Horizon

Still Angry

At Cliopatria this weekend, Ralph Luker discussed the New York Times Magazine’s The First Occupation, a look at lessons to be drawn from Reconstruction. A good read.

The photograph accompanying the piece blew me away (here’s the same scene, though not the exact same photo), and put the conversation we had earlier about the Confederate flag into a new perspective. That’s an American city (Charleston, 1865). 1865 really wasn't that long ago.

Judas and Radikalkritik

A while back I predicted that the Gospel of Judas will be used to support any religious/scholarly position whatsoever, regardless of actual contents of the document. We haven't even had to wait for the text to be released for the first competitor to throw his hat into the ring.

Via Hypotyposeis, we learn that Hermann Detering has put an analysis of those fragments of Judas we've seen onto his Radikalkritik website. The full article (German PDF) is here, and a poorly-worded English summary is here. He argues against a historical Judas, against a historical betrayal, and in fact suggests that the mythologized figure of Judas is a later accretion to the gospels, added by the orthodox to slander the gnostic competition:

"Protestexegese" wurde also daher nicht von den Gnostikern, sondern den großkirchlichen Theologen betrieben. Das positive Judasbild der Kainiten war kein Protest gegen das Negativbild der Großkirche, sondern das negative Judasbild der Großkirche ein kirchlicher Protest gegen das positive Judasbild der Gnostiker ­ verständlich vor dem allgemeinen Hintergrund einer Abgrenzung vom gnostischen Antinomismus.

Will traditional scholars respond? Will another radical knock off Detering's beret? How many more contestants will enter before Judas is even published? Keep tuned to Horizon to find out!

Taser Roundup

Four recent stories on police tasers, each offering a very different perspective on the use of the device:

March to Protest Taser Gun Death
Man Shot By Gun Instead of Taser Sues
Tasers Not Always the Answer, Police Trainer Says
Stun Gun Ends Standoff with Man on Crane

FWIW, I don't think any one of these stories is necessarily more important or telling than any other. But I do think it's incumbent on us to appreciate the perspective of all four rather than singling out one or two for effect.

Strong Language

As France nears Sunday's vote on the EU constitution, one citizen says:

"I would rather be an American than a European."

Veneration and Hair-splitting

There's a discussion going on at HNN over Edwin Yoder's review of John Coski's The Confederate Battle Flag. It is probably typical of the net that most participants appear not only not to have read Coski's book, but also not to have bothered reading the Yoder review to which they're theoretically responding.

I'm almost as well-credentialed to comment on this, since I haven't read Coski's book either. Unfortunately I have read Coski's essay "The Confederate Battle Flag in Historical Perspective" in the 2000 volume Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South, which I assume the book is an expansion of. Tainted by knowledge of the subject, I'll have to limit myself to the observation that one of the reasons people get into such heated arguments over the flag is that the wide variation in its historical uses gives everyone some uniquely noble or despicable set of ideas to identify it with. Coski does an excellent job of listing each of these meanings, which makes it easier to see that a partisan's position may actually be correct, but will certainly be incomplete.

I think that while many white southerners revere the Old South, the majority of us want to. But venerating the southern past with a clean conscience requires us either to rewrite it or to concentrate on the slivers of southern history that are unambiguously noble. Harry Turtledove plays to the first desire in his alt-history sci-fi novel Guns of the South, in which a victorious President Lee rams an emancipation bill through the Confederate Congress before crushing a rebellion by his time-traveling Afrikaner suppliers. It's a magnificent way for the reader to cheer for a Confederate victory without having to grapple with the consequences of a Union defeat.

The second approach to the southern past can lead to real hair splitting, as it requires approval for Confederate symbols in some contexts with simultaneous denunciations of their use in others. David Hackett Fischer gets perilously close to this in the Massive Resistance chapter of his Liberty and Freedom:

Its rhetoric reached back to the iconography of southern independence in the Civil War. So also did its symbols. A modern revision of the old Confederate battle flag became the leading emblem of white supremacy and massive resistance. It claimed a kinship with Robert E. Lee, but this was not the old four-square "stainless banner" that had been carried with honor by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War. This was something different, a twentieth-century polyester Jim Crow flag with rectangular proportions that were ironically closer to the Stars and Stripes than to the old Confederate battle flags. The southern flag of massive resistance was a new image, invented for a second civil war and quickly adopted by racist movements in many parts of the world.

