Underbelly

Louisville Redux

2013-05-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

I spent a good (sic) part of my 20s in Louisville, which I remember as an old Midwestern (sic-not southern) metal-bashing town. My law school commute buddy was the first guy I knew to carry a portable phone. Or maybe it was just a beeper. Anyway, the point was that he was some sort of a production expediter at the Ford plant; nobody knew he existed unless the line went down, in which case he had to earn his keep. Aside from him, I remember the flac for the General Electric heavy appliance plant ("appliance park," they called it), whose job was to chill out the reporters--just one of many strategies his bosses had put into place to try to out-hustle the unions by going over the unions' heads with direct appeals to the populace.

I left in 1969, and haven't been back since for more than three days at a time. I assumed (though I hadn't actually checked) that both Ford and GE have long since vanished from the Louisville scene, or at least withered on the vine to mere shadows of their former self, all part of the general hollowing-out of the rust belt (but cf.* infra).

I had learned that Louisville's subsequent fortunes were not all bad. Two guys playing golf together and riffing on ideas to get rich--they hit upon the idea of what became Humana, the health services giant. John Y. Brown, Jr., flamboyant son of a flamboyant father, bought Kentucky Fried Chicken from the original Colonel Sanders and kicked it into the big league (Brown in his youth liked to tool up and down Fourth Street in a red convertible with a couple of babes. "Either the boy will wind up a millionaire or ion the penitentiary," they liked to say. He did worse: he became a governor).

Recent inquiry shows that Humana is still a major presence in Louisville, and KFC also retains a large footprint. But I somehow failed to grasp the rise of the new driver of the Louisville economy until I stumbled across this in the National Journal: a major employer in its own right and a force multiplier for its surroundings (hint they come to your door). Louisville as the best location in the nation, heh. I lived in Cleveland in 1954 when they made the same claim, and we know how that turned out. Anyway, God bless 'em although I do not CafePress CEO Bob Marino when he says that "Louisville the place where I want to live until I die."

I fired the piece off to the friends from my Louisville days (there aren't may left). The dependable Swifty took the conversation to a whole new plane:

Hi jack – to me, Louisville was a city of meat packing plants, whisky distilling, beer brewing, cigarette rolling. Remember when the neighborhood breweries were shutting down? One of the worst tasting beers I ever tried was the Irsh beer, don’t remember it’s name. it held on longer than the others.

He is right, and I had utterly forgotten: standing outside the cigarette plant with Thelma Stovall, an old union rep running for one state office or another, I forget which but there were so many. I remember the beer, too. I tried to write that one of the breweries had "gurgled hideously down the drain," but a narrow-minded copy reader toned it down. I knew I needed fo find another line of work.

---
*But maybe I was wrong. I just now did some Googling. Evidently there is still an Appliance Park; in 2012 they spread the word that they were hiring 230 workers, starting at $13.03 an hour; they got 10,000 applicants. The announcement said they wanted people with "competencies." Meanwhile here is a 2010 press release on Ford retooling for new production in Louisville.

Update: I just now thought to check the Louisville unemployment rate. Seems to be running in excess of eight percent, which would appear high for a city with so much sunny hype.

Thavis on the Vatican

2013-05-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

I'm finishing up John Thavis' Vatican Diaries and I think I'll file it under "modified rapture." Thavis is an accomplished story teller with years of Vatican-watching to draw on and he is able to show how much, here as perhaps everywhere else, grand policy is shaped by less-grand personality, the enthusiasms and aversions of ordinary people. But he's also a beat reporter who will never burn a source even from his retirement perch in Minnesota, he's put together book which is unlikely to offend any but the most monstrous bitter-enders on any church issue. Even those cast in a bad light will read in and cluck that he could have been a lot worse (well--possibly excepting the archbishop caught on a wire trying to make his moves on a young priest). Indeed he largely gives the game away in the first chapter,--a wryly cheerful account of life in the press gaggle on a Papal outing--making the point, perhaps inadvertently, that the most seasoned reporter on the Vatican beat really doesn't get much more by way of inside dope than those of us half a world away at the business end of a TV connection.

One thing he does well is to bring together the fragments of narrative on a bunch of issues that the yokels hear about but don't follow closely day to day--stuff you probably know if you already if you are a faithful reader of Vatican-watcher's blog posts (I'm not--it really hadn't occurred to me that they exist until I read Thavis' book).

Another virtue is that it reminds you how much the Vatican is like the old joke that ends "from then on, it was a hell of a lot like Cincinnati." Or perhaps Queens: people say the Vatican is like the Mafia and I think there is some truth there, but perhaps not in the sense ordinarily intended. I don't think the Vatican has a regular modus vivendi of assassination (at least not lately; cf here and here). No: the real point is (I'm pretty sure I have written this before)--the real point is that the Mafia is an old, sluggish, sclerotic behemoth, lurching from limited success to near failure. So also the Vatican: the real wonder, sometimes, is that they find their way at all.

Which offers a framework for one topic on which Vithers is pretty good: his sketch of the troublesome outliers like the late Marcel Lefebvre, creator of the Order of Saint Pius X and perhaps the church's most visible dissident against Vatican II; or Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, father of illegitimate children by at least two women, abusers of countless children, including his own.

Both these worthies are dead now. But the real question is why they exercised such power for so long--how come nobody gave them the bum's rush long before they became a public embarrassment.

The answer--a moment's reflection ought to give you the hint--is that they were just way too good at what they did. They created enthusiasm, they prompted vocations, they filled the pews and most of all, they raked in the money. And even though the founders are dead, one has to assume that some of the old momentum persists.

And so the question has to be: what happens now, with a new Pope bearing a whole new set of enthusiasms and, yes, new alliances. I don't know, but I think I may sign up for Vithers' blog just to stay on the cusp.

Afterthought: I wonder how many people, retiring from Rome, move to Minnesota?

But You Knew That: Passion (and Jewelry)

2013-05-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Buce hied me off to Best Buy this morning with a refractory Ipad. I there acquired the services of an intelligent youngster who spent about half an hour fiddling with the device (no charge) before explaining what she thought I needed to do and making it clear that I should do it myself because I wouldn't want to pay her as much as she would charge.

"Do you want me to write it out?" she asked.

"Nah, I understand," said.

She grabbed a Post-it and pen. "I'll write it out," she said.

While she wrote, I noticed that she was wearing the largest ring I had ever seen outside the Vatican. Turquoise and silver, as in "Indian."

Finally she passed over a couple of Post-its and turned as if to move away to her next, one may hope more profitable, encounter. Idly I said:

"Do you make your own rings?"

She stopped in her tracks. "No," she said, but then she turned and launched into what gave promise of being a long narrative about the jewelry game and its intricacies. After a minute or two she caught on to herself, put a cork in it, thanked me and turned away.

