Tag: history

“Continent cut off…”

The news this weekend is dominated by reports of how the entire EU failed last week to reach agreement with David Cameron on the next president of the EU Commission, and had to settle on a compromise candidate, Jean-Claude Juncker, supported only by the non-British faction of the EU. Only Hungary — despite its borderline fascist government — was able to garner Cameron’s support, while the remaining 26 EU members had to make do with the bare consolation of having their preferred candidate take office.

(This was right after soccer teams from many nations were brusquely snubbed by the England side, who could not be persuaded that the quality of the other team’s playing was such as to keep them from attending to other pressing engagements back home.)

Senior Conservatives were not magnanimous toward the defeated EU, accusing other national leaders of “cowardice” for refusing to publicly defame the EU leader whom they had agreed to, and would consequently be working with in the coming years, despite the fact that some of them had not at first considered him their favourite candidate.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said Britons “will be proud that at last they have a Prime Minister who has demonstrated that he puts the interests of Britain first — regardless of who or what is pitted against him.” Perhaps the leader most determined to assert British interests against Europe since King Harold II, who was also famous for keeping his eye fixed (on real reform). They were similarly disdainful of reports that Pope Francis has not completed a conversion to the Anglican Church, and are seeking further investigation of reports that a large ursine has been seen defecating in a forested tract. Continue reading ““Continent cut off…””

Liverpool accent

One of the things most migrants to Britain suffer from — regardless of whether English (of some flavour) is their native language — is a sort of dialect-colourblindness, the inability to recognise regional and class distinctions of accent and dialect. I can now more or less identify “northern” speakers, London working class, urban midlands dialects, and the accent that people refer to as “posh”, as distinct from the fairly neutral accent of BBC announcers, and I already knew the Scottish and Northern Irish accents before I came. I had to learn for my permanent residency “Life in the UK” test that the Liverpool dialect is called Scouse, while the Newcastle speech is Geordie, but I can’t recognise the difference between those and Manchester or Yorkshire speech respectively. And the important thing is, even if you can pick the right one out of a lineup, you don’t have the proper associations with them. Thus, I was completely unaware that northern accents are scorned, and many northerners are defensive about the way they are perceived. I’ve learned to recognise these accents, but the associations that British people bring to them are purely abstract facts to me. Similarly the various lower-class urban (see e.g. Scouse, above) and rural dialects.

All of this is prelude to an extraordinary comment that I came across in reading Mark Lewinsohn’s The Beatles: Tune In, the first volume of a projected 3-volume biography of The Beatles. Continue reading “Liverpool accent”

The long arm of the gay mafia

I was amused by the intimations that cropped up in reports on Brendan Eich’s dismissal as CEO of Mozilla that he had been (in the words of one comedian) “whacked by the gay mafia”. Now, the “X mafia” is a standard lazy joke, and the more nonviolent the image of the group whose mafia this is supposed to be the better the appeal to those whose livelihood depends on a steady stream of cheap laughs. But my first reaction was that for gay people to be accused of mafia tactics must be a marker of progress — people don’t like the mafia, but they respect its power! Surely the notion that gay people are too powerful would have been a difficult concept to formulate until very recently.

I was wrong, at least as regards the entertainment industry. In Terry Teachout’s fascinating new biography of Duke Ellington, Mercer Ellington is quoted as saying that his father was unconcerned about Billy Strayhorn’s homosexuality.

But Mercer also reports that Ellington believed in the existence of “a Faggot Mafia… He went on to recount how homosexuals hired their own kind whenever they could, and how, when they had achieved executive status, they maneuvred to keep straight guys out of the influential positions.”

The age of victimhood

I recently read Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands, a synoptic account of the Nazi and Soviet terror in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Overall, the book disappointed me somewhat. I was expecting something more profoundly original than it actually was. Most of what he had to say would be familiar to anyone who has read the separate histories of the Nazi terror and the Soviet terror. Where comparisons were made, they ofter reminded me of the dadaist antijoke that exists in many forms — all of them fairly arbitrary — going something like “How is the Pope like an orange? Answer: They’re both round, except for the Pope.”

Again and again I felt like Snyder was trying to say, “Look at how similar the Stalinist and Hitler genocides were… They were both racially motivated, except for Stalin. They were both devoted to extracting economic value from the bodies of enemies of the state, except for Hitler.” And so on. At other points he seems committed to pointing out how completely different the two were… except that then he has to admit that they weren’t all that different, and in many respects you can’t even separate them in time and space, or in motivation, as they clearly learned from each other, and in some cases intentionally or unintentionally collaborated.

