Liberty for all

“When I am old, I shall write criticism; that will console me, for I often choke with suppressed opinions.”

Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Georges Sand

I feel compelled to unburden myself on the topic of libertarianism.  There are all sorts of people who describe themselves as libertarians, and it’s hard to make sense of the mix.

• You have gun-obsessed Rambo-wannabees like the guy who created the picture here (Click on it to visit his blog if you have a robust tolerance for the way out!).
• There are folks like Clint Eastwood who once remarked, “My political philosophy is simple.  Everybody should leave everyone else alone.”  Yep, good one, Clint.  That’s a real roadmap for governing a modern industrial state of 300 million.
• There are those inpsired by the crackpot intellectual, Ayn Rand, who at least must be granted the credit for inventing a new literary genre, the philosophical soap opera.
• And then there are thoughtful people, like a fellow I work with, who are quite reasonable but seem to revel in the libertarian cachet of ornery contrarian thinking.

I often find myself in agreement with specific critiques of libertarians, whether they are left-libertarian nearly-anarchists or right-libertarian, free market ideologues.  In fact, many of the respectable, i.e., rational and scientific, critics of the global warming point of view (AGW) are, in fact, libertarians.  But, in the end, I find it to be a bizarre and utopian political philosophy that is in full denial of the facts of human history.  As a point of view that influences the political choices you make, yes, I can see that, but anything more…?  Closer to wacko.

For libertarians of all stripes, the state, um…I mean, THE STATE, is the greatest evil.  The state, and “collectivist” actions that seek to improve life, or enslave others.  I’m all against enslavement, but I rather like improving life, even if the agent is the evil state.  Libertarians would say that’s a Faustian bargain, bound to end in the Gulag or the death camps.

Why The State?  Why not money?  Isn’t that the root of all evil?  Or…language?  Without language, now state, no money!  It’s a rather simplistic point of view.  Are they realistic in their expectations of what would succeed the present situation of vigorousl state activity?  Do they care?  Do they want to revert to pre-industrial, geographically isolated “eco-regions?”  I dunno…

Sure, some state solutions fail.  Bureaucracies are cumbersome and can mutate into strange things that frustrate the very improvements they were created to bring about.  What else is new in this, the fallen state of mankind?

As a practical political philosophy, liberatarianism is pure hokum.  People advocating it are either naive or dishonest.  Naive if they believe that a general attempt to apply libertarian principles would result in anything other than the most powerful economic and political forces capturing the state and bending it towards their own ends, which is what they are always trying to do; or dishonest because they are part of those forces and they see libertarianism as a nifty way to pursue that goal under cover.  Mostly the former, I think, because corporate and political power has captured so much of state power today, that libertarianism is probably more of an annoyance than a help.

I miss Venice

I last spent time in La Serenissima about thirty years ago.  How time … [insert cliche here.]  I was on my way to India via the land route, and stopped for a week or so, drunk with architecture.  It was September, and I thought that the high tourist season would be over by then, but I was wrong.  I spent my first night on the Lido beach, I recall.  The sight of boats laden with tourists gliding through the dark, surrounded by crowded walkways, reminded me of Disneyland, but I knew why I was there.

With daylight, I found my way to the Giudecca, the Jews’ island, where the International Youth Hostel was.  I ate for free during the several days of the Festival of Unity staged by the Communist Party – delicious.  The irony was tasty too – I am neither an observant Jew nor a communist.  Moreover, the Jewish ghetto of Venice was never located on that island, which is home to one of the great Renaissance monuments, the church of Il Redentore  by Palladio.

Venice seems to have a special place in the imagination of Europeans, even Italians, as well as tourist hordes worldwide, and it is featured in films often. Two films I like very much that feature Venice are Italian for Beginners and Bread and Tulips, one Danish, one Italian, both romantic comedies.  Then there are the films I don’t like, and films I thought were great but that I’m too scared to watch again.

When I was studying the history of architecture, a grad student told me that “everyone loves Venice.”  That is, all architects and planners, regardless of their stylistic bent or ideology (and the latter can be pretty fierce among architects – intensity seems inversely proportioned to the number of completed projects…) all point to the city of Venice as the exemplar of whatever they hold most dear.  It is often cited as a supreme example of “organic” urban growth, and indeed, from the air, it looks sort of like a schematic fish!  I have always thought the Grand Canal, snaking through it, looks like the main intestinal tract in higher animals, and once again, that is, sort of, what it is for the city as a whole.

