As I am reading W. H. Kenney’s Jazz on the River I am also listening to the audiobook of Michael Massing’s Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind. Martin Luther, when he wasn’t blowing up Catholicism or excoriating the Jews, wrote many significant hymns that became central to Lutheran worship and helped to create a musical culture in Germany that was exported to the U.S. by German immigrants in the 19th century. One group of such immigrants, the Streckfus family, saw the decline of the packet boat industry along the Mississippi River in the 1890s and, perhaps because of that German musical culture, conceived the idea of converting their vessels into excursion boats featuring live orchestras and huge dance floors. It was on Streckfus steamers that Fate Marable spent fifty years leading Black orchestras, introducing New Orleans jazz to white audiences and teaching scores of notable jazz musicians (with Louis Armstrong at the top of that list) to read music fluently enough to make them employable when they (part of the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South) moved on to a bit of fame, if not fortune, in Chicago and New York. And another German immigrant, Bix Beiderbecke, growing up on the Mississippi shore in Davenport, Iowa, caught the jazz bug after hearing the riverboat orchestras, and became one of the first notable white jazz musicians. Martin Luther, no doubt, would have been appalled by Beiderbecke’s music.
It’s the same old song . . .
Summarized from Jazz on the River, by William Howland Kenney (2005), pp. 107-108:
- 1896: The American Federation of Musicians is founded with forty-four local unions. Local #44 is the Black musicians’ union in St. Louis, Missouri. For three decades Local 44 prospers, with Black musicians playing the venues that white musicians didn’t want: dance halls, nightclubs, and riverboats.
- 1927: With the end of silent movies, the white musicians who formerly played in movie theatres lose those jobs and begin moving in on the riverboat jobs, throwing Black musicians out of work.
- 1929: With the Depression, white musicians lose most of their other jobs playing vaudeville, stage shows, opera houses, and concert halls.
- 1930: The A.F.M. revokes Local 44’s charter, making it impossible for Black musicians to negotiate for contracts playing on the riverboats. Subsequently, three-quarters of the remaining riverboat jobs go to white musicians, leaving most Black musicians playing in marginal venues for non-union wages. Similar stories played out in cities across the nation.
- 1944: the A.F.M. finally charters a new union for Black musicians in St. Louis, Local 197.
- 1971: Local 197 is dissolved when the St. Louis musicians’ union is finally integrated.
Mama Lou
I just came across this lovely piece by Eric McHenry in The American Scholar that seems to provide the definitive story behind “Mama Lou” and the origins of songs like “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay” and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”:
Bessie Smith’s recording of “Hot Time” may be the closest we will ever get to Mama Lou’s original version, but the UK’s Ottilie Patterson and Chris Barber do a great job with it, too.
Like a heartbeat: why man-made systems fail
Utopians, ideologues, and system-builders of all sorts run aground when they forget that life is biological. Systems needs to breathe. They need to slow down or speed up, contract or expand, in response to changing conditions, like a heartbeat. Too much freedom? Increase order. Too much order? Increase freedom. Too little regulation? Too much regulation? Adjust as needed.
Far easier said than done, but inelastic systems guarantee failure, like medieval Christian attempts to fix “permissible” interest rates, aiming to avoid usury while still allowing for normal economic activity, and failing at both—because actual interest rates fluctuate with the money supply, like a heartbeat fluctuating to meet the needs of the body.
The more that man-made systems imitate this biological elasticity, the more they will succeed.
Can real men live in a peaceful society?
In 19th-century Europe the growing middle class generated by the Industrial Revolution developed a new way of life. In bourgeois towns the streets were lit at night; policemen ensured order, supported by judges, courts, juries, and jailers. City parks provided pleasant Sunday walks, and perhaps even a brass band playing music in a pavilion. Fathers went to work each morning. Some returned home for the midday meal, along with the children home from school; all returned home for supper with the family. Mothers stayed at home to care for the children, maintain the house, and prepare the meals. In wealthier families they were assisted by servants who helped with the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and care of the children. The men worked in shops and offices, as clerks or salesmen, or as managers in one of the local factories. Physical labour was left to the working class in towns, and to farmers in the countryside. Wars were a thing of the past, or took place only at the remote edges of the continent.
In this new bourgeois society, new male stereotypes emerged: the pompous banker; the crafty lawyer; the doctor who might cure you or might kill you with his primitive treatments; the dandy, with his fancy clothes and smooth talk for the ladies; the mousy clerk; the fawning salesman. None of these male figures were strong candidates for the army. No, the army’s officers were from the upper classes—the noblemen who for countless generations had been bred for war. The ordinary soldiers and sailors were from the working classes. The bourgeois men were too soft to make good soldiers. They were peacetime creatures, better suited for commerce than for combat. Sport was the only aspect of bourgeois life where the old warlike masculine virtues were still cultivated, with boxing and wrestling most prominent. (In the 20th century the role of sport in bourgeois life exploded, with multiple forms of team sports and an entire industry of exercise and fitness for people who rarely exercised their bodies on the job.)
When it came to love and marriage, this bourgeois society produced a whole new set of stereotypes. The young bourgeois man was not very attractive to the girls whose attention went to the “bad boys” with bulging muscles and scars from brawling. These “dangerous” guys seemed much more exciting to girls than the well-behaved, well-dressed, well-spoken boys they knew from school. Despite their attractions as lovers, however, these “dangerous” men rarely made good husbands—if they married at all—and so most of the bourgeois girls eventually got over such passing infatuations and settled on some reliable fellow who could be counted on to provide her with a comfortable life and be a good husband and father. In the 20th century, similar dissatisfactions with the lack of excitement in bourgeois life led teenagers of both sexes to experiment with “wild” behaviours featuring music offensive to their parents, crazy fashions and hairstyles, tattoos, motorcycles, boyfriends or girlfriends their parents would not approve of, drug and alcohol abuse, and sexual adventures—anything and everything, in short, to violate bourgeois norms and conventions.
At the heart of this new bourgeois life and its dissatisfactions was the new bourgeois man who, despite his education and sophistication, was decidedly unexciting. The stereotypical man of earlier times, by contrast, performed physical labour that kept him fit and strong; was ready at a moment’s notice to use his fists or pick up a weapon to wield against enemies or wild beasts; but could also play a fiddle or sing a song or build a house, and wanted to marry a good woman and raise a family. He combined, in short, the traditional masculine virtues with a dedication to home and family.
These traditional masculine virtues go way, way back. In Homer’s Odyssey we hear the tale of Ares, the god of war, having an affair with Aphrodite, the goddess of love who has been married to the crippled smith god, Hephaistos, in a failed attempt to tame and domesticate her. Ares is hyper-masculine: a strong, handsome warrior who loves the battlefield even more than he loves women. Aphrodite is hyper-feminine: beautiful, sexy, and unfaithful. In bourgeois society Ares would be a low-class thug, and Aphrodite a shameless whore. Their extremes of masculinity and femininity are taboo in a middle-class world. The problems of respectable middle-class women managing their inner Aphrodites deserve attention, and the consequences of middle-class women violating sexual taboos are serious and well-known: scandal, disgrace, sexually-transmitted disease, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, single motherhood, etc. But our focus here is on the marginalization and condemnation of hyper-masculinity in bourgeois society, because the consequences of men violating bourgeois taboos around masculinity range from the personal (e.g., assaults, domestic violence, rape) to the collective (e.g., gangs, fascism, and war). We see these pathological versions of manhood today in politics and society around the world: authoritarian leaders, tribal and national chauvinism, celebration of “bro culture”; pop music stars who are misogynistic in both their art and their lives; politicians who ramp up male fear that the women are “taking over.”
In William James’s 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” he writes of “manly virtues,” of which he approves and wishes to preserve while at the same time avoiding their ultimate testing-ground, war. Society may have changed, James writes, but human nature remains: “modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.” That “love of glory” reminds us, perhaps, of sport as both preparation and substitute for war. “We are the champions!” cry the winners. Sport having failed to end war, James proposes his “moral equivalent”: mandatory conscription of all young men for a period of service dedicated to arduous tasks that are needed but usually regarded as undesirable vocations: “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them . . . .” Working in teams, they would toil and sweat together, help each other, learn brotherhood and comradeship, and have the satisfaction of giving themselves to a cause greater than their own petty, personal desires. James, writing in the last year of his long life, asserts that “Such a conscription . . . would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.” In closing he writes, “I have no serious doubt that [we] are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness . . . .”
Without doubt James’s scheme would achieve a good deal, as we have seen in the United States in the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, or in John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps. These programs, however, though inspired by James’s essay, were both voluntary—the universal conscription proposed by James has never been tried. Without such an experiment, we cannot know whether James’s idea could indeed so satisfy the noble and positive aspects of war that war itself would forever end. Is it possible to tame the urge to make war? One thinks of chivalry, the medieval attempt to civilize roaming bands of armed brigands plaguing towns and cities by inspiring them to be noble, brave, honest knights upholding Christian morality and defending the weak and defenceless (especially if they were beautiful ladies). We may scoff at this chivalric myth, but it has had some staying power. Millions of young men, admonished by their mothers to behave “like gentlemen,” have learned to stand when a lady enters a room, to offer their seats to the elderly, to remove their hats at the supper table, to speak without swearing, and to defend others against bullies.
On the other hand, a few minutes spent browsing social media may lead to serious doubts about chivalry’s staying power. And while many young men may still learn good manners from their parents, it is hard to see this as more than surface behaviour that quickly evaporates under stress—or when using an encrypted account. Underneath any polite bourgeois surface that still exists, the hyper-masculine spirit of Bertran de Born (ca. 1140 – 1215), the Occitan poet-warrior, still lurks:
Maces and swords, colourful helms,
shields riven and cast aside:
these shall we see at the start of the battle,
and also many vassals struck down,
the horses of the dead and wounded running wild.
And when he enters the combat,
let every man of good lineage
think of nothing but splitting heads and hacking arms;
for it is better to die than to live in defeat.
