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If you were planning a pirate cruise, Jürgen Schrempp is just the stamp of man you’d choose to command. He has an unbridled relish for life: climbing the Himalayas with Reinhold Messner, challenging Garry Kasparov at chess, loping at dawn through his South African game reserve with a Glock 9mm at his hip. Unlike the traditional Doppel-Doktor Dipl.Ing. type of German executive, he rose through the ranks: starting from a mere auto mechanic to become Chief Executive of the mighty Daimler-Benz. Life, for Schrempp, is an adventure.
What qualities does a successful buccaneer require? Decisiveness, charisma… and flair: the ability to sniff out booty beyond the horizon. On this day in 1998, Schrempp led his docile Board of Directors in a characteristically daring raid, spending 36 billion dollars to acquire Detroit’s Chrysler in the largest cross-border industrial merger ever achieved. Chrysler was going through one of its spasms of profitability; it still bore the mark of the legendary Lee Iacocca, no mean swashbuckler himself. Schrempp saw the chance to mate the meticulous, slow-growing worthiness of his German operations with a venturesome, rough-and-ready, unstuffy American style. He called the deal “a marriage made in heaven.”
When the combined management of the new entity met together for the first time in a palatial hotel in Spain, Schrempp out-backslapped, out-laughed, out-sang, and out-drank all the American senior executives, finally retiring to his room with a bottle of champagne in one hand and his personal assistant slung over the other shoulder (she’s now his wife; he had another at the time). Yet he ran his meetings the next morning with consummate briskness and focus, giving new strength to the phrase “hard-headed businessman.” His co-chairman, though – his partner in this celestial marriage – seemed uncomfortable: Bob Eaton was quiet, awkward, provincial, occasionally given to tears. In the face of Schrempp’s relentless drive, he retreated into silence and isolation like a neglected spouse, soon announcing his early retirement.
Almost immediately, the shared venture started to run aground on the hidden reefs of culture. German managers demanded worked-out proposals, submitted through the usual channels; Americans preferred face-to-face discussions, even though these sometimes produced no decision. Germans smoked; Chrysler’s headquarters were smoke-free. Germans ordered wine at lunch and worked late every day – an uncomfortable fit with Diet Coke-drinking, Little League-coaching Americans. But then Chrysler executives earned up to four times as much as their Daimler counterparts – but then, again, Chrysler kept a tight rein on personal expenses, while Daimler allowed unrestrained junketing. Every meeting, every conversation was an opportunity for two-way resentment.
The worst part of any unhappy marriage is an unspeakable truth – and here the truth was that, though billed as a merger, this was obviously a takeover. Daimler had the money, the reputation, and Schrempp’s global vision; any wind of change, for good or ill, would be blowing from Stuttgart to Detroit. Yet it seemed vitally important that it should not be felt that way; Daimler executives were terrified that the merger would appear as an Anschluss (and, just by saying it, I’ve shown you why). Though in command, they took a polite, hands-off stance – thus compounding resentment with bafflement. Chrysler began to leach talent; integration stalled. The business swung from a $2 billion profit to a $2 billion loss in six months. DaimlerChrysler’s share price fell 60% in two years.
Schrempp had other worries, too. His Asian strategy, involving a substantial stake in Mitsubishi Motors, was mired in debt; his eco-strategy, based on the tiny-but-chic Smart cars, was burning through cash; Mercedes, the solid foundation for all else, was proving shaky; in 2004, its reliability rated lower than Hyundai’s. Analysts pointed out, and shareholders noticed, that a portfolio of dodgy businesses does not mitigate risk, but amplifies it.
Schempp’s old shipmates on the Board stuck with him long after investors had abandoned him, but even they had limits to their patience. He was pushed overboard in 2005; in 2007, Daimler cut the cable and let Chrysler drift into the jaws of Cerberus LLC, a private-equity company – in effect paying to get the damn thing off their hands. Chrysler is now owned by a far less charismatic figure: the US taxpayer. And Jürgen Schrempp is back in South Africa, scanning the blue horizon.
The War to End All Wars came to its end today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. A very poetic gesture – and, for once, a chance to answer the pragmatic question: “what is poetry worth?”
Those in charge of the carnage had known for at least five weeks that the end was coming. First to notice was the German commander, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff; with the thousand-year view of a Prussian officer, he saw inevitable checkmate in the sudden willingness of his soldiers to surrender rather than die for each lonely trench and dugout. He cared only for his Army: an institution that, he believed, extended beneath and beyond any temporary regime or ruler. He would willingly throw the Kaiser – and Germany itself – to their enemies if there was a chance to save this knightly Order in field-gray; so, on September 29th, he wrote to his superiors suggesting that they should accept terms.
Someone facing imminent death will think fast about alternatives – but the further away from that buzzing, pounding reality men are, the more deliberate they become. For a month, telegrams went back and forth, clarifying points, rephrasing requests. There was a lot at issue; the Allies wanted the Kaiser to abdicate, but were unsure whether making this demand immediately might stiffen German resistance. The Germans were hoping to retain some military capability, if only to suppress the communist revolts that were beginning to break out across the country. Everyone but the Americans was scrabbling to find an alternative to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a dangerously idealistic set of war aims that would mean the end of multi-ethnic empires and cozy secret diplomacy. Weeks passed. Tens of thousands died.
On November 8th, German representatives – now, after a revolution, civilian socialists – arrived at the railway car of the Allied Commander, Generalissimo Foch. More theater: “What is your purpose here? What do you want of me?” The shabby-looking trade-union leaders, surrounded by gold braid and fierce mustaches, were forced to go through the humiliating charade of begging that they be told the terms under which they might be allowed to surrender. A request for immediate cease-fire was contemptuously refused. Foch then disappeared, leaving the details to his staff; by now, the 11th had already been decided as the moment juste. The guns continued to fire.
At five in the morning on this date, the signatures were put on the document of Armistice, to come into force six hours later. A lot can happen in six hours. Even once they had received the news of imminent peace, most artillery batteries continued blasting away until the last minute, because it was more efficient to blow up a few more of the enemy than to have to cart away all those heavy shells. Some American generals, for reasons of their own, ordered their men to advance and capture the town of Sedan, the symbol of French defeat at the hands of the new German Empire in 1870. The result was furious recrimination, lasting resentment, some friendly-fire incidents, and a few hundred more casualties. A General Wright of the US 89th Division felt his men would look better for the peace parade if they were scrubbed up. He had heard there were intact baths in a nearby Belgian town, so he tried to take it: another 300 dead.
9:30 a.m.: Englishman Henry Ellison, like Ludendorff a veteran of the first campaign of the war, was killed while investigating reports of Germans in a wood near Mons, where that campaign was fought.
10:45: Frenchman Augustin Trebuchon died while bringing his comrades the message that hot soup would be available once the firing ceased.
10:58: Canadian George Price was shot by a sniper while accepting flowers from a Belgian civilian.
10:59: American Henry Gunther, obeying who knows what conception of honor, charged a platoon of German soldiers preparing to surrender and was mown down.
All four were privates. No general died this day.
There were further deaths through blunder and accident, but they no longer counted as official casualties of war. Of these, the total for November 11th was 11,000 – more than all those killed, wounded, and missing on D-Day. That, it seems, is the price of poetry.
Two years ago today at the Ibero-American summit, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was feeling on top of the world; oil prices were heading quickly toward $100 a barrel; he had just proposed a referendum to abolish term limits, central bank autonomy, and restrictions on nationalization; he had removed his most prominent media critics by shutting down the main private television channel. He had the ear of OPEC, of the OAS, of the UN, and of his Latin American neighbors, all of whom needed his oil. He could be excused the temptation to sound off a little.
Chávez is known for his seemingly impromptu quips: intoning, as he mounted the UN podium after George W. Bush, “the Devil was here; you can still smell the sulphur.” Warning the then Secretary of State, “don’t mess with me Condoleeza; don’t mess, little girl.” Berating “Mr. Danger Bush-Hitler – a coward, a killer, a perpetrator of genocide, an alcoholic, a drunk, a liar, and an immoral person.” Condemning Halloween as a form of “terrorism.” In a sense, talk is what his Presidency is all about: he came to power through the media, cannily agreeing to abandon an attempted military coup in exchange for ten minutes on national television. His brief but electrifying speech made his name. Now, he reaches his people through a live call-in show, Aló Presidente, which promises and delivers “news, singing, jokes, and entertainment.” The program runs as long as he feels like; the record so far is eight hours.