Now, the city is a fossil, without an economy independent of tourism, although we shouldn’t despise it for that since in our “spectacular age,” tourism is an industry like any other.  The sinking has stopped with the cessation of pumping in Mestre and other places, but high water, as always, is a problem.  The flood gates are under design to preserve the physical fabric of the place from inundation, but the lower stories  of many structures, already sunken to the point that portions are permanently submerged while they were designed for occasional flooding, are crumbling and need shoring up.

I don’t really care – the city is a physical creation unlike any other in the world and should be appreciated for that beyond all else.  It is a monument to the amazing creativity of the urban collective, and it provides an ideal point against which to measure any urban fantasy, because it was as real as real can be for centuries.  Pity it, laugh at its not-too-clean canals, dismiss it as a decaying urban theme park:  what city can claim to have been so powerful, so rich, so influential, and so fantastically beautiful in a way unmatched by anyplace on earth for so long?

Oh, and then there’s that Fourth Crusade, with its never-ending lessons for the rest of us…

The Little Ice Age – View from Versailles

Baby, it’s cold out there!!

From the memoirs of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, a blast from the past reporting on the Little Ice Age and the horrible effects of global cooling!  An excerpt from Chapter XLIV:

One of the reasons Madame de Maintenon had brought forward, which much assisted her in opposing the siege of Lille, was the excessive cold of this winter [1708-09]. The winter was, in fact, terrible; the memory of man could find no parallel to it. The frost came suddenly on Twelfth Night, and lasted nearly two months, beyond all recollection. In four days the Seine and all the other rivers were frozen, and,—what had never been seen before,—the sea froze all along the coasts, so as to bear carts, even heavily laden, upon it. Curious observers pretended that this cold surpassed what had ever been felt in Sweden and Denmark. The tribunals were closed a considerable time. The worst thing was, that it completely thawed for seven or eight days, and then froze again as rudely as before. This caused the complete destruction of all kinds of vegetation—even fruit-trees; and others of the most hardy kind, were destroyed. The violence of the cold was such, that the strongest elixirs and the most spirituous liquors broke their bottles in cupboards of rooms with fires in them, and surrounded by chimneys, in several parts of the chateau of Versailles. As I myself was one evening supping with the Duc de Villeroy, in his little bedroom, I saw bottles that had come from a well- heated kitchen, and that had been put on the chimney-piece of this bed- room (which was close to the kitchen), so frozen, that pieces of ice fell into our glasses as we poured out from them. The second frost ruined everything. There were no walnut-trees, no olive-trees, no apple-trees, no vines left, none worth speaking of, at least. The other trees died in great numbers; the gardens perished, and all the grain in the earth. It is impossible to imagine the desolation of this general ruin. Everybody held tight his old grain. The price of bread increased in proportion to the despair for the next harvest. The most knowing resowed barley where there had been wheat, and were imitated by the majority. They were the most successful, and saved all; but the police bethought themselves of prohibiting this, and repented too late! Divers edicts were published respecting grain, researches were made and granaries filled; commissioners were appointed to scour the provinces, and all these steps contributed to increase the general dearness and poverty, and that, too, at a time when, as was afterwards proved, there was enough corn in the country to feed all France for two years, without a fresh ear being reaped.

Ahhh…civilization!

Forget this ah…wilderness, back to nature stuff!  Get with the real, the civilizing program. Why does everyone I know recoil in horror when I show them pictures of rococo interiors or drag them into the Met period rooms?  How far we have come from our roots.  The book, The Age of Comfort by Joan DeJean recalls them to us, with style.

The 18th century English may have had the edge in satire, hands down (French caricatures of the time seem to me to be crude in comparison with what the Brits were able to produce; see Gatrell’s book and these posts) but the French had it in the style realm.  Ms. DeJean’s book narrates how our homes came to be what they are, why French style has been synonymous with style for so long, and reveals the origin of toilets (no, the English did not invent them), blinds and curtain treatments, sofas, armchairs, night tables,  bidets and boudoirs, living rooms, reading rooms, and the whole notion that one’s architectural surroundings should encourage a way of life, or reflect one’s consciously held values of the good life.

She describes the rise of cotton as the darling of the fashion industry, indeed, the rise of a fashion industry is itself a part of her subject.  Looking at 18th century images of people today we may feel they are over dressed and formal, but compared to their fathers and mothers, they were practically naked.  Such freedom – as Rousseau said, man born free, is everywhere in chains… Is the first step towards liberty to dress well?  No wonder Oscar Wilde was so fond of French culture.

