.

“It’s not nearly enough to smear the ‘neocons,’ clucks TigerHawk (channeling The Corner) in little-dog-Fala mode, “they have to get their children, too.”

The Corner hardly deserves the courtesy of a response, but TigerHawk does. So, friendly advice to TigerHawk: give this one a bye. There is plenty to complain about in the WP, but this one doesn’t pass the giggle test.

The particular bone of contention seems to be the work of Simone Ledeen: apparently she is “trilingual” with a “major MBA.” Allow me to respond by quoting myself, from the TigerHawk comments:

Simone Ledeen apparently was qualified by the standards of the time. But it wasn't why she was hired, and is nothing to do with her assignment, which was to advance her own career and the careers of her neocon cronies. Cronyism is indeed an endemic, indeed a pandemic, problem, but "the other guys do it, too," is not a defense. If TigerHawk really wants to make waves on this issue, he might want to tackle the problem of dynastic politics more generally: Clintons and Bushes and Kennedys--and Sharons and Assads, and heaven knows how many other clans and tribes where political preferment is becoming a family business.

Simone Ledeen's real problem is the problem with affirmative action hires everywhere: she's got to believe she deserved it, yet in her heart of hearts, she know that she just passed a phoney test.

Indeed, if TigerHawk is in a mood to give a second thought here, he might realize that this policiy of we-don't-want-nobody-nobody-sent policy is a longterm disaster for the neocons themselves. How many institutions can stay strong while hiring the sons and daughters of the faithful?

The Lawrence Summers of Popes

The Daily Show suggests that Benedict is the George Lazenby of Popes, if not Roger Moore. It’s a thought, but I have a different suggestion: he is the Lawrence Summers. They’re two guys big brains who spent most of their lives in hothouse environments where you could pretty much say what you wanted to, and where you could win the argument with your smart mouth. As Manuel Paleologos II might say, if you can’t run with the big dogs, stay out of the kitchen.

Nb: linking the Daily Show is the blogger equivalent of brain death, but the bit link up there is really really funny.

Concession fn: a reader points out that the Pope doesn’t have two uncles who are Nobel Prize winners, and he doesn’t get to chum around with Elisa New. So far as we know, heh heh.

Schneier on Herding Cats, etc.

Bruce Schneier has a fascinating post here on the difficulties of managing IT security in a great university, interesting in itself, but also a useful reminder of the difficulties of managing anything in a great university. In a word, decentralization. A university is a lot like a leased-department bordello, where every entrepreneur is trading on his own account ("hello, sailor, going my way?).

Universities are edge-focused; central policies tend to be weak, by design, with maximum autonomy for the edges. This means they have natural tendencies against centralization of services. Departments and individual professors are used to being semiautonomous. Because these institutions were established long before the advent of computers, when networking did begin to infuse universities, it developed within existing administrative divisions. ...

The lack of central authority makes enforcing uniform standards challenging, to say the least. Most university CIOs have much less power than their corporate counterparts; university mandates can be a major obstacle in enforcing any security policy. This leads to an uneven security landscape.

There’s also a cultural tendency for faculty and staff to resist restrictions, especially in the area of research. Because most research is now done online -- or, at least, involves online access -- restricting the use of or deciding on appropriate uses for information technologies can be difficult. This resistance also leads to a lack of centralization and an absence of IT operational procedures such as change control, change management, patch management, and configuration control.

I also liked "students" as "a large number of potentially adversarial transient insiders." No dean would quarrel with that one.

Herding cats, as they say, or (I believe this one is Woodrow Wilson) like trying to move a graveyard. Or like trying to marshal a parade of turkeys, except that if you don't control the turkeys, they pile up in a corner and suffocate each other.

My friend Katy likes to say that antisocial behavior that would be punished anyplace else is rewarded in the university. Quite right, although perhaps the alternative is worse.

Bush Approval

at 44 percent, says Gallup, says Political Arithmetik. At this rate, he ought to be at about 950 percent by election day. Link.

How Dare You Pay Me What You Owe Me?

Here's one for my buddies over at the debtor-creditor blog:

When a Yemeni shopkeeper says that he can tell Americans do not trust him because they always insist on paying immeditely when they buy something, you have to know how important it is to people in that region to believe that debt forges a relationship.

Lawrence Rosen in the London Review of Books, page 28, 7 September 2006
(reviewing Jason Burke, On the Road to Kandahar)

Fn: My all-wise friend Joel says it works for small-time lawyehrs, too. If the lawyer pays you in full, it means he is getting ready to decamp.

A Good Word for Ferenc Gyurcsany, Liar

Unless I missed something, the only person to get the Hungary story right is Bronwen Maddox at the (London) Times, here. Ferenc Gyurcsany got himself caught on tape saying that his government lied. Of course: every government lies. But he said so in the context of hectoring his own comrades to straighten up and fly right. Let's all pray for more such self-confessed liars.

The painful truths that everybody refused to hear

Commentary by Bronwen Maddox

OF COURSE Ferenc Gyurcsany should stay as Prime Minister. It will be a disaster for Hungary’s hopes of economic reform if he quits. His stroppy remarks to his party leaders were provocation of limitless resonance. His many enemies, who dislike his flashy style, his marriages, his policies — everything about him — rose with glee to that provocation and urged the rioters into the streets.

But if he lied it was in the sense that George H. W. Bush did in saying: “Read my lips”: promising not to raise taxes, and then doing just that. If Hungarians claim that he kept them ignorant of the terrifying state of national finances, then they are the only ones on the planet not to have known.

Hungary has been living on borrowed time, buoyed up by the cheery view that Western Europe has taken of the fortunes of the former Soviet bloc countries. That has allowed it to borrow money more cheaply than its horrendous national debt would normally dictate.

Those figures are no secret. The financial markets, and Brussels, have been sceptical about the Government’s repeatedly revised plans for getting its finances into good enough shape to join the euro.

“I admit, in the past four months [since the general election], I failed to convey the message about the need for reform,” Gyurcsany said yesterday. To whom? Hungarians? Then they must have had their hands over their ears.

Since his electoral success, he has announced tax rises and budget cuts — the minimum necessary — and his reliance on raising a lot of new revenue has met with scepticism. A report this month by the Economist Intelligence Unit observed: “Tax morality in Hungary is relatively low.” Indeed.

The Prime Minister aimed one part of his self-flagellation accurately: the Government missed good opportunities to push through change in the past four years when it would have been easier. Growth has been strong and exports rose by 17 per cent in euro terms in the year to May.

That is a reminder that in many ways Hungary’s popular image as one of the solidest of the ten countries that joined the EU on May 1, 2004, is well founded. Its manufacturing is broadly based, its governments have been centrist and sensible; its people are educated and outward-looking. It is a sophisticated and confident country.

But the causes of its budget deficit go back a long way. Voters have not wanted to give up state jobs or benefits from the past, while their expectations of their Government have risen with modernisation.

The danger now is that loss of confidence in the reforms would cause the forint to slide. That could push up interest rates and make debt even more costly. “The coalition [Government] has the support of the market and of credit rating agencies as a result of the push for reforms,” says Raffaella Tenconi, emerging markets analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort.

The rioters cannot claim that Hungary’s problems are news. If every leader who had ever put a good spin on bad figures were to quit, this week’s UN General Assembly would be a very small affair.

Back to First Principles

Observing an off-list email exchange, I've had to suffer through a new round of the liberals this, the liberals that, yada yada. Let us return to some fundamental truths:

• This is not a conservative administration. For dangerous innovation, it bids fair to compete with the French in the Revolution. For fetishizing abstract principle, it runs with the simplificateurs terribles of Marxism.
  

• Commitment to capitalists--must it really be said again?-- has nothing to do with a commitment to capitalism: indeed, they are well-nigh antithetical.

• Adherence to the Constitution is conservatism.

  As Hume so rightly demonstrates, our rights as citizens are the hard-won achievement of a long and much-contested tradition. Habeas Corpus is so important that it is in the Constitution itself--we didn't have to wait for the Bill of Rights. As Cardozo says, not lightly regarded are the decisions of quiescent years.

• The alliance of Christianity and torture is, I admit, not unexampled, but it has been pretty much out of fashion since Napoleon abolished the Inquisition.

• The alliance of Christianity and holy war is also, I admit, not unexampled, but it has been pretty much out of fashion since the Venetians invaded Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade.

A corollary principle here involves the place of Democrats in the search for responsible centrism. I suspect that one reason why the wingnuttery works so hard to demonize Clinton and Carter is not their "leftism," but precisely the contrary: their capacity to seek, and even to achieve, a meaningful middle ground. Clinton on welfare, Carter on deregulation, to take just two examples: lefties will never forgive them, but ironically, the wingnuttery is no kinder. Their crime is not that they demonstrated the failure of centrist government: rather, that they exemplified its success. Nothing is more inimical to the purposes of the nihilist right than the experience of seeing something go really well.

There, everything clear now?

Oh, Those New Yorkers, Such Sophistication

OverheardinNewYork.com:

The Fat Part's Free, But You Have to Pay for the Protein and the Carbs

Shopper #1: I've never bought yogurt before. I don't know what to get. What does fat free mean?
Shopper #2: You know, its free... of fat.
Shopper #1: Oh, OK.