A man with such a powerfully loquacious urge cannot suppress it without pain; so when José Luis Zapatero, the mild-mannered Spanish Prime Minister, addressed the Santiago summit, Chávez added a running commentary. He was annoyed at Spanish investment in Latin America – its money was competing with his; his socialist-populist politics take their name from Bolívar, the enemy of Spain; and he believed that the previous, conservative Spanish government had conspired against him. So he grumbled and murmured throughout Zapatero’s speech, attacking “fascists” who were “not human, but lower than snakes.” Zapatero was forced into defending his predecessor (and political enemy) as a legitimately-elected leader – but Chávez heckled on, even though the organizers had shut off his microphone. It was a classic scene: the soft-voiced lecturer losing control of the room to the mouthy kid in the back row; so the principal came down like a ton of bricks. King Juan Carlos of Spain, usually as calm and kindly as his stamps and coins portray him, leaned forward, red-faced, and addressed the rogue president: “¡¿Por qué no te callas?!" “Why don’t you shut up?” Significantly, he used the te form of address, suitable for children – or family members.
For all its violent political emotions, the Latin world values courtesy highly; the question of who played the boor in this story was immediately divisive. Domestic opposition in Venezuela seized on the king’s slap-down with glee; it appeared widely on T-shirts, YouTube videos and ringtones. Countries run by well-educated political élites generally applauded Juan Carlos; we can’t have such disruptive behavior at summits – it’s far too reminiscent of Krushchev and his shoe. Other, more popular governments defended Chávez – and not just because they shared his leftist convictions.
Demagoguery is mostly a matter of words, not deeds; leaders like Chávez seize and hold power by appealing directly to the people over the heads of all the traditional practitioners of politics. The vows they make, the airy palaces of hope they construct for the poor and mistreated, are their chief accomplishments. Unlike those he admires (Fidel, Che), Chávez has never won a war; like those he consorts with (Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, Lukashenka), he has failed to deliver the new dawn he promised. His government is fundamentally disorganized, composed of yes-men and ex-officers with no administrative ability. He himself is the kind of infuriating boss who calls you at four in the morning requiring a report on, say, the prison system by nine, then goes off on vacation having forgotten all about it.
So he talks instead – volubly, colorfully, aggressively – valiantly insulting the “empire” whose citizens, at the gas pump, provide all his finance; boasting of the Bolívarian accomplishments to come; sniping at his neighbors in Colombia; providing news, singing, jokes, and entertainment. He could never do as the King suggested – for if he ever did shut up, he would disappear.
Where were you? When the Wall came down, Jane and I were bumping down the cobbled roads of Czechoslovakia, five months into a fourteen-month honeymoon behind the Iron Curtain. We’d known for days that something was up, because the VB, the Czech police, had regularly stopped our conspicuously West German car to see whether we had any East Germans in the trunk.
All that Autumn, citizens of the DDR had been suddenly overcome by the urge to go on long camping trips to Czechoslovakia – especially south-west Bohemia, close to the border with Hungary. This wanderlust struck just about the time the new Hungarian leadership announced that it would make no effort to prevent East Germans from crossing their territory to reach the West. Each evening (after we reached the campsite marked on our official government itinerary, and received our police accommodation stamp to be handed in at our agreed exit point), we would pitch our tiny igloo tent next to groaning Trabants laden with the entire contents of some apartment in Leipzig or Karl-Marx-Stadt. Eager families would inspect our miraculous Opel (Ach, mein Gott! Four cylinders!), listen to the BBC news on our radio, and pump us for inside information on life in the West. “How much money do you make in a month?” Ach, mein Gott! Their views on capitalism were somewhat colored by the propaganda of their State, which assured them that we led lives of indolence on the sweat of others – and by the counter-propaganda of Dynasty and Dallas, which they could watch surreptitiously on West German television. They were headed, in their own minds, toward an astoundingly well-groomed world where everyone had ranches and no one had to work.
We had entered the DDR in June, at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. It was a daunting process – machine guns, tank traps, razor wire – made the more so by the knowledge of the hundreds of lives lost in trying to cross the other way. By November, though, we were old hands at the State and its constant, intrusive attempts at control. We managed with insouciance the hundreds of little chits of paper, beige and brittle as a cracker, printed in smudgy violet ink, each one of which was essential to remaining free, mobile, and fed. We did not jump in fear when policemen suddenly shook our igloo in the pre-dawn hours (“Zeltkontrolle!”) to make sure we had not swum to Denmark; we felt no surprise when, having strayed into a forbidden zone and been shaken down for a bribe, we got a receipt for it.
At the same time, we began to see what kept people from rebelling against such obsessive meddling: its very predictability gave life a certain serenity. No one worked very hard; everyone had a rich social life, whether in the slightly-subversive circles of democratic politics or the Lutheran church, or simply having the friend who could fix your heating if you helped install his new plumbing. Little treats (Angolan coffee, glycol-rich ice-cream confections, employee vacation camps) enlivened an existence that was dull but not uncomfortable; such treats were within everyone’s reach. The State and its imperatives were like sea-currents to a mariner or gravity to a mountain climber – constantly there, potentially dangerous, but generally manageable.
To be a citizen of the DDR was to be a child under the care of a strict and slightly mad nanny, who kept you clean and nourished in exchange for obedient performance of certain rituals and acquiescence in certain slogans. No childhood, though, can last forever. The State was not economically viable: you cannot promise perpetual ice-cream to a society that does no work. A slight relaxation after forty years of paranoid vigilance meant that at least some East Germans knew there was more to democracy than big hats and oil-wells. The Politburo itself was changing – gone were the old apparatchiks, each with the charisma of an over-exposed passport photo, and in came the young, media-minded Communists who wished to be popular, not just obeyed. This was fatal to the régime: when Nanny asks if you love her, you know she’s lost her grip.
It was one of these new faces, Günther Schabowski, who precipitated the fall of the Wall today – through a characteristic blunder. Preening himself in the unfamiliar glare of a live press conference (but forgetting that it was live) he suddenly announced that the border controls that had sent so many on camping trips to Bohemia were to be relaxed “immmediately.” It was supposed to be over a few days, when the border guards would have orders about how to maintain the appearance of bureaucratic control. Instead, tens of thousands gathered at the checkpoints after the Politburo members had gone to bed. The guards, brought up to have no initiative, simply opened the gates. Without planning, without control, history just… happened.
Norman Rockwell – if there’s any more groaning, I shall keep you all in after class – Norman Rockwell, who died today, stands up to closer scrutiny than he usually gets. We may dismiss him as a corny hack, we may appropriate and distort his imagery with an ironic, post-modernist snigger; or we may elevate him to the post of Great Teller of the American Story, chronicler of lost decency, exponent of the small-town values that made a great power – but in all these, we do him a disservice.
Rockwell insisted on calling himself a commercial artist, although he had sworn with student friends never to prostitute his muse, take advertising work, or make more than fifty dollars a week – but that’s rather like promising to keep in touch with friends you make on vacation. He was practically born to be a commercial artist, earning enough from magazine jobs at the age of fifteen to put himself through art school. It was a heroic time for illustration: Maxfield Parrish’s purple mountain majesties left nothing for LSD to reveal; N.S. Wyeth’s gritty yet painterly pirate scenes set a million boys and girls in the rigging, a cutlass in their teeth. Rockwell absorbed the meticulous technique, but looked closer to home for his subjects. Tall, scrawny, brought up unhappily by chilly parents, he found enough in ordinariness to set his fancy going.
Ordinariness – who else has made it so interesting? Even those who shudder at the saccharine sentiment of, say, the old family doctor solemnly applying his stethoscope to the child’s doll – eurrrgh – still find themselves drawn in by a familiar or unexpected detail: Grandma used to have that chair; the doctor has a broken nose; the child has a hint of disbelief. These figures are not mere placeholders: they are real, yet acting a primal scene. Whether they are advertising insurance, or pens, or freedom of speech, or Plymouth cars, they draw us in because they are simultaneously Everyman and Cousin Al. We believe in them because we, too, worry if we have bought the right car or properly live up to our liberties. These neighbors and friends have no such doubts.
Of course, we also believe because Rockwell was so very good at his trade; he may have played popular tunes, but he had a virtuoso’s command of the instrument. Art critics take a queasy enjoyment in catching his iconographic references, such as the pose of Rosie the Riveter, derived from Michelangelo’s prophet Isaiah on the Sistine ceiling, or the tributes to Velasquez and Rembrandt in the Triple Self-Portrait. The fact is, art works on us, whether its aim is high or low; Rockwell’s was somewhere in the middle, but it was consistent, true, and deadly.
“I paint the world as I would like it to be.” Rockwell worked all day, every day. Two of his three wives suffered from clinical depression. His children usually saw him only when they served as his models – not a “typical Rockwell” childhood. Yet this distance also served his art. Not very happy himself, and with no great gift for making others happy, he became a student of the appearance of happiness – those tiny clues to wholesome, self-possessed contentment that seem so unattainable to the depressed, the shy, or the resentful. He recognized these as attributes, practically in the Homeric sense – and that the bearers of them only look like ordinary folks in the way that gods and heroes go in disguise among men: normal to all outward appearance, yet touched with inner radiance.
