Author: Eric MacKnight

Violence in America

“This is not who we are”? Seriously?

Assassinations are as American as apple pie. The presidential assassinations alone are almost too numerous to remember. Include killings or attempted killings of other elected officials, add in other political figures like Malcolm X and MLK, Jr., and . . . where’s my abacus?

Then we have organized violence, starting with the genocide of indigenous people, moving on to slavery, which segued into a century of vigilante violence against Blacks in the South during Jim Crow, continuing with police violence against Blacks and other marginalized people right down to yesterday’s traffic stop and ICE raid.

Then we have media violence, beginning with frontier stories; the mythologized Old West of gunslingers, rustlers, and crusading sheriffs; and Prohibition gang violence; career criminals (e.g., Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde); psychopathic killers; Mafia families; and the cops chasing after all of these modern criminals.

School shootings. Other mass shootings. Domestic violence.

And let’s not forget war movies. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.

A lot of violence.

1944/45 all-star jazz broadcast

Jubilee was a radio program on the Armed Forces Radio Service intended for African-American soldiers during the Second World War and the Korean War; the program ran until 1953. The photos below are from a broadcast in either 1944 or 1945; the photos are dated a year apart although it is clearly the same session. I have been unable to find any audio recordings of it.

“1944 Command Performance program on the Armed Forces Radio Service, ensemble performing: Honeysuckle Rose. Produced in Hollywood. L to r.: Count Basie (vb), Lionel Hampton (vb), Artie Shaw (cl), Les Paul (gtr), llinois Jacquet (tnr sax), Tommy Dorsey (tbn), Ziggy Elman (tpt), Buddy Rich (dms), and Ed McKinney, obscured by Rich (bs)” https://www.ijc.uidaho.edu/hampton_collection/items/ijc_lionel_hampton_0790.html
“JUBILEE BROADCAST to US Troops, Aug.1945.Count Basie (piano)Illinois Jacquet(sax)Tommy Dorsey, Ziggy Elman, Buddy Rich, Artie Shaw, Lionel Hampton(vibes)” https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-jubilee-broadcast-to-us-troops-aug1945count-basie-pianoillinois-jacquetsaxtommy-35111013.html

Let’s not put Descartes before the horse

Or, “The Mind-Body Problem? No Problem”

The great French mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes (1596 – 1650), concluded that he could know for certain that he existed, because he was thinking: “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum in the original Latin).

Here’s the joke:

A horse walks into a bar and orders a beer.  The bartender says, “You’re in here every day.  You might be an alcoholic.”  The horse says, “I don’t think I am,” and disappears.  It’s a joke about Descartes, but you don’t want to put him before the horse.

Of course, if the horse doesn’t think he is [an alcoholic], he is still thinking . . . but that spoils the “horse before the cart” / “Descartes before the horse” joke.*

Here is Richard Watson, in his fascinating Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes (2002):

According to Descartes, each human being consists of a mental, thinking, active, unextended soul-mind united with a material, unthinking, passive, extended body. Most people in the Western world believe that this is true, that we have bodies and we have souls. . . .

In the twenty-first century, this is how the last battle for the human soul will go. Materialists will discover more and more about how the brain works. Mentalists will never be able to show how an independent mind works. One day, one hundred, two hundred years down the line, everyone will finally realize that the materialists have won and that the mentalists have lost this last battle for the human soul. When humankind finally faces the fact that the mind is the brain, that there is no independently existing mental soul to survive the death of the body, that none of us chirpy sparrows is immortal, when Descartes’ ghost in the machine finally fades away and his animal machine is triumphant, then there will be a revolution in human thought the like of which none has gone before.

[pp. 313, 327]

What follows from this? I have a body; you have a body; the dog, cat, and cockroach all have bodies; the trees have bodies; soil consists of a multitude of bodies; even stones have bodies. Each of these bodies functions in ways that are more similar (mammals, for example) or less similar. Humans have language. Dogs hear pitches where we hear only silence. Trees, we have learned in recent years, communicate with each other through mitochondria. What we share in common is . . . we are bodies. Atoms and molecules. We come from atoms and molecules, and we return to atoms and molecules. We are quite literally one with every other body, with the earth itself, with the universe. Stardust. “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,” wrote Walt Whitman, “And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, / And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. / All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses; / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” What if we lived that sense of solidarity with all bodies, respect for all bodies?

This idea of a body, applied to all of nature, makes us “one with everything,” to use the Buddhist phrase, but in a different, more concrete sense. Clouds, rocks, dogs, trees, Descartes, all are bodies made of the same materials, materials that recycle among all the different kinds of bodies that exist. Or, as John Lennon put it, “I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together.” We just need to add an “it” to those pronouns.

The old joke turns out to be truer than expected: it is wrong to put Descartes before the horse, if he and the horse are brothers. Sometimes the horse leads; sometimes Descartes leads; sometimes they go separate ways. But they are both bodies, and both deserve respect.

