Where the Snooping Has to Stop

In the gym locker room yesterday, I overheard another old nekkid guy tell a friend: "I mean if you was makin' a phone call to some Al Qaeda tonight, I think the government ought to know, don't you?"

Well, sure the government ought to know.  And ought to be able to rip the roof off your bedroom to make sure you aren't shacked up with the preacher's wife.   But  somehow there was something--maybe it was the aroma of Foaming Bore-- that made me also think I was listening to a guy who really wasn't all that keen about the gummint sticking its nose into his business.  Like, for example, a guy that is totally cool we went 110 million background checks without a director over at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  The thought that one of those background checks might surface "some Al Quaeda" just didn't seem to figure.  

And  just for a fleeting moment, I wondered how my birthday-suited neighbor would feel if we had a law allowing electronic surveillance only for gun owners.  I mean admit it, have you ever met a terrorist who wasn't exercising his second amendment rights  armed and dangerous?  Don't we have rational basis, strict scrutiny, all those other Constitutional icons, for the cohort that is fully weaponized? 

No, I thought not.  Somehow my guess is that the people who are most comfortable with blanket electronic surveillance are also totally cool with my wandering around with a tactical nuclear weapon on my back, as long as I'm a paid up member of NRA (note to terrorists: join NRA).  Indeed, I suppose if anybody ever really raised the issue, we'd end up with a rule that provides that the snoops can rip the roofs of the bedrooms of every home in America except those occupied by gun owners.  Forget I ever said this, okay?

The John and Howard Show

Boy, here's a name I haven't thought of much lately: John Silber, paladin of all that is good and great in American academic life; also freelance bully and headline grabber--and in particular, arch-foe of Howard Zinn who played the Questing Beast to Silber's King Pellinore.  I haven't thought that much about Zinn lately either although I guess I was aware that his People's History of the United States, once the cynosure of campus radicalism is apparently still in print and still grinding out a nice piece of change for the the Zinn estate.  Zinn (or his ghost) is also the recipient of a gift--really, a pair of gifts--perhaps rather grander than he deserves.  One is a biography by Martin Duberman, apparently a sympathetic observer even if clear-eyed about at least some of the shortcomings of his subject.  The other is a superb review of the book (and of Zinn) by one  David Greenberg (hitherto unknown to me), willing to approach both Duberman and Zinn with perspective at once clear-eyed and compassionate.

I'm to review the review--go read it yourself, it's great, and not that long.  But I do want to say a word about the conflict between Zinn and Silber which appears to form a center of the book as perhaps it did of Zinn's career.  For those just arriving, Silber was the high-saliency president of Boston University and Zinn represented, to all appearances, just exactly the sort of guy Silber did not want cluttering up his government department.   Clearly Greenberg holds no particular high regard for Silber:.  

Silber’s ostensible concern for academic freedom was belied by his tyrannical style. Heedless of due process, intolerant of dissent, Silber imposed his will on the faculty and students, generating only more unrest.

For such a man, Zinn was a natural target, and however bitter the conflict, you can;t escape the notion that Zinn loved it: to all appearances, it gave him all the street cred a self-proclaimed radical could have wanted.  

But let me turn back to Silver.   Like him or not (I don't know many people who do, or did), still I think you'd have to concede the sincerity of his commitment to the academy, or at any rate to his own vision thereof.  But whatever his virtues, I think you'd also have to concede that he was an unquenchable publicity whore--one of those people, to put it differently, who really doesn't care whether he wins or loses the good fight as long as the spotlight stays on him.

I'm  not quite sure how this plays out in the life of Boston University--not nearly well informed enough to pass judgment.   As a distant observer, my guess is that BU is a more impressive place now than it was before Silber set foot in the place, whether because or in spite of him I wouldn't want to say.  But that won't keep me from speculating that Silber might have done a better job of work on Zinn if he'd been quieter about it.   And that here may be half or dozen or so University leaders who have done far more damage to the cause of progressive politics just by being a bit more reptilian about it.

a

Saving Detroit: A Proposal

If you're standing near a microphone, you'd better get out of the way or be trampled by the mad stampede of public figures rushing to tell the world that, no,  not never, no way will we gave any money to bail out Detroit. 

Okay, but here's a suggestion.  Give 'em the White Sands Missile Testing facility.  Or the Los Alamos Nuclear lab.  Or any other of the array of goodies that flow from the Federal coffers to New Mexico, making New Mexico the biggest net importer of Federal dollars--a taker instead of a maker, as we might say.  Or if you prefer, any of the other 30-odd states who hold membership in the moocher club.  The list includes every single one of the old Confederate states except Georgia (which at least for a while used to pretend it was not rebel territory anyway).  It also includes a veritable who's who of the Republican leadership: Alaska, Utah, Kentucky, Alabama,, Oklahoma (Oklahoma?) and so forth: nothing like Senatorial power, I suppose, to keep the sluice gates open.

This is, of course, nothing new.  It's in the nature of nationhood that the rich parts support the poor parts--just ask the Liga Nord in Italy, or any German who lived through the shower of Deutschmarks that welcomed East Germany home to ein volk.  In the  United States, we generally do it in two ways: one by "federalizing" wealth transfers which in the nature of things flow from one part of the geography to another.  And the other, by doling out military resources: they used to say that Mendel Rivers' South Carolina had so much military hardware it risked sliding back into the Atlantic Ocean (to join, I suppose, the pirate ecology from whence it arose).

Of course, this may be precisely Grover Norquist's point.  It's a crime against nature for  Delaware to feed New Mexico, just as, I suppose, it is an offense for St. Louis to feed East St. Louis, or for Manhattan to feed--well, anybody above the top of Central Park.  Come to think of it, as I walk around my own neighborhood, I'd say the folks over past Sixth Street are looking a little grabby themselves.

Meanwhile, although we don't have separate rankings for cities, I see that the State of Michigan stands fairly high on the "makers" side of the equation--eighth out of the fifty, just ahead of Nebraska.  Even if we aren't going to bail out Detroit, how about smoothing down the distribution, so Michigan gets to keep some of the money they now send to, say, Maine or Maryland, and keep it for the homies?

Should She be Fired?

i.e., this one?

Or this one?

Afterthought, speaking as a long-experienced and bona fide old person, I treat it as a matter of profound indifference that the chirrupy little blonde is scared of old people.  Of course she is scared of old people. She is a young person.  It's her job to be scared of old people.  Did not the saintly Lisa Simpson say she didn't want to sit next to grandpa because he smelled funny?  Yeh, sure, the blonde has to bite her tongue and be nice to to old people  anyway and you know what, sweetie?  I'm not all that crazy about young people when they are, e.g., acting like idiots.  But we learn to suck it up and rub along anyway, don't we?

I'd say the boss in the cute-blonde case is being a jerk, but she probably learned an important life lesson.  The other guy is  a prime candidate for the may-he-rot-in-hell file.  But at least the lady gets to keep her pension.

Opera in One Paragraph

The topic is Bluebeard's Castle by Bela Bartók.‎

The castle is a sanctuary of operatic secrets. Its bolted doors, pressed by Judith's curiosity, open onto a musical imagery which discloses the guilty mysteries of opera.

