195. Summer to end of summer

Not exactly the Rocky training montage

At the gym yesterday I was thinking that we're down to the last month and a half of Greening season -- only a month until International Dragon Boat Races, which is my warm up for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. The good news is that I'm on the mend. My mysterious ulnar nerve problem seems to be resolving itself, and the rest has helped my wrist. My back is slowly improving. I will not be back to full strength by the first week of October, but I should be fully functional. Given the year I've been having, that's a win. At this point I'll be happy if I end the season with all my limbs connected and my faculties intact.

I would love to start a more intensive training period for September -- I'm not happy about the strength I've lost since I've been nursing my back and nerve -- but that would be risky at this critical time. Better to take it slow now and possibly crank it up a bit after HSB.

Summertime

Today the inland (hotter) areas of the Bay Area are supposed to hit the mid-100s F; tomorrow the mid-110s -- Phoenix heat. Meanwhile I'm still sleeping under double comforters. Aside from a number of Sundays (always Sundays, so far) when the SF temp has slipped into the 80s, it has been consistently cold this summer. That will probably change soon, maybe as soon as tomorrow, but SF has been almost too cold for me this year. (Let's see what I have to say at the end of October.)

TV

I've been catching up with my TV the last several weeks. I bought (and then resold) seasons 12 and 13 of "NCIS," so I'm only two seasons behind now. The show (the show runner, I'm guessing) is very good at using its bully pulpit. At least a couple times a season they highlight some good cause related to Navy and Marine service people or veterans. Not only is it a good thing to do, but the show's audience is not going to complain, even if it does take time away from the "entertainment." It's a win-win, but you probably still have to have a show this successful to get away with it.

This week I'm wrapping up "Castle," the 8th and final season. The show has a lot going for it, but I think it's been limping along ever since Castle and Beckett got together. (I wonder if part of NCIS's success is how Gibbs has never really changed?)

The writing this season has been sloppy. There have been two episodes inspired in part or in whole by psychology experiments (including the Stanford prison experiment) but one of them makes no sense by the end of the episode when you finally know all. Aside from my trick of picking the villain by the casting, I'm usually not that concerned with figuring out Who Done It, but if you had been attempting that with the experiment episode you would have been mislead and confused.

Still, when they just let Castle be Castle, the show is as good as ever. 

Hobart Building

Something has bugged me ever since I moved to SF...

See that blank wall in the center of the photo? That's the side of the, otherwise attractive, Hobart building, that was never intended to be seen. 

Some closer views of the tower.

Before the International Style hit SF, the intersection where Montgomery ("The Wall Street of the West") hits Market was a place of beauty. 

All that remains of these three buildings is the base of the one in the middle.

First Wells Fargo took down the building next to the Hobart and replaced it with a much smaller building next to their new tower (briefly the tallest in town). 

Then Crocker Bank sacrificed the top of the building across Montgomery so they could build their own office tower at the other end of the block. 

New Crocker tower at left with Galleria in between.

Combined, these changes meant that the blank side of the Hobart was revealed and that it was also visible for blocks.

There is now a plan to rebuild atop the base of the old Crocker building -- now a Wells Fargo, housing my safe deposit box -- and this may (or may not) help by blocking the view a bit. But, short of building something more fitting abutting the Hobart, I think something could be done with that blank wall. Something matching the granularity of the Hobart tower. Maybe. Anyway, some kind of mural.

Later that same day...

Just went out for a late lunch and to take some of the photos of the Hobart building above. Stepping out of the air conditioned Bank Cafe, I got a nose full of ozone. It's already warmer -- though not at all hot -- but the change in the air chemistry tells me that the wind has shifted and we are now swimming in air from the east and north rather than the usual air off the Pacific. Besides given me a Proustian flash of past time (the San Fernando Valley in the 1960s), this means we might indeed hit the 90s in the next several days. The horror! It will be a novelty to no longer sleep under blankets until the fog returns. And speaking of weather...

Hurricane Harvey

I've gotten sucked into a Facebook discussion of Harvey (the storm, not the rabbit) and to what extent this is a sign of climate change. (Now, I'm wishing that giant imaginary rabbits might become a sign of climate change.)

Of all the obvious indications and consequences of man-made climate change, I think this is one of the worst examples to point to. Hurricanes are just too unpredictable and it would not be unrealistic for someone to point to the 1900 storm that devastated Galveston as an example of previous storms that were on the same scale. And I continue to hold my position until someone can craft a convincing argument that the other weather pattern that boxed in Harvey, and sent it meandering around Houston and then back into the Gulf, was a consequence of higher air or water temperatures. That other weather pattern is what seems to set this incident in a new category.

But someone posted a link to a counter position HERE that I think is very interesting, without changing my view. Actually I'm kind of shocked I didn't make this connection to the Houston/Beaumont area as the Mecca of the petroleum economy/society. And he doesn't even mention Spindletop, which I would have done. It really is almost too perfect.