*Bonus chuckle, this one from Richard Watson in the same book:

One day Morris Raphael Cohen, a legendary professor at City College New York, gave a lecture on Descartes’ method of doubt in which he left uncertain the question of the existence of everything. The next morning when Professor Cohen arrived at his office, he found waiting for him a young man who was obviously in great distress. Professor Cohen opened his door and ushered the student inside. “Tell me, Professor Cohen, the student blurted out at once, “I’ve been worrying all night. Tell me, do I exist?” Professor Cohen fixed him with a steely eye and in his eminently imitable Yiddish accent said, “Zo who vants to know?”

Rabbit-hole reading

When I was a boy, we had a good collection of books in the house, but just one encyclopedia: the Columbia Encyclopedia, a one-volume, large-format book at least six inches thick, with labeled cutouts for each alphabetical division making it easy to place a boy-sized thumb in the cutout and go directly to the beginning of whatever section was desired. I spent a good deal of time browsing in this encyclopedia. Each article would mention something I knew nothing about, and which I would then have to look up in another article—a process ended only by fatigue, hunger, or my mother’s command. 

Seven decades later, I have lost track of that encyclopedia, but the process continues. One article, song, or reference in a book leads to another. I check Wikipedia entries, listen to songs on YouTube, and then buy an album in Apple Music or order another book online to add to one of the several stacks of books waiting to be read that surround my La-Z-Boy recliner. What would one call this learning process? “Organic,” perhaps, but certainly not systematic. My attention wanders like an earthworm, sniffing for interesting bits (do earthworms sniff?) and occasionally finding a luscious clump of something where I stay for a while, munching.

From the “Words Matter” Department: The Assassination of Henri IV

The great event during the Descartes brothers’ years at La Flèche was the interment of Henri IV’s heart in the school chapel in 1610. Henri IV had been assassinated by a Catholic religious fanatic named Ravillac, who was incensed at Henri IV’s plan to invade Germany to help Protestants against the Catholics of the Holy Roman Empire. Ravillac leaped into the king’s carriage and stuck a knife into the very heart that was now being ceremoniously delivered to the college church.

So the Jesuits and the Catholic League (who never forgot that Henri IV was formerly the Protestant king of Navarre) finally got Henri IV, who wanted to go to war with holy Spain. The view that the Jesuits and the Catholic League instigated the assassination, however, is not a very popular way of stating the matter among Catholic historians. What happened is that a student from the Jesuit college at Clermont in Paris had tried to assassinate Henri IV in 1596 and failed. Then Ravillac, another Catholic student, got him.

It is classic. The Jesuits had been teaching the perfidy of Henri IV for years. This or that priest had told his students that France would be better off if Henri IV was dead: Will no one rid us of this man? As has happened more than once in such circumstances, some dedicated young man decided to do the deed in the name of God. He acted alone. The Jesuits were not to blame.

—from Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes (2002), by Richard Watson

Coda

Despite the Jesuits’ hatred of Henri, his heart was interred, according to his wishes, at the collège he had founded, and was joined later by the heart of his queen, Marie de Medici. In 1793, during the Revolution, when Jesuits, Bourbon monarchs, and foreigner queens were equally despised,  both hearts were burned in the public square.

So it goes.

World War II, up close and personal

Rick Atkinson’s excellent World War II trilogy—The Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light—provides a comprehensive history of the war’s three great invasions in the Western theatre: North Africa, Italy, and the final campaign from Normandy to Germany. It punctures some of the hagiographic portraits of American leaders that I grew up with, and it honestly includes the sordid side of war, from bedbugs in Yalta to the epidemic of venereal disease that followed the liberation of Paris. Atrocities were committed on all sides, from the murder of captured soldiers to the looting of captured towns and widespread rapes committed by victorious soldiers—not to mention the bombing of civilians in cities on both sides of the conflict, and of course the monstrous Nazi extermination camps.

Atkinson does not sanitize the story. The “Allies” struggled with each other for precedence and prestige, often descending to the level of whiny children. Operations were a series of endless screw-ups, with colossal waste of men and equipment. No one ever seemed to learn that bombing civilians leads not to surrender, but to stiffened resistance. The single omission I noticed was Atkinson’s failure to mention the havoc wreaked among surviving soldiers and their families by PTSD.

In the end, Hitler and fascism were defeated, and Atkinson closes his trilogy with a poetic paean to what he clearly thinks was, despite all of its ugliness, a noble cause. This may or may not strike readers as overly sanguine. Today the 1945 defeat of fascism seems more like an armistice, at best. Certainly there is no ceasefire in Ukraine, or in Gaza, and ICE agents in the U.S. are doing a pretty good imitation of Nazi thugs. The dream of a world without war, discrimination, bigotry, racism, and exploitation seems remote indeed.

Federico demonstrates his love of ethics

In 1472, Federico da Montefeltro’s army of twelve thousand men laid siege to the Tuscan city of Volterra.