What have we learned today children? We learned that everybody has a passion. But you knew that.

Did I Destroy Cleveland? Not Entirely (An Update)

2013-05-14T14:19:00.000-07:00

A few years back I regaled the faithful with my account of how I destroyed Cleveland. When the news broke last week about the house of horrors I naturally hightailed it to Google to see if I was responsible. Answer: not really. Target zero for the current gruesome story is about three miles away from the unspeakable Area B.

But I'm not quite sure that's the end of it. Like, I am sure, almost everybody else, I found myself wondering: what kind of a neighborhood is this, anyway? Best I can tell, there are some longterm residents. Isn't there anything by way of community surveillance that might have picked this up? Slate picks up on the issue, with a different spin, reacting to a commenter in the Plain Dealer:

“At the moment, the hum of criticism on Seymour Avenue is about the subtle signs, such as the lowered shades or odd behavior of Castro and how he never entertained guests,” he writes. “These are the kinds of signs that police officers who patrol a specific beat over time might notice or hear about from neighbors. But that kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended.”

That kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended—that’s the line you should remember if you’re looking to criticize the cops here. Intuition is one of a police officer’s foremost assets. But missing persons and odd behavior become suspicious only when you are intimately familiar with a neighborhood, with what normalcy means and when normalcy is breached.

In Cleveland and elsewhere, that sort of hyperlocal knowledge is on the wane.

Well yes, that's easy to latch onto. Good morning, Mr. Policeman Brownbear. Good morning, Johnny--shouldn't you be in school? We all have that picture in our mind, and it is unfailingly filed under "ancient history." As it happens, I live in a neighborhood that has all the old prelapsarian good order that you could possibly imagine--and I haven't seen a beat cop here in 30 years (cruiser did stop in my front yard the other evening and rousted an apparent drug suspect; they let him go).

The inference might be that community policing works if and only if there is a community. So, wasn't there something by way of community on Seymour Avenue to pick up the slack? In his justly admired backgrounder, Robert L. Smith sketches a response:

This stretch of Seymour Avenue is near the historic heart of Cleveland's Puerto Rican community but it's no bustling barrio. Yards tend to be fenced with rusty chain-link on a block of long, narrow lots running between West 25th Street and Scranton Road, just south of Interstate 90 and Scranton Cemetery. Several houses, like the one next door to Castro's, are boarded up and abandoned.

Residents say the neighborhood feels safer since police chased away drug dealers a few years ago, but they learned to keep to themselves and to avoid asking too many questions. "Beware of Dog" and "Keep Out" signs are prevalent.

The block is anchored at its eastern end by a stately, red-brick church, Immanuel Lutheran. At the west end, across West 25th street, is the venerable neighborhood bodega, Caribe Grocery, which has been owned for decades by Ariel Castro's uncle, Julio "Cesi" Castro, and which closed after the media descended.

The industrious Castro family has a long history in Cleveland...

Well--no, not a response, for with all his best efforts,he doesn't seem to be able to put his finger on the question of why the neighborhood is not a barrio, why it is a ghostly cardboard cutout of what you would want it to be.

Boy I wish I had the answer to that one. I don't, and I'm sure it is above my pay grade. But I am willing to shake down at least one possible culprit: It's those %$#@! expressways. Way I read Google, ground zero is tucked into an armpit (I choose my words with care) formed by I-90 and I-71. Now just about anybody with any on-the-ground knowledge agrees these days that urban freeways are, in retrospect, a dreadful mistake: that they provided no really adequate solution to urban traffic problems and far worse, they tended to suck the lifeblood out of any community that suffered their depredations.

Yes I know, I know, there are a thousand objections. Some neighborhoods suffered without any expressway in earshot (actually, that would be my in-laws'),. Some survived the expressway (Really? Where?). I can think of any number of other possible causal factors that would have to be plugged into the equation.

Still, you imagine yourself at 2207 Seymour and you breath in the exhaust fumes and you listen to the hum-thrum of the traffic every hour, every day, every year, and you have to wonder.

The Issa Rule: With all that Shit, There Must be a Pony!

2013-05-14T11:25:00.000-07:00

“I want seven hearings a week, times 40 weeks," he said in 2010. I suspect he hasn't achieved quite those numbers. But I'd say that Darrell ("our gremlins are different") Issa, has done a spectacular job of establishing himself not merely as the richest member of the House but the one who gets the most, then perhaps the most visible and memorable, TV time. Poor John Boehner, orange-faced and weepy, surely racks up more hours in his role as the most ineffectual House leader since Frederick Muhlenberg. But Issa--a Google search for "Darrell Issa threatens" yields up some 1,410,000 hits; "Darrell Issa warns," another 78,000; for comparison, "Darrell Issa promises" garners only a measly 43,000.   Here's a guy who, in his role as chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has surely kept the faith with all those whose primary goal is to assure that the executive branch accomplishes nothing, zero, bupkas, nada, zilch--or at least not until it is wrested away from the foreign-born interloper and returned to the good, grey reactionaries to whom it properly belongs.

All this is a a shame but in more ways than one. That is: aside from mere partisanship, the government needs oversight, and needs a proper oversight. We've had spectacular instances of Congress in its oversight role. Perhaps none is more famous than the teamwork of Sam Ervin, Howard ("What did he know and when did he know it?") Baker and others who carried us through the Watergate crisis without losing their dignity and without destroying the national fabric.    We've had legislators who used the investigative power to build honorable careers--perhaps none more notable than Senator Harry S Truman, the man from Pendergast, whose work investigating war contractors did so much to overcome his (undeserved) reputation as a machine hack. We've even had investigations that turned on themselves, as when Joe McCarthy set out to destroy the Army and wound up destroying himself ("Have you no sense of decency, sir?").

And to keep matters in focus, we badly need some good investigation now. The notorious Benghazi debacle, for example: whatever you think of the politics, it was an unambiguous operational failure and we absolutely need the best possible job of reassessment, as in "what went wrong and why?" But it seems that all we've had so far is grandstanding, name-calling, and the unceasing search for an easy hit.

That is: aside from one what we sometimes get and badly need, we've also had far too many clown shows that end up discrediting not only themselves but the entire legislative process (I know--as if it could be any more discredited than it already is). And I admit, I don't know, perhaps it is too early to tell. Maybe Issa's hounding of the ATF, of Obamacare, of Benghazi, of the CIA, of the SEC, of the Army, of the Attorney General, and now the IRS--maybe somewhere out there somebody will come up with some insights for sensible reform.