--Grocery, 40th & 5th

Overheard by: Super Mike

Free Content Find

JohnColtrane.com pipes a wonderful free background set: link.

Is This Real?

It has the ring of something that will implode into a paranoid fantasty. But it seems to be well sourced. Stand by for developments (thanks, Crank):

Indian village elders order trial by boiling oil

Sun Sep 17, 2006 7:57 AM BST

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The leaders of a village in the Indian state of Rajasthan ordered 150 men to dip their hands into boiling oil to prove their innocence after food was stolen from a local school, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

In late August the school's principal informed police that rice and wheat had disappeared but no action was taken, the Sunday Express said.

The council, or panchayat, of Ranpur village, 340 km south of state capital Jaipur, then decided to take the law into its own hands.

After 10 days spent trying to identify those responsible, it issued what the paper called the "mediaeval diktat".

The 150 men from Ranpur and two neighbouring hamlets were told to pick a copper ring from a cauldron of boiling oil. The council elders then announced that the 50 who refused the order must be behind the crime. Many are now nursing their burns.

"We would have been ostracised had we refused. Out of fear all of us agreed. This is not the first time this has been done," said one 45-year-old man. He has now testified against the elders, who have been arrested.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved (link).

How Many Travesties Are There?

Trav-es-ty…An exaggerated or grotesque imitation, such as a parody of a literary work. … A debased or grotesque likeness;

Second thoughts on Stoppard’s Travesties: how many travesties are there? The play itself is, perhaps, a travesty of Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest. Earnest is itself a travesty of—well, just about everything, but perhaps in particular, on Victorian middle class mores. Old Carr’s memory is a travesty on truth and history (the diary, as Wilde would say, of things that never happened). Tristian Tzara’s dada is certainly intended as a travesty of art. I am a bit reluctant to treat James Joyce as a travesty, although Stoppard turns him into as fine a travesty of verse drama as you are likely to hear (exceeding but by a gnat’s crotchet the splendid little bit of Gallagher-and-Sheehan later in the same show). Lenin: now there was a travesty: of the enlightenment, at least, and of Russian culture. Whether Lenin was a travesty of revolution is perhaps a nicer question: perhaps revolution itself is a travesty of itself. That, at any rate, may be the point of the smashing denouement in the second act, where Stoppard puts a line of Wilde into the mouth of Lenin (I won’t repeat it here, but you’ll know it when you hear it)—and it fits, oh boy it fits.

There. Are there any more?

Fn: There's a fine piece by Charles Simic in a recent New York Review of Books of the new Dada show at the Met. See it here.

Curriculum

I cooked this up a few weeks back for another purpose, but it still wors. Books I wish the next President would read:

Michael Bacevic, New Militarism (glamorizing the military and related topics)
Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State (as Milton Friedman says, nobody loves a free market)
Bruce Bartlett, Imposter (Bush bashing from the right, every critical quote from a right winger)
Martin Van Creveld, Rise & Decline of the State (on intl banks, mafias, porous borders, etc.)
William Easterly, Elusive Quest for Growth (or maybe his new one, which sounds suspiciously like his old)
Thomas Hammes, Sling & the Stone (on why winning battles is not winning wars)
Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire (thinking man's Noam Chomsky)
Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong (critique of patriotism)
Pete Peterson, Running on Empty (I expose my flinty New England roots here)
John Scott, Seeing Like a State (on the burden of living out some other guy's fantasy)

When he's done with that, the President can come back for the advanced list (He? Or she? Sure, or she). No, no dates and links. Sorry 'bout that, but you can find them at your, ahem, online retailer of choice.

Further Restaurant Note

We took a bye on Max's House of Bagged Spinach.

The Best Little Wine House in Davis

Continuing to gnaw our way through Central California—in San Francisco, we had a nice meal with friends at Venticello, tucked away (sic) behind Grace Cathedral near the top of Nob Hill (shrimp wrapped in prosciutto); took some young folks to the Great Eastern in Chinatown, where the fish hop out of the pond and onto your plate; then brunch with a friend at Zuni before the opera.

But the best meal of the week was (envelope, please) in Davis, 60 miles inland. There must be 80 restaurants in Davis if you count the Dairy Queen, but our vote goes to Tucos Wine Market & Café, tucked into an odd space just off the railroad station.

Okay, "restaurant" is a bit of a stretch. Wine by the bottle is probably the moneymaker. The on-site dining is 10 tables for two plus a few more on the patio, and a tiny bit of bar space. You can buy a pork chop or a halibut steak but the real action is in the “small plates”—“appetizers” in some parlance. It’s the kind if place here they sell soup by the shot, and where Balsamic vinegar is a menu item (8-year-old Trebbiano at $5). The wine list is deep for such a small shop, and they push the flights—samplers of two-ounce shots. We chose a plate of chicken/corn ravioli, and a sampling of patés, along with a flight of four California reds—top marks to the T.R. Eliot Three Plums 2004 Pinot.

I know next to nothing on the backstory of this place, but my guess it is a cook who has found away to minimize his time managing and leave more time to hang over the stove. Caution: the Davis Wiki suggests it may have gone downhill lately, but it seemed fine to us. For our money, not even Fresno can top it.

The Last Leopard, with Pastry and Proust

Over dinner with my friends Michael and Linda, we fell to talking about Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, the celebrated (novelized) biography of his grandfather, the Sicilian prince. It was a happy reminder of David Gilmour's wonderful biography, The Last Leopard (1991)--this of the grandson, not the grandfather. I did an Amazon review which you can find here. I didn't think to include this sample:

Rising at about seven, he would be walking down the Corso Vittrorio Emmanuele toward the center of the city by eight. Turning west at the Via Roma or a little further on at Quattro Canti, he then walked westward until he reached one of his favorite cafes, the Pasticceria del Massimo in Via Ruggero Settimo. Then he had a long breakfast and read one of the books he had brought with him. He ate cakes and pastry with particular pleasure, recalled Francesco Orlando, if he had before him a volume of sixteenth-century French poetry. Once he sat in the Pasticceria for four hours and read a whole Balzac novel at a sitting. . . . Before leaving the Massimo, he bought some more cakes, which he put in his bag, and then wandered off to Flaccovio’s or one of the other bookshops. He felt guilty, however, about buying so many and used to pretend to Licy that he had found them in a sale.

Lampedusa in the crowded streets in mid-morning, recalled Orlando, was a sight difficult to forget: a large bulky figure, very distinct and shabby, his eyes alert and his leather bag always overloaded with books and confectionery which had to last him the rest of the day. Flaccovio had a similar memory of Lampedusa entering his shop not in the least embarrassed by his bag containing courgettes and several volumes of Proust.

Sorry, I didn't save the page number and I don't have the book any more. Gilmour went on to write an admirable biography of Lord Curzon, a bit of a "last leopard" himself; find it here.

Not Earnest, The Other One

We got a nice twopher this week. Last night in SFO, we saw ACT’s fine production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. But that is only a onepher. Recall that Travesties is a riff on Oscar Wild’s Importance of Being Earnest. The twopher is that last week at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, we saw Earnest.

I don’t know, somebody must have done this before, although I wasn’t informed. But these plays just cry out to be played as we saw them, back to back. Stoppard is dense with allusion anyway, and when he builds a whole play on just one such, then you know you’ve got to do your homework or you’ll wind up like poor Henry Carr, who never gets anything right.

Yes, but maybe no. Another wonderful thing about Stoppard is that he is like one of those children’s books (Gulliver’s Travels, say) where children can enjoy it on one level and adults on another at the same time. Or like The Simpsons: with The Simpsons, I always know I am missing at least half the allusions (especially the music) but there is enough there to keep me happy anyway.

Stopppard works that way but trust me, what is funny unencumbered is even funnier with the overlay of the one playwright in the last hundred years who might be even funnier than he (I exclude Shaw who is admirable but too tendentious). On its own, it is a great parlor trick: in context, it is like juggling 24 plates with a fiery sword.

I see that Travesties runs until October 14, and Earnest, through the end of October. Yes, I know it is a bit over the top to plan for this sort of thing, but some lucky viewers, by luck or by planning, will still wind up seeing them both. I envy them; they’ve got something to look forward to.

What the Pope Got Right, and What Wrong

TigetHawk is Mad and He’s Not Going to Take it Any More. The Pope condemned religious violence. Angry Muslims took to the street. “Never,” says TigerHawk, his temples throbbing – “Never in the history of Christianity has a pope been proven correct so quickly and demonstrably.” He continues:

For my part, I am sick of "Muslim rage." …. [T]here is simply no defense for the behavior of these imams and their followers. It is barbaric, and everybody who is not barbaric or an unreconstructed apologist for barbarians knows it. The Muslims who commit arson and mayhem in response to some Westerner speaking his opinion -- and the pope, as leader of the Roman church, is exactly that -- have chosen to act as enemies of reason, peace, and everything that is good in the world.

The Pope, in short, has nothing to apologize for. I’m mostly with TigerHawk on this one. But I’m not quite ready to let the Pope off the hook. Not that he shouldn’t have said it. And not just “he’s got a right to his opinion.” It is an important issue, and it is refreshing to see an important voice on moral issues willing to take it on. If he feels he can make a contribution, well God (as it were) bless him.