In the middle of June, the citizens negotiated their surrender. Federico agreed to their terms that the city should not be sacked, but his soldiers, having breached the walls, soon entertained other ideas. Hundreds of Volterrani were slain and their possessions looted. Machiavelli later wrote that for a whole day the city ‘suffered the greatest horrors, neither women nor sacred places being spared.’ . . .  Federico . . . did his best to prevent looting but . . . ‘great disorders’ arose—violence and rapine of such fury that afterward Federico ‘could not contain his tears.’ Regardless, Federico indulged in some looting of his own . . . [taking] seventy-one Hebrew manuscripts [including] a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Old Testament . . . [comprising] almost a thousand leaves of heavy parchment . . . that required two people to lift it.

These precious volumes were added to Federico’s library in Urbino. . . . Aristotle’s Ethics was a particular favorite of Federico’s. . . . At intervals during the battles, Federico enjoyed hearing passages from it read aloud.

—Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence, pp. 267-68

Ah, Federico! Ah, humanity!

Auden’s 1941 Literature Course

W. H. Auden, the great poet and essayist, taught a course called “English 135: Fate and the Individual in European Literature” at the University of Michigan in 1941. Here is the course syllabus:

All of that in one semester!

Let me know when you have completed all the required reading. Bonus points for those who also complete the recommended critical readings.

Credit to openculture.com for this!

Vicious Romans

Thomas Wiedemann’s thin volume, Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic, begins with this sentence: “The values of the Roman republic into which Cicero was born were both militaristic and competitive”—a claim amply supported by the next 83 pages of murders, treachery, slander, and endless legal battles consisting largely of ad hominem attacks. I confess to skimming more and more quickly. The Chinese phrase puts it succinctly: 他们都是流氓, “they are all gangsters.”

That *other* 9/11 . . . more like Jan 6

From the “Plus ça change . . . ” Dept: France experienced an epidemic of political violence in 1937, culminating in September and November.

The most spectacular bombing happened on 11 September, when two devices exploded in the Etoile district of Paris, causing significant material damage and killing two police constables. The culprits were two French men, René Locuty and Lêon Macon. Both men were members of the secret extreme right-wing group, . . . the “Cagoule.” Eugène Deloncle, a veteran of the 1930s extreme right, directed the Cagoule, while wealth French business interests bankrolled the organization. . . . The French police had long kept the Cagoule under surveillance, yet the authorities were motivated to act only when Deloncle launched an abortive coup on 15 November 1937. In January 1938, Minister of the Interior Marx Dormoy exposed to the French public the frightening scale of this terrorist organization’s plot against the Republic. Nonetheless, so thoroughly associated with “unFrenchness” was terrorism at this time that the existence of a French terrorist group was difficult to believe, a fact that Deloncle’s allies in the right-wing press and political establishment played upon.

—Chris Millington, The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939

Let’s see . . . terrorism associated with foreigners . . . right-wing groups secretly financed by rich right-wing businessmen . . . our own people wouldn’t do such things . . . . Sounds strangely familiar, eh? Same old song, different names.

And then Millington adds this: “If right and left perceived different enemies behind terrorism in France, each side considered the matter with reference to broader long-established anxieties over the “immigrant problem” and the porosity of French borders.”

Tell me about it!

Unending Conflicts: Reflections on “The Longest Day” and “The Last Battle,” by Cornelius Ryan

Listening to the audiobook version of Cornelius Ryan’s account of the fall of Berlin, The Last Battle, read by the fabulous Simon Vance, inspired me to buy the audiobook of The Longest Day—which turned out to be much better than the Hollywood movie, despite the monotonous sing-song intonations of the reader, Clive Chafer.

In The Longest Day Ryan highlights the tremendous good luck that blessed the Allies, and the amazing foul-ups that doomed the Germans. First, the stormy weather that told the Germans the invasion could not possibly occur in early June, and the break in the weather that was just long enough to push Eisenhower to give the go-ahead. Then, the first group of Army Rangers attacking the cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc missed their landing spot, causing a delay in their reaching the top of the cliffs; as a result, their reinforcements, hearing nothing from them by the agreed hour, diverted to Omaha Beach, which probably saved the Americans from being driven back into the sea there. On the German side, Hitler was convinced that the Normandy landings were a feint, and that the real invasion would arrive in the Pas-de-Calais. Rommel left Normandy to go home to Germany for his wife’s birthday on the 6th, and to see Hitler to persuade him to release to him the reserve Panzer tank division. In his absence, the Germans badly miscommunicated the early reports of the landings, and Hitler delayed release of the Panzers until it was too late to drive the Allies off the beaches. By the time Rommel was finally alerted and got back to Normandy, the Allies had a firm foothold in Europe and Germany’s defeat, caught between Eisenhower in the west and the Russians in the east, was inevitable. In short: the success of the D-Day landings was almost a miracle.

The Last Battle, like The Longest Day, weaves its narrative around portraits of a diverse collection of Germans, Russians, Americans, Brits, and others of all sorts, both civilian and military. The accounts of atrocities committed by the advancing Russians, often in revenge for atrocities committed by German soldiers in Russia, are recounted in some detail. Among the German leaders, the cowardly Himmler and the vainglorious Göring vie in ignominy with the sycophantic yes-men surrounding Hitler, who by this time was a shrivelled, delusional basket case. But even the best of the Germans, like Heinrici, despite their intelligence and courage, were using their undeniable talents to support a regime of psychopathic bigotry and brutality.

