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The muscles twitched in the commander’s jaw. “Periscope depth,” he barked. “Aye, aye, Sir!” It was a bitch having AVSDU on the blink; not that he was maneuvering blind, but when you’ve got seven thousand tons of nuclear-powered naval might throbbing at your fingertips, you need good situational awareness. The operation was already running late; time to hit the chicken switches. “Sonar! What’s the latest track for contact S-13?” “Can’t see, Sir: I have all these sportswriters and chief executives in the way…”
It wasn’t exactly like that, but it was close. The USS Greenville, a Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine, was on one of its periodic PR exercises today in 2001. The “distinguished visitors” – DVs in Navy parlance – were fundraisers for a possible refurbishment of the retired battleship Missouri. There were sixteen of them on board. The idea was to take them out from Pearl Harbor, dive, give them lunch, then run through a sequence of exciting fast maneuvers, culminating with a “main ballast blow” – in which the sub surfaces at speed, broaching like a whale. DVs love it, especially since they are sometimes given the controls during the blow. Well hell, there isn’t a lot to it: just flip the switches and hold on tight.
For Commander Scott Waddle and his crew, this was a necessary part of their duty, if not a particularly rewarding one. With no more Soviet threat and a construction cost per Los Angeles-class boat of around $2 billion, a peacetime Navy has to keep a lot of decisionmakers happy. The Greenville’s own name was a PR concession, after one of the Navy’s main suppliers of precision components, based in that Tennessee town, complained that the big cities seemed to be getting all the glory. Tipper Gore, wife of the state’s favorite son, was the boat’s sponsor.
Today, though, this necessary duty was proving a burden. The AVSDU, or Analog Video Signal Display Unit, was supposed to integrate sonar information with the view from the periscope, giving the commander a heads-up display. It wasn’t working; he’d have to get his sonar information by calling for it, over the heads of all his excited visitors. The control room, built for efficient occupancy by twenty crew, held nearly double that number. Lunch had run late – it was time to get these folks back to shore while they were still buzzing from their fun ride. The DVs sat ready at the controls. A final check through the periscope: “I hold no visual contacts.” The reporter and the businessman pulled the levers; the huge mass shot toward the surface – and sliced the stern off the Japanese fishing-education ship Ehime Maru, sinking it almost immediately with the loss of nine lives, including four high school students.
It was an entirely avoidable accident, but a comprehensible one. The nature of the mission gave it a certain unreality. Rather than execute procedures to the highest standards of the service, the goal seemed to be to provide a good time; as Waddle later wrote, “I could barely suppress a smile as I watched the expressions of joy and amazement on the faces of our distinguished visitors.” A collision in such informal circumstances seems as out of place as a death at a wedding.
Still, it had happened – the survivors were picked up (not, for good operational but bad PR reasons, by the Greenville) and the emphasis shifted to handling what was now an embarrassing international incident. The US administration did what would work for a US audience: the President apologized almost immediately; so did the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Ambassador to Japan. The Navy, in the person of Admiral Fargo, apologized face-to-face with relatives of the dead. But Waddle was kept out of sight; in American terms, this made sense: until an official court of inquiry determined exactly what had happened, it would be inappropriate to place or accept blame. Besides, our litigious society long ago learned that personal honesty about an error, while morally admirable, can cost institutions a lot of money. Everything had to wait for the judgement. Surely an apology from the President would be enough in the meantime.
This, though, was a severe misestimation of Japanese sentiment – for in Japan, obligation and amends are direct and personal, not corporate. To the relatives of the dead, Waddle had killed their children and Waddle had the sole duty to seek forgiveness. To keep him in the background was not only a scandalous attempt to weasel out of a duty of respect, but a symptom of the unequal relationship between the US military and Japanese civil society. Soon, the Greenville’s faulty piloting became equated with rapes and killings committed by US servicemen in Okinawa; Waddle was called “the most terrible criminal of them all.” The fact that civilians had been at the controls (which, if not hushed up, had certainly not been publicized) compounded the impression of thoughtless American cowboys trifling with Asian lives. The alliance that had maintained peace in the Western Pacific for fifty years came under heavy strain.