But Jeeze Louise, Papa, you should have seen this one coming. You should have known you were going to create a rumpus and that ten gazillion Muslims (plus the Times and the Guardian) would be on your neck. This does not mean you should have kept quiet. It does mean you should have been ready for the uproar. You should have the second-day story in the can and ready to go. You should have bean ready to use all your formidable powers to try to turn this into a useful dialogue.

Instead, we’re told that the Pope is “extremely upset” at the response and “only meant to say” blah blah blah. This is not constructive. It conveys that he hasn’t thought it out; that he doesn’t understand the implications of his own words; that he doesn’t (in the strict sense) know what he is talking about.

Well, he does and he doesn’t. He was (mostly) right the first day. He’s a little bit right today. But if he is really going to let himself get rolled this easily, then there’s a good case to be made for the notion that he should have kept silent altogether.

In short, the Pope has to do more than just pontificate.

Fn: TigerHawk is also pretty ticked at the New York Times. He's mostly right on that one, too, but it's a separate issue and deserves, if anything, a separate comment.

Wish I'd Said That

Matt Festra, commenting at the Mankiw blog, adds one to my repertoire:

Math has added rigor to economics, but it has also added mortis.

Economics of Restaurants (Second Prize,Two Nights in Fresno Dept.)

We spent two nights in a Radisson in downtown Fresno this week (don’t ask). Downtown Fresno is—well, think downtown St. Louis, Downtown Phoenix, Downtown Baluchistan, where they shoot anything moving at night because nobody would be out there but a drug runner. No, don’t think Baluchistan, but think of any American city where you can fire a cannon after 5 p.m. and wait for the echo.

Bear with me, there’s a point here. I mean: we like to eat, but ten years ago, faced with a challenge of this sort, the chances are we would have hunkered down over the mini-bar or accepted the humiliating ministrations of the drab-looking restaurant in the lobby. If there was a good restaurant in Fresno, how would we know? And if we knew, how would we find it?

Think what we do now. No, there is not a Zagat Fresno, but just five minutes of Googling and we had found—well, maybe not Aureole, but still, half a dozen choices that looked at least passably promising.

Next spot—how to find them? They weren’t downtown, and Fresno seems to sprawl out over about half the San Joaquin Valley. The hassle of charting the course would have been enough, if not to defeat me, then at best to generate an unpleasant half hour of wrong turns, missed exits, and squinting under a flashlight at a wrinkled map.

Today, not a problem. We have a GPS, so we fire up the computer and let the mystery voice tell us where to go. And not to make a long a story of it, things worked just as they should—not once, but twice, or actually three times: one of our choices was closed and we were able to bop on to Plan B without missing a beat.

In short, satisfying, painless, and a thousand times better than the mini bar. For the record: Campagnia is a bit overdone, but passable with a nice wine list. Chef’s Table is way more pretentious than it needs to be: the food was fine, and the wine topnotch (try the Pillar Box Shiraz). Oh, and Echo is closed.

There is a point around here: somehow how things aren’t what they used to be. I’m wondering in particular what this sort of thing does to the lobby restaurant business. Or, come to think of it, to the seemingly fancier places out in the edge of town. Is it truly harder for the one to keep, and easier for the other to get, the customers they want?

[Afterthought-- reservations: in the end, it seems they aren’t a big deal in Fresno. But of course I did have my cell phone—no, strike that, we both had cell phones. Here’s one guy I wouldn’t want to be: the chap in the hotel org whose compensation is a function of those irritating hotel telephone charges.]

Update: I was too hard on Fresno restaurants. Tonight in San Francisco, we dined at a Zagat 23 where the food was no better, and the wine a good deal worse.

Hey, It's aThought (Common Article III Division)

Thoughts while numbed before CNN:

In 1989, American forces played deafening music outside the Papal Nunciaturia in Panama City, purportedly to drive Manual Noriega out of hiding and into captivity. Concede that Nine-Inch Nails might count as torture, in any form. But query, would it be a violation of Common Article III of the Geneva Convention to subject the accused to incessant replays of George Bush Press Conferences? Blah blah stay the course. Blah blah keep America strong. Blah blah a uniter. Blah blah not a divider. Stay the course, hey stay the course. Nu-cu-lar, nu-cu-lar, NU-CU-LAR!

Hey, it’s a thought.

Background: according to this source, the fabled “booming of Noriega” is a bit of an urban myth—evidently at best, a bit of serendipity of which the top brass disapproved and to which it put a stop. Evidently President (the other) Bush thought it “irritating and petty.” Now, as to CNN…

The Three Classes of Pauperdom

Guest-blogger Honoré de Balzac weighs in with an outline of "the three classes of pauperdom" in Paris:

First, there is the poverty of the man who keeps up appearances now but whose future is secure: the poverty of young men, artists and society people who are temporarily embarrassed. The signs of this poverty are only visible to the most practised observer and even then a microscope is required. These people make up the equestrian class of paupers, they will go around in cabs. In the second class of the order are old men who have ceased to care about anything, and who wear the cross of the Legion of Honour over an alpaca coat in June. Theirs is the poverty of old retired people, ageing clerks whose home is at Sainte-Périne, people who are hardly concerned any more about how they dress. Finally, there is the poverty that goes about in rags, the pauperdom of the working class; this is poverty in its most poetical form, admired and painted (especially at carnival time) by Callot, Hogarth, Murillo, Charlet, Raffet, Gavarni, Meissonier and artists generally.

Honoré de Balzac, The Black Sheep 120

(Penguin Paperback ed. 1970)

Comments: we can pass over class one as really not pauperdom at all--the right wing press makes much of this class in arguig that today's poverty problem is exaggerated. Cl,ass two has been greatly reduced by Social Security and Medicare (recall that the old used to be the poorest class in the United States; now they are, by many measures, the richest). Re class three--is there any genre of art that treats them as quaint or diverting, as they seem to have been in Balzac's day?

Note that Balzac is writing in and about the early 19th Century. What other classes of pauperdom do we encounter that Balzac did not (or that he did not notice?)?

From the Best Book I Read Last Year

Rooting around in my hard disk, I found a nice summary extract from Martin Van Creveld's Rise and Decline of the State (1999) (link), surely the best book I read last year. Oddly enough, I seem not to have retained page numbers, but I will add them once I run them down.

“…government and state are emphatically not the same. The former is a person or group which makes peace, wages war, enacts laws, exercises justice, raises revenue, determines the currency, and looks after internal security on behalf of society as a whole, all the while attempting to provide a focus for people’s loyalty and, perhaps, a modicum of welfare as well. The latter is merely one of the forms which, historically speaking, the organization of government has assumed, and which, accordingly, need not be considered eternal and self-evident any more than were previous ones.

The first place to see this particular form of government was Western Europe, where it started developing around 1300 and where the decisive changes took place between the death of Charles V in 1558 and the Treaty of Westphalia ninety years later. Speaking very roughly, and skipping over the many differences that separated various countries, the process worked as follows. Having fought and defeated universalism on the one hand and particularism on the other, a small number of ‘absolute’ monarchs consolidated territorial domains and concentrated political power in their own hands. Simultaneously, in order to wield both the civilian and military aspects of that power, they set out to construct an impersonal bureaucracy as well as the tax and information infrastructure necessary for its support. Once the bureaucracy was in place, its own nature—the fact that the rules of which it consisted could not be arbitrarily violated without risking a breakdown—soon caused it to start taking power out of the ruler’s hands and into its own, thus spawning the state proper.

…the state was originally conceived principally as an instrument for imposing law and order on groups and people. About a century and a half after its birth, however, it met with, and proceeded to appropriate, the thunder of nationalism, thus providing itself with ethical contents. . . .

Unlike any of its predecessors at any other time and place, it is not identical with either rulers nor ruled; it is neither a man nor a community, but an invisible being known as a corporation. As a corporation it has an independent personal. The latter is recognized by law and capable of behaving as if it were a person in making contracts, owning property, defending itself, and the like.

As of the last years of the twentieth century, it is becoming apparent that [this] characteristic of the state—the fact that it has a persona—is [coming to drive the evolution]. In the main, the threat to the state does not come either from individuals or from groups of the kind which exercised the functions of government in various communities at various times and places before 1648. Instead it comes from other corporations: in other words, from such ‘artificial men’ as share its own nature but differ from it both in respect to their control over territory and in regard to the exercise of sovereignty.”

This is still only a summary of what is surely a stimulating piece work, by a scholar with a proven record in military history (his earlier work includes one called The Transformation of War (1991)(link), together with studies of logistic and of command). For a different version, follow this link. A natural companion to Van Creveld's work is Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, A. D. 990-1992 (link).

Meet the Guest Blogger

I spent most of the day in a car so I’ve commissioned a guest blogger—put your hands together in a big Underbelly welcome for French novelist Honoré de Balzac:

Alas! The colonel no longer loved anyone in the world except for one person and that person was himself. His misfortunes in Texas, his stay in New York, a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the very highest level, where the brutality of self-interest reaches the point of cynicism and where a man, fundamentally isolated from the rest of mankind, finds himself compelled to rely upon his own strength and at every instant to be the self-appointed judge of his own actions, a city in which politeness does not exist; in other words, the whole voyage, down to its very slightest details, had developed in Philippe the pernicious inclinations of the hardened trooper.

Honoré de Balzac, The Black Sheep 62

(Penguin Paperback ed. 1970)

It goes on like this. And you thought we had a low opinion of the French. So far as I know, Balzac never set foot in New York. Or in Bedford, New Hampshire either, come to think of it.