Oh, to be in Echternach (Luxembourg – or, if you prefer, Luxemburg, or even Lëtzebuerg), now that November 7th has arrived; for today is the feast day of Saint Willibrord, commemorated since earliest times by the famous Hopping Procession.
Well, it’s now a “dancing” procession and has moved to Whit Tuesday, but the idea remains roughly the same; thousands of pilgrims – German, French, Belgian, Luxembourgeois – bound by solemn oath, caper their way from the saint’s abbey to his bones in the basilica, waving white handkerchiefs. The rule used to be “three hops forward, two hops back,” but this has been outlawed, along with the cow-bell dance and limbo-ing under the cross. There is still, nevertheless, a good deal of to left-to-right skipping, encouraged by bands scattered through the town playing the Springprozessionsmelodie, claimed to have originated in an Irish jig but now considerably be-oompahed. It takes all day; last year 9,000 people achieved the feat. Saint Willibrord has been declared the patron saint of movement disorders.
Perhaps that should be “patron saint of ambiguity” – nothing about Willibrord is entirely certain. Born to another saint, Wilgils (or Hilgis), an Angle (or Saxon) living in austere, pious Northumbria, Willibrord showed promise even before birth. On the night of his conception, his mother dreamed that the full moon fell into her mouth and illuminated her bosom – not in any pagan way, it was quickly explained, but as a metaphor for her son’s missionary future. The boy was sent off to Ripon monastery “as soon as he was weaned;” his father, having done with worldly duty by siring him, retired to a life of contemplation in a beehive on a wind-lashed headland. Taught in Ireland, consecrated in Rome, freighted with relics and holy objects, Willibrord took as his task the conversion of the Friesians, a nation of warlike pagans occupying what are now the Benelux countries. He was backed by Pepin, King of the Franks, whose new-found enthusiasm for Christianity was equalled only by his righteous desire for the Friesians’ rich lands and ports.
It was a three hops/ two hops business; Willibrord managed to establish churches and monasteries and profane a temple or two, but there were setbacks. The Duke of the Friesians, Radbod, was within a whisker of conversion (there is a lovely embroidery in Utrecht showing him stripped for the ceremony, testing the baptismal pool with a nervous toe), when he found out that he would not have the company of his ancestors in Heaven; he would sooner be damned, he said, than spend eternity with a bunch of Christians.
This was always a problem with missionary work: ironing out the details. The big concepts of the faith were often taken up with enthusiasm; grim Anglo-Saxon kings were immediately entranced by the image of worldly life as a bird’s brief passage through the lighted mead-hall before flying out the roof-vent into the storm. Details, though, were the very devil; do we need to give up our dances along with our beliefs? Are our new souls allowed the old habits and rituals, the cleansings and fertilizations that seem to keep the earth going, that feel as right and natural as scratching your head or rubbing your hands? You know how superstition creeps into every corner of life – just as you know that the Yankees might have lost the World Series if you had (or had not) been watching.
When Willibrord slaughtered the sacred cattle of the god Fosite (cognate with the German Vorsitzer, “President”), the local king was enraged – not just at the sacrilege, but because Fosite was the god of peaceful negotiation; appeals to his shrine were the only way to avoid bloodshed in arguments – an important let-out in an armed, lawless society. Willibrord, though preaching peace, had nothing practical to offer as a replacement – and yet he must have learned something about his new flock, since almost all his attributed miracles have to do with increasing the supply of wine.
So we hop on in an ambiguous world, believing disparate things in our compartmented minds. Because life only makes sense in retrospect, we keep our explanatory options open, skipping to one side or the other as fate (or providence) leads on the dance. Whit Tuesday is on the 25th of May next year; I hop to see you in Echternach.
“The name… is Rosenblum. Salomon Rosenblum.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it? Ian Fleming, steeped as he was in the visceral distaste for foreigners that marks the nervous middle-classes, would not have been happy for it to be known that his model for James Bond was the illegitimate son of a Jewish doctor from Odessa. Yet Rosenblum – as he was, for a while, named – had all the qualities that audiences admire in Bond: he was at home everywhere, he enjoyed every luxury life could provide, he craved risk like oxygen, he killed without compunction. He was a compulsive womanizer and, yes, something of a cad. Unlike Bond, though, Rosenblum was only truly at his enemy’s mercy once… but, in real life, once is enough.
By definition an agent, secret or not, works for someone; Rosenblum preferred working for himself. Employment requires trust, something you can’t necessarily count on from the other party. Having fallen foul of the Czarist secret police, Rosenblum (now Sigmund) faked his own death, stowed away for South America and fell in (now as Pedro) with an expedition run by a British Intelligence officer, whom he served so well he was given a British passport… or perhaps not, though this was the story he told. Perhaps he had arrived from France, where someone very like him had gained the trust of two Italian anarchists on a train and slit their throats, making off with their group’s war chest. Whatever the truth, he was soon (as Sidney) a prosperous-seeming seller of patent medicines in London. One regular patient, the Reverend Hugh Thomas, had a beautiful young wife. Eyes met in the consulting room. The vicar suddenly got significantly more ill and, in a dingy hotel room in Brighton, went to join the choir eternal. The doctor who signed the death certificate and recommended quick burial was young, dark-eyed, and unknown to the medical registry. Mrs. Thomas and her insurance money married Rosenblum (now Sidney Reilly) a few months later – the witnesses were government officials, closely associated with the intelligence service.
This was in 1898; by 1899, Reilly had set off on a career of world-girdling deception that kept him on the move for more than twenty years. Now a new-minted Briton, he returned to Russia, scouting out Caucasian oil-fields; he sold the plans of Russian-held Port Arthur to the Japanese – and then, when the Japanese attacked, sold supplies to the Russians at siege prices; he saved the company that became BP from French ownership by rowing out to the Rothschild yacht dressed as a priest and whispering a counter-offer into the ear of the proprietor; he took a job as a welder in the Krupp factory and stole its weapons plans; most importantly, he intrigued in post-revolutionary Russia, supporting attempts by the Allies to overthrow the Bolshevik state. The coup was set for September 1st, 1918; it even included Latvian red riflemen of the Kremlin bodyguard. But on August 30th, Fanya Kaplan (not, I believe, a close relative) shot at Lenin, the “Red Terror” began, and the plot was exposed. Reilly escaped by train, coolly impersonating a German diplomat. Throughout these adventures, there was never a glimpse of broader political purpose or principal. Reilly lived only to deceive, to profit, and to seduce.
For such a man, trust is a dangerous word. In the autumn of 1925, rumors began circulating of a Monarchist Union of Central Russia – a counter-revolutionary force ready to strike, now that Lenin was dead. Émigrés were receiving messages from old friends inside Russia, inviting them to meet the leadership and plan for the soon-arriving day. Reilly, believing or disbelieving, arrived at a rendezvous on the Finnish border, where polite figures greeted him: “Good evening and welcome, Sir.” It was only when he was across, alone in their company, that it became, “or should I say – greetings, Comrade.” There had been no Monarchist Union; the whole affair was a trap, devised by the OGPU secret police, and dubbed “Operation Trust.”
Throughout his weeks of imprisonment, Reilly took notes of his interrogation in tiny handwriting on cigarette papers and hid them in the chinks of his cell wall. It was professional habit: someone might be interested in what the Soviets wanted to know – someone might pay. In the end, only his jailers benefited from his analysis. On or about this date, they took him out into the snowy woods of Sokolniki Park and shot him.
Despite all his valuable work, Reilly received no posthumous recognition from Britain, in part because he exemplified qualities that have made almost every famous British spy-writer, from Buchan to Greene to Fleming, speak suspiciously of Jews: he was rootless, without ties to any home or people – and yet skilful, managing the subtle, deadly haggling of life’s bazaar so much more smoothly than could the earnest pink-faced man in stout shoes. He served the masters best who best served him. This is how a successful agent survives – for loyalty is as much a weakness as drunkenness or a hidden sexual quirk. It is only in fiction that a spy can afford to trust.
Or, possibly, not. The man called Johnson was actually Guy Fawkes, a soldier returned from mercenary service with the Spanish and recruited by a conspiracy of Catholic squires because of his experience with countermines and petards. Brave Fawkes was, but the rack is patient – he soon gave up all the names and plans he knew. The leader of the plot was Robert Catesby, a young man related to almost every prominent Catholic family and raised in the atmosphere of conspiratorial resistance that marked the old faith in the dangerous days after Henry VIII split from Rome. He was devout, clever, and rich, but “very wild, and spent much above his rate.” He was also strongly influenced by the prevailing Jesuit doctrine of “mental reservation,” which allowed believers to lie, swear falsely, or even commit treason if they believed that in so doing they were preventing a greater evil.