It's certainly a stretch to claim that a 2:3 proportion makes this closer to the US flag than it is to this. This is especially surprising since Fischer has no sympathy for secession or segregation, putting right-wing secessionists in a rogues' gallery of the "conservative fringe of the Federalist Party" after 1800, the pro-slavery movement, "small bands of Communists and Fascists in the early twentieth century, and elements of the academic left in American universities during the late twentieth century" who "put themselves outside the broad tradition of liberty and freedom."

Where's the Beef?

At first I couldn’t believe that the Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is also Edward N. Luttwak, Bolivian cattle rancher, but I’m pretty sure he is. In a 1999 article for Foreign Affairs, Give War a Chance, he wrote:

An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat.

I know it’s wrong to suggest that in every cattle rancher’s chest there beats the heart of a neo-con. I’m just pointing out the coincidence.

So when he gets a chance to review Reviel Netz’s Barbed Wire, An Ecology of Modernity, it’s not too shocking he’d thump it good because, you know, without barbed wire we’d all be vegetarians, lower on the food chain, and soft on defense. Actually, he doesn’t say that. But the book makes him so angry he can only sputter out the brilliant shoelace analogy (if barbed wire is bad, then so are shoelaces - nah nah nah nah nah).

And it turns out that cattle are fierce fence destroyers, so short of electric fences, barbed wire is the best way to contain them.

Thongy Gobbets

I finished Fatal Shore yesterday, except for skimming the endnotes.

One of the things I've enjoyed about the book is Hughes's wording. You'll stumble across a sentence like "there was no way to make a thongy gobbet of barely singed wallaby meat digestible to a teething infant" and then spend the next week trying to use the word "gobbet" in conversation. I don't even know where I'd seen it before.

I do know where I've seen the word "trapanned", however. It shows up in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, as well as Morgan's American Freedom, American Slavery. It's a seventeenth-century word for "kidnapped", and was used to describe transportation, either to Virginia or Australia.

My own family immigrated as indentured servants, so it's impossible for me not to compare the condition of the "assignment men" in Australia with that of the servants of Virginia. Hughes makes the comparison only briefly, on p. 287:

The American colonist owned his indentured servants. He had paid for their transportation across the Atlantic. . . . Convicts were capital, like slaves, and had been freely traded as such since the early seventeenth century. . . . In Australia, which had been settled as a jail, no free settler ever paid for a convict's passage from England; and that, in the official view, disposed of the settler's claim to a right of property in the convict's labor.

I'll be posting some comparisons between the two systems of unfree labor over the next couple of weeks, as time allows. In the meanwhile, here's a thread tracing the ballad "The Lads of Australia" back to "The Lags of Virginia."

Lost Tapes

In Witness to a Century, George Seldes briefly mentions being interviewed for Warren Beatty’s Reds, saying the taping took five hours and seven reels of film for fifteen seconds of screen time.

Reds clearly isn’t the greatest movie made, but I’ve got a comfy place for it in my heart; for nothing else, Warren Beatty deserves to be remembered as a fine filmmaker not just for making a movie about America’s radical left in the early 20th Century, but releasing it in 1981. It’s still not out on DVD, and it’s been suggested the problem may be due to Beatty’s reluctance to provide a director’s commentary.

There’s plenty to like about Reds (and some to dislike), but the one enchanting feature it has is the snippets of interviews with Seldes, Henry Miller, Will Durant, Hamilton Fish, Rebecca West, and others. If it’s true that Seldes was interviewed for five hours, then you have to assume that roughly the same amount of time was spent with the other interviewees. What a treasure of reminiscences. Probably, a lot of the footage is of no interest, but if, after editing, they could give us a few DVD hours of that bunch, we could skip the Beatty commentary and experience a real historical record.

crossposted at mrbfk

Mr. Smith Blows in Washington

An interesting Tim Noah piece which touches on the misunderstood historical context of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - a film that I have always been earnestly implored to love, but which, to be perfectly honest, I find both hokey and boring (mind you, if you really want to see Capra go off the deep end, check this out some time).