From the Bin: The Death of Sherborn Dearborn

From the History of Bedford New Hampshire from 1787 (1903), in a section on “Fatal Casualties, Remarkable Cases of Perservation, etc.” at p. 642:

October 22, 1869—Sherborn Dearborn, aged sixty, was killed by the kick of a horse. He was on his way home from Manchester and stopped at Mrs. Lochran’s house on the plains. The house stood as few rods east of the top of the hill on the road from Manchester. It was afterwards burned. His body was found with his back broken. Word was brought to Mr. F.F. French, who sent Damon Jenkins and John D. Rowe to carry him home. He lived a few days after that. He was a man of great natural ability, but with some irregularities of conduct.

Some irregularities of conduct?

We Read Overheard in New York So You Don't Have To

A New Way Around Male Fear of Commitment

Girl #1: He actually told her he was only dating her because she had cancer?
Girl #2: Yup.
Girl #1: That's such a dumb reason to date somebody.

--Alfangi Spa, 39th & Madison

Overheard by: Emily (link)

Dayan on the Problem Confronting Israel (1956)

More from Avi Shlaim in The Iron Wall, this time an extraordinary insight into the mentality of the first post-independence generation of Israeli leadership. This is a quotation from Moshe Dayan, he of the eye patch, perhaps the most adventurous and very likely the smartest of the crew. Dayan is speaking “at the funeral of one Ro’i Rotberg, a young farmer from Kibbutz Nahal-Oz who was murdered by Arab marauders in April 1956:”

Yesterday morning Ro’i was killed. The quiet of spring morning blinded him, and he did not see the murderers lying in wait for him along the furrow. Let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred for us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.

We should demand his blood not from the Arabs of Gaza but from ourselves. . . . Let us make our reckoning today. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house. . . . Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and await the moment when their hand will be able to reach our blood. Let us not avert our gaze, for it will weaken our hand. This is the fate of our generation. The only choice we have is to be prepared and armed, strong, and resolute, or else our sword will slip from our hand and the thread of our lives will be severed.

Shlaim comments:

Dayan was clearly not insensitive to Arab feelings. He recognized the injustice that his country had inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Arabs. But his very empathy bred deep pessimism concerning the possiblityof an accommodation with them. It was not self-righteousness but the conviction that Israel's survival ws at stake that led him to reject any magnanimity. ...

Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall 101-2 (Paperback ed. 2001)

You Want Thought-Provoking Commentary? Look Someplace Else

Some guys are willing to work just a whole lot harder than I do. Here, for example is a line-by line explication of The Speech. And here is a good takedown of John Yoo, together with, um, what do I count, 18 links to others sharing in the pile-on. But when Darth Vader is your rabbi, it really doesn’t matter, does it? Thanks for both to Michael J.W. Stickings, guest-blogging at The Carpetbagger Report. And here is a summary of the Arab press on the fifth anniversary of you-know-what.

Shlaim on Roads Not Taken

Reading Avi Shlaim’s Iron Wall can be a slog (not unlike Céline infra): you have to care an awful lot about Arab-Israeli to follow the intricate pathway through the moves and counter-moves of political and military episodes running back almost 60 years into the past. But if politics is indeed the slow boring of hard boards, this is exactly what you should do. And Shlaim sets it forth with as much clarity as you could hope for in a topic so dense.

The “Iron Wall” of the title is not just a literary conceit. Rather, it is the idea that

…the Palestinians were a nation and that they could not be expected to renounce voluntarily their right to national self-determination. It was therefore pointless … to hold a dialogue with the Palestinians; the Zionist program had to be executed unilaterally and by force.(598)

Shlaim argues that this posture dominated Israeli public life from (at least) independence in 1948 until (at least) “first the Egyptians, then the Palestinians, and then the Jordanians … recognized Israel’s invincibility” (599) and came to the negotiating table (he is writing in 1999). Shlaim has three noteworthy purposes: one is to write Israeli history unblinkingly, rather than merely as the story of David Ben-Gurion chopping down a cherry tree. A second is to show how this “Iron Wall” policy played itself out. The third is to suggest how there could have been another way—how the history of Israel can be read as a history of Roads Not Taken, of Missed Opportunities.

Reading the early chapters (I’m not finished with it yet), it is almost chilling how often one finds resonance with the current uproar—not neat parallels, but a spooky sort of echo against the current spirit of adventurousness, the sense that with a bit of enterprise we can effect change through the whole Middle East. Another theme—a favorite of mine—is the distinction between (or confusion of) the political and the military—Israel’s (and our own) knack for winning the battle and losing the war. Here is Shlaim on the end of the Suez Crisis in 1956:

The three political aims behind the Sinai Campaign were the overthrow of Nasser, the expansion of Israel’s borders, and the establishment of a new political order in the Middle East. None of these aims was realized. … Despite all the political miscalculations and failures of those who planned the Sinai Campaign, it is their version that became firmly entrenched in the mind of the overwhelming majority of Israelis. The popular perception of the 1956 war in Israel is that it was a defensive war, a just war, a brilliantly executed war, and a war that achieved nearly all of its objectives. (184-5)

Sound familiar?

Presidential Reading

Now that The President has slogged his way through Camus’ Stranger, he might want to tackle another French modern classic. Like this one:

Nous voici encore seuls. Tout cela est si lent, si lourd, si triste… Bientôt je serai vieux. Et ce sera infin fini. Il est venue tant de monde dans ma chamber. Ils ont dit des choses. Ils ne m’ont pas dit grand-chose. Ils sont parties.

That is:

Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad . . . I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They’ve talked. They haven’t said much. They’ve gone away.

Beckett? No, that would have been my first guess, too. But it’s Céline, the opening of Mort à crédit (Edition Gallimard 1952), translated as Death on the Installment Plan (Ralph Mannheim Trans. 1966), a favorite of budget balancers and social-security privatizers everywhere.

Re the summer reading list, link here for an account of how it all (maybe) happened.

No Thanks, I'll Just Work on my Lanyard

From the 2006-7 program of the UC Davis Emeriti Association:

Thursday, January 11, 2007 Dr. Frank Mitloehner--"Dairy Cows and Global Warming"

(Invited)

Now We Are 86...

I’m not sophisticated to deliver a clean link for this, but if you like good-natured mediocre BBC radio comedy (hey, don’t we all) pop over to BBC Radio 4 Comedy here and fire up “Nineteen Sixty-Six and All That.” I particularly liked the bit about literature in the 20s—the Irish gave us Joyces’ Ulysses; the French gave us Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the Americans gave us Eliot’s The Wasteland, and we produced Milne’s Now We Are Six.

How Henry Ford Survived a Depression

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker (link) [via Newmark’s Door (link) {via DeLong (link)}] argues that General Motors is trapped by its dealers, paying the price for decentralization, locked into relationships from which it can’t profit and can’t shake.

It was not always thus. At least by common folklore, Henry Ford used the dealership system to ride out the post-WWI depression. The story is famously retold in John Dos Passos’ great novel:

In 1918 [Ford] had borrowed on notes to buy out his minority stockholders for the picayune sum of seventyfive million dollars.

In February, 1920, he needed cash to pay off some of these notes that were coming due. A banker is supposed to have called on him and offered him every facility if the bankers’ representative could be made a member of the board of directors. Henry Ford handed the banker his hast,

And went about raising money in his own way:

he shipped every car and part he had in his plant to his dealers and demanded immediat5e cash payment. Let the other fellow do the borrowing had always been a cardinal principle. He shut down production and canceled all orders from the supplyfirms. Many dealers were ruined, many supplyfirms failed, but when he reopened his plant,

he owned it absolutely,

the way a man owns an unmortgaged farm with the taxes paid up.

In 1922 there started the Ford boom for president…

John Dos Passos, The Big Money 56

(Washington Square Press Paperback ed. 1961)

The Miseducation of Brad DeLong

I’m a great admirer of Brad DeLong’s blog, but I have a tough time makinge sense of the great glob of bile and spittle that he just landed on Bill Greider (link). Geezers will remember Greider as the author (or at any rate, the amanuensis) of The Education of David Stockman (get yours for $1.96), in which Stockman details to Greider how he discovers that the Reagan fiscal/economic policy was all smoke and mirrors. Among reporters in his generation, Greider (whose politics often strike me as near-looney) is one of the shrewdest observers of humankind. He’s sympathetic, funny—and often devastating, as he was here in this which was for him (as I recall) pretty much of a career-making item.

Apparently (I learn via DeLong) the SEC now believes that Stockman “may have lied” in fronting for a rust-belt auto parts company that later collapsed into bankruptcy (link). I learn also that Greider, now at The Nation, has mounted a sort-of defense (link). It’s actually pretty anodyne stuff. Greider says of Stockman (who has not been formally accused of anything):

I don't know the facts of Stockman's present travail, but I have a hunch he is guilty mainly of excessive optimism, not fraud. When asked, I express sincere sympathy for his plight.

Recalling Stockman’s Washington days, Greider recalls:

His greatest sin … was telling the truth, albeit belatedly. That is one transgression Washington does not forgive.

This strikes me as entirely correct. So far as I can tell, Stockman went into the Reagan administration a true believer. At some point, the scales fell from his eyes. At some later point, he bared his breast to Greider, who rode it into one of the decade’s most amusing bits of political inside baseball.