The greater evil was the end of Catholicism in England. The old families to whom Catesby was related had great hopes of the new King James, since he had been baptized a Catholic by his mother Mary,Queen of Scots; this was to forget, though, that he had been schooled by George Buchanan, as chilly a Calvinist as you could find on Scotland’s wind-blasted hills. Mortified at seeing the new reign bringing no new favors to his people, Catesby resolved to explode the whole establishment, kidnap the young princess, and train her up as a Catholic sovereign. His friends, hot-blooded young cavaliers like himself, applauded the idea.
The problem with conspiracy is scale: any plot large enough to ensure success is already too large to ensure secrecy. As the close knot of Catesby’s cousins and neighbors extended, seeking out help from more distant friends, it opened up gaps through which the State could thrust an enquiring bodkin – for, though the buildings that housed it may have been ramshackle, the fabric of the King’s spy system was tight and sound. The Earl of Salisbury, its head, surveyed the world of the plotters like a grave owl overseeing a field of mice – waiting, watching, waiting.
The catholic Lord Mounteagle received an anonymous letter in late October, warning him not to attend the opening of Parliament, “for God and man have concurred to punish the wickedness of this time.” Mounteagle insisted the letter be read aloud (thus excusing his conduct to government and conspirators alike) before delivering it to Salisbury, who set it before the King, who ordered Knyvet to search the cellars, where Fawkes was found. It was all remarkably neat.
How long before had Salisbury known? He would never say, and the others were soon all dead: Catesby and Percy after a shootout in a Staffordshire manor-house, Fawkes and the minor plotters hung, drawn, and quartered. The country embraced a Protestant monarchy in reaction to the averted danger: King James got more money out of Parliament that year than his predecessors ever did. The British still “remember, remember, the Fifth of November” with bonfires in every town and village. In truth, the fires are simply a continuation of an ancient pagan solstice tradition, theologically abhorrent to Protestant and Catholic alike – but this fact will be scant comfort to the effigy of Guy Fawkes, clad in cast-off clothes and seated in the flames.
“Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future. If she was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest. So I gave it beautiful breasts.'' Ruth Handler, born today, remained resolutely unapologetic about her creation, named after her daughter, that made a fortune for herself and her husband Elliot (the “El” of Mattel; Matt dropped out in the early days).
Mrs. Handler said that the idea for Barbie came to her when she saw how her daughter’s friends used dolls to recreate grown-up scenes (“That’s your third martini, George…” “So what if it is?”) – play that assorted ill with the Kewpie babies and Raggedy Anns the toy industry was turning out for them. In this, she was observing something that anthropologists had discussed for decades: children are, by and large, much less interested in the kiddy stuff with which we furnish their Golden Years than in speculating about and preparing for their own futures. Childhood in most hunter-gatherer societies is just adulthood at play-scale: among the Mbuti pygmies of the Congolese forest, the children build a whole camp, the bopi, within sight of but off limits to adults, where they play at all they have seen grown-ups do: hunting, preparing food, dancing, even making love. “Primitive” human life depends critically on sophisticated, well-practiced skills; if you have ever cooked or hunted in the company of a child, you will know how eager they are to pick up the lore.
Barbie is certainly no pygmy; her life revolves less around bark canoes and monkey hunts than pink Corvettes and fashion shoots – and this is a problem for many. Her improbable proportions (were she scaled up to full height, the original Barbie would measure 39”-18”-33”) have been blamed for enforcing unrealistic body-shape assumptions in girls and possibly encouraging anorexia. Her glamorous lifestyle apparently creates an ideal of vapid, empty-headed consumption. Saudi clerics even claim that she is Jewish, part of a Zionist plot to undermine Islam (although her full name is actually Barbara Millicent Roberts, of Willows, Wisconsin – which suggests Scotch-Irish to me, with perhaps some French-Canadian on her mother’s side).
Part of the problem is that the future we now offer our children is not the one they innately find most appealing. Male rhesus monkeys tend to seek out the same aggressive, purposeful toys that human boys do; females prefer more “girly” objects. In a culture that actively suppresses stereotypes – with good reason – we are bound to have an uncomfortable time with the deeper currents of gender. We deny boys toy weapons, with the result that they run around shooting bananas at each other; we tell girls that fulfilled womanhood has nothing to do with attractiveness – that is, until they’re old enough to watch Sex and the City.
This conflict is best summed up in the person of Barbie’s secret forebear – the doll on which Ruth Handler actually based her design and whose copyright Mattel bought up and suppressed: Bild Lilli. A fashion doll sold in restaurants and bars in 1950s Germany, Lilli was a very realistic grown-up – though perhaps not an ideal role model. Based on and intended to publicize a comic-strip character in the magazine Bild, Lilli was a determined girl on the make in a bomb-shattered, easy-money country short of men, using her looks and street-smarts to get ahead: typing by day and allowing wealthy admirers to take her to cabarets by night. Her tag line was not “let’s have a pizza party!” but rather, “I could do without balding old men – but my budget couldn't!”
For Mrs. Handler, Barbie always represented the “chance to realize your dreams” – which is certainly how it turned out for her. The dreams of a young girl will naturally include glamor and allure as part of the repertoire of womanhood. And why not? Denying their pleasurable if limited role in real, daily life risks banishing them to the fringes, as qualities exclusive to celebrity or the more visible corners of the sex industry. That would be a shame – for, on the whole, it is better to aspire to be Barbie than Lilli.
“Mister President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.” That’s the sort of advice a Chief Executive always likes to hear from his Attorney General – and Theodore Roosevelt, thanking Philander Knox for his considered opinion, went ahead and acted on it.
The issue was a method to get safely from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Victory in the Spanish-American War had given the US new responsibilities in the Far East, and Roosevelt, as a strong-Navy man, did not relish the idea of exposing his expensive battleships to the rigors of Cape Horn. A glance at the map made clear that the narrow spine of Central America would have to be the spot for a crossing – but where?
Whatever stout Cortez may have reported, the Isthmus of Darién is not the best place to link the great oceans; Nicaragua is, offering easier gradients, better geology, and a huge lake halfway along the route. But Darién had been the scene of an attempt at a canal by the dredger of Suez, Ferdinand de Lesseps. Though bankrupt, his old company held two advantages: a right-of-way, subsequently sold to the United States, and a lobbyist of genius, Monsieur Philippe Bunau-Varilla.
When the possibility of a Nicaraguan route came up in Congress, Bunau-Varilla had somehow to prevent the Senators from seeing sense – not an impossible task, but a tricky one. An anonymous engraver at the American Banknote company came to his rescue: working on a new Nicaraguan 10-centavo stamp, the artist had worried that his picture of Mount Momotombo, a near-dormant volcano, was lacking in dramatic focus – so he took the liberty of adding a little bubbling lava and a satisfying plume of smoke and ash, à la Vésuve. This was just what the Darién lobby needed; circulating this image among the lawmakers, they explained that Nicaragua was a notorious seismic minefield, with volcanic monsters (like this one!) just waiting to shake the new canal to flinders. You can’t argue with stamps; the Senate plumped for Darién.
Thus far a man, a plan, a canal – but Panama, key to the palindrome, was still a mere province of Colombia, far out of sight and mind of politicians in Bogotà. Colombia was undergoing a periodic episode of political turmoil, and one thing it would not do was attend to the affairs of its distant northerners, especially if this was at the behest of the meddling United States. The treaty agreeing the Darién canal lapsed in its legislature. Once more, Bunau-Varilla had a solution: organizing local malcontents into a Panamanian independence movement, he armed it, wrote a constitution, devised a flag, and bankrolled the revolt out of his private funds.
The conspirators were prepared for a civil war (there had been three in the past), but in the end independence was achieved thanks to those two trustiest allies, Confusion and Delay. Colombian troops moving north found constant impediments to their advance from obstructive local railway officials and a shadowing US naval force; they eventually gave up. Total casualties are reported to have been one civilian of Chinese origin and a donkey. Panama declared its independence on this day in 1903 and was recognized almost immediately by President Roosevelt; on the 18th, the new nation signed the canal treaty with the United States. Who, exactly, signed? Why the high representative of the Panamanian patriots, resident in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel: Philippe Bunau-Varilla. The heroic task of carving a slot through the isthmus began and America took over the sovereignty and administration of a 10-mile-wide strip of Central America, where its forces remained until 1999. It was an astounding undertaking: grandiose, daring, and magnificently illegal.
Gimme a “B”!
Gimme an “O”!
Gimme a “Z”!
OK, fine, that’s enough, settle down...
