War is the wrong response to terrorists

War is the appropriate response when one nation is invaded or attacked by another. The most recent obvious example, in Ukraine, illustrates the case: Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022 set off a war between the two nations that continues today. Ukraine is completely justified in defending itself by going to war against Russia.

War is the wrong response, however, to terrorist attacks. George W. Bush made this mistake when he responded to Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in 2001 by sending armies to Afghanistan and Iraq. The result? Two decades of war, thousands and thousands of deaths, two countries devastated, and trillions of dollars expended—with no discernible reduction in terrorist activity by Al-Qaeda, Isis, Iran, Hezbollah, etc. Going to war against terrorism leads only to bloodshed, destruction, and hatred.

Now Israel is making the same mistake—not for the first time—in Gaza and the West Bank, with the same results.

So what is the appropriate response to terrorism?

Criminal investigation, arrests, and prosecution.

Terrorist acts are criminal acts. Send investigators. Offer rewards. Make arrests. Put suspects on trial. Then make damned sure that your system of justice is truly just, and is not actually a system of injustice that promotes . . . terrorism.

Nations that go to war against criminals commit criminal acts: they become criminals.

 

Recipe: Israeli-Palestinian Soup

Ingredients

  • Three major religions all descended from the same patriarch (Abraham / Ibrahim).
  • A small piece of land.
  • Limited fresh water supply.
  • A history of genocide going back thousands of years.
  • An equally long history of anti-Jewish hatred in historically Christian countries.
  • A shorter but still long history of Islamophobia in historically Christian countries.
  • A history of conquest and colonization going back hundreds of years.
  • Neighbouring nation-states all governed by one flavour or another of authoritarian leaders, and mostly populated by overwhelming numbers of oppressed poor people.
  • Islamist terrorism and anti-Semitism as a reaction against both authoritarian governments and the imposition of modern Western values.
  • Nearly a century of Palestinians being dispossessed and oppressed by Israeli colonization.
  • An impotent United Nations.
  • Big-power rivals taking sides as they continue their rivalry by proxy and jockey for access to the region’s petroleum.
  • Weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, making money.

Directions

  1. Stir until all ingredients are hopelessly mixed.
  2. Once set in motion (long ago), the mixture will continue to ferment and to spontaneously combust at irregular intervals.
  3. No further intervention is needed to continue the process. We are all in the soup.

Help for marking essays and giving feedback to students

My “Marking Key” is available for purchase here along with a free download of the Marking Key Error Log. The Marking Key is a digital-only PDF that can be shared with students. The Error Log can be printed.

The Marking Key began to take shape years ago when I was faced with large numbers of essays to mark. Tired of writing the same comments repeatedly in the margins, I began with a simple one-page handout with the most common errors and marginal comments numbered. Instead of writing out the comments, I simply put the corresponding numbers in the margins. Students could then refer to the handout to see what the numbers meant.

Gradually, the Marking Key expanded into a hyperlinked document that, including all the explanations and appendices, runs over fifty pages. Although I keep thinking it must finally be complete, I continue to make additions and corrections from time to time.

For teachers faced with stacks of essays, it can be a great time-saver.

Students can use the hyperlinked elements of the Marking Key to read further explanations that will help them to avoid making the same errors in future work. The errors are grouped into three sections: Essay Technique, Style & Expression, and Mechanics: Grammar, Spelling, Punctuation, Etc. The 50+ pages of explanations and examples represent several decades’ worth of handouts covering the full range of issues that students face as they work to become fluent and competent essayists.

I usually ask students to complete the “Marking Key Error Log” when they receive their marked essays; this helps to ensure that they actually use the Marking Key and benefit from it. When deciding which errors should be given priority, students should correct the errors that are in bold face first.

The Marking Key and the Error Log are the most effective tools for teaching composition that I have discovered in more than forty years of teaching. Have a look at it here—

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Eric-Macknight

—share with any English teachers you know, and let me know what you think.

The empire was attacked

The empire was attacked.

Babies cried, or lay lifeless

Mothers sprawled awkwardly

Young men, old men, old women, girls and boys

Body parts and fluids everywhere.

Only whimpers, or dazed silence as the sun shone indifferently.

 

It struck back.

Babies cried, or lay lifeless

Mothers sprawled awkwardly

Young men, old men, old women, girls and boys

Body parts and fluids everywhere.

Only whimpers, or dazed silence as the sun shone indifferently.

 

Somewhere, crowds cheered in triumph.

Somewhere, crowds screamed in rage.

—6 May 2011

 

Trees, baby! Trees.

Bits and bobs from The Overstory, by Richard Powers:

“You’re a psychologist,” Mimi says to the recruit. “How do we convince people that we’re right?”

The newest Cascadian takes the bait. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

. . . which reminds me of e. e. cummings:

plato told

him:he couldn’t

believe it(jesus

told him;he

wouldn’t believe

it)lao

tsze

certainly told

him,and general

(yes

mam)

sherman;

and even

(believe it

or

not)you

told him:i told

him;we told him

(he didn’t believe it,no

sir)it took

a nipponized bit of

the old sixth

avenue

el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

Another debatable claim—

The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

—seems increasingly dubious as this long, sprawling novel continues. Powers moves us most when showing us how much we have been missing in our understanding of nature—

“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them. This isn’t mystical. The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. . . . Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete to eat them. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.”

—and by the end it is this overwhelming vision that sticks. The human dramas, which may have initially drawn us in to the story, have lost their power. We want to go into the woods, sit at the base of a tree, and just listen.

UC Santa Cruz, sort of

From The Overstory, by Richard Powers, p. 257:

He’s admitted to the new social psychology graduate program down at Santa Cruz. The campus is an enchanted garden perched on a mountainside overlooking Monterey Bay. It’s the worst place he can imagine for finishing a doctorate—or doing any real work whatsoever. On the other hand, it’s perfect for making interspecies contact with sea lions down by the pier, climbing the Sunset Tree naked and stoned at night, and lying on his back in the Great Meadow, searching for a thesis topic in the mad cloud of stars.