The first door reveals instruments of torture, the second an armory. There is gore on everything: opera is synonymous with bloodshed and erotic violence; its arena is Scarpia's hidden back room. Behind the third door is a stockpile of gold and gems: Fafner's hoard in Siegfried, supplemented by the jewels which tempt Marguerite in Faust, Giulett in Les Contes d'Hoffman, and the Dyer's Wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten. The fourth door conceals a garden of trilling birdcalls, a paradise omnipesent in oper from Monteverdi's Arcadia to Walther's suburban Eden in Die Meistersinger or the summertime of Gershwin's Catfish Row The fifth door opens with a triple forte blast of C major and an orgn volley. Its vista is that of annexed territory, the ambit of Bluebeard's reign; opera indulges the conquistadorial man of power—Monteverdi's Nerone and Handel's Cesare Vasco, Enée and Siegfried. The sixth door unlocks a lake of coldly rippling tears. Opera's emotional reservoir is fed by Charlotte's lachrymose aria in Werther, by Desdemona's first tears, wept as Otello spurns her, or by the distraught Elsa, when Lohengrin leads her to the minister to shed her tears in joy. Beyond the seventh door...

 What is "beyond the seventh door" is left as an exercise to the student. Or consult Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera 225 (1987) from which this excerpt is taken.

From God's Mouth to Your Ear

Four hundred languages?   Then I suppose it is true to say that  the new Bible app revolutionizes Biblical scholarship.  But is it also true that it includes no Hebrew, no Septuagint, no Vulgate Latin?  That is, none of the root sources for so many of the others?  Apparently it does include a Greek New Testament, though.  And I gather Vulgate, etc., are available elsewhere.  See, e.g., link.

Still, it does intrigue me how casual Christians are about translation, and the use of translation.  Unlike, say, Jews, who still bat Hebrew into the little rascals' heads in the afternoon after regular school.  Or Muslims who read/recite it in the original, whether they understand it or not.  Idle thought: I have a friend who, as part of his study of Buddhism, is learning a bit of Pali (not Sanskrit, he says, too hard).  But how many Buddhists read the sacred texts in an original language?  Or Hindus?  Me, I have no idea.

[None of this first-hand knowledge with me.  I am tracking a study list where I lurk and I don't know (nor have I asked to find out) that they be would want to be quoted/outed.]

Ch'tis

Mr. and Mrs. Buce idled away a good-natured couple of hours the other night watching Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis.  It's an amiable piece of fluff, of interest (at least to an outsider) primarily because apparently it is France's biggest-grossing movie ever.  As such, it tells you--by which I mean, "me"--some interesting stuff that you might not otherwise guess about French culture.

The plot is straightforward--enough so that you can't imagine why nobody ever thought of it before.  Harassed postal manager dreams and schemes to get a transfer south to the Mediterranean.  Through his own incompetence, he winds up instead getting sent to Berques (pop. 3,800), way up at the tippy top of France, just under the Belgian border.  The north, oh dear the north: he'll hate it, this will never work.   The ch'tis, the sticks, though whether this is supposed to be a vulgar Anglicism or Berques patois, I am not sure.  Anyway, welcome to the sticks.

You can pretty much construct the rest of the plot from there and you'll be right and no harm done.  Think Northern Exposure with smelly cheese and rubber faces: the French do seem to like rubber faces.  I suppose that part of the point is that it gives its French audience a reassuring sense of nationhood while introducing them to a chunk of the country they never even suspected existed.  Yes, it does seem that nobody in France ever set foot in Berques unless they were born there, except perhaps for one old guy about whom the less said the better.  In terms of general framework, then, it is a lot like France's previous all-time top seller, La Grande Vadrouille--also a road film with a lot of good-natured merrymaking.

What is perhaps most eye-opening for l'étranger ignorant is that both the co-stars (one also the auteur) are also étrangers--at least in the sense that they both have visibly foreign roots.  In particular, Algerian: the auteur, Dany Boon, is identified at Wiki as the son of an Algerian Kabyle--i.e., Berber--father.  It says here that Boon's mother is Picard-French, i.e., the ch'tis--and that he has built a lot of his career on Picard-ethnic humor (his co-star, Kad Merad, is identified as having been born in Algeria to an Algerian father and a French mother).

The whole package seems almost absurdly transportable.  Evidently there is already an Italian version: Benvenuti al Sud.    Wiki mentions plans for an American version, although I don't see any sign of it.  Wouldn't take much imagination to cook up another 180 or so more.   Especially worth watching, I suspect, would be the Korean.

The Oil Shock: Another Story?

You remember the Nixon oil shock? If you are of a certain age, of course you do. In 1973 the world price of oil jumped from $3 to $8-$9, then $12-$15, then (in the Reagan years) over $30.  And not just oil: all sorts of commodity prices went through the roof.

You thought it was all about the cartel, right, OPEC, perhaps actuated by the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War—a calamity for the United States? Could be, but Yanis Varoufakis thinks otherwise. In The Global Minotaur, he explains how it was all really our (well: Henry Kissinger's) idea:

[I]f the Nixon administration had truly opposed oil price hikes, how are we to explain the fact that its closest allies, the Shah of Iran, President Suharto of Indonesia and the Venezuelan government, not only backed the increase but led the campaign to bring them about? How are we to account for the administration's scuttling of the Tehran negotiations between the oil companies (the so-called “Sisters”) and OPEC just before an agreement was reached that would have depressed prices? … [W]hy did the United States not oppose with any degree of real commitment the large increases in oil prices?

Why, you ask? Varoufakis answers:

The simple reason is that … the Nixon administration [did not] care to prevent OPEC from pushing the price of oil higher. For these hikes were not inconsistent with the administration's very own plans for a substantial increase in the global prices of energy and primary commodities. Indeed, the Saudis have consistently claimed that Henry Kissinger, keener to manage the flow of petro-dollars to America than to prevent the rise of energy prices, was encouraging them all the way to push the price of oil up by a factor of between two and four. So long as oil sales were denominated in dollars, the US administration had no quarrel with oil price increases.

Elaborating:

Recalling that the new aim was to find ways of financing the US twin deficits [budget and trade—ed.] without cutting US government spending, or increasing taxes, or reducing US world dominance, American policy makers understood that they had a simple task: to entice the rest of the world to finance the USA's deficits. … [A]s oil prices rose, every part of the capitalist world was adversely affected. However, Japan and Western Europe (largely lacking their own oil) were burdened much more than the United States.

Meanwhile, the rise in oil prices led to mountainous rents piling up in bank accounts from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, as well as huge receipts for US oil companies. All these petro-dollars soon found their way to Wall Street's hospitable bosom.

And there you have it. Now, I think of myself as being a moderately attentive observer of conspiracy theories and their kin (I even buy a couple, though not most). But I never heard of this one. I tried it on some of my homies who dismissed it with a poorly concealed sniff of contempt at my foolishness for even countenancing such nonsense. It does sound a bit baroque, like a nine-cushion carom shot. Are there any takers?

Varoufakis on "Controlled Disintegration," etc.

I've spent some quality time the last couple of days with Yanis Varoufakis' The Global Minotaur—an account of our modern economic history as seen by one of the chipmunks in the path of the great steamroller. It's a refreshing read, a familiar story told in a somewhat unfamiliar way. It has many merits and some provokes a few unevadable reservation—reservations which I may or may not get to in this post.