As a child I would come home from school and watch WWII movies on television. They seemed like ancient history to me. Later I realized that the end of the war had been just 15 years before my afternoon television entertainments. Later still I realized that many of the fathers of my schoolmates had fought in the war. Today as I read news reports of the war in Ukraine, the atrocities in Gaza, and the neo-fascist ICE raids in the U.S., I realize that the Second World War did not end, really, but merely paused to catch its breath, like the American Civil War. These conflicts flare up into overt violence, then subside to uneasy truces, then flare up again, but seem never to end.

Some big, fantastic notion

E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973) remains a fount of wisdom—wisdom which is in short supply today, and which we need. Desperately.

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion—political or otherwise—which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time. —E. F. Schumacher

The economy is more important

The economy is more important, so we must continue using fossil fuels.

The economy is more important, so we must stop wearing masks and tracking deaths from the pandemic.

The economy is more important, so we must continue degrading the environment.

The economy is more important, so we cannot stop doing business with murderous dictators.

The economy is more important, so we cannot prioritize human rights.

The economy is more important, so we cannot spend more on schools, hospitals, and low-income housing.

And so on.

Environmentalists need to get behind nuclear power

Why? Because the only options to nuclear are 1) fossil fuels, or 2) no-growth, and neither of those is a viable option.

Nuclear power sucks, but only in the same way that everything else in an industrialized society does: multinational corporations, international banks, big tech. None of this is going away; the only hope is to manage it through sensible and effective regulation.

Wind and solar are great, but limited. Only nuclear power can supply enough energy to replace what we get now from oil, coal, and gas—as well as powering the inevitable growth in developing economies. France has been using nuclear power successfully for decades. It is long past time for the environmental movement to stop the fear-mongering about nuclear power and begin the hard work of expanding its use as quickly and safely as possible.

Not all regions need nuclear power, or are well suited to it. Coastal British Columbia, for example, prone to earthquakes and with plenty of capacity for wind- water-, and even solar-generated electricity, is not ideal for nuclear power. Eastern BC and Alberta, on the other hand, make a lot of sense for nuclear development, particularly in Alberta, where nuclear power could displace the oil and gas industry and re-train and re-employ its workforce.

Ron Chernow’s “The House of Morgan” (1990)

Chernow tells the story of the Morgan banking dynasty from the 1850s to the 1980s—as sobering and depressing a tale as one could ever care to read. From the earliest days onward, the Morgan crowd was invariably on the wrong side: against workers and unions, in favour of monopolists, always on the side of the super-rich. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Morgans (J. P. Morgan, Morgan Grenfell, Morgan Guaranty, Morgan Stanley, etc.) financed the rise of fascist governments in Japan, Italy, and Germany. Any Latin American despot who offered stability and profits became a client, with Juan Peron of Argentina at the top of the list. Beginning in the 1970s they tapped into Arab oil money—an effort aided by their longstanding anti-Jewish policies. They bitterly resisted any and all efforts at banking regulation, which they branded as “socialist” and “communist.” And they found ways to make money out of every war from the Civil War on. They rode the wave until finally being reduced to just another Wall St. company at the end of the dog-eat-dog cowboy financing of the 1980s.

The story is depressing, first, because the Morgans made billions from being on the wrong side; and second, because of how empty and soul-destroying their lives were. Mansions, estates, yachts, limousines, hobnobbing with royalty, gold-plated fixtures, and all their time spent thinking about how to make more money. It is hard to imagine a more boring group of people.

U.N. identifies companies complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/1/un-report-lists-companies-complicit-in-israels-genocide-who-are-they

The U.S. response: sanction the author of the report: https://apnews.com/article/francesca-albanese-gaza-genocide-sanctions-un-israel-ff0501f318b7dd0d923c30f10b639724.

Lockheed Martin
Leonardo S.p.A (Italian arms manufacturer)
FANUC (Japanese)
Microsoft
Alphabet (Google)
Amazon
IBM
Palantir Technologies
Caterpillar
Rada Electronic Industries
Hyundai
Volvo
Booking		 Airbnb
Drummond
Glencore
Chevron
BP
Bright Dairy & Food (Chinese)
Orbia / Netafim (Mexican)
BNP Paribas (French)
Barclays
BlackRock
Vanguard
Allianz
AXA

Mark Carney: A Canadian Macron?

Just as the French elected Emmanuel Macron to stave off a surge of support for Marine Le Pen’s far right populism, so Canadians have elected the Liberal Party led by Mark Carney to stave off the threat of Pierre Poilievre’s poisonous right-wing populism. Both men are former bankers. Macron, for all his strutting and showboating internationally, has been a disappointment domestically, failing to satisfy either conservatives or progressives. In Canada, progressives who normally would have voted for Green Party or NDP candidates voted Liberal, hoping that Carney would not only save us from Poilievre and stand up to Trump, but would also effectively address the climate crisis and the housing shortage.