I tell you, I find no such savour
in eating or drinking or sleeping
as when I hear the cries of “attack!”
from both sides, and the noise
of riderless horses in the shadows;
and I hear screams of “Help! Help!”
and I see great and small alike
falling into the grassy ditches
and the dead
with splintered lances, bedecked with pennons
through their sides.
The ladies of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court, according to the legend, invented chivalry to tame the violence of the men around them. Can we do better? Can we have manhood without murderous violence, or are the two inseparable? If humans are indeed highly evolved animals rather than aspiring angels, perhaps other animals can help with these questions. A male dog who cannot be trained out of his violent behaviour is sometimes castrated. The same procedure is used with stallions and other farm animals that are no longer needed for breeding. From the Wikipedia page on gelding:
Castration allows a male animal to be more calm, better-behaved, less sexually aggressive, and more responsive to training efforts. Additionally, it is known for making the animal quieter, gentler and generally more suitable as an everyday working animal, or even as a pet (in the case of companion animals).
A drastic solution, but apparently it works. Would it be a violation of human rights? Cruel and unusual punishment? Or a natural consequence for people whose repeated anti-social violence poses a grave threat to society? Surely there must be less drastic solutions. Are prison and castration our only options for controlling anti-social hyper-masculinity, or can men learn to express their virility in positive ways that make them better people and make their communities stronger and safer? Will future scientists devise a way to adjust the hormone levels of an anti-social male without emasculating him? Or must we expect that war and violence, as they have always been part of human experience, will remain with us as long as there are humans?
I am reminded once again of that triangular diagram of human nature, as imagined by Plato and Aristotle, and recycled by Dante in his vision of Hell. The diagram shows Appetite and Will as the base of the triangle. Reason, the highest and best part of human nature, according to the Greeks, and for Christians the most divine part of our nature—the part that distinguishes us from other animals—is the small bit at the top of the triangle. Optimists have argued that we can use our reason to restrain our appetites and master our will. Recent studies in neuroscience, however, have suggested that our choices are made long before they reach the level of articulation, and that while we may think we are using our reason to make decisions, we are actually using our reason to ratify decisions already made unconsciously. Politics and current events in the 21st century would seem to support this view, especially when one considers the perverse reasoning used to justify bigotry, hatred, discrimination, and an appalling variety of atrocities.
Dante’s Hell is this same diagram, flipped upside down. As Virgil guides the Pilgrim down into the pit of Hell, they begin with the less serious sins—sins of the appetites—pass through the sins of willfulness, and finally reach the bottom of the pit, where the worst sins are punished: those that involve perversion of Reason, that divine gift of God to humans, for evil purposes. The logic is clear, but I am beginning to think that Dante got it wrong. When I consider the most pernicious human evils—racism, religious hatred, sexism and misogyny, and the hyper-masculinity that transforms these negative emotions into murderous violence—they seem to be rooted deep in our nature, in our appetites and our willfulness, in our psycho-biology. Reason has little to do with these dark impulses. We fear the Other, a fear based in our own insecurities, and that fear easily turns to hatred. Men’s insecurities respond to threats, as discussed above, with hyper-masculine violence both individual and collective. Can we be kind, loving, generous, even selfless? Of course . . . but only, it seems, if we have been blessed with situations in which our insecurities are not threatened. Here is Hamlet’s take:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? . . .
Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?
—II.ii
Ah, but Hamlet, as we know, was prone to melancholy.
Paradise lost
When I was a boy, bird poop was everywhere. Cars parked on the street would be covered with it. More than once I was hit on the head while riding my bike or walking down the street. I remember, too, digging my hands into wet sand at the beach and bringing up scores of sea creatures: tiny crabs, shells of all kinds (many inhabited), sand dollars, etc. As a young man home from university years later I did the same thing and brought up nothing but sand. And today, bird droppings are rare items. I cannot remember the last time I was concerned about birds overhead doing their business on me.
A passage from the biography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) that I have been reading brought these memories to mind. In February 1803, von Humboldt was voyaging by ship from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Mexico:
The Pacific was full of life—it was as though the sea was paved with fish. Pods of dolphins passed by, ‘resembling herds of swine.’ There was a plethora of birds, too: pelicans, gulls, sea swallows, so that ‘the sea looked like a huge pond covered in birds.’
—Maren Meinhardt, Alexander von Humboldt: How the Most Famous Scientist of the Romantic Age Found the Soul of Nature (2018)
A huge pond covered in birds! Roadkill of the Industrial Revolution. Lord, what have we done?
Roy and Lou
On November 9th we lost Lou Donaldson (November 1, 1926 – November 9, 2024), and today we lost Roy Haynes (March 13, 1925 – November 12, 2024), two giants of music who gave so much to us, and who proved that the good do not always die young. As Roy told Jon Batiste in an interview a few years ago, every day is Thanksgiving. Thank you, gentlemen. The world is a better place because you were here. As for the rest of you: go listen to their music!
Don Quixote’s wise words
The inspiring words of Don Quixote, seeking to console Sancho Panza:
All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve, and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long a time, the good is close at hand.
—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Part I, Chapter XVIII)
In the next moment he learns that their saddlebags have been stolen and they have nothing to eat.
Nonsense in a Strange Land
I revisited Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land after half a century by listening to the audiobook, which, mercifully, is based on the shorter version first published in 1962, rather than the “uncut” version published in the 1990s by Heinlein’s widow.
At its worst, the novel is a hodgepodge of nonsense interspersed with offensive and mildly offensive artifacts of the time when it was written and the gender of its author. At its best it does indeed (as Heinlein claimed) raise fundamental questions worth considering about who we are as a species, and how we ought to live. It’s something like the People Magazine version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Are the questions worth the nonsense? No. But the nonsense is just treacly enough to keep the book in print and selling for another fifty years, I fear.
November 2024
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. . . .
Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.
—Howard Zinn,
from A Power Governments Cannot Suppress and “Artists of Resistance”
Clown, madman, thug: the appeal of fascism
Hitler’s power and success never ceased to astonish Mussolini. There was something unreal, something that didn’t make sense about the triumph of this Bohemian psychopath. In his heart of hearts, Mussolini saw Hitler’s success as a bizarre freak, an aberration on the part of world history. . . .
Novikov . . . [after seeing a Nazi army officer on the street] said to himself three words he would remember again and again. “Clown!” Then correcting himself: “Madman!” Then correcting himself once more: “Thug!”
—Stalingrad, by Vasily Grossman (1952)
Hitler, Hinkel, Drumpf, Trump: variations on a theme. Why does the fascist clown madman thug appeal to millions of people? All our astonishing science and technology will mean nothing if we cannot answer this question and put fascism finally, permanently in the past.
Even the best army . . .
Even the best army is doomed to fail when it is required to perform impossible tasks, that is, when it is ordered to campaign against the national existence of other peoples.
—General Friedrich Paulus, commander of the German 6th army who surrendered to the Russians in the Battle of Stalingrad.
Perhaps Vlad Putin and Bibi Netanyahu should take note.
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels
Think of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, with Nick Carraway observing his dubious friends and acquaintances—part of their story but always on the margin of the action.
Think of Marcel Proust’s endless reconsiderations of everything.
Turn the narrator into a woman, who adds to endless reconsiderations endless and peculiarly feminine doubts, self-doubts, waxing and waning of self-confidence.
Begin the story with two girls in a working-class neighbourhood of post-World War II Naples and its collection of petty criminals, gangsters, shopkeepers, and fascists whose wartime activities are never mentioned but permeate the air.
Is Lila/Lina Elena’s best friend? enemy? doppelganger? evil twin? Will Elena, like Nick Carraway and Melville’s Ishmael, escape the fate of the others, or will she be dragged down with them? The novels present an exhausting yet hypnotic four-volume, slow-motion train wreck covering half a century of these fascinating, frustrating, sometimes infuriating, occasionally hilarious lives.
In the background we get the Sixties, political upheaval, Cold War, the sexual revolution, etc.
P.S.: The men, with rare exceptions, do not come off well. Not at all.
P.P.S.: The narrator’s name is Elena, as is the author’s, and in the novels Elena becomes a novelist who writes about her best friend . . . but the novelist’s name is a nom de plume. And . . . the rumour mill has it that the author may actually be a man, writing under a woman’s name! Mon dieu!
Hurricane Trump: The climate has changed
Meteorologists are scrambling to make sense of the what experts call the most dangerous instance of bizarre weather events seen so far.
“The climate isn’t changing,” one of them says. “It has changed.”
Hurricane Trump, readers may recall, seemed to have finally disappeared in early 2021. “We thought the worst was over then,” says Dr. Jeremiah Sunshine, head of the National Hurricane Center.
Now, however, to the experts’ amazement, Hurricane Trump has returned and is heading not for a particular city or region, but straight towards the entire United States! Hurricane watchers say that unless Trump changes course at the last minute, it will wipe out much of the US and then head straight for Western Europe. Only Moscow, Pyongyang, and Budapest would appear to be safe. They are calling this incredible phenomenon “Hurricane Trump II.”
Hurricane Trump first appeared in 2015 in New York City. Veering southward, it struck Washington, D.C., inflicting what commentators kept calling “unprecedented” damage. Environmental regulations were blown to pieces, while corporate profits soared out of sight. The federal budget exploded, and the national debt disappeared into the stratosphere along with corporate profits. The Republican Party took a direct hit, and has been out of commission ever since. International allies were battered mercilessly, while adversaries, strangely, seemed to sail serenely through the chaos. In the midst of all this, the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into a confusion that was made even worse by Hurricane Trump, which spewed denials, bleach, and horse pills in every direction while bodies piled up in temporary storage trucks and hospitals were overwhelmed by the number of patients and the lack of essential supplies. Hurricane Trump continued throughout the 2020 election year and into 2021, when it smacked right into the US Capitol on January 6th. The resulting injuries, deaths, broken windows, pilfering, and filth seemed to mark the climactic end of the storm, and despite all the damage there was a widespread feeling that the ordeal was finally over.
