The Greatest Mass Extinction since the Spanish Flu

My friend Ken the maven of Chapter 13 bankruptcies brings it back to mind:

In mid-April of 1987, our government’s records showed that more than 7,000,000 children mysteriously vanished from the United States.  There was no disease or plague, no terrorist strike and children were not simply running away from their homes in huge numbers.  No, this was because in 1987, the IRS began requiring that all dependents claimed on annual income tax returns had to have their own Social Security Numbers.  Over the years, many tax payers had been claiming dependent deductions for children that did not actually exist; this new requirement on the 1040 forms in 1987 meant that these ‘phantom’ children simply vanished.

I recall hearing it described as one of the most important tax reforms of its time.  And memory tells me it was cooked up by a guy in sleeve garters behind a Steelcase desk. Hope he has some more good ideas.

Vautrin's Advice

For a few magical years, being a lawyer seemed like a cool profession.  You  could make some big bucks, play with nice grownups and even stand  chance to score with the ladies (as we then called them, if memory serves).  I remember one of them being featured in a commercial for Scotch.

Somehow all that  has passed away.  "Like doing homework for a living," I heard Tom Hanks sneer  on a talk show just recently.  It's finally sunk in on us that a lot of lawyers never did make that much money and on the high end, it seems the bankers make infinitely more money and apparently work a lot less.  

Why didn't someone tell us it would end that wa--oh wait, looks like someone did.  That would be the old scoundrel himself, Vautrin, in Balzac's Le Père Goriot, where he tries to school the young Rastignac in the perils of his chosen career.

By the age of thirty, you will be a judge making 1,200 francs a year, if you haven’t yet tossed away your robes. When you reach forty, you will marry a miller’s daughter with an income of around 6,000 livres.  Thank you very much. If you’re lucky enough to find a patron, you will become a royal prosecutor at thirty, with compensation of a thousand écus [5,000 francs], and you will marry the mayor’s daughter. If you’re willing to do a little political dirty work, you will be a prosecutor-general by the time you’re forty.… It is my privilege to point out to you, however, that there are only twenty prosecutors-general in France, while 20,000 of you aspire to the position, and among them are a few clowns who would sell their families to move up a rung. If this profession disgusts you, consider another. Would Baron de Rastignac like to be a lawyer? Very well then! You will need to suffer ten years of misery, spend a thousand francs a month, acquire a library and an office, frequent society, kiss the hem of a clerk to get cases, and lick the courthouse floor with your tongue . If the profession led anywhere, I wouldn’t advise you against it. But can you name five lawyers in Paris who earn more than 50,000 francs a year at the age of fifty?

Quoted in Piketty, Thomas (2014-03-10). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Kindle Locations 4140-4148). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Vautrin  then counsels our hero on the more promising path: marry rich.  Sounds like a reasonable choice--except for one whose only marketable skill is "doing homework," where can we expect him to find a rich bride to begin with?  Or is this why they call it "fiction"

But Can She Do it with Her Teeth?

The staff and management here at Underbelly Central take pride in their conviction that theirs is the only first-class weblog to measure performance in the United States Senate as a function of skill at the castration of defenseless animals.  Up to now, we could discuss only one instance.  Now there are two.

HT JKP.  Alternate headline "A nation of sheep" are rejected because in this case it's pigs.

Followup on Lear, with a Brief Meditation on Body Mass

Here's a physiological note, inspired by Michael Pennington's masterful performance in King Lear.  Specifically, one of the ensemble was--shall we say--a fat guy, and he played it to good advantage: he did one bit that was a knockoff (I am sure) of s Brueghel painting I've seen somewhere, and it helped to nail the orientation of the whole production.

Which set me to thinking: you really don't see a lot of fat people in New York.  Chunky, maybe, especially when wrapped up in their winter snuggies, but really nothing like the displays of bulk that have become so much  defining element of our national consciousness and self-consciousness.  And if you doubt me, go take a look at that marvelous portfolio of chart porn served up serendipitously  by The Atlantic from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  Turns out  that the winners of the low-body-mass sweepstakes are almost all in or near the mountain states (which figures, when you stop to think of it).    The outliers are (a) Marin County just north of San Francisco and (b) yep, Manhattan.

I suppose the Serious People can offer explanations far more well-armed than my own.  You do have a lot hard-drivers who never stroll when they can stride (well: they never stroll at all).  I suppose there are a lot gyms, though there don't seem to be quite as many as there were when I first began spending time here back in 1996.

And perhaps the obvious choice: they're not in their cars.  They do take buses, and subways (oh boy do they take subways).  But at least you have to walk to get to the subway.  And, of course, up and downstairs.  Yes, that's it.  Up and down stairs.  Infrastructure solution for America: more subways. With stairs.

NY Philharmonic Note

Followup on two nights at Avery Fisher Hall, both in almost the identical seats, up in the nosebleed section, where the view is magnificent and where the acoustics, you might think, are pretty good. And perhaps they are, but here's the thing.  Some familiar pieces (Gershwin's Concerto in F, Beethoven's Eroica) sounded like they never sounded before.  Was it us, or the conducting, or does something get lost in the baffles?  Especially the brass.   Lots of brass in both items and that is fine, but it seemed a bit muddy, undisciplined.

