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.
Pork People
I'm back at Coffee to the People after having breakfast at the Pork Store. I'm sitting at a different table and this one, I'm delighted to find, has a concert poster for "Not In Our Name" an anti-war benefit in Berkeley from 2003 headlined by Ani Difranco, who I love. Cool.
Absalom
p321 Shreve imagining Bon, "...It should have been me that failed; me, I, not he who stemmed from that blood which we both bear before it could have become corrupt and tainted by whatever it was in mother's that he could not brook...."
p323 Still Shreve talking to Quentin, "...and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girls' nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something young in the cedars like he never saw before..."
I haven't a clue what Shreve/Faulkner means by this, or what Ivan/Dostoyevsky means by "sticky little leaves", but it would seem there's some male descriptive tradition here that I've never known about -- though I wonder if it can be traced back to either Goethe or Byron. In this day, however, "sticky buds" sounds like potent cannabis.
"besides knowing that that sherbet [Judith] is there for you to take... and him [Bon] not used to that since all the other cups [women] that had been willing and easy for him to take up hadn't contained sherbet but champagne or at least kitchen wine..."
I must confess here that it's never occurred to me to compare women to beverages. Now I'm also wondering what beverage I would be. This is why reading is so valuable :-|
Next Shreve speculates about how incest might differ from other "fleshly encounter[s]." The idle curiosity of sister-less boys.
Troy 2
Still reading that other book. Finished the part where he covers what is now known about the Hittites and Mycenaeans (some) and about the Trojans and "Sea Peoples" (next to nothing). For someone who has spent far too much time reading and thinking about obscure areas of history (and philosophy) I have very little interest in subjects we are unlikely to ever know much about. The best case scenario would be our discovering some historical text -- carved into clay, probably -- by a precursor of Herodotus. How would we ever be able to judge the veracity of his (or her) account? Maybe "alternative facts" go back a thousand or more years BCE -- in fact I'm sure that they do. (I really like Kellyanne's "alternative facts" coinage. This is a term the study of comparative religion has always needed.)
What's more important? What actually happened over 3000 years ago or what the Attic tragedians, and Homer and the others, were able to make of it. Just as what actually happened to the characters in Absalom, Absalom! (nothing, in fact) is less interesting than what Quentin and Shreve see in this Rorschach-like story.
You can even say that what Trump does will be less interesting (though it does look like it's going to be compelling TV) than what the rest of us do with this situation. Will this turn into America's "Finest Hour" or, as an article I read suggested, is this just a Hegelian thesis, antithesis situation waiting for a synthesis.
My tendency to see American history as an echo of the Roman Republic is consistent with this Hegelian view, I think. Though I'd never thought of Roman History in that way. I've always viewed the swings between the popular and senatorial Roman factions as like a machine falling out of balance and finally toppling over. But I guess you can see the Empire as a kind of synthesis. And of course the core of this synthesis was that, while the Roman people continued to hold elections and the offices of the Republic remained, the real power was removed from their hands. If anyone before had doubts about why one would want to do that, they should be gone now.
Though I still think there is a chance for a synthesis that preserves the Republic. But that could change if The Opposition can't get it's shit together in the next several years. If instead we go all Italian, I'll have to reconsider the desirability of the Imperium.
Finally
Our rains are finally letting up. On the one hand I don't mind: We've got a good supply of water and snow, and I would like to start getting back to the gym regularly. On the other hand, now people are going outside to smoke again. Now we'll get to see if the air cleaner I bought for myself at Christmas actually works.
Marius to Trump
I mentioned Marius the other day. Back around 1980, when I put together a history of the fall of the Roman Republic, I started with Marius. After saving Rome from the Teutonic hordes, he came to represent the people (proletarii) vs the patricians and wealthy plebeians who ruled the Republic. This was the culmination of a process that started during the 2nd Punic War when the small scale yeoman farmers were displaced by the capital and slave rich latifundia. It took a long time for the Republic to come apart, but by the time of Marius the common Roman had no role in the economy and little status in the state. This left them open to revolution and the era of bread and circuses. The Rome of Livy's earlier books was over and all that remained was the most powerful military establishment in the West. Does any of this sound familiar?