Readers of Hollaback: the Interdisciplinary Journal of Pep will be well aware of the importance of today’s date: for it was on November 2nd, 1898 that Johnny Campbell, fanatic supporter of the Minnesota Gophers, leaped from the stands to initiate the rhythmic chanting of nonsense from which all modern cheerleading derives. “Rah, Rah, Rah! Sku-u-mar, Hoo-Rah! Hoo-Rah! Varsity! Varsity! Varsity, Minn-e-So-Tah!” – thus ran Campbell’s mystic antiphon. There are some who claim that this derives from a yet more ancient Princeton psalmody (“Ray, ray, ray! Tiger, tiger, tiger! Sis, sis, sis! Boom, boom, boom! Aaaaaaah!”); and indeed it might: Thomas Peebles, a Princeton graduate, appears to have brought the arcanum to the northern woods around 1894 – but this is officially pre-history.
How do we get from Campbell’s sudden gift of tongues to the strangely wholesome bump and grind that now enlivens football and basketball half-times all across the country? Through a series of historical transformations that, traced in retrospect, seem inevitable. Return with me now to the ur-spring of cheerleading and you will find the scene most surprising: not only are the protagonists all men, they all have enormous beards, and they are all speaking German. These are liberal German nationalists of the 1830s, dreaming of a time when the repressive petty monarchies imposed on a great people by the cynical Congress of Vienna would be swept away in a surge of popular vigor and national virility, creating a single, democratic Germany under the red, black and gold. In preparation – realizing that, say, “Revolutionary Training Clubs” might attract official attention – they formed indoor sporting groups to strengthen mind and body for the struggle, practicing unarmed exercises to which they gave the classical name of gymnastik (though they stopped short of doing what the Greek word actually means: “that which is performed nude”).
When their glorious moment arrived in 1848, the revolutionary gymnasts bounded out of hiding – and were quickly defeated. Rather than certain death or prison, many chose emigration to America, where, as university graduates already knowing a foreign language, they quickly got jobs in the forest of new colleges springing up in the Midwest. Their indoor gymnastik seemed an ideal sport for institutions battling hard winters and tight budgets – and thereafter, who could be better to lead the new fad of massed shouting then men trained for rhythmic movement in a somewhat Germanic atmosphere? Gymnastics lent to cheerleading its penchant for tumbling and complicated tableaux; but there was one further contribution to come: ladies. In the bloomer and Liberty bodice days of college girlhood, gymnastics was one of the few acceptably demure woman’s sports (and so good for the posture!); when women were finally allowed out of doors, it was the gymnasts who arrived first on the field – to join, then surpass, their male equivalents, achieving in a few short years the pinnacle of the human pyramid. Call me an old roué, but you can’t deny that there is something infinitely more restful about watching a phalanx of smiling girls cavort with pompons than having some bounding, sweaty man shout “boola boola” at you through a megaphone.
Of course, there’s more to it than that. Cheerleading is now not just a welcome relief from the game, but a competitive sport in its own right, all style points and top-secret routines, with international championships in categories from Tiny to Senior. There is even the All-Star class for cheerleading squads unaffiliated with any, uh, cheer-ee: “Go [Your Team Name Here]! Push ‘em back [Generic Institution]! Yay Whatever!” It’s also surprisingly dangerous: although only about three percent of female high school athletes are cheerleaders, cheerleading accounts for 65 percent of major injuries in girls' high school sports and 67 percent of major sports injuries to female college students.
The culprit is a familiar human oddity: anything we do becomes competitive and elaborated, from riding horses to breeding dogs to skating on ice. It’s not just that industries and individuals make money from competitions, or that we can’t enjoy simple pleasures; it’s a basic need to see how high we can go before we totter and fall. And, for all its frou-frou, there is something atavistic in cheerleading itself. Edward Hagen at Humboldt University claims that dancing together began as a territorial defense ritual: if we dance together, we belong together as members of the same tribe. So when the Bring it On Girls shake their stuff (“I’m sexy, I’m cute, I’m popular to boot”), is means much the same as when the New Zealand rugby team performs its Maori haka (“It is death, it is death! It is life, it is life!”); in the stands, we feel we know just what they mean. Rah.
Merdre! With this shocking yet nonsensical ejaculation, Père Ubu – the vast, turnip-shaped King of Poland, with his one retractable ear and three teeth – opened the play, incited a riot and destroyed any vestige of decorum in the theater. Henceforward, art of all kinds would no longer be a simple element of civilized life: it was now something to be loved or hated intensely – and, above all, talked about incessantly.
Alfred Jarry, author of Ubu Roi, was just the man to heave such artistic grenades. Less than five feet tall, he made a vocation of being un-ignorable, riding everywhere in Paris at great speed on his racing bicycle, carrying (and firing) two pistols and occasionally painting his face green in homage to the goddess absinthe. He wore his cycling clothes everywhere, even to funerals – although if the deceased were a close friend, he would at least untuck his trousers from his socks. He lived in an apartment built to his scale, in which visitors had to stoop; only the giant stone phallus in the corner was, he said, “not a reduction.” The house was apparently designed to revolve once every century. Jarry spoke with an exaggerated and flowery precision, referring to himself in the royal plural and pronouncing all syllables with staccato clarity – including the silent ones.
His art was commensurate with his life. As well as Ubu, he produced a novel, The Supermale, describing a fearsome future in which humans, drugs, and machines were locked together in a dance of increasing tempo: five-man bicycles, the riders fed on Perpetual Motion food, racing express trains across continents. He collaborated with many of the Symbolist poets and journal-writers, his contributions always welcome because they were so extreme, purging the school’s ideas of their last contamination by reason. He created, in the character of one Dr. Faustroll, the new science of ‘Pataphysics, which governs “the laws of exceptions and explains the universe supplementary to this one.”
Pére Ubu had his origins in Monsieur Hébert, chemistry teacher at Jarry’s school in Rennes; the grotesque, flatulent tyrant first appeared in a marionette play he staged with his teenaged friends. And this is the key to his dual influence: every subversive-schoolboy writer, from Flann O’Brien to Monty Python, gratefully tips the hat to Jarry; but duller classmates, learned without humor, have embalmed his legacy in a cold, echoey critical necropolis. They took him seriously: the semioticists; the constructivists; the insisters on the primacy of text, indicator, and structure over sense and intention; the purveyors of extended interpretive metaphor, gnostic riddles and tortuous prose. It is not just the heavy-humored “Institutes of ‘Pataphysics” in Paris and London, dancing with leaden foot after their green-faced sprite; it is every literature and contemporary art department in every university in the Western world. Jarry was a major if unwitting contributor to making the twentieth century the Golden Age of Guff. Well might one say, “merdre!”
“Anti-alcoholics are unfortunates in the grip of water, that terrible poison, so solvent and corrosive that out of all substances, it has been chosen for washing and scourings.” Absinthe (and, in its absence, ether) caught up with Jarry on this day in 1907. He lay, apparently comatose, at 34 already a legend among the young artists of Paris. Suddenly one eye opened and fixed the attending doctor with an imperious stare; the high, nasal voice intoned for the last time: “We would desire... a toothpick.” Brought one, he grasped it, smiled beautifully in purest joy, and died.
Elderly gentlemen shouldn’t go on unsupervised foreign adventures. This, for many, was the lesson to to be drawn from the Suez Crisis, an Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt that entered its critical phase today in 1956. It has been described as the last spasm of colonialism, the trigger for Arab hostility to the West, and the moment when the world became reduced to two superpowers. In reality, it marked the exchange of one set of bad habits for another, possibly worse.
The roots of the crisis extended back to Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, when French engineers first surveyed the route of a possible canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. A company funded by a combination of the local Ottoman overlord and French private investors completed the canal in 1869; the opera Aïda was commissioned for the opening ceremonies. Impoverished by such vast expenditure, the Egyptian viceroy was soon forced to sell his canal shares; the British government snapped them up, thus protecting the strategic route to India. Bankrupt potentates soon require more than just money, however: after an anti-European uprising in 1882, Britain forced the Egyptian monarchy into a cooperative arrangement by which the Khedive could reign while British civil servants ruled. This system persisted until the 1950s.
By then, Britain’s access to India was no longer relevant – but world politics had entered the oil-stained era in which we now live. Two thirds of Europe’s oil came through Suez, much of it pumped from countries where the British had installed or supported friendly governments. Starting with the exploits of T.E. Lawrence, Britain had been painstakingly constructing an Arab world composed of tribally-based monarchies with efficient, apolitical armies – Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia all fit this pattern. In Egypt, however, the monarchy was rapidly losing support and the army was highly political, drawing on bubbling reserves of ethnic and religious resentment. A military coup led by Gamal Abdul Nasser toppled King Farouk in 1951; the new government’s tenuous support at home required that it try to establish dominance abroad, extending Egyptian influence in the name of pan-Arabism. This was an old game: Egypt, after all, had ruled an empire when the British were still painting themselves blue. The strategy naturally demanded maintaining bad relations with the old masters. Nasser therefore undermined friendly Arab régimes, acquired arms from the Soviet bloc, and seized the canal.