For this latest apologia, DeLong adds Greider to the post-office wall display headed “Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?” He says:

But there was no truth-telling exercise to collaborate in. Republican Vice President George H.W. Bush knew that Reagan's fiscal policies didn't add up; he and his people coined the phrase "voodoo economics." Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker knew that Reagan's plan made no sense: he called it a "riverboat gamble," meaning an imprudent and unwise throw of the dice.

DeLong thereupon anatomizes four different categories of Reagan partisans. He puts Stockman in group four:

Those who knew that the tax cuts and defense spending increases would unbalance the budget, and thought that the deficits created would put irresistible pressure on congress to do what it would never do otherwise--shrink a social insurance state.

There’s a grain of truth in this categorization, but it utterly fails to capture the essence of Stockman's experience, and Greider's narrative. The point is that Stockman came into the administration with a vision, however misguided, of how to Make Things Work. What spun him –and what he told Greider about—was the discovery that almost nobody in the entourage gave a rat’s patootie about whether it worked or not: they were there for short-term profit and let everything else go hang.

Oddly enough, DeLong doesn’t even identify a category for these: the self-serving liars and hypocrites who made the whole system go. Instead he speaks of

The innumerate and gullible--most of them willfully so--who did not look into assurances that the Reagan administration's plan would balance the budget.

I suppose there were some innumerate and gullible (though “willfully…gullible” skirts dangerously close to incoherence). Yet the truly innumerate and gullible were, for the most part, those in the audience—the voters or the bystanders, who deluded themselves into believing they had a role in it all (I suppose I would include the President himself, floating out there like a plaster Madonna at the front of a Corpus Christi parade). Nobody can rightly call Stockman “innumerate.” He was “gullible”—but not about “the plan.” He was gullible not to anticipate the tsunami of venality (okay, grand theft) that came to roll over him.

Greider says he disclosed “bracing realities”—DeLong says there were no “bracing realities” to disclose. But there were: not about the voodoo-ness of voodoo economics, but about the wholesale knavery that lay behind it. DeLong calls it “he said-she said” journalism. But it is not: it is “he-said” journalism, in that he is describing how one well-intentioned country boy lost his cherry.

If there was an Emmy for missing the point, then for this one, DeLong would be a contender. No wonder I can never understand macro.

Children, Stay In School

Abu Zubaydah, identified as "the first Osama bin Laden henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001," says that yes, he knew Jose Padilla, the American terrorist wannabee.

Mr. Zubaydah ...told his questioners that Mr. Padilla ... believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.

David Johnston, New York Times, here.

The Celebratory Shelf, and Percy's Paradox

Trust Patrick Kurp to come up with something interesting that I’ve never seen before. Here he introduces Alfred J. Appel Jr.

In The Art of Celebration (1992), the Nabokov scholar Alfred J. Appel Jr. proposes that we devote four or five of our bookshelves exclusively to what he calls “the life-affirming, celebratory works of the twentieth century.” Along with recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ruby Braff and Henry “Red” Allen, and the movies of Astaire-Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton, Appel suggests appropriate books:

“Ulysses should occupy a place of honor on the top, shortest Yes Celebratory Shelf, flush left against the varnished wood. Nabokov, a writer whose works I happen to love, should have seven or so inches to himself there, next to Joyce. Hardcover volumes of the collected poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur will be conspicuous for their handsome, durable spines.”

Appel is not suggesting we judge literature with a Happy Meter: Life-affirming, good; Nay-saying, bad. In fact, he admires Kafka while placing him, rightly, on the “No” shelf, probably next to Beckett.

The “celebratory” shelf is a great idea—I must run home and get the hammer. But “yea” and “nay” is more complicated. Joyce and (even more) Nabokov can be among the chilliest writers in the corpus. On the other hand someone (I think it was Walker Percy, of which see infra) pointed out that Kafka’s first readers fell down on the floor laughing, saying – omigawd, he got us to the life. I believe I have heard the same thing re Chekhov.

"Fell down on the floor laughing"--the point here, I think, is what I dub “Percy’s paradox”—“the man on the train who is alienated, and who then reads a book about a man who is alienated, is no longer alienated.” Percy elaborates:

That's the aesthetic reversal, which I noticed way back. It's a curious thing. I don't think enough attention is paid by psychologists or by semioticists to the curious fact that situations which are experienced directly can be painful (or of not much account, or even of not much meaning), but when they are read about or written about, a kind of reversal takes place--and the reader or the writer takes pleasure in it. The pleasure is a fundamental thing, going back to the origins of speech or consciousness …

[Here’s the link.]

Weekend Reading: Wish I'd Written That

We fritter away out time so you don't have to. Go straight here:

What not to do on 9/11:

Those personally affected by these outrages may have their own private memorials. But to hallow the events with repetitious publicity turns a squalid crime into a constantly revitalised political act. It grants the jihadists what they most crave, warrior status. It more than validates terrorism as a weapon of war, it glorifies it. (Full text here)

The press as an echo:

If Bush suffers a major political setback [in November], the media will feel freed up to tear into this war as they have never done before. Again, it will not be a conscious, orchestrated decision -- there will be no covert meeting at which senior editors and producers conspire to declare Iraq an epic failure. But the pack will change direction, as it always does when it smells blood. (Full text here)

What to do before graduate school :

Item 10 on the list: Fire someone, especially someone you like. A commentator adds: The firing should involve someone with a spouse and a baby. (Full list here).

Presidential Humor

As of 5 pm (pst) Friday, Google-blog “ Bush fart jokes” and you get 1,399 hits (for what it is worth, “’Mother Theresa’ fart jokes” gets only nine.)—for an explanation, see link here. I feel no profound impulse to expand that number, but it did set me to wondering. A couple of years back, New York Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr. published First Off the Tee, a study of our Presidents’ golf habits. It was that rarest of publishing phenomena—a journalist’s book that turned out to be more far-reaching than its pretensions.. The publisher billed it as a genial collection of sports anecdotes but it quickly won acceptance as a pretty good study of presidential character (along the way it established, if it did not introduce, the word “billigan”).

It struck me—if we can learn about presidents from golf, can we not learn also from styles of jokes? It still strikes me as a good question. The trouble is, the evidence is remarkably thin: apparently not that many presidents are all that funny. Well: Jack Kennedy gave working evidence of an urbane wit. Woodrow Wilson ditto, perhaps rather more academic (but a lousy golfer). Lyndon Johnson seems to have had a knack for the scabrous one-liner. Ronald Reagan could read the jokes on the prompt card.

But beyond that—what? Richard Nixon as a jokester? Jimmy Carter? Dwight Eisenhower? Oh, give me a break. The evidence suggests that being president and telling jokes just don’t seem to go together.

Not clear how this plays out with other world leaders. Winston Churchill certainly knew how to tell a story but he may be a special case. DeGaulle complained that you couldn’t do anything with a nation that had 200 kinds of cheese. Nikita Khruschev was famous for ‘old Russian proverbs,” some of which he was making on the spot. And one is tempted by the fantasy of a conversation between Henry the K and Mao Zedong.

K: Mr. Chairman, ve vould very much vish you vould vouchsafe…

Mao(with a goofy grin): Confucious say—girl who ride bicycle, peddle it all over town!

Nah, this is getting out of hand.Better to come back closer to come.What if we had a present who enjoyed not so much flatulence as, shall we say, knock jokes?

Knock, knock

Who’s there?

The President.

Right…

No, really…

Do Me a Favor

and go here and vote for my friend Bruce Wolk.

{nb.: there is a ladies' division--they've got their own page.]

By What Warrant

do we assert that the following limerick was fashioned by President Woodrow Wilson:

I sat next to the Duchess at tea--
It was just as I feared it would be:
Her rumblings abdominal
Were simply phenomenal
And everyone thought it was me.

...and while I am at it, let me revivify a couple of my own favorites (not coined by me):

I once knew a man from Poiteau
Whose limericks stopped at line two.

...and:

I once knew a man from Verdun.

In Which I Play the One-Book Meme

Okay, here goes.

1. One book that changed your life:
Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution. Not a great book, I suspect, but a pretty good book, and it got me started on serious grownup history and politics.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
Tolstoi’s War and Peace, which I have always thought too short. I read it first in my late 20s while working in DC; I used to sneak out to Macpherson Square to squeeze in an extra chapter. Read it a couple of years ago with my wife, and I think I may read it again someday soon.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
I think I’ll ask for my one-volume student edition of the Iliad, in Greek with lots of good notes and a built in lexicon. Ought to keep me occupied for a long time. Have told my friends that if I ever get thrown in jail, this is the one they should bring to me. I’ll tell the screws it is a Bible.

4. One book that made you laugh:
Does Byron’s Don Juan count as a book (apparently for Amazon, yes)? The most nearly endlessly satisfying “narrative” (if you can call it that) ever written.

5. One book that made you cry:
Maybe Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, but I was out of college and in an unpleasant marriage at that point, and feeling sorry for myself.

6. One book that you wish had been written:
Hm, too many of them. But here is one book that was written, and did not survive: Leon Trotsky’s history of the Masons. My recollection (from his autobiography, My Life) is that it was a casualty of his escape from Siberia.