Today, such philosophical notions are part of the standard training of architects and architectural historians, but their origin is usually traced to the Bauhaus, the Functionalist idea,  William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement.  Who would have joined Morris in a spiritual marriage with Francois Boucher, but they are brothers under the skin after all.  Decoration was an almost ethical pursuit for the Age of Comfort:  it emodied ideals of life, leisure, sex, romance, and the development of the intellectual and moral self.   So much for rococo frivolity!  What could be more serious than pleasure!

Date in history

Today is the first night of Hanukkah, that minor historical commemoration that American Jews have transformed into a non-Christian Xmas, just to get into the holiday spirit.  David Brooks, the muddle-headed conservative columnist I used to love to hate (I stopped reading him, so now I don’t care what he writes.) actually had a decent column about the history of the day – maybe his niche is really popular historical writing.  Anything but present-day affairs.

Just a remembrance of a revolt of religious fanatics, Jewish ones (fundamentalists?) against those lovable, rational, cultured, Hellenizers who were ruling Judea at the time.  Lots of Jew-honchos thought the way to go was to get with the Greco-civilization program, but Judas Maccabeus disagreed.  He and his terrorist crew decided to kill off the collaborators and make things hot for the Greeks.  Well, that’s my reading of it, and I tend to side with the moderates. 

Miracles and God, and candles burning on despite the lack of oil, that was all embroidered on later.

Does it get better than this?

Who better than MAD to satirize the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction, aka MAD?

Thanks so much to Doug and Scott of The Mad Cover site and The MAD Store for digging up this old favorite of mine!

Chosen few

The Bible, the Book of Genesis in particular, has been coming up in my daily rounds, lately.  I’ve been on a Bible binge of late:  read the King James Five Books of Moses, got the Wolverton illustrated version, and was just looking at some nice linoleum prints of the text in my local library.

And…R. Crumb’s long-anticipated illustrated version of the first book of the Bible, “All 50 chapters!  Nothing left out!” has arrived at last.  For devotees of Crumb or the good book, it’s a happy day.  Crumb has played it straight, so if you are hoping that he has turned the stories into an excuse for weirding us out, you will be disappointed.  If you doubt it, look at his representation of Onan in the leading image of this post:  Who would have thought that coitus interruptus would be treated with such discretion by the creator of the Snoid, Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and innumerable other phallic maniacs?

He stays very close to the text, although the words are not my favorites, but a modern translation, and he’s done a lot of research.  He did take a liberty with the serpent – showing him as an upright lizard with legs rather than a snake – or did he?  In his notes, he gives a convincing justification for his change from tradition.

Abraham is the patriarch to whom God makes an offer that he cannot refuse.  He really can’t - declining an offer from Yahweh is not an option.  Somehow, I feel that the story of Abraham and Isaac is the center of the whole convenant thing between Jehovah and the Jews.  Was it really such a good deal for the Jews to be the Chosen People?  It had advantages, but oy!, in the long-term?  There really wasn’t a choice in the matter, maybe that’s the ultimate lesson of the story.

Which brings us up to the present time:  Marek Edelman was remembered in an obituary in the New York Times yesterday.  Edelman was the last survivor of the Jewish uprising – he didn’t think that word was appropriate – against the Nazis as they moved to destroy the Warsaw ghetto and murder all of its inhabitants…liquidate is the word that everyone uses.  Apparently, he was prone to speaking inconvenient truths, are at least, truths as he saw them.  He dismissed the word “uprising” saying it was simply the desperate attempt by a couple of hundred people to determine when they would die and how.  There was not question of success.  He was not keen on Israel or Zionism.  He decided to remain in Poland all his life, a fact which drove some Jewish scholars of the Holocaust batty.  He ridiculed the notions of heroism that people retroactively assigned to some peoples’ actions, while others, those who went quietly to their deaths, were categorized as passive.  He said they only did what they could to maintain their dignity, to comfort their families for whom there was no hope at all of rescue.

For some Jews, the question of the nature of the deal they got from God rankles.  “If we are the Chosen People, how could you let this happen?”  Which brings up the question – Chosen for what?

For a depressing sample of scholarly venom deployed against Edelman, read these letters in Commentary from the 1980s regarding an article on Poles and Jews.  Commentary is a creature of the Podhoretz gang, a bunch of Jewish former leftists who “got religion” and turned hard right.  The original neo-cons.

There’s our man!