Details: first night was Jeffrey Kahane doing a 20th-Century program with Ravel, Weill  and Greshwin.  He conducted from a grand piano that faced the audience, its sounding board looking like nothing so much as a map of Nevada.  I read the Weill hasn't been done here since 1934.  I'm a huge Weill fan but I think maybe there's a reason.    Or maybe I could get mymind around it on repeated listenings.  The Gershwin was, as I say, strange and I'm genuinely baffled as to whether it is just me or something about, well, perhaps the baffles.  The Ravel, FWIW, came across just fine.

Second night was Joshua Bell, conducting (when he could sit still) from the position of first-chair fiddle.  His instrument was an ear-catching Strad, except that his real instrument was the orchestra of St. Martin in the Fields,he which played with loving attention.  This troupe should be used to the terms of engagement and to him, and for the strings, at least, I'd say they were: they seemed to engage and accomodate each other with no excess of effort.  With the brass, again, I'm not so sure.  It might have been where I was sitting, but here is another possibility: I wonder if they could see him.  Though the stsge was built up on stair-steps, still it seemed as if perhaps they had to guess some of the time as to just what they wanted and when.

Oh, and one real blessing: this orchestra is small, which was refreshing for the Beethoven, but he also did the Brahms violin concerto and for the Brahms, it was s revelation.  Evidently Brahms, swimming against the tide of his time (think Bruckner, Mahler) really wanted a small orchestra and I'm not sure I ever heard him that way before.  Or whatever.  Brahms had it right and I'm grateful to Bell for showing how it could be done.

Did America Enjoy a "Trente Glorieuses"?

One recurrent point of reference in Thomas Piketty's fascinating Capital in the 21st Century is the "trente glorieuses," the  30 years between 1945 and 1975 when the French, to their own astonishment and that of everyone else, somehow restored, nay created for the first time, their functioning first-world economy.  Piketty treats it as a defining event in modern French life and I am in no position to gainsay him.  But then he says:

In North America, there is no nostalgia for the postwar period, quite simply because the Trente Glorieuses never existed there: per capita output grew at roughly the sme rate of 1,5-2 percent per year throughout the period 1820-2012.

Um.  Well, I'm not disposed to dispute him on data; let's assume he is right that growth in the US has been slow but steady since before forever.  But I'm not at all sure this is the only index upon which gloriousness may arise.   Employment, plus employment security, for example.  I think I've said before (too often?) that the period 1947-1973 in America counts as just about the only time in any country where a person of ordinary ability (I'm talking to you, little Homer Simpson) could hold down a job that would support a non-working spouse and 2.3 kids in a suburban ranch-style home with at least one car in the garage.  Call it vingt-six glorieuses, at least within its narrow limits.

I mean this, I should stress, as only a minor point: Piketty's is a fascinating account which I am taking deliberately at a slow pace, the better to assimilate its charms--a bit like one of those classic novels he likes so much to cite.  Minor, but still a point, and perhaps a caution that he still perhaps knows more about France than he does about the United States.

Degenerates on Display

We popped over to the Neue Gallerie today to take in the new show on "Degenerate Art" under the Nazis--which was not the best ever but good enough--and also the goulash, which was up to par.

The show builds on a defensible premise: to show some comparisons/contrasts between the art of which the Nazis approved and the dreadful modern stuff that came before.  By "dreadful modern," I mean the stuff you will have seen and enjoyed at--and will cherish from--your previous forays to the Neue.  By "Nazi," think Hitler, or Mussolini or Stalin, except in various ways I think maybe the competitor-scoundrels came up with a more interesting and varied product than the little man in the mustache itself.  Mussolini, after all, fancied himself a sort of modernist, at least in his early days, at least as long as there were lots of choo-choos and suchlike.  Stalin's contributions to the arts may be regarded as slender but the Soviets did keep grinding out those gloriously, yet oddly compelling, posters, right on into the post-War period (statement of interest: at Chez Buce, there is a Soviet kitsch poster on the bedroom wall, along with an array of mama in a selection of hats, and a photo  of bedful of babies).

Worth the price, as I say, and it seems to have found its audience:  at 11 am, the line ran around the corner onto Fifth Avenue and I tell you it was pretty chilly.  Someone in the line said something about their being extra security, so I guess the anti-degenerate party lives.

Still, I'm not sure the project works as a museum show.  Most of the goers will have seen the degenerate part--mostly right here at the Neue-- and the Nazi art doesn't deserve a second look (which is the point, of course, but still).  The comparisons themselves aren't immediately enlightening.   I suspect maybe the trouble here is that the real story is in the back-story: the particular machinations that led the Nazis (or really, Goebbels) to crack down on the degenerates as hard as he did.  Did Goebbels, or Hitler (or anyone) really care?  Or was this just posturing on the path to power?  The point is, perhaps, that I should have done my homework, or at least that I wish I had.  I suppose there was good stuff available on topic in that lovely museum shop.  But the stack is already high and other topics press their demands.  And, of course, as the Jews are said to say of any major holiday: we won, they lost, let's eat.