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
I suppose it is too easy and predictable to say Mein Kampf, so for variety let me suggest Sound of Music. That Julie Andrews has a lot to answer for.

8. One book you’re currently reading:
Just finishing up T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom—a long slog, but on the whole, worth the effort.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
Well, I keep telling myself that someday I will get round to Charles Doughty’s Travels in the Arabia Deserta. Said to be the most unreadable classic in the English language. I suspect I will not get around to it.

10. Now tag five people:

Allison, Anupam, Crank, Kevin, Toni,

Might Be the Best Econ Blog Comment in Many Months

This might be the best econ blog comment I have read in many months--hoisted from here . I say "might be" because I'm real shaky on micro (my chagrin tinctured by the notion that it just might be a psuedo science anyway). And the commentator is, you will have to concede, more than a tad elliptical in his presentation. Still--an earlier commentator had asked "how many libertarians are there[?]" --with the suggestion that there weren't very many. "Bartlett" is Bruce Bartlett, the renegade Republican who wrote an admirable book with material drawn almost 100 percent from critics on the right. The commentator (a certain "Blissex," otherwise unknown to me) responds:

Well, there are at least two strands of libertarians in the republican party, gun activists and small-government ones. The gun people are actually quite numerous. My impression is that the small-government ones are few and they matter(ed) only as the ideological conscience or figleaf of the party.

Bartlett's problem is that he does not want to talk about the 3rd wing of the party, the business interests.

Because while many small-government libertarians assume that business interests were small-government too, this was a colossal misunderstanding: business interests care a lot not about principles like small government, but about outcomes, so they are against big government only when it benefits someone else, and wholly in favour when it benefits them. And they are far more important than the libertarians because they pay the bills.

Then I thoroughly disagree with, as rather selective and self-serving, his summary of policy in the 70s and 80s:

«[W]hen inflation became a serious problem in the 1970s, the Keynesians really had no good explanation for it or a cure.»

Well, those were as a rule neoclassical Hicksian ''keynesians'' (general equilibrium + liquidity trap), but the explanation was there and the cure was there: It was fairly well known that after the Vietnam War ''gun and butters'' economic policy and the subsequent oil shock inflation was deliberately being let rip to shift the brunt of the adjustment on savers to the benefit of corporate (business and union) interests.

The cure was to stop using inflation to do so, but it was politically impossible for a while.

Contrarily to Friedman's shallow principle, ''inflation is always and everywhere a political phenomenon'' (coinage and seignorage are some of the principal tools of political power) and this was well understood in the 1970s too, doublespeak or not.

«In this intellectual vacuum, libertarian economists like Milton Friedman gained credibility and influence by arguing tight money was needed to stop inflation.«

My impression is that instead when the inflation party had reached their objectives, the anti-inflation party used Friedman as the excuse to return to normal. Volcker's primary instrument was very painfully high nominal (and real) interest rates for years, in other words (investment side) long term demand management to counter inflationary expectations. Money supply followed.

Economists were not asking themselves how to stop inflation; they knew very well. The questions were how create a political climate that allowed for the pain of lowering of inflation, and how to sell it using which figleaf.

«The Keynesians also had little to offer when economic growth slowed...»

Well, those neoclassical Hicksian ''keynesians'' had a full employment general equilibrium model with the one little exception (the liquidity trap), and thus were indeed a bit stumped. Keynes had quite interesting concepts as to why growth happened, and so did Schumpeter...

«This opened the door for the supply-siders, who advocated tax rate reductions to stimulate growth. ...»

But this was just demand management by another means, and the tax-rate excuse was thin, as tax rates even within large bands seem to have little effect. In the 50s the top rate was 90% on incomes above $3m-$5m (depending on which inflation index you use):

http://WWW.IRS.gov/pub/irs-soi/histaba.pdf

seemingly without ill effects, and anyhow with supply-side tax cuts government did not become that small, the deficit just went up.

But there were two types of supply siders: those who thought that a deficit stimulus via lower taxes would succeed where a deficit stimulus via higher spending wouldn't (neither worked much beyond redistributive effects), and the ''micro matters'' supply siders who thought that the brake was not an insufficiently large deficit, but institutional and microeconomic constraints, like excessive government regulation and ownership of industries, which was generating too many positions of rent. For example AT&T was a master at regulatory capture, and was holding back (deliberately) computer networking and technology (consent decree of 1956 and consequences).

The ''micro matters'' supply siders seem to have had a rather greater impact on welfare and growth than the deficitarians whether Hicksian or Lafferian, and that is really a vindication of Keynes (and Schumpeter) and ''animal spirits'' theory.

Bartlett again tries to forget what is uncomfortable for him: just as the Republicans have a business interests faction which is far more important than the libertarian one, supply siders had a ''micro matters'' faction that actually made a lot more sense than the tax-cutting one.

Posted by: Blissex | Sep 6, 2006 4:44:55 AM

The source blog ("Economist's View") is a current favorite. Great for stimulating econ stuff, with a virtually total absence of snide or snarky commentary.Comments to Blissex continue to roll in. They deserve attention in their own right.

He Hasn't Met My Auntie

I'll tell you a Turkish proverb ... They say: 'If you meet a bear when crossing a rotten bridege, call her--dear Auntie.'

Benny Morris, The Road to Jerusalem:
Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews
(I.B. Taurus reprint ed. 2003)

Excessively Restrictive

We’re staying in a rented vacation house—the kind that comes with a set of management instructions magneted to the refrigerator door. Most of them are sensible and helpful (“Barbecue works; be careful”). But I wonder about this departure protocol:

Turn everyone and everything upside down and shake to find all house keys…

This seems excessively restrictive. Considering some of your companions, aren’t there times when, even you had found the house keys, you might want to “turn [them] upside down and shake…”--?

Why They Keep Playing Merry Wives of Windsor at Ashland

We’re at Ashland, Oregon, at the Shakespeare Festival, for some theatre. It’s high-quality decompression for us: a straight shot up the expressway from home, and not much to do when we get here except see some plays and wander around the streets shopping for tchatchkies.

We’ve been doing this for years, and I must say, these guys –the players—maintain a consistently high level of craftsmanship. And there is a lot to be said for repertory companies: you learn to do some stuff when you work together over and over that you can’t do on the fly.

Odd thing, though: I’d say that over the years, one of the things they have been least successful at is—Shakespeare. They do, say, 10 plays a year of which maybe four are Shakespeare himself, the rest other stuff. The Shakespeare is rarely bad, but it is hard to think of any one Shakespeare performance that was ever knock-down wonderful. One possible exception: Henry V with Dan Donohue back in 2000—maybe the best Henry V that I ever saw (and see also on Merry Wives of Windsor below). But so many times you get the sense they are being spooked by it all—uh oh, we are playing Shakespeare, we hear footsteps. They feel they need to clutter it up with stageplay, as if they didn’t trust the text to carry itself.

On the flip side, one thing they’re really good at is farce. This perhaps makes sense. No doubt that farce is hard, in particular because it requires so much coordination, verbal and physical--just the sort of thing a repertory company ought to excel at, and this one does. So also they do well with battle scenes, swordplay.

I get some support for this point as an inference from their choice of plays. They seem to have a weakness for Two Gentleman of Verona--one of Shakespeare’s weakest scripts. But it has a dog, and as the proprietor tells Will in Shakespeare in Love the audience does love a dog (and Ashland has an honorable tradition of stunningly talented dogs).

Another favorite here is Merry Wives of Windsor. To my mind, this is a much-misunderstood play. Shakespeare purists look down their nose at it--no pretty verse. But the point is that Shakespeare, over his career, tried everything. MWW is farce, and played as farce, it can be wonderful—and has been produced at consistently high quality in the Ashland high-quality farce shop.

Afterthought: So far, the only thing we've seen this week is Cyrano de Bergerac with a Richard Howard who, with 18 seasons, must be the grand old man of the company. It's an absurd play and it goes on 'way too long, but Howard is a total pro and this was, I must say, one of the best things he has ever done. As we recall, the first time we saw him, he was the guy who walked buck naked across the stage in Curse of the Starving Class. He was good then. He's matured. He kept his clothes on.

Divided Hearts

Theodore Dalrymple tries (not entirely successfully) to make sense out of his own attitude to Muslims in Britain. He describes a friendly encounter with a Muslim cabdriver, and continues (link):

Despite my liking for the driver as an individual, whom I adjudged sincere in his moderation, I could not entirely disembarrass myself of a residual prejudice against him: He was, after all, a Muslim, and I recognized in myself something discreditable that has become visceral, not under fully conscious control, namely a distrust of more than a billion people because of their religion.

It was not always so. In my youth and young adulthood, I traveled widely in the Muslim world—in the Middle and Far East, Central Asia, and parts of Africa—and I was not aware of any anti-Islamic feeling whatsoever. On the contrary, I saw—superficially, no doubt, for I spoke none of their languages and did not tarry long—many virtues in the people among whom I traveled. They (by which, of course, I mean the men) were usually extremely dignified and very hospitable. I feared for neither my safety nor my possessions while among them. Even in Nigeria, where the people cheerfully said of themselves, “There is no such thing as an honest Nigerian,” the Muslim North was conspicuously more honest than the Christian and animist South. I witnessed a hue and cry in a northern market, in which a thief was chased and then beaten. It was crude and vicious, no doubt, but more effective than, for example, the British police in the suppression of petty crime. Larceny on a grand scale was another thing altogether: The northern politicians were specialists in it. But you could leave your belongings in the middle of a town and find them still there when you returned.