The reappearance of Hurricane Trump three years later cannot be accounted for. Climate scientists are reconfiguring their models and projections, trying to understand a new reality in which hurricanes, long after they appear to be over, return like boomerangs, stronger than ever. “I am sorry to say that we have little understanding of what is happening,” says Dr. Sunshine. “We can only advise people to board up their windows, pile up the sandbags, avoid pregnancy or any other condition requiring gynecological care, try not to be an immigrant or even to look like one, fill up the gas tank, and be ready to flee at a moment’s notice.” Asked if anything else can be done, Dr. Sunshine paused thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “it couldn’t hurt to vote. Might not help, but it couldn’t hurt. At this point, it’s certainly worth a try.”
Give some to the drummer?
Fate Marable (1890 – 1947) spent most of his life as pianist and bandleader on Mississippi River steamboats. In 1910, with a thousand passengers dancing to his orchestra’s music,
a fire broke out in the hold. Despite their orders to keep playing lest the passengers panic, each of the musicians in turn laconically allowed as how he figured he’d just ease on over and ‘see what was happening to the boat,’ in order, of course, to report back. Each one in turn slipped out and disappeared, including Marable, who left his drummer to carry on alone.
Sigh. I imagine the drummer thinking, “Ah, at last they’ve given me a solo!”
The steamboat
. . . burned to the waterline that evening. As a local paper reported: ‘Wild panic broke loose among the passengers, and . . . a general stampede ensued. Screaming, cursing, praying men, women, and children fought, jammed, and trampled over one another in mad chaos and confusion.’ Two passengers lost their lives, and crew members, who jumped into the water to help floundering passengers, later reported that babies rained down on them from the deck railings. After reuniting with his musicians on Bad Axe Island, Marable found that without the [steamboat] he and his band . . . no longer enjoyed gainful employment. Happily, John Streckfus [the owner] soon went out and bought a whole fleet of boats . . . .
—William Howland Kenney, Jazz on the River, p. 43
So, the drummer—who was he?—seems to have survived, but no word on whether he was able to save his drums.
The Circle of Modern Political Ideologies
It’s not a line, or spectrum, from right to left, but a circle where the extremes meet. Understood in this way, the current love affair of the American far-right with Putin of Russia and Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and Mr. Trump’s mish-mash of name-calling against his enemies, begin to make sense.
Toxic Globalization: guns, drugs, oil, and music
Bread and circuses, my eye. Those Romans were amateurs.
Globalization began with Silk Road traders bringing bubonic plague to Europe, wiping out a third of the population.
It continued with Columbus and other Europeans bringing a catastrophic pandemic to the Americas in exchange for gold, silver, tobacco, tomatoes, and potatoes.
It reached a new high with the British triangle trade: guns and cotton fabric to West Africa in exchange for slaves who were taken to Caribbean and American colonies to work on sugar plantations and, later, cotton plantations. Sugar, rum, cotton—and lumber for shipbuilding—went from the colonies to Great Britain, completing the triangle.
Sugar was needed for the tea to which Britons had become addicted. The tea came from China, and as the Chinese wanted nothing British except silver, which the Brits did not want to part with, a two-pronged solution was conceived. First, they exported opium from another British colony, India (which included what we now call Afghanistan) to China and bullied the Chinese into trading tea for opium, eventually addicting millions of Chinese. Second, they stole the secrets of processing the leaves of Camellia sinensis into tea, and then developed tea plantations of their own in India and Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka).
In the 20th century, especially after World War II, globalization expanded. All those factories built to make weapons for the war needed new markets. Guns went to “developing” countries, i.e., former European colonies in Africa and Asia and Latin America; in return came illegal drugs to feed the growing addiction market in Europe and North America: marijuana, cocaine, and our old friend opium, now refined into heroin. The third major commodity of world trade was petroleum, without which international trade would have been much slower—petroleum, which literally fuelled automobile culture, the international travel industry, and the global environmental crisis.
Indispensable to all this commerce were bankers and gangsters.
Organized crime works by skimming profits, and globalization provided unprecedented business opportunities. Dictators and insurgents around the world needed weapons; gangsters could provide them, even where the commerce was prohibited by law. Weapons were often exchanged for drugs that could be exported and re-sold at enormous profits, using the clandestine networks developed by the gangsters. The dirty money acquired in these transactions needed to be cleaned (“laundered”) and that’s where bankers, casinos, and real estate developers came in.
In the United States, the sale of alcohol was made illegal in 1920. Prohibition led to an explosion of organized crime. Big money could be made running illegal breweries, distilleries, bars, and nightclubs, and importing alcohol from outside the country. During the Great War of 1914-1918, another wave of the Great Migration had swelled Black urban populations in the northern cities where factories churned out war matériel. They brought their music with them: gospel music, blues, ragtime, and jazz. An economic boom followed World War I. Urban populations had money to spend. Organized criminals supplied the music and the booze. At the same time, technology enabled recordings that could be distributed nationwide—and beyond—and radio broadcasts sent the new music into almost every home. Entertainment and music became industries controlled by organized crime. Musicians were kept in poverty by nightclub owners and record companies that skimmed most of the profits for themselves.
In Chicago, Al Capone adored the music and fostered an entire generation of music. In Harlem, the Mob-owned Cotton Club had as its house band the sophisticated Duke Ellington Orchestra. Kansas City had an entire district of jazz clubs . . . made possible by a corrupt political machine that served as a model for the Havana Mob [of the 1950s] as constructed by [the gangster Meyer] Lansky, [Cuban dictator Fulgencia] Batista, et al.
—T. J. English, Havana Nocturne, p. 244
After Prohibition ended in 1933, many of the gangsters switched to drugs: marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. (Others, most notably Meyer Lansky, disliked the drug trade and instead moved most of their operations to the casino business in Cuba.) Musicians were often paid in drugs, and their addictions provided a new market for the drugs being imported by the mafia while also ensuring that the musicians would remain dependent.
Musicians unwilling to perform and record on the gangsters’ terms simply could not work. Behind the scenes of almost any star singer, musician, band, or comedian you will find the mafia. Louis Armstrong hired a mobster, Joe Glaser, to be his manager, knowing that Glaser would enrich himself at Armstrong’s expense. Why? Because Glaser would protect him. Forty years later, five young men who later came to be known as The Band could not get a recording contract from anyone except the mobster Morris Levy; faced with the choice of getting ripped off or not recording at all, they signed with Levy. Such famous cases are not extraordinary—they are typical. The mob’s control of the “entertainment industry” was pervasive.
[1931, Chicago] By this time he had his big ‘Pistol—Pulling it out—As he said—”My name is ‘Frankie Foster.” And he said he was sent over to my place (Show Boat) to see that I ‘Catch the first train out to ‘New York. . . . Then He Flashed his Big ‘Ol’ Pistol and ‘Aimed it ‘Straight at ‘me. With my ‘eyes as big as ‘Saucers’ and ‘frightened too I said—”Well ‘Maybe I ‘Am ‘going to ‘New York.”
—Louis Armstrong in His Own Words, p. 110
Instead of going to New York, Armstrong fled. He spent two years in Europe. When he returned, he hired Joe Glaser to be his manager, following the advice given to him by a friend when he left New Orleans:
[Black Benny] said (to me), “Dipper, As long as you live, no matter where you may be—always have a White Man (who like[s] you) and can + will put his Hand on your shoulder and say—“This is “My” Nigger” and, Can’t Nobody Harm’ Ya.”
There was a positive side to these relationships. Both Jews and Italians had been the victims of prejudice as immigrants, and neither group had quite the same racist aversions to Blacks as did the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority. Among many of these Italian and Jewish gangsters, Black musicians found protectors who shielded them from racist patrons and cops, bailed them out of jail, gave them a meal or a drink when they were down and out, or paid their rent, and employed them. There was also a significant number of Italian and Jewish performers—singers, comedians, musicians—who shared stages with Blacks and became friends, breaking the taboos of racism and leading the way toward a future of equality and justice. Overall, however, all performers were exploited by the gangsters, and white gangsters were just as racist as other whites.
In 1950s Cuba, Havana’s casinos, nightclubs, and brothels were mob operations that financed the Batista dictatorship. Hollywood movie stars, politicians like the young John Kennedy, along with many other celebrities and high-flyers provided a glamorous cover for this sordid arrangement. When the Castro revolution expelled the mob from Cuba, they retrenched to Las Vegas’s garish casinos and hotels, where middle-class Americans with money to spend could “let their hair down”: gambling, strippers, big-name entertainers, and lots of alcohol.
In the 1980s, Reagan’s deregulation of banking and finance made it possible for a new class of billionaires to suck money away from the middle classes into their own bulging pockets, until the U.S. wealth gap came to resemble the traditional wealth gaps in monarchies and dictatorships: a tiny group of the super-rich at the top, and then everyone else. The difference between this deregulated hedge-fund capitalism and the “pure capitalism” of organized crime? The hedge-fund guys had purchased legislators who made their operations legal.
Long before the 1980s, there were discreet but obvious ties between the Mob and “legitimate” businessmen. Frank Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, recounts a holiday gathering of gangsters in Palm Springs:
And it wasn’t just Sam Giancana. Throughout the day one mob boss after another showed up at [Sinatra’s] Alejo house. There was Johnny Rosselli, . . . a guy named Joe F. and another called Johnny F, and some others with Italian names no one could pronounce. Each guy came with at least one or two thick-necked bodyguards. . . .
That weekend I would drive Sam Giancana around Palm Springs to meet his visiting fellow mobsters, each of whom was staying in some gated mansion, not of celebrities but rather of the faceless fat cats from all over who owned manufacturing companies and heavy industry . . . . Those mobsters were certainly connected, although I’m not sure to whom.
—
Mr. S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra, by George Jacobs and William Stadiem (2003)
Drugs and alcohol, guns, oil . . . an “entertainment industry” controlled by the same criminals who trade in guns and drugs . . . a corrupted banking industry facilitating the transfer of huge amounts of money . . . billionaires in super yachts while middle-class folks struggle to buy a home or pay medical bills or finance an education beyond high school . . . pandemics spreading worldwide faster than we can even track . . . a climate crisis that threatens to make much of the planet uninhabitable.