In the end, the US government does what it normally does, and paid: $11.5 million to the prefectural government, $8 million to replace the ship, $16.5 million to the relatives of those killed. Scott Waddle resigned from the Navy, and then did what the Navy had consistently urged him not to do: he went to Japan to apologize in person, individually. It did not go perfectly – some relatives refused to meet him – but another said, “when I saw Mr. Waddle as a person who was crying and apologizing, I thought he was apologizing from the heart.” It was a mission performed with care and attention – what any public should desire of its military.
Why, in their past lives, was everyone a princess or mighty warrior? Didn’t anybody dig ditches in the ancient world? Who took out the garbage? Who fed the elephants? Despite these quibbles, reincarnation has many attractions as an idea: it offers us another spin of the wheel; it puts punishment or reward for our deeds into a more credible landscape than the everlasting flames or clouds; it simplifies the question of where all this busy consciousness comes from and goes to. It’s tidy and sensible, like recycling. And it makes each of us special – if only because we once ruled Egypt.
If you shy away from such a seductive principle because it is unscientific, take heart: Professor Ian Stevenson, described by colleagues as “a methodical, careful, even cautious, investigator, whose personality is on the obsessive side,” spent a lifetime documenting instances of “reincarnation-type cases.” A tall, reserved Scots-Canadian, Stevenson had none of the guru about him: kindly but by no means hypnotic eyes peered through functional glasses; tweed, not saffron robes, enveloped his lanky frame. First in his class at McGill medical school, he embraced the self-restrained style of scientific expression: his speeches and papers were the opposite of inflammatory. The only hint of unorthodoxy in his makeup was his mother’s devotion to Theosophy, which he described as “a kind of potted Buddhism for Westerners.” It was in her extensive library on mystical subjects that Stevenson first came across the idea that would occupy his life.
The evidence he presents is this: over 2,500 cases, from cultures around the world, where small children would describe previous lives and deaths they had experienced that turned out to correspond in detail with those of real people whose stories the children could not have known. The most extreme – and therefore most attractive – example was a boy in Beirut who described having been a 25-year-old auto mechanic, killed when he fell from a moving car on a road near the beach. The boy could apparently name the driver of the car and the close relatives of the dead man. Stevenson was as careful of fraud and premature conclusions as a scientist should be; he discounted muddled or clearly self-deluded accounts. Yet some stories simply didn’t submit to a “normal” explanation. Not only stories, in fact: one of Stevenson’s books documents hundreds of cases where the pattern of a child’s birthmarks or birth defects duplicates injuries received in the “past life” that child recalled.
Skeptics naturally shied away from research so redolent of signs and portents, but, to Stevenson’s credit, no one has pointed out obvious blunders in his data collection or reporting methods. It seems scientific – and indeed the problem may actually be with what “scientific” means. Science proposes explanatory hypotheses and then seeks to disprove them by counter-example. A “statistically significant” positive result in experimental science usually means that there is a less than 1-in-20 probability that the results seen were produced by chance alone. A well-conducted experiment isolates a proposed mechanism of causation sufficiently from the surrounding random phenomena to make a statistically-significant result genuinely tell us something about what is going on.
Now, Stevenson never proposed a mechanism; there was nothing here to test – no potential counterexample where a child with the same apparent memories could be shown not to be reincarnated. Stevenson also couldn’t gauge how likely this phenomenon was to appear by chance alone, because the data had selected itself – he only knew about a case because it was unusual. There was no way to isolate these remarkable stories from the other remarkable coincidences that mark life on this numerous earth.
For human life is filled with coincidence; the statistician Warren Weaver mentions hearing a stranger, a German professor at the University of Bogotà, suddenly describe every specimen tree surrounding Weaver’s house in rural Connecticut; he documents two men who, never having met, joined the Army simultaneously, served in the same unit, were the same age, and looked so much alike that they were taken for identical twins; one was named, Baker, the other Cook. There are six billion people on the earth. Even if there is only a one-in-a-million chance that you have a given characteristic, you share it with more others than would fill the Royal Albert Hall.