We humans are not very good at reason, but a storm is a kind of logic even a fool understands. Some percentage of the people flooded out this time will come to the conclusion that living on this coast is not worth it. (There are supposedly about 100,000 Katrina evacuees still in the Houston area. I would love to know what kind of decisions they make now.) Even the people who decide to stay this time will be less likely to stay next time, especially as funding for repeated inundations is reduced. And companies -- even energy companies -- may be less sentimental in their decisions than the average person. 

How many more storms will it take to convince a significant percentage of the population? I don't know. And how to make the transition from making better decisions about residence placement to making lifestyle changes that reduce the likelihood for even more destruction in the future? I have no idea. I still think that's more likely to be driven by economic factors relating to electric vehicles becoming cheaper than gas powered vehicles. We are much better at making that kind of comparative decision. (Though that's the sort of decision process that led to the off-shoring of so many jobs and the Wallmart-ization, and now the Amazon-ization of the retail economy.) 

And I fully expect a large percentage of the people who flee to higher ground will continue to deny climate change. Because stupid monkeys.

194. TURKEY TROTS TO WATER

The World Wonder'd

There's a new book out about one of my favorite Pacific War battles titled The World Wonder'd: What Really Happened Off Samar. This title is designed to appeal to people who already know something about the battle, and to keep Admiral Halsey spinning in his grave.

I've written about the battle before, but, I can't recall if I've written about the radio message. Nelson's flag message before Trafalgar may be more famous, but no radio message is more famous in the history of the U.S. Navy. 

At the time, coded messages were padded at both ends with more-or-less nonsense phrases. In this case, the phrase at the beginning of the message was TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG. Followed by the actual message FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR. Now, at the time, the part in bold was enough to upset Halsey, as Nimitz (CINCPAC) was questioning where the task force he wanted covering San Bernardino Straight was, and Halsey hadn't dispatched it. But then came the final padding phrase, that seemed so relevant that the people decrypting the message had not removed it, but sent it to Halsey along with the message, THE WORLD WONDERS. This drove Halsey into a rage as it sounded like Nimitz was very openly questioning his conduct of the battle -- which he was, but THE WORLD WONDERS was just a freak accident on the worst day of Halsey's life. (There's actually a Wiki entry for this message, HERE.)


There are two famous "action" tropes, one of which goes back to Homer. There's the scene where the protagonist puts on all his armor and weapons, at the end of The Odyssey, Ulysses, together with his son and father, armor up with Athena to assist them. In Predator 2, Danny Glover's character does the same thing, out of the trunk of his car, before going into the meat locker building for the big fight. The other trope is that the hero loses his main weapon or weapons and has to overcome while at a disadvantage. In Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character has to improvise explosive arrows in that final fight after losing all his commando gear. 

The events leading up to the sending of the message above, demonstrated that Halsey lacked the intuition (which Spruance, at that moment Nimitz's Chief of Staff, had in spades) of knowing where he should be on the battle field and what he should be doing. As a result, we get the battle I've written about before, with the escort carriers, destroyers and destroyer escorts, the sub-junior varsity, facing off against the cream of the Imperial Japanese Navy off Samar. A U.S. force intended and trained for anti-submarine and landing air support, took on and fought off -- arguable defeated, when you consider the loses on each side and who ended up in control of the battle field -- the Japanese in the battle that came closest to being the Decisive Battle both navies had planned on for decades. (The Battle of the Philippine Sea, won by Spruance, was actually more "decisive" but it looked nothing like what everyone had expected, as it was fought entirely by aircraft and submarines).

Had the battle been fought the way Nimitz and Lee (the U.S. battle force commander) would have preferred, the Japanese battleships and cruisers would have been confronted by a similar array of U.S. Navy ships. That would have been the battle everyone had long imagined. Instead, thanks to Halsey, we get the action movie trope which is far more interesting. Though, to this day, the world still wonders and speculates about how that other battle, between USN and IJN battleships, would have played out.


The YouTube series "The Great War" is currently covering the Third Battle of Ypres and has just explained how British general Plumer has noticed a way to counter Ludendorf's new defensive in depth approach on the Western Front. After three years of unimaginably bloody fighting, Ludendorf noticed that it was better to hold the front with lighter forces, but in depth, and counter-attack any advance. Plumer noticed that this meant the Germans would give up the first lines of their positions with very little fight. By taking only what the Germans were willing to give up, over time the British could make substantial gains a little at a time. This is not Patton's rock soup, but it is related to rock soup. 

I mention this, along with what I've said above about Halsey and Spruance, because it shows how long it can take -- three years during the Great War -- before commanders with a knack for noticing the crucial weakness of the enemy under new circumstances can work themselves into positions where they can achieve something. 

In retrospect, the First Battle of Verdun (we've just started the Second Battle) looks like madness, because the French seem to have been acting as though it was Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War. It would have made so much more sense to have treated Verdun like it was the same as anywhere else along the front. The value of that position, in 1916, was not worth the price paid to defend it. 