Orwell yet again

There's a new word: "pornword."

What It's Good At

Another dumb Time magazine list: the All-Time 100 Best Movies. At least it's not in any ascending or descending order. I don't think I would have thought of Finding Nemo.

Light and Movement

“Isn’t there a man here who can tell me why I did it?”

Victor McLagan, in the role of Gypo Nolan in John Ford’s The Informer, cries out the question everyone wants answered, one of the few great lines in a film that depends so little on dialogue. You can’t watch this movie without seeing that Ford grew up during the silent era; his use of image and action to advance a story – put to great effect in the later films - had to have been a skill, a sensibility developed during his early years in the industry. The movie borders on the melodramatic at times, but there are some fine moments: the crumpled “wanted” poster following Gypo about the Dublin streets, Frankie McPhillips’ fingernails raking the top step as he slides down the stairs after the Black and Tans have gunned him down.

Are today’s filmmakers at a disadvantage? Of course, they can study the silents, but I wonder whether they would develop the discipline that comes with having to tell a story without dialogue.

Speaking of Orwell quotes...

I saw a bumpersticker on a pickup truck yesterday. It said:

War Is For Peace -- Dumbass!

Could Somebody Please Get It Right?

I think it’s fine that Ben's query into the Orwell “liberty” quote forked off into the craft of funky spam and the minefields of baby-making, but I’d like to return to the quote itself. Alan raised the spector of it being an Orwell pseudo-quote, and although it turns out that it’s not, the fact that everyone and his cranky sister cites it without a source and that it comes from a piece most people have never read lends a lot to Alan’s point.

First, the quote, if this source, which I provided yesterday, is accurate, is:

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

On the web (and Harry’s Place), it is often cited this way:

Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.

Now, both mean the same thing, but it has to be granted that someone has either erred or futzed with the words. This means that whoever first typed it out for web consumption was either working from memory (usually a mistake) or suffers from some sort of optic disability. After that, we have thousands (millions?) of people not really quoting Orwell, but quoting someone who has misquoted Orwell.

What this means is there is a literal horde of Orwell “liberty” quoters out there who’ve never read that particular work of Orwell. This is backed up by the work not being a widely distributed one. Oh sure, a lot of people have read Animal Farm; but how many have read the preface to it that was suppressed in most editions?

In context, Orwell was speaking of freedom of the press, specifically in the light of the difficulty of criticizing Stalin in the 40’s. I have to doubt he would have gotten behind the right of some blogger to call Bill Frist a turd.

A few paragraphs above his now famous misquoted quote, Orwell says this:

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

Which is pretty much the same, but with a slight qualifier at the end.

This all may not be in the same ballpark as the “rough men” line Orwell never wrote, but it’s sitting in the parking lot outside, having a tailgate party.

Liberty, if it means anything

I've always been a bit annoyed by the Orwell quote that Harry's Place uses on their banner. Surely such a definition ignores the right of the hearers to at least not listen, if not actually to not be lectured at in the first place.

This has been on my mind a lot more lately, with the recent wave of German spam. My inbox is flooded not with ads for medications I don't want, but with several links a day to unfavorable articles on Muslim immigrants to Germany. So far as I remember, this is the first overtly political spam I've ever gotten — it's definitely the first that manages to get through the wall of filters I've erected.

So tell me, was Orwell's statement more reasonable when read in context? Or was he simply providing a motto for the advertising industry?