Pennington's Lear

In New York for a bit of culture--we popped over to Brooklyn to  see Michael Pennington's King Lear.  The presentation seems to have sold out before it was advertised; Mrs. B happened upon it while surfing and snapped up the last two tickets at a preview.  In sum: I probably haven't seen enough to judge, but for  my money, Michael Pennington may be the best Shakespearean actor alive.  I judge on a fairly thin record: this Lear and his performance back in 2010 in a Peter Brook presentation of Shakespeare's sonnets.  Well, that and his three marvellous "director's commentaries"--on Hamlet, Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, as profitable as anything I've read about Shakespeare in years.

Pennington was, as I say, wonderful: he's a Lear who is querulous and  cranky and demanding--all those things you youngsters hate about us wrinklies and crumblies--but he also has dignity and inspires awe.  I think I know why: he doesn't shout.  Or didn't shout until the last few minutes when he carries Cordelia onto the stage.  By this time you're ready to grant that he has something to shout about, and you'll value even more highly the nuance that went before.

Pennington, then, was worth the price of admission but the production as a whole was oddly disjointed.  Most of the cast seemed to have their characters nailed and most seemed to have a good handle on Shakespearean diction--no small feat where so many actors seem to wangle their way onto the stage with no sense about how to handle Shakespeare at all.  I suppose you have to credit the director for this which is fine, but then I'd guess you'd have to blame him for the fact that the performance as a whole didn't seem to jell. Which left you in the odd position of feeling that however much you might admire Pennington as an actor, you really didn't really engage with his fate all that much.

I'm not sure just why this was so but it did seem that three, maybe for or five, of the cast, for all their proficiency with the Shakespearean manner, simply didn't know how to put their lines across.  That would include Cordelia and the fool; a Lear without his fool loses a lot of his punch and a Lear without Cordelia has problems not easily surmounted.

No mater; this is Pennington's show and if you get a chance to score a ticket, grab it. You may not be enchanted but you certainly won't be disappointed.

Still Hangin' With My Homie, Charles de Gaulle

Alice Roosevelt Longworth (yes?) said her father, Teddie, wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.  I'm not sure about the wedding part but consider this about Charles de Gaulle:

In November 1963, at the funeral of Kennedy, who had been assassinated on the General’s birthday, he towered over the heads of state and government, and insisted on walking to the cathedral beside Jacqueline Kennedy and the diminutive figure of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia despite the concerns of the US security service for his safety. He was seated in the eighth row, which he considered below the dignity of France. So, putting on his spectacles, he made his way forward, greeting fellow statesmen and royalty until he reached the front. ‘Right, we can start,’ he said to a protocol official and sat down where he was.

Fenby, Jonathan (2012-06-20). The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved (p. 516). Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Not Quite the Dullest Post I Ever Wrote

A few weeks back I hurled some unintelligible mismash on corporate debt:  I said that debt on a leveraged balance sheet ought to be cheaper than pure equity--but that as I penciled it out, I kept coming to the conclusion that debt on a leveraged balance sheet was more expensive than pure equity,.  This seemed wrong to me and I wondered whether I had led myself into a rookie error.  I tried the piece on a couple of smart people who had the grace to pretend that they never got the message, and on a colleague who agreed that yes, I must be wrong, but he wasn't sure why.  On a rethink, I've come to the conclusion that (a) no, I was not wrong; but (b) it's actually fairly trivial.  I was muddling one important premise, this regarding the allocation of risk.  Assume the unleveraged balance sheet bears some risk (Doesn't it always?  I mean, nothing is certain, right?).  Add leverage; normally we would expect (leveraged) equity to bear the enterprise risk, and for debt to be risk free.

But what if debt is not risk-free?  What if debt  bears some of the enterprise risk.  Let's go to the numbers.

LittleCo has assets worth $1.000. There are 10 shares which implies a share value of $100 (each).   Suppose LittleCo also throws off $100 in earnings/dividends every year forever.  This looks like a straight-out 10 percent return.  Everything parses.

Note, I'm not saying that LittleCo is risk-free.  That $100 represents the weighted sum of a spectrum of probabilities.  I mean, suppose that the value of LittleCo, starting at T=1 might be $1,200 or might be $800, with a 50 percent chance of each.  Then: 0.5(1200)+0.5(800)=$1,000, and everything still parses.

Now, suppose we decide to replace half our equity with debt.  Suppose debt costs eight percent (plucked out of the air--no way to derive it).  That seems to suggest that we can get $500 worth of debt for $40 a year ((500x0.08, yes?).  That seems to leave $60 for equity.

Equity costs 10 percent.  60/0.1=600=$600.  Woo hah.  Looks like we have just created $100 in value for equity.   Can this be right?   It cannot be right.  Rather, we have dumped all the enterprise risk on equity, so equity will demand a higher return. The formula is re=ra+(D/E)(ra-rd) (sorry, I can't do subscripts).  So 0.1+(500/500)(0.1-0.08)=0.12=12 percent.  Then 60/0.12)=500=$500 and we are back to ground zero.  What you lose on the swings you  make up on the roundabouts.

So far this is baby steps. But take one step further.  Suppose the risk spectrum is not just 800-1,200.  Suppose it is: 50 percent chance of zero and 50 percent chance of $2,000..  The probability weighted sum value for the enterprise is still $1,000. Now, again replace $500 equity with debt.  At what rate?  Again I don't know--but I also know that this time debt is not risk free.  The probability weighted sum of the returns to debt are: 0.5(500)+0.5 (zero) = 250=$250.  And just to close the circle, the potential payoff to equity if 0.5(2000-500)+0.5(0)= 750=$750.  So enterprise value is 250+750=1,000=$1,000 and everything parses again.