The American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, loathed Nasser – but he had no fondness for ex-colonial nations, so Britain and France decided to act alone on their grievance. It was a cunning plan: Israel would invade Sinai, the Egyptian army would fall back across the canal, and the two old powers would suddenly drop in between the combatants in the name of peace: a nineteenth-century Great Power coup de main. And it worked, perfectly. On this date, the second half of the operation was set in motion: French and British parachutists and amphibious units seized control of most of Suez, despite local resistance and inevitable confusions. Though the Egyptians managed to block the canal with sunken ships, the invasion was – technically – a success.
Politically, it was a disaster. Dulles was furious at not having been consulted (though he and his brother, who ran the CIA, knew perfectly well what was going to happen); he wanted no adventures without American approval. Moreover, the US had its own interests in the Arab world, in Saudi Arabia – pan-Arabism was fine as long as it was our pan-Arabism. He arranged for Canada to introduce a motion at the United Nations, condemning France and Britain and proposing the first use of UN peacekeepers. To back this up, he threatened immediately to sell all America’s holdings of British government securities, thus destroying its economy – the financial equivalent of the nuclear option. Britain caved in, then France; in less than two months, they withdrew. The last European power play was over.
So what did we all gain by kicking over the old Diplomacy board and putting Middle East politics in the hands of the post-colonial, pro-democratic superpower? Conflict in the region has continued, essentially uninterrupted, for more than fifty years. Every Arab government (with the tenuous exceptions of Lebanon and Iraq) is an autocracy founded on military or secret-police power, itself armed and paid for by subsidies from the US or oil-rich Gulf states. Egypt remains a tyranny; its pan-Arabism has given the world Hamas; its Muslim Brotherhood proclaimed the ideology of Al-Qaeda, for which John Foster Dulles’ friends in Saudi Arabia provided the manpower. France, enraged by what it saw as US treachery, withdrew from NATO, developed its own nuclear deterrent – and then sold the technology to Israel. The wars we are fighting today sprang from the seeds of Suez. One must doubt whether Metternich, Disraeli, Bismarck, or Talleyrand would consider any of this a success.
Grover’s Mill, New Jersey is lovely at this time of year. The long tree-fringed pond still glows with the late blaze of fall foliage. Down at the mill itself, you’d think you could buy a pumpkin; but it’s now a mower-repair shop – perhaps a more appropriate business for a commuter town. It’s quiet: way off on the left you can just hear the shouts from the football field and running track of West Windor-Plainsboro High School North, and on the right the cheers from Ditto Ditto Ditto South.
How very different from the scene here sixty-nine years ago today: “Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake… it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… Ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.” Listeners to CBS at 8:15 that evening could have been excused for a slight sense of unease; in their cars or kitchens, tuning in at random, they would have heard enough to give anyone a fright – not necessarily the pulsating lips, or the “great tripod machines” wading across the Hudson, or the heat-rays incinerating bystanders, but the more credible atmosphere of clogged roads and panicking crowds, the emollient but useless reassurances of high politicians, the increasingly chaotic and terrified news bulletins. It was very well done: that Orson Welles was a talented director - and, at the age of twenty-two, a very naughty boy. Moreover, since his Mercury Theatre of the Air’s production of The War of the Worlds was a cultural program, there were no ads to break the spell: sponsors had assumed there would be few listeners.
There weren’t many – possibly six million, as against 30 million for the Chase & Sanborn Hour, but those few were spurred into action. Police switchboards were quickly overwhelmed. People in Newark rushed out of their homes and stood looking toward the sky, from whence came their doom. Members of the National Guard called their armories, asking where to muster. A West Orange bartender actually turned out six paying customers to go home to his family. A man called the Dixie Bus Terminal to report the disaster – but refused to go into details, explaining that “the world is coming to an end and I have a lot to do.” My father’s father, forty miles north of New York, bundled his whole family into the car and drove out into the woods; but then, having fought through a revolution and shared a prison with the young Stalin, he had a keen sense of the possibility of the improbable.
Though we talk of “mass hysteria,” the number of the hysterical was not actually massive. The New York Times played up the story, but could report only “scores” of people in the streets; its own switchboard received a total of 875 calls. Significantly, most of the seriously upset people were alone – women at home, men in cars – without the opportunity to discuss and consider their fears. Few, also, mentioned Martians or walking tripods – they babbled of “gas attacks” or bombing from the air. They weren’t worried about extraterrestrials. This was exactly a month after the Munich crisis: they were worried about Hitler. When the truth was explained, most settled down quickly, annoyed rather than shaken at having been taken in by such a stunt. One Louis Winkler of the Bronx provided a typical reaction: “I thought it was the McCoy; in my mind, it was a pretty crumby thing to do.”
The newspapers made much of The War of the Worlds because they feared radio’s usurpation of the news audience; radio made much of it because an aura of “social manipulation” provided a powerful weapon in its campaign to gain advertising. Welles himself called it the “radio version of dressing up in a sheet and saying Boo!” – for he knew that tomorrow things would return to normal and we would continue to get our facts from responsible, conscientious sources. But now – as newspapers collapse, radio and television pander for shrinking audiences; as we seek our news from those entertainers or controversialists whose opinions we already share – we may soon have no way to be sure what is honest reporting and what is just theatre of the air, nor whether those ominous figures in sheets are neighbor children… or real monsters. Happy Halloween.
German Romantic literature sets great store by the bildungsroman, a novel in which the hero, through suffering and self-discovery, achieves a worthier role in life: finding something – or someone – to believe in. It is the intellectual equivalent of a love story, structurally little different from those heart-warming tales in which plucky Nurse Eileen earns the grudging respect, then the torrid embrace, of moody, brilliant Doctor Lance.
Dr. Josef Goebbels, born on this date, earned his PhD. in German Romantic literature and wrote a bildungsroman of his own. It’s a sad little piece, revealing an intelligent man’s sense of inadequacy when faced with true poetic inspiration or unthinking physical heroism. Goebbels wanted above all to be a Goethe – or a soldier. Doomed by incapacity to be neither, he became instead a journalist and a Nazi. In Hitler, he found what the dime-store novels promise: a dominant character, worthy of surrender. “The secret of his success is in the indescribable magic of his personality. Those who know him the best love and honor him the most. One who has sworn allegiance to him is devoted to him body and soul.”
As he was painfully aware, Goebbels made an odd-looking übermensch: a tiny dark man with a club foot and lively, vulnerable eyes, who appeared to be being swallowed up by his hat. But this awareness gave him a unique skill in presenting his movement’s image to the world. In 1926, he was sent as party leader to Berlin – sophisticated, sarcastic, socialist Berlin, where Nazis were a minuscule minority. He was an instant hit: where Hitler’s podium manner was harsh, demanding, and self-absorbed, Goebbels acknowledged and played to his audience. He made jokes – of a sort – used heavy irony, dropped easily-caught references. He made storm troopers feel cultured, as his protegée Leni Riefenstahl would make them look imposing and his friend Albert Speer make them appear monumental. As a reward for his success, Goebbels was made Reich Minister for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda when Hitler took power.
He was at last in his element. Goebbels thrilled at the idea of shaping opinion; its very cynicism gave him a delicious sense of potency. His ministry’s control of all media, from film studios to radio stations, offered him what every critic desires: a chance to run the show (and, incidentally, seduce the actresses). Here, too, his outsider’s sensitivity led to success; though he hammered hard at the party’s messages, he also insisted on producing non-political entertainment, often of the frilliest kind. Only by playing on his führer’s secret fondness for Mickey Mouse did he secure permission for this frivolity – but it was an astute move, because those who came to watch the naughty operetta or escapist travelog would also have to sit through and absorb the anti-semitic newsreel and the paranoid speeches.
Yet, though he played the arch-manipulator, Goebbels concealed a desperate secret: he actually believed in all this. When the war came, he welcomed the chance to mobilize the home front for what he saw as a noble struggle – and when things began to go badly, he yearned to make reality reflect his propaganda: to organize the nation as a single force, battling for a shared ideal. Others pursued institutional rivalries, carving out temporary fiefdoms from a fast-shrinking Reich with its increasingly drugged, dithering, inattentive leader. Goebbels alone persisted; his inextinguishable faith in victory may have done much to prolong the agony of defeat.
In the end, he was the only one left. Hitler was dead, Himmler and Göring were attempting to surrender, Bormann and the others had disappeared on their ill-fated breakout attempt. Newly-named chancellor of a non-existent government, Goebbels refused to leave: “a captain does not abandon a sinking ship.” When Red Army soldiers captured the Chancellery bunker, they found his half-burned body (recognizable from its leg-brace), along with those of his wife and their five little blond children, all with names loyally beginning in “H.” Not all love stories end well.