Yeh, and maybe pigs will fly,   But in the interim, here's one more investigation that I'd love to see. Can we have an inspector general, please, to give us a look at the record of the Issa committee? How much has that guy cost us since he got his hands on the gavel?   And what, exactly, has he accomplished? If we're looking for government fraud, waste, and abuse, would it make sense to start right here?

Exam Time

2013-05-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

Professors like to complain about grading. I can sympathize: it is a hard part of the job. The scandalous secret is that it is the only hard part of the job. Other than grading, you can spend your life in following your bliss, and if your trifling classroom obligations aren't what you want them to be, why then you just haven't engineered them right, so you have no one to blame but yourself.

The trouble with grading is that it is a constant and unforgiving reminder of how little you've accomplished: I blow it in so straight and it comes out so crooked I told them and I told them. You really know how to hurt a guy, don't you? Which isn't to say the papers are awful. Often, by any independent standard, they are pretty good, okay, good enough (once in a while they slip in a ringer but that doesn't change the generalization). The thing is, you want them to be brilliant, just like y--

Oh wait a minute, maybe they are just as brilliant as you are, and maybe that is precisely the problem. As I think I've said before, my two great nightmares are, one, that I haven't lived to my potential; and two, maybe I have. As Nietzsche said, you gaze too long into the bluebook and you will find the bluebook looking back. Welcome, professor, this is your life!

But grading time is a good time to put your mind on something, anything, rather than the task at hand. I wouldn't be surprised that this (grading) week is the week when a whole lot of first drafts get done on the syllabus for next semester, when, of course this time at last I will finally get it right. As for me, I haven't actually retooled the syllabus (though maybe I should)--but have you any idea how many really great full-length operas there are available for free on Youtube?

This might also be a good time to reformulate your entire research agenda. And for this I can offer a suggestion from the late C. Wright Mills. It's stated in pre-digital terms, but you can recodify:

[T]he rearranging of the file ... is one way to invite imagination. You simply dump out heretofore disconnected folders, mixing up their contents, and then re-sort them. You try to do it in a more or less relaxed way ... Of course, you will have in mind the several problems on which you are actively working, but you will also try to be passively receptive to unforeseen and unplanned linkages.

--So Mills in "On Intellectual Craftsmanship," reprinted as an appendix to The Sociological Imagintion (OUP 1959). And now back to the blueb--oh look, there's a kitty!

That Day Again

2013-05-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

My mother died about 30 years ago. Our relationship was, ahem, nuanced, but I can testify that she was a woman of formidable abilities and impressive achievements. And, to be fair, wanted nothing but the best for her children.

But along with all else, she had a scabrous sense of humor and I bet she would have enjoyed:

All right lady, I'll buy those lousy poppies;
All right lady, I'll buy those pencils too.
All right lady, take off those old dark glasses:
Hello, mother, I knew it was you.

Oddly enough, I can't track down a YouTube version.

Hoisted from the Comments:Eb on What they Teach in School

2013-05-12T11:06:00.002-07:00

The other day I wrote a bit about what they do and do not teach in econ 1A. The Sapient Eb* offers an insight which itself invites a comment. Eb:

It's amusing to compare Econ 101 to Physics 101. Both are largely false, based on simple ideas that have been discredited. Both are pedagogically sound beginnings. But the difference, I think, is that a person who takes Physics 101 and stops there has learned something useful. A person who does the same with Economics 101 has a lot to unlearn before s/he reattains their previous level of sophistication.

I think that law school is comparable to Econ 101.

Further thoughts: one, I had a law student a while ago with a pretty good engineering background. He explained the teaching of the second law of thermodynamics. First year, they tell you, you write it down and spit it back on the exam. Second year, they teach it, you say this can't possibly work. Third year, they teach it, you say, unh hnh, with the right assumptions and the right luck, this just might be true.

Now, as to law school. Eb, you touch a nerve. For years my job in the canonical curriculum was the course in "contracts." And boy to I mean canonical. So far as I know, every beginning law student at every Anglo-American law school in the known universe takes "contracts."

But here's the catch: no one practices contract law. Don't misunderstand; people practice adjectival contract law: labor contracts, or entertainment contracts, or construction contracts, whatever. But the law school course in contracts--it was invented in the 19th and early 20th Century by a madman and a pious fool who believed that there was a single unifying set of principles that underlay all contracts and that they could be usefully stated and taught; more, that they were the right place to begin a legal education.

Next point: nobody believes this any more. Haven't for a long time, if ever. It was dying, if not dead when I began teaching 45 years ago. And as they say about Elvis, it's getting deader. [Side issue: people will object that there is a realm of contract theory that remains alive and well, articulated by, e.g., Randy Barnett and Charles Fried. True enough, but the relation between contract theory and a unified contract law is at best haphazard or incidental.]

Yet we keep doing it. Why?   Well I suppose, we can make some plausible retrospective justifications: it is at least somewhat possible to teach contracts as a course in "legal method" (if we know what that means). And it's useful, even worthwhile, to explain what you might call a meta-theory of contract: explaining why it came to be some important, why it isn;t really important, what is important in its stead. But all this is post hoc. The real reason, I lies somewhere in the realm of inertia or existential angst: if we didn't have a course in contracts, how would we know we are a law school.

Re the rest of the law school curriculum I suspect the story is more complicated, but I note two points. One, my law students spend more and more of their time in "clinicals," or "externships," which may mean "paying us $50k a year so they can work for someone else for free." Students tend to love clinicals--often better than their regular courses, as they will be quick to tell you. And they may be right. But there lingers the embarrassing question: if we are just an apprenticeship mill, why not rip off the mask and show our true identity?

And two, as to classroom work. Beyond the "required" or "semi-required" core ("the bar courses"), an awful lot of "advanced" legal education tends to look more and more like polisci. Translated: stuff the professor thinks will be career-advancing for her, and which s/he can persuade students to think of as fun.

And? And I don't know. I'm painfully aware that I am sounding like the old geezer. I remember the geezers from my own youth who complained that "the boys" didn't take code pleading or equity any more --"and where will they learn how to replevy a dog?"    I find myself feeling the same way when I see a student taking a course in tenant's rights when he doesn't know how to record a mortgage.

But I recognize that there's an underlying issue here far deeper than I (or, let's be fair, anyone else) can fathom: exactly what does go on inside a University and in particular, is it worth those insanely high prices when so much of the pure content seems to be online for pennies (or even for free)? We have only the dimmest shadow of an answer though the word "socialization" appears visible through the void. More crudely, maybe "contracts" and "polisci" and yes, "externships" are all just artifacts of a system barriers designed to maintain a hierarchy and, specifically, a core of elites whose main role in life is to be In while others are Out. Oh dear, vulgar Marxism. Sorry 'bout that. Really, I am.
---
*He goes by the name of Ebenezer Scrooge although I suspect he does not run a London counting house.