Radical TV

Carrying on with my obsession with television news, I’ll share this excerpt from this Neil Postman essay, The News, from Conscientious Objections…

…the evening news must try to do what cannot reasonably be done: give a decent account of the day’s events in twenty-two minutes. What the viewer gets instead is a series of impressions, many of them purely visual, most of them unconnected to each other or to any sense of a history unfolding. Taken together, they suggest a world that is fundamentally ungovernable, where events do not arise out of historical conditions but rather explode from the heavens in a series of disasters that suggest a permanent state of crisis. It is this crisis – highly visual, ahistorical, and unsolvable – which the evening news presents as theater every evening…

This is where television news is at its most radical – not in giving publicity to radical causes, but in producing the impression of an ungovernable world. And it produces this impression not because people who work in television are leftists or anarchists. The anarchy in television is a direct result of the commercial structure of broadcasting, which introduces into news judgments a single-mindedness more powerful than any ideology: the overwhelming needs to keep people watching.

Bobby's got a brand new blog

...and he even says nice things about us.

Bobby, congrats and good luck.

Hitchens on Literature

I feel like a parasite these days, living off Michael Schaub at Bookslut. But here's a CH interview excerpt from Stop Smiling.

Some of Us Just Have Writer's Block

Thanks to Jessa Crispin at Bookslut for the lead on The Bloody Scalp of Literature.

Searching for unknown authors was arduous work. How, actually do you find records of people whose very existence was, in some cases, officially erased? Some budding authors were so broken by long prison terms that they never wrote again. Or at least never well. And still others fled to the West, where their works and worlds had no meaning and where they literally got lost in translation.

Look Who's Talking Now

Donald Rumsfeld, on the now retracted Newsweek story:

"People lost their lives. People are dead. People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be careful about what they do."

Murnau’s Faust

I’ve never seen F.W. Murnau’s work. Nosferatu is surely available here in the boondocks, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever see Faust if I insist on traveling only between Burlington and Glens Falls. I enjoyed Roger Ebert’s review, but what interested me most was this comment:

Like all silent-film directors, Murnau was comfortable with special effects that were obviously artificial. The town beneath the wings of the dark angel is clearly a model, and when characters climb a steep street, there is no attempt to make the sharply angled buildings and rooflines behind them seem real. Such effects, paradoxically, can be more effective than more realistic ones; I sometimes feel, in this age of expert CGI, that I am being shown too much -- that technique is pushing aside artistry and imagination. The world of "Faust" is never intended to define a physical universe, but is a landscape of nightmares.

Another Day in Paradise

My bi-weekly visits to upstate New York have devolved into all-day television watching sessions with my father. Turns out that Vermont Public Television, a broadcast many of us can’t get in Vermont, comes in as good as a cable station at my father’s. So I saw for the first time the Keno Brothers and what may be the tackiest show on earth. The program’s success depends on those two human specialties, ostentatiousness and voyeurism, and features Leigh and Leslie – twins – going to people’s homes to appraise their stuff. If you don’t believe that the vulgar materialism of America is a sort of disease, you should watch this show.

Abuser Reviews

I give you the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game.

Scroll more than halfway down and there's 1984.

Some other things that apparently suck are The White Album, Citizen Kane, and 2001. Oh, and whatever you do, don't leave that page without checking out the section on the King James Bible.

Greatest Americans

The Discovery Channel is blatantly ripping off emulating the BBC's Greatest Britons project with its own Top 100 Greatest Americans shortlist, as nominated by the ever-discerning public. C'mon, we can do better than this. I will start the ball rolling by short-shortlisting the relatively few folks on the DC's list who IMHO really deserve to be there (note that I take the historical long-view on this sort of thing; 'greatness' seems to me a quality only testable by time, which means that I am reluctant to include anyone whose achievements, however honorable, took place only within the last quarter-century. Others may see fit to squabble about this in the comments).

Abraham Lincoln
Albert Einstein (But a very questionable choice as "Greatest American").
Alexander Hamilton
Benjamin Franklin
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Eleanor Roosevelt (Anna Eleanor Roosevelt)
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Frederick Douglass
George Washington
Jackie Robinson (Jack Roosevelt Robinson)
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
Martin Luther King Jr.
Susan B. Anthony
Theodore Roosevelt
Thomas Edison
Thomas Jefferson
Wrights Brothers (Orville & Wilbur Wright)

I notice that James K. Polk gets shafted again ...

