Genealogy Bleg

Here's an invitation to give me some free knowledge/advise on an issue of genealogy.  I've done a bit of desultory inquiry into the particulars about my ancestors though I have to admit that I haven't worked that hard at it.

Anyway, the topic is occupations, particularly labor, particularly skilled labor.  Start with my father's family. They were hill-country Yankees from Central New Hampshire, i.e., in and around Newbury.  I've more or less assumed they were farmers (what else was there?)  though I do remember being told that my father's own father was a shoe worker. And by all accounts, a successful one.  It is said that he wore a white shirt to work--same shirt all week different collar each of six days.  My father, who had modest white-collar (!) jobs once told me that his father the shoe worker probably earned more money (inflation adjusted) in the 20s than he, my father, earned in the 50s.

Meanwhile my mother's family were Swedish immigrants.  Her mother's parents (my great-grandparents) fetched up in Rhode Island a bit before 1870.  Rhode Island?  An odd place for a Swedish immigrant?  The thing I heard when young was "well, we knew people there."   But I think I may have a better answer: velvet mills.  From what I read, there were indeed mills for the production of velvet in that part of the world.   Pressing out into uncharted territory, I gather that the manufacture of velvet was a high-skill occupation.  I'm, wondering if it might have been the kind of trade for which the Americans actually recruited--in the sense of "paid the freight of"--European immigrants.  Actually, the Swedish GGF died after just a few years, but the family seems to have held onto a modest respectability notwithstanding.

This version puts both my Yankee grandfather and my Swedish great-grandfather in factory jobs where they made pretty good money.   I once said "artisan labor," but I don't think that would be right.   Not artisans but I gather there were some factory jobs where you needed reasonably skilled factory hands, as distinct from artisans.

Can anyone enlighten  me further?  I know that most genealogy is fantasy and I know that right now I am spinning threads out of my own gizzard, but I'd be delighted to pin down a more granular account if anybody can offer one.

What it Was About Herblock

I watched last night a few minutes of the HBO soaper on Herblock, the legendary Washington Post cartoonist.  But then I flipped it off so I wouldn't wake up and find the set still yammering at me at 3 am.  On my brief exposure, I'd say the director was hustling for the Academy Award in "bland," and Hank Steuver's excellent WaPo review (which I just now saw) confirms all my suspicions.

Or at least, I must like being the lonely dissenter on this sort of thing.   Because so far as I can tell, I am the only person who always thought Herblock vastly overrated as a cartoonist, as a humorist, as a Washington mover and shaker.  Well: only mus be too strong a word.  I'm sure that there are cadres of truculent nay-sayers out there in the boonies who, if they ever heard of Herblock at all, would or did consign him to the hellfires appropriate for the chardonnay-sipping Bilderberg cabal.   What I meant, of course, was the only nice person (or nice-person wannabee) among those who wore their invisible Herblock medallion as a badge of honor.

Honor, yes, but more: the point is that for a couple of generations of Washington elites Herblock was a badge of identity a not-so-secret handshake, a sign that you were one of the club.  For them, "did you see Herblock?"  was like ee cummings yelling to his neighbor Djuna Barnes across Patchin Place in the morning to make sure she was really still there.  Yes, I am still there, slugging it out, we can continue to fight the good fight..

You can get the point when you reflect on the fact--I suspect nobody mentioned this in the documentary--that Herblock was no more than moderately talented.  He could do deft and economical sketches, especially of children: I sure wish I could do that.  But his villains were dreary, unimaginative and lead-footed.  Some of his cartoons were genuinely funny but many--most?--were predictable.  Almost never did he surprise.  And to suggest that he  had a "signature style" was another way of saying he pretty much got stuck in a 30-year rut.

What he did have--I gather Lewis Black made the point--was concision.  It's hard to think of anybody who could soundbyte an opinion with more celerity-anybody more successful in defining a political figure the way Herblock did to McCarthy, Johnson, Nixon, even Clinton  And this may be the clue to his peculiar kind of popularity: Herblock was the busy man's guide to Right Thinking.  You really never have time enough for this sort of thing: you have places to go, people to see.  You need someone to give you the memo on the Topic of the Day, and to keep you on board with Received Opinion.  