Without a proposed mechanism and a method to quantify significance, Stevenson’s observations may have had science’s birthmarks, but not its life. Does that make them bunk? Not at all; but it leaves them, for the moment, outside the province of testable reality. His evidence is about something without explanation – and, unfairly for him, its whiff of the occult is likely to discourage further investigation.
Ian Stevenson died today in 2007 – giving him the one chance to attempt an experiment in his otherwise anecdotal field. The combination for the lock on the filing cabinet in his office was set through a mnemonic known only to him. He said that, if he were able, he would attempt to communicate this from beyond the grave to a living consciousness – to prove that human existence is cyclical, and life not merely an arrow shot towards death’s target.
So far, the cabinet remains shut.
Most children don't like champagne: the bubbles feel like needles to their sensitive noses. Most hate foie gras – eurrgh, liver! Most writhe with embarrassment when their parents dance, or sing, or smooch. They are, in their way, puritans: they find these pleasures disgusting.
Girolamo Savonarola was such a child. The son of a weak-willed, improvident courtier in Ferrara, he fled from the pastimes of the castle to take long solitary walks in the fields and devour Aristotle and Aquinas in the library. He fell in love, once and disastrously, with an unobtainably high-ranking girl. He was angular, awkward, intense, with a glance under bushy brows that mingled scorn and beseeching, exaltation and tenderness. One feels that he was, in character, something like many modern mathematicians and musicians: emotionally attuned to the abstract – to the beauties of structure, reasoning, and divine mercy – and finding what most people do all day a tedious and slightly revolting distraction.
Having run away from court, he fled from medicine, his parents’ choice of career, to become a Dominican monk. It was the order that sent him in 1482 to Florence, theater of his triumphs and disasters. At first, he believed himself in the anteroom to heaven. The cloisters were decorated with the paintings of Fra Angelico; the streets offered up men who knew even more than he about the Greek philosophers and Doctors of the Church. The city, under the indirect rule of Lorenzo (the Magnificent) de Medici, was an intellectual treasure-box. Yet the streets were also filled with dandified bravos singing obscene ditties written by the ruler himself. The painters were as happy to record the loves of Venus as the Madonna and Child. The scholars dabbled in the dark pools of Hermetic, Chaldean and Kabbalistic ritual – and many took more than an intellectual interest in their handsome young students. The city was not a republic of virtue, but a tyranny sweetened by corrupting pleasures. The patronage by which Lorenzo made Florence beautiful also made it his.
Savonarola preached passionately against all this, but his unpolished style meant his sermons remained a poor draw for a discriminating audience. Time and misfortune, though, soon made the Florentines attentive. Lorenzo died in 1492: his son, the foolish and violent Pietro, rashly attempted to hold by force what his father had won by guile. The Papacy dropped into the grasping hands of Rodrigo Borgia, whose rapacious avarice, supported by his murderous sons and marriageable daughter, shamed an already degraded Church. The French invaded, revealing in a march the length of the peninsula that the great states of Italy could never unite, hating each other more than any common enemy. The wars brought in the thread of repressed self-loathing that still marks Italian culture; they also brought in syphilis. Finally, the year 1500, with its apocalyptic associations, was fast approaching. The ringing calls to repentance of a visionary who saw the fiery sword of God brandished over the land now seemed worth listening to.
The French drove out Pietro in 1494; Florence’s new government was as completely, if indirectly, controlled by Savonarola as the old had been by Lorenzo. It was a “Christian, religious republic,” with the same concern for outward austerity and self-denial that we see in Islamic republics today. People dressed in gray; they ate no meat for half the year. They no longer sang to the lascivious pleasings of the lute. The young boys were enlisted in a moral police that went from door to door gathering evidence of misdeeds. And today in 1497, they arranged Savonarola’s most famous moment: the “bonfire of the vanities,” in which were consumed the symbols of their now-disgusting past: mirrors and cosmetics, carnival masks, playing cards, indecent books and pictures, pagan statues. Legend has Botticelli tossing his own canvases onto the pyre; we cannot be certain how much real beauty was consumed – although we do know a Venetian art dealer offered 22,000 gold florins for the whole pile, so there must have been more than mere gew-gaws.