This parody, like all parodies, is founded on truth, in part. In my day (1969-72) we called Santa Cruz (the town, not just the university) Hippie Heaven. Plenty of flakiness—so much that when I moved to Oregon a few years later I had an immediate aversion to that state’s Santa Cruz simulacrum, Eugene, and happily continued north to the state capital, Salem, which was as much like a boring midwestern town as anything west of the Rockies. What a relief! When I was at UCSC two highly-touted professors recruited to the school left after just one year for East Coast schools where students were serious about their studies. Plenty of UCSC students and teachers were serious about their studies—I was one of them—but the tone of the place was definitely set by the “middle-class white-boy”* faux hippies and their silliness. I had a few great teachers; I learned a lot; but I was happy to drop out in the middle of my third year when they demanded that I declare a major, and I have never had the least desire to go back.

*”Middle Class White Boy” is one of Mose Allison’s inimitable classics.

The blackness behind us and before us

In W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995), this prescient and evocative passage seems to speak directly to us in the summer of 2023:

Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread. In Italy, France and Spain, in Hungary, Poland and Lithuania, in Canada and California, summer fires consume whole forests, not to mention the great conflagration in the tropics that is never extinguished. A few years ago, on a Greek island that was wooded as recently as 1900, I observed the speed with which a blaze runs through dry vegetation. A short distance from the harbour town where I was staying, I stood by the roadside with a group of agitated men, the blackness behind us and before us, far below at the bottom of a gorge, the fire, whipped up by the wind, racing, leaping, and already climbing the steep slopes. And I shall never forget the junipers, dark against the glow, going up in flames one after the other as if they were tinder the moment the first tongues of fire licked at them, with a dull thudding sound like an explosion, and then promptly collapsing in a silent shower of sparks.

Has any phrase ever conveyed the human condition more succinctly than the blackness behind us and before us?

Phil Freshman, my good friend

Phil Freshman, who I met in 1970, died yesterday.

There are so many good memories, and so many stories I could tell.

I first saw his name in a by-line on an article in the UC Santa Cruz student newspaper in the fall of 1969. The article was about freshman orientation; I thought the by-line was a pseudonym. A few months later this guy stuck his hand out and said, “I’m Phil Freshman.” I started laughing.

In 1981 I was living in Oregon when my little brother got married in our home town in San Diego. Wanting to surprise him, I told him I wouldn’t be able to make it, then got into my car and started driving south. In L.A. I stopped to pick up Phil, who was at home with his parents in Reseda. We arrived in time for the wedding, and Phil spent the entire afternoon talking with everyone at the reception. He had a way of meeting people I had known for years and finding out more about them in ten minutes than I ever knew. As the sun was setting and we started back north, I said, “So . . . what do you think?” There was a pause, then a sigh; then he shook his head. “I thought people in L.A. were superficial,” he said.

His original idea of a career in journalism turned instead into a career as a copy-editor who specialized in catalogues and other publications by art museums. Meticulous and stubborn (and almost always right), he was invariably embroiled in disagreements. In 1982, while working at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), two of his colleagues wanted to dispense with the hyphen in the name of their department. His memo to the boss on this topic is reproduced here for posterity. (“I was just trying to make people laugh, convince them via humor,” he said later. The hyphen in “Twentieth-Century Art” was retained, but no one seems to have laughed.)

To: Earl A. Powell III
From: Phil Freshman
Subject: Twentieth-Century Hyphens

As you know, a storm has lately been rattling teacups in the upstairs offices over what would seem to be an innocuous grammatical point. Maurice Tuchman and Stephanie Barron evidently abhor the presence of a hyphen when it is used to hook up the words Twentieth and Century when they appear adjectivally prior to the word Art. More specifically, the curators, formerly of the Department of Modern Art (formerly the Modern and Contemporary Art Department) are adamantly opposed to having their newly renamed department publicly known as the Department of Twentieth hyphen Century Art. I’m told they see the hyphen, in this location at least, as a blemish, an excrescence.

I confess that when I first heard of their assault on our language’s unsung little intelligibility-maker, my professional instinct was to rush unquestioningly to its defense. After all, wouldn’t our bearings be more difficult to find if we didn’t have the adjectivally employed hyphen to tell us we were about to see “sixty-odd works of art” rather than “sixty odd ones”? And how embarrassed we might feel if we were left, hyphenless, to divine the best way to approach an “ill favored woman”.

More angrily, and pointedly, I could have arisen, stuck an index finger down onto any properly punctuated book, newspaper, or magazine page where the subject of 15th-century poetry, 19th-century sculpture, or 20th-century anarchy was treated and then, folding my arms, let my case rest.

However, being a student who knows the language has a way of changing, sometimes radically, before our very eyes, and being an employee of an American museum in a time when more and more of those institutions’ modern art departments are adopting this century’s name for their very own, I decided to do a bit of digging. I called four major museums, each of which had, according to the 1981 Official Museum Directory, “20th Century Art” departments. Instead of phoning these museums’ editorial departments and collecting a pile of confirmations for my view, I spoke with members of the departments in question; if they felt as Maurice and Stephanie do, and had gotten their museums to condone the breaking of grammatical code, I wanted to hear from them how they had justified it.

The four museums I called were the Metropolitan in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the Metropolitan, a Mrs. Rubin, the assistant to one of the associate curators of Twentieth no hyphen Century Art, told me the department had had the name since the ’60s and that no one, certainly no editors, had to her knowledge ever questioned the usage. She said the department refers to itself in all public places hyphenlessly. “But now that you mention it,” she added, “yes, I guess you’re right. I wonder why no one has ever said anything?”

Next I called Boston. “Don’t mention that hyphen!” cried Debbie Emerson, the departmental secretary. “We all think it’s ugly, unsightly.” But does the Museum of Fine Arts use it? “Yes,” she admitted. “Our editors make us. On business cards, in the annual reports, everywhere. But around the office we avoid it like the plague.”

Then it was Philadelphia, where I talked with the curator herself, Ann d’Harnoncourt. “You tell Maurice and Stephanie I’m on their side,” she said. “I just can’t stand that hyphen, and I never use it in any of my letters.” But what about the museum’s official usage? “Well of course it’s correct and the museum includes it in the calendar of events, the annual report, you name it. But God, it’s so unaesthetic!”

Finally, Chicago. Susan Frio, the department’s secretary, was just as hot on the subject as her co-religionists in Boston and Philadelphia. “We despise that hyphen, but what are we going to do? We co-publish the University of Chicago Manual of Style [LACMA’s style bible], and so it would look pretty dumb if we deviated from that. So we make it Department of Twentieth hyphen Century Art consistently.”