The spine of the book is V's account of global economic policy from Bretton Woods forward and in particular, how the US came to dominate world economic policy for a generation in a structure that (surprise) the US had created. As V shows, it was a structure that depended on the US continuing to function as a creditor nation—which it certainly did, resoundingly, for the first few post-war years (for convenience, call these “phase I”).

His account of what you might call “phase II”--the years after Nixon dumped Bretton Woods and OPEC jacked up oil prices—is intriguing but less universally plausible. A difficulty with his discussion of both phases—but more urgent in phase II—is the degree to which V credits his story to calculation, instead of mere chance. Grant that Bretton Woods was an act of calculation on the part of the US (or more precisely, on the part of Harry Dexter White). Still it is hard to believe that anybody could have—or even presumed to—forecast in detail all of what actually came to pass. As with the story of any major policy initiative, there seems to be a lot more of good luck, bad luck, and sheer blind randomness than V seems willing to credit.

The concern is more urgent in “phase II” when, in the standard narrative, the wheels more or less came off the bus. So much of post-1971 policy seems to be a mix of improvisation, blind flailing and serendipity. But remarkably, V seems to try to turn this all into some kind of grand plan. He has resurrected a speech by Paul Volcker from 1978 in which Volcker said (per V):

[A] controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980s.

Now, I don't know what the hell Volcker thought he was saying in this remark—was it off the cuff? Was there a context? Was it (one is genuinely tempted to wonder) an attempt at bleak humor, however out of place for one in such high office? Whatever. The point is that V seems to treat it as a statement of considered policy—as if the Wise Men sat around the polished oak conference table in the Treasury Department situation room and said “it's agreed then—we'll have a controlled disintegration.”

Well of course you can't prove a negative and anyway I wasn't there. But if it is/was considered policy, you'd have to concede that it was one that achieved its successes (if any) much more by good luck than by calculation, and in many cases, did not achieve successes at all (one can just hear Jimmy Carter when he gets news of the helicopters crashing in the desert saying “Oh good! Controlled disintegration!").

So, modified rapture. Still, you'd have to credit V with important insights you don't often find elsewhere. One, perhaps most important, is that it gives you some hint of how we got ourselves into the mess where we are the world's only banker—and, worse, where we don't do anything else. The point is, we got here because we made it so. We created a system in which we are the banker-of-bankers; having done so, it's a bit rich for us to be surprised to find ourselves where we are.

There's more, and actually I haven't yet finished the last few pages where he discusses the Europe meltdown which might well be the center of his expertise. And even though I find a lot of this helpful, he does go off on one particular tangent which has my head reeling. But I think I'll leave that one for another hour, or day.

How SJ Spent his Sybaritic Youth

While I am waxing nostalgic, it's a good time to catch up with our old friend SJ Perelman and see what he remembers about his sunshine years:

Whenever I stretch out before my incinerator, churchwarden in hand and, staring reflectively into the dying embers, take inventory of my mottled past, I inevitably hark back to a period, in the spring of 1926, that in many ways was the most romantic in my life. I was, in that turbulent and frisky epoch, an artist of sorts, specializing in neoprimitive woodcuts of a heavily waggish nature that appeared with chilling infrequency in a moribund comic magazine. It was a hard dollar, but it allowed me to stay in bed until noon, and I was able to get by with half as many haircuts as my conventional friends above Fourteenth Street. 

 So from the The Most of S.J. Perelman  290 (Steve Martin, ed.)   It's the opening of an essay called "Cloudland Revisited: Great Aches from Little Boudoirs Grow."  It's a kindofa, sortofa review of a book called Replenishing Jessica, which sounds like it might be the most boring saucy novel ever to escape the writer's garret.  And yes, I keep a copy of Perelman in the can, doesn't everybody?

Catching Up

I learn that an old acquaintance died last month. Not “friend” precisely; in fact I don't think we had actually spoken together for 20 years or more. But we had been on and off each others' radar since we were 18. We'd exchanged any number of small courtesies and he had done me some modest favors. At 18 I held him in awe, tinged with fear; my attitude matured into great respect later.  Although we hadn't been on the same track lately, he was enough of a public person that I had been able to follow his life pretty much until the end.  By all accounts he had loved ones, achievements, recognition.   A life well lived, I can report, and did I mention that he died of a stroke on a cruise ship? So, lucky in his living; also lucky in his dying as people of my age and stage are increasingly likely to note.

So, why am I surprised? Hard to say: perhaps because we hadn't been much in each other's company since 1979-80 and I still picture him in the full vigor of his 45-ness. You say that was 33 years ago? Let me check my watch. Oh dear...

L1037 and the Resiliency of a Great Tradition

We passed a pleasant evening last night in the company of Note by Note, Ben Niles' engaging documentary about the construction of "L1037," a Steinway concert grand. It's a lovely piece of work--the movie, but of course also the piano--not impaired by the fact that it's a giant infomercial for Steinway, because what does it matter whether Steinway gets an infomercial or not anyway?  As many have noted it is also an elegy--threnody?--to old-fashioned craft where guys (and yes, some women) get to do jobs they enjoy  for a decent piece of change.  The nearest comparison I can think of is those shots you get at the HD operas of backstage crews at the Met, although I suspect the Met crews get paid better, and that the Steinway crews exercise more skill.  

Our enjoyment was  not greatly dampened by the thought that the old family firm is just now being sold to an LBO house at a 33 percent premium over the recent trading price.  A spokesman for the buyer says  they are “not contemplating any changes to any of the manufacturing operations,” and one's natural first thought is: yeah, right.  The obvious path in a deal like this is to replace all the brass fittings with plastic and then trade off the brand name until it wears out at which time you throw it away.  But maybe not: Warren Buffett did business with Katherine Graham for a generation without ever trying to tell her how to run The Washington Post (and now that I think of it, the top guy at the shop that bought Steinway is also a director of the New York Times).  So we shall see.

Chez Buce is not favored with a Steinway, grand or otherwise, but we do have a lovely little Petrof upright; Mrs. Buce likes to tickle the ivories while I prepare dinner which is win-win as far as we're concerned. We bought it a few years back for about $6,000.  The tuner told us last week we could sell it for $26,000, which would make it the best investment we ever undertook.  But unlike the Steinways, we are not disposed to sell.

Seeing the Steinway show and eyeing our prized Petrof, I was prompted to do a bit of Googling. I learn that Petrof was a Bohemian who went down to Vienna to learn the piano trade, and built a firm which (so far as I can tell) remains in family hands today--a demographic not unlike Mrs. Buce's grandfather, although he never owned a piano company, or a piano.  And here's another fact that should have dawned on me before: evidently Petrof was confiscated by the Commies in 1948, returning to private (family) hands only after 1989.  I'd love to know more about that: were the Reds smart enough to realize that they had a golden goose, best left undisturbed?

But the history does offer a thread of consolation: if Petrof can survive the Soviet Minotaur, maybe Steinway can survive an Wall Street buyout.

Housekeeping: Rogue Audio

I'm getting some backchat from fans (sic!) who say that when they try to fire up Underbelly, they get some weird audio-video of John Stewart.

I think I know the problem, though I am not sure I know the solution.  It seems what you are picking up is the tag  end of a post I did the other day about the new Sperber bio of Karl Marx--the author did a bit on The Daily Show, which I collared and posted.

I think I'll just kill the post out.  If the problem persists, feel free to alert me in the comments to this post--all the better if you have a proposed solution.