Stalingrad, thanks to its position on the river, might have been worth the price paid on both sides to capture and to defend it, though I'm not at all sure of that. But Verdun, if lost, could easily have turned into a dangerous bulge in the German lines, especially if the French had thrown their forces on its flanks rather into its teeth. Just speculation, of course.

The European armies viewed the American Civil War as an amateur show, and since the troops were almost entirely militia, there's some truth to that. But the lack of a large standing army, with an entrenched officer corps, made it easier for junior (and retired) officers like Grant and Sherman and Sheridan to rise to positions of command. I think Grant (and Lee) have reputations as field commanders that are better than they deserve, but Grant could have schooled the Entente Powers on how to go about winning their war. (The main difference being that, at the end, all the Union armies were under Grant's command, whereas the Entente was herding cats with five distinct major national armies in the field.)

A Failure To Thrive

I've collected a list of potential book titles including A Failure To Thrive. Has anyone ever started out with a title and then written a book to fit? And what would this book be about? Ignoring the non-fiction options, I suppose this would be about a person who passes through childhood and adolescence and into young adulthood so damaged that there is no future for him or her. The only question is how will the person destroy him or herself. Lucy Barton and Renee, from The Elegance of the Hedgehog, turn out to be surprisingly resilient, to thrive despite their early circumstances. 

It would probably be more striking, and even more believable, if the protagonist came from a more generous background. Of my young online acquaintances, the one most likely to fit this title is the one with, in many ways, the most going for her. (Actually there would be a tie here, with a guy with pretty stereotypical issues.) 

But why would anyone want to read this book? It could well turn out like Hunger (the one by Knut Hamsun -- it turns out there are several books with that title) -- and that book was a pretty complete waste of my reading time. Though I do like to tell the story of reading that and pleading with the character, by the end, to finally fucking die. In a way this is the ultimate anti-hero. 

Next time, Paper Bullets of the Brain (from Much Ado About Nothing). 

193. You will have only one story

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Jack London

A passage from Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton struck me as I'm re-reading the book. Here she's quoting a famous writer acquaintance, 

"You will have only one story," she had said. "You'll write your one story many ways. Don't ever worry about story. You have only one."

And this made me think about the Jack London story "South of the Slot," set in SF I just read. (See HERE.) One of my first thoughts was that it could also have been titled "The Call of the Wild." But now I'm wondering to what extent Buck is just an animal version of Big Bill Totts in this story. Buck came first, in 1903, but did London have Bill Totts in mind all along, and thought it would be easier to sell an allegorical tale set in the Yukon?

But what I've been thinking about even more, is that Jack London is the person I would like to talk to about what's going wrong in America. I think his perspective on the gentrification of South of the Slot, now called SOMA, would be very interesting. The world he described in this story is almost totally gone now. There are some last vestiges around 6th and Mission, but in general, the infrastructure that supported the lower and under classes in this part of the city has been methodically destroyed (phase one of "urban renewal") or is in the process of being re-purposed for the benefit of the middle and upper classes. 

The flop-houses and SROs that Thomas Pynchon wrote about in The Crying of Lot 49 are virtually gone now along with most of the work that provided a living for the people living South of the Slot. Even the shipyard around pier 70 is in the process of being transformed into a mixed use development with tech incubators and a thousand to two thousand units of new, up-to-code, housing. Is it any wonder that the descendants of the people London was writing about here, thought voting for Trump would be worth a shot? Even if they don't get anything out of it, it's still worth it for riling up the gentry.

And there's another side to this gentrification of South of the Slot, the trashification of the north. I wrote the paragraphs above at the Peet's on Market and then walked home -- across where the slot once was -- and through the heart of the previously posh Union Square shopping district. Based on the businesses you see lining the sidewalks of Grant street, the area is even more posh now than it was in the past, but when you look at the crowds on those sidewalks the picture changes. And not just because this in near the end of the peak tourist season. The days of hats on men and women, and gloves on women is long gone. If you were to bring back a gentleman or lady from London's time (or as late as the 1950s) they would be appalled by the vagrants and scavengers, but the commonness of the shoppers and sightseers would be just as shocking. I'm pretty sure they would see this as an invasion from South of the Slot, culturally if not strictly based on residential addresses.

Where Liberals meet the Alt-right

This weekend there's a to-do in town over some Alt-Right group attempting to demonstrate in town, or on the Presidio -- which is almost, though not quite, SF. What amuses me about this is that the thing you can not say in polite (liberal) circles is that most of the people who are making the most noise against the White Separatist factions, already live in (defacto) White Separatist suburbs. (These are the same people who drive their cars, granted many of them are hybrids, to oil pipeline protests.) 

First generation at university

I woke up Sunday to a news radio report on a California program to assist students who are the first in their family to attend university. It occurred to me that that would have applied to me, while I was in school, so I started paying more attention. One of the characteristics of these novice students, according to the report, was not speaking up in class or asking questions. This would be amusing to anyone who shared classes with me. Though, to be fair to the program, I was not at all typical since I had practically grown up on college campuses.