Flash Music

2013-05-11T14:06:00.001-07:00

So my cousin Dave shipped me this lovely bit of flash music from the Plaça de Sant Roc in Barcelona. It's wonderful in its own right and it brought back happy memories of the day just a couple of years ago when Mrs. B and I trooped through the same square with a couple of adolescents: we elders had to yield up assorted articles of clothing so the nubile 18-year-old could pass the modesty and decency test for entry into the old church.

Mrs. B shipped Dave's clip off to the other adolescent who was with us in Barcelona; he graciously responded with a favorite of his own. I guess I have said before, I am totally in the tank for flash music, particularly flash opera. Duly prompted I went looking for more exemplars to share back.

I did find some, but I also picked up a bit of unintended education. Some takeaways: one, there are a lot of flash-whatevers: the number is growing, rapidly if perhaps not quite exponentially. Two, they vary: some really wonderful, a few kind of bad and most--well, most pretty much you would expect "most" to be. And three, sad to say I think I can descry the viper of commercialism. There seems to be an ad agency somewhere that can produce you a flash performance that looks just like Disney, or maybe it is Disney (I choose not to link).

Another point, really a new-to-me insight: some items lend themselves to flash better than others. The "Ode to Joy," supra, works nicely. It seems a particular favorite is Orff's Carmina Burana and I guess I can see why: big chorus, lots of noise and drama. Here's an an appealing rendition, from the Westbahnhof in Vienna. Here's another, this from Indianapolis (seems de rigeur for the location shot to show the crowds going about their business all innocent before the music pops).

The opera standards are popular. There's plenty of Mozart, including this from Aix. Also Verdi; here's a bit from SFO under the name of "pop-up opera," which seems right for the occasion. Carmen, of course; here's a gratifyingly underproduced version from the grand old Spanish city of, um, Edinburgh. Here's another, this from Grenoble, mostly a one-person performance but I'd say the girl is good.

Indeed all good stuff, although for a real flash mob, I'd have to admit it is best to have something more, like, flash. So it just may be the grand prize ought to go to this one from the Cape Cod Stop 'n Shop (and a tip o' the cornet mute to my sister Sally, who sent it to me from next door in South Harwich).

Update: And here is a more general introduction to flashmob culture.

I'm Not an Economist But ... [IS-LM and What they Teach in 1A]

2013-05-10T15:16:00.003-07:00

This may be old stuff to everybody but me but this morning I was reading Krugman on IS-LM and a light dawned about econ is taught to beginners, and later to others (it's a wonderful piece, by the way, whether my inferences are correct or not).

Here's the deal: in 1A (and again in 100A) we all learn boot camp supply and demand: price goes down, demand goes up. But it turns out that macroville, it doesn't quite work that way. As K says:

[W]e are at minimum talking about two variables, not one – GDP as well as the interest rate. ... That means that loanable funds doesn’t determine the interest rate per se; it determines a set of possible combinations of the interest rate and GDP, with lower rates corresponding to higher GDP. And that’s the IS curve.

So far so good. But what struck me is that this is only one place where the 1A relationship doesn't hold. Here's another: call it "Soros reflexivity" or if you want to be less hifalutin, just "herd behavior." Anyway, suppose everybody starts to dump BigCo stock. From 1A, you would think that the drop would draw new buyers into the market and firm up the price. But no: a big drop may lead to an even bigger drop--ask former British Prime Minister John Major what George Soros did to the pound, and watch him sputter. Which, again, is not what they taught us.

I can think of another: portfolio insurance. You can sketch a fairly simple model (ninth grade algebra only) where you buy some stock and protect against losses by buying some bonds. You here the stock is going into the dumper, you want to stay insured so you sell even more stock, driving the price down further (use the same model--this may look like a special case of the previous example but I think the motivation is different.) It's what (a) did (b) did not cause the flash crash of '87.

There's also the little matter of Giffen goods--price of potatoes go down, people buy fewer potatoes. Actually I gather this one they sometimes do teach in 1A but I don't think anybody believes there are (m)any Giffen goods to begin with.

That's it. Maybe there are more. But my point is that the world is a lot more complicated than it looks in 1A.

Dynamic Whatever

2013-05-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog are most likely the sort of folks who already know about "Dynamic Scoring," described by Wiki as forecasting "the impact of fiscal policy changes by forecasting the effects of economic agents' reactions to incentives created by policy." It's a great idea in principle--e.g., if you raise taxes high enough, you may tamp down some taxpayers' willingness to work. Wiki also says that it " difficult to apply in practice due to the complexity of modeling economic agents' behavior.," which I think translates into "economists have a model tailor-made to any set of assumptions about human behavior that you can imagine." Or more simply: we spin these threads out of our own gizzard. Kissin' to postmodern renditions of EBITDA, recast as "net income plus anything else we want to count as earnings." Cf., generally, "working the ref."

I just stumbled on a companion piece lately in an unlikely source: reading about the development of the English Bible, aka English versions of the Greek/Hebrew Bible. The catchphrase here is :"dynamic equivalence." Once again, Wiki to the rescue: the " original definition of dynamic equivalence was rhetorical: the idea was that the translator should translate so that the effect of the translation on the target reader is roughly the same as the effect of the source text once was on the source reader."

If this begins to sound like "means what we want it to mean,;' then you are catching the flavor of the whole operation: the affray continues between the "literalists" (or perhaps better "formalists") and those who think we need new tools for a new age. I probably have already let my biases show here but I don't want to get carried away: I recognize that translation is a fiendishly tricky business, just as vulnerable to judgment and discretion as, well as accounting: in either field you're going to come up with some difficult tradeoffs for which there is no satisfactory resolution. But in either case, as it seems to me inescapable, the more "dynamic" you get, the less willing you are to let the source data speak for itself, the more willing to embrace the view that you know better than the original It's an ineluctable temptation: evidently that was exactly how Cicero felt when he undertook to translate (render?) Demosthenes into Latin. Me, I am just more and more distracted by the version that transfixed me when I was young (and I am stunned to find he is still around--must be as old as Cicero). For a fuller account, once again it's back to Wiki.

Anniversary: Jack Cade--No Wait, Listen...

2013-05-08T09:31:00.003-07:00

The 463d anniversary of Jack Cade's rebellion, the prompt for the most famous lawyer jape of all time, infra. And as good a time as any to record that it's really a compliment.

Cade:
I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat
and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.
Dick:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Bada boom. So Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2, Act 4, scene 2, 71–77, and lawyers have been to catch up with it ever since. I do think they could use a more effective publicist, though.