So far, he has talked tough about U.S. aggression, but accomplished little. He has snuggled up to the Albertan oil and gas lobby, apparently in what is surely a doomed attempt to win over enough Albertans to break the Conservatives’ stranglehold on the province and tamp down the nutbar secession movement; but has done nothing to promote carbon-free energy development. And he has pushed through a bill that will accelerate construction projects, alarming both environmentalists and indigenous groups.

It is very early days, and I hope to be proved wrong, but at the moment Carney seems headed toward the same fate as Macron.

Meanwhile in the U.K., the Labour Party under Keir Starmer is criminalizing peaceful protest and free speech by anyone who happens to object to genocide in Palestine, while the neo-fascist revolution in the U.S. is proceeding briskly. We are living, as the fake “Chinese curse” says, in interesting times.

[To be updated as events unfold.]

Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels

I read through most of these detective novels many years ago, but the other day was offered a sharp discount on the audiobook version of Unnatural Death, and I have been enjoying it very much. Wimsey, the second son to a noble father, is independently wealthy and amuses himself by solving crimes the police cannot. He is a traumatized WWI veteran; his trusty man-servant, Bunter, was his batman during the war. Usually jaunty and flippant, Wimsey occasionally falls into deep depressions, and these lingering effects of his backstory add depth to his character.

Besides being witty, well-written, and well-plotted, the Wimsey novels provide a wonderful look at Britain between the wars, including the surplus of marriageable women left with few options, the casual sexist, racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish prejudices, and the class divisions that were so fundamental to British society. Sayers’ depiction of women, culminating in the character of Harriet Vane, makes her feminist sympathies clear, but her attitudes otherwise remain veiled.

For an imperfect but more detailed overview of the Wimsey novels, see this Wikipedia article.

Revisiting “Brideshead Revisited”

The video, starring Jeremy Irons. I have not read the book.

There was a great deal I did not remember at all, and some I misremembered. The one detail I recalled correctly from 1982 was Diana Quick’s bare boob—the first bare boob I had ever seen on television. On the other hand I was completely wrong in thinking it was a story about the World War—the First? the Second?—that concluded with the empty estate of Lord Marchmain being commandeered as a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers.

Jeremy Irons spends most of the eleven episodes staring glumly or blankly as others talk to him or around him. Anthony Andrews, the other lead, literally disappears into a weirdly pious alcoholism in North Africa. The great delight for me was John Gielgud’s performance as Irons’s quirky, perversely funny father. And Nickolas Grace gives a bravura performance as the flamboyantly gay Anthony Blanche—”Antoine”—who in the end proves the most clear-eyed of them all.

Part way through watching the DVDs I wanted to read the book—especially the Moroccan episode, which I had completely forgotten—and I may get around to it. But by the end I was worn out: far too many unhappy rich people and far too much Catholic piety for my taste.

French military discipline, 1914

As the French army falls back toward Paris in the face of an overwhelming German advance, the Minister of War, Adolphe Messimy, decides that the ineffective General Victor-Constant Michel must be replaced as Military Governor of Paris. At the same time, a majority of the newly-formed coalition government decide that Messimy must himself be replaced. Barbara Tuchman, in The Guns of August, picks up the story:

Michel stormed when asked by Messimy to resign, protested loudly and angrily and obstinately refused to go. Becoming equally excited, Messimy shouted at Michel that if he persisted in his refusal he would leave the room, not for his own office at the Invalides, but for the military prison of Cherche-Midi under guard. As their cries resounded from the room Viviani fortuitously arrived, calmed the disputants, and eventually persuaded Michel to give way.

Hardly was the official decree appointing Gallieni “Military Governor and Commandant of the Armies of Paris” signed next day when it became Messimy’s turn to storm when asked for his resignation by Poincaré and Viviani. “I refuse to yield my post to Millerand, I refuse to do you the pleasure of resigning, I refuse to become a Minister without Portfolio.” If they wanted to get rid of him after the “crushing labor” he had sustained in the last month, then the whole government would have to resign, and in that case, he said, “I have an officer’s rank in the Army and a Mobilization order in my pocket. I shall go to the front.” No persuasion availed. The government was forced to resign and was reconstituted next day. Millerand, Delcassé, Briand, Alexandre Ribot, and two new socialist ministers replaced five former members, including Messimy. He departed as a major to join Dubail’s army and to serve at the front until 1918, rising to general of division.

In Tuchman’s account, refusal to obey orders was rampant in the French army, from the Minister of War down to the lowliest private, but was frequently found as well  in the British and Russian armies. As in Tolstoy’s version of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, Tuchman tells of continual miscommunication that, added to chronic failures of military discipline, leaves one persistent impression of the opening weeks of World War I, on all fronts: utter confusion.

Language wars

The left keeps fighting the language wars and losing everything else.