What are we to conclude from all this? Seemingly, the law-abiding adjectival hyphen, just trying to do his job in the strife-torn world of modern language, is undergoing a death-dealing hail of abuse by other twentieth-century art departments than our own. However, he has, in most places, managed to survive. I want him to survive here. And so I recommend, consistent with both grammatical practice and the policies of reputable (though embattled) museums, that this museum recognize the legitimacy and necessity of linking Twentieth and Century with a hyphen whenever those two words publicly precede Art.

Naturally, I wouldn’t presume to suggest extending this rule to the private correspondence and paperwork of the Twentieth-Century Art curators, or anybody else. That would indeed be a less-than-reasonable, over-regimented, far-fetched, and even un-American policy.

In 2015 he came to visit me in Suzhou, China, where I had been living and working for a decade. Although we hadn’t seen each other for years, we picked up right where we left off, and Phil was the same curious, gregarious omnivore of new experiences that he had always been. I am so blessed to have known him, and I will miss him, as the saying goes, like salt.

Gibbon, massacres of Christians, and dying moths

From Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, Chapter XV:

Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in her hand.

“What’s that book?” said Ridley, when she had shaken hands.

“It’s Gibbon,” said Rachel as she sat down.

“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” said Mrs. Thornbury. “A very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always quoting it at us, with the result that we resolved never to read a line.”

“Gibbon the historian?” enquired Mrs. Flushing. “I connect him with some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie in bed and read Gibbon—about the massacres of the Christians, I remember—when we were supposed to be asleep. It’s no joke, I can tell you, readin’ a great big book, in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths—tiger moths, yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa, my sister, would have the window open. I wanted it shut. We fought every night of our lives over that window. Have you ever seen a moth dyin’ in a night-light?” she enquired.

The passage continues:

Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.

“You like this?” he asked in an undertone.

“No, I don’t like it,” she replied. She had indeed been trying all the afternoon to read it, and for some reason the glory which she had perceived at first had faded, and, read as she would, she could not grasp the meaning with her mind.

“It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth,” she hazarded. Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her words, but Hirst demanded, “What d’you mean?”
She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she could not explain it in words of sober criticism.

“Surely it’s the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that’s ever been invented,” he continued. “Every sentence is practically perfect, and the wit—”

“Ugly in body, repulsive in mind,” she thought, instead of thinking about Gibbon’s style. “Yes, but strong, searching, unyielding in mind.” She looked at his big head, a disproportionate part of which was occupied by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.

“I give you up in despair,” he said. He meant it lightly, but she took it seriously, and believed that her value as a human being was lessened because she did not happen to admire the style of Gibbon. The others were talking now in a group about the native villages which Mrs. Flushing ought to visit.

“I despair too,” she said impetuously. “How are you going to judge people merely by their minds?”

“You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect,” said St. John in his jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it made the person he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in earnest. “‘Be good, sweet maid’—I thought Mr. Kingsley and my Aunt were now obsolete.”

“One can be very nice without having read a book,” she asserted. Very silly and simple her words sounded, and laid her open to derision.

“Did I ever deny it?” Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.

Oradour-sur-Glane

In the summer of 1987 Mike Radow and I were driving the back roads of France in my crappy Renault 5 and stumbled on Oradour-sur-Glane, the site of a notorious massacre carried out by Nazi SS troops. The village has been preserved as the Nazis left it, as a memorial. We stopped and walked through the burned-out main street: hulks of old cars, houses missing roofs and fronts, a chimney here, a sewing machine there.

We came on a tour group. The speaker was an older man who was one of about thirty people who escaped the slaughter. His audience had tears running down their faces as he told the story.

The men had been gathered in several barns; the women and children in the church. The Nazis machine-gunned their victims, often just in the legs. They threw grenades into the church. They piled straw and other combustibles on top of the wounded, then set fire to the church and to the barns. They pillaged the houses of food and valuables, setting each house afire once it was looted, and finally burned the whole village. People found hiding in their homes during this pillaging were killed. Most of the victims died by being burned alive.

The old man saw me standing at the back in my Moroccan black leather jacket, looking very Aryan. “D’ou venez-vous?” he asked. Where are you from?

It was one of the few times in my life that I was completely happy to say, “Je suis Americain.” The whole group sighed in relief.

The massacre took place on my birthday, June 10th, in 1944, eight years before I was born. It was apparently a reprisal for some Résistance attack in the days following the Normandy landings on June 6th—an attack that had nothing to do with Oradour-sur-Glane or any of its residents. The total number of people killed was 642, but only 52 of the bodies could be identified. The rest were beyond recognition.

In the spring of 1992 I was living in Vienna, Austria. One day I found, in the International Herald-Tribune, this brief article:

Austrian SS Veterans Honor Butcher of Oradour-sur-Glane - Intl Herald-Tribune Apr:May 1992.png

I had no words to express my disgust and outrage then, and thirty years later that has not changed, even though the account given of the massacre on the French version of Wikipedia (see below) describes Stadler as a colonel, not the regiment commander.

Almost none of the perpetrators were prosecuted; most of those that were imprisoned served less than five years before being released. One SS Sergeant was sentenced to life in prison in 1981. In 1997 he was released on humanitarian grounds. He died in 2007, age 86.

Here is an English-language account of the massacre, and a more detailed account in French.

Robert Hébras in 2008.

The man telling the story of the massacre in 1987 might have been Robert Hébras, who was wounded by machine-gun fire in his leg, abdomen, and wrist, but played dead. He and four others remained hidden underneath the corpses of their friends and neighbours even after the fire was set, waiting until the last possible moment to make their escape. He died this past February 11th, 2023, 97 years old. May he rest in peace.

One of the families of the village, eight months before the massacre. None of them survived.

Attention, for Donne, was everything

From Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, pp. 294-95:

It was very deliberately that he wrote poems that take all your sustained focus to untangle them. The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. Donne suggests that you look at the world with both more awe and more scepticism: that you weep for it and that you gasp for it. In order to do so, you shake yourself out of cliché and out of the constraints of what the world would sell you. Your love is almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? It may be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His startling timelessness is down to the fact that he had the power of unforeseeability: you don’t see him coming.

The difficulty of Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world’s most mercurial resource. The command is in a passage in Donne’s sermon: ‘Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.’ Awake, is Donne’s cry. Attention, for Donne, was everything. attention paid to our mortality, and to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us, attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet and mouths. . . .

[The quotation is from Donne’s Sermon XXV.]