So my prejudice is of recent, not distant, origin. Of course, I had long realized that the political traditions of the Muslim world were very different from those of my own country, and in my opinion inferior to them; but that was true of much of the globe, and extensive travel had taught me that the nature, virtues, and charms of a society were not completely captured by a description of its political institutions. Politics is not all.

The Islamists have changed all that. No doubt that was their intention: They invited, and wanted, a binary view of the world in order to overcome and defeat the half of it that they consider ungodly, evil, and an impediment to perfection on earth, and not coincidentally to their absolute power. Their success has been to instill apocalyptic visions in people who were previously immune to them.

Later, after further exploration of the point, Dalrymple sums up:

There is no doubt that the Islamist strategy is working at the moment. It will destroy the possibility of normal human contact of the kind that inhibits prejudice and mollifies hatred, and sow only suspicion and violence in the hope of attaining a total and final victory after some kind of apocalypse.

But then he concludes (unexpectedly?):

In the end, however, I don’t think the strategy will work—in the modern world, Islam itself is too much of an intellectual nullity, just as Marxism was, for it to triumph. Moreover, diseases tend to decline in virulence as epidemics wane. Short-term, I am pessimistic; long-term, which is perhaps to say after my death, I am optimistic.

Worth a read, even if it doesn't quite parse.

A Frolic of My Own

Off on a frolic of my own for a coupla days. Maybe no action until Friday.

We Are All Little Lee Kwan Yews

There’s a curious little fandango playing out across the blogosphere tonight over what you might call “the problem of the public sphere.” What, exactly can you leave to markets or (to turn the point around) what sorts of functions can you safely entrust to the government.

Regular readers (at least if they read my mind) will recognize this as a favorite of mine. I’ve long thought that differences over the issue are carried on at a level of near-mindless simplicity. We’ve now had at least a generation of “market” ideologues who don’t seem to grasp that a market is a cultural artifact and that there can be markets that function well, and markets that serve as a travesty on the very idea of market. Yet at the same time, there’s a cohort of persistent old lefties who seem never to have given up on their faith in the government as problem-solver—without any suggestion that they ever gave the premise much thought.

The issue burst forth here in a remarkably candid (but predictably articulate) formulation from Brad DeLong of what you might call “the Confucian position.” Brad, it turns out (though this might surprise some regular readers), is an unabashed technocrat (link):

My natural home is in the bipartisan center, arguing with center-right reality-based technocrats about whether it is center-left or center-right policies that have the best odds of moving us toward goals that we all share--world peace, world prosperity, equality of opportunity, safety nets, long and happy lifespans, rapid scientific and technological progress, and personal safety.

Brad came in for a (perhaps predicable) burst of flame from some of his devoted commentators, and somewhat less predicable flaming from Atrios, a high-visibility lefty. Atrios had a tough time containing himself (link):

It's a dangerously wrong view of the world. First, there are absolutely fundamental differences of opinion about the direction of this country which will have tremendous impact on the lives of people. … Those differences of opinion exist throughout society, including in the club of technocrats.

Second, it's a useful conceit to imagine you're above ideology, to plant your feet in a place and call it the center, imagining you have the facts on your side and everyone else is an ideologue, but that's hogwash. Certainly some people are more informed by the facts than others, but that doesn't free them from ideology.

Third, as someone who has spent a reasonable amount of time around the kinds of people DeLong is talking about, I'm not sure I want them running anything. The sensible technocrats haven't exactly had the best track record lately, in part because imagining you're above it helps to isolate you from the consequences of what you're advocating.

Atrios’ contribution has not escaped notice. Take It Personally, channeling Atrios, declares (link) that DeLong’s “is the kind of talk that makes me want to scream. And not just lefties. TigerHawk, who understands himself as an independent-minded conservative, declared “I agree with Atrios,” and muttered “blue moon.” “The whole worldview might work in a different reality,” growled GoodNonsense (link) “but not this one.” Others have chimed in on Brad’s original offering. Max Sawicky (a technocrat if there ever was one, declares (link) “technocrats yes,technocracy no.” And so it goes.

I confess that when I hear this kind of discussion ME usually GO, not because isn’t important, but precisely because it is important, and the level of the discussion is usually so low. Actually it is a bit higher in the current round than sometimes, but the fact remains: there are a thousand thousand nuances on this government/private dichotomy frontier, and it is rare that any discussion of the topic so much as brushes with any of them.

To make the point briefly, when I think public/private, I think “Singapore,” at least as we left it under Lee Kwan Yew—by almost universal agreement, the one smashingly successful Confucian leader in modern times. Lee is a headache for left and right alike. Lefties, in my experience, feel profoundly uncomfortable about Lee. And well they might, though they do so for the wrong reasons. Typically they don’t like his authoritarianism, his nosiness, his infliction of harsh punishment for crime, whatever. Yet I’ve met a fair number of lefties in my time, and there’s scarcely a one of them who doesn’t look in the mirror in the morning and see Lee Kwan Yew looking back—who doesn’t think he could run a benign dictatorship if only fate would give him the task.

Righties are typically less uncomfortable about Lee, although to my mind, they’ve got just as much to be uncomfortable about. Most righties feel on the whole comfortable with Lee: they like the business friendly climate, and they wouldn’t mind getting in a few licks with the paddle themselves. Yet they rarely seem to notice that he undermines almost every but of doctrine that they’ve been preaching since heck was a pup: principles of initiative, of entrepreneurship, of individual freedom, and the like.

Well, so be it. Singapore is a long way away (and I haven’t a clue what has been going on there lately). But the fact remains: this public/private cleavage is one of the elephants in the drawing room—one of those great, lumbering presences that nobody seems to notice. My own guess is that we are all little Lee Kwan Yews at heart at heart, and we all want our freedom of motion (for me, at least, if not for thee). If Brad’s post (and the response) can generate some shrewd inquiry on the topic, I’ll be delighted. But I’m not holding my breath.

Nobody Goes There...

The odd thing is, I understand what this means:

"Jordan is hugely popular ... When something like this happens abroad you inevitably get those who are frightened away. But there is a huge draw to places that are given a bad press because the masses are not there."

--British Tour Operator,

commenting on this morning"s
shooting of tourists in Amman

As Yogi Berra says: "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

Linking to Links

This post is the kind of thing the blogosphere is good for.

Acknowledgements Again

I am a sucker for a good Acknowledgment. Consider this, from the preface to Thomas J. Barfield's magnum opus on the nomads of Central Asia. And do not miss the boffo closer:

I … feel a strong sense of gratitude to those scholars whom I know only through their writings, and upon whose critical foundations this work depends. … One shares in the excitement of fresh discovery and passionate debate coming thorough the sometimes yellowing pages of columns relegated to the quiet recesses of great research libraries. These scholars, whose works have too often lain fallow for long periods (if library circulation cards are a reliable indicator), have been my colleagues in an extremely long-running international seminar. Like many of them, my interest in the topic has been more personal than practical. No grants were requested or received to support the research or writing.

Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier:
Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757
(Blackwell paperback ed. 1992)

Still Attitudinizing

This is good fun in its own right, but there is a meta-story here that nobody seems to have noticed (link here; for the meta-story, see below):

Rival biographer admits hoax Betjeman love letter

Hugh Muir
Monday September 4, 2006
The Guardian

One of the most spirited literary feuds of recent times gained momentum yesterday as the author Bevis Hillier outed himself as the writer of a fake letter published as part of a biography of John Betjeman.

One week after the love letter was exposed as a fake, Hillier is reported to have confessed that he engineered the plot as an embarrassment to his rival AN Wilson. On close inspection, the first letters of each sentence spelt out the words: "AN Wilson is a shit."

Hillier has written his own three-volume biography of Betjeman and is said to have been aggrieved at the status publishers gave to his rival's book. Yesterday, he explained how he employed the vocabulary Betjeman might have used, including words such as "Tinkerty-tonk", to fool his rival and to take his revenge.

"I wanted the acrostic love letter to spell out 'AN Wilson is a shit' and then built sentences around that," he told the Sunday Times. "I also needed to ensure it seemed valid."

Animosity between the two was heightened by Wilson's review of the second volume of Hillier's work. "This is a hopeless mishmash of a book," he wrote in 2002. "Some reviewers would say it was badly written, but the trouble is, it isn't really written at all. It is hurled together." In 2004 Wilson also wrote a newspaper article which was seen as an attack on Hillier. "How utterly pitiable to be some old bachelor in a Hiram's hospital, smock-clad like a pauper in the reign of Henry VIII, dripping resentment like the dottle from a smelly churchwarden's pipe, and with so little in his life that he has to worry his sad old head about a book review," he said.

Hillier told the Sunday Times that advance publicity for Wilson's book left him enraged. "When a newspaper started billing Wilson's book as 'the big one', it was just too much," said Hillier, 66.

The fake letter, which was sent to Wilson two years ago from Roquebrun, France, appeared to come from a woman called Eve de Harben, who enclosed what she said was a passionate love letter apparently written by Betjeman in 1944 to Honor Tracy, a wartime work colleague. De Harben said she had been passed the letter by her father, an old friend of Tracy. Wilson put the letter in his book at the end of the chapter entitled "Betjeman at War".