This spasm of disgust at needless consumption is familiar. Think of diamond-encrusted cellphones; of Hummers on the school run; of gold-leaf, caviar, and Kobe-beef pizzas… and it’s easy to start looking for the matches. We also still link our disgust with apocalyptic thinking: how can I justify spending eight dollars on a "designer ice sphere" for my luxury vodka when the world is burning up? The problem Savonarola found was that, as with climate-change, people can’t maintain the posture of self-denial for long; if the Apocalypse is going to come, it needs to come soon. After four years of gray, meatless good behavior, the citizens had enough. They allowed their moral dictator to be arrested on the orders of a corrupt Pope, tortured, and then burned on the same spot where he had built his bonfire. The long-term and the abstract may do for the world’s rare saints and martyrs – but most of us live for the pleasures of here and now.
The conventions of the siege take two possible forms: either the freedom-loving people have surrounded the dark tower, bulwark of tyranny – or everything that is true and good is sheltered behind these high walls while the slavering horde rages outside. Literature has no model for the siege that took place tonight in 1934, when thieves within were surrounded by fools without.
France’s Third Republic, born in 1871, began its slow death soon after. For all its expositions and architectural splendors, its artistic brilliance and civilized vices, the régime nursed a fatal disease: it represented, not France, but itself. The governing class was a minority – petit bourgeois, clannish, anti-clerical and anti-socialist, windy and ineffective in debate but perfectly capable of stitching together deals in the back corridors and pleasure-houses of power. With a few exceptions, its leading figures tended to be small, slightly shabby provincial lawyers and notaries, Tweedledums whose main interest was in gaining a Ministry for a week or two – before some parliamentary wangle brought down the government and Tweedledee moved into the office with the big Louis XV desk. Governments succeeded each other on a monthly basis, with the same faces arriving to enrich themselves a little further, distributing contracts, taking kickbacks, profiting from insider knowledge. They were, as a class, unimpressive – but they knew how to keep the ball rolling; it was if the country had been taken over by a venal version of the Rotary Club.
A club, of course, defines who’s not in it as much as who is. This grubby, commercial, godless republic had many enemies. By definition, monarchists hated it; and there were quite a few of these in Paris, young men of the Camelots du Roy who combined the noble ideal of chivalric service with a fondness for beating up students. There were the romantic Catholic idealists of Action Française, whose identification of France, God, the Land, Battle, and blue eyes shaded off naturally into virulent anti-semitism. There were the veterans’ organizations, chief among them the Croix-de-feu, or "fiery cross," which yearned to restore the solidarity and discipline of the trenches (although the French army had nearly collapsed through mutiny in 1917, with order restored only after thousands of executions). Its leader, Colonel de la Rocque, enjoyed arranging marches – and hoped, like Mussolini, to march himself into power. What did these movements – anti-tax, anti-freemason, anti-Jew, anti-anti-clerical – have in common? I think you can guess.
February 1934 wasn't an unusually bad month for the Republic. True, the effects of the Great Depression were beginning to be felt even in the uncommercial depths of la France profonde. There had been the usual scandals: a nationwide investment fraud; a junk-bond scam connected with the Jewish financier Alexandre Stavisky, who may or may not have been killed by the police; the bankruptcy of a well-connected speculator. A new government was coming in, supported by the Socialists, whose price was the dismissal of the rightist Prefect of Police for Paris – a man who did not feel that policing should apply to his pals.
Somehow, though, this became the moment and these the issues around which the anti-government coalesced. “Everyone – tonight – in front of the Chamber!” blazed the headlines of far-right newspapers, and everyone came. Monarchists, corporatists, fascists – thousands streamed into the Place de la Concorde and attempted to break through the police cordons protecting the Chamber of Deputies, “where the robbers have barricaded themselves into their cave.” They threw coal and iron railings and slashed at horses and men with razor-blades on canes. The police fired back; rioters and bystanders alike were killed.