192. Art & Soul

An SF eclipse

This is the morning of the eclipse. Here in SF it's only a partial eclipse, and it's still foggy, so you can't even see the sun. So I'm surprised to see so many people, many in little groups, out on street corners trying to see the eclipse. They either have the special glasses or are pointing their smartphones where the sun probably is.

I find this disturbing as what they should be doing is joining me in trying to locate a virgin to sacrifice before it's too late. I approached several tourist families with daughters who didn't look too skanky, but they were not as public spirited as I had hoped. We may be doomed.

Art & Soul

This weekend was the Art & Soul Festival in downtown Oakland. I worked both days (I'm tired) but it went just about perfectly, so I'm happy. I had intended to take photos but was so busy I forgot. Here's the only photo I took, as I was heading to my sector Sunday.

Our debris boxes. The big one on the left holds all the toters we were using for hauling and for vendor stations. Some of the toters are on the street side of the dumpsters. Oakland's Waste Management uses a nonsensical color system where landfill is brown, recycling is gray, and only compost makes sense with green. And while SF's Recology toters are clearly labeled, these say nothing. The best thing about this year was that they had just repaved the streets downtown -- wonderfully smooth for dragging filled toters over.

My sector was a block of 12th Street, with food vendors and some porta-potties, and two of the four stages, including the main stage. Some of our (Green Mary) people came into my area doing roving sorting, but they were mostly the useless people who sort but don't pull bags or what they've sorted -- rather like OCD people who rake up all the leaves in a wind storm, but don't do anything with the leaves, so they just blow around again. And Oakland provided a crew of haulers working under James. James and I have worked together for years and, by Sunday, we really had it down -- which means that his guys had instructions to leave my stations alone until I pulled the bags. With a very few exceptions, I pulled every bag for them to haul. But until the end of the day, when I sorted down the stations as I took them apart, there were very few bags actually pulled, as I just pulled out the compost into green, compostable bags, that only I was using, so it was even easier to spot my bags that can just be tossed into the compost dumpster. I went through about four rolls of bags over the weekend, not bad considering that the event is a bit short (Noon to 7:30) and started out slowly each day.

The vendors are always clueless, so the best you can do is to go by periodically and sort the mess they've made. Yes, this is the sorting-and-not-pulling behavior I was just complaining about, but they have large toters instead of small bags, so it mostly makes sense to wait until the toters get full to swap them out and dump them. It worked reasonably well. 

The other problem area is the main stage and back stage. The security guy at the main stage asked me on Sunday if we could move the two stations in the crowd area against the wall/fence and I realized that would be better for me, too. So we did, and that helped. By mid-day the crowds there are such that I can only get in there at set breaks and with a bag, instead of a toter. So I would carry my bag through, clear the compost out of the two stations, and then go back stage and clean up the stations back there. Musicians and backstage caterers have an intense competition to see who can ignore the trash sorting instructions the most, and as usual, this year everyone was a winner.


I'm running low on content (or I've been busy with other things) so I'm not sure when I will post next.

191. America, Britain, and Canada

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On the streets

I knew that pattern of only loud, crazy women couldn't hold up forever. This afternoon I ran into a shouting crazy person who was male. Balance returns to the city.


Continued from last time...

We Could All Have Been Canadian

There follows a review about how nasty the Revolution was. It was after all, at the time, a civil war, and there is nothing more vicious. From that, Gopnik moves on to comparing the Revolution to the American Civil War.

Had the British won, we might now be taught about a fight between brave British emancipators and indigenous slaveholders, with the black slaves who defected to the British-loyalist side [and were returned to their owners after Yorktown] seen as self-emancipaters, as the blacks who defected to the Union Army are now, and with Washington's and Jefferson's [some of the owners who got their slaves back] rhetoric of liberty shown the same disdain we have for the not-very-different libertarian and individualist rhetoric of their heirs in the Confederacy. We would perhaps wonder, far more than we are allowed to, how radical Whigs like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine ever allowed themselves to betray their own Enlightenment principles by making the tragic error of entering into a compact with slaveholders.

Yes, I did hope they would eventually get around to integrating "Tory" into these party definitions, but no such luck. I presume Tory describes the party that both of these parties were struggling against, though he also says that they were in opposition to the "regular" Whigs.

...Three decades ago, Gordon Wood, in "The Radicalism of the American Revolution." asked us to see the Revolution in the broadest historical scale, and to realize that, whatever its failings and brutalities and hypocrisies, it represented a decisive break with doctrines of inherited power and monarchical rule, and a move toward democracy that had scarcely been so dramatically accomplished since very ancient times. Jonathan Israel's forthcoming book "The Expanding Blaze" promises to make a similar case: that the revolution was the great radical act of its day, responsible directly and indirectly, for the onset of the modern age. Abolitionism rose from the promise of the Revolution more than the Revolution sustained slavery.