Stoneman on Greece

Ah, here's a find: my battered copy of A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece, edited by Richard Stoneman. copyright 1984.  I can't remember when I got my copy but I think maybe around 1990, the last time I traveled with a backpack and slept on the ferry's open deck.  From his web page, I gather that this was his second book.  But he's clearly a bona fide classical scholar with (by now) a long resume, not just phoning it in.  He seems to have a special enthusiasm for the reception of classical culture in later times.

Flipping through the Companion, at 87 I hit upon his entry for "Nafplion," Nauplion, "formerly known," as he says, "as Nauplia or Napoli di Romagna."  He might have added that it is one of the pleasantest little cities you could hope to find anywhere, plus being the perfect jumping-off point for some gonzo classical ruins.  "In the anarchic interregnum following the War of Independence [i.e., the Greek one, 1821-32--ed.] the mountains of the Pelopennese were the strongholds of numerous klephtic bands.  LaMartine, in Nafplion in August 1831, described the situation:"

The most complete anarchy reigns at this moment over all the Morea.  Each day one faction triumphs over the other, and we hear the musketry of the klephts, of the Colocottroni faction, who are fighting on the other side of the gulf against the troops of the government. We are informed, by every courier that descends from the mountains, of the burning of a town, the pillage of a valley, or the massacre of a population, by one of the parties that are ravaged their native country.  One cannot go beyond the gates of Nauplia without being exposed to musket shots.  Prince Karadja had the goodness to propose to me  an escort of his palikars to go and visit the tomb of Agamemnon; and General Corbet, who commands the French forces, politely offered to add to them a detachment of his soldiers.  I refused, because I did not wish, for the gratification of a vain curiosity, to expose the lives of several men, for which I should eternally reproach myself.

A. de Lamartine, Travels in the East, translated by TWR (Edinburgh, 1850).  That is:

L'anarchie la plus complète règne en ce moment dans la Morée. Chaque jour une faction triomphe de l'autre, et nous entendons les coups de fusil des Klephtes, des Colocotroni , qui se battent de l'autre côté du golfe contre les troupes du gouvernement. On apprend, à chaque courrier qui descend des montagnes, l'incendie d'une ville, le pillage d'une plaine, le massacre d'une popu lation, par un des partis qui ravagent leur propre patrie. On ne peut sortir des portes de Nauplie sans être exposé aux coups de fusil. Le prince Karadja a la bonté de me proposer une escorte de ses palikars pour aller visiter Le tombeau d'Agamemnon, et le général Corbet, qui commande les troupes françaises, veut bien y joindre un détachement de ses soldats;  je refuse;  je ne veux pas exposer, pour l'intérêt d'une vaine curiosité, la vie de quelques hommes, que je me reprocherais éternellement.

 A. de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient, archived here.

Question of the Day: Chinese Restaurants in Trier

Bob asks: Why are there so many Chinese restaurants in Trier, i.e., Germany?  No, it's got nothing to do with the fact that Saint Ambrose was raised there, but hint: they are mostly down by the railroad station.  For Bob's answer, go here.

AP Question

Identify and locate on a map:

a) Doha
b) Davos
c) Darfur

For extra credit, is Djibouti a city or a nation?

Wealth Watch: the Art Market

I'm sure this is not original with me, but I'll repeat it: one reason for the high end art market is that it is so hard for the truly obscenely rich to find things they can buy not available to the ordinarily prosperous.  Charles Saatchi and I can each buy a spanking new Toyota Camry, maybe even a Lexus.  Charles Saatchi can buy a formaldehyde shark and Nigella Lawson; not I.  Now this:

More than $70 million for Rothko’s “White Center” in 2007, a high-water mark for that artist.

More than $20 million later that year for a Damien Hirst pill cabinet, then a record for a living artist.

And $250 million for Cézanne’s “Card Players” in 2011, the highest known price ever paid for a painting.

Given the secrecy of the art market, few knew at the time who had laid out such unprecedented sums.

But it has become increasingly clear that those masterpieces and many more have been purchased by Qatar, a tiny Persian Gulf country with enormous wealth and cultural ambitions to match: it is buying art at a level never seen before.

The times keeps going on about "Qatar" as the buyer but I think the real focus should be on 30-year-old Sheika al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, whose name translates as "Richie Rich."  “Art becomes a very important part of our national identity," she (sic) said in a TED talk a while back.

In other news, from last week's Economist:

Qatar, with one of the world’s highest GDPs per person, scored lower than impoverished Albania in reading, science and maths in the OECD’s PISA study in 2009.

The Economist does add: 

Almost everywhere else [in the world] boys and girls did more or less equally well (on standardized tests), but in Arab countries girls outperformed their pampered male siblings by huge margins, and most Arab countries have more female than male university students. 

 No word yet on whether the Sheika will be making a bid on Nigella Lawson. 

Much a-Don't

I really really wanted to enjoy the new Much Ado About Nothing--the one he shot in black and white, in modern dress, by Joss (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) Whedon, on a break from The Avengers.  We go way back, Much Ado and I: it is, I think, the first Shakespeare play I ever attended because I wanted to, no pedagogic pressure.  It remains a sentimental favorite (though I have never again seen it so well done).   I still tend to rank it more highly than the Serious People do.

And this production had so much going for it: great director,  country house setting (well:  Santa Monica), near-zero budget, just twelve days--twelve days!--for shooting as in "Hey gang!  Let's do a show!"

I'll have to grant that maybe my particular circumstances worked against him:   the theatre is a single concrete-block room with an air conditioner like a ship's boiler.  I really can't imagine how you would have understood anything did you not know the script fairly well to begin with.   Under the circumstances, I'm honestly not sure whether the blame here falls on Whedon or the boiler air conditioner.

On the other hand, he had plenty going for him that survived the passive-aggressive undercurrent of noise.  This is obviously a cast completely comfortable with Shakespeare, not to say with each other.  More: it is a performance entirely devoid of the curse that impairs so much of bigtime Shakespeare: the ponderous piety, the hey-we're-doing-Shakespeare sort of thing.  That lack itself is almost a game saver.

But--you can see where this is going--the damn thing just doesn't work.  These guys may be pals with good technical training but they aren't funny.  Not being funny, the play finds no way to set off the comedy against menace, not against reconciliation. Time after time, they swallow their best lines so fast you aren't even sure you hear them go by.

Watching the show, I flirted with the notion that the fault might be in the setting: maybe the play--for all the delicacy of its wit--just needs a big stage with plenty of room for pratfalls and bada boom.  Maybe, but then this morning I went back and read Stephanie Merry in The Washington Post. 

[Whedon] had reminisced about simpler times — leisurely days when he would assemble his friends for impromptu readings of Shakespeare’s plays.

“A little light brunch, a glass of wine and [we’d] read a play,” recalled Alexis Denisof, known for his role as Wesley on “Buffy” and “Angel,” who plays Benedick in “Much Ado.”

With what little downtime Whedon had, he decided to decompress by recapturing that merriment.

 And:

 [T]he filmmaking process felt like a family reunion. The narrative unfolds as a series of get-togethers, each character perpetually toting a glass of wine, and there’s some sense that when the director yelled for a cut, the vibe remained lively, if not entirely relaxing.