Kenny Clarke: Jazz has become classical music.

Kenny Clarke:

Jazz has become classical music. We try to play some of the old things we used to do good, really good. I mean you have Beethoven specialists, people who play Beethoven all their lives, the same pieces over and over again. No one ever says to them, “Man, why don’t you change your repertoire?” So they play Beethoven. OK. I play Charlie Parker. I play Thelonious Monk—and I’ll be playing it all my life. The important thing is that it’s well done. If you play it good, it’s good.

—1973 interview, quoted in Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke, by Mike Hennessey

Philly Joe Jones on Kenny Clarke: “I was so knocked out that I didn’t sleep at night.”

Kenny Clarke influenced me enormously. He totally revolutionized the world of the drums. He originated the way we play bass drum today—all those spaces. He taught us so much that we could progress a little further. When I first heard him play, I was so knocked out that I didn’t sleep at night. When I listened to Kenny I had the impression of being in the presence of the gods; that’s how impressed I was when I saw him play.

We lived together in New York for a time and that was a great opportunity for me. Kenny was my mentor. Max Roach and Art Blakey also expressed great feeling on the drums—and there are other great drummers like Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes. Some of them are excellent. But not like Kenny Clarke. Even Max, great as he is, doesn’t touch me as much.

—Philly Joe Jones in Jazz Hot, October 1985. Quoted in Mike Hennessey, Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke.

Airbnb is evil

When you go on holiday and rent an Airbnb, you are actively promoting the housing crisis for renters.

“Jasper, Alberta has hundreds of Airbnbs, but not a single place to live

“‘Desperate to find housing’: In resort towns, landlords are pulling units from the long-term rental market to convert them to short-term rentals”

Read the article here:

ricochet.media/en/3974/jasper-

 

Kenny Clarke: “I always thought drum solos were very stupid.”

I was never a soloist. I always thought drum solos were very stupid. I always concentrated on accompaniment. I thought that was the important thing. That was my basic function: to accompany. And I think that’s why a lot of musicians liked me so much.

—from Klook: The Story of Kenny Clarke, by Mike Hennessey

Kenny Clarke recording at Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary studio. Minimal equipment, maximum results.

Orwell: Why are beggars despised?

From Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Chapter XXXI:

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? — for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. . . . Money has become the grand test of virtue.

Homeless people, empty office buildings. What to do?

Premise 1: There are lots of homeless people in the downtown area.

Premise 2: Since office workers got used to working from home during the height of the COVID pandemic, many of them prefer not to return to the office, and as a result we have lots of empty or half-empty office buildings . . . downtown.

Conclusion: Therefore we should continue ignoring the homeless problem, and force office workers to go back to their cubicles.

Pretty obvious, really.

Update: Here is an article detailing all the issues involved in converting offices to residences, written by a couple of people who actually know what they are talking about: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-heres-what-it-would-take-to-turn-empty-office-buildings-into-residential-housing.

Plato on old age

At the beginning of The Republic, Socrates walks from Athens to the port city, Piraeus, to see an old man named Cephalus and ask him what it’s like to be old.

“There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the ‘threshold of old age’–Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?”

“I will tell you, Socrates,” he said, “what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is—I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away: there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, ‘How does love suit with age, Sophocles,–are you still the man you were?’ ‘Peace,’ he replied; ‘most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.’ His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden.”

—Plato’s Republic, B. Jowett (Translator). Book I.

Removing gender from athletics

A conversation today got me thinking about the current controversy in the U.S. and in international athletics about transsexual women and girls being banned from competing in women’s and girls’ teams and competitions.

Here’s my question: Why do we still have gendered athletic competitions at all? The standard answer, of course, is that most women and girls, in most sports, will not be able to compete successfully against men and boys, who in general are bigger and stronger. But is the current norm—separate teams and leagues based on gender—the best solution?

In the case of school team athletics, for example, why not simply have First Tier teams, Second Tier teams, and Third Tier teams? Placement would be determined by performance, not gender. The current nonsense of classifying athletes by gender identity and testosterone levels could be put aside. All interested students could participate on teams suited to their skill levels. Girls, boys, and trans students skilled enough to compete against the best athletes in the First Tier could do so; those lacking the skills to make the First Tier could still enjoy playing in the Second or Third Tier.

The same idea could be employed in individual sports like tennis or swimming or track and field. In the Olympics, for example, instead of male swimming competitions and female swimming competitions, why not have First Tier swimming, Second Tier swimming, and Third Tier swimming? If your performances reach a certain level, you qualify for the First Tier. Otherwise, you compete in the Second Tier, or the Third. The objection, undoubtedly, would be the same argument used in favour of gendered competition: many women and girls would be excluded because they would not be able to compete successfully against men and boys, even at the Second or Third Tier levels. Dishonest individuals who could not win in the First Tier would deliberately underachieve so they could be relegated to the Second Tier, where they could then capture all the gold medals.

Maybe. But measures could be taken to mitigate against unfairness. And fears of cheating are overblown. Cheating is already a part of every sport, and every sport has rules and sanctions to minimize dishonesty. Most athletes, however, want to test themselves against tough competition. Winning against opponents whose skills are clearly inferior would hold no satisfaction or pleasure for the vast majority of competitors.

I am “thinking out loud” here, and perhaps I have not thought hard enough or carefully enough about these issues. It does seem clear to me, however, that banning and stigmatizing transsexual athletes is cruel and unsustainable. There has to be a better way.

You couldn’t give me a billion dollars to get on an airplane.

The great Paul Motian, from Motian in Motion, a wonderful 2020 documentary of his life and career. Skip to the 41-minute mark for this:

Oh yeah. No, I won’t get on an airplane. Forget that. You couldn’t give me a billion dollars to get on an airplane. I’m serious. Give me a billion dollars—I will not get on an airplane. I just did so much of that, man, so much touring, wow, year after year after year after year. Planes. Airplanes. Hundreds of airplanes. Terrible! That’s terrible! Touring is a horrible life.

Years of international living and traveling have led me to exactly the same conclusion. Having said that, billion-dollar offers are welcome.

Climate Change Solutions

I know some of you out there are worried about climate change.

I’m here to help.

If it gets too hot, here’s what to do. Go out to your SUV, start her up, and flick on the AC. Stay in there until you’re cooled down.