In words, debt will be more risky than pure equity when it bears some of the enterprise risk.  My only remaining cavil is with the idea that debt is "risk free."  Finance types are always assuming that debt is "risk free," whereas truly risk-free debt, if it exists (but how could it), must be the exceptional case.

This looks obvious enough once I spell it out that I probably should be embarrassed even to post it.  I guess I was focusing on the simple examples in the Modigliani-Miller chapter of the coursebook where debt is always risk free. FWIW, my beloved colleague John Hunt pointed out that Robert K. Merton clearly understood and accounted for this result in his seminal paper laying the math foundations for Black-Scholes.

 

Jeff Bezos must be Smarter than I Am

There are  no arbitrage opportunities, but here is an arbitrage opportunity:  Rick Perlstein's Nixonland is available on Amazon Kindle for $9.99 (or "with audio/video" for $11.92).  It is available as Audible audio for $27.97.  But buy the Kindle version and you can then download the audio for $4.49.

So it never makes sense to by the audio alone, right? Because you get it audio and Kindle together are cheaper than the audio alone, right?

Isn't this an arbitrage opportunity?  What does Jeff Bezos know that I don't know?

[And it's not just Perlstein.  On casual scan, this anomaly seems to occur with a whole bunch of audio offerings.]

The End of the Law School Bubble

In retrospect, I think my professional life in the law coincided with a golden age.  I've long said I spent my early years pushing against unlocked doors.  Now as I prepare to let go, I'm pretty sure I'm observing the end of a bubble, on the order of the dental education bubble pop in the 80s (in the United States--and in other nations, perhaps today).   Not that lawyers will go away--sorry,no such luck.  But it is hard to see how we'll soon to the palmy days of the 90s (and before?)  Some graduates--a few--will still grab the big bucks. but there will be fewer and they'll have to work for what they get.

Some of these thoughts came into focus today when I listened to a Man Who Knows talk about trends in law school enrollment.  Key takeaway: the decline in law school enrollment and  law jobs may have coincided with, but it is not exhaustively explained by, the 2008 financial market collapse.  Other,perhaps more urgent, candidates include, at the top end, the rise of big data and his trusty sidekick, the search algorithm.  For many  years the mega firms gobble up top talent at high prices for the most dreary of office jobs: combing through hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of documents for little nuggets of information that might assist in bashing an adversary's face in as a part of the dance of litigation.  It never did make a lot of sense and apparently those days are over as more and  more of that kind of searching can be done by machines.  

At the other end of the scale, we've seen the expansion of on-line do-it-yourself.  This kind of thing isn't entirely new (I've been a big fan of Nolo Press for years), but ease of access and general convenience seem to be driving an increase in the role.    And elsewhere in the world, we're witness the relaxation of rules on what kinds of jobs must be done by lawyers only: pressure for that sort of thing is bound to reach the United States.  Correspondingly, we're seeing an increase in law-degree-helpful jobs: jobs for which you may better your chances for employment by having a law degree, but for which the law degree is not essential.  Which takes me back to my own law school days when many of my classmates (well--maybe me--) saw the parchment as a job market force magnifier even if we weren't going to practice law.

One seeming anomaly:  a blip up in "public interest" or non-profit jobs, at a time when such entities seem to be experiencing declines of their own.  Can this be right?  It can be right, once you recognize that a lot of these new public interest jobs are being paid for by the law schools themselves to keep the tads out of the marketplace.  The Economist explains how paying pencil out as profitable for law schools, if it keeps them in competitive play for applicants.  Vagrant speculation: are we coming to a day when subsidized postgrad employment will be baked into the cake, something you buy when you write those seemingly exorbitant tuition checks.

I Can't Quite Figure Out David Gilmour

David Gilmour is the author of one of my favorite short biographies (of Giuseppe di Lampadusa, author of The  Leopard) and of several other books that I've read with pleasure and profit.   Right now I'm finishing up his In Search of Italy and I can't quite figure out what to make of it.

On the surface, it looks like it might be a yawn: a 10-peaks-in-10-weeks slog through a lot of long-forgotten dates and names.  It does start a bit slowly--about the Romans he doesn't have a lot to add but then the competition is pretty stiff. It is in the Renaissance that he really hits his stride.  Yes, there are a lot of names and dates, but this is definitely not just predigested Wiki: rather, he shows an extraordinary knack for for the crisp and lethal insight about people and correspondingly about entire social movements.  He is particularly good on the late 19th Century: his is one of the most helpful brief accounts I ever saw of the Cavour/Garibaldi revolution, giving full display to its essential fraudulence and self-delusion.  Which is not to say that his tone is particularly savage: indeed his very restraint is enough to make his account all the more telling.

And here's the puzzle.  A book like this usually begins with an account of how much the author loves his subject--at one point I had the impression that Gilmour actually lived in Italy though I now think I am mistaken.  Yet it's odd to see how someone who really loves the country could tell the story with which measured detachment--neither lost in his own enthusiasm, not choked in bitterness.  What we have instead is some marvelous story telling set against a background of almost glacial reserve.