On this day in 1919, Woodrow Wilson lay in his sickroom at the White House, felled both by a stroke and by the bitter disappointment of the collapse of his plans for the League of Nations. Into the hushed and shadowed chamber crept a messenger with a piece of legislation passed that day by Congress. Wilson’s glaring eye scanned the title; his palsied hand refused to sign – but, sent back to the Senate, it returned within hours, his veto overruled. Thus passed the Volstead Act that made America officially dry for the next fourteen years.
The Act was a triumph of single-topic agitation – in particular, the lobbying power of the Anti-Saloon League and its mild-mannered but relentless general counsel, Wayne B. Wheeler. He had no side-issues; his interest extended along only one dimension. Candidates who supported prohibition, whatever their other opinions, received the bounty of the League; pro-tipplers, whatever their other virtues, were hounded from office. As his publicity representative Justin Steuart said, "Wheeler controlled six congresses, dictated to two presidents of the United States… distributed more patronage than any dozen other men, supervised a federal bureau from outside without official authority, and was recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States." The League invented what we now know as “pressure politics,” mobilizing the violent emotions of unschooled voters to turn elected representatives into hunted animals. It monopolized the telegraph wires into Congress for days, sending thousands of separately-signed but identical messages to legislators until they collapsed and voted in the Great Drought – whatever may have been their own private fondnesses for juleps or sours. In the aftermath of the Act's passage, the feeling in Congress was not one of achievement or hope, but of relief.
The relief was premature – for in merely prohibiting the manufacture, sale, consumption, import, and export of intoxicating liquors, Congress provided no guide to how the thousand little social rituals that touch on alcohol were to be sorted into Innocence and Crime – nor how the Federal government was actually going to enforce its writ in every American living room, kitchen, or cellar. From a simple prohibition, matters rapidly became more tangled: the Catholic church gained a dispensation for communion wine. Italian-Americans lobbied for the right to ferment fruit at home, leading to a huge increase in low-quality grape-growing and the beginnings of the California street-wine industry. Freighters loaded with scotch and rum loitered just off the three-mile territorial limit, to be met in the dark of night by buyers in speedboats. Breweries, stuck with a bulky product, put themselves under the protection of mobsters, who in turn bribed policemen. The boundaries between good behavior and bad, clean money and dirty, became increasingly blurred.
A thing forbidden becomes a thing desired. America, restricted to the pure and limpid spring, suddenly found a raging thirst for something with pep – yet, if you wanted to accompany your veal scaloppine with anything more appropriate than root beer, you had to break the law. If you thought a seidel of ice-cool lager the proper reward for a hot day’s work, you were putting money into the pockets of the Mob. If you wanted to overhear the conversation of Mr. Benchley and Mrs. Parker, you had to seek them out in one of New York’s 50,000 basement speakeasies, where you could sample exotic cocktails devised to mask the tooth-loosening aftertaste of bathtub gin. Drinking, with the intense concentration of an illicit pleasure, became the proud badge of the sophisticate. Even my own grandfather, a school principal of staunchest moral views, would welcome the weekly visit of the quiet man in the all-shadowing hat bearing the brown paper package.
When Wayne B. Wheeler’s “noble experiment” was finally repealed in 1933, it left marks on America that have never faded: a nervous emphasis on “alcohol” rather than a nuanced social view of the different roles of wine, beer, and spirits; a perverse patchwork of local legislation that makes the same behavior normal in Town X but criminal in neighboring Town Y; a hard-drinking middle-class cocktail culture; a well-funded Mafia with, in many cities, a corrupt police force; and – to our lasting shame – some of the weakest, wishy-washiest beer in the world. It is enough to drive a man to drink.
On this day in 1553, the neighborhood of Champel was, as it is still, a desirably leafy little district on the suburban fringe of Geneva. Look, yonder comes a procession: a minister in black, some worthy serious citizens, a strapping country fellow – a forester? – and in the middle an extraordinary figure: obviously a foreigner, chattering sometimes in French, sometimes in Latin, sometimes silent and self-collected, then suddenly crying out “misericordia!” in a loud voice. The walk stops where a pile of brushwood, partly covered in fallen foliage, surrounds a pillar. There they crown the stranger with a chaplet of sulfur-soaked leaves, bind him to the stake… and light the brush. Several terrible shrieks are succeeded by the sound of prayer through the smoke. In an appalling half-hour, Michael Servetus is no more. It is a scene that has troubled Calvinist consciences ever since.
Samuel Coleridge remarked, “if ever a poor fanatic threw himself into the fire, it was Michael Servetus.” It’s a fair point; Servetus, a Spaniard, exhibited a flamboyant confusion of gifts: he was a brilliant physician, discovering the circulation of the blood a century before Harvey. He was an eminent geographer, working as a consultant/copy-editor throughout Europe. He spoke six languages and knew the Bible with an intimacy that few except John Calvin shared. Yet, at the same time, he was haughty, bold, contentious; obsessive, intense, abrasive. Finding a point of theological difference, he wrote Calvin reams of letters in the style almost of a modern stalker: intimate, insinuating, bumptious, needling, and abusive. His opinions on the Trinity gained him the rare distinction of being burned both by Catholics and Protestants – though the Catholics had to make do with an effigy and five crates of his books.
Having escaped from this frying pan, Servetus threw himself for unknown reasons into the fire of Geneva, from which the usually restrained Calvin had promised “he would not escape alive.” He himself may not have known why he did it; his testimony at his trial flips between cool textual criticism and explosions of insult: Calvin was “Simon Magus, impostor, sycophanta, nebulo, perfidus, impudens, ridiculus mus, cacodaemon, homicida” – yet also a man of great learning to be consulted in all difficult matters. Perhaps the underlying motive was this: though willing to die for his ideas, Servetus could not bear to die unnoticed. He sought the pyre as a moth seeks the candle.
What truths are worth dying for? You may not be surprised to learn that Servetus was roasted for matters about which few believing christians now give a second thought: whether Christ is the eternal son of God or the son of eternal God; whether divine will, mercy, and inspiration constitute three "aspects" or three "persons;" whether faith or baptism is the true test of membership in a church. Hardly has a heretic been burned to more general satisfaction than he was: theologians across Europe unanimously approved his sentence, usually adding one or two further terms of execration as they did so – yet (without wishing to cause further offense to modern theologians) I should point out that Servetus’ views on these vexed points seem to accord most closely with what individual christians of all sects now actually believe. They also provide the firmest framework for mutual understanding between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. But this requires admitting that the Creed recited daily in churches around the world is not the creed of the private heart – and that much of what we do on our various Sabbaths is a matter merely of custom.
Servetus died for an unprovable irrelevance; but the same could be said of those who die for country, or freedom, or tolerance. If we wished to die for a truth, we would have to choose "natural selection" or "special relativity:" things open to test and counter-example. The rest remain matters we feel deeply but cannot comprehend, that demand allegiance the way those we love do – as unknowable intimates.
Today marks the birth in 1491 of Zhu Houzhao, soon to reign as Zhengde, "Rectified Virtue", tenth emperor of the Ming (“brilliant”) dynasty. Even before he ascended the throne at the age of fourteen, he was a wonder: attentive, polite, educated in the Confucian classics and trained in the military arts. His father, a painstaking and responsible ruler, wanted to make sure his son understood both the intricacies of government and the legacy of the dynasty’s founder, a penniless peasant who had brought order to China through the force of his personality and the rigor of his rule.
Yeah, fine, whatever: the moment Zhengde attained supreme power, he couldn’t have cared less about retaining the Mandate of Heaven. He wanted music and concubines (Muslim ones, preferably), wrestling matches, and wine – hot, strong, and plentiful. Yes, imperial sacrifices and audiences usually took place at dawn, but dawn is early. Some time just before dinner would do just as well. And why do I need to do all this stuff, anyway? I’m emperor!
This relaxed view of imperial responsibilities rapidly ran into a problem: the traditional bureaucracy, headed by the Grand Secretaries, was too committed to the Confucian ideals of just action and self-restraint to respond instantly to the emperor’s need to spend. So he turned to the eunuchs, always a volatile element in Chinese statecraft, whose influence was so troublesome that the first Ming emperor had put up a large stone plaque in the palace reading, “EUNUCHS ARE NOT TO BE INVOLVED IN ADMINISTRATION.” Zhengde must not have spotted it. He allowed one eunuch, Liu Jin, to arrest, torture, and kill all those he pleased; but with this power came the responsibility to find yet more money for the emperor, who planned a new private palace outside the Forbidden City – since his simultaneous fondness for lanterns and gunpowder had burned down most of the imperial quarters.
Zhengde was not a monster; touchingly, what he craved most was a taste of real life. He would sneak out of the palace in disguise to wander the streets of Beijing. When a scarred veteran of the wars, Jiang Bin, arrived with tales of the free and easy life in camp. Zhengde escaped to the border with him and returned claiming to have killed a Mongol himself. Thereafter, he insisted on living, Gaddafi-like, under canvas, in a tent palace of 162 interlinked yurts. He created for himself a martial alias, General Zhu Shou, whom he insisted should be given a dukedom (and a duke’s salary). He heard from his attendant magicians that a reincarnated Buddha was to be found in Tibet – so he sent off another eunuch to entice him to court: a Buddha would at last be something worth getting up for. But the expedition was slaughtered in the mountains and by the time the eunuch returned, Zhengde was dead, at thirty, having fallen drunk out of his boat on the Grand Canal.