WHAAAT?

Stalinist folk music cadres at the Albert Hall in 1966?

Sorry, I couldn't come up with a "holes" joke. Anyone else please be my guest.

Bruce Chatwin

He seemed to come from nowhere and then leave just as quickly, that boyish-looking charmer of a writer who would have turned 65 today. You don’t hear about him anymore, but gosh, when I think of writers I really fell for at some time or another, Bruce Chatwin is on the short list. His biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, had this to say about him back in 2000.

Telling stories was how Bruce Chatwin gave of himself. Whatever else can be said of him, in this respect he was a giver. “Having him around was having extra oxygen in the air,” says the writer Sybille Bedford. Francis Wyndham, who in 1972 recruited him to the Sunday Times of London, says, “He made you participate in what, in that moment, did not seem to be a fantasy. One was included in it, even though he did all the talking. But he made me feel he was talking because of me, which explained the sense of exhilaration. That was part of his charm: He made me feel pleased with myself.”

Bruce’s storytelling engaged all his faculties: his youthful looks, his savage mimicry, his peacock voice — both invigorating and crushing at the same time, and “always on the edge of mirth.” The performance was physical. As he watched his audience come forward on their chairs, affirming him, he grew and so did his stories. “He went straight into a performance,” says his friend Jonathan Hope. “He’d sit bolt upright, ramrod back, his eyes popping, and roar off in fourth gear on his idée fixe of that week or hour.” He reminded Hope of Danny Kaye, a Chatwin favorite, who was able to convince an audience entirely by phonetics that he was speaking in Hungarian. Hope could seldom follow Chatwin’s stories to their conclusion. “But he would conjure up incredible images. Evening in the Atlas Mountains, the sky an exquisite cerulean blue, the stars coming out one by one and the wonderful sang de boeuf of the North African desert.”

Self Portrait

Last night, while other, more productive people were working on first novels, attending public hearings, grading papers, and changing diapers, I watched NBC Nightly News and took notes. Some people have meaningful lives; others eat dinner in front of the tv.

There is no news on Nightly News. There are stories. Last night there were eight: a plane over Washington, the grenade incident in Georgia the previous day, violence in Iraq, fallout from United dumping its pension program, illegal immigration in Arizona, the regular stock market report, King Tut on tour, and a profile of a Marine killed in Iraq. You don’t learn anything from these stories, but there are lots of moving pictures and men in suits speaking earnestly. This constituted nineteen minutes of a thirty-minute program.

Story lead-ins, previews of the stories coming after the next commercial break, and a weather update by the local affiliate, consumed another three minutes, roughly.

That left eight minutes for eighteen commercials. Eight were health related (prescription drugs for allergies, insomnia, and constipation; blood meters; over-the-counter medications for heartburn and headaches; low-fat foods). Three ads promoted NBC’s own programs, and others featured USPS’s online services, Capital One credit cards, Miracle-Gro Garden Soil, Hyundai, and Pedigree Small Breed dog food. Of course, there was the obligatory Levitra pitch directed at those who still believe there has to be more to marriage than just companionship and a nasty mortgage.

The constipation (or poor regularity) drug ad ran twice.

Less Than 45 Years of Horizon Left

Thanks to Michael Schaub at Bookslut for this lead on the future of text. I should be dead by then, so what do I care?

Phantom Baptist Foiled!

Since this story got a lot of Netplay (and rightly so), I think it's only fair to follow it to its conclusion - for now, anyway. Perhaps a rhetorical pat on the back is in order for those church members who have clearly 'encouraged' Reverend Chandler to spend more time with his family?

Phantom Professor Foiled!