That’s what globalization has brought us, but like the addicts we are, we tolerate all the short-term side effects and long-term debilitation in return for the highs, the sweetness, the bliss. Without globalization, would we have Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, etc.? Would we have Olympic champions, the World Cup, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and all the amazing athletic achievements of the past century? Would we have dazzling holidays around the globe? Would we have restaurants serving up delicious ethnic cuisines in our home towns and “world music” on our playlists? The culture and economy spawned by globalization feed our addictions, both literal and metaphorical, and it seems inevitable that we will end up as all unreformed addicts do.
CODA
So, what are the “through lines” in this story?
- Technology, from the wheels and sailing ships that connected China to Europe in the days of the Silk Road, to the cell phones and social media that connect everyone to everyone else today.
- Genius and talent, funded by gangsters both legal and illegal. Think of the Florentine bankers who financed the Italian Renaissance, making Michelangelo and Leonardo possible; or the hedge fund billionaires who own the Los Angeles Dodgers, making Shohei Ohtani possible; or Werner von Braun, funded by Hitler, and then the US government; or the fabulous music of post-WWII Cuba, funded by the Mob’s casinos.
- Addiction. To tea, to sugar, to alcohol and other drugs. To entertainment. To gambling. To sex. To shopping. To social media. To everything.
- Environmental destruction. Coal. Petroleum. All the pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers required for industrialized agriculture. Air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination. Insect and bird populations, aquatic life, hundreds of other species extinct or in danger of extinction. All of this leading to climate change, mass migrations, and potentially making the planet uninhabitable.
- Pandemics, from the bubonic plague to smallpox and syphilis to influenza to SARS and COVID and mpox, with more to come, we are told.
- Exploitation of vulnerable populations. Of China by the British in the 18th century. Of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East by Europeans in the colonization that began with Columbus and continued for the best part of 500 years. In the “neo-colonial” economic imperialism of the Cold War era that followed decolonization and World War II, and continues today. Of women, trafficked around the world, both for sex and to labour in sweatshops where they help to feed the appetites of those who are better off for more and more things, at bargain-basement prices. Of migrants working illegally to process chickens or harvest vegetables so the rest of us can buy groceries at prices we can afford.
E. F. Schumacher, the author of Small Is Beautiful, was right. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, was right. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, was right. But they were all, along with many others less well known, spitting in the wind of globalization. Me, too.
Further Reading
- Mezz Mezzrow, Really the Blues (1946)
- Levon Helm, This Wheel’s on Fire (2nd ed., 2000)
- The Baby Dodds Story, as told to Larry Gara (2002)
- Tony Scherman, Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story (1999)
- Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (2005)
- Louis Armstrong in His Own Words, ed. Thomas Brothers (1999)
- T. J. English, Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution (2009)
- T. J. English, Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (2023)
- George Jacobs and William Stadiem, Mr. S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra (2003)
- “BC’s Underground Economy Is Huge. And Deadly,” by Geoff Meggs. The Tyee, 22 August 2024. https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2024/08/22/BC-Underground-Economy-Huge-Deadly/
CODA #2
Listen to the younger son of independent Singapore’s founder, Lee Kuan Yew. The Lee family has controlled Singapore, poster child for the post-WWII Asian economic “miracle,” since 1965.
“There is a need for the world to look more closely, to see Singapore’s role as that key facilitator for arms trades, for dirty money, for drug monies, crypto money.”
A Singapore government spokesperson said the country had “a robust system to deter and tackle money laundering and other illicit financial flows”, pointing to its favourable ranking in Transparency International’s corruption perception index, well above the UK.
Duncan Hames, director of policy at Transparency International UK, said: “As Britain knows all too well, countries can look like they don’t have a domestic corruption problem yet still play a key role in enabling corrupt networks elsewhere. Singapore’s regional role as a major financial hub makes it attractive to those seeking to move or hide illicit funds, especially from a relatively high-risk neighbourhood.”
Practice vs. Performance
The International Baccalaureate labels homework assignments and assessments as either “formative” or “summative.” Students quickly figure out that “formative” means ungraded, and conclude that ungraded means unimportant, and therefore optional. This is a grave error.
Analogies can help here. Music students who never practice will perform poorly in their recitals. Student athletes who slack off in practice sessions or miss them altogether will perform poorly in competitions.
- If you practice well, then your recitals will go well.
- “Practice well” means completing all assignments conscientiously and submitting them on time. Key words: all, conscientiously, on time.
- If you do not practice well, your recitals will not go well.
- Foolish students think that practice is unimportant because it is ungraded. They do poorly on summative assessments.
- Wise students understand that (a) practice is what’s really important, and (b) good practice will make summative assessments easy and produce better results.
The following table shows all the “formative” work for one of my English classes in one column, and the “summative” work in the other.
| “Piano Practice” | “Recitals” |
| Independent Reading | Speeches and recitations |
| Vocabulary exercises and tests | In-class writing tasks |
| Blog Posts | Unit Finals |
| Personal Writing | |
| Independent Reading Journal Entries | |
| Personal responses to the readings | |
| Practice public speaking | |
| Quizzes on assigned readings | |
| Class participation | |
| Note-taking |
If you are still unsure which is more important, consider this: Without practice, your performances are going to be worthless. Without performances, however, your practice sessions still have value, because they give you long-lasting skills.
Reluctant readers: how to help a child who does not enjoy reading
If your child is a reluctant reader, here are some suggestions:
- Read together. Inexperienced readers have trouble translating written words into sounds. Take turns reading, one sentence read by you, the next by your child as he or she reads along.
- Reading together can also help to turn reading from a chore into a pleasure. Make this reading time a treat. 15 minutes a day, every day, will do wonders. The regularity is key.
- Avoid “graphic novels” (a.k.a. comic books) as much as possible: the goal is to learn how to pay attention to written language, not pictures. Moreover, the text in graphic novels often does not model proper capitalization.
- Take your child to a bookshop where the employees really know books. Explain that your child is a reluctant reader. If your child has a special interest—hockey, horses, swimming, etc.—that will help the bookshop staff find books that will be both appealing and accessible.
- Children with serious reading challenges like dyslexia can benefit from reading along with audiobooks. The idea, again, is to help them learn how written text translates into sounds. It is important that the child not just listen, but reads along with the narration. It is also important that the audiobook version of the book is unabridged, matching the written text word-for-word. A digital device that is just for reading can be helpful; those that include games and other distracting apps are not.
- A good list of books recommended by students at each grade level can be found on the website for Nancie Atwell’s Center for Teaching and Learning in Maine: https://c-t-l.org/reading-resources/kids-recommend.
- Finally, your child’s English teacher will always be happy to help. Do not hesitate to reach out any time you have a question, suggestion, or concern.
Write what you know?
If you are a writer who has lived in just one place, has never traveled, speaks just one language, and has a limited education, you should write about your home town.
Or, if like James Joyce you are multi-lingual, impossibly erudite, and you have traveled and lived in several countries, you can then . . . write about your home town.
James Joyce, husband and father
From the “Good Artist ≠ Good Person” Department:
1907: Joyce, living on a negligible salary as a bank clerk and funds borrowed from his brother, with a young son and a pregnant wife, eluding creditors and moving from one shabby apartment to another, gives notice to his employer. On his last day of work,
he drew a month’s salary (250 lire) at the bank and went on a farewell spree—a drunken adieu to the Eternal City, which he had come to consider ‘vulgar’ and ‘whorish.’ When [he was] suitably drunk, two congenial bar-flies took him to a backstreet and relieved him of his bulging wallet. He returned home penniless and completely soaked from an evening downpour.
In 1922, Joyce and his friends celebrate the first printing of 1,000 copies of Ulysses, published by Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. Joyce
presented copy no. 1,000 to Nora who immediately offered to sell it to Arthur Power who was present, a joke which Joyce pretended to find amusing. Although it was widely believed that Nora had never read Ulysses, according to Power it was evident that she had. She admitted to McAlmon that she had read the last pages of the book, adding, ‘I guess the man’s a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, surely!’ When McAlmon told her that it was her down-to-earth presence that had transformed her husband from ‘the word-prettifying bard’ and ‘martyred sensibility,’ Stephen Dedalus, she told him, ‘Go along with you! What they’ll be saying next is that if it hadn’t been for that ignoramus of a woman, what a man he would have been! But never you mind, I could tell them a thing or two about him after twenty years of putting up with him, and the devil take him when he’s off on one of his rampages!’
. . . When one young man approached him in a restaurant and asked, ‘Could I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’ he replied, ‘Oh no, don’t do that; it did other things too.’
On the other hand, the family goes on holiday in Brittany in 1923:
. . . Touring the countryside with Lloyd Morris, the American critic, and his mother, they came across a field of druidic stones. When they stopped for lunch Joyce took Morris aside and said that if the womenfolk were to comment on the shape of the stones no mention should be made of their phallic significance. Such talk among ladies, Morris concluded, was taboo for Joyce.
. . . [Stuart] Gilbert decided that the problem with the Joyces was that they lived empty lives, forming only fleeting attachments to things and making few real friends. That was why Joyce filled his life with pointless campaigns . . . . He was, thought Gilbert, deeply cynical about human intentions, and other people’s troubles left him unmoved, except for those of close family members.
[1936] The sound of warplanes exercising over Paris was an intimation of the change which was slowly transforming European consciousness. On 19 July civil war erupted in Spain and the approaching Berlin Olympics would show to the world the assertive face of the dictatorial right. The young were engaged in war and words of war, and their literary interests were reflecting that change of mood and commitment. Joyce, on the other hand, felt he had more personal enemies with whom to contend, and talk of war simply did not interest him. . . .
[On a visit to Denmark with Nora] Everything centred around himself. ‘He was,’ wrote Vindling, ‘like a spoiled boy with his quiet, eternally permissive mother’ . . . .