Ming China was a pyramidal society built on loyalty, its officials seeking little more than a just ruler to serve faithfully. Zhengde’s offhand exploitation of this system shattered the core of sincerity around which it was was built. He was not the last, nor even the worst of Ming emperors, but his blatant disregard for the purpose of a ruler made the regime’s decline inevitable. It is not that an emperor is actually different from other men, but that the ideal of leadership gives all the heart to follow. We work together better under the illusion of a higher power.
What you call “history” depends on the size of maps you use. From a Situation Room deep beneath Washington or Moscow, all the world seems your chessboard, with each square infinitely magnifiable on a need-to-dominate basis. For the observant local, however, even a walk around the block is rich with remembered incident. The annals of the poor are only short and simple to the uninformed, often patronizing, outsider.
To its 100,000 proud inhabitants, the island of Grenada is a whole world, from the hotel-lined beaches of Point Salines to the up-country hamlets of St. Mark Parish. And what a world: its rich soil supports a vast herbarium of valuable plants – oranges, wild coffee, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and a quarter of the world’s supply of nutmeg. Approaching by water, you will scent the island before you see it. It is a land blessed by nature’s bounty and cursed by the proximity of larger neighbors.
Grenada gained independence from Britain in 1974. It was a botched process: the original idea had been to create a West Indian federation on the model of Canada, but this foundered on jagged local rivalries invisible from London. The second-best choice was to find the “right people” to take over government – that is, professional middle-class people – and Grenada’s right person was Sir Eric Gairy. Yes, he had once been dismissed for corruption; yes, he seemed slightly dotty, demanding that the UN declare a Year of the UFO; yes, he reinforced his hold on power using violent street gangs. But he fit the accepted international pattern of ex-colonial leader.
He was less acceptable to local opinion, which was stirred up, not just by the unjust distribution of wealth and influence on the island, but by winds arriving from off-shore: the Black Power movement, the liberation struggles of Africa, the books of Franz Fanon, the example of Stokely Carmichael (himself, like Macolm X’s mother, from neighboring Trinidad). All these vague but passionate urges condensed around the New Jewel Movement, a youth/collective/educational/women’s/socialist party, and its tall, charismatic, eloquent leader, Maurice Bishop. Taking advantage of Sir Eric’s absence on an international junket, Bishop’s party staged a coup in 1979 declaring a “revolution for work, for food, for decent housing and health services, and for a bright future for our children and great grand-children.”
Bishop’s rule, known locally as “the Revo,” remains an agonizing “what if?” for most Grenadians – and shows the pointlessness of speculative history. We might draw parallels with another tall, handsome orator in Cuba and assume that Bishop would have ended by disappointing and dominating his people, falling into easy habits of personal rule, caprice, cronyism, and inefficiency. Or he might have done what he said he would do: build up through universal education and internal investment an enterprising but fair-minded society on the models of Switzerland and Tanzania. We can’t know – for in 1983 his childhood friend and second-in-command, a less popular man and more doctrinaire communist, mounted a coup that led to the deaths of Bishop and his cabinet and a takeover by the People’s Revolutionary Army.
The Grenadian square had already been glowing dimly in Washington; now it lit up. Grenada is at one end of the Caribbean chain, Cuba at the other. Seen at that scale, the resemblance to a line of dominoes was striking. Cubans were helping to build the new airport, ostensibly to increase tourism, but possibly useful for military purposes. Five hundred US citizens, students at a low-standards medical school, were stranded on the island. And the US military, bruised by failure in Vietnam and the fouled-up Iranian rescue mission, needed an opportunity to get its act together. The intervention was to be called “Operation Urgent Fury” – but “Operation Restore Mojo” would have been closer to the brief. The flotilla approached at dawn on this date.
It didn’t all go smoothly; parachute landings were messed up and amphibious groups didn’t arrive until full daylight. The Cuban construction workers were armed and fought back. Two Navy air strikes hit, instead of their targets, the HQ of the 82nd Airborne and a mental hospital. Troops were issued with maps that had no contour markings; radio networks didn’t link; one infantryman had to call in air support from a pay phone using his credit card. Oh, and the Reagan administration forgot to inform the Grenadian Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, that it was invading her country. Bad form.
Lessons, though were learned: the next year saw a thorough reorganization of the US military, making it a far more integrated, effective force. The US, Britain, Cuba, and the Soviet Union issued statements and reassessed the global situation. Clint Eastwood produced a movie about the invasion, celebrating America’s newly-recovered machismo. And Grenadians were left thinking – as they still do – about what might have been… but that’s a local matter.
The myth of flight is that it is effortless. “Free as a bird” is not actually free at all: while earth-bound creatures need only deal with two dimensions of uncertainty, birds are subject to the three-dimensional turbulence of air – convection gradients, shear planes, vortices, microbursts – as well as to the usual worries about food and predators; no wonder they seem so twitchy. Yet humans find the appeal of flight so strong that passengers willingly wait in line barefoot and clutching little resealable bags; designers spend lifetimes in bleak fluorescent-lit offices in charmless company towns; and governments shovel trillions of taxpayers’ funds into the quest for the next “beautiful bird.”
In doing so, they introduce one element of uncertainty that real birds need not worry about: politics, which often has the same effect on design that sunlight had on Icarus. No air industry felt this mysterious yet deadly force more keenly than Britain’s in the 1960s, where alternating blasts of nationalization from the Left and cost-cutting from the Right had reduced the proud companies that made the Spitfire and Lancaster to nerveless, gibbering wrecks. In both the military and commercial realm, governments had killed off or delayed projects that might have put the UK back at the top of the design heap. As it was, any engineer with talent was pulling out the atlas and looking up “Seattle.”
France, too, was finding that it could no longer afford its ambitions; so in 1962, both governments instructed their national airplane companies to cooperate on a new project: a supersonic transport. Late in a party, someone found a thesaurus and suggested the name “Concorde” to represent this unlikely marriage. The development was expected to cost about £150 million and take about four years. There was no provision for cancellation. In fact, the plane was finally available for sale eleven years later and by then had cost the British public some £974 million, or $7 billion today.
There had been a few skeptical noises made along the way. In July 1969, Baroness Wooton had asked the aviation minister in the House of Lords whether anyone would actually pay enough for a Concorde ticket to justify the cost – to which Lord Beswick gave this magisterial reply: “ My Lords, not only have Her Majesty's Government considered it, but some professional people have spent the best part of their working week producing graphs and curves on this very problem.” Well, there you are. The noble lords then decided that this was enough questioning about a “great technical adventure,” and went on to discuss the Loch Ness monster.
One prescient peer had asked whether Concorde would be allowed to fly at supersonic speeds “over civilised countries.” The answer was affirmative, but wrong – for Concorde would not be allowed to fly over Carol Berman’s house. Ms. Berman lived on Long Island and launched a successful appeal to forbid supersonic flights into JFK airport. Without the New York route, American airlines pulled out of their commitments to buy Concorde. The British government, having given all that taxpayer money to its nationalized airplane company to develop the plane, then lent taxpayer money to its nationalized airline to buy it.
It might seem strange that every man, woman and child in Britain and France should be asked to pay the equivalent of three hundred dollars to let a few executives and rock stars travel across the Atlantic faster than the rest of us – but this is to deny the existence of a widespread and uniquely human fault: the sunk-cost fallacy. We ought to consider our investment options as of now: whatever choice will produce the best returns for the future is the right one, regardless of what we have paid in the past. Instead, though, we tend to favor the choice that has already cost us a lot – we can’t bring ourselves to write it off. Other animals don’t do this. Perhaps it’s a matter of pride – if you admit your mistake, you look foolish. Or not wasting things: the same instinct that makes your grandmother feed you last week's stew because “it needs eating.” Or because humans are always in a provisional situation, where demands could suddenly change; we can’t give up because tomorrow, perhaps, everyone will have an urgent appointment across the ocean – and we’ll be ready.
Amazingly for such a committee-led project, Concorde was in fact a beautiful bird – elegant and astounding. For thirty years, its subsidized passengers enjoyed a “great technical adventure:” narrow seats, no carry-on luggage, but a powerful sense of witnessing the extremes of accomplishment. It flew for the last time today in 2003. I saw it pass this very window, an improbable gleaming shape in the pale sky, circling the city like a giant stork seeking a chimney on which to nest. Low and slow it flew by, then waggled its wings and climbed into the clouds, passing – effortlessly – from the present into history.