I am watching The Life of Émile Zola (1936), corny and stirring by turns, starring Paul Muni.  The movie focuses on his trial for libel that resulted from his publication of J’accuse..! his dissection of the sham conviction of Dreyfus for treason.  Virulent hatred of Jews was at the center of the case, so it’s interesting how the film treats the subject of anti-semitism.

The words “Jew” and “anti-semitic” are never spoken in the film.  The theme is all very sotto voce.  When the general staff is looking for a fall guy to take the blame for the spying they have detected, they examine a roster of it’s members.  The religion of each is noted.  The head points to Dreyfus’s name and says, “There’s our man.”

When Zola is brought before the kangaroo court for libelling the French military, there are several long shots of the assembled dignataries and spectators. A huge painting of The Crucifixtion makes the point that church and state are not separate in France.

 The violent anti-Dreyfus mobs are shown, but there is no indication of their vicious anti-semitic bent.  Nor is the anti-clericalism of the Dreyfusards hinted.   You have to know the history to read the subtext of the film.

     

The IWW Speaks

Today was a holiday – Labor Day – so I went to see the Great Falls at Paterson, NJ, something I’ve wanted to visit for a long time.  Alexander Hamilton called attention to this site, and got George Washington’s support for a planned industrial city here that would exploit the power of the rushing Passaic River.  After the Civil War, it was one of the most thriving industrial cities in the United States.

Paterson is a severely depressed city now, with few signs of gentrification or working class vibrancy.  The old mill buildings, impressive in their massing, are mostly empty.  The one that used to serve as a major assembly point for locomotives is now a museum.

Besides the falls, we were drawn to Paterson by this house, the Botto House.  It was the focal point of the six month silk workers strike in 1913 that idled the great textile manufacturers of what was then known as Silk City.  The police force of Paterson totally backed the owners, so worker rallies  there were liable to be met with brutal force.  Mr. Botto,  a skilled weaver from the Piedmont of Italy, offered his house, which he had built for his family, as a meeting point in the town of Haledon next to Paterson.  The mayor was a German immigrant and a socialist, so there was no fear of the police there!

This photo shows the house totally surrounded by thousands of workers who had come to be addressed by the likes of Upton Sinclair, Big Bill Haywood, and a host of international socialist, anarchist, and super radical IWW celebrities.  The strike was remarkable for its size, its duration, and the solidarity of the different national groups (there were many!) and skill levels involved.  Eventually, they were starved back to work, but the strike lived on as a vivid symbol of worker power, and no doubt many an organizer got his training there.

The house, a landmark and museum, is now surrounded by a quiet residential neighborhood, but at the time it was in the middle of a large green bordered by woods that formed a natural ampitheatre.  Botto’s granddaughter lives nearby, and sold the house to the museum in the 1980s.  We stood on the second floor balcony from which the rabble rousers had addressed the crowds.

The uptairs has a room in which to watch a very good short documentary on the strike and the Botto family.  Hard lives these people had – even relatively well off ones like the skilled tradesman Botto – but how many recall their struggles today?  According to the film, Botto was one of a large community of north Italian skilled laborers who brought a strong tradition of activism and agitation to our shores.  I wonder how they passed through the examination of Ellis Island that was supposed to deny access to anarchists and trouble makers?

On the way out, I purchased a facsimile edition of the 1923  I.W.W. Song Book - Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent. I like that title.

Army of Shadows

Jean-Pierre Melville’s portrait of a small group of French Resistance fighters left me shaken.  The film has very little violence in it, but it produces a non-stop feeling of acute tension.  In his “minimalist” directorial style, Melville’s characters rarely discuss their feelings or motivations.  They rarely discuss anything.  The Germans are methodical, brutal, and occasionally openly sadistic.  The fighters move around in the death-maze created by the Nazi occupation, carrying out their missions and trying not to get caught…yet.

They sense that they will all be caught, eventually.  Life and death frequently hinge on split-second decisions, or just plain chance.  In an early sequence, the main character finds himself on a bench in Gestapo headquarters sitting next to another man waiting for questioning.  The only outcome of interrogation is death.  With a few words at an opportune moment, a plan is formed.  The hero escapes, and the other?  Did he escape the machine gun fire we hear?  We, and the hero, never know.

The army is one  of shadows, in the shadows, but also of shadow-people.  To preserve security, no one knows much of the history of anyone else.  An important figure in the organization is a family relation to another, lesser figure.  Neither knows of the other’s work. The less known, the less said during the inevitable torture.  That’s if you don’t get the chance to swallow your cyanide first.