[1938] In March he had received an appeal from Jewish acquaintances, to whose friendship and rich culture he owed so much, to help friends and fellow-Jews evade the clutches of the rampaging Nazis. Now, in June, at the prompting of Daniel Brody and through a friend at the French Foreign Office, he helped Hermann Broch, the Austrian novelist (and author of a book about Joyce) escape from Vienna to Paris. In May, Edmund Brauchbar and Gustav Zumsteg (whose mother owned Zurich’s Kronenhalle) asked him to assist friends and family members to escape to Ireland or England. In October, having sought the assistance of Benjamin Huebsch in New York, he helped the family of Paul Pèrles, son of a Viennese bookseller, who was Brauchbar’s cousin, get to America via London. The following year he would assist the son of Charlotte Sauermann, a soprano at the Zurich opera, to escape to the West. In all he helped some fifteen or sixteen Jews escape to safety. To Jacques Mercanton he said pityingly, ‘Those poor Jews!’ Here was a man finally awake and ready to help, faced with the barbarism that negated art and human kindness.
—Gordon Bowker, James Joyce: A Biography
James Joyce, “A Painful Case”
She asked him why he did not write out his thoughts. For what? he asked her with careful scorn. . . . To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios?
COVID-19: “An ongoing threat”
Despite overwhelming evidence of the wide-ranging risks of COVID-19, a great deal of messaging suggests that it is no longer a threat to the public. Although there is no empirical evidence to back this up, this misinformation has permeated the public narrative.
The data, however, tells a different story.
COVID-19 infections continue to outnumber flu cases and lead to more hospitalization and death than the flu. COVID-19 also leads to more serious long-term health problems. Trivializing COVID-19 as an inconsequential cold or equating it with the flu does not align with reality.
State of play, mid-July 2024: we’re all in the soup. [updated]
Updated July 21—now that Biden has announced he won’t run for re-election. Buckle up for a sexist / racist hullabaloo! If the Dems unite behind Harris, they have a chance. Otherwise, it’s Project 2025 time. (See bold-faced bullet point, below.)
- Joe Biden has been the most progressive president in history and has pushed back against corporations, the super-rich, and the Israeli government (not nearly enough to satisfy anyone outraged by the genocide of Palestinians, but plenty enough to piss off the pro-Netanyahu folks (see below). He is also elderly, and a terrible public speaker, thus a) turning off a huge proportion of know-nothing voters who like their celebrities young, cool, and glib; and b) providing ample fodder for a media feeding-frenzy. Yesterday we learned that he has COVID again, which will only add to the frenzy.
- The corporate Dem crowd of billionaires who don’t want regulation or taxation of the rich any more than their right-wing MAGA billionaire brethren are trying to get rid of both Biden and Harris.
- The AIPAC pro-Israel nuts who will do anything to put a pro-Bibi president in the White House are for Trump.
- The low-information “moderates” and “independents” who will determine the outcome of the election do not like or trust Kamala Harris because she is a) a woman, and b) non-white.
- The black women voters who were essential to Biden’s razor-thin wins in swing states in 2020 will not turn out for the Democratic candidate if Harris is dumped.
- If Biden and Harris are dumped, the candidate who emerges just weeks before the election will have no campaign organization on the ground and no money. The Democratic billionaires will throw some money, but will not be able to repair the lack of campaign organization that takes at least a year to build. Plus the party will be divided by factions bitterly blaming each other for the debacle.
- If Biden steps down and Harris becomes the presidential nominee, she will have to a) get the corporate Dems and party power brokers on her side, b) somehow retain the support of union members who have been strongly pro-Biden, and c) overcome the anti-woman, anti-Black prejudice among crucial “swing” voters.
- Season all of this with mass-media click-bait sensationalism (Trump is great for business if you are in corporate media) and hysterical social media disinformation. Let simmer for a few weeks, and voila!—we’re all in the soup.
King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band: Two Photos
(ca. 1923) Left to right: Johnny Dodds, clarinet; Baby Dodds, drums; Honoré Dutrey, trombone; Louis Armstrong, second trumpet; Joe “King” Oliver, lead trumpet; Lil Hardin (married to Armstrong, 1924 – 1931), piano; and Bill Johnson, banjo.
King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, 1921. Left to right: Ram Hall, drums; Honoré Dutrey, trombone; King Oliver, trumpet; Lil Hardin, piano; David Jones, saxophone; Johnny Dodds, clarinet, Jimmie Palao, violin; Ed Garland, bass. Courtesy of The Frank Driggs Collection.
The first photo shows King Oliver’s group after Baby Dodds and Louis Armstrong came aboard. According to Baby Dodds, he and Louis left Fate Marable’s riverboat orchestra in September 1921. King Oliver was in San Francisco at the time, and the second photo would appear to be a publicity shot made in California. Late in 1921 Oliver’s drummer, Ram Hall, left the group and was replaced by Baby Dodds over the objections of his older brother Johnny, who had not heard Baby play in some time, and who distrusted him because of his drinking. But Davey Jones, shown in the second photo with the saxophone, had played with Baby on the riverboats and urged Oliver to hire him—which he did. In 1922 Oliver took the band—most of them, at least—back to Chicago, and in 1923 (according to Baby Dodds) Armstrong, who had been playing in Chicago since leaving the riverboats, was added to the group. (Source: The Baby Dodds Story, As Told to Larry Gara.)
I am curious about the second photo. The group would have performed in formal dress, as in the first paragraph. The clothing in the second photo seems designed to play to racist stereotypes about Blacks as country bumpkins. Whose idea was it to present the band like this? Did these clothes belong to the musicians, or were they rented or purchased for the photo shoot? Who posed the group so artistically? (Notice how the angles of Dutrey’s trombone, Oliver’s trumpet, and Dodds’ clarinet match, as do the angles of Hardin’s right arm, Jones’s sax, Dodds’ torso, and Garland’s bow.) Were they really playing, or just miming? Was Lil Hardin just pretending to protect her ear from Oliver’s trumpet? Finally, are there other versions of this photo from the same session, with the same costumes but different poses? We don’t have video of them performing, but videos I have seen of other New Orleans musicians (including Armstrong) do not include the kind of showmanship suggested in the second photo. Is that because the musicians in the later performances were more restrained, knowing they were being filmed? Were they looser and more animated in their live performances?
If anyone knows more, I would love to hear from you.
Louis Barthas: the old lady and her garden
Louis Barthas (1879 – 1952) was a cooper (barrelmaker) from a small town in the south of France. He joined the army when war broke out in 1914 despite being a 35-year-old husband, the father of two young sons, and a socialist staunchly opposed to the war. During four years of service on the Western Front he kept a diary, and miraculously both he and his notebooks survived. He never thought to publish his war diaries, however; it was only his grandson, a school teacher, who recognized their value and brought them to the attention of a historian at a nearby university who arranged their publication in 1978. They were published in English as Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918. (Poilu in French means “hairy” or “bearded”; it is the slang term for the ordinary soldiers of the French army, similar to “Tommy” for the British soldiers, and “doughboys” for the Americans.)
In this passage from 1916, Barthas reveals his talents as a storyteller, his own quiet generosity, and his love for the simple pleasures of life. In early April, 1916, Barthas and his regiment has been relieve at the front and is resting behind the lines.
The long sojourn we had in this village was such that a great intimacy built up between the poilus and the inhabitants, especially among the ladies. Some idylls were kindled; there were some amorous adventures which became tied and untied. As for me, a loving and faithful husband, I won the affections of a lady of Lamotte.
But alas, for her and for me. The snows of sixty-five winters had colored her hair, and this lady was a poor old hag living with her husband in a shack at the far end of the village.
The husband, worn down by the years and by rheumatism, lay moaning in his bed. His wife used up her last reserves of strength making sure that her bits of field didn’t go fallow, as well as a rather large garden surrounding the thatched cottage, three-quarters of which were choked with thistles and other weeds.
I observed all this one day, when I was on my way to guard duty at the village’s exit points, this useless and ridiculous guard duty which they had set up according to established practice.
Except on Sundays, this guard duty was a sort of relief for the poilus; in exchange, you could cut out twenty-four hours of drills or parades. Only the four hours of night duty you’d pull could perhaps be wearisome for those who couldn’t appreciate the charm of solitude, of nocturnal silence, of contemplation of a starry sky, etc.
It’s true that, at this time, stinging April showers often troubled the poetic moonlit vigils. Then you would seek refuge in the clever little sentry boxes which the wicker workers had fashioned out of the boughs of the Crécy forest. But if the down pour lasted, you’d be chased out by the raindrops and find better shelter behind a wall. It was during one of my breaks between guard duty shifts that I picked up a tool and went to working, spading the old lady’s garden.
“But monsieur,” said the old lady, “you’re working for nothing. I’m too poor to pay you anything.”
“Don’t worry about that, grandma. I’ll stop by every day when I’m off duty, until your garden is in good shape and your potatoes are planted,” which she despaired about getting done in time.
In fact, four or five days later, the work was done. The old lady didn’t know how to express her thanks. She picked out for me the best apples in her cupboard, and I had to accept a coffee one evening. The old man wanted to be at the party, too, so we took our coffee in the sickroom.
As coquettish as any daughter of Eve, the old lady showed me her portrait at age twenty, and the old codger smiled impishly, as if to say, “You see, we were young once, and we were carefree in those days.”
And I had to listen to the tales of their young love. They were about to be married when the war broke out—the war of 1870, that is. He went off in the Garde Mobile. Once peace was signed, he hurried back to Lamotte to find his fiançee, but the Prussians were still occupying the region and the village. The marriage was put off. From morning to evening he was at her house, attending to her every need. One day, they were having a cozy tête-à-tête at home, which they hardly ever left, when a rude and insolent Unteroffizier burst in. He claimed that he needed some information, but his true purpose was to harass the lovers. He went so far as to try to kiss the young woman, right in front of her fiancé.
Evoking these distant memories, the old lady turned red with indignation, as if she could still feel the lips of the Boche.
But the story isn’t finished. The young man—now an old codger, nailed to his bed—had to defend the honor of his Picard blood, and to avenge the outrage he slapped the German on both cheeks.
The [German] dashed out more quickly than he had come in, but he came back a moment later with a squad of policemen who seized the unlucky fiancé and dragged him off to jail, under a rain of blows and kicks.
The cantonment’s [German] commander was a captain who inspired real terror among the inhabitants for his severity, his brutal discipline. He decided to set an example, to make it known that whoever dared to raise a hand against a German non-com would be shot the very next day.