Indeed, that abolitionism burned brighter in Britain than in the independent States, as historians have argued, has at least something to do with America's triumph: Britain could demonstrate that it was better, more honorable, than its former colonies at a time when such a demonstration was urgently sought. Then, too, the separation of the Southern plantation owners from the West Indian ones weakened a formidable lobbying force within the Empire...
...

The authoritarian reformers -- the empire, in other words -- have something to be said for them; and what is to be said for them is, well, Canada. Our northern neighbor's relative lack of violence, its peaceful continuity, its ability to allow double and triple identities and to build a country successfully out of two languages and radically different national pasts: all these Canadian virtues are, counterintuitively, far more the legacy of those eighteenth-century authoritarian reformers than of the radical Whigs. This is literally the case; the United Empire Loyalists, as they were called, the "Tories" who fled from the States, did much to make Canada. More than that, Canada is the model liberal country because it did not have an American-style revolution, accepting instead the reformers' values of a strong centralized, if symbolic, monarchy... a largely faceless political class; a cautiously parlimentary tradition; a professional and noncharismatic military; a governing elite -- an establishment.

The Canadian experience was not free of sin -- as the indefensible treatment of the First Nations demonstrates... Still, there is something to be said, however small, for government by an efficient elected elite devoted to compromise. The logic of Whig radicalism, in whatever form it takes, always allows charismatic figures undue play; there's a reason that the big Whigs remain known today while the authoritarian reformers mostly sink into specialists' memories of committees and cabinets. 

The first modern charismatic politician, John Wilkes, was among the greatest Whig heroes of the American radicals. Nor is it entirely accidental that he would give his name to the charismatic actor who killed Lincoln. The red thread of theatrical violence, violence as show and spectacle and self-definition, links the violence implicit in all cults of great men...

A couple times here I started thinking of Christian Tiejen's Toryism as being part of this "authoritarian reform" tradition, especially if you think of him as first presented in Some Do Not. And perhaps this is so, but I would have to know more about how this story played out in Britain after the Revolution, and Gopnik doesn't indicate if du Rivere goes into that.

I still want more, but this was so much what I needed to read that I'm still shocked that I should have stumbled upon it. And he doesn't really go back on the position laid out at the start. The position I can't argue with. And I'm glad he invoked the libertarian tradition, even if it was only applied to the Confederacy. The core libertarian values (free rein to exploit everything and everyone) are the most consistent American values from Colonial days to now. "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" was in part political, sure, but also signaled the rise of the middle class. This is why America was the Great Satan to Dostoevsky.

The Reichs

Yesterday I was thinking, as one does, about America now and Germany in the 1930's. The thing to remember about the Third Reich is the extent to which it was an after effect of the Second Reich. The House of Hohenzollern had been breeding a docile, leader craving population for a century. To expect that population to seize it's own agency was simply unrealistic. (The same goes for the Arab world today). The American population may be just as racists as the Germans were in the 30's, but they are as un-docile as can be imagined. I think it's easier to imagine the U.S. slipping into a chaos like Syria than into anything like the Third Reich.

Or to go back to my previous view, I can still see us going the way of Rome starting with Marius. That the population seems to be nearly balanced between the Blue and Red, supports this and the Roman history of alternating terrors. 

190. America and radical Whigs

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Still the New Yorker

I am still working my way through the bag of New Yorkers. Scanning the early pages I noticed Jason Epstein's name following a letter in The Mail. The content of the letter is either petty or an instance of setting the record straight. What amuses me is that, while Epstein's name still comes up now and then, what I mostly remember him for was the funniest feature I ever read in Architectural Digest. The subject was his apartment (with terrace) in the old police building, though the focus of the story was actually the relationship between Epstein and the catty, gay interior decorator who put the apartment together for him. (It was a wonderful apartment.) I still have that magazine somewhere.

At last!

I finally have discovered an article that asks the core questions behind the Trump debacle, "We Could All Have Been Canadians" by Adam Gopnik in the May 15, 2017 New Yorker.

And what if it was all a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America -- what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders' panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy...

I'm guessing this opening is going to be countered before the end, but I can't see how I'm going to be convinced.

...In plain American, is Donald Trump a bug or a feature of the American heritage.

...The quarrels that took place in New York and Philadelphia [in the late 18th century] went on with equal ferocity, and on much the same terms, in India and England. And though they got settled by force of arms and minds differently in each place, it was the same struggle everywhere. "Radicalism flourished in Boston, Bristol, and Bengal, while fears of disorder and licentiousness provoked rural elites in both the Hudson Valley and the English shires," [Justin] du Rivage writes [in Revolution Against Empire, Yale]. "As radical Whigs gained strength in North America, the political culture of the British Empire became increasingly Janus-faced."

I can't believe how far up my street this article is.