Unhoused, not homeless. Undocumented, not illegal. Transgender, not transsexual. Sex worker, not prostitute. And let’s be extremely careful about what word to use to refer to people of colour in the United States. Negro, the word used by Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr., is out. Afro-American and African-American (with or without the hyphens) had their day, but no more. This week the acceptable term is Black, with a capital B (which is the exact meaning of Negro, but . . . never mind).

Meanwhile, millions of people continue to live on the streets; immigrants continue to be abused by employers, traffickers, and government thugs; people with gender dysphoria continue to be harassed and vilified; women continue to be sexually exploited; and racism continues unabated.

Cartoon idea: Crowd chanting “She’s not illegal, she’s undocumented!” as ICE thugs hustle a woman into an unmarked van.

Essential vocabulary in the Age of Trump

autocracy: government by one person with absolute power
homophobia: fear and hatred of homosexuals
misogyny: contempt for women, and the determination to limit their freedom; sexism
oligarchy: government by a small group of people
philistine: a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them
plutocracy: government by people whose power derives from their wealth
racism: fear and hatred of those identified as members of a marginalized racial or ethnic group
transphobia: fear and hatred of transsexuals and transgender people
troglodyte: a person whose opinions are ignorant, reactionary, and anti-intellectual
xenophobia: fear and hatred of foreigners

At the local coffee shop

A quietly posh, white-haired grandmother sipping her coffee. Across from her a pretty seven-year-old, evidently her granddaughter, sipping her hot chocolate. Both of them taking small bites from their pastries. I wondered whether the grandmother was remembering, as I was imagining, a day when she, at seven, was taken to tea by her grandmother and sat quietly, answering the grandmother’s questions, as the little girl did today.

“Ithaka,” by C. P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

“C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-p-cavafy

Pessimistic prediction

Check back in late 2026 to see how this holds up:

  • Trump’s fascist ICE raids, his trashing of government agencies, and his Neanderthal bullying foreign-policy initiatives will prove quite popular.
  • He will “make deals” on his tariff threats and pass another big tax cut, so the economy will begin to rebound.
  • In the mid-term elections Republicans will hold the Senate for sure and possibly keep their majority in the House, too, because the Democrats are hapless.

Patrick gets the answer right

A parable of education

I was working at the YMCA’s daycare centre. It was summertime, so the kids were there all day. My boss was not happy with the programme for 4- and 5-year-olds, so she asked me to spend some time with those classes and just observe what was going on.

Patrick was the youngest of the 4-year-olds. He was skinny, pale, and freckled, with a large bush of orange hair and enormous blue eyes. He looked like a little clown. He was usually off in his own world somewhere, oblivious to everyone else. His mum dropped him off quite early, and when the teacher arrived he was already deep into a box of Legos and far away on Planet X. The teacher would greet him, “Good morning, Patrick!” and Patrick, as if awaking from a dream, would turn briefly from his toys and reply, “Hi, honey!” Everyone found this amusing, but when Patrick’s mum found out she sat him down and explained that his teacher had a name—Mrs. Johnson—and he should call her by her name. The next morning, greeted by the teacher, Patrick replied, “Hi, Johnson!”

On swimming day the 4s and 5s had the pool together. There was some sort of holdup with the snacks, though, so while the teacher of the 5-year-olds sorted out the problem, the teacher of the 4-year-old class had both groups sitting in a circle, waiting. She began talking about colours in a syrupy, sing-songy voice. She had a few sheets of coloured construction paper. “Yesterday we learned our colours, didn’t we?” she began. “Georgia, do you remember the colour you learned?” She continued around the circle in this way, and finally got to Patrick, who was way off on Planet X as usual, returning only when he heard his name at the end of the teacher’s question. “Do you remember the colour you learned, Patrick?” Startled out of his reveries, he looked up to find everyone staring at him expectantly. He knew he had been asked a question; he knew everyone was waiting for him to answer; but he had no idea what the question was. He bent his head and began balling his fists up inside his striped t-shirt.

A helpful and sympathetic girl from the 5-year-old class asked, “Is it on his shirt?” Patrick’s eyes went to his shirt, searching desperately for the answer. “No,” the teacher said, “it isn’t on his shirt. But it is on his shoes.” 

Patrick was wearing red sneakers. His eyes leapt from his shirt to his shoes. Everyone waited, hardly breathing. Suddenly, Patrick had the answer. His body relaxed. He lifted his head up, smiled, and answered triumphantly, “Dogshit!”

And he was right.

“The Glass Key,” by Dashiell Hammett (1931)

There are no normal people in this novel: only gangsters, ward bosses, corrupt politicians and corrupt government officials and corrupt cops and corrupt journalists. No children, no young lovers, no happy married couples, nobody going to work or shopping in the neighbourhood or picnicking in the park. Noir, noir, noir.