Stuever remarks on the air of nostalgia that hangs over the whole project, as if for a more civilized, more gentlemanly time.  Could be that.  Could be that what we miss is the  very idea of Received Opinion:  that set of beliefs and commitments generated by the  old invisible choir--the choir itself that  network of deep thinkers and glitterati who drank and rutted and chatted together and told us all where we stood.  If ever there was a central node on this transmission line, it was Herblock.  Well, we could have done a lot worse.

Stuff I Did Not Know about the Brothers D

I lived through the Eisenhower/Dulles years--some of the time, in Washington itself.  But here are some things I never grasped until today:

• John Foster Dulles was the savage foe of everything he was a savage foe of, yet he exposed his neck to the thuggish Joe McCarthy, and why?   Apparently because he remembered how Woodrow Wilson rebuffed Congress and paid for it with the loss of his entire program, perhaps even his life.  John Foster was determined not to make the Wilsonian blunder. He knunckled under to McCarthy because he remembered Wilson.

• Allen Dulles as head of the  CIA may have made more mischief than John Foster as Secretary of State.  Foster bloviated; Allen sent in spies.  Yet Allen was not a clever man; he had no aptitude for analysis and no fully-developed world-picture.  He just loved gossip and intrigue.

• Henry Luce the publisher-potentate  and Allen operated on a common premise: if the guy in the field reported something contrary to what you believe at your desk at home, fire the guy in the field. 

• True that Dwight Eisenhower as President sent no American forces into battle.  But he thought coups against foreign governments were okay, presumably because the ones who got hurt were the other guys'.

Such is what I glean from The Brothers Dulles by Stephen Kinzer.  More anon.

It's Not Even Past

Remember the old old South with brave hearts and fair ladies, with grateful, dutiful slaves and Jeanie with the Light, Brown Hair?  No, neither do I. Well then, remember the old South, with sharecropping and lynching where pellagra makes you scrawny? 

Remember how hard it was to throw that all away:

[S]elf-satisfied, complacent. They will not be diverted from their smugness, their unwillingness to look critically at what they are, with the result that throughout their history anyone who has attempted to point out to them the extent to which they are being used and manipulated for the benefit of those in power has been unable to get anywhere. Conversely, those who have flattered their self-esteem and confirmed them in their prejudices have been able to manipulate them to vote and act contrary to their own economic and political interests. ... [T]he average Southern white refused to recognize the divergence between his interests and those of the very wealthy, complacently preferring things as they were to a fairer share of the benefits of government, and allowing himself to be easily beguiled into voting his prejudices instead of his economic welfare.

 No?  Well then, remember the new South that put all the old stuff behind us?  Where blacks would gain from the new industry and industry would gain from desegregation and new-age carpetbaggers like Newt Gingrich didn't care about the burden of history because they weren't there and didn't want to look back?

Remember--Oh hell. Check:  Poverty.  Obesity.  Divorce. Disconnected youth.  Death of the American Dream.

Remember what Faulkner said about the past in the South: It's not even past.

BenWhiteGhaziWaterGate

Listening to the incessant drumbeat of right-wing chatter over Ben Ghazi--and observing how little it seems to have done so far to discredit Hillary--I came to wonder how this current episode might compare with the (equally ineffectual?)  obsession over Whitewater back in the Bubba administration: are talk shows comparing Ben Ghazi to Whitewater?  

Answer: apparently not.  Sporadic Googling over the past few days show only a few--and these mostly random and haphazard--references drawing the parallel in cable-land.  I did, however, learn that in high school basketball, Whitewater swamped Clinton 44-28.

Little Propane Tank in the Big Woods

The Wichita Bureau transmits an update from the local stringer up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin:

Well, the Governor declared a state of emergency in WI on Saturday night:  All of the counties and townships are setting up warming places for those who are running out of Propane and/or money.  In September the cost was $1.40/unit, by last Thursday it had risen to $3.50/ unit in EC, on Friday it went to $4.50/unit, and today it went up over five dollars.  We have a real bad week coming and it is going to be interesting.