Then, a dramatic moment: the veterans’ brigades marched into the square, ten thousand strong. Had they moved on the police, there is little doubt they would have broken through and seized the seat of government; it would have been an anti-Republican taking of the Bastille. But, after a brief parley with the police, they about-faced and left. Can it be their leaders realized that if they won here, they would be in charge? And that they had, in fact, no idea what they would do with power? In the end, the Deputies survived the night; there were no heads on pikes and the Third Republic survived another five-and-a-half years before surrendering to Hitler.
What, as we gaze across the foggy dawn cobblestones littered with lost hats, is the lesson? Merely this – people out of power lose any sense of what it is for: they become spasmodic, suspicious, hysterical. People forever in power lose any sense of what it is for: they become self-protective, in-turned, corrupt. Trying to keep your intellectual enemies out of the political process radicalizes both sides of any debate. Even the stupid and bigoted need representation: for, from outside the castle, a college-educated policy wonk can seem just as dangerous as a Freemason or a Jew seemed to the crowds in the square.
He stood upon a little mound
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
'Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.'
A boy born today in 1840 in Sangerville, Maine, brought – with characteristic Yankee ingenuity – nearly inconceivable suffering to the world. Hiram Maxim had the classic Boy’s Own childhood: taught in a one-room schoolhouse when not tending sheep, apprenticed at 14 to Mr. Sweat the carriage-maker, soon producing his first invention (a better mousetrap), and then going on to fame, fortune, and praise from the crowned heads of Europe.
Why were Yankees ingenious? Because there weren’t very many of them. A shortage of farm labor made every handy contrivance, from wheel-driven potato sorters to chicken-mounted egg-markers, worth perfecting during the long winter evenings. Each village school could afford its unmarried academy graduate to teach the secret arts of plane surveying, estimated volume, and compound interest. A merchant tradition made foreign markets, from London to Canton, as accessible as Chicago or New Orleans – and a proud and pervasive stinginess meant there always capital hidden around, waiting for an attractive proposition. A bright, ambitious boy could soon find himself enriched by his talents; and Maxim did. He moved on from his Uncle Levi’s machine works in Fitchburg to take up a post as engineer for the fledgling United States Electric Lighting Company. There he turned his hand to all the sources and uses of this remarkable new power, inventing (in passing) the light bulb, but finding to his disgust that Thomas Edison’s superior manipulation of the patent laws prevented his profiting by it. In annoyance, he went to England and took up British citizenship.
The fateful conversation took place at an Electrical Exhibition in Vienna in 1882: “I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.’” The 1880s were a dangerously accelerating time in European politics, as competing powers turned to industry to give them the advantage in the inevitable war to come. Krupp, Schneider, Škoda – across the continent, the most profitable use for steel was in bigger, better killing devices.
Maxim claims to recall how he was knocked over as a boy by the recoil of a hunting rifle; whether it was this or a mature engineer’s appreciation of the art of using wasted energy, he soon came up with his patent money-maker: a gun that captured a portion of its explosive force to reload and re-cock itself, reducing its user’s role to pressing a button. There had been repeating guns before (one, the Puckle, used square bullets – but only when fighting non-Christians), but they were complex and heavy and tended to jam. Here was death in a handy wholesale package.
Having tested all variants in his London garden (annoying his neighbors and permanently deafening himself), Maxim went into business to exploit his now watertight patents. The U.S. government was not interested, nor were the French (they had had bad experiences with their own repeater design); but the British were keen on a tool that could multiply the firepower of their soldiers. Why? Because, as with the Yankees, there weren’t very many of them, spread thinly around the world. They understood the usefulness of ingenuity, first trying out Maxim's invention on the Matabele of Rhodesia; the devastating results inspired Belloc’s acid little poem above.
Maxim was fortunate in having as his salesman the man who inspired Ian Fleming’s Blofeld: Basil Zaharoff, a Greek-Turkish arms merchant of enormous charm and no allegiance. His knack for bribing generals and journalists across the world put all the powers in competition to snap up Maxim’s lethal invention. Zaharoff earned such large commissions that he was able to buy the company.