 Bingo.  We're not watching a production for our entertainment here.  We're watching a home movie of a bunch of old friends having a party.  I dread the prospect that whole battalions of high school teachers will dragoon their charges off to an obligatory viewing on the premise that hey, it is given to us by a man who did Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Fn.:  I've made it s point not to read anybody else's review so far.  But I see that as of this writing, the famously soft graders at Rotten Tomatoes weight it in at a paltry 63 percent.  So apparently I am not alone.

BTW speaking of missed lines, did I just not hear it or did they really leave out my favorite Shakespearean setpiece:

Good morrow, masters. Put your torches out.

The wolves have preyed, and look, the gentle day,

Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about

Dapples the drowsy east with spots of grey.

Thanks to you all, and leave us. Fare you well.

Pensions Again: For My Friends Who Think That I'm Not as Smart as Paul Krugman

I've been getting some backscatter from my homies for remarks yesterday upon public pensions--specifically from those who say I'm not as smart as Paul Krugman, be still my soul.

Well, I'm impenitent.  I concede that part of the uproar is the forces of evil trying to demoralize us and sap our will (or demonize us which is pretty close to the same).  But the public pension problem is real.   More, there re a number of differences between the public issue and other matters with which it may be confused.  So let's review the bidding, taking note of a few points, every one of which is actually well known by anybody who has read this far.

One: forget the nay-sayers Social Security is actually in pretty good shape, and will remain so for a while.  Public pensions are a lurid actuarial nightmare.  Corollary, social security has actually been pretty well managed. State and local pensions have too often fallen into the hands of incompetents, mediocrities and outright crooks.  Honorable exceptions including my buds in public pension management.

Two: the real problem with Social Security is that the noise machine has succeeded in muddling it up with health care, and health care is a problem.  Health care is also, be it said, a problem that cannot be solved by tinkering with the public system alone, but it is a problem.

Three, Social Security does have problems, but they are not related to fund management.  The biggest is the absurdly regressive mode of fund-raising.  It's an outrage but an outrage that nobody is pressing to solve just now.

Four, the root problem with Social Security is that it is part just savings and in part, wealth transfer (side note--oddly enough, it seems to be impossible to pin down  just exactly how much is which: I've tried).  Anyway--I know I've said this before--this leaves supporters in a strategic trap.  If they argue that it is only a savings program, they are met with the rejoinder, "Then why not let it it go private?  Let people manage their own money blah blah." If they admit that it is wealth transfer then they re toast because the voters aren't going to support it as wealth transfer.

Five, re state and local--well, I guess you could say they are wealth transfer insofar as they are transfer from taxpayers to public employees.  But in that sense, every employer payroll is wealth transfer.  And rich-to-poor (on the order of Social Security) has never (so far as I know) been part of any state and local pension scheme.

Six: I admit I don't know everything about every public employee pension fund, but anyone I've ever seen, there's a direct line between contributions and the employee's right to draw: your pension is part of your compensation package.  Of course we pretend (or used to) that your Social Security account is "your money."  But of course, it has really never been that.  The problem with state and local is that there really is "a fund," and more often than not it has been recklessly, or inattentively, or criminally, mismanaged.

Seven: on that last point, while state and local pensions are unlike Social Security, they are very much like private pension plans where, for a generation, employers have been breaking promises or ignoring them with impunity (often enough, with the help of corrupt union brass).  Here again I can endorse Mathbabe:

  “[B]ankruptcy” in the realm of airlines has come to mean “a short period wherein we toss our promises to retired workers and then come back to life as a company.”, 

 Which brings me to

Eight (and last): I suspect a good part of the hostility to public employee pensions just now comes from people who have been screwed out of their private pensions and can't see why the teachers and social workers should not suffer as well.  Sad to say, I find it hard to quarrel with this.

Sellars' Theodora

Theodora is one of Handel's last works.  I read that "the public did not react favorably" to it, and I suppose I can see why.  It is about the persecution of Christians by Romans, and it is composed with all the austere dignity the subject would seem to require.  Handel himself apparently saw things differently; by the account of his librettist, Handel thought the aria "He Saw the Lonely Youth," at the end of Act II,  superior to the "Hallelujah Chorus" in the Messiah. 

I think I can see (or her?) what is going on here.  In fact, Theodora contains a thousand fragments that you can recognize as inimitable Handel.  But in ordinary times they are decked out with jewels and feathers; here they are stripped down to their essence.  A fun-loving, distractible London audience may be thought not quite worthy of it.

Mr. and Mrs. B have now finished a superb (and widely acclaimed) version by Peter Sellars from the Glyndebourne Festival, and it is everything you might hope it would be.  Here's Willliam Christie (who must be one of the luckiest men in contemporary opera) conducting David Daniels, Dawn Upshaw and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, all at the peak of their power.  Especially Lieberson, who died at 54 (in 2006) and all you can think is--my God, what a loss.

And did I mention that it took us three evenings?:  Perhaps we weren't quite worthy of it either.

Here's a Youtube rendition of "He Saw the Lonely Youth" with libretto though oddly, without any context--I have no idea who is singing or playing:

[Background and quotation from Choral Repertoire by Dennis Shrock.

Krugman on Pensions: Move Along Folks, Nothing to See Here

I really do not get Krugman's point on public pensions this morning.   Okay, I can see that he is saying, put narrowly, that the  shortfall in state and local pension liabilities isn't as big a problem as it cracked up to be.  I suppose the answer to that is the old punchline, "compared to what?"  And I guess I'd agree that the current shortfall--even a much bigger one--might not be as bad as global warming, or nuclear proliferation, whatever, but this doesn't seem to be Krugman's ultimate point.  What really seems to bug him is the intuition that there is some kind of sinister conspiracy to exaggerate the extent of a problem which, taken in perspective, just isn't that bad..  "So, why is it being hyped?," he asks, and "Do I even need to ask?"

Well, maybe he doesn't but I do.  I'm really not clear what the answer to his rhetorical question.  I guess he might be telling us that it is being hyped by those who hope to demoralize us into giving up and accepting our impending poverty and desolation.  And I agree, there might be some of that going on--the conservative noise machine has gone a long way towards achieving this result with Social Security (don't bother, it won't be there anyway!)..  But the public pension problem is real, even if not as big as a breadbox.  And I suspect a good bit of the concern comes from people who are just damn ticked off when they finally discover how badly they have been (are being) used and abused by near- (or outright) criminal mismanagement.  Pensions are a classic instance of a can that can be  kicked down the road because, even though all the interested parties will get old or dependent sooner or later, still for most of them the point is not yet.   Sure, some will say that you left the window latch unhooked last night, you really can't blame the burglar for walking off with grandmother's heirloom necklace.  But I don't really think Krugman wants to put himself in company with that crowd.

Actually, when I stop to think of it, I guess I am part of the demoralization faction because I've been pretty well satisfied for years that just about none of us--except those that get lucky and die early--will see what they thought they were promised out of their public pension.   But "move along folks, nothing to see here," is not a good solution.

Afterthought  But he was perfectly right in showcasing Dean Baker who picked up that absurd pension howler in the Washington Post this morning.

Afterthought II  For a bit of cold water on the smoldering K, go here.  "Public Plan and Reputational Risk Task Force," heh, what a concept.

Afterthought III:  In fairness, I suppose Krugman might be thinking of Walter Russell Mead, for whom every time a public pension stumbles, an angel gets its wings.  See, e.g., link.