I'm not sure what I think about this. Elaine Liner appears to be a popular and talented writer and teacher, and Southern Methodist University will be the poorer without her. I think the pretensions of American campuses (and especially campus administrations) need to be regularly pricked and poked. And I simply don't believe SMU's claim that it de-hired her for undisclosed other reasons. On the other hand, on the other hand ... the problem seems to be that the Phantom Professor has been less and less phantomlike for some time, and many of her students and peers were recognizing her - and themselves - in her often-caustic writings. Which sets up a classic collision between two good causes - free speech and privacy. As Liner's former department chair says, "When I’m a student and I talk to a professor about my grades or my health of my family, I assume I’m doing so in confidence.” (Liner denies that she ever betrayed confidences, and claims to have mangled identities out of recognition: others evidently dispute this. So subjective a point is probably impossible to judge either way). I dunno, I really don't. My best guess is that I think when Liner started to sense that she was no longer working in anonymity then she should have realized that the jig was up and that it wasn't professional any longer to keep up a rhetorical barrage against at least semi-recognizable people.

A Message From Ben

Hello everyone. Ben can't post here right now, but he asked me to pass on some great news. He and his wife had a baby yesterday. I guess this makes me the first from Horizon-land to congratulate them. Well, congratulations!

Oh, he also wanted me to say habemus filiam, but I'm not entirely sure what for. Well, anyway, it's a girl. :)

Great minds

Y'all should go read Crooked Timber today. They've got two perennial Horizon favorites in a row: a John Lott item followed by an Aubrey-Maturin item.

Getting the Huff

Arianna Huffington's semidemiblog - part counter-Drudge, part celebrity pow-wow - opened the shutters this week. Jack Shafer has given it a good look over. Since I am reliably informed that liberals actually enjoy living in a free society and tuning in to hear an echo is not their idea of a good time, they may find H-Post uncomfortable territory:

Do these people intend to engage? Is it even in their wheelhouse to debate? How will the Huff Post's liberal core react when its right-wing press contributors, such as Byron York and Tony Blankley, bring a hard one down on their snout? Hollywood liberals such as Aaron Sorkin and Laurie David rarely encounter sharp political disagreement inside the cocoons of their Hollywood salons, and when they do it's not generally with a practiced rhetorician. Or worse still, what sort of psychic meltdown awaits Huffingliberal Rob Reiner if he finds himself in a vicious intellectual rumble with liberal journalists he regards as fellow travelers, such as my friend David Corn of The Nation? When you're used to being patted on the back all the time, a devastating counterargument feels like a sucker punch. Does Huffington keep enough air kisses in stock to mend all the owies?

H-Post is of course manned in the main by Friends of Arianna. One of my bottom-drawer claims to fame is that I can produce a published document in which Arianna cites me (with approval). Does that make me a Friend of Arianna? I guess not. Or perhaps it places me in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Huffington Galaxy, amongst the other millions of dim and ephemeral blips, light-years from the luminus core of H-Post bloggers. Still, we have shared a bottle of mineral water together (we'll always have Poland. Spring). And I wonder: perhaps in the future everyone will be a Friend of Arianna for fifteen minutes?

The More Things Change...

From Mark Twain, January, 1868:

It is disgraceful, in Congress, or anybody at all, to question the honor and virtue of the highest tribunal in our country. If we cannot believe in the utter and spotless purity of the Judges of so sacred a tribunal, we ought at least to have the pride to keep such a belief unexpressed. I cannot conceive it possible that a man could occupy so royal a position as a Supreme Judge, and be base enough to let his decisions be tainted by any stain of his political predilections. I hate to hear people say this Judge will vote so and so, because he is a Democrat -- and this one so and so because he is a Republican. It is shameful. The Judges have the Constitution for their guidance; they have no right to any politics save the politics of rigid right and justice when they are sitting in judgment upon the great matters that come before them. If the Reconstruction Acts are Constitutional, we ought to believe they will sustain them; if they are not, we ought to hope they well annul them. When we become capable of believing our Supreme Judges can so belittle themselves and their great office as to read the Constitution of the United States through blurring and distorting spectacles, it will be time for us to put on sackcloth and ashes.

Wigan Wedux

I can see why they probably hate Orwell in Wigan. But could someone kindly explain the thing about whippets?