Alternatively, if it’s too cold, here’s what to do. Go out to your SUV, start her up, and turn on the heater. Stay in there until you feel warm again.

Now, somebody’s going to say these are just short-term solutions, and I have to admit, that’s true. So, if you get tired of sitting in your car, here’s what you do.

It it’s too hot, go to the airport and catch a flight to someplace nice and cool.

If it’s too cold, go to the airport and catch a flight to someplace nice and warm.

Whatever you do, don’t let this climate change thing force you to change the way you like to live. Be the boss!

That’s it.

Happy to help.

Cause of death

With AIDS, unlike COVID-19, you had to work pretty hard to be infected. Walking into a restaurant and breathing was not enough.

So when people died of AIDS, the reports would say, “died of complications from AIDS,” and everyone understood that having AIDS made you vulnerable to a host of other illnesses—pneumonia, for example.

COVID deaths, however, are being massively mis-reported and under-reported. If someone with COVID contracts pneumonia and then dies, the cause of death is reported as . . . pneumonia! Why? Because if COVID deaths were reported as “died of complications from COVID-19,” all holy hell would break loose. Lots of people would be more reluctant to walk into restaurants and breathe. Or to go to shopping malls, or go out to a nightclub, or go to a play or a concert.

That would be bad.

Gotta keep the economy going, y’know?

Companies Producing AR-15s and AR-15 Knock-Offs

Let them know what you think of them.

Colt’s Manufacturing Company http://www.colt.com/
Barrett Firearms Manufacturing https://barrett.net/
Bushmaster Firearms International https://www.bushmaster.com
Caracal International http://caracalusa.com/
C.G. Haenel https://www.cg-haenel.de/en/
Heckler & Koch http://heckler-koch.com/
Remington Arms http://www.remarms.com/
Sturm, Ruger & Co. http://ruger.com/
SIG Sauer http://sigsauer.com/
Smith & Wesson http://smith-wesson.com/
Springfield Armory, Inc. http://www.springfield-armory.com/
Norinco http://en.norincogroup.com.cn/

My message to these companies:

Why are you selling weapons to civilians that are designed for warfare and end up being used in mass killings?

You are worse than murderers: too cowardly to pull the triggers yourselves, but happy to profit from the carnage.

You are despicable.

Politics 101

  • Most voters are in the center, when they pay attention; and most don’t pay attention. They aren’t interested. They just want to work and fall in love and follow sports and watch TV.
  • It is outrages on the right that push uninvolved voters to pay attention and become involved, that motivate them to vote, and to vote for progress. Think about Bull Conner’s thugs attacking kids with firehouses and dogs in 1963. In recent days we have the right-wing Supreme Court overturning abortion rights, or DeSantis et al banning books, etc.
  • The progressive left’s best strategy is to make their votes necessary for liberals to get elected and pass legislation. This is much easier in a parliamentary system (Canada, the U.K.) than in the U.S., with its two-party system so firmly entrenched. But it’s not easy anywhere.
  • Progress is multi-generational. One lifetime is barely the blink of an eye on history’s timeline. It is natural, from the perspective of a single lifetime, to feel enormously frustrated. And it is very difficult to take heart over incremental improvements that, with rare exceptions, began long before you were born and will not be completed until long after you die.
  • Start local! National politics is really, really hard to change. City councils, school boards, county commissions, and state/provincial legislatures are where progressives need to start. But this is slow, tedious work and, historically, progressives have been more inclined to street demonstrations that usually have limited (sometimes counterproductive) effects—although we tend to remember the spectacular exceptions.

Sharp alterations and abrupt oscillations can be expected

“In view of the truly extraordinary record of the past few centuries, no one can say for sure that new and unexpected breakthroughs will not occur, expanding the range of the possible beyond anything easily conceived of now. Birth control may in time catch up with death control. Something like a stable balance between human numbers and resources may then begin to define itself. But for the present and short-range future, it remains obvious that humanity is in course of one of the most massive and extraordinary ecological upheavals the planet has ever known. Not stability but a sequence of sharp alterations and abrupt oscillations in existing balances between microparasitism and macroparasitism can therefore be expected in the near future as in the recent past.

“In any effort to understand what lies ahead, as much as what lies behind, the role of infectious disease cannot properly be left out of consideration. Ingenuity, knowledge, and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity’s vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life. Infections disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, as it has been hitherto, one of the fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.”

—Wm. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976, 1998). Final two paragraphs.

COVID and history: lessons learned

1. Not just people, but entire cultures can be pigheaded
There is a pigheaded resistance to government in Anglo culture that persists even when public health measures are desperately needed to save lives. We have seen this during the COVID-19 pandemic, but history shows that it is nothing new.

British liberals, in particular, saw quarantine regulations as an irrational infringement of the principle of free trade, and bent every effort toward the eradication of such traces of tyranny and Roman Catholic folly. . . .

In England . . . a libertarian prejudice against regulations infringing the individual’s right to do what he chose with his own property was deeply rooted . . . .

[As Asiatic cholera approached, Parliament established a Central Board of Health in 1848] and began installation of water and sewer systems all over the country. . . .

Intrusion upon private property to allow water mains and sewer pipes to maintain the straight lines needed for efficient patterns of flow was also necessary. To many Englishmen at the time this seemed an unwarranted intrusion on their rights and, of course, the capital expenditures involved were substantial. It therefore took the lively fear that cholera provoked to overcome entrenched opposition.

—William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, pp. 272, 276-77

Pigheaded resistance to common-sense public health measures can be found outside of Anglo culture, of course. McNeill notes elsewhere in the same book that, confronted with bubonic plague during the annual hadj to Mecca, Islamic authorities shrugged it off on the theory that Allah alone determines who lives and dies, and when. Similarly, regular outbreaks of cholera among during Hindu pilgrimages to the Ganges River did nothing to diminish enthusiasm to join the crowds.

2. Money talks
Scurvy had been a problem for sailors ever since Columbus. When the British navy learned that the disease resulted from a Vitamin C deficiency, they decided to supply British warships with citrus fruits. As it turned out, however, Mediterranean lemons were more expensive, so they opted for limes from the West Indies, which were much cheaper. Unfortunately, the West Indies varieties were also much lower in Vitamin C, so scurvy outbreaks in the British navy continued for another 80 years. But think of the money they saved! [McNeill, pp. 273-74]

3. Public health is not private health
As I have noted previously, governments are not particularly concerned with your health, or mine. They are only concerned about health when it becomes a public problem by swamping hospitals or impacting the workforce and damaging the economy. Soft-headed dopes like me who continue to think that my governments, local and national, ought to be concerned about my health, are bound to be disappointed.