In Which I Confess to a Guilty Pleasure

I've done a lot of mean things in a long life but I have never yet watched one of those TV shows where you get to invade some guy's privacy while he finds out whether he is the Father of the Baby (wonder if they have booked Prince William?).  Nor, now that I think of it, none of the other of those countless orgies of public humiliation where people get cut. chopped, slashed, fired, demoted where someone puts his/er most intimate moment under the glare of the white lights for us all to enjoy.

Until now, but I blame the gym.  The Precore bikes are arrayed across from a ban of TV screens and the Food Channel is the best of a bad lot.  I admit I am still beguiled by the Contessa, reigning champ of the cotton-underwear division and even little Rachel Ray, mistress of the art of being sexually unthreatening to a geezer such as myself.

But my shameful weakness is--wait for it, folks--Restaurant Impossible, where our protagonist shows poor duffers how to run their business.  Oh, I know, I know, he is a downmarket superhero,some kind of cross between Mr. Clean and the Man from Glad.  The catch is that he's really pretty good.  You can tell in the moment that most of these places are management train wrecks.  And his advice--well, I'm not the expert now, am I?  But most of his advice seems like sound good sense.  For this, they shed a tear.

But that's the kicker, isn't it?  Most of it is sound good sense, in the perspective but people really shouldn't have to be told this stuff, should they?  Yeh, right most people aren't there yet.  Rather, I think what we're seeing here is the reasons why restaurants have such a legendary failure rate: everybody eats, so everybody thinks they can cook, and everybody thinks they can run a restaurant.  Only the first three of those propositions is unequivocal.

There's also the matter of the cycle of failure.  With the ordinary retail store, there's just a pileup of bad inventory, or no inventory at all.  With a restaurant, it's cockroaches and spoilage.

So in this context, Mr. Clean looks, well, clean.   But I recall one more anecdote, this from my friend Ignota who works with small business all the time. I said--you're good at this, you ought to set yourself up as a straightener-outer, to get things organized and back on track.  They don't want it, she said.  They want you to come  in on Friday night and solve the problem by Monday morning, and then let them go on as before. Coming soon, I bet: Mr. Clean returns.

Karl Marx and the Violent Overthrow of the Streetlight

Karl Marx lived out most of his  adult life in blameless bourgeois respectability in London where, inter alia, he was once elected Constable of th Vestry of St. Pancras.  But hey, even the sinister mastermind of World Revolution has to blow off a little steam every once in a while:

[I]n the 1850s, probably during the Crimean War. Marx, Edgar Bauer, and Wilhelm Liebknecht had taken part in a pub crawl one night. After considerable consumption, they came to an establishment where a group of Odd Fellows, working-class members of an English lodge, were drinking. At first the encounter went well, and enthusiastic toasts were offered, denouncing “Russian Junkers,” since, as Liebknecht pointed out, most Englishmen could not tell the difference between Prussia and Russia. But gradually another mood took over and Edgar Bauer denounced English “snobs,” followed by a drunken Marx, who launched into an enthusiastic speech praising German Wissenschaft and German music. No other country, Liebknecht remembered him saying, had produced musical artists like Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven. Germany was well ahead of England, and only its current wretched economic and political conditions prevented it from being ahead of all other nations, as it one day would be. Liebknecht noted that he had never heard Marx speak English so well. The assembled Odd Fellows were less than happy and turned on their guests with cries of “Damned foreigners!” Just barely escaping a beating, the three émigrés rushed out into the street, where they began throwing rocks at gas lamps, and had to flee again to avoid being arrested by the Bobbies who had appeared to investigate the tumult.

Sperber, Jonathan (2013-03-11). Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (p. 494-5). Norton. Kindle Edition.

House of Canards

After two trial episodes of Neflix' House of Cards, Chez Buce has sent it to the shower, declared it the weakest link, held it chopped and said "you're fired."  There might be good stuff later on--there were some moments even in these two--but so far, it sounds like the auteur is an Englishman who feels the need to explain American politics to the yokels even though he doesn't understand it very well himself.  One of the saving graces of the original was that Francis Urquhart always you that little twinkle as if to say hey, it's only an entertainment.  The American cast doesn't seem to find anything funny in anything.  Perhaps they have read the rest of the script.

Thoreau's Summer

For our New England friends, a note on as msrk of summer seen by Henry David Thoreau:

[A] word Thoreau associates with summer is “coolness”as this excerpt shows: “With or without reason, I find myself associating with the idea of summer a certain cellar-like coolness, resulting from the depth of shadows and the luxuriance of foliage, (327). Similarly, he expresses his grateful feeling to wend his way “to some pure and cool stream and bathe therein”(II: 277) Bathing was an important daily routine or “a religious exercise” nthat Thoreau practiced while he lived by Walden Pond (Walden 88).   Likewise, he comments on the waters of the river: “The river has a June look, dark, smooth, reflecting surfaces in shade. The sight of the water is refreshing as suggesting coolness” (IV: 116). We might accordingly say that the coolness of summer is linked with shadiness or umbrageousness and water to bathe in. Thus, the three words we have focused on are closely related to each other. The blitheness reminds us of the sunniness and heat of summer, which make the luxuriant foliage of the trees more appealing, because they provide cool shade.

--So Michiko Ono Nature in her Prime: Thoreau's View of Summer, Kawauchi Review: Comparative Studies in English Language and Culture, 4-5 (2006).  An accessible version of the quoted passage is in the NYRB Classics reprint, The Journal: 1837-1861 217 (Damon Searles ed. 2009).

"Don't Shoot Me, I'm a Lawyer"--Reprise

Return with me now to Main Street outside the Armstrong Hotel in Shelbyville, KY,  and the honor-vengeance killing of General  Henry H. Denhardt; also the echoing chorus of "don't shoot me, I'm a lawyer" (go here).  My new found Kentucky friend, Hugh "Uncledoc" Wilheight, who kindly furnished me with the lyrics to the commemorative ballad, has now served up an exhaustive account of the whole gory story from The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 84, pp 361-396, the work of one William E. Ellis, professor of history at Eastern Kentucky State (apparently this guy).

The story is easily told.  Verna Garr Taylor took a bullet.  General Denhardt said she shot herself.  The prosecutor said the General shot her.  The jury hung 7-5 for acquittal.  It was on the eve of a second that that her brothers gunned down the General, and the lawyer achieved fame in song and story for a one-liner he probably never uttered. 

Ellis speculates idly on the place of the account in the history of violence and vengeance particularly as practiced in the Bluegrass State but he doesn't go very far with it.  He directs most of his efforts to constructing an extended narrative chronicle. A modern reader will do well to restrain the impulse to  draw contemporary comparisons, not least on the phenom of the Denhardt trial as a media bacchanal.  

But the hung jury and the ensuent killing vengeance killing are not the end of it.  A prosecutor put the Garr brothers who shot Denhardt themselves on trial for murder. "I shot to protect my life," one of them testified.  Perhaps more remarkable--somehow, heaven knows how,   the defense persuaded the judge to allow evidence calculated to demonstrate what a rotter the victim was.  Ellis:

A number of military men paraded to the witness stand, all of whom soundly flayed the general. They alternately described him as 'domineering,' 'power-drunk,' 'officious,' and 'cruel and inhuman.'   Brigadier General Ellerbe W. Carter characterized Denhardt as 'one of the most violent, domineering and unscrupulous men I every knew.'  Two other witnesses claimed to have overheard the general threaten to shoot down the Garr brothers. 