Wichita grumbles in response: "My suggestion was to burn Republicans – they’re in oversupply"  But to be fair, he has to spend his days in the free state of Sam Brownback.

 

Update:  Wichita adds:

Trans-Canada pipeline blew up last night near Winnipeg. Going to be mighty cold. Gas company calling people in EC to turn down temps in house one at a time. 

Nostalgia Note:  Mrs. Buce began her professional career in Eau Claire.  She likes to tell stories about driving to work on tires that had frozen to the pavement. Ka THUMP ka THUMP.

 

 

Are You Ready for Teddy?

Joel suggests that the Davos powwow is Ted Talks for rich guys.  Maybe, but I thought Davos was about exchanging business cards and schmoozing--and that listening to talks (you could arrange it through YouTube) was merely the maguffin.  Like speed-dating.

Joel offers a riposte: remember Grossinger's, the crown jewel of the Borscht Belt vacation hotel circuit.  Joel reports that on "singles weekends," Minnie Grossinger deliberately short-staffed the check-in desk so the queues would build up and people would have to schmooze.  So, Davos as Grossinger's writ large.

At least I guess.  I've never been to Davos.  Or Grossinger's. Anyway, Grossinger's went bankrupt. 

And now that I think of it, I have never successfully completed listening to a Ted Talk.

The Two Minds of Robert Gates

At the end of his remarkable memoir on his time as Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates poses a question for himself:

Treated better for longer than almost anyone in a senior position I could remember during the eight presidencies in which I served, why did I feel I was constantly at war with everybody, as I have detailed in these pages? Why was I so often so angry? Why did I so dislike being back in government and in Washington?

--Gates, Robert M (2014-01-14). Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Kindle Locations 10314-10317). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Gates offers his own answer: "It was because, despite everyone being 'nice,' getting anything of consequence done was so damnably difficult even in the midst of two wars."  Fair enough, although I can offer him a consolation: however "damnably difficult" these encounters may have been to live through, still the recounting of them is precisely what makes his memoir so fascinating.  Yet, while I don't reject his own analysis, I think I can offer a further explanation: I think one reason he found it all so "damnably difficult" is that he was constantly at war with himself.

Review the evidence.  On any soundbyte divide between hawks and doves, Gates counts as a hawk.   He thought it important to "stay the course" (ugh) in both Afghanistan and Iraq: he felt certain that we had a constructive role to play in rebuilding each country (which we, one might add, had played so great a role in destroying in the first place).  He admires and largely trusts the military leadership.  And presses more than once his view that both  that both Bush and Obama got the big decisions right.

Yet he is the most cautious of hawks.  He's concerned almost to the point of obsession with the well-being of the troops: he takes almost every casualty as his personal responsibility.  Repeatedly he raises the question of what will happen next?  Can we do this?  Can afford not to do it?  Are we doing it in the right way?

After a while, you begin to see a larger theme.  Gates does say he feels that Obama didn't have his heart in the Afghan War (indeed, this is about the only thing that most reviewers want to quote).  Yet in time, you can see that Gates is at best ambivalent about it himself.   He doesn't want us to leave Afghanistan until he has done what we can to establish a secure an orderly nation.  Yet here is Gates himself, writing on what he saw in 2010 in the runup to the Afghan elections: 

Embassy polling showed that in 2005 about 80 percent of Afghans saw us as allies and partners; by summer 2009, after nearly eight years of war, that was down to 60 percent. As I thought about the tipping point, it seemed to me we had several vulnerabilities with the Afghan population. One was civilian casualties; every incident was a strategic defeat, often caused and always manipulated by the Taliban and then magnified by Karzai. Another was our thoughtless treatment of the Afghans in routine encounters, including U.S. and coalition military vehicles barreling down the roads scattering animals and scaring people. We often disrespected their culture or Islam and failed to cultivate their elders. We collaborated with Afghan officials who were ripping off ordinary citizens. In Kabul and all over the country, we and our coalition partners, as well as nongovernmental organizations, far too routinely decided what development projects to undertake without consulting the Afghans, much less working with or through them on what they wanted and needed. Was it any wonder that Karzai and others complained they had no authority in their own country? Or that even reasonably honest and competent Afghan officials got no respect from their fellow citizens? For all our hand-wringing and hectoring about corruption, we seemed oblivious to how much we were contributing to it, and on a scale that dwarfed the drug trade. Tens of billions of dollars were flooding into Afghanistan from the United States and our partners, and we turned a blind eye or simply were ignorant of how regularly some portion was going to payoffs, bribes, and bank accounts in Dubai. Our own inspectors identified how lousy— or nonexistent— U.S. government controls were. From Karzai on down, Afghans had to shake their heads at our complaints about their corruption when elements of the American government (and almost certainly a number of our closest allies) were paying off them and their relatives as agents and to secure their cooperation. Hillary Clinton and I repeatedly objected to this contradictory behavior by the United States, but to no avail.