By way of a taste, here is Gilmour's account of "the partisans," famed in song and story, who fought so valiantly (as we are told) against the retreating Germans in World War II.   You can find their memory kept green "in Verona’s Piazza Brà, beside the great Roman amphitheater," in the statue of "a young fighter of the Resistance, handsome and fearless, a rifle slung over his shoulder and an inscription with the words, ‘To those who died for Liberty’."  Gilmour elaborates:

After the armistice in 1943 Italians joined the Resistance for a variety of motives. Some were anti-fascists who wanted to defeat fascism, some were patriots who wanted to expel invaders, and more were communists who aimed for both of these things and a political revolution as well. Many , however, simply drifted into it because they were on the run from German and fascist forces. Although they were unskilled in open combat, the partisans proved to be effective in guerrilla warfare: they blew up bridges and killed fascist officials, they helped liberate the cities of the north from the German occupation, they punctured the credibility of Salò and they signalled the redemption of Italy. For some twenty months they fought courageously, and about 40,000 of them were killed. Yet there were never very many of them, perhaps 9,000 at the end of 1943, some 80,000 at the end of 1944, and about 100,000 by March 1945, when victory was certain. 1 Comparable numbers had volunteered to fight for the Republic of Salò even though most of them must have known that defeat was inevitable . The Resistance was thus not the nation in arms: it was about one-third of 1 per cent of it in arms, roughly the same proportion that had volunteered to fight the Austrians in 1848.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 5833-5842). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

There Must Be a Common Thread Here

Three links tonight with a common thread and I refuse to acknowledge any fault if I can't identify what that common thread might be.

One, "clans," as anatomized by Marc S. Weiner in describing his new book, which I haven't heard of until today  but now hope to read.  Put it in context: we all grew up on de Tocqueville, arguing that it is "intermediate institutions"--families, communities, churches, voluntary societies and suchlike that provide the ligaments of civic life.  Without these intermediate institutions we would all stand naked before the raw power of the leviathan.  Weiner's argument can be read as a response and rebuttal to de Tocqueville.  It is the state that guarantees our freedom, he argues, and the enemy of that freedom is the clan.  

Why the clan?  In Weiner's telling, the norm of the clan is the clan itself.  Preserving the honor of the clan trumps liberty.   If, for example (my example) our cousin has an improper sexual relationship, why then it is quite right to kill her because she has brought dishonor on the clan.  

It;s a refreshing argument, this sketch of "statist libertarianism, and it is refreshing to see it taken seriously over at the libertarian mother church, the Cato Institute.  Try tying it together (though I don't know how) with Suzanne Berger's Boston Review piece headed "How Finance Gutted Manufacturing.,"  The title is a bit of a stretch but the piece itself is a fascinating threnody to old-fashioned vertical integration.  Or more precisely to an enterprise that understood itself as woven into the fabric of its community and whose managers (but not its outside investors) wanted it to stay that way.  She fringes upon, though the does not specifically mention, the hallowed Coasean debate about "command" versus "contract" in the enterprise, and gives a plausible account of how or why we might have lost something important by shifting away from command.  Some  interesting responses also, including an oddly wrong-headed piece by Dean Baker in which he talks about German owners being "stuck with" their workers, whereas it seems that German owners have come to understand their work force as an asset worth preserving.

And finally, Dave weighs in with a link to The Atlantic's piece on Angry Young Men. "Won't be news to Buce readers," he says.    He's right: I've talked before about the anarchic energy of, say, Sherman's veterans or the young bucks without steadying adult hands on the Polish-Ukranian frontier--or the very absence of young bucks as promoting pacific resolution and good public order in Switzerland.  And upper body strength and the need, or lack of need, therefore. Still not sure I see the connection but I suppose there is something here  about old-fashioned men's work and the state as guarantor of order and of marauding gangs as a form of clan.

*****

And They'rre-off!

Am I correct to detect just a whiff of hubris cockiness in Nate Silver's account of how he hires, which might perhaps be titled "why I will get everything right while everybody else gets everything wrong"--?    Me, I'm still a big Nate fan, but I'm also looking forward to the launch of Ezra Klein & Co. over at Vox.Com.  "Looking forward" with optimism, though not reassured by the way they've buried themselves in a steamin' heapo o' pre-launch hype: we can only hope that it is the fault of the publisher and that the Kleinsters can surmount it.

Meanwhile I can't escape the intuition that David Leonhardt back at the Times is playing a game he doesn't quite understand.  "Three full-time graphic journalists" and "I was a math major in college" smell suspiciously like a lack of focus.

Whatever.  For your entertainment, see if you can guess which of the stories linked above contains which quote:

"...some innovative new editorial products that let us deliver contextual information more cleanly, clearly, and regularly."

"...trying to help readers get to the essence of issues and understand them in a contextual and conversational way,”

"I’m a dork,"

The Geezer Niche

I'm sure the marketing guys are all over this one but I've just noticing a to-me-surprising phenom in TVland: call it "the geezer niche."  In short, old guys.  Not exactly wise and loveable old guys like Life with Father, and not really figures of quaintly comic charm like Scrooge or Santa Claus although there may be some comedy involved.  I'm noticing a more nuanced and modern variety.