Il Divo

2013-05-07T19:33:00.000-07:00

I'll bet we see them both in Arts and Letters Daily: two densely detailed obituaries of Giulio Andreotti, who apparently did not mind being recognized as Il Divo, the mastermind of Italian politics for most of the time since World War II, even if it brought him perilously close to disgrace. The obit in The Telegraph is thicker with anecdote, but I'll cast my vote for Jon Tagliabue's rendering in the New York Times because he more sharply poses the central puzzle of Andreotti's long career: how did so (seemingly) evil a man preside over the rise of Italy from near-third-world poverty to its current position is one of the richest nations in the world?

The question is not rhetorical by which I mean I do not have a foreordained answer for it. Could be that Andreotti was not as bad as he was cracked up to be? Or that Italy is not doing as well as I like to think? Or--yes, I am tempted here--that the Italians have mastered the art of not letting bad government get in the way of the good life?

This is, after all, the most perfunctory of nations--the "geographic expression" in Bismark's famously dismissive one liner; the one where they didn't even pretend they spoke a common language until after World War II; the one where the Pope himself told the folks they didn't need to pay taxes (I know the Pope changed his mind on that one; it is equally conventional to remark that the change of mind seems to have got lost in the famously slow Italian mails).

Eppure si muove; and yet it moves, Galileo's folkloric recantation of his recantation. It was the title of a pretty, although perhaps a bit too cheery, account of Italian politics I read back in the 80s, round about the first time I ever went there. On the whole, my guess that things are a tad worse now than they were then: the postwar miracle is over, real earnings seem to have declined and that damn song-and-dance man just keeps going and going and going (we keep him because with him, we know we'll never have to pay taxes). Which might, in the end, by Berlusconi's best defense: hey, Italians have survived and thrived under dreadful government before.

Afterthought: I had totally forgotten that somebody actually made a movie about Andreotti (L'uomo Magro?) a few years back. I know I watched it,stuck around all the way to the end. But in retrospect, it is apparently just about as colorless and forgettable as Il Divo so often attempted to be. For my Italy-sleaze fix, I'd rather go back and take another look at Habemus Papam, about a Pope who seemed about as gentle as the new incumbent, but didn't seem to enjoy it as much.

File this one for Columbus Day

2013-05-07T17:55:00.002-07:00

I suppose I should have saved this for October and the celebration of the depradation of the native peoples, but I just found it now and I'm afraid I will forget it then. So:

Hail! oh King of Aragon!
Reign! oh princely paragon!
Down upon your marrowbone,

Long live the King!

Monarch mightier is he, sir,
Than Joe Smith or Julius Caesar,
Brigham Young or Nebuchadnezzar,

Long live the King

And hail to Isabella, too,
For she's a right good fellow too,
And a right good tune to bellow to

Is long live the Queen!

So Constance Rourke in her classic American Humor: A Study of the National Character (NYRB 2004; original 1931). This from a certain Columbus el Filibustro, the product of one John Brougham, working in the 1840s. Roarke says he "produced a lusty, gay, and savage humor," which is within the bounds of acceptable exaggeration, and says his best work "will bear comparison with Gilbert and Sullivan," which is not (unless the purpose of the comparison is to remind how vastly superior G and S are).

But what gets me is the echo of T.H. White, memorable for, inter alia,

God save king Pendragon
Long may his reign drag on.

...which sounds to me lot like outright pilferage. And also

Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks;
On him our hopes we fix--
He is our king.

Which is, of course, not comedy at all, or at least not intentionally so. I haven't troubled to determine whether this proper second verse precedes Brougham or follows him.

For rhyming, I suppose it is also proper to measure Brougham against

But oh ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly - have they not henpecked you all?

And if Lord Byron can get away with it, I see no reason to stick up our nose at Brougham.

Afterthought: For perspective, note that five of the seven counties with the lowest incomes in the United States are in South Dakota. Bet you can guess what is going on there.

Jayson and his Enablers

2013-05-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

Others can probably say better than I why I read every word of last week's three-part series in the University of Maryland's student newspaper on their notorious grad, Jayson Blair (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,). You remember Jayson, fired ten years ago last week from the New York Times after it became clear that his whole career was just a boatload of lies. About his Times years it didn't tell me much that was new--I had followed the story when it was new, fascinated by Blair himself, even more fascinated by his handlers at the Times: one would have thought them the least gullible people people in the world, but here they were, sucked into the Blair fantasy as tightly as if it was a Nigerian 419 scam (or did I just put my own gullibility on display?).

The part that I didn't know was the prequel (see especially Part 2 of the series), about his years as a student at UM, where the same MV seems to have been on display from the beginning. You've got to admire the professionalism of the student editors and their sources for seeking to manage the mix of schadenfreude and and sheepish embarrassment over the evidence that Blair could have gotten away with so much and for so long.

The paper also touches on, but doesn't really embrace, what is perhaps the most interesting lesson of the whole episode: i.e., new evidence for the ancient insight that you can't cheat an honest man. We've had years to meditate on why the bigfeet at the Times--notably editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd, who lost their jobs in the riptide--were so eager to let themselves be hypnotized by Blair's poppycock. What was new and even more interesting to me was the student paper's dissection of the role played by the various enablers at the J-school.

There's a fair amount of oh-what-a-shame gee-we-just-wanted-to-help on display here. But near the end of the third installment, somebody let slip what strikes me as a more promising theme. "maybe they simply didn’t want to see the signs [a UM professor] said. Maybe they allowed the allure of Blair’s promising future — and the ways it could boost the college’s national profile — to obscure their judgment."

Unh hunh. Read the whole thing and you can't escape the inference that a whole lot of people wanted Blair to succeed because they had skin in the game: that they hang onto his coattails and go along for the ride. Please God let him burnish the reputation of the school where I work; and while we are at it, God, would it kill you to let him help me get a better job?

Aside from clothes-ripping self-mortifying confession, I suppose you can never really nail anybody on this kind of a charge. I suppose there were some people who were, despite the warnings, genuinely taken in by Blair's schtick (but if so, for cryin' out loud why were they teaching in a journalism school)? Easier to surmise that there were some who believed because they wanted to believe--which certainly puts them in good company, alongside Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd. And I think it is fair to wonder how many knew perfectly well that the wheels would come off the Blairite bus, but just hoped that they could enjoy the ride and get off safely at their own stop. If I'm right on that last, the cynicism on display would be something appalling. But maybe that is the lesson the kiddies are supposed to learn?

"...not like a Christian at all."

2013-05-05T15:33:00.001-07:00

Alexander Herzen cherished warm memories of "old Filvmonov," his jailer at the Krutinsky Monastery, converted into a police barracks--"a simple creature," Herzen recalls, "kind-hearted himself and grateful for any kindness that was shown him, and it is likely that not much had been shown him in the course of his life." Old Filmonov liked to tell stories of his past.