On one side were what he calls "authoritarian reformers"; on the other, those radical Whigs. (Both were seeking to sway or supplant the "establishment Whigs.") This isn't the familiarly rendered divide between Tories and Whigs; the authoritarian reformers were less fusty country squires attached to old English institutions than an elite executive class of intellectuals and aristocrats committed to the Empire and to the reform of institutions that were seen as preventing the Empire from being maximally efficient. It was a group of men who, in spirit and psychology were not entirely unlike "reformers" in Communist China, open to change for the purpose of reinforcing their own power in an intact hierarchy. The authoritarian reformers were "not a political party per se," du Rivage writes. "They were, rather , an ideological vanguard, a loosely organized group of politicians, publicists, and theorists." (Significantly, no famous names cling to the group, career politicians and businessmen like William Murray [perhaps THIS one], Matthew Decker, and Viscount Bolingbroke [one of those guys] were their mostly interchangeable leaders.) They wanted a strong monarch surrounded by a circle of aristocratic advisers; very limited democracy; reform in the Army and Navy; and a tax-heavy system of mercantile trade -- all of it intended to make the Empire as profitable as it needed to be.

Extended taxation within the Empire was central to their agenda. They sincerely believed in "taxation without representation," because they saw citizenship not in terms of sovereignty and equality but in terms of tribute received and protection offered. Pay up, and the British Navy will keep the Frenchmen, pirates, and aboriginals away. Samuel Johnson, who was hired by the authoritarian reformers to write the 1775 pamphlet "Taxation No Tyranny," captured the argument best: the men who settled America had chosen to leave a place where they had the vote but little property in order to live in a place where they had no vote but much property. With lucid authoritarian logic, Johnson explained that even though the American citizen might not have a vote on how he was taxed, "he still is governed by his own consent; because he has consented to throw his atom of interest into the general mass of the community."

Interestingly, the flaw in this logic is the same flaw that undid many 19th century Utopian communities -- the generation born into the new status quo never consented to whatever it was their parents may or may not have consented to. The Founding Fathers were born in the Colonies and probably knew little of conditions in England or of what their ancestors may have thought was a fair trade when it came to citizenship.

The radical Whigs, though they, too, were implanted within establishment circles -- grouped around William Pitt [the Elder] and the pro-American Marquess of Rockingham, [does Gopnik not know how many people have shared these titles?] with the devilish John Wilkes representing their most radical popular presence -- were sympathetic to Enlightenment ideas, out of both principle and self-protection, as analgesics to mollify "the mob." They represented, albeit episodically, the first stirrings of a party of the merchant class. [Now I want to know to what extent all these "hons" were involved in trade.] They thought that colonists should be seen as potential consumers. Alexander Hamilton, back in New York, was a model radical Whig -- trusting in bank credit and national debt as a prod toward prosperity, while the authoritarian reformers were convinced, as their successors are to this day, that debt was toxic (in part because they feared that it created chaos; in part because easy credit undermined hierarchy).

The radical Whigs were for democratization, the authoritarian reformers firmly against it. The radical Whigs were for responsible authority, the authoritarian reformers for firm authority. And so on. This quarrel, du Rivage argues, swept across the Empire and as much as it divided colony from home country, it united proponents of either view transnationally. Those we think of as "loyalists" in the American context were simply authoritarian reformers who lost the war; those we think of as "patriots" were simply radical Whigs who won.
...

No one at the time [of the Revolution], du Rivage suggests, saw what was happening as pitting a distinct "American nation against an alien British one. Participants largely saw the conflict in terms of two parties fighting for dominance in the English-speaking world. The scandalous high-water mark of du Rivage's iconography occurs in January of 1775, when Pitt (now ennobled as the Earl of Chatham) brought Franklin, then living in London, into the House of Lords to witness his speech on behalf of the American radicals, in effect sealing the unity of the single party across the ocean. This scene... was, in its day, as significant as that of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

...Had the radical Whigs secured their power in Britain, our Revolution might well have taken on a look and feel more like those of the later Canadian and Australian dissolutions from the Brits: a political break toward "home rule" but without any of the elaborate paraphernalia of patriotism attached to it... 

...Although his [du Rivage] sympathies are with the radical Whigs, he sees that many of the authoritarians' claims were not false. [The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps had to be created to replace the protection supplied by the Royal Navy.]
...

To be continued... 

On the streets

The surprising thing this summer on our streets is that most of the outrageously crazy (shouting and ranting) people have been women. Maybe the shouting men seem more dangerous and get locked up by the police? 

I'm at my favorite pizzeria which has a public trash container sitting adjacent to the bus stop out front. As a professional trash sorter, I notice anyone messing with trash (this reminds me of one of the many unforgettable Gary Larson, "The Far Side" cartoons in which dogs -- perhaps in two cars -- are locking eyes and wagging tails at each other while nuclear bombs go off all around). Today I saw something I've never seen before and can't explain.

A guy who looked to be a street person was breaking down the trash piled on top of the trash can just the way I would have in the process of sorting it. He was actually going further and, after removing the plastic from the cardboard trays that hold food and drink items before they are sold, and flattening them, he continued to tear them into smaller pieces before putting everything into the can. 