When the inevitable came, the nations would have cause to regret the ingenious invention they had bought in such numbers. In their planning, one Maxim was the equivlent of thirty rifles; but this was a fatal underestimation, for thirty soldiers vary in their aim, interest, and bravery – while one Maxim-gunner, fed with ammunition, can blaze away all day long. No mass infantry attack could overcome a nest of machine-guns; the young men of Europe, nearly ten million of them, fell before this automatic reaper – helpless as Matabele.
From the moment when that first .303 round coughed from Maxim's muzzle, we have been condemned to a world where cheap, unskilled mass murder is always practicable. Nearly 130 years after its invention, the gun remains on active service –ready to kill. Whatever happens, we have got/ the means for death – though we would not.
A famous name can be a poisoned inheritance. Whatever advantages it might bring, being born a Rockefeller or a Rothschild makes you the odd one out in any social grouping or assumption. You have nothing to complain of; your work is just a hobby, your politics a dilettantish pastime; “We, the People” does not include you. How can you join any group? Your name is like having “MONEY” tattooed across your forehead.
Patricia Hearst was a student at Berkeley in February 1974; she was 19 years old. Though the daughter of media executive and granddaughter of the newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst, she had no particular politics. Unlike many of her hipper classmates, she was engaged to be married – her one concession to the spirit of the times was that she was living with her fiancé, Steven Weed. On this date, two cars pulled up outside their apartment; a group of armed figures burst in, beating Weed as he tried to keep them from abducting Hearst, whom they stuffed into their car’s trunk before screeching off, firing in all directions. Three days later, her father received a letter: “The United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army, armed with cyanide-loaded weapons served an arrest warrant upon Patricia Campbell Hearst… DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE.”
In the 1970s, the name “American” had some of the same resonance as “Hearst,” at least to young white kids. Raised in the comfortable 50s, watching war movies, Robin Hood, the Untouchables, and the Cisco Kid, many had an unsettling sense of their own aimlessness and the hypocrisy of their elders. “We beat Hitler, but if you looked around, we were being Hitler.” In Vietnam, Chile, the Philippines – in the ever-more ghettoized city centers abandoned by white flight to the suburbs – there was evidence of terrible injustice, committed by Dad, the very Dad who worried about one’s unsuitable friends and one’s vague job prospects. If only one could join the People, the Oppressed, then it would be possible to act on this rage.
The Symbionese Liberation Army had one genuine black member – a charismatic career criminal named Donald DeFreeze – and nine others who talked in black accents when they sent in tapes with their demands to the radio stations. The group had its roots among Berkeley students who went to visit local prisons. When DeFreeze escaped from San Quentin, they took him in – and suddenly life moved from theory to practice. They armed themselves; they made maps and planned operations. It was intense and, one suspects, fun. But then they went and killed Dr. Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of schools, on DeFreeze’s mistaken assumption that he was about to introduce ID cards for students. Two members were arrested after a shootout and charged. Hearst’s kidnapping was to have someone to trade for these “soldiers.”
No one is left alive to dispute her claim that she was physically and sexually abused, and thus brainwashed into joining her captors. Later examples of the “Stockholm Syndrome,” in which captives come to take on the values of their captors, show that no abuse is necessary to produce this result. In any case, the tone in the taped messages from Hearst swiftly changed from, “I just hope that you'll do what they say Dad and just do it quickly,” through, “people should stop acting like I'm dead. Mom should get out of her black dress, that doesn't help at all,” to “I have chosen to stay and fight. I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia. It is in the spirit of Tania that I say, 'Patria o Muerte, Venceremos.'" – all in just eight weeks.