He had no idea of the circumstances which brought on this incident. But luckily for our pair of young lovers, he was billeted at the home of the town’s mayor, who told him the whole story.
The terrifying officer summoned the young girl, the heroine of the story, to his office. She presented herself, fearful and faltering. There also appeared the ungallant non-com, who was forced to confess his misdeeds.
The next day they released the young Frenchman who was expecting to be shot. Three days later the village was delivered from German occupation. And our two young folks got married, loved each other, and had many children, now either dead or living far away. And they remained there, at home in the poor thatched cottage, from which only death would take them away.
The prescience of Henry Adams
Henry Adams (1838 – 1918) was the great-grandson of John Adams, the American revolutionary and second President of the United States. His grandfather, John Quincy Adams, was the sixth President of the United States. His father, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., was Lincoln’s ambassador in London. Henry Adams served as his father’s private secretary in London. In 1862 he wrote the following in a letter to his elder brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr.:
I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
Two more of his observations that resonate in our own troubled times:
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces. . . .
The Trusts and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy. They were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot.
—The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Nouns
Nouns
have tense, like verbs—future, present, past. I can’t remember how I learned
the nouns that mean to me,
and can’t forget the ones I know.
The nouns that mean to me
are stars
in my familiar sky. I love them all,
even those I hate,
because they make my world.
When one is lost, or dies,
its light goes out.
I see the hole that’s where it used to be.
I have a patchwork quilt that’s made of lead.
Each time a noun that means to me is lost, or dies, I add a square. My quilt keeps gaining weight,
but I must carry it everywhere.
Soon the weight will be too much. I will
have to stop and rest.
You may see me, looking tired,
staring at the sky.
Later I will stop for good, wrap myself,
and sleep.
The starlight will not wake me.
The quilt will keep me warm.
—ca. 1984
Willie Mays (May 6, 1931 – June 18, 2024)
21st-Century Do Re Mi
Based on Woody Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” (1940).
Lots of folks down south, they say, headin’ north every day
Desperate to get away from poverty and crime
Back home the gangsters own the cops, climate change has killed the crops,
The tragedies just never stop, their lives’re on the line.
But the police at the port of entry say,
“You’re number fourteen thousand for today,” and
Chorus:
If you ain’t got that do re mi, boys,
If you ain’t got that do re mi,
You better go back to beautiful Libya,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, DRC.
You may dream of being European,
Or America may be your fantasy,
But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot
If you ain’t got that do re mi.
Maybe they board a leaky boat, or maybe they try to swim or float
To happiness that’s just across that river or sea
Or jump a train that’s speedin’ by, or just keep walkin’ if they can’t fly,
Riskin’ life and limb, to be free.
But the Northern papers say it every day:
“We don’t want you brown-skin people, go away!” and
[chorus]
The COVID Blues
One take. Needs a fiddle, and someone who can play, and someone who can sing. Steal this song. Make it better.
The Value of Poetry
Most people today believe that poetry has little or no value. Along with other literature, the arts, and everything that academics call “the humanities,” poetry has been dethroned in the 21st-century league tables by science, mathematics, engineering, economics, business administration, finance, and technology. These practical subjects have value, so we are told, because they produce results that can be quantified and monetized. In the 21st century, money-value is the only value we recognize. We even say that something is important only if it “counts.” Music, novels, and films are important only as entertainment, and they are admired only if they make their producers a lot of money.
Practical subjects like science also have value because they ask questions that produce answers.
Poetry (which will stand here for all literature, music, dance, visual art, etc.) raises questions that have no answers—and what could be more useless, worthless, and pointless than that? We shall see.
In Small Is Beautiful (1973), the statistician and economist E. F. Schumacher writes, “The true problems of living . . . have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. They demand of man not merely the employment of his reasoning powers but the commitment of his whole personality. . . . They demand . . . forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives.” He goes on:
Science and engineering produce ‘know-how’; but ‘know-how’ is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. . . . At present . . . the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.
In other words, poetry inspires us to think about the unanswerable questions that lead us toward wisdom, not just “know-how.” Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing, and what should we be doing? Schumacher notes that wrestling with such questions “tends to be exhausting, worrying, and wearisome. Hence people try to avoid it and to run away from it.”
You may recognize that impulse in your own response to questions without answers like, “Who are we?” Perhaps it is reassuring to know that this is a normal response. Searching for wisdom isn’t easy. It’s a lifetime project. There is no guarantee of success. But without the wisdom that poetry, etc., may bring us, we will have no idea how to live; why to live; what to do with all our science and technology.
And that is the value of poetry.
[Image: https://wordart.com/get/image/8ohz8dol55xd.png]
E. F. Schumacher, “Small Is Beautiful” (1973)
Fifty years later, Schumacher’s critique of modern society has been confirmed by events.
He was ignored, of course, by economists, Wall Street, and politicians, and now we see the results that he predicted.
- environmental collapse
- pandemics
- mass migrations into cities, and from poor countries to wealthy countries
- rural areas and poor countries empty out and become backwaters of poverty, drug addiction, and resentment
- the enormous wealth and income gap between the tiny billionaire class and everyone else
All of this has been driven by the greed of the ruling classes and justified by the misguided priorities of economic theory that pursue profits and growth, not universal prosperity and quality of life.
Some tasters:
Scientific or technological ‘solutions’ which poison the environment or degrade the social structure . . . are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction. . . .
Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or waterpower: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and ‘uneconomic’. . . .
Economics, which Lord Keynes had hoped would settle down as a modest occupation similar to dentistry, suddenly becomes the most important subject of all. Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government . . . . It tends to absorb the whole of ethics and to take precedence over all other human considerations. Now, quite clearly, this is a pathological development . . . .
It is a strange phenomenon indeed that the conventional wisdom of present-day economics can do nothing to help the poor.
Invariably it proves that only such policies are viable as have in fact the result of making those already rich and powerful, richer and more powerful. . . .
An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods . . . .
A tiny minority
In The Republic and elsewhere, Plato famously divides human nature into three parts: appetite, will, and reason. If you picture an isosceles triangle divided by two horizontal lines, the biggest of the three sections that result is appetite, at the base of the triangle. The middle portion is will. The smallest part, at the tip of the triangle, is reason. Appetite and reason are self-explanatory. Will (sometimes translated as “spirit”) is that part of us that determines to do something, just because. Think of the dog who insists on jumping up onto dad’s favourite chair, which has been forbidden to him, even though there are plenty of other comfortable spots available.
Plato thought that we share the lower two parts of our nature, appetite and will, with the other animals. Reason, exclusive to humans, was the part that made us different from other animals, and better. Christian theologians adopted Plato’s scheme. In Dante’s Inferno, Hell is imagined as a giant cone with its point at the centre of the earth. Look at it in cross-section, and it is Plato’s triangle, upside-down. In the upper sections are the sins of the appetite—lust, gluttony, greed, etc. Lower down, in the middle section, are sins of the will—violence, most notably. At the very bottom are the worst sins, those resulting from perversion and misuse of our reason—fraud, deceit, and treason. Those sins are the worst because they take the highest, best, and most god-like part of our nature—reason—and use it for evil purposes.
As Dante makes his way through Hell, he continually exclaims at how many damned souls he sees—multitudes, crowds, hordes, and so on. I have been thinking about Plato’s triangle and Dante’s Inferno more and more often. How many people do you know who live mostly to gratify their appetites and their will? How many cultivate their intellects? And of those who cultivate their intellect, how many of them use that faculty of reason for good purposes? In Dante, the damned are described as those who have “lost the good of intellect” (Canto III), and the souls of the damned are countless.
Dante’s Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are, of course, mirror images of the living world. Those who are not consumed by appetite and will, who use their reason, and use it to do good . . . are a tiny, tiny minority.
The most ferocious animal on the face of the earth
When I looked around the verdant recess in which I was buried, and gazed up to the summits of the lofty eminence that hemmed me in, I was well disposed to think that I was in the ‘Happy Valley’, and that beyond those heights there was naught but a world of care and anxiety. As I extended my wanderings in the valley and grew more familiar with the habits of its inmates, I was fain to confess that, despite the disadvantages of his condition, the Polynesian savage, surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature, enjoyed an infinitely happier, though certainly a less intellectual existence than the self-complacent European.
The naked wretch who shivers beneath the bleak skies, and starves among the inhospitable wilds of Tierra-del-Fuego, might indeed be made happier by civilization, for it would alleviate his physical wants. But the voluptuous Indian, with every desire supplied, whom Providence has bountifully provided with all the sources of pure and natural enjoyment, and from whom are removed so many of the ills and pains of life—what has he to desire at the hands of Civilization? She may ‘cultivate his mind—may elevate his thoughts,’—these I believe are the established phrases—but will he be the happier? Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible; and the devoutest Christian who visits that group with an unbiased mind, must go away mournfully asking—‘Are these, alas! the fruits of twenty-five years of enlightening?’
In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;—the heart-burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissentions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people.
But it will be urged that these shocking unprincipled wretches are cannibals. Very true; and a rather bad trait in their character it must be allowed. But they are such only when they seek to gratify the passion of revenge upon their enemies; and I ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that custom which only a few years since was practised in enlightened England:—a convicted traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and suchlike heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men!
The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.
—Herman Melville, Typee (1846). Chapter XVII.
From Wikipedia:
Of all the major island groups of the Pacific, the Marquesas Islands suffered the greatest population decline as a result of Eurasian endemic diseases carried by European explorers, which resulted in epidemics, particularly of smallpox, to which they had no acquired immunity. The estimated 16th-century population of over 100,000 inhabitants, was reduced to about 20,000 by the middle of the nineteenth century, and to just over 2,000 by the beginning of the 1900s.
Freedom: Where is Goldilocks when we need her?
In his Confessions, Saint Augustine writes, “As a youth I prayed, ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not right now.'” Today we all ought to be praying, “Give us freedom, but not too much.”
Ah, but how much is too much?
Imagine centuries of monarchy in Europe, first during the Roman Empire and continuing into the 19th century. Small elites of military rulers allied with landowners and the Church at the top; large masses of peasants doing the work and living the life that Hobbes described: “poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Clearly, not enough freedom.