I suppose you could start with Coach Ernie Pantusso (Nicholas Colasanto)  on Cheers and  Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Conrad) on Hill Street Blues, although in both cases, the ticket of admittance may be that they were graceless enough to die in mid-narrative.  Aside from that I don't remember anything precisely geezerish about Coach.  Rather, I'd mark him down as a good, dependable funny man whose most memorable contribution may be that his passing opened the door to the young Woody Harrelson (currently verging towards geezerhood himself in True Detective).  Esterhaus is perhaps a better candidate, as one recalls the mix of hilarity and horror he generated by his lust after benign affection for a high school cheerleader.  

You get a bit more benign horror in Holling Vincouer (John Cullum) on Northern Exposure--Vincouer who wouldn't marry his pubescent sweetheart because she was too old for him: the Vincouers are long-lived and monogamous and Holling fears he would outlive her.  We also know that Vincouer's grandfather ate Ruthanne's grandfather in a snowstorm, so just edgy enough to be funny without upsetting matters.

I suppose others have noticed but I'm just now picking up on the idea that there is a streak of comedy in another and more genuine geezer--Corrado Soprano, "Uncle Junior," (Dominic Chianese) in The Sopranos, perhaps the only one of the despicable lot who could get his hand caught in a piece of heavy machinery without coming to a horrific end.  But there seem to  me to be a subtle shift here; whereas Esterhaus and Vincouer were charmers with just a bit of edge for entertainment, you get the impression that Corrado is a genuinely rotten human being who somehow achieves his moments of charm almost in spite of himself.

Which brings me to the one who I'd place one who stands alone--Roman Grant, the polygamous patriarch in Big Love.  As a wise man once asked--has Harry Dean Stanton ever made a bad  movie?  The answer is yes but it's a detail: his rendition Roman might get a few black chuckles but he is overall one of the most compulsively watchable villains in TV history.

]And finally--I still don't quite what to do with the one who started me down this rathole: Louis Kaester, "The Commodore" in Boardwalk Empire.  I'm still in Season 2 but so far I'd say he is as resoundingly awful a human being as Roman Grant.  Yet you can't help noticing how much fun Dabney Coleman seems to be having with the part.  He comes across as nothing so much as an old stage hoofer who figured he'd never get a job again, and can't fathom his own good fortune--I bet he blew off the invitation was a prank.  A genuinely awful human but still, as a certified geezer myself, I'd say being shot with an arrow by a naked Diana is a pretty cool way to go.

[Yes, he ain't dead yet.  But considering what comes after, I'm fancying that he might wish he was.]

Roosevelt v de Gaulle: What Was FDR Thinking?

The rest of you puzzle over Putin, I'm still trying to figure out de Gaulle.  No, not de Gaulle, but his "allies," in this case the President of the United States.  You remember FDR, the one in the wheelchair, with the cigarette holder and the benign (if icy) smile.

Here's the thing:  de Gaulle had one overvaulting purpose which was to preserve the identity of an independent French nation, aka "the Free French."  In pursuit of his goal, he stepped on toes, kicked shins, wounded egos. But he also had a clear and coherent strategy: he also understood that to achieve his purpose, his best path was to make the French indispensable to the Allied war effort (and to make sure that the Allies knew it).   Many--perhaps most--people who encountered de Gaulle during the war did not love him, but quite a few came to understand him.  Notable example, de Gaulle drove Churchill into legendary rages.   But Churchill was not one to let personal indignation blind him to pragmatic convenience: he usually found a way to accommodate himself to de Gaulle  because he understood that at the end of th day, de Gaulle was on his side.  And Eisenhower--he certainly had his disagreements with the general, but he was usually pretty good at keeping his relationships off the boil, and he seems to have understood just what de Gaulle could do for the common cause.

The puzzle is Roosevelt.  He seems to have encountered de Gaulle in a posture of sporadically contained outrage, laced with withering contempt.   Unlike Churchill, he seems never to have let down his guard.  Worse, his rancor seems to have infected those round him--Secretary of State Cordell Hull, for example, or Secretary of War Henry M. Stimson (though Hull who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, might well have wound up in the same posture without exterior assistance).

And why?   Particularly after D-Day, when the Allies were back on Northern European soil, and when it was clear that de Gaulle, vindicated, was evolving into an authentic national hero--what was the percentage for Roosevelt in persisting in trying to marginalize, even to humiliate, him?  Why not at least tolerate--no, why not embrace someone who was clearly emerging as the authentic voice of a liberated nation?

I don't have any answer to that one.  One might be tempted to say that FDR found de Gaulle "too conservative" for his taste.  Such a conclusion might have been a mistake--de Gaulle eluded and still elude simple characterization.    But in any event, it didn't prevent Roosevelt (or at any rate, his government) from maintaining cordial relations with the quisling Vichy statelet almost to the end.  One might speculate that Roosevelt found de Gaulle too cozy with then communists.  This would surely have been a misjudgment of the man who did more than any other to thwart communism in postwar France.  And in any event, it would be pretty rich coming from someone so chummy for so long with "uncle Joe" Stalin).

One is--I am--tempted to speculate that de Gaulle brought out the inner Roosevelt: a steely-hearted loner who really didn't like anybody very much, however well he may have concealed his isolation under a gauzy exterior of charm.  One might be tempted, but then you'd have  to explain Roosevelt's apparently genuine affection for Churchill--often at least as refractory as de Gaulle, yet a man who may well have been Roosevelt's one genuine friend.  As I say, I don't have a good answer to that one.  For valuable prizes, readers are invited to set me straight.