Either Sulla's marching on Rome or Marius's seventh consulship marked the point where the wheels finally came off the Roman Republic. From here on there was a series of violent swings between the popular and conservative factions being in control of the state. This would continue until the victory of the Second Triumvirate and the start of what we think of as the Empire.
Anyone who has made it through Livy and Polybius has to mourn the passing of the Rome of Camilus and even of the Scipios; but it also has to be admitted that the really juicy history starts with Sulla. Sulla, Pompey, Caesar and the rest, made spectacular lemonade out of the lemons of the Republic's bitter entrails.
Polybius wrote one of the greatest introductory passages ever for his history of Rome, and his words anticipated the factors that would eventually undermine the Roman Republic, and probably ours as well...
Alas, I mis-remembered the source of my quote, but I still want to include Polybius so here is Polybius's opening paragraph, which I think is one of the wonders of written history, and all the more remarkable for having been written before 117 BC (when he died):
1 1 Had previous chroniclers neglected to speak in praise of History in general, it might perhaps have been necessary for me to recommend everyone to choose for study and welcome such treatises as the present, since men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past. 2 But all historians, one may say without exception, and in no half-hearted manner, but making this the beginning and end of their labour, have impressed on us that the soundest education and training for a life of active politics is the study of History, and that surest and indeed the only method of learning how to bear bravely the vicissitudes of fortune, is to recall the calamities of others. 3 Evidently therefore no one, and least of all myself, would think it his duty at this day to repeat what has been so well and so often said. 4 For the very element of unexpectedness in the events I have chosen as my theme will be sufficient to challenge and incite everyone, young and old alike, to peruse my systematic history. 5 For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in p5less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government — a thing unique in history? 6 Or who again is there so passionately devoted to other spectacles or studies as to regard anything as of greater moment than the acquisition of this knowledge? -Source: Loeb Classical Library edition, 1922 thru 1927
The quote I had in mind is actually from Gibbon and it goes like this:
In the purer ages of the [Roman] commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain.
-Somewhere in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
I should have known it was Gibbon from the sentence structure. Since Gibbon's subject is the time when this was no longer the case, when the average Roman citizen was marginalized, the statement hints that this reduction in the status of the Roman yeoman farmer in the late Republic -- like the similar reduction in the status of the English peasantry during Gibbon's time and of the American working classes since the 2nd World War -- can only have negative effects on the smooth running of the state.
The rise of the latifundia, or of industrial capitalism, or of the modern corporation, undermines the health of even the strongest state. The resulting instability, so evident in the dramatic political swings of the late Republic, can undermine the state and must change it to some extent. Trump is a puzzling choice to represent these people, but then so was Julius Caesar.
Labor Day weekend
Today is part of the Labor Day weekend so not all my usual hang-outs are open. I noticed that the Starbucks at the Chinatown Gate (opposite Cafe de la Presse) was open, so I am working there. Not surprisingly, and the reason I've never come in here before, it is swarming with tourists. The world's loudest woman finally left a few minutes ago -- in search of a taxi as the Wharf was too far to walk. (Why come here if you're just going to ride through Chinatown and North Beach in a taxi?)
Tomorrow is (traditionally) the last day of the tourist season. I'm tempted to warn the people around me that they need to be out of the city by Wednesday morning. Just a friendly reminder.
In fact, the tourists never really go away, but there are at least fewer Americans between Labor and Memorial days.
The navy of the old
At the gym today I noticed an elderly Chinese man walking toward me wearing a shirt or sweatshirt with lettering on the chest. I expected it to be his alma mater or possibly the school of his child or grandchild. Instead it said "Old Navy."
Perhaps this is the demographic Old Navy should be seeking out -- the old are cheap and not particularly picky about their clothes. Or maybe it would be better to say that their taste in clothes is as questionable as the taste of teens and tweens. Altering their branding to push the "Navy of the Old" idea would be easy enough, and The Gap could still come up with a new brand to appeal to the young.
All this has reminded me that I do need to run down to the Navy of the Old before they discontinue light-weight cargo pants for the year. I may already be too late.