Scared to go to the hospital: an open letter to BC Premier Dave Eby

To British Columbia Premier Dave Eby

Dear Mr. Eby,

Before Dr. Henry’s latest announcement that health care workers would no longer be wearing masks on the job, I was already extremely reluctant to go to the hospital because of the outrageous waiting times in the emergency department.

In August 2021 I was forced to call an ambulance and go to the ER when I had an attack of vertigo. Nauseous, miserable, and dry-heaving into a cardboard bucket, I sat for 12 hours in a waiting room filled with scores of sick people. It was horrible.

Now, in addition to inhumane waiting times, going to the hospital will mean being needlessly exposed to every airborne disease around.

If these policies were being promulgated by a right-wing party I would not be surprised. But the NDP??

What the hell has happened to the NDP??

Whatever it is, it’s appalling.

Sincerely yours, [etc.]

Gun violence is not about ideology: it’s about money

In 16th-century France the Wars of Religion tore the nation apart for almost forty years. The atrocities committed make 21st-century terrorists look like Boy Scouts. King Henri IV finally restored peace (for a while) by addressing the real causes of the conflict: not religious doctrine, but economics and political power.

I was reminded of this today talking with a friend about the latest wave of gun homicides in the U.S. Those eager to prolong the status quo want you to think that this is an ideological disagreement about the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, about the right of citizens to own guns.

Wrong. It’s about the profits of gun manufacturers and sellers. The ideological hysteria is stirred up by people who profit from it.

Remember when bar owners were held liable if they allowed customers to get drunk, and those customers subsequently got behind the wheel and caused accidents? The epidemic of drunk driving, seemingly insoluble, stopped. There are still drunk drivers, but not nearly so many.

The same approach could dramatically reduce gun violence in the U.S. Make it possible for victims and their families to sue gun makers and gun sellers whose guns are used in mass killings. Suddenly sellers will be much more careful about who they sell guns to, and manufacturers will change the kinds of guns they sell.

Follow the money.

Casablanca American School Turns 50

Hala R. Mustafa Al Hassan
Casablanca American School
Casablanca, Morocco

Dear Hala,

I have been pondering what to say in response to your appeal for memories of CAS as part of the school’s 50-year anniversary celebrations.

My first thought was: it should not be all about me. It should be about you, Hala, and your classmates in 1986 when I arrived to teach all of the English courses, Grades 7-12. I remember the first time I asked students, “What do you think?” and seeing the looks of blank terror on their faces: having come from schools where “learning” was all about memorizing what the teacher said, they had never before been asked that question. I remember Hind arriving in Grade 10 with barely a word of English. At break one day she was sitting with her friends outside on a sunny fall day during a break. “How are you?” I asked. “Oooh,” she said, fanning herself, “C’est hot!” I remember my Indian students explaining the logic of arranged marriages to me and persuading me that arranged marriages made more sense than “love matches.” I remember Nita, Sanguita, and Meenakshi dressing me up as Krishna for “Indian Night” at the Churchill Club. Although my three years at CAS (1986-89) came near the beginning of my teaching career, I am still in touch from time to time with so many of my former students from Casa: Myriam and Kamal, Marcus and Pontus, Cat, Amal, Noura, Alia, Hind, Youness . . . . It speaks to the strength of the bonds we formed.

This little memoir should be about John Randolph, the best head of school I ever worked for across four decades and four continents and eleven schools. When I first met John, at a recruitment fair in San Francisco, I saw him sitting behind the table under the Casablanca American School sign and assumed from his looks that he was Moroccan. By now, I think he probably is! John showed me that a head of school could be fiercely principled, passionate about education, and utterly devoted to the best interests of his students. I could write a small book about John and his profound influence on me and my career. I remember him reciting Langston Hughes’ poem, “As I Grew Older,” at morning assembly in the courtyard of the old upper school. I am still teaching that poem, almost forty years later. John Randolph started out as my boss and became a dear, lifelong friend. I know that I am far from alone when I say that I could never thank him enough. 

My colleagues at CAS left lasting memories, and became lifelong friends. Mike Radow and I met on the plane returning home to Oregon from that San Francisco recruitment fair and ended up sharing a flat for the first year; or was it two? John Hall, Velma, Marcia, Orestes, Gayle, and then all the local staff who were so kind, generous, and helpful to us clueless expats. It was a vibrant, committed group of teachers. Anne Osman was a pillar of strength, along with her marvellous husband, Farid. Jack and Tricia Shepherd arrived in my second year and became essential members of the faculty. And through it all the indefatigable Marie Randolph, like a mother hen, took care of us all. We did not always agree, but we always cared about teaching and learning above all else.

In another sense, however, this little memoir should be about me, just as those of other CAS alumni should be about them, because that’s what Casablanca American School was always about: the students, teachers, staff members, and parents who made it the wonderful place it was, and is. I am sure that the 50th anniversary celebrations will provoke a tremendous response, because Casablanca American School has made a tremendous difference in the lives it has touched.

Sincerely yours,
Eric
(yes, you can call me Eric now, Hala!)

A purposeful life: Stephen Kotkin

“Having a purposeful life is actually not that hard. You’re in a school, you’re in a workplace, you’re somewhere where you can affect other people in a positive way. You can lead a life that can show others what good values are, and you can lead a life that dedicates yourself not only to your own material well-being but to the well-being and development of others around you. And it can be on a humble scale. It can be in a small classroom or a small workplace, a small work team. And having a positive impact, even on one other person, gives far greater meaning to your own life, and is profoundly satisfying.”

—Stephen Kotkin

Source: The very tail-end (2h41m) of a long discussion from May 2022 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Slightly edited for clarity. Kotkin is a scholar (Princeton, Stanford) and historian who specializes in Russian history.

Plagues and uncertainty

In the three centuries when bubonic plague swept across Europe, no one understood that the disease was carried by fleas and rats. Many people died; some became ill but recovered; some never became ill at all. These apparently random events made no sense, and so people resorted to superstition, mysticism, bigotry, and hysteria.

How little has changed since then.