But one remark impressed me: He pointed out that both Stalin and Hitler obsessively portrayed themselves as victims of their victims. Claiming the mantle of victimhood has become so pervasive as a political strategy — both in domestic affairs within western democracies and in international relations — that it’s hard to remember that it was once considered disgraceful, the last refuge of the pusillanimous. At least, that’s my impression. It would be interesting to see an academic treatise on the history of the victimhood stance.

Hitler famously accused the Jews of dragging an unwilling Germany into war. Stalin accused the starving Ukrainians of anti-Soviet propaganda by blatantly starving. The Germans dressed up prisoners as Polish soldiers (and shot them) to show that the obvious German aggression was really a response to an attack. Of course, the need to play at “just war” has been with us since the advent of Christendom. It’s hard to imagine Alexander the Great caring much about showing that Thracian soldiers had crossed the border first and hurled the first spear. But it’s also hard to imagine Bismarck feeling the need to dress up corpses in French uniforms.

And it wasn’t just the great tyrants. One of the most chilling passages that Snyder quotes comes from a German officer writing to his wife about the difficulties he had slaughtering Jewish children, who “flew in great arcs, and we shot them to pieces in the air”. But then he thought of his own children, and that perversely steeled his nerves: “I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse.”

If there is any application of this principle to contemporary events in any lands that formerly rhymed with Calamine, I can’t imagine what it might be. I remember, when we were living in Canada, reading an article in the newspaper about a recommendation by a panel of Quebec historians that the teaching of Quebec history in schools should be rethought to be more positive, less emphasis on the quebecois as perennial losers. I thought that was a great move, and would bode well for Quebec and for Canada as a whole if it were adopted. In the long term. There’s power in being a victim, until there isn’t, until the moment when it suddenly tips over into being pathetic.

King Camerute, holding back the waves

“Prime minister seeks to assert his authority over natural disaster”

Canute: “But it’s not a blank cheque…”

This was a sub-headline in The Guardian. He has pledged unlimited funds to the flood control effort:

My message to the country today is this. Money is no object in this relief effort, whatever money is needed for it will be spent. We will take whatever steps are necessary

However, before he can control the storms, the PM needs to assert his authority over his cabinet, since today the transport secretary said “I don’t think it’s a blank cheque.”

Of course not. Philosopher King Camerute was simply asserting the Buberian I-Thou relationship of the government to money. Money is not an object, it is a subject, and we must respect its concerns. The people whose homes are under water may feel that certain steps are necessary, but the money may have different feelings, and not wish to be instrumentalised in that way.

Compute the interest

Another comment based on Sharon Ann Murphy’s wonderful book on 19th century life insurance in the US: She describes an 1852 case in which the American Mutual Insurance Company tried to renege on a claim, where a preëxisting condition was found in an autopsy.

Not surprisingly, the jury sided with the beneficiaries; they “were out thirteen minutes, just long enough to compute the interest” on the original claim.

Indeed, the verdict is not surprising. What is most surprising, however, is that the jury computed the interest. I wonder how likely it is that a jury of twelve today would include even a single person capable of computing compound interest.

The 25th state?

Canadians used to accuse Americans of plotting to make them the 51st state — indeed, if all of Canada were to be a single US state it would only be the second largest by population. (I remember an article a decade ago or so that suggested that they talk so much about it, it must be their secret desire.)

In the book Investing in Life, about life insurance in 19th century US, there is a reference to the caution of William Bard, first president of New York Life Insurance and Trust Company, in insuring lives lived in climates potentially less salubrious than that of New York City.

For example, while Bard believed the climate of Halifax, Nova Scotia to be “as favorable to life as that of any other state” and consequently appointed an agent there in 1833, he was much more cautious about risks in western New York or the midwestern states.

Plus ça change — post-feminist edition

One of the most useful nuggets of compressed wisdom that I absorbed from the humanities portion of my university education was an off-hand remark by a teaching assistant, Paul Leopold, that “each generation rejects its parents and rediscovers its grandparents.” Implicit was that the rediscovery is often unintentional and even unwitting. It’s just that there is very little scope for real novelty, so those who are both eager to be new will turn away from what is familiar, and can then hardly help — particularly if they think they are avoiding influence by remaining ignorant of the past — but recapitulate an earlier generation.

feminism survey

It has commonly been observed that many women who came of age in the late 1980s and 1990s, heirs to all the accomplishments of 1970s feminism, who take for granted that they are free to shape their own careers and relationships, reject the word “feminism”. They associate the word with sins of their mothers (even if not their own literal mothers), and identify with various sorts of vaguely defined “post-feminist” ideologies, if they are the sort of people inclined to care about ideologies rather than just living their lives. A recent survey of American women found that among women aged 30-44, only 32% identify themselves as feminists, barely more than in the oldest (pre-baby Boom) age group. Among women aged 45-64 feminism has 41% support; interestingly (and confirming Leopold’s dictum) support seems to have revived among the youngest women.