Gates, Robert M (2014-01-14). Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Kindle Locations 6513-6522). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

This is a damning indictment, not so?  And it is really nothing new, yes?  Gates (channeling Fred Kagan)  makes a point of insisting that "We're Not the Soviets in Afghanistan."  That is probably true; it is equally true that we aren't the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanking.  We're full of good intentions.  Yet at least since Vietnam and certainly since Iraq, we've piled up an abundance of evidence to tell us that we really don't know how to play this game--that, despite the best efforts of the best military leadership, we wind up wreaking the same kind of havoc and generating the same kinds of resentments that we tell ourselves we want to avoid.

Update:  moments after hitting "post," I ran across this.

"Best Job the Girl Ever Had"

Now this:

If a single career woman is not  making her age times $1,000 in annual salary by age 30, she should either change careers or marry a career man making $80,000 or better and become a wife and mother. And then live comfortably and afford one additional child for each $20,000 per year he makes over $80,000.

--Attributed to one "Barbara Greenlee, B.S., R.N., ship's nurse, Kauai, Hawaii."  Reprinted in Tom Parker, Rules of Thumb 2, 1 (1987).  The reader is invited to consider how, if at all, the paragraph might be amended to account for current conditions.  For extra credit, estimate how long before 1987 the advice would have made sense.  For the grand prize, explain why the author didn't just say "$30,000" instead of "age times $1,000 in annual salary by age 30."

The New World of Subway Romance

My friend the Crank is a-flutter over the fact that Kindle readers appear to be sopping up Mein Kampf.  Apparently part of the point is that since it's Kindle nobody knows what you are reading, so what the hey.  But this suggests a curious twist in the tradition of underground flirtational literacy.  Used to be that you could pretty easily strike up a conversation based on your neighbor's dust jacket.  It was also a neat sorting mechanism: go for the one with Erica Jong''s Fear of Flying, we would have said; give Mary Daly a bye.

Others have lamented that these days you can't lure in anybody because nobody knows what is behind the grey boards.   But how about "I see you have a Kindle!   So are you enjoying your taste of Hitler?"

My Accounting Students Need More Kierkegaard

I think the toughest thing to sell to the students who pick up a smidgen in my finance class is that it's only history: accountants are great at telling you where things came from or where they went to; they are no better than the rest of us t assessing where they are going.   Or, as the (other) melancholy Dane said:

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

Soren Kierkegaaard, Journal Entry, 1843.

Bedtime Reading: When all else Fails ...

When all else fails, try the Duc de Saint-Simon.  There's nothing quite so cozy as tucking down with the Court of the Sun King.  It might even put you to sleep, but with luck, you'll come across something really entertaining along the way:

Chamillart was appointed in the place of Barbezieux, as Secretary of State; and wanted to give up the Finance, but the King, remembering the disputes of Louvois and Colbert, insisted on his occupying both posts. Chamillart was a very worthy man, with clean hands and the best intentions; polite, patient, obliging, a good friend, and a moderate enemy, loving his country, but his King better; and on very good terms with him and Madame de Maintenon. His mind was limited and; like all persons of little wit and knowledge, he was obstinate and pig-headed— smiling affectedly with a gentle compassion on whoever opposed reasons to his, but utterly incapable of understanding them—consequently a dupe in friendship, in business, in everything; governed by all who could manage to win his admiration, or on very slight grounds could claim his affection. His capacity was small, and yet he believed he knew everything, which was the more pitiable, as all this came to him with his places, and arose more from stupidity than presumption—not at all from vanity, of which he was divested. The most remarkable thing is that the chief origin of the King's tender regard for him was this very incapacity.