Sounds like a thriller?  It’s not like any other.  The people are ordinary, made extraordinary by their ordeal.  No heroic missions – it’s not even clear how much they accomplish – so much of the action centers on their responses to the arrests of their associates.  During one halcyon segment, a local noble provides his estate for use as a nocturnal airstrip for British planes, and all goes remarkably well for a while.  The man was a reactionary before the war, but he came around.  We are told matter-of-factly that the Germans rounded him up with his private militia of local farmers and shot them all without trial.  Back to the alleyways…

I read that some left-wing critics in 1969 (the year of its release – it was not successful and was hardly seen until its recent restoration) called the film “Gaulist propaganda.”  De Gaulle was considered by many, at that time, to be a reactionary obstacle to progress in France, his glory days as the leader of the Free French were far behind. 

There is a scene in the film in which de Gaulle is featured briefly, pinning a medal on a Resistance leader who is clearly moved to be in his presence.  But as for la politique quotidienne – everyday politics, that is – I think the film is way beyond that.  In an early scene, when the main character is in a prison camp, he addresses a young fellow inmate, an inexperienced, self-identified communist, as “comrade.”  The young man, surprised, asks, “Are you a communist too?”  “No,” he replies. “But I have comrades.”  They make an escape plan.

The sequence of images below is from the climactic scene at the end.  Mathilde (Simone Signoret) the mastermind of so many operations is compromised by the Nazis.  She must be eliminated.  She accepts her fate.  It is the only way.

[I don't want to give too much away, but on at least one occasion, Melville's style was so minimalist, I was confused about a fact that provides a powerful emotional statement.  The scene takes place in the dead of night, but because, in film, there must be some light, I was left somewhat in the dark!]

Balzac pre-Benjamin

Add to my list of overrated thinkers, Mr. Walter Benjamin.  Much is made of his arcane and metaphysical piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Mass Production.”  In fact, my college senior thesis borrowed most of the title – “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Mass Reproduction.”  Clever, eh?

Well, here is the gist of that esoteric work, en avance, in a sentence, from Balzac’s Beatrix, one hundred years before:

While working for the masses, modern industry progressively destroys works of art that had been as personal for the buyer as for the creator.  Nowadays, we have products; we no longer have works.

Leathernecks/Chouans!

On NPR today, I heard an interview with a Marine Colonel directing American forces in Afghanistan against the Taliban.  He remarked on the nature of the countryside in which they were fighting, describing it as some of the most difficult you could imagine in which to wage a counter-insurgency effort.  The countryside is divided up into squares that are bounded by trees and shrubs, providing cover for small bands of fighters, and making movement of his troops slow and dangerous.  The description matches exactly that of Balzac’s portrait of Brittany in his historical novel, The Chouans.

This was Balzac’s first entry into his monumental cycle of novels, and it is his only in his projected “scenes of military life.”  It tells the story of brutal guerilla warfare between the agents of the infant French Republic, and the rebellious people of Brittany who, like the great Vendee, fought the authority of the Paris government and supported the return of the king.  The novel is heavily influenced by the work of Walter Scott, and it is remarkable, I thought, for its gritty and believable portrayal of a bloody provincial civil war.

Balzac’s politics were “conservative” after a fashion, he was a monarchist, but he plays fair.  The Chouans are often shown as bloodthirsty, ignorant, bestial peasants led by noblemen with various degrees of integrity and clergy who seem to be mentally in the middle ages.  The Republicans are led by Commandant Hulot, an impressive, honorable, and laconic man who lives again, and dies, an old decorated soldier in the magnifient novel, Cousin Bette. But there is also Corentin, a cold, devious, unprincipled spy for the Republic’s police, who cares nothing for honor, and would turn his coat for the right price, or the right woman delivered to his bed.  In his introductory role in Balzac’s comedy, he is an incroyable, one of the enthusiasts of the first revolutionary days known for their outrageous and scandalous dress, and he reappears much later in A Harlot High and Low, where he meets his match in Vautrin, the arch-criminal.

The novel turns on the romantic and machiavellian actions of a central female, Marie de Verneuil, a pre-cinema Bond-girl.  Is she a whore, a noblewoman, a spy, a republican, a royalist?  All of the above?  She is destroyed by the deadly game she plays, one that will not make space for a deep and true love that is beyond, or above, politics.  Or is that just too sentimental, and does she deserve everything she gets?  You decide.