190. America and radical Whigs

Link to Table of Contents

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.

187. Trump as Commodus

If you leave, they will come

Yesterday I was home all morning dealing with the sump pump and cleaning the building (while waiting for the pump guy). Then I went out a couple hours in the early afternoon for lunch before returning home. The United States Post Office figured early afternoon would be the best time to find me at home, to sign for my new Vegetarian Shoes.

Since they "missed" me, I had to walk to the PO on the other side of North Beach (so, past two closer POs) to collect the shoes that I'm now wearing. I'm still at the cafe across from the PO -- a place I used to frequent back when the Trader Joe's a block away was still the closest one to my house.

Making sense of the senseless

Someone shared on Facebook yet another interesting political take on what the Trump Presidency really means. This one is by Andrew Bacevich in The Nation (here). What is particularly frustrating is that I agree with everything he says to here:

STARTING OVER

I am by temperament a conservative and a traditionalist, wary of revolutionary movements that more often than not end up being hijacked by nefarious plotters more interested in satisfying their own ambitions than in pursuing high ideals...

Right after this he tosses Burke, and any notion that "the people" have consciously made the decisions they have made, out the window and comes up with an action plan for a commonwealth in the best of all possible worlds.

Previously, he points out something I hadn't thought of, that American Presidents have been increasingly "Imperial" since FDR, and that it's just the insane casting of Trump in this role that has shocked us into noticing this. So, rather than looking at an American version of the fall of the Roman Republic, we're looking at the American version of the end of the Pax Romana and the reign of the Good Emperors. Interesting.

But then he comes up with a Liberal view of what America stands for (something America has never stood for) and expects the people who voted for George W. and Trump to suddenly reveal themselves to be a -- momentarily confused -- philosopher electorate, and right our ship of state. What no one seems willing to acknowledge is that it is our form of democracy that is in question. Just as the Founding Fathers never imagined semi-automatic firearms, they never imagined such an irresponsible and ignorant electorate. (I wouldn't like the electorate they were familiar with either. If you admit that the Enlightenment was naive, then where do you go from there in establishing good government? I have no clue.)

The New Yorker

Someone dropped off a bag of New Yorker magazines the other day that ended up in my care. I've been working through the cartoons. But this evening I noticed a Qualcomm ad on the back page of one issue and thought it might be interesting to note the advertisers today, as compared to back in the 1970s when I was a regular reader. Only there aren't any. Or very few. Here's the list of ads for this issue: 

1. A full page for Citi -- but American Airlines and Master Card are also visible so it may be co-advertising.
2. A vertical column for The Metropolitan Opera
3. A full page for Accura
4. A full page for ehrmantapestry.com
5. Two vertical columns for The New Yorker Festival sponsored by mastercard and Land Rover
6. A vertical column for healthyish ("a new site from Bon Appetit")
7. A full page for New York Presbyterian Hospital
8. A full page for Qualcomm
9. Two vertical columns split between five advertisers (plus one small ad for the New Yorker. I haven't included self-advertising)

So all together seven full pages of ads out of eighty printed pages. How do they manage to stay in business? Though, with my original thought in mind, the only ads that would have puzzled me in the '70s would be the website and Qualcomm and I guess the Japanese luxury car instead of Lincoln -- who has the first two pages in the next issue I picked up. Maybe the first week of July is not prime time?

Quicker than the automat

I was sitting in the Bank Cafe when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something launched from near the Peet's counter toward where people were sitting and thought, "Wow, they have introduced an exciting new form of table service." But instead it was a crazy woman tossing things around the place. She was chased out.

83. Chairs + Democracy

Previous - 82. I've decided

Chairs

A long time ago I wrote about my fondness for the oak cabinetry and tables in the Peet's on 4th Street, opposite Whole Foods. The only thing I didn't like were the chairs that were made of a wood that looked almost like a cheap plywood.

I was reminded of this because this new Peet's (on Market) and another location I peeked into the other day, have a new style of chair I really like. I would describe it as being inspired by Eames chairs, 

Well, now that I look at the Eames originals, the resemblance is not that close, but they are closer to this than to the standard wood cafe chairs they had before.


...or at least by Mid-century modern chairs. Here, the chair wood seems to be more refined than the counters and other fixtures -- the reverse of 4th Street. 

Political philosophy

One good thing about the election of Trump is the way it is provoking political and philosophical debate on government in general and democracy in particular. I'm reading an interesting article in The New Yorker that has got my philosophical juices flowing.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians.... 

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs.... 

Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable....”

Since I've advocated licenses for both procreating and voting, I'm not unsympathetic to this notion except that I view the people Mill wanted to give extra votes to as a huge part of the problem. People with university degrees often have no clue what life is like for the common man. That's part of the reason we have consistently ignored the economic fate of the working classes since WW2. First blacks, who had been employed in war industries, were abandoned and then everyone was left to sort out the consequences of the David Ricardo inspired off-shoring of American jobs starting in the 1970s. The notion that workers could be re-trained and educated to take more intellectually demanding jobs ignores the fact that this is not an option for many. And this ignorant cohort is precisely the source of support for fascist movements.

The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do...

I wish this were true but I question this conclusion. What data is it based on? The history of "democracy" is pretty thin and short. Athens was quite fond of war and their optional invasion of Syracuse is a fairly exact analogue for our invasion of Iraq. Venice was more of a plutocracy. The U.S. and European democracies have started or participated in any number of wars against 3rd World countries. Not to mention U.S. wars against Mexico and Spain. 

Like many people I know, I’ve spent recent months staying up late, reading polls in terror. The flawed and faulty nature of democracy has become a vivid companion. But is democracy really failing, or is it just trying to say something?

This is the key question. As little as I like the treatment, I can't help thinking this is a necessary ordeal if we are not to go the way of the Roman Republic. It would be very disagreeable to have to one day acknowledge Donald Trump as the Savior of the Republic, but it's not impossible. What would be worse however is if he failed to create a fairer economic playing field for the working classes of all colors.

Next - 84. Absalom