Great Men: a Matched Set

Once again I'm indulging my curiosity about General Charles de Gaulle who, among other achievements, personally created "the free French" in World War II by spinning threads out of his own gizzard.   You don't build such an unusual resume without being a difficult person and de Gaulle  was surely difficult.  People remember Churchill saying that "the heaviest cross I have to bear is the cross of Lorraine." Apparently it wasn't actually Churchill (it was somebody close to him).  But it's one of those remarks that lives because it sounds so right.  Here's a memorable occasion when the two alphas lock horns.  Churchill had become, shall we say, profoundly disappointed with de Gaulle, but he felt tht circumstances demanded that he try to path things up. 

 He ... carefully choreographed the meeting at Downing Street, telling [his secretary, Jock] Colville that he would rise and bow slightly but not shake hands, while indicating to the General the chair in which he should sit on the other side of the big table in the Cabinet Room. He would not speak in French but would converse through Colville as interpreter

Churchill went through this rigmarole when de Gaulle came into the room. ‘General de Gaulle, I have asked you to come here this afternoon,’ he began. Colville translated, ‘Mon Général, je vous ai invité à venir cet après-midi.’ Churchill broke in to say: ‘I didn’t say Mon Général, and I did not say I had invited him.’ 

After a little more from Churchill, de Gaulle began to speak, also correcting the translation. So the secretary left the room and called in a linguist from the Foreign Office. When he arrived, the two leaders had been sitting looking at one another silently for several minutes. After a short time, the interpreter emerged red in the face, protesting that they must be mad: both had told him he could not speak French properly so they would have to manage without him.

Fenby, Id.
 
Later:

The Prime Minister warned that some British figures suspected that his visitor had ‘become hostile and had moved towards certain fascist views which would not be helpful to collaboration in the common cause’. Rejecting the charge of authoritarianism, de Gaulle said he ‘begged the Prime Minister to understand that the Free French were necessarily somewhat difficult people: else they would not be where they were. If this difficult character sometimes coloured their attitude towards their great ally . . . [Churchill] could rest assured that their entire loyalty to Great Britain remained unimpaired.’ It was just the kind of statement designed to melt his host’s anger.

Outside, Colville tried to eavesdrop, but the double doors defeated him. He decided it was his duty to burst in – ‘perhaps they had strangled each other’. Just then, Churchill rang the bell for him. Entering, Colville found the two men sitting side by side, ‘with an amiable expression on their faces’, smoking cigars and speaking in French.

Fenby, Jonathan (2012-06-20). The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved (p. 175). Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

And on a separate occasion:

[W]hen the writer and politician Harold Nicolson said that, for all the problems he caused, the General was a great man, the Prime Minister responded: ‘A great man? Why, he’s selfish, he’s arrogant, he thinks he’s the centre of the universe . . . You’re right, he’s a great man!’

Fenbyn Ibid., 133. 

Ukraine: Population, Water

The Wichita bureau points me to a couple of Ukraine facts I haven't seen elsewhere. One, population is on the skids--down from about 52 million in the early 90s to under 46 million today. General mortality statistics look similar to Russia's with, notably, that absurd gap between males and females over 65--M/F ratio in Russia, 46 percent, Ukraine, 51 percent.  Just eyeballing the chart, it looks to me like the Russian population may be falling faster than the rest--or at any rate, the areas of smallest decline (or absolute increase) are all in the far west.

Sources: here and here.

Item #2, it is suggested that the Crimea might be in water deficit. This sounds plausible but a desultory Google search doesn't turn up anything particularly helpful: this is really the best I could do, and I  note that it is a few years old.  I gather that Crimea gets its electricity from the mainland--any risk that somebody just pulls the plug?

Nostalgia Isn't What it Used to Be (Senate Division)

Reading Robert Kaiser's nostalgia spasm about the good old days when there were nice people in Congress, I think it is time for the political equivalent of a bitch slap.  Okay, maybe Everett Dirksen was a warm-hearted boodler; he was still a boodler.  And if he is the best you can offer ...

But does Kaiser remember-- no, actually, I guess he doesn't remember--the 80th Congress, the Do-Nothing Congress, the Congress that made it their business that Harry S Truman accomplished nothing, nothing, in what they confidently assumed would be the sunset of his incumbency?

Wiki has the list.  If I count right, only four of the top 25 (in seniority) were Republicans but that's a distraction: most of the Democrats in the top 25 were the guys who would have been Republicans today: gentleman racists like Walter F. George and Richard Russell of Georgia, self-promoting lightweights like Tom Connally of Texas and genuinely rotten human beings like Pat McCarren of Nevada (said to be the last person in the senate who could castrate a sheep with his teeth--top that, Ted Cruz) (It's always seemed to me that McCarren did more long-term damage than his colleague Joe McCarthy because McCarren was more disciplined and purposeful, not to say more often sober).  Or Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, perhaps the most grotesquely racist of them all, against  tough competition.  And speaking of McCarthy, at seniority #25 we get New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, a McCarthy defender-apologist who presided over the Party of Chiang Kai-Shek.  It was Bridges (along with Idaho's Herman Welker) who blackmailed a colleague to suicide by threatening to expose gay son (yes, Welker didn't show up until 1951, but close enough).  Further down the list we get Owen Brewster, who mastered the stupid politician trick of building a Maine political career on support from the Ku Klux Klan.  Press on down and you come to Homer Capehart, the father of the juke box industry, along with his benchmate, William Jenner, who gave isolationism a new meaning.