He served in Moldovia, in the Turkish campaign of 1805; and the commander of his company was the kindest of men, caring like a father for each soldier and always foremost in battle. 'Our captain was in love with a Moldavian woman, and we saw he was in bad spirits; the reason was that she was often visiting another officer. One day he sent for me and a friend of mine--a fine soldier he was and lost both legs in battle afterwards--and said to us that the woman had jilted him; and he asked if we were willing to help him and teach her a lesson. "Surely, Your Honor," said we; "we are at your service at any time." He thanked us and pointed out the house where the officer lived. Then he said, "Take your stand tonight on the bridge which she must cross to get to his house; catch hold of her quietly, and into the river with her!" "Very good, Your Honor," said we. So I and my chum got hold of a sack and went to the bridge; there we sat, and near midnight, the girl came running past. "What are you hurrying for?" we asked. Then we gave her one over the head and; not a sound did she make, bless her; we put her in the sack and threw it into the river. Next day our captain went to the other officer and said: "You must not be angry with the girl: we detained her; in fact, she is now at the bottom of the river. But I am quite prepared to take a little walk with you, with swords or pistols, as you prefer." Well, they fought, and our captain was badly wounded in the chest; he wasted away, poor fellow, and after three months gave back his soul to God.

'But was the woman really drowned?' I asked.

'Oh yes, Sir,' said the soldier.

I was horrified by the childlike indifference with which the old man told me this story. He appeared to guess my feelings or to give a thought for the first time to his victim; for he added, to reassure me and make it up with his own conscience:

'You know, Sir, she was only a benighted heathen, not like a Christian at all.'

--So Alexander Herzen, Childhood, Youth and Exile (OUP Paperback 1980). Russians have long experienced a, shall we say challenging, relationship with the Muslim people on their southern border.

If Its "Darby," Why do they Spell it with an "E"?

2013-05-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

"Oh, you lived in Kentucky.! Did you ever go to the Derby?"

People actually do ask me that from time to time. Or did, until they figured out I had nothing interesting ready by way of reply. They'd make a deal out of pronouncing it "Darby," I never knew exactly why.

But this was only one among many lacunae in my knowledge of Darbyhood, for the fact is I never did attend a Darby, not even though I was, after all, a newspaper reporter, and I pulled the Saturday shift on Darby for several years.

I do recall that in my very first year they sent me out to cover the "early morning revellers," so we could have something for the first edition which closed before the race was run. They were big on early morning revellers, my guys.

Anyway they sent me out in the company of another newbie, one John Macaulay Smith, a truly lovely human being with a kind of fey, behind-the-fan manner that made you never quite sure whether or not he was joking. Which was a good posture to maintain when one discovered, as we quickly did, that neither of us had ever been to a Darby before, nor even a horse race; that indeed, either one of us would have a had a tough time telling which end was which on the horse.

Perplexed by our own ignorance we somehow got the idea of ringing up city desk for advice--where, happily, we fell under the tutelage of one Frank Hartley, a model of dour worldliness right out of central casting.

"Okay," I responded to Frank and recradled the phone. "He says first we find the paddock. Now, what's a paddock?"

John offered what I suppose was his version of a shrug. Neither of us had the slightest idea.

And that's really the end of my Darby raconteurship I except I remember spending the rest of I don't know wandering about aimless while John uttered phrases like "Paddocks will please curry past the cantor" and such like, and I wondered what I would do if somebody actually chose to follow his instructions.
'
So any way you tell it, we were less purposeful than our colleague Barbara Carlson. Barbara drew the gig to go find those early morning revellers who had strayed into the downtown streets. Apparently our editors had led a sheltered life, or any rate, perhaps remembered an earlier generation. For to hear Barbara tell it, by her time on the street, there was nary a reveller to be found. Indeed, you could have fired a cannon clean down Fourth Street to the river and done no more than perhaps startle the reporter who had been sent out to find them.

But this did not dismay Barbara who rose to the occasion by phoning in some of the finest examples of winsome homespun I had ever heard. Something about Charlie Rainwater, the Indian who was afraid he had wandered too far from home and so brought a supply of his own jerky. These days, that kind of thing would get you fired and publicly denounced in a front-page apology from the the Ombudsman ("diligent inquiry has failed to uncover a Charlie Rainwater nor indeed any other Rainwater of any race or ethnic provenance, nor even so much as a slice of homemade beef jerky.") Ah, those were the days.

The Clothes' New Emperor

2013-05-03T14:14:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I wrote a squib about how Franco and Gorbachev, fecklessly and at last with futility, sought to loosen the reins on their too-dynamic societies while retaining control. Reading this week's Economist, I'm reminded that my vision was all too blinkered. I could just as well have expanded my vision to include Xi Jinping, the new leader of China as he tries to mount his tiger the same way one might stuff rattlesnakes into a Vokswagen--i.e,., very carefully. Xi seems to encounter his new (Subjects? Children? Brethren) with an attitude common among Chinese leaders down through the ages: deep-seated belief in the entity, coupled with a conviction that by herculean effort it can be made to work--and stark terror at the spectacle of a billion (plus) individuals, each with his own hopes, fears and convictions.

My guess is that Xi Jinping never heard of John Keats and would have dismissed him with contempt if he had. But he might want to pause over the oft-quoted excerpt from Keats' letter 280 (to his brother, George):

"I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass – the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it – I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along – to what? The creature hath a purpose and his eyes are bright with it."

It is tempting to patronize anyone so presumptuous as to try to exercise leadership over so many creatures with so many purposes, but it's probably fair to reserve a bit of compassion for Xi. That is--it's easy from far away to dismiss China as a monolith but even a bit of reflection we can see that it is nothing of the sort. Just a few moments' thought should remind us that it is a monolith with a nasty habit of exploding, perhaps unexpectedly but still often, into a chaos of private purposes. Chinese themselves, when they consider the problem, are tempted to dismiss their afflictions as a curse imposed by insolent outsiders and their is just enough truth in that view to distract them from the fact that it is not only outsiders who create so much trouble. Or if outsiders, at least outsiders with a lot of local help.

I'd say the Economist has at least a crude handle on an inevitably complex problem: Xi has to choose whether to nurture "the people" or "the state." And given his (and China's) long history, it wouldn't be surprising to find that he thinks he can tilt to the state--for which read "the party," the supposed benign parent, guiding and protecting is charges to a fuller maturity.

But as any number of examples prove, there's only so much guiding and protecting that you can do--perhaps especially (but not merely) when all that blather about guide and protect is just a self-justifying hoax to guide and protect the activity of lining your own (or your children's) pockets. I'd say Xi needs just a dash of humility here or he might be in for a world of disappointment.