A few revolutions bring us to 19th-century Europe and the rise of the middle class. Increasing prosperity, security, peace. . . and boredom. Money-making. Respectability. Social conventions. Manners. Sexual repression. Hypocrisy. The suffocating nature of Alfred Doolittle’s “middle-class morality” permeates European literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It could still be found in the North American suburbs of the 1950s.
In Europe the reaction against bourgeois life centred in France, and especially in Paris. Liberation from middle-class morality, religion, art, and literature led to sexual promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse, and artistic experimentation that broke away from convention in every way conceivable. This cry of freedom continued into the 20th century, with even better drugs (heroin instead of opium; then LSD, etc.), more and more vulgarity and sexual exhibitionism, and further attacks on traditional artistic conventions: narratives with no coherent plot, musical “compositions” with no sound, etc. The question, “What is art?” was confidently answered: anything you want it to be. Freedom!
Enter D. H. Lawrence:
Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.
As I look around today, I see a lot of frictional opposition and very little glad obedience. Returning to king and church, however, hardly seems an attractive solution. Some of the early middle-class rebels, frightened and appalled by their experiments with freedom, fled back to their roots and transformed into political reactionaries and religious zealots: Rimbaud, for example, who became a colonial capitalist and died in the arms of the Church. This is Goldilocks jumping from the bed that is too soft to the one that is too hard.
Life is biological, and freedom is like blood pressure: neither too much nor too little is a good thing. The question is, can humans restrain themselves? Or can they be saved from themselves only if they submit to an autocratic State and Church?
Here is Lawrence again:
Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.
And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.
On the other side, we have Dostoyevsky:
But yet all his life he loved humanity, and suddenly his eyes were opened, and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God’s creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony. Seeing all that he turned back and joined—the clever people. . . .
In his old age he reached the clear conviction that nothing but the advice of the great dread spirit could build up any tolerable sort of life for the feeble, unruly, ‘incomplete, empirical creatures created in jest.’ And so, convinced of this, he sees that he must follow the counsel of the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and therefore accept lying and deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction, and yet deceive them all the way so that they may not notice where they are being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think themselves happy. And note, the deception is in the name of Him in Whose ideal the old man had so fervently believed all his life long. Is not that tragic?
How many of us can dig down to Lawrence’s “deepest self”? How many of us are more likely to surrender our freedom when it becomes too unruly and chaotic? As Alfred Doolittle says, “I put it to you; and I leave it to you.”
Notes
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
- Alfred Doolittle: in G. B. Shaw’s play, Pygmalion.
- D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
1782: Edward Gibbon describes the Germans and reveals himself
Edward Gibbon’s famous history may be reliable at some points, highly dubious at others. It does, however, provide a reliable portrait of its author. We see his wide learning and erudition. We feel his supreme self-confidence as he makes one bold assertion after another. We see the influence of his social class, his era, and his nationality in his unexamined assumptions about “civilization,” “savages,” and “barbarians.” (The same terms were often used by Europeans to describe the indigenous peoples of the Americas.) We see his respect for Christianity and corresponding disdain for pre-Christian, polytheistic religions. We see his disapproval of gambling, drunkenness, and infidelity, and his patriarchal attitude toward women. These oft-quoted passages about the Germanic tribes during the Roman Empire may or may not be reliable when it comes to the Germans, but they provide a clear portrait of their author. Writing reveals the writer.
From Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1, Chapter IX (1782):
The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [ca. 56-120 A.C.E.], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-labourer, the ox, in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater, difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce, that without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life.
Of these arts, the ancient Germans were wretchedly destitute. They passed their lives in a state of ignorance and poverty, which it has pleased some declaimers to dignify with the appellation of virtuous simplicity. . . . The value of money has been settled by general consent to express our wants and our property, as letters were invented to express our ideas; and both these institutions, by giving a more active energy to the powers and passions of human nature, have contributed to multiply the objects they were designed to represent. . . . Money, in a word, is the most universal incitement, iron the most powerful instrument, of human industry; and it is very difficult to conceive by what means a people, neither actuated by the one, nor seconded by the other, could emerge from the grossest barbarism.
In the dull intervals of peace, these barbarians were immoderately addicted to deep gaming and excessive drinking; both of which, by different means, the one by inflaming their passions, the other by extinguishing their reason, alike relieved them from the pain of thinking. They gloried in passing whole days and nights at table; and the blood of friends and relations often stained their numerous and drunken assemblies. . . .
Strong beer, a liquor extracted with very little art from wheat or barley, and corrupted (as it is strongly expressed by Tacitus) into a certain semblance of wine, was sufficient for the gross purposes of German debauchery. . . .
A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty. Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism. . . . A people thus jealous of their persons, and careless of their possessions, must have been totally destitute of industry and the arts, but animated with a high sense of honour and independence. . . .
“In the days of chivalry, or more properly of romance, all the men were brave and all the women were chaste;” and notwithstanding the latter of these virtues is acquired and preserved with much more difficulty than the former, it is ascribed, almost without exception, to the wives of the ancient Germans. Polygamy was not in use, except among the princes, and among them only for the sake of multiplying their alliances. Divorces were prohibited by manners rather than by laws. Adulteries were punished as rare and inexpiable crimes; nor was seduction justified by example and fashion. We may easily discover that Tacitus indulges an honest pleasure in the contrast of barbarian virtue with the dissolute conduct of the Roman ladies; yet there are some striking circumstances that give an air of truth, or at least probability, to the conjugal faith and chastity of the Germans. . . .
Although the progress of civilization has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favourable to the virtue of chastity, whose most dangerous enemy is the softness of the mind. The refinements of life corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes. The gross appetite of love becomes most dangerous when it is elevated, or rather, indeed, disguised by sentimental passion. The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners, gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life. The German huts, open, on every side, to the eye of indiscretion or jealousy, were a better safeguard of conjugal fidelity than the walls, the bolts, and the eunuchs of a Persian harem. To this reason another may be added of a more honourable nature. The Germans treated their women with esteem and confidence, consulted them on every occasion of importance, and fondly believed, that in their breasts resided a sanctity and wisdom more than human. . . . In their great invasions, the camps of the barbarians were filled with a multitude of women, who remained firm and undaunted amidst the sound of arms, the various forms of destruction, and the honourable wounds of their sons and husbands. . . . The sentiments and conduct of these high-spirited matrons may, at once, be considered as a cause, as an effect, and as a proof of the general character of the nation. . . .
The religious system of the Germans (if the wild opinions of savages can deserve that name) was dictated by their wants, their fears, and their ignorance. They adored the great visible objects and agents of nature, the Sun and the Moon, the Fire and the Earth; together with those imaginary deities, who were supposed to preside over the most important occupations of human life. They were persuaded, that, by some ridiculous arts of divination, they could discover the will of the superior beings, and that human sacrifices were the most precious and acceptable offering to their altars. Some applause has been hastily bestowed on the sublime notion, entertained by that people, of the Deity, whom they neither confined within the walls of the temple, nor represented by any human figure; but when we recollect, that the Germans were unskilled in architecture, and totally unacquainted with the art of sculpture, we shall readily assign the true reason of a scruple, which arose not so much from a superiority of reason, as from a want of ingenuity. The only temples in Germany were dark and ancient groves, consecrated by the reverence of succeeding generations. Their secret gloom, the imagined residence of an invisible power, by presenting no distinct object of fear or worship, impressed the mind with a still deeper sense of religious horror; and the priests, rude and illiterate as they were, had been taught by experience the use of every artifice that could preserve and fortify impressions so well suited to their own interest.
. . . A solemn procession was occasionally celebrated in the present countries of Mecklenburgh and Pomerania. The unknown symbol of the Earth, covered with a thick veil, was placed on a carriage drawn by cows; and in this manner the goddess, whose common residence was in the Isles of Rugen, visited several adjacent tribes of her worshippers. During her progress the sound of war was hushed, quarrels were suspended, arms laid aside, and the restless Germans had an opportunity of tasting the blessings of peace and harmony. . . .
Such was the situation, and such were the manners of the ancient Germans. Their climate, their want of learning, of arts, and of laws, their notions of honour, of gallantry, and of religion, their sense of freedom, impatience of peace, and thirst of enterprise, all contributed to form a people of military heroes. . . .
1527: The Sack of Rome
Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” broadcast about the sack of Rome in 1527 inspired me to do a little digging in the History of Atrocities department.
From Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization:
Charles [V, King of Spain and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire], still remaining in Spain, and moving his pawns with magic remote control, commissioned his agents to raise a new army. They approached the Tirolese condottiere, Georg von Frundsberg, already famous for the exploits of the Landsknechte—German mercenaries—who fought under his lead. Charles could offer little money, but his agents promised rich plunder in Italy. Frundsberg was still nominally a Catholic, but he strongly sympathized with Luther, and hated [Pope] Clement as a traitor to the Empire. He pawned his castle, his other possessions, even the adornments of his wife; with the 38,000 gulden so obtained he collected some 10,000 men eager for adventure and pillage and not averse to breaking a lance over a papal head; some of them, it was said, carried a noose to hang the Pope. . . .
In Milan the imperial commander was now Charles, Duke of Bourbon; created constable of France for bravery at Marignano, he had turned against Francis when the King’s mother, as he felt, had cheated him of his proper lands; he went over to the Emperor, shared in defeating Francis at Pavia, and was made Duke of Milan. Now, to raise and pay another army for Charles, he taxed the Milanese literally to death. He wrote to the Emperor that he had drained the city of its blood. His soldiers, quartered upon the inhabitants, so abused them with theft, brutality, and rape that many Milanese hanged themselves, or threw themselves from high places into the streets. Early in February, 1527, Bourbon led his army out of Milan, and united it with Frundsberg’s near Piacenza. The conglomerate horde, now numbering nearly 22,000 men, moved east along the Via Emilia, avoiding the fortified cities, but pillaging as it went, and leaving the countryside empty behind it. . . .
On May 6 . . . the swarm entered from a confusing variety of directions; some were hidden by the fog; others so mingled with fugitives that the Castle cannon could not strike them without killing the demoralized populace. Soon the invaders had the city at their mercy.