Duc de Saint-Simon (2012-05-16). Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency - Complete (Kindle Locations 3226-3234).  . Kindle Edition.   Who--Andre Gide?--said that the less we respect Saint-Simon as an historian, the more we admire him as a novelist?

Welcome, Browser Links...

Yes, that Browser.  Also those from Equitable Growth.  As I've said before, stick around, there's pie.  

I see you came for the Bob Gates post. That's fine, but I've done better stuff than that. Feel free to explore.

"Oh Listen, They're Playing Our Song!"

Overheard at Chez Buce.  The subject was the music of our youth.

--You remember Ralph Flanagan?
--Who?
--Ralph Flanagan.  Big band.
--Never heard of him.
--Oh you remember.  He was big the year I was a senior in high school.
--I guess I was too young.
--Sammy Kaye, Blue Barron, Alvino Rey.
--Well I remember Sammy Kaye.
--Flanagan  has a Wiki page--oh wait:

As of August 19, 2010, Ralph Flanagan and his Orchestra were listed by EMI Music as a missing royaltor, which means that EMI have lost contact with the estate of Flanagan and his heirs and band members, and that royalty checks are being returned to the record company by the Post Office.

 Fame is fleeting.  Whereupon we cracked a bottle of bubbly and fired up a Nat King Cole CD.    Seemed to be some kind of bootleg from Mexico, with cha cha cha.

Footnote: why are so many of these big band guys from Ohio?  Flanagan was from Loraine.  Sammy Kaye was from Lakewood.    Blue Barron, Cleveland. Guy Lombardo came from London, Ontario, just across Lake Erie.   Alvino Rey was born in Oakland but the family moved back to Cleveland when he was two.  Evidently they wanted to guarantee him a career in big bands.

Slow Boring of Hard Boards: Gates, Shultz, Acheson And the Art of the Political Memoir

I'm barreling through Robert Gates' much-hyped memoir of his tour as secretary of defense under two Presidents and they are right, it is a delight--one of the very best memoirs of actual governing that I've ever read (although maybe I need to read more such).    It is also, be it said, not remotely that farrago of political gamesmanship that the prince of courtiers, Bob Woodward, described in his first-out-of-the-box Washington Post review a couple of weeks back--why anybody still takes that guy seriously is beyond me.

It is, as many have noted, a remarkably unbuttoned affair, with a lot more blunt judgments than you usually get in this king of book.   I'd guess, following  Fred Kaplan, that it sounds a lot like an insurance policy by a guy who wants to guarantee that no one will ever invite him back into pubic office again.  Yet cherry-picking can give a sadly distorted impression.  Really, the thrust, the heft of the book lie not so much in the sharp judgments but in the rich and densely textured account of what it is to be a cabinet secretary, juggling a trunk full of hot knives every day for something like four years.  And even as he pitches his barbs, he restrains himself from adding any that aren't necessary to his story.    He makes it clear, for example, that he felt the "occupation phase" of the Iraq war was a major policy error, and that he has little or no use for the Obama domestic agenda. But neither is central to his story here so he doesn't waste any ink on them.   It is, in any event, the kind of book you would want every one to read before they took up a position of such trust and responsibility--except that if you did, the chances are that all the people you really want on the job would run yelping for the door.  As homework for the beginning office holder, I'd rank it pretty close to  what I suspect is the most instructive  book I read in the last year--James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy.  Taken together, they provide a chastening lesson in what you are up against when you try to accomplish anything in public administration.   Or perhaps it is the a bare third behind The Power Broker, Robert    massive (perhaps overlong) biography of Robert Moses.  Either way, that's tough company.