My impression, from occasional glances at journalism on the issue, is that women wish to separate themselves from the “feminist” label, which they associate with negative attitudes toward family, men, and sex, and a generally rigid view of life, and denial of femininity. This is supported by research finding that current undergraduates were most likely to associate a random feminist with the following adjectives: man-hating, lesbian, unhygienic, angry, behaves like a man, unattractive.

I was reminded by all this by a remark in the chapter on women’s issues in Dominic Sandbrook’s history of Britain in the early 1970s:

For most of the 1950s and 1960s, feminism was widely supposed to have disappeared… On the left, it was often seen as divisive, distracting, and self-indulgent… Even articulate outspoken young women like Shirlie Williams, the daughter of the pioneering women’s rights campaigner Vera Britain, rejected the “feminist” label, which was thought to belong to the lost age of the suffragists. “it was,” she said, “a matter of generations.”

And the young Sheila Rowbotham, who… later became one of Britain’s best-known feminist writers, thought that feminists were “shadowy figures in long, old-fashioned clothes, who were somehow connected with headmistresses, who said you shouldn’t wear high heels and makeup. It was all very prim and stiff, and mainly concerned with keeping you away from boys.”

So, right before what now appear as the glory days of militant feminism, a post-feminist malaise had already set in, rejecting the word “feminist” and what was perceived as the joyless feminism of an earlier generation. I suppose it’s cause for hope.

A squash, not a pumpkin

A NY Times article on the spread of Halloween culture in Britain, includes this explanation

Britain’s adoption of the American holiday is perhaps not a surprise. Halloween was originally an ancient Celtic celebration in Ireland and Scotland, exported to the United States by immigrants. The Irish and Scots point to older Halloween traditions. The jack-o’-lantern was originally a squash, not a pumpkin; apple-bobbing began as a matchmaking ritual; and people wore costumes to ward off evil spirits.

A bit confusing to those of us who know that pumpkins are squash. What they mean to say, I think, is that before the pumpkin and its squashy compatriots migrated to Europe in the backwash of the conquistadores, the jack o’lantern was a turnip, hence the famous quip of Winston Churchill on seeing Stanley Baldwin in his dotage “the light is at last out of that old turnip.”

(I did a Google search to check the provenance of this quote. Amusingly, two web sites that mention it give diametrically opposed contexts. The website winstonchurchill.org cites a book Irrepressible Churchill for placing the anecdote as a devastating barb in the Commons smoking room in 1937, shortly after the end of Baldwin’s active political career. Another website cites no source for making it a “fond” remark after Baldwin’s death, in 1947.)

Civil wars in US and British memory

I commented a while back on the NSA and GCHQ naming their most secret programs of spying on their fellow citizens after battles of their civil wars (American and English respectively). I didn’t remark at the time, but this clearly shows the dominance of the NSA, since it is striking how little memory there is of the English Civil War, in comparison to the omnipresent shadow cast by the American Civil War over US politics. It’s hard to imagine a British nerd making a playful reference to battles of the English Civil War, except in an attempt to anglicise a prior US nerd reference to the American Civil War.

A minor example of the latter is the comment by a Republican congressman, enthusiastic that his party was steering the country toward a government shutdown, and responding to a skeptical question about the (Democratic controlled) Senate’s response by saying

Ulysses S. Grant said, ‘Quit worrying about what Bobby Lee’s doing and let’s focus on what we are doing,’ ” Culberson added. “We are focusing on what we need to do and not worrying about what the other guy is going to do. . . . That’s how Ulysses S. Grant won the war.

It is a telling statement about the current state of US politics that one party is portraying the other as their opponents in a civil war. (And, in return, they are being compared to terrorists and hostage-takers.)

I see this as an improvement over Republicans invoking the spirit of the Confederacy. Oddly, Representative Culberson is from Texas. Even more oddly, he preceded this invocation of Civil War strategy by saying “We’re 100 percent united!” I guess that’s the effect of civil war, to make the residue seem more unified.