Oh, I could go on.  Captious readers will say I've  stacked the deck.  Probably so.  I skipped over Ralph Flanders, Wayne Morse, John Sherman Cooper.  I also skipped over others whose record is more equivocal: people like Robert A. Taft who gained a reputation as the thinking man's conservative, giving cover and support to the worst lizards on the rock.   Still, I think there is plenty enough evidence to remind us that this is another one of those cases where you want to be careful what you wish for.  And evidence for the glum truth that maybe we aren't "in decline" after all--rather, we always were this way. 

Met HD Prince Igor

We took in the Met's HD of Borodin's Prince Igor today.  It was a first for both of us and I must say I liked it although I'd probably have to see it a couple more times really to get my mind around it.  Meanwhile, a few takeaways:

• They say of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov that the real hero is the chorus.  Maybe, but much truer here: I can't think of any other opera in which the chorus exercises quite so much narrative heft.

• Can you name any other opera which fixes so much compassion on the plight of a nameless peasant girl,married off as a sexual convenience and then discarded?  Or presents the marauder and his friends so unambiguously as a gang of loutish frat rats?

• Is there any other opera--Russian or otherwise--that gives God so slender a role in determining the outcome of military conflict?

• As a reconstruction of the only opera by an important Russian composer, this new production would seem to be an important Russian cultural event.  Yet it seems to have been hatched in Turin and launched and now we see it launched in New York City. Why isn't it at the Mariinsky, and where is Gergeiv?  Netrebko? Come to think of it, where is  Putin?

Fun fact: It appears that Putivi, locus of this Russian masterpiece, is in the Ukraine.

The Invention of the Ukraine

Responding to that Ukraine post, Brad asks:

Where did the Union Republics of the USSR come from? The Czar's empire was not organized in any such way, was it?

He's got a point.  I suppose the answer is: the usual mix of violence and fiction, with perhaps rather more violence than some.  The Russkies had spent a good part of the 19th Century beating up on the "Southern" components, most of which had cultures utterly unrelated to the Beloved Motherland, and knew it. Cf. Tolstoi, Haji Murat and Lermontov, Hero for Our Time, passim.

Ukraine is a more complicated case.  Like just about every state, it's a ragbag --Andrukohovych's point, I suppose. We know that today, part (but not all?) of the Ukraine has a culture that is "like" Mother Russia's, though just what part and just how much like is hotly contested.   We know also that the 19th Century was the great age of national invention. And we know also that, unfortunately for all concerned, the "Ukraine" is part of a great swath of mostly flattish land with few high-saliency physical markers--which is to say,  no defensible borders. where multitudes are often charging back and forth making life miserable for those in their path.   Frank Golsczewski summarizes:

  Historically, the southern areas of today's Ukraine were unsuccessfully claimed by the Kievan Rus' around the ninth and tenth centuries, though they were inhabited by Turkic or other steppe peoples, the Tatar Mongol Golden Horde, and the Crimean khanate, a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.  Only in the eighteenth century were they resettled by Russia (as Novaja Rossija, 'New Russia, using settlers from all over Europe), after the Russian Empire under Catherine II and Prince Potemkin conquered the steppe and Crimea.  

link.  Thus it seems that 19th Century "Ukraine" was a mélange of Russian Empire and Austrio-Hungarian Empire with remnants of the Golden Horde, along with Rusyns and Ruthenians (if and insofar as they are distinct) plus Poles and--oh, yes of course, Jews.    But  the late 19th Century brought about what you might guess if you're familiar with the history of any other European nation--an outbreak of Ukraniophilia with plays, poems, novels, and the inevitable maps purporting to show what "Ukraine" was and ever had been. The principal advocate/culprit appear to be one Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, whose ten-volume History of Ukraine-Ruthenia is said to be devoted to establishing the uniqueness of the Ukranian line.  Here is a modern critique.  It is said that Hrushevsky's own mother was a Pole and that his death in 1934 occurred "under mysterious circumstances."

Bonus extra: for your amusement, I copied the first long paragraph above ("He's got a point") and ran it through Google translate, first in Russian, then in Ukranian (neither of which I can read, though I can usually dope out the alphabet). The reader is invited to judge the degree to which they are "the same."

Он попал в точку. Я полагаю, что ответ: обычное соединение насилия и фантастики, с, возможно, а еще большему насилию, чем некоторые. В Russkies провел большую часть 19-го века избиения на "Южный" компонентов, большинство из которых имели культуры совершенно не связанные с любимой родины, и знал, что это. Ср. Толстой, Хаджи Мурат и Lermentov, Человек без свойств, повсюду.

And Ukrainian:

Він потрапив в точку. Я вважаю, що відповідь: звичайне з'єднання насильства і фантастики, з, можливо, а ще більшого насильства, ніж деякі. У Russkies провів більшу частину 19-го століття побиття на "Південний" компонентів, більшість з яких мали культури абсолютно не пов'язані з улюбленої батьківщини, і знав, що це. СР Толстой, Хаджі Мурат і Lermentov, Людина без властивостей, всюди.