Reading Gates' book did set me to thinking: exactly how many public-service memoirs actually teach you anything, as distinct from just presenting a facade of self-justification, together with the settling of old scores?  My search set may be small, but I can think of only two others: one, George Shultz' Turmoil and Triumph about his years in the Reagan administration. There is a slight air of special pleading in the Shultz book.  Which is no wonder: after the train wreck that was Iran contra, there was enough finger-pointing and blame shifting to fill a fairly large battleship.  Shultz wants us to know it wasn't his idea and I am pretty sure he wins that argument. But win or lose, there is so much more of "what we did and how we did it" that it belongs on anyone's list.  Side note: Gates plays a walk-on role in Shultz's memoir, in his avatar as presenter of the CIA view on the Soviet Union; Shultz wasn't impressed.  I suppose there is more on this in an earlier Gates book about the CIA, which I haven't read.

The other belongs almost on a  list by itself: Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation. To call it a memoir almost obscures  its real virtue: as the title suggests, Acheson really was present at the creation of the post-World-War-II world: it is no exaggeration to say he wrote the first great history of the Cold War.   It's also a joy as a piece of prose exposition in a way that Shultz and Gates really are not. Both Shultz and Gates are clear, concise and carefully argued. Acheson is all of these but he is also saturnine, elegant and funny.  Seems we don't get that any more.

Which reminds me of one other item that might qualify for this list, although it isn't quite on topic. I mean the Autobiography of Abba Eban, in which he gives his unforgettable account of the founding of the State of Israel, which he saw from his peculiar vantage point as Israel's face in the United Nations.   Even more than Acheson, Eban is both writer and actor: I think it's fair to say that Eban's presentation determined for a generation the public view of Israel.   Gates can't claim that kind of distinction, partly because that was never his job.  He very likely was, however, for good or ill the most effective Secretary of Defense ever,  and he's written a book that proves it.

Followup:  For an interesting contrary view, go here.  For a full-scale bill of particulars, go here.  Both of these pieces aim their heaviest fire at Gates' earlier career and his misguided appraisal of the Soviet Union. I think Cole overdoes it

Starbucks: And a-One and a-Two

I'm in  the back corner at Starbucks now, within earshot of a table full of people in matching black shirts. Nuns?  No, mixed sex.  Mussolini street thugs?  No, far too polite.  Oh, right--Starbucks staff, no maybe the shift leaders, getting instruction from HQ on --well, I think on how to orchestrate, no choreograph, the intricate array of to-ing and fro-ing that seems to be built into the Starbucks model,.  It sounds like some kind of multipolar maximization problem, like a game of Oregon Trail, where the ultimate commandment is never ever let the customer walk away because the queue is too long or (just as bad) roll on by because the drive-thru line looks clogged.

I'm trying not to listen--I've got work to do--but I can;t help but wondering: why are they sitting at a table?  Seems to me they can't really learn the steps unless they get on out there and do the dance.

Corruption, Then and Now

Listened to an instructive faculty lunch talk yesterday about "corruption" in the law of insider trading. A core point that there are certain norms of behavior in  the exercise of office, the violation of which we regard as (not simply wrong but) "corrupt," some kind of fundamental deficiency.  En route, the speaker gave us a screen shot of text from the great George Washington Plunkett, once a wheel horse of Tammany Hall--actually, not all that important as a political leader, but memorable because he unburdened his mind to a willing listener, and so we have him to thank for the most vivid and (at least) entertaining defense of old-style ward politics.

Here's a sample of Plunkett (though to be honest, I'm not certain this is exactly what the speaker was showing us--I wasn't taking notes):

I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. 

Ain’t it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that’s honest graft. Or supposin‘ it’s a new bridge they’re goin’ to build. I get tipped off and I buy as much property as I can that has to be taken for approaches. I sell at my own price later on and drop some more money in the bank. 

Wouldn’t you? It’s just like lookin‘ ahead in Wall Street or in the coffee or cotton market. It’s honest graft, and I’m lookin’ for it every day in the year. I will tell you frankly that I’ve got a good lot of it, too.

Link.  Well, yes.  Not precisely what we regard as the norm of good behavior today.  What intrigues me at the moment, though, is not the substance but the texture.  Plunkett  clearly wants to explain or justify himself.  Yet one can't escape the notion that he's not entirely happy with his own defense--that he knows he isn't likely to sell it to his audience and, more important, maybe not even to himself.