And she did stay and fight. On April 15th, she was caught on security camera footage during a raid on a branch of the Hibernia Bank (founded by the family of her best friend at school) carrying an assault rifle and shouting at her hostages. When DeFreeze and five others died in a shootout with Los Angeles police, Hearst carried on with the remaining few, holding up banks, robbing stores, preparing for further “actions” – and arguing. The “leadership” (if one can can use that term in a group of six people) thought her too rebellious, but others admired her: “I hope you'll have the chance to meet P.H. She is incredible! She amazes me!” She belonged.
“Greetings to the people. This is Tania. I want to talk about the way I knew our six murdered comrades because the fascist pig media have of course been painting a typically distorted picture of these beautiful sisters and brothers. Cinque was in a race with time believing that every minute must be another step forward in the fight to save the children. Gelina was beautiful. She taught me how to fight the enemy within through her constant struggle with bourgeois conditioning. Gabi crouched low with her ass to the ground. She practiced until her shotgun was an extension of her right and left arms…” …Emily Harris is a computer consultant; Wendy Yoshimura paints watercolors; Mike Bortin favors ID cards in schools; Sara Jane Olson, a pillar of her local dramatic society, wrote the “Serving Time Cookbook.” Her daughters remark, "when people ask, we say, "she was not a terrorist. She was an urban guerilla.'" They add, "she lived in Berkeley. It was sort of normal there." Everyone ages.
Arrested in September 1975, Patty Hearst eventually served 21 months for bank robbery before having her sentence commmuted by President Carter and being pardoned by President Clinton. She thinks America makes too much of the terrorist threat: “Get real! There's so much weeping and wailing and memorializing, my feeling is it'd be a lot healthier if people didn't externalize so much and kind of bucked up a little bit." She works, when she works, as a voice actress: "I've always wanted to be a cartoon character. I've practically been reduced to that in real life.” Maybe that's the price one pays for a famous name.
February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver…
The February in Don McLean’s song American Pie was that of 1959. On this date, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (the Big Bopper) climbed into the Beechcraft Bonanza of Dwyer Flying Services to make the brief flight from Clear Lake, Iowa to Moorhead, Minnesota. The pilot was Roger Peterson, a recently married young man who lived for flying. At 21, he was a year younger than Holly – also a newlywed.
It was bitterly cold; a snow-laden front was approaching from the north-east, but Peterson and his boss, Mr. Dwyer, felt that conditions were still clear enough for a flight under Visual Flight Rules (Peterson was not yet instrument-rated). The plane taxied to the end of the runway and called in for a final pre-flight weather report. Then up into the sky it climbed, with Dwyer watching his young employee and his important passengers from the control tower. The plane’s tail light shone in the distance – drifting strangely downwards. “It’s an optical illusion,” said the local controller. “I’ve been flying since I was thirteen,” replied Dwyer; “I’ve seen a lot of airplanes.” The chill he now felt did not come from outside.
They found the wreck the next morning, quiet and still under a light drift of snow. Though wearing their seat-belts, the passengers had been thrown free, but Peterson was wrapped in his plane as in a cocoon. Careful analysis showed that there had been no mechanical failure; the plane had flown at cruising power, though at a 90° right bank, straight into the ground.
The death of the young and talented seems a message from the gods: we scrutinize it in the hopes that we can find some significance to account for the apparently random cruelty of fate. The circumstances that put those men into that place at that time have become a fixation for many around the world, who ask the smaller whys because they have no answer to the bigger one.
The first answer lurked in the instrument panel of the Beechcraft. The critical instrument for flying in reduced visibility is the attitude indicator, or artificial horizon. This has always posed conceptual difficulties for pilots, because it shows the horizon moving while the little wings representing the plane remain stationary. “Fly the wings, not the horizon,” intone the wise instructors, but it’s easy to forget in a moment of fluster. Many plane crashes, including those of 747s flown by senior fleet pilots, are ascribed to this confusion. To make matters worse, the Bonanza was fitted with a model of indicator that showed climb and descent in the opposite orientation from those on which Peterson had been training. He may well have believed he was level and climbing when he was actually hurtling toward the earth.