There is a murder—or at least an accidental death—to solve in this novel, but there is no detective, per se. Instead, the protagonist is a political operative and collection of incongruities, Ned Beaumont. He takes a multiple-day beating that makes the typical knock-out of classic detective fiction seem a mere love-tap, but never reciprocates. He has been in the town where the story is set for only a year and a half, and yet he is best friends with his boss, the town’s political kingpin, and on very affectionate terms with his boss’s mother and sister—besides knowing everyone, down to the last punk and cab driver and speakeasy operator. Relentlessly stoical and transcendently astute, he is nevertheless addicted to gambling. Irresistibly attractive to every woman in the story, he never shows the slightest interest in them and seems as much the career loner as any mysterious cowboy gunslinger in a Wild West novel; and yet he leaves town with the best of the women at the end. And despite an extended stay in hospital after that beating, he seems to suffer no long-term effects: no limp, no scars, no kidney damage, no chronic weakness.

But still there is something compelling in Hammett’s grim, stripped-down, laconic narrative style. Like his protagonist, Hammett never lets up, never gives in, and we are pulled into his narrative’s irresistible current.

Baseball Clichés

There’s a lot of ballgame left to be played. It hasn’t been a textbook start. They’re trying to chip away at the deficit. A two-run blast! The game has really sped up on him. He hasn’t got his best stuff tonight. He threw a rocket to first base. Let’s right the ship. That was way upstairs. It’s a game of inches. He came to play. It’s getaway day. He got squeezed on that pitch. He left the yard. His first trip to the plate. They’re playing him to pull. That’s two gone. Two out, nobody on. He’s clutch at the plate. At the top of the zone. A chopper to short. His baseball I.Q. is very high. He plays the game right. He sends it down the right-field line. It hugs the line. A big turn around first. He takes the base—a two-out free pass. No defence against a walk. He smacks one to left field. He found a hole. He’s tipping his pitches. With two strikes he needs to shorten up. That swing is too long. It caromed off the wall. They swept the series. They went wire-to-wire. The count is even. A walk-off! He rounds the bases. It ran inside. Jammed him. It’s a different team today. He lays off that pitch. Peaking over his shoulder at the runner. You can feel the momentum. It’s a hitter’s count. The stars are aligning. It’s a pitcher’s count. He’s on the bump. He kicks and fires. Strike ’em out throw ’em out. That was just a bad at-bat. Don’t let the ball play you. Play a clean game. He’s trying to find the strike zone. Back-to-back K’s. Picks it up on one hop. He steps up to the dish. Power hitters. Those bats are warming up. He misses downstairs. The tying run is at the plate. The count is even. He ran through a red light. There’s traffic on the base paths. Station to station. Top of the lineup. Bases loaded. He’s throwing smoke. He challenged him with a fastball. Swing and a miss! Don’t expand the strike zone. Clips the outside corner. He’s dealing. High-leverage arms. Back-to-back hooks. On deck. Waiting in the wings. In the hole. Comes in with a heater. Right at the knees. Threw it right by him. Struck him out looking. A pitcher’s pitch. He rings him up. He swings through it. Busted him up and in. A little chin music. Tough to do damage. Make him throw strikes. He was taking all the way. One pitch one out. The runner was stranded. The last nine outs are the toughest. He picked his pocket. He goes back to the warning track, he’s out of room, looks up, and it’s gone! A sky-scraping home run! A monster home run. A bomb! A no-doubter. The right fielder just turns and watches it go. An insurance run. They’ve blown the game open. They’re putting up some crooked numbers. He’s taking one for the team. The bottom of the order. The seventh-inning stretch. Retired at first base. They haven’t cashed in on their opportunities. Struggling offensively. Buzzed his tower! Up and in. Down and away. The inner part of the plate. The outer part of the plate. A defensive swing. Drifting foul. Couldn’t get there in time. He misjudged it. The series finale. They’re playing match-up. A 1-2-3 inning. Retired in order. A bloop hit. A lazy fly ball. An ice-cream cone catch! He closed the door. He missed the bag. It’s a new ballgame. The wheels have come off. It’s all about getting outs. That first out is so important. He scorched it! His bat’s starting to heat up. Right at the centerfielder. Right back through the box. A rocket off his bat. He gave it a ride but the ballpark held it. A long out. Very playable. Popped him up. That’ll find the seats. He fires to first. He might have chased Ball 4. He’s battled through injuries. Ahead in the count. Just got a piece of it. Just wide of the chalk. Another big inning. Down the stretch. One game at a time. Brushed him back. Taking all the way. Can o’ corn. Another goose egg. Did he go around? A productive out. Move the runner. Putting up zeroes. Down to their last out. Down to their last strike. He went up there hacking. The lead held up. A dandy of a pitching duel. It was a team win.

 

Nothing like us

Very few people study Ancient Greece these days.

For one thing, the Greeks were terrible misogynists. They seemed always to be at war. Their politicians were mostly driven by personal ambition, and many of them were plainly corrupt.

The richest of the Greek city-states, Athens, founded its wealth on slave labour and the economic exploitation of its smaller and weaker neighbours.

And yet, out of all that mess came great art, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and even science and medicine.

The Greeks were, in short, nothing at all like us.

Addendum: Greek words that are completely irrelevant today:

Misogyny, democracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, autocracy, demagogue, sophistry . . . well, you get the idea.