As they rushed on through the streets they killed indiscriminately any man, woman, or child that crossed their path. Their bloodthirst aroused, they entered the hospital and orphanage of Santo Spirito, and slaughtered nearly all the patients. They marched into St. Peter’s and slew the people who had sought sanctuary there. They pillaged every church and monastery they could find, and turned some into stables; hundreds of priests, monks, bishops, and archbishops were killed. . . . Every dwelling in Rome was plundered, and many were burned, with two exceptions: the Cancelleria, occupied by Cardinal Colonna, and the Palazzo Colonna, in which Isabella d’ Este and some rich merchants had sought asylum; these paid 50,000 ducats to leaders of the mob for freedom from attack, and then took two thousand refugees within their walls. Every palace paid ransoms for protection, only to face later attacks from other packs, and pay ransom again. In most houses all the occupants were required to ransom their lives at a stated price; if they did not pay they were tortured; thousands were killed; children were flung from high windows to pry parental savings from secrecy; some streets were littered with dead. The millionaire Domenico Massimi saw his sons slain, his daughter raped, his house burned, and then was himself murdered. “In the whole city,” says one account, “there was not a soul above three years of age who had not to purchase his safety.”
Of the victorious mob half were German [Lutheran]s, of whom most had been convinced that the popes and cardinals were thieves, and that the wealth of the Church in Rome was a theft from the nations, and a scandal to the world. To reduce this scandal they seized all movable ecclesiastical valuables, including sacred vessels and works of art, and carried them off for melting or ransom or sale; relics, however, they left scattered on the floor. One soldier dressed himself as a pope; others put on cardinals’ hats and kissed his feet; a crowd at the Vatican proclaimed Luther pope. The Lutherans among the invaders took especial delight in robbing cardinals, exacting high ransoms from them as the price of their lives, and teaching them new rituals. Some cardinals, says Guicciardini, “were set upon scrubby beasts, riding with their faces backward, in the habits and ensigns of their dignity, and were led about all Rome with the greatest derision and contempt. Some, unable to raise all the ransom demanded, were so tortured that they died there and then, or within a few days.” One cardinal was lowered into a grave and was told that he would be buried alive unless ransom were brought within a stated time; it came at the last moment. Spanish and German cardinals, who thought themselves safe from their own countrymen, were treated like the rest. Nuns and respectable women were violated in situ, or were carried off to promiscuous brutality in the various shelters of the horde. Women were assaulted before the eyes of their husbands or fathers. Many young women, despondent after being raped, drowned themselves in the Tiber.
The number of deaths cannot be calculated. Two thousand corpses were thrown into the Tiber from the Vatican side of Rome; 9800 dead were buried; there were unquestionably many more fatalities. . . .
Plague had visited Rome in 1522, and had reduced its population to 55,000; murder, suicide, and flight must have reduced it below 40,000 in 1527; now, in July of that year, plague came back in the full heat of summer, and joined with famine and the continued presence of the ravaging horde to make Rome a city of horror, terror, and desolation. Churches and streets were littered anew with corpses; many of these were left to rot in the sun; the stench was so strong that the jailers and prisoners fled from the castle parapets to their rooms; even there many died of the infection, among them some servants of the Pope. The impartial plague struck the invaders too; 2500 Germans in Rome died by July 22, 1527; and malaria, syphilis, and malnutrition cut the horde in half. . . .
On December 7, after seven months of confinement, Clement left Sant’ Angelo, and, disguised as a servant, made his way humbly out of Rome to Orvieto, apparently a broken man. . . .
Losing all hope of aid from the League, Clement offered his full surrender to Charles; and on October 6 he was allowed to re-enter Rome. Four fifths of the houses had been abandoned, thousands of buildings were in ruins; men were amazed to see what nine months of invasion had done to the capital of Christendom. . . .
The story of civilization, indeed.
Tolkien’s childlike world
The Tolkien books are “restful,” as A. S. Byatt is said to have remarked,* because they are free of sex, and of money. In this respect they are childlike. The people in the stories are seen in the ways that children—privileged children, at any rate—see people. Money exists, but without much regard for where it comes from or how it is earned. Travellers are welcomed into comfortable homes where abundant food appears on the table and soft beds await them when the evening meal has finished. Everyone seems to be independently wealthy, or on summer holiday, without any hint of a servant underclass. The hobbits seem to be farmers, mostly, but we never see them working. Butterbur runs his inn, but who prepares the food, and who washes the dishes or cleans the rooms or launders the linens? Like young children, we readers rarely or never consider such matters: we unthinkingly accept the delicious food and comfortable lodgings. We are grateful and happy, but we do not inquire into the sources of all these comforts.
The people in Tolkien’s stories fall into the categories used by children to classify grown-ups. Old people are either gruff and grumpy, or kindly and wise; some of them start out appearing to be gruff but are revealed in time to be kindly. Men are sorted by their jobs: farmer, gardener, innkeeper, soldier, etc. Unmarried women are young and beautiful; married women are nurturing and motherly; old women are wise and caring, with an occasional witchy character like Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. Many modern readers and critics have pointed out that these roles and stereotypes belong to an era and a culture and a social class that can be traced to Tolkien’s own life as a middle-class Catholic and an Oxford don nearly a century ago..
Children today, no doubt, see adults rather differently. But there remains that period of life before adolescence when one sees the world without thinking about sex or money. That innocence, much regretted once one crosses the threshold into the adult world, naturally appeals to us when we have had some experience of the stress, anxiety, and heartache that follow inevitably from becoming a sexual creature who must earn a living and pay for everything. Tolkien’s world offers a respite from such concerns. We imagine the delight of being welcomed as guests and never needing to think about who pays for it all or who cleans the toilets (another item completely absent from Tolkien’s world). We take a holiday from lust, jealousy, and sexual envy. It is, as Byatt says, restful.
And then, the kings and queens. Fathers and mothers. Aged, in the child’s eyes, and yet ageless. All-wise, all-powerful, always protecting their children, their people. Sometimes we have stories recounting the child’s nightmarish fears, stories of evil kings, evil queens, reassuring stories that always end with the overthrow of the wicked and the establishment of a new order under new, benign monarchs. The true king is restored. All is well. The child in us does not long for democracy, but for the benign rule of a father-king and mother-queen. This longing explains much of what we read in the news. We long to be ruled by the true king.
*Byatt is quoted in this Wikipedia article, but the source is not clearly indicated.
Joe Biden is the best President of my lifetime
By “best” I mean, from a progressive point of view.
I was born in 1952, so the candidates are Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, and Biden.
We can eliminate the Republicans right away, so that leaves Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Kennedy’s relations with the civil rights movement were awkward, at best. His speeches indicating a shift away from Cold War hostilities were promising, but those promises came to nothing when he was murdered. Johnson would be at the top of my list for his domestic policies, especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but his Vietnam catastrophe takes him off the table. Clinton was far too dodgy and neoliberal for my taste. That leaves Carter, Obama, and Biden.
Jimmy Carter did a lot of good things. Most notably, he got Israel and Egypt to sign a peace accord, but he also gave amnesty to Vietnam War draft dodgers, promoted solar energy, etc. He had the bad luck to inherit a lousy economy; he was blamed for taking the tough measures that handed his successor, Reagan, a much better economy. He also had the bad luck of being in office during the Iran hostage crisis which, along with traitorous back-channels deals with the Ayatollah by Reagan’s team, lost him his re-election bid. But he also did not understand how Congress works and—early in his term, especially—created a lot of unnecessary problems for himself.
Obama, for all his resonant speeches and charming smiles, was essentially an Eisenhower Republican in his policies, both domestic and international (except that Ike didn’t have drones). His greatest achievement was the Affordable Care Act. But he bailed out the fat cats while leaving ordinary folks to take all the pain of the 2008 financial crisis, with repercussions we are still suffering from. He had to be pushed on gay marriage by his VP, Joe Biden. He didn’t have the guts to get out of Iraq or Afghanistan, and his policies were ineffective, at best, in Syria and Libya. Apart from health care and some inspiring speeches . . . he didn’t accomplish much.
Joe Biden inherited a rotten situation in Afghanistan, and it was ugly. But unlike all his predecessors (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford in Vietnam; Bush II and Obama in Afghanistan) he had the cojones to get out, knowing it would be ugly. He also inherited the 80-year-old insoluble Israeli-Palestinian mess and had it blow up last fall when Hamas attacked over the border, committed atrocities, and took hostages back into Gaza. Could he take a harder line against Israel? Sure. But the consequences, both political and geo-political, are rarely considered by his critics on the Left. Short answer: the situation is a horrific mess, has been for some 80 years, and is likely to remain so. The blowback from any significant change in U.S. policy toward Israel would make the blowback after the Afghanistan pull-out look like a D.A.R. tea party. But I trust Biden and his team to make the best choices available to them, and I cannot think of anyone else who would do better in Biden’s place.
Beyond these two foreign policy crises, Biden has been as outstanding as I can imagine an American president being. His deep understanding of Congress has allowed him to pass significant progressive legislation despite unrelenting obstruction by Republicans, including the infrastructure bill, and the “Inflation Reduction Act”—which do more to address climate change and move toward a green energy economy than anything any other president has done. He managed the recovery from the COVID recession by putting money into the pockets of ordinary folks, resulting in the strongest economy in the world, by far. He is the most pro-labour president since Harry Truman or FDR. He is a skilled negotiator, as seen in his budget deal with Kevin McCarthy. Where the Republicans and the courts have blocked him, he has found ways to make progress anyway, as in his cancellation of student loan debt for millions of people. He is a wily politician, as when he got obstreperous Republicans to promise publicly not to touch Medicare and Social Security during one of his State of the Union addresses; or when he gave them almost everything they had ever asked for in a border reform bill, whereupon they nixed the deal—effectively killing the “crisis at the border” issue as a Republican talking point. His only equal on the domestic front is LBJ, and on the international front . . . would you prefer Johnson to Biden? Not me, thanks.
Is he good on TV? Nope. So what? That’s not the job.