Meta-Story: this is a lot like the plot of Angus (sic) Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which revolves around a hoax perpetrated to embarrass a famous man. Plot (spoiler) details here. You see stuff like this on Masterpiece Theatre, you think they are just overdoing it for the American audience. But no, they really do operate in this bitchy, vindictive, houthouse manner. Thanks again, Joel

Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

There’s a curious and perhaps poignant story today in the (London) Telegraph, showcased by Arts & Letters (link here). It showcases an old (well—72) former schoolmaster, squeezed out 22 years ago from a headmastership in Bradford—“his crime” (as the Telegraph acidly brands it) “daring to criticize multiculturalism.” The Telegraph details:

Mr Honeyford thought that schools such as his own, the Drummond Middle School, where 95 per cent of the children were of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, were a disaster both for their pupils and for society as a whole. He was a passionate believer in the redemptive power of education, and its ability to integrate people of different backgrounds and weld them into a common society. He then became notorious for, among other things, his insistence that Muslim girls should be educated to the same standard as everyone else.

All very well, but why bring it up now? Because, as the Telegraph declares, he was “finally vindicated” last week –“the same liberal establishment that had professed outrage at his views quietly accepted that he was, after all, right.”

Translated: Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary made a speech, publicly questioning the multiculturalist that, for so long, have acted almost as a test of virtue among ‘right-thinking people:

In our attempt to avoid imposing a single British identity and culture, have we ended up with some communities living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds between them?

There are so many cross-currents here it s hard to get a grip on all of them. The Telly is surely right that the ground is shifting in Britain on relationships with immigrant/ethnic communities (although wouldn’t it be better to say “the former liberal establishment?”)

Anyway, it pretty much unravels from there: the Telly suggests that’s all smoke and mirrors, a flim-flam—but then suggests that we’re all getting culturally integrated anyway. And as if to confuse matters completely, the Telly goes so far as to say that the problem wasn’t the message at all, only the “tone.”

So the point is—uh, I forget exactly. But the interesting part is: this is the Telly. We Anglophiles tend to think of it (remember it) as the last bastion of empire, Union Jack, John Bull, four feathers, Englishmen never will be slaves yadda yadda. Now we have one old guy with early stage Parkinson’s, listening to the cricket and watching his wife work in the garden (the story says he is “understandably bitter,” but none of the quotations support that view). From the byline, we gather the Telly put five reporters on the story. This is the best they can do?

From the Bin: The New York Aristocracy

Edith Wharton in her memoirs apologizes, more or less, for having mocked old New York:

The readers (and I should doubtless have been among them) who twenty years ago would have smiled at the idea that time could transform a group of bourgeois colonials and their republican descendants into a sort of socials aristocracy, are now better able to measure the formative value of nearly three hundred years of social observance: the concerted living up to long-established standards of honour and conduct, of education and manners. The value of duration is slowly asserting itself against the welter of change, and sociologists without a drop of American blood in them have been the first to recognize what the traditions of three centuries have contributed to the moral wealth of our country. Even negatively, these traditions have acquired, with the passing of time, an unsuspected value. When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by a youthful palate; and I should like to atone for my unappreciativeness by trying to revive that faint fragrance.

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)

Lost Boys of Polygamy

Honest, I did not--do not--have the intention of turning this into a polygamy blog, but as I've said before, I am interested in (unnerved by) the problems of a society with a surplus of unattached males. I've made the point that this is one important consequence of polygamy, and I've gone so far as to imply that I am the only one who cares about the issue.

Silly me.

Silly me II.

Silly me III.

Optional bonus arranged-marriage joke:

Roman pagan woman to rabbi: so, your god created the world in just six days. So, what did he do after that?

Rabbi: he arranged marriages. Believe me, lady, it is not as easy as it looks.

How to Win a War

Reading Thomas Ricks’ hypnotic Fiasco (2006) removes all doubt that a pivotal moment in our millennium was that point in the Spring of 2003 after the fall of Baghdad when time stood still as the Iraqis waited to see how the Americans would consolidate their victory. And the message was—nothing. Not a thought, not an idea, not a clue of what to do, or how to do it, or indeed that there was anything that needed to be done.

As anyone can see today, this was a disaster from which so many other calamities followed. And completely avoidable: armies have been governing conquered cities as long as there have been armies. The Americans did it a hundred times in the wake of World War II.

It isn’t easy: the Chinese say you can conquer a country on horseback, but you can’t govern from there. But it can be done and for failure to do it, the price is high. The Americans appear not even to have grasped there was a problem.

There are all kinds of ways they might have learned. But here is one: in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Anchor ed. 1991), T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) tells how he and his companions faced the problem of conquest in Damascus at the end of another war:

We passed to work. Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into terms of peace. We had to save some of the old prophetic personality upon a substructure to carry that ninety per cent of trhe population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must depend. …

Quickly [the Arab leaders] collected the nucleus of a staff, and plunged ahead as a team. History told us the steps were humdrum: appointments, offices, and departmental routine. First, the police. A commandant and assistants were chosen: districts allotted: provisional wages, indents, uniforms, responsibilities. The machine began to function. Then came a complaint of water-supply. The conduit was foul with dead men and animals. An inspectorate, with its labour corps, solved this. Emergency regulations were drafted.

The day was drawing in, the world was in the streets: riotous. We chose an engineer to superintend the power-house, charging him at all pains to illuminate the town that night. The resumption of street lighting would be our most signal proof of peace. It was done, and to its shining quietness much of the order of the first evening of victory belonged: though our new police were zealous, and the grave sheikhs of the many quarters helped their patrol.

Then sanitation. The streets were full of the debris of the broken army, derelict carts and cars, baggage, material, corpses. …

Next, a fire-brigade. The local engines had been smashed by the [retreating] Germans, and the Army storehouses still burned, endangering the town. Mechanics were cried for; and trained men, pressed into service, sent down to circumscribe the flames. Then the prisons. Warders and inmates had vanished from them together. … The citizens must be disarmed—or at least, dissuaded from carrying rifles. A proclamation was the treatment, followed up by good-humoured banter merging into police activity. This would effect our end without malice in three or four days.

Relief work. The destitute had been half-starved for days. A distribution of the damaged food from the Army storehouses was arranged. After that food must be provided for the general. The city might be starving in two days …

The routine feeding of the place needed the railway. Pointsmen, drivers, firemen, shopmen, traffic staff had to be found and re-engaged immediately. Then the telegraphs: the junior staff were available: directors must be found, and linesmen sent out to put the system into repair. The post could wait a day or two … The currency was horrible … .

Taken all in all, this was a busy evening.

So Lawrence, pp 649-51. You can get a used copy on Amazon for $7.50. The subtitle is “A Triumph.”

Another New Blog

Did not know until today that another group of friends of mine have their own blog. On the well-established principle of cronyism, they will go on th link list, first chance I get.

Fn: Done.

Orgel on Getting It and Not Getting It

Someone has said that the job of the critic is to Get It, and the great failure of the critic is Not To Get It. Prof. Stephen Orgel, introducing Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, considers the obstacles that face audiences and critics as they try to figure out just what sort of play it is. The First Folio characterized it as a "comedy." John Dryden considered Winter’s Tale (along with Measure for Measure and Love’s Labour’s Lost) and concluding that these plays

Were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least, so meanly written, that the Comedy neither caus’d you mirth, nor the serious part your concernment.

Later, in the 19^th Century, as Orgel recounts, the Irish critic Edward Dowden found a home for Winter’s Tale (along with Pericles, The Tempest and Cymbeline) as a “romance.”

Orgel observes:

Dowden’s generic ploy undoubtedly enabled criticism to see the interrelations of these four plays more clearly, and probably served to disarm the most obvious rationalistic objections to their action.

Orgel also cautions:

The new genre, however, has proved as obfuscatory as it has been enlightening; various attempts to move beyond the circularity of the definition, refine its terms, establish the genre within a tradition, have revealed a good deal about the history of romance, but perhaps nothing so much as its ultimate inadequacy as a critical category for Shakespearean drama.

Still, as Orgel pithily remarks, “the creation and refinement of artistic categories has been one of the primary functions of criticism …”

Source: Stephen Orgel, ed., in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Winter’s Tale 2-3 (1996).

Rainbow Coalition

Mike Boyer at FP : “At the next [Congressional] immigration hearing, call … Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S.commander in the Middle, to testify. Ask him if he could fight the wars in without the 33,000 non-U.S. citizens currently serving in the military.” Boyer also points to a new study that shows that Hispanic soldiers are doing the dying in Iraq.

Fine as far as it goes, but if he wants to understand the American military as a rainbow coalition, he might look at the resumes of the generals themselves. Just as a quick review, consider: retired Gen. John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff (Georgian/Polish—came to Peoria IL when he was 16); the present chairman, General Peter Pace (“born in … to Italian-American parents”) General Anthony Zinni (“the son of Italian immigrants); General Eric Shinseki (“the first Asian-American four-star general"), Manila-born Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (a Filipino whose father endured the Bataan death march); Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. , (the “highest-ranking Hispanic” in the military). And, of course, Gen. John (“the mad Arab”) Abizaid himself.

Afterthought.: What’s so surprising here? It’s natural to find the military as an unlocked door on the pathway to upward mobility.