Every form of government tends to perish

Here’s more Will Durant, paraphrasing Plato’s Republic in The Story of Philosophy:

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In either case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims; but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease (556). “Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power” (557).

But even democracy ruins itself by excess—of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses (588). “As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them” (Protagoras, 317); to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey,” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protector of the people” rises to supreme power (565). (Consider the history of Rome.)

The lust for the spoils of office

From the “Plus ça change” Dept—

Will Durant, in The Story of Philosophy, paraphrasing Plato’s Republic:

[After describing a rural paradise of simple, healthy, peaceful life] he passes quietly on to the question, Why is it that such a simple paradise as he has described never comes?—why is it that these Utopias never arrive upon the map?

He answers, because of greed and luxury. Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. “Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones—you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states” (423). A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: “they will spend large sums of money on their wives” (548). These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy—wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of party and the lust for the spoils of office.

Clerihews

Definition
“A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem of a type invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875 – 1956).

Form
“A clerihew has the following properties:

  • It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it mostly pokes fun at famous people
  • It has four lines of irregular length and metre for comic effect
  • The rhyme structure is AABB; the subject matter and wording are often humorously contrived in order to achieve a rhyme, including the use of phrases in Latin, French and other non-English languages.
  • The first line contains, and may consist solely of, the subject’s name. According to a letter in The Spectator in the 1960s, Bentley said that a true clerihew has to have the name “at the end of the first line”, as the whole point was the skill in rhyming awkward names.

“Clerihews are not satirical or abusive, but they target famous individuals and reposition them in an absurd, anachronistic or commonplace setting, often giving them an over-simplified and slightly garbled description.” 

—From Wikipedia

Samples (by E. C. Bentley)

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St Paul’s.”

The younger Van Eyck
Was christened Jan, and not Mike.
The thought of this curious mistake
Often kept him awake.

Some Original Clerihews
1.
Young Winnie Churchill
Thought, “A career in the Church’ll
Surely drive me barmy.
I think I’ll join the army.”

2.
The philosopher Socrates
Said, “I try not to mock at these
Tedious fools, but they all take a fall
‘Cuz they’re such know-it-alls.”

3.
Miss Florence Nightengale
Ditched her farthingale
And thought, “I will hie me a
Ways down the road, perhaps to Crimea.”

4.
Steven Jobs
Threw away gobs
Of mess and fuss
And designed a computer for the rest of us.

5.
Miles Davis
Thought, “God save us
From slavish imitation.
Let’s try some innovation.”

6.
Thelonious Monk
Was in a deep funk
Until he manufactured
Chords that were fractured.

More of E. C. Bentley’s clerihews can be found at Project Gutenberg, here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46691/pg46691-images.html

Oligarchy, the anti-democratic sentiments of the wealthy classes, and the rise of authoritarian leaders: 2025? 1930? Try the 5th century B.C.E.

Yes, history keeps rhyming, and yes, the more things change the more they stay the same. Here is Will Durant setting the stage for the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle:

[As for the Sophists,] there is hardly a problem or a solution in our current philosophy of mind and conduct which they did not realize and discuss. . . . In politics they divided into two schools. One, like Rousseau, argued that nature is good, and civilization bad; that by nature all men are equal, becoming unequal only by class-made institutions; and that law is an invention of the strong to chain and rule the weak. Another school, like Nietzsche, claimed that nature is beyond good and evil; that by nature all men are unequal; that morality is an invention of the weak to limit and deter the strong; that power is the supreme virtue, and the supreme desire of man; and that of all forms of government the wisest and most natural is aristocracy.

No doubt this attack on democracy reflected the rise of a wealthy minority at Athens which called itself the Oligarchical Party, and denounced democracy as an incompetent sham. . . . The Athenian oligarchic party, led by Critias, advocated the abandonment of democracy on the score of its inefficiency in war, and secretly lauded the aristocratic government of Sparta. Many of the oligarchic leaders were exiled: but when at last Athens [was defeated in the Peloponnesian War], one of the peace conditions imposed by Sparta was the recall of these exiled aristocrats. They had hardly returned when, with Critias at their head, they declared a rich man’s revolution against the “democratic” party that had ruled during the disastrous war.

—From The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant

My favourite memory of science class

It was in Grade 7.

Our teacher was a no-nonsense fellow who addressed us as Mr. This and Miss That.

We were having a lesson about the properties of matter.

Steve Brodhag, sitting in the back row, had dozed off.

The teacher, noticing this, called out in a loud voice, “Mr. Brodhag, what’s matter?”

Steve, wakened suddenly, groggily replied, “Uh, nothin’.”

The Harlem “Renaissance”

In 1927, there were perhaps 300.000 African Americans living in the vicinity of Fifth and Seventh Avenues, roughly from 130th to 155th Streets. They lived, according to census and Urban League studies of the period, in housing designed for 16,000. . . . Many lived in tenements so “unspeakable” and “incredible,” in the words of a 1927 city housing commission report, “the state would not allow cows to live in some of these apartments.”

—Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf, by Barry Singer