Despite modern science and medicine, we don’t understand why some people suffer serious illness or death from COVID-19, while others experience only mild symptoms, or none at all; why some may escape entirely; why some suffer long-term disability after surviving the acute phase of the disease. Popular responses to this fear and confusion are often medieval in their embrace of irrationality and superstition and pseudoscience.

Humans seek clear, simple answers to their questions. They do not respond well to uncertainty and ambiguity. Plagues kill, but the suffering is compounded by our determination to arrive at an answer in the face of contradictory or incomplete evidence. As uncomfortable as it may be, we will be better off acknowledging that we don’t know, and acting accordingly.

To be hopeful in bad times: Howard Zinn

“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.”

—Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, p. 270.

A plague on half your houses. Repeatedly.

From William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1998), pp. 182, 185:

“[In the Mediterranean port cities] until the seventeenth century occasional plague outbreaks, carrying off anything up to a third or a half of a city’s population in a single year, were normal. Venetian statistics, for instance, . . . show that in 1575-77 and again in 1630-31, a third or more of the city’s population died of plague.

“Outside the Mediterranean, European exposure to plague was less frequent . . . and, at least sometimes, also more catastrophic. . . . In northern Spain, 1596-1602 . . . half a million died . . . . Subsequent outbreaks in 1648-52 and 1677-85 more than doubled the number of Spaniards who died of plague in the seventeenth century. Pasturella pestis must thus be considered as one of the significant factors in Spain’s decline as an economic and political power. . . .

“. . . The plague did not disappear among populations living closer to the Eurasian steppe reservoir, nor did it diminish in virulence . . . in those regions where it continued to manifest itself. . . . Changes in housing, shipping, sanitary practices, and similar factors . . . were the decisive regulators, both in the advance and in the retreat of plague.”

July 1914: can’t be bothered with politics

Helen Pearl Adam, a British journalist then working in Paris, wrote in her diary for July, “In 1914, the people of France had decided that it could not be bothered with politics.”

—Mary McAuliffe, Twilight of the Belle Epoque, p. 270

A month later the German offensive had begun the war that would transform Europe at the cost of millions of lives.

Robert Louis Stevenson on learning to write

“Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. . . .

“That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats’s; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear someone cry out: But this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters: he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man’s ability) able to do it.

“And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines beyond the student’s reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very true saying that failure is the only highroad to success. I must have had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own performances. I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me, ‘Padding,’ said one. Another wrote: ‘I cannot understand why you do lyrics so badly.’ No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These were returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained. If they had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked at—well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning and living.”

—Memories and Portraits, Chapter IV (1912)

Anti-Semitism and COVID: plus ça change . . .

In 1900 the French government granted a general amnesty to everyone involved in the notorious Dreyfus Affair, in which anti-Semitic members of the military establishment had framed Alfred Dreyfus, who was falsely convicted of treason and spent years in prison before being released and pardoned. Dreyfus and his supporters wanted justice, not a pardon for a crime he never committed. The French government, however, wanted an end to the controversy. To prosecute the wrong-doers would have stirred the national passions, which had been stirring for far too long already.

Emile Zola, in an open letter to the President of the Republic, wrote this sentence:

The view that one can save a people from the disease that gnaws it by decreeing that the disease no longer exists is myopic indeed. [L’Aurore, 22 December 1900]

Plus ça change . . .

Hugo, at last

What a surprise to discover, in my old age, the magnificent Victor Hugo!

Having been subjected as a child to the maimed reductions of Hugo produced by Walt Disney and his ilk, I thought that I knew his work, and had no desire for further acquaintance. My main interest, moreover, was history, not literature, and certainly not corny melodrama. When in my mid-twenties I rather surprisingly chose to become a high school English teacher, I embarked on a crash course of literary education, but Hugo—whose books were far too long for any high school reading list—never merited my attention.

A few months ago, however, I began listening to an audiobook version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, wonderfully narrated by George Guidall. I was looking for something entertaining but not wholly frivolous, and decided to fill this gap in my reading without straining my aging eyes.

What a surprise, then, to discover that Hugo’s novel is actually an essay, a long, sprawling essay on the architectural history of Paris, with the famous cathedral both literally and figuratively at its centre. The French title, Notre-Dame de Paris, rightly places the cathedral in the forefront and fails to mention its bell-ringer. The melodrama featuring Quasimodo, the hunchback, Esmeralda, the gypsy girl, and Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon, provides the spoonful of sugar needed to help readers swallow Hugo’s passionate dissertation. Published in 1831, it turned the Cathedral of Notre-Dame into a tourist attraction, forcing the authorities to invest in its restoration and to preserve numerous other medieval buildings that otherwise would have disappeared.

Even the melodrama is far from what Disney made of it. Following the penniless playwright, Gringoire, through the darkening streets of the city, we stumble with him into a gang of street criminals. We are shown the desperate poverty of Esmeralda’s mother as a young woman, and her crazed religiosity as a prematurely-old woman. Most striking, for me, was the sexually frustrated, self-absorbed Claude Frollo and his obsession with Esmeralda. Here he is, in Hapgood’s translation:

“I love you. Oh! how true that is! So nothing comes of that fire which burns my heart! Alas! young girl, night and day—yes, night and day I tell you,—it is torture. Oh! I suffer too much, my poor child. ’Tis a thing deserving of compassion, I assure you. You see that I speak gently to you. I really wish that you should no longer cherish this horror of me.—After all, if a man loves a woman, ’tis not his fault!—Oh, my God!—What! So you will never pardon me? You will always hate me? All is over then. It is that which renders me evil, do you see? and horrible to myself.—You will not even look at me! You are thinking of something else, perchance, while I stand here and talk to you, shuddering on the brink of eternity for both of us! Above all things, do not speak to me of the officer!—I would cast myself at your knees, I would kiss not your feet, but the earth which is under your feet; I would sob like a child, I would tear from my breast not words, but my very heart and vitals, to tell you that I love you;—all would be useless, all!—And yet you have nothing in your heart but what is tender and merciful. You are radiant with the most beautiful mildness; you are wholly sweet, good, pitiful, and charming. Alas! You cherish no ill will for any one but me alone! Oh! what a fatality!”

He hid his face in his hands. The young girl heard him weeping. It was for the first time. Thus erect and shaken by sobs, he was more miserable and more suppliant than when on his knees. He wept thus for a considerable time.