Happy VE-Day

The Big Scary World

I didn't care too much for this Garrison Keillor piece in The Nation (thanks to A&L Daily), but I did like this:

The reason you find an army of right-wingers ratcheting on the radio and so few liberals is simple: Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time...Here at the low end of the FM dial is a show in which three college boys are sitting in a studio, whooping and laughing, sneering at singer-songwriters they despise, playing Eminem and a bunch of bands I've never heard of, and they're having so much fun they achieve weightlessness--utter unself-consciousness--and then one of them tosses out the f-word and suddenly they get scared, wondering if anybody heard. Wonderful. Or you find three women in a studio yakking rapid-fire about the Pitt-Aniston divorce and the Michael Jackson trial and the botoxing of various stars and who wore what to the Oscars. It's not my world, and I like peering into it. The sports talk station gives you a succession of men whose absorption in a fantasy world is, to me, borderline insane. You're grateful not to be related to any of them, and yet ten minutes of their ranting and wheezing is a real tonic that somehow makes this world, the world of trees and children and books and travel, positively tremble with vitality.

What About Ramsay?

According to the Washington Post (and perhaps others), "Labor [will] be returned to power with the lowest share of the national vote of any ruling party in British history." Not according to my Butler and Sloman it won't. The short-lived Labour administration of 1924 won only 30.5 per cent of the total vote in the election the previous December - granted there was a delay between the vote and Labour taking office, and it only held (fleeting) power with the conditional support of the Liberals; but still ...

Spoiled Ballot

I have the opportunity, should I choose to follow through on the relatively small amount of paperwork, to vote in two of the most important election systems in the world. This ought to give me a powerful sense of entitlement as a global democratic citizen. But in neither case do I bother. The reason in both cases is the same (1). It's the same reason that Mr. Peter MacLeod of Fareham, Hampshire didn't vote yesterday, as he explained to The Independent:

"Sir: The party leaders have been desperately exhorting us to vote, but for the first time in a general election I am declining the offer. Not because I am apathetic to politics, far from it. I value my vote and would like it to count. It might have something to do with the fact that party leaders rarely, if ever visit my constituency, minor parties do not always put up candidates and canvassers never knock on my door.

When the party leaders plead for us to vote, they are not really talking to me. They are talking to the minority of people who really elect governments in this so-called democracy. They are of course the floating voters who live in marginal seats.

I however, like a majority of us, live in a safe seat. No one hunts for my vote because the result is guaranteed. At the last two elections, the winning candidate here polled more votes than the next two parties combined, at a time when Tory fortunes appeared to be in a terminal nosedive. I could vote Tory as I did in the 1980s but I would only needlessly add to the candidate's assured large majority. I could vote Lib Dem again or even Labour or Green but I would be wasting my time.

We need electoral reform to re-engage people like me who know that their vote does not materially count. A simple amalgam of PR and first-past-the-post would suffice, with half the MPs locally voted for and the remainder elected according to national voting figures."

(1) Not strictly true in the case of Pennsylvania, a presidential swing-state which in recent elections has been a major battleground. But certainly true in the specific case of Philadelphia, which in addition to being congressionally no-contest has such a dismal record of Tammany-style corruption that a democratic political culture has more or less broken down.

Not Bad for a Girl

If you have a subscription, then you can read the whole Greg Allen article...

In the early 1950's Lee Krasner, not yet famous but already a promising Abstract Expressionist painter, asked Hans Hofmann, her former teacher, to help her land a gallery show. He offered her the biggest compliment he could: "This is so good," he said of her work, "you would not believe it was done by a woman." Nevertheless, he declined.

...Asking why women's art sells for less than men's elicits a long and complex answer, with endless caveats, entirely germane qualifiers and diverse, sometimes contradictory reasons. But there is also a short and simple, if unpopular, answer that none of these explanations can trump. Women's art sells for less because it is made by women.

"It's eating up peanuts at a rate of knots..."

Charmed to find in the current Guardian that UK election coverage still spends lots of time discussing "the swing." Wot is it anyhow -- just the change in point spread from one election to the next?

Elucidations on current UK political behaviors much welcome here anyhow.

("...It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or -- what's that strange thing you British play?"

"Er, cricket? Self-loathing?"

"Parliamentary democracy...")