 The prosecutor, per Ellis, "countered with the obvious: two men had shot down another man, who was unarmed.  Moreover, they shot him in the back."  The defense countered that the brothers had "a right to shoot a mad dog."  The jury deliberated for an hour and a quarter before bringing in a verdict of not guilty.  The audience erupted into a cheer and rushed to congratulate the accused..  Evidently (again), the rule is that "the boy needed killin.'"

Hey, Maybe I Was Right All Along

Those bogus Asiana pilot names: last week I said you ought to look for a vengeful ex-boyfriend. But I backed down as soon as I heard they came form an NTSB intern. But wait, no; evidently the intern did not provide the names;  but only confirmed (heh!) the namesat the request of the gullible marks at the Fox outlet.   So the question remains: who thought them up, and who set her up?  So far as I know that name hasn't been disclosed.  I do see that the (unpaid?) intern has been fired; smiley-faced, artlessly gullible talking head apparently still on the job.

Janet

Turn your back for a moment and they name a new president for the University of California.  Inside Higher Education (and others?) is treating it as a "surprise pick," but is it?   Granted that most university prexies scratch their way up through the chairs, still it seems by now quite a number of figures who have made the leap from Washington into the university front office but it isn't really all that new.  My bud Joel mentions Terry Sanford, Donna Shalala, Mitch Daniels.  I see him and raise him Bob Kerrey and John Brademas. 

 Remember Brademas?  Wiki reminds us he was the Democratic party heavyweight who left Congress to become president of NYU (1981-92).  Brademas was on the edge of my radar in my newspaper days and I remember thinking that it was an odd choice.  But then, no.  The job of a University president is to orchestrate an illimitable range of feuding constituencies, and to funnel money; in short. to manage the kind of Roldex you bring with you from Capitol Hill.

Unencumbered by any specific knowledge, I'd guess that Napolitano may have decided that it wasn't worth hanging around Washington waiting for either the Attorney Generalship or the Supreme Court.  My notion is that she is likely to be pretty good at what she was hired to do.  Maybe the really interesting question, at least for University insiders, is: who will be her provost.

We Read the October 1, 1950, Issue of Forbes So You Don't Have To

You'd sure think I could find better things to do with my time.  Random snippets, from text, editorials and ads.  Type faces are (more or less) from the original.

Hesitate to buy a home at today's dizzy prices.

Official Curbing of Installment (debt) buying is healthy.

 Christians and Pagans cannot come to any agreement because there is nothing to base it on.  United Nations must contain all Christians, with the Prince of Peace as its head...

If that harum-scarum little Alice from never-never land paid avisit to this day and age she would feel mighty topsy-turvy goings on in the business world.  In labor reltions particularly.  You find employers beckoning to the union to comde in and talk over wage increases.  You see huge corporations like Ford, Chrysler, tearing up their union agreements and signing new ones even though the old pacts still had some time to run.  You hear about outfits like Northrop Aircraft serving coffee to applicants who come to hunt for jobs...

FLASH ANNOUNCEMENT

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ATTACH $1.  TO THIS COUPON AND MAIL

Had any experience in deep snow?  Got any idea about a vehicle that can negotiate arctic terrain at all seasons?  Then maybe you had better get in touch with the National Inventors' Council, a group of 18 top-flight scientists, engineers and research men who are working closely with the Department of Defense on problems encountered, or to be encountered, by the armed services...

NO CIGARETTE HANGOVER

The World Will Never Be the Same

 Been in the car or chattering with relatives all day so I haven't read much or seen much news (the jury is still out, right). But I did happen upon--wait for it folks, Forbes for October 1, 1950:   And this just in:

BANK WIRE

The staid banking business gets a lift November 1 when bankers from coast-to-coast take to the wire via a teleprinter network linking 142 banks in 36 cities.  Planned and sponsored by a group of New York and Chicago bankers, the system was engineered and developed in 18 months by Western Union Telegraph Co.  Dubbed The Bank Wire it will provide direct, fast and confidential communications.

The system will be used to make money transfers, security purchases, sales, and quotations, letters of credit, and other foreign department business, etc.  Further uses are limited only by the imagination of the bankers and the scope of the banking business (not to mention tariff regulations).

In all, 54 cities will eventually be connected (another 46 banks in 18 cities will be cut in on December 4), with aggregate banking resources exceeding $106 billion.

 There's a map, showing the connection lines (I think it is only the 54).  There is a direct line from Chicago to San Francisco (not LA). No connection to Phoenix or Salt Lake.  And in Florida, only Jacksonville. 

The Gatekeepers, Twice

I don't think I've ever done this before: watched the same movie on two nights in the same week.  Not quite successive: last night we had a dinner guest.  But tonight and Wednesday, we watched The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh 's documentary comprising extended interviews with the six living former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency.  Maybe my search set isn't large enough to justify an opinion but I'd have to say this is very likely the best documentary I've ever seen.  Face it, most documentaries, certainly including those that get the award nominations, have a a fairly crude and obvious agenda.  I suppose I'll have to grant that Moreh has a sort of an agenda:   Israeli-Palestinian relations are just awful.  But it is hard to think of any comparable product that shows a realm of such unforgiving intractability.

Credit goes to Moreh, of course, but even more to his six interviewees.  Every single one sounds sane, even when they are talking about what may look like the insane moments in their own career.  None seems ready to apologize for much, but none, so far, as I can tell, feels that he accomplished much and none seems to see much hope for the future.

Two viewings.  Partly the problem is just my own ignorance.  I like to think I pay attention to Israeli politics: I've visited there with great pleasure and profit and I could name you most of the prime ministers in something like chronological order.  But lending an ear to these six is, if nothing else, a jarring reminder of just how much there is one might need to know before even pretending to make sense out of so challenging an issue.  

Which raises, perhaps, a second point: I would have done well to do some homework.  Each of these six is a sharply defined individual, with his own issues and his own stories.  On first viewing, I had a tough time keeping them straight. I found myself frantically flailing at Wiki to try to get at some thumbnails. And happily, before this second viewing, I did stumble onto some pretty good capsules at the producers' website.

All that said, I suppose the audience for this product is pretty limited.  I gather that many, perhaps all, of the interviewees have gone public with their views in Israel before now, so nothing would have come as much of a surprise to the home audience (and as others have said, the whole display is a reminder of how much easier it is to talk frankly about Israeli politics in Israel than it is in the United States). And if there's one thing worse than a story with now happy ending, it may be a story with no ending at all.  At least so far.

It's the Intern, They Say

I share the general covert sniggering about the, ahem, unfortunate public "naming" of the Asiana pilots earlier today. I see the National  Transportation Safety Board is now blaming it on a so-far unidentified "intern."  Might be, although I confess I had been playing with a different theory.  Seems to me that the target victim here might have been not the billions of Asians who might choose to take offense at the misnaming,, or the several hundred Americans who might feel embarrassed at the outing of their loutish insularity, but rather the poor dear who got snookered into reading this stuff on the air.   Of course she should have known better and of course that's why there used to be editors, but if this intern story loses its legs, I'd take another look at her disappointed ex-boyfriend.