Forget Bitcoins

2013-05-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

Here comes the Choco Pie:

The Choco Pie is a mouth-drying, individually wrapped slab of cake, marshmallow and chocolate, and in South Korea it is as important a part of childhood as Britain’s Mars bar or the American Twinkie. It is manufactured by the Orion company of Seoul, exported across Asia, and consumed in an arc of countries from Japan to Uzbekistan. In 2004, South Korean manufacturers began to set up factories in the North Korean city of Kaesong, an unprecedented experiment in co-operation between the fraternal enemies, and the core of what the South Korean government called its Sunshine Policy. Along with South Korean managers, manufacturing technology, telephone lines and a motorway, they brought the Choco Pie.

Within a few months, the bosses from Seoul began slipping their North Korean workers a Choco Pie or two as a perk. In part, this was a response to the Kaesong wage regime: rather than being paid directly, salaries were processed by the North Korean authorities, which then handed over the money minus hefty deductions. The Choco Pies were a small piece of South Korean largesse, but it was difficult at first to know how enthusiastically they were being received. The fact that Orion wrappers were nowhere to be found in the rubbish bins of Kaesong might have suggested indifference, but the opposite was true: the local workers, most of them women, had quickly realised that the Choco Pies were too delicious and valuable to eat. Kaesong employees, the best paid in North Korea and among the worst paid in Asia, were hoarding their pies, and selling them on at remarkably inflated prices: as high as the equivalent of $10 a piece, a large proportion of their monthly take home pay. The cakes found their way onto the black market in Pyongyang; corrupt soldiers in Kaesong, who routinely exacted ‘fines’ from the South Korean managers, began to accept, and sometimes require, payment in chocolate and marshmallow. By some estimates, 150,000 Choco Pies were being dispensed in Kaesong every day.

Translated: once again, money is anything the people think is money: decorated paper, stone wheels, digital blips, even shiny pieces of metal. And not even the most repressive of governments is any better than so so at controlling it. It's all adumbrated in a famous econ paper which had the air of novelty when it was published, though it is pretty much conventional wisdom today.

The excerpt is from Richard Lloyd Parry, "Advantage Pyongyang," reviewing Victor Cha, The Impossible State in the London Review of Books for May 9. The whole thing appears to be ungated; it's worth a read.

And BTW, what is it with the LRB? The showcased items for the week, along with Parry, are James Meek on the Cyprus haircut and Donald MacKenzie on the ~~Whitehall heist~~ bank restructuring of aught eight. Oh, and something about a former prime minister. For a literary rag isn't this all getting a tad financial?

The Franco-Gorbachev Connection

2013-05-02T22:01:00.003-07:00

Still absorbing Stanley Payne's highly rewarding Spain: A Unique History, I'm particularly taken by his (justly) long appraisal of the career of the dominant figure in Spain's 20th Century politics, the Caudillo, Francisco Franco. It's way too to rich to summarize in a brief blog post but a couple of points are worth noting. One, per Payne it is not true that Franco was a reluctant ally of the Nazis. Payne undertakes to show that Franco was totally cool with the Nazis; the trouble was that his conditions for cooperation were too high. Specifically, he wanted large chunks of Africa and Hitler didn't think he could give them away without offfending the French who, apparently, he felt he needed more.

And two, everybody, not least Franco himself, seems to have been surprised that Franco survived the collapse of Nazi Germany--not only survived but thrived for another 20 years. He achieved this feat, on Payne's account, by a fabulous display of political trimming, as he struggled to fit old doctrines to new demands. A particularly instructive comparison here would be Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia who also succeeded in reinventing himself and his ideology in the interest of survival. On he evidence, one would say it was Franco who did it better, handing over power to a stable democratic state while Tito left behind a maelstrom.

The Tito example does indeed provoke reflection but I wonder another instructive comparison might be with Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet U-- pardon, Russia and the remnants of that rare political creatures, an empire that quietly and (more or less) peacefully disbanded itself. One especially point of comparison: apparently Franco thought/hoped that he could facilitate modern economy without abandoning the traditionalist authoritarianism that lay so near to his heart. So in the same vein Gorbachev who learned only too late--or maybe never learned--that once you loosened the traces, there simply wasn't any place for the party any more.

Franco had plenty of blood on his hands--much more, I'd say, than Gorbachev. Toss in the undisputed fact that he was a man almost totally without any personal magnetism or charm and you have a character who won't so much be remembered badly as not remembered at all. But on balance he makes me remember the old Kentucky (mock) political rallying cry: they can go further and do worse and probably will!
.

Recommendation?

2013-05-02T12:33:00.000-07:00

One of the grandkids is discovering our common past. He's saying it is a pity he wasn't in Paris in 1968, so as to have a part in the making of a better world. He adds that he understands the opportunity carried an uncountable risk of death, but those are the breaks (an older cuz, with the wisdom of years, says he may get his chance yet).

I can grok. As I told him, I have often thought it ungracious of my parents that they did not birth me 15 years earlier so I could have had a chance my ass shot off for Stalin in Spain in 1937. But always ready to encumber with help, it occurred to me to offer up a short list of background reading. I suggested:

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, A History of the World, 1914-1991
Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the 20s to the 90s
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

So, one red, one pink, one deep blue, maybe flaming purple. We report, you decide. But then I got to thinking: all three of these guys are Eurocentric. Forget about the subtitles, yes, I mean Hobsbawm and Johnson just as much as Judt. And I wondered what, exactly, would you offer that provided the same focus on the United States?

I really can't answer that question. I can think of a lot of good books about the US in the late 20th Century but they're mostly specialized, single topic. I hardly think he is primed yet for, say, Murray Kempton's Part of Our Time. Or Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm. Or Richard Ben Cramer's What it Takes. Or--but like I say, I'm too blinkered. I want big picture. And no, despite your entreaties, I will not be the one to serve up Howard Zinn. Kid should be able to find some things for himself, like Story of O or Fanny Hill.

Any suggestions?

From My Existentialist Phase

2013-05-01T22:14:00.000-07:00

I seem to have gone through some kind of existentialist phase around 1976. Here's an item from the card file:

In the long run...what is really chosen is oneself. It is out of decisions that the self emerges. A self is not given ready-made at the beginning. What is given is a field of possibility, and as the existent projects himself into this possibility rather than that one, he begins to determine who he shall be. It is in this context that the question of permanence versus provisionality must be considered. A unitary self, as distinct from a series of unconnected acts can emerge only if there is a constancy of policies and commitments.