I assumed at first that he was looking for recycling, but there was no sign of that. No idea what his agenda was. 

189. Reading and writing

The problem with my new irregular pattern of blogging is that I forget to post. Sorry about that. Will try to be more regular in the future.

Writing 

Medium suggested this piece about Feynman and writing that I loved. (Here.) I can't believe I'm still learning new things about Feynman. I've been saying for years that if you really want to learn about something you need to write about it, or better yet, teach it to someone. And I could have gotten that from Feynman. 

What really surprised me is how the advice here overlaps with what you get from Strunk & E.B. White. It's also a variation on my technique for helping programmers debug their own code -- making them explain it to me so they have to question all the assumptions they forgot they were making. 

He even has the "reading the text aloud" bit that is the advice I most often give to writers (no indication that they pay any attention). I'd like to think that what is said here about using simple language and explaining things as if to a child, are the reasons Feynman had so little patience for practitioners of the Liberal Arts, who are famous for obfuscation. (Of course this is also the same reason I hate Gell-Mann and QCD. Any clever child would listen to the bit about "up" and "down" and seemingly randomly "colored" quarks and conclude you were just bullshitting them by pulling random terms our of your ass. Though I may be flattering myself here.)

More New Yorker 

I picked up the next New Yorker in the bag and was relieved to find more ads in this one -- I do think I may have caught the Summer doldrums issue.

This issue has a total of 34 full pages of ads, compared to seven in that other issue. (This one even has the hearing aid ad.) 

And it has a "Critic at Large" piece by James Wood on W.G. Sebald titled "The other Side of Silence." Wood was "stuck by how much funnier his work is than I first took it to be." I've talked before about how I would like to be able to click on a word to get an explanation of what, exactly, the word means to the author or to the character. In this case, I wan't to know what pharmaceuticals (or other drugs) the author is on now and was on for his earlier reading.

Though, to be fair, in this piece Wood and Sebald are talking about the difference between British and German humor and Sebald describes German comedy shows on television in this way, "They are simply... indescribable." So perhaps there is a Germanic form of comedy in Sebald's writing that I simply missed. 

I've now finished Wood's piece and it's interesting, but is consistent with Sebald's writing in that it is suggestive but without resulting in a flash of insight that suddenly makes all clear. The final paragraph is quite fine,

Sebald has some beautiful words in "Austerlitz" about how, just as we have appointments to keep in the future, it may be that we also have appointments to keep in the past, "in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished." We must go there, he writes, into the past, in search of places and people who have some connection with us, "on the far side of time, so to speak." That last phrase puts me in mind of a famous passage from "Middlemarch," in which George Eliot says that if we were truly open to all the suffering in the world it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we would die "of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." Most of us, she finishes, manage to live by wadding ourselves with stupidity. We survive only by ignoring the faint but terrible roar. In his great work, Sebald visited that far side of time which was also the other side of silence. He could not ignore it.

Middlemarch is on my heels like the Tristero. What to do, what to do? If I was Sebald I would probably catch a train for either Vienna or Venice.

Crane 

It's hard enough to swap out the HVAC equipment on top of a nine or ten story building under normal circumstances, 

but when you toss in an SF slope, it gets really interesting,

A truly 21st century moment

A man got on my bus with a screaming child and sat next to me. Then he got out his smartphone and quickly distracted and silenced the kid. Not a peep out of him for the remainder of the ride.

Don't know what the app was, but it gets my vote for App of the Decade.

The problem with the New Yorker...

...is that it sucks you in. I only intended to scan the cartoons but then I hit that piece on Sebald, and in the issue I picked up today (I seem to be drifting backward in time, Sebald's influence, no doubt) there's a critique of the new Hamburg concert-hall, the Elbphilharmonie. 

This is the structure that, when I first saw it nearing completion in one of the Architecture magazines, my first thought was, "Another Herzog & de Meuron project." Along with their museum in Madrid, these two projects are architectural variations on a theme.

CaixaForum, Madrid

Alex Ross isn't overly impressed with the "Elphi" as a musical venue, and he says less about the architecture than I would have liked -- still have no idea what the brick podium is used for. 

And in this same issue is a "Life and Letters" piece by Thomas Mallon titled "Jack Be Nimble" and subtitled "Trying to remember JFK." Mallon seems to be about my age, maybe a year older. (Wiki is more precise than the author, Mallon is under a year older.) 

We are in sync as members of our cultural cohort. The only differences are that he was attending Catholic schools and his parents were Republicans. I, and my family, were more enthusiastically pro-Camelot at the time. However, my parents drifted into the Republican party as they grew senile, I'm, sorry, I meant to say as they aged. And I was forced to revise my youthful faith in JFK along with my youthful faith in God and the American Way of Living Like the World Is A Store We Can Loot and then Set on Fire. 