 Which me to thinking. There was a time (not so?) when a proto-Plunkett might have felt no need to justify himself--might have taken it for granted that the purpose of holding public office was to line his private pockets--that anyone who, given the chance, forbore to enrich himself at the public expense, was just a fool?   There was a time (yes?) when people actually bought and sold the office for the explicit purpose in trafficking in its opportunities for personal gain?

What I'd like to know is--when did that attitude change?   When and how did we develop a norm of public duty that enjoins the Punkettian protocol?  And don't tell me "we're not there yet." Of course we have "corrupt" (heh!) politicians (though I suspect it's  bit strong to ring in the number at 100 percent).  But they try to conceal it--and not just because they might go to jail.  They try to conceal i because they "know" it is wrong--that not even the Plunkett defense will pass the giggle test?

I'm sure "there's a literature" as they say down at the faculty club.  Just confessing my ignorance, that's all.

What Should My Law Students Know About Accounting?

I posed that question in an idle moment the other day.  My friend Hizzoner weighs in with a response:

But they should know that, despite appearances and protestations, financial accounting is malleable.  In short, the transactional types should leave the course with doubt, and the litigators should leave with a cross-examination checklist.

That sounds spot on to me.  I could flesh it out a bit. These are the students in my corporate finance class. Exactly one of them admits to knowing any accounting (and she has 10 years' experience, as a CPA).  For the rest--well, I spend a day each on "the balance sheet" and "the income statement."  Then I spend a day giving them three examples of (well-recognized and widely accepted) accounting devices which can lead to weird results.  One, depreciation. Two, inventory accounting. And three, the expensing of R&D.  I end by stressing that in each of these, the accounting "solution" is a defective compromise which may, after all, be the best solution to an unsolvable problem.

Now, forward to cash flows.

It's Not You, Marcel, It's Me...

...but I think we need to see other people. No, no, dear, of course I'm not breaking up with you, it's just that I need...some...time.

So Buce to Marcel Proust, or perhaps to his shadow Marcel, hero of his 3,000-page doorstop, À la recherche du temps perdu.  Seems like only yesterday (actually, I guess it was last month) that I set out to  make the long journey through this which Edmund White calls the most respected of 20th Century novels.   I suspected what would happen, and it happened. As long as i had an hour or two or three a day, I was able to keep a rhythm, and even follow up with some of the original French.

But then school started and now here I am back in the classroom with the markedly un-Proustian agenda of bankruptcy and corporate finance.  And I can certify that Proust and the finance classroom just don't mix.  It's not the time: I'm not one to work 18 hours a day at anything, and I probably could find time for an hour, maybe even two, or three, a day to indulge my Belle Epoque enthusiasm.

I suppose you could say it's brain cells:  I've reached the age where 200,000 brain cells die every day and I just can't risk destroying too many of the survivors in a private enthusiasm. But it'd not just brain cells.  No; it is the utter discontinuity of tone, of manner, of sensibility that it takes to move from one to the other.  I woulds get the bends, and bends are not covered by my health plan.

I expect to be back in the spring, Lord willin.' And if the Lord is not willin'--if I die with a stack of Prousts on the night table--why then, you'll know that I was never bored, that I never ran out of stuff to read.

Now, exactly which things are there about financial  accounting that my students just must learn?

Another Casualty of Google: the Half-Forgotten Song

I've had one of those little threads of music in my mind for the past few days; the kind that can drive you nuts because you can't quite remember it and can't quite forget it either. The theme is gimme the old.   Gimme the old da da dee dada da.  Gimme the old--what?  Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer?  Gimme that old-time religion?  Gimme shelter?  Gimme gimme gimme?  Nothing quite worked.

But Google "gimme the old" and the first hit, at least a few minutes ago as a "Keep Calm" Poster with the injunction "Keep Calm and Gimme the old Razzle Dazzle"  (Italics mine).

Oh, that's it: not give me but give them (or more colloquially, give 'em) the old  razzle dazzle:

So there you have it: not even a vagrant snatch of melody can evade the reach of Inspector Google.