Levy on Risk and Capitalism

I enjoyed Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune--profited from it, too, I think--although I would have a tough time saying just what the book is about.  No matter: I think the author, if pressed, might have to admit the same,.  The subtitle is "The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,"  What we have here half a dozen loosely connected accounts of people who cope with various kinds of dislocations in the economy of 19th Century America.  I suppose you could say that "risk," broadly defined figures in all of them, although in some the relevance is more attenuated than others.  In any event a hasty reader might infer that Levy thinks risk is peculiar capitalism. If that were a fair characterization then I think you'd have to say that he is forgetting disease, drought, famine,natural disaster and all the other visitations that have afflicted humankind throughout its history.  But I don't suppose he is saying that.  I suppose he is saying (although, strictly speaking, he does not say) that there are certain risks that are are peculiar to capitalist (market?) societies, and that demand responses beyond the ken of mere hunter-gatherers.  He doesn't specify in detail but he does use the phrase "self-ownership" by my count eleven times  to describe the creature newly obliged to lfunction in the new human bazaar.  In context  the phrase appears to come freighted with a kind of horrified fascination and I think I sense (though again, he does not spell out) a nostalgia for some kind of communal past.  He's entitled to that,  of course,but it might have helped if he had been more specific.

Surely the best of these loosely-related stories is his account of the "fraternal societies" that arose in the late 19th Century, to mix ritual,social companionship and benefit payment schemes for members.  You can't spend a lifetime reading commercial law cases without stumbling onto these fraternal societies and I thought I knew a bit about them but I seem to have had it backwards. I had assumed they were precursors of organized market insurance, but apparently they come later: they arise, rather, as a a foil to (and a criticism of) the (as we might say) morals of the marketplace.  The linchpin is that if a member (say) dies, then the society may pay a death benefit; but the money comes from an assessment levied only after the triggering event.  Translated, these societies have--and want--nothing to do with actuarial tables, experience rating, investment reserves and all the other accouterments of a conventional insurance: we are not like them.  It's  interesting also to read his account of the fraternal societies as they try to feel their way through the changing institutional structure of a changing age.  At one point we have Samuel Gompers, new leader of the new American Federation of Labor arguing that "an ideal labor union was really a 'life and health assurance company,' with a 'strike benefit added.'"  Oddly, having done so well with the fraternal societies as foils to "insurance," he says little except in passing about the rise of insurance more generally.

I also profited from his discussion of the post-civil war settlement and the question of how to reconfigure the newly freed black labor force. We talk of "40 acres and a mule" as an idea that went nowhere; but  Levy is able to show that there were some limited experiments with giving blacks access to land for farming,   Some of the support for the idea came from northern abolitionists and here is where it gets really interesting. Levy's point here is that the abolitionists--often enough rooted in the textile economy of New England--hoped to see the blacks through their energy back into cotton, as cheap supply for the northern mills.  But no: the newly empowered blacks seemed to show an unsettling tendency to subsistence farming, as if the idea of putting their own food on the family table was more attractive to them then the idea of getting into production for market (Levy touches virtually not at all on the economics of the choice--whether subsistence farming was a viable alternative, whether production for market realistic promise of a better  life).

Levy also offers an interesting sketch of another little-known institution: a "Freedman's Bank," created in the aftermath of the war to accept and invest the savings of the newly liberated former slaves.  The bank seems to have received an impressive lot of deposits although Levy doesn't linger long on trying to figure out just how the ex-slaves could have acquired--and held onto--so much money.  In a cruel followup, the bank collapsed and the money mostly disappeared, whether the result of fraud, mismanagement, or the general maelstrom surrounding the Panic of 1873,  It's a sad story but a sad part of it is that a lot of white depositors met the same fate when their banks too got swept into the undertow.  I suppose you might say that here we have one of those "risks" that only capitalism can offer.   Perhaps so, but here would have been an excellent point to meditate on just which risks are (or are not) artifacts of a market economy.

I think Levy does less well on the travail of farmers on the frontier in the 1870s-90s.  Heaven knows there was plenty of risk out there: tornadoes, locusts, dust storms, drought, whatever.  Levy seems particularly disturbed that these folks seem to be producing "for market" as distinct from--well as distinct from what, exactly?  Did he hope to find subsistence farming on the 100th meridian?  Levy doesn't specify, and in general here I think his problem is that he doesn't offer much by way of context.  I'd like to know more about what he thinks of the pattern of rain drought that seems to have played so large a role in the development of the frontier; more about how he understands the role of deflation in the money economy.  And so forth.  It would be a far more complicated story but maybe that is the point; maybe this is is all too complicated to deal with adequately in a single chapter.  A chapter on the futures market in Chicago seems vulnerable to the same kind of complaint.  Levy makes it tolerably clear that he hasn't the least use for futures trading in any but perhaps the most limited way.   He might be right, but I think the whole issue needs a more imaginative understanding than he seems able to give it.

Levy's final chapter on "the trusts" is perhaps most disappointing.  He's talking about the great age of industrial consolidation beginning, perhaps, with the Corsair Compact on JP Morgan's yacht in 1885 and continuing, perhaps, to the death of Teddy Roosevelt in 1919.  It's a fascinating story and it presents issues that I don't think we  begin to understand even to this day.  But that's the problem: for good or ill it is a highly visible story and it has been combed over often. Levy would have to be prepared to bring something new to the table; else we might as well retreat to older and more polished (if still incomplete) accounts.  

[One index of Levy' shaky grasp of the issue is that he builds his story of "the trusts" around the now-forgotten George W. Perkins, a vice-president of New York Life who spent a few not-very-satisfactory years as a Morgan associate.  Levy refers to Perkins (if I read him right) as "running the House of Morgan" which certainly would have come as a surprise to the old man himself.  Perkins was, rather, a man of some achievement in the insurance business who nonetheless made a perfect fool of himself in the Hughes insurance inquiry of 1906.  Perkins' first love appears to have been politics or, more narrowly, putting himself into the public eye.  He's entirely too slender a reed to carry the burden that Levy imposes on him.]

So, an imperfect, but still a good book.  The stuff about the fraternal societies and black land ownership are worth the price of admission. Every other topic is sufficiently interesting and important to deserve a fuller,more measured treatment on its own.

Loose Change on Human Capital

I've been reading a bit lately on the post-Civil War settlement and in particular, the question of how to redeploy the former slaves, now citizens, in control of their own (as we might have said) labor power.  In particular, about the celebrated mantra of "40 acres and a mule"--give 'em land, let 'em work it for themselves and stay out of their way.  

I've always had the vague sense that 40-acres was supposed to be undoable and last night I got to wondering--was it undoable?  What did it require?

For an answer, consider: there were something like 4 million slaves liberated by the war.  As a wild stab, let's figure five people per family.  So, 800,000 families.  Ill spare you the pencil work but this translates into land about equal to the state of Mississippi.  This would include, of course, the rich bottomland of the delta.  But it would also include the scrub in the Faulkner country up north, which is hardly worth anything to anybody.  So, throw in a second state.  Throw in Louisiana.  More scrub and more delta.

So, doable.  Didn't happen, of course.  My own take is that it was that ol' darlin' Andrew Johnson who made it his business to assure that no freed slave got anything except his freedom and sometimes maybe the pants he stood up in.  And FWIW, I'll bet he thought that free-the-slaves stuff was a dreadful mistake.

Fun to speculate on what the world might have looked like if he hadn't got in the way.