“Come!” he said, these first tears passed, “I have no more words. I had, however, thought well as to what you would say. Now I tremble and shiver and break down at the decisive moment, I feel conscious of something supreme enveloping us, and I stammer. Oh! I shall fall upon the pavement if you do not take pity on me, pity on yourself. Do not condemn us both. If you only knew how much I love you! What a heart is mine! Oh! what desertion of all virtue! What desperate abandonment of myself! A doctor, I mock at science; a gentleman, I tarnish my own name; a priest, I make of the missal a pillow of sensuality, I spit in the face of my God! all this for thee, enchantress! to be more worthy of thy hell! And you will not have the apostate! Oh! let me tell you all! more still, something more horrible, oh! Yet more horrible!…”

And of course there is no happy ending. Esmeralda, forced by Frollo to choose between him and the hangman, goes to her death. Frollo, watching the execution from the top of Notre Dame, is pushed to his death by his adopted son, Quasimodo, who is also in love with the girl. Quasimodo then disappears, but we are told that many years later his bones are found embracing Esmeralda in her grave. My only serious complaint with this melodrama is Esmeralda herself, who shows spunk and intelligence early on but becomes a simpleton when she falls for the worthless Captain Phoebus.

Inspired by Notre Dame, I decided to have a go at Les Miserables. At first I was disappointed. In Notre Dame, Hugo has barely begun his story before launching into his disquisition on Paris. In Les Miserables, the story dominates the beginning of the novel. I began to think that in his second masterpiece, Hugo had surrendered entirely to melodrama.

I was wrong.

Caught in Hugo’s web by the improbable sentimentality of Jean Valjean’s tale, readers of Les Miserables find themselves a captive audience for the author’s history of France; his quasi-Hegelian theory of history; and his long, detailed argument that all of the political ups and downs, progressions and regressions, actions and reactions of French history from the Revolution of 1789 to the follies of Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire—that all of these contradictory movements tend, slowly and unevenly, toward the establishment of a truly democratic republic of justice and equality. Hugo’s fierce denunciations of injustice retain their power 160 years later.

Along the way he pauses to consider, at some length, the Battle of Waterloo; the history of convents; the street urchins of Paris; the sewer system of Paris, and the use of slang. How did he find the time and energy to, first, learn about all these matters and, second, write about them at such length? “Astonishing” is the least one can say. For a taste of Hugo in one of these expository expostulations, see my earlier post, “Victor Hugo: socialism and the fate of England.”

Having discovered, so late in life, these two magnificent books, do I regret not reading them when I was younger? Not really. I doubt I would have appreciated them. And I am not inclined to recommend them to my high school students, either—with perhaps a rare exception. But some of you may be ready for the unexpurgated Hugo, and if so, I salute you. Enjoy the journey!

The Story of the Taoist Farmer

The following text was published on a website that no longer exists, and I am unable to contact its author, Duen Hsi Yen, so I am reposting it here.

Version 1:

This farmer had only one horse, and one day the horse ran away. The neighbors came to condole over his terrible loss. The farmer said, “What makes you think it is so terrible?”
A month later, the horse came home–this time bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors became excited at the farmer’s good fortune. Such lovely strong horses! The farmer said, “What makes you think this is good fortune?”
The farmer’s son was thrown from one of the wild horses and broke his leg. All the neighbors were very distressed. Such bad luck! The farmer said, “What makes you think it is bad?”
A war came, and every able-bodied man was conscripted and sent into battle. Only the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg, remained. The neighbors congratulated the farmer. “What makes you think this is good?” said the farmer.
As told by Executive editor, Elise Hancock, in the Johns Hopkins Magazine, November 1993, page 2, in section entitled Editor’s Note.
Version 2:
A man named Sei Weng owned a beautiful mare which was praised far and wide. One day this beautiful horse disappeared. The people of his village offered sympathy to Sei Weng for his great misfortune. Sei Weng said simply, “That’s the way it is.”
A few days later the lost mare returned, followed by a beautiful wild stallion. The village congratulated Sei Weng for his good fortune. He said, “That’s the way it is.”
Some time later, Sei Weng’s only son, while riding the stallion, fell off and broke his leg. The village people once again expressed their sympathy at Sei Weng’s misfortune. Sei Weng again said, “That’s the way it is.”
Soon thereafter, war broke out and all the young men of the village except Sei Weng’s lame son were drafted and were killed in battle. The village people were amazed as Sei Weng’s good luck. His son was the only young man left alive in the village. But Sei Weng kept his same attitude: despite all the turmoil, gains and losses, he gave the same reply, “That’s the way it is.”
As told by Chin-Ning Chu, in “The Asian Mind Game: unlocking the hidden agenda of the Asian business culture — a westerner’s survival manual,” New York:Macmillan Publishing Company, page 182. (1991)
Version 3:
A man who lived on the northern frontier of China was skilled in interpreting events. One day, for no reason, his horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?” Some months later his horse returned, bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a disaster?” Their household was richer by a fine horse, which his son loved to ride. One day he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?”
A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiersmen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame did the father and son survive to take care of each other. Truly, blessing turns to disaster, and disaster to blessing: the changes have no end, nor can the mystery be fathomed.
The Lost Horse, a Chinese Folktale.
As told by Ellen J. Langer, in” The Power of Mindful Learning,” Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, page 99-100. (1997).
Version 4:
近塞上之人有善術者，馬無故亡而入胡，人皆弔之。其父曰：「此何遽不為福乎！」居數月，其馬將胡駿馬而歸，人皆賀之。其父曰：「此何遽不能為禍乎！」家富良馬，其子好騎，墮而折其髀，人皆弔之。其父曰：「此何遽不為福乎！」居一年，胡人大入塞，丁壯者引弦而戰，近塞之人，死者十九，此獨以跛之故，父子相保。故福之為禍，禍之為福，化不可極，深不可測也。
Translation (see above link for annotations and comment):
Among the people who lived close to the border, there was a man who led a righteous life. Without reason, his horse escaped, and fled into barbarian territory. Everyone pitied him, but the old man said : “what makes you think this is not a good thing?”
Several months later, his horse returned, accompanied by a superb barbarian stallion. Everyone congratulated him. But the old man said: “what makes you think this is cannot be a bad thing?”
The family was richer from a good horse, his son enjoyed riding it. He fell and broke his hip. Everyone pitied him, but the old man said: “what makes you think this is not a good thing!”
One year later, a large party of barbarians entered the border. All the valid me