"Imagine Broadway Melody of 1984..."

Well, anyhow, here's 1984: The Opera. No, really. Composed and conducted by Lorin Maazel, libretto by J. D. McClatchy and Thomas Meehan, premiered in London on Tuesday. Unfortunately, it's not well reviewed in the New York Times. Oh well. Still sounds interesting.

(Item thanks to Buck of the BadAttitudes community.)

What Would His Mother Say?

The Sunday New York Times featured an alarming photo of Bill Frist. I can’t find it online, but it’s just as well because it’s a shocking portrait of the man who wants to be your next president. It’s a picture of just his head, presumably in contemplative mode, with his glasses hanging from his mouth.

It’s fine to bring values to the political table, but isn’t your position undercut when the press takes pictures of you with dirty objects in your mouth? And this man calls himself a doctor. What kind of message is he sending to his future national constituency?

I’m sure he engages in thorough personal hygiene on a regular basis, that he follows Mom’s advice and gives himself an extra scrub behind the ears. Nevertheless, that section of real estate is a fairly greasy area, so there is no excuse for sucking on the bow of your spectacles. At least not publicly.

I ain’t voting for him.

Election Games

In honor of the campaigning taking place across the Atlantic, here's a Saki story about boys and "peace toys":

"Are we to play with these civilian figures?" asked Eric.

"Of course," said Harvey, "these are toys; they are meant to be played with."

"But how?"

It was rather a poser. "You might make two of them contest a seat in Parliament," said Harvey, "an have an election--"

"With rotten eggs, and free fights, and ever so many broken heads!" exclaimed Eric.

"And noses all bleeding and everybody drunk as can be," echoed Bertie, who had carefully studied one of Hogarth's pictures.

Getting There from Here

It’s a shame the first post of Horizon’s second year will concern a stolen car, camels, bourbon, middle-age decadence, and a dog named Trousers, especially when you review the posts from May of 2004. That was some beginning a year ago. The intelligence! The wit! The commitment to the nobility of language! The lack of three (make that four) exclamation marks in the same paragraph!

I read almost nothing this past weekend, traveling to upstate New York to steal my father’s car. He did sign it over to me, but as his memory is but a memory, it felt like stealing. Taking the car away was a public service: he is eighty-seven and thinks there’s nothing wrong with his going for afternoon spins when the inspiration strikes. You know you’re old when you have to take Daddy’s T-Bird away (actually it’s a Ford Escort, but I don’t recall a Beach Boys song about Escorts).

On the way to New York, driving south through the Champlain Valley, we spotted a camel in a field. I’ve seen plenty of llamas in Vermont and a few buffaloes, but that was my first camel. It was a Bactrian camel (two humps), the kind that can handle the cold. I’d be interested in understanding the desirability of camel-ownership, and wonder how you go about obtaining one.

Saturday evening I was introduced to eighteen-year-old bourbon. Having humble beginnings, I’m the sort who knows Wednesday’s bourbon hasn’t aged enough, but Tuesday’s is just fine. After a couple fingers of that heaven, a friend let me sit in her new Mini Cooper. I declined the offer to drive it around the block, saying I wasn’t driving anywhere in anything with the whisky in my blood. This struck my friend as odd, and then I remembered I was in a part of the world where the natives don’t find it strange that there should be publicly-financed snowmobile trails that lead from bar to bar. The Mini Cooper is an astonishingly beautiful automobile, but more astonishing was my friend saying, “You know, I’ve turned fifty-one, the kids are through college, so I thought I deserved this.” I smiled and thought, this is exactly what’s wrong with this country.

When I returned home Sunday, I saw Alan A’s Trousers Began a Grudge was the last post of Horizon’s first year. I thought if we changed it to Trousers Begins a Grudge we’d have a decent children’s book on our hands. Trousers would be the name of a dog that has difficulty staying out of the neighbor’s yard. Lots of conflict and important life lessons, and at the end Trousers saves the neighbors by rescuing them when their house catches fire during the night. Then he retires to Pennsylvania and becomes the Horizon mascot.

I hope everyone had as good a weekend.