Today, as I said when writing about The Road To Character, I'm more impressed with Eisenhower than with JFK and have long been aware that there are issues where I agree even with Barry Goldwater (drug policy, for instance). Though this is really just acknowledging that JFK was a politician and it is the job of politicians to compromise. FDR and Eisenhower made embarrassing compromises as well. 

To be honest, what kept me reading this political/biographical piece was not the politics but the nostalgia. Now I have nostalgia for decades I share with more recent age cohorts (the '90s seems to get short shrift in this regard. The music of the '80s is almost as big a thing as the music of the '60s, but no one but me seems to miss the '90s) but there is something fundamental about one's first decades, or even the first decade and a half. 

By coincidence, just the other day I was talking to a friend of a neighbor who had moved to Boulder, CO the year (1964) we moved away to SoCal. There must be a person out there somewhere who hated living in Boulder, but I've yet to run into them. Reminiscing about Boulder with people always ends up like talking about the One-who-got-away. And for me, thoughts of JFK and Camelot blend in with memories of the Flatiron foothills, the snow, the ungodly wind storms, and the general feeling of suburban American at it's zenith (based on auto styling, of course.)

Of course it is also mixed up with youth. With that period of your life where you consistently grow in most every way from one year to the next. And this was a few years before my fondest dream was personal emancipation from my family -- something that wasn't even a thing then (to my knowledge) but that I consistently dreamed of as my parents argued elsewhere in the house (mostly.)

Since this is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I've been reminded that that was also the summer cities burned across America. The assassinations were bad news that shocked and saddened us, over the hills in the San Fernando Valley we were aware of the Watts Riots in 1965, but it wasn't until I was faced with the draft in 1970 that the public side of life really affected me personally. For most of these years, the latest car models or the Fall TV programming were bigger news for me.

188. Meritocracy & housing

Problems with meritocracy

Besides the obvious problems (people who don't excel, for instance), another flaw of meritocracy is that, for the big winners, it doesn't stay a meritocracy. Once you're filthy rich it doesn't require that much merit to stay wealthy and to even build on that wealth. Which is not to say that everyone can manage this.

The descendants of the really rich simply become a new class of privilege you are born into -- in the same way that noble families in Europe started out as a kind of meritocracy in a much earlier era. Back when the Roman era was transitioning into the Middle Ages, positions of merit became inherited and a class system came into being. Now it's a system based on wealth (not just land) whereas then it was primarily a land based system. But this could change again.

The never-ending saga

Replacing our bad sump pump should happen next week, on their third visit. Given the difficulty of their getting a truck in here, I would have brought along a replacement pump "just in case." But I don't run the world.

In the end of our alley, there are two gates. One was replaced last year and now the other gate has been patched and repainted. It looks pretty good to me,

On the right.

This is the color of their other fences, so I guess they had some extra paint on hand. I would have painted it to match the rest of this fence, myself.

Profiles in crazy

Earlier today I was sharing a large table at Starbucks. The person on the end to my right was a somewhat disheveled looking older woman (at least as old as me) who sounded normal enough at first, but after an hour or so I became aware that she was probably crazy in a very similar way to someone in my building who imagines herself to be the subject of a huge conspiracy. 

This woman caught my ear as she kept trying to make an appointment for an ophthalmologist. In fact, from what I could hear -- casually eavesdropping while also working on something else -- she may have made several "emergency" appointments for her acute cornea problem. Between making these appointments she was calling regulatory or industry associations to complain about some doctor who had, to simplify, done her wrong. As I said, she sounded perfectly normal most of the time, but got quite emotional while trashing this doctor. 

I really wanted to look to see if she showed any sign of this emergency problem she complained of, but my angle was bad and it would have been too obvious. Insects, and even prey animals, have such an advantage when it comes to nonchalantly eyeing neighbors. No wonder horses don't miss a thing.

The Van Ness corridor

Had a number of things to do along Van Ness today so I got to review the latest crop of new development along Franklin/Van Ness/Polk. There's not one of them that turned out well. The hospital isn't finished on the outside -- and I still have some hope for it -- and there's a smaller building at Clay and Larkin that isn't bad, but the others are so bland that they look like boring commercial buildings even though I'm pretty sure they are all residential. I think they were planned at a time when the need for housing was so intense that the developers thought they would just be wasting money making them look interesting.

In fact, so much new housing has hit the market, or is about to hit the market, that rental rates and condo values are starting to moderate just a bit. Though, to be fair to the developers, this could mean that they are in a better position to drop prices since they haven't invested in features that would appeal to the high end.

Given the fairly desperate housing situation in SF, it's amazing to me how many units are sitting empty. At least one, and possible two of the small buildings on my alley are vacant. Virtually all of the subsidized housing in Chinatown -- and there's a lot -- is being renovated and has been vacant for a year or more. Who thought it was a great idea to do all those projects at the same time? It makes no sense from any perspective except that of the contractors who I imagine are getting a premium for their work.

I'm not saying that there will be a glut of housing on the market in 2018, but I don't see how all this new and renovated housing could fail to alter the market.