So John Macquarrie. Existentialism 185-6 (1973). On the next card, I find an echo, from someone who didn't think of himself as in any way an existentialist:

The sentiment of being is the sentiment of being strong. Which is not to say powerful: Rousseau, Schiller, and Wordsworth are not concerned with energy directed outward upon the world in aggression and dominance, but, rather, with such energy as co9ntrives that the centre shall hold, that the circumference of the self keep unbroken, that the person be an integer, impenetrable, predurable, and autonomous in being if not in action.

That's Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), a book I remember reading with great pleasure and I think profit, though I could never quite get straight which was Sincerity and which Authenticity. With both of the above, compare the bit on the next card from a near-forgotten early novel by a man who became famous later:

I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city. It is one of those saying which, because they deal with the particular and the concrete, like the instructions on a bottle of patent medicine, can appear flippant, except to those who have experienced their truth. To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born in disorder. From an early age, almost from my first lesson at school about the weight of the king's crown, I had sensed this. Now I was to discover that disorder has its own logic and permanence: the Greek was wise.

That is VS Naipaul, The Mimic Men 118 (1969). From Palookaville, second hand and barbarous, that's all for tonight.

What have we Learned Today, Children?

2013-05-01T11:42:00.001-07:00

Perhaps nothing. But we have relearned a lesson easy to forget: that insurgents are almost always children of the comfortable middle class, almost never the dispossessed. Link.

Perspective

2013-04-30T20:29:00.000-07:00

Here's Isaiah Berlin as we like to remember him:

It is difficult enough to develop an adequate consciousness of what we are and what we are at, and how we have arrived where we have done, without also being led on to make clear to ourselves what such consciousness and self-consciousness must have been like for persons in situations different form our own; yet no less is expected of the true historian. ... [I]maginative projection of ourselves into the past, the attempt to capture concepts and categories not altogether like ours by means of concepts and categories that cannot but be our own, is a task that we can never be sure that we are even beginning to achieve, yet are not permitted to abjure. We seek to apply scientific tests to our conclusions, but this will take us but a lttle way. Without a capacity for sympathy and imagination beyond any required by a physicist, there is no vision of either past or present, neither of others nor of ourselves; but without this, normal--as well as historical--thinking cannot function at all.

--"The Concept of Scientific History," I History and Theory 1 (1961) at 26-7. So my old notes from perhaps 37 years ago). I don't have that book any more (I think maybe I read it in the library at the London School of Economics). But I do see tht the same essay is bound up in a paperback appropriately enough titled Concepts and Categories, published in 1980.

I'm remembering Piaget (yes?--I can't find the reference) testing kids on the developing political consciousness by inquiring whether they could recognize "the same" mountain when photographed from different angles, i.e., from different points of view. And those (can't find a good cite) who talk about the development of perspective in Renaissance art as part and parcel of a growing political maturity (but they still burned Savonarola at the stake).

I copied out the Berlin quote about 30 years ago. I bet it was about the same time that I copied out two passages from Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art. First:

When Ibsen was once asked why he gave the heroine of his Doll's House such a foreign-sounding name, he answered that she was named after her grandmother who was Italian. Her real name was Eleonora, but she had been pampered as a child and called Nora. to the objection that all this played no part in the play itself, he replied in amazement: 'But facts are still facts.'

--Id., 52. And:

There is an extraordinary number of anecdotes about Balzac's relationship to his characters, similar to the one about Ibsen. The best known is the incident with Jules Sandeaux who, while telling him about his sister's illness, was interrupted by Balzac saying: 'That's all very well, but let's get back to reality: to whom are we going to marry Eugenie Grandet?

Id., 53. This is perhaps the attitude that the Shakespearean critic L.C. Knight mocked (and substantially undermined) with his essay ""How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?"--a question which, bye the bye, the author made no attempt to answer.

'We Think We're Just Special"

2013-04-30T12:43:00.002-07:00

Reading Stanley Payne's (somewhat ironically?) titled Spain: A Unique History, I'm reminded again of how blinkered are our own perceptions of our own political reality. As in, we think we're so special; but the briefest reflection should suggest that our own experience finds echoes almost everywhere,not least in the recent history of our close cultural neighbors, the Europeans.

Case in point: "liberals;" "nice people;"--that would be me, your honor--so often suck on their unassuageable sense of hurt, fueled by the insight that "they" just don't understand our good intentions: how we'd all be so much better off if "we'd all" just do as we say and become a tolerant, cooperative, seculariust and yes (perhaps) multiculturist and certainly (well-maybe) market--oriented. Specifically it makes us crazy when the Tea Party and its ilk let themselves get snarled up in the Muslim Thing, the Abortion Thing, the Gun Thing when we tend to regard all of these issues as distractions that ought to be got out of the way.

I won't labor the whole catalog of reasons of why "we" are right--nor the companion-account of how entirely this misses the point. My purpose at the moment is to observe only not-new this particular discontinuity is; how much it helps to explain so much of European politics over the past couple of hundred years.

You could start with the French Revolution, or more precisely, the royalist/Catholic reaction against the French Revolution; you could start with Balzac's first real novel, Les Chouans. People tend to dismiss the Chouans (when they pay attention at all) as useful idiotsm gullible tools of an evil and manipulative master classs. Balzac makes it clear that it's far more than that: the reaction (sic) of his Chouans is clearly fueled by the sincerest of passions.

So also Spain and Portugal. It's worth noting that as Spanish/Portugues "liberals" took baby steps with power in the 19th Century, they weren't at all enthusiastic about extending the franchise. And with good and sufficient reason: they understood that the peasants weren't at all interested in "their"--the liberals'--issues and would do what they could to defeat them. I suppose this has something to do with what Marx had ind when he fulminated about the idiocy of the peasants, although I suspect he may have come to the point from a slightly different perspective.

If this was novel insight for the Spanish liberals, it certainly wouldn't have surprised, say Napoleon III who grasped early on that he could build a government of the reactionary elite on a properly motivated mass audience. And forget about Napoleon: it comes close to the truth to say that every important European government of the 19th or 20th Century came from a reactionary elite that learned how one --not just the reluctant consent, but the enthusiastic cooperation--of a mass.

Another thing that is so great about Spain as an example here is that it is a dazzling instance of just how complicated both "liberalism" and "conservatism" can be. Spain had secularist/liberals whose main concern was to try to develop markets; but it had others whose primary motive seems to have been simply to bring down the church. Similarly the right had (at least) the traditionalists of church and monarchy; and the bullyboy streetfighters of falange. Also the military, whose internal complexities were far more arcane than our post-Franco memories tend to tell us. And let's not get started on the socialists...

I don't know if there is any consolation to be found here--to know that politics has always been as complex and contradictory a business as it appears today. But at least, Payne is a good companion along the way. And as to "unique," recall the old sports announcer's insight: everyone is unique and this one is no different.