Thus far the accident report; but we really want to know what karmic agency made this fatal flight necessary in the first place. Well, Holly had run out of clean underwear. The “Winter Dance Party” that promised to take a troupe of recording stars through the frozen Midwest had turned into trek of the damned, with flu-stricken musicians huddling together on a bus with no heating. Holly’s drummer had to drop out, hospitalized with frostbite. Sure, they were all celebrities, but they were also young and poor.
Holly, though, was bright and decisive – he didn’t complain, he acted. Just as he’d proposed on his first date, sent his band home to Texas, and settled in New York to work on a new fusion of rhythm and blues with rock and roll, he decided he’d had enough of the bus. Flying to the next gig was the only answer; he made all the arrangements. That was his style – he was on his way.
The others were on the flight through fate’s usual arbitrariness. Valens, whose career lasted only eight months, had never flown in a small plane before. He kept bugging Holly’s lead guitarist Tommy Allsup to switch with him, until Allsup offered to flip a coin for it. Valens won. The Big Bopper had the flu and asked to take the place of Holly’s bassist, Waylon Jennings. When Holly heard Jennings wasn’t coming with them, he joked, “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up.” Jennings answered off-handedly, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” The gods are also cruel to the survivors.
How can one mourn what might have been? Not every promising artist who dies young is destined to become a mature genius. As it is, we still have from Richardson and Valens the droll ebullience of Chantilly Lace and joyful energy of La Bamba; and Holly, in two short years, recorded enough to fill a decade of releases. The same focus and decisiveness that put him in harm’s way made his artistic choices so clear and resolute that Bruce Springsteen still listens to him before every performance, “to keep me honest.” The music didn't die, because what they did will not fade away.
The Nile crocodile looks calm, unambitious, its eyes fixed on some distant point, its jaws gently smiling as if dreaming of peace. Huge and seemingly benevolent, it tempts smaller animals to relax, dropping their guards and getting on with their lives. But all the time, that dead eye is watching, that small but devious brain anticipating the moment to strike.
Idi Amin Dada was a keen observer of wildlife. He felt an affinity with the animals of Uganda, that lush paradise where the Nile first swells into a significant river. When he was dictator, he would travel downstream in his cabin cruiser, taking the salutes of the crocodiles, hippos and elephants with unaffected pleasure. He shared their imposing physical presence: six-foot-four, nearly three hundred pounds of solid, purposeful bulk. He had been a boxer and a rugby player: “with my speed, with my weight, if you tackle me, you can harm yourself; I think you should know this.” Unschooled, he yet had that instinct for ruse and surprise – unsettling friendliness alternating with sudden, crushing brutality – that makes a successful bully.
Crocodiles succeed without needing to be smart; Amin had cunning, but he was also very stupid. He joined the East African Rifles as a cook, rising through the ranks to be a warrant officer by the time Uganda approached independence. His British officers called him “a splendid man by any standards,” praising his toughness and discipline, but mentioned that he was “virtually bone from the neck up.” He thrived in the army because it gave life such obvious structure, with simple orders and operations, ranks and medals. When the British left in 1961, they made him a lieutenant – he reached major general a few years later.
Clever people are often fatally wrong about the stupid, mistaking lack of intelligence for lack of ambition or assuming that the doctrinaire will also be loyal. The new rulers of independent Uganda used Amin much as the British had: as a tool that could be relied upon not to act for itself. President Milton Obote sent him to sweep away the traditional power in the land, the king of Buganda, and to assist in a range of corrupt schemes and tribal suppressions. It was not until too late that Obote noticed how Amin had packed the army with his own people from the far north-west of the country. In the false security of his own intelligence, Obote delayed doing anything about this troublesome servant until he came back from a Commonwealth leader’s summit – but the big man moved faster, seizing power in a matter of hours on this date in 1971. His initial announcements were typically humble, claiming that he was a simple soldier and that he would soon reinstate democracy, having released all political prisoners and cleaned out corruption. In fact, he was already slaughtering all Obote’s fellow Lango tribesmen in the army. It was the beginning of eight years of horror.
What is power for? What, having the chance to accomplish things, will you do with it? This is not a question that troubles stupid people. Power is power; the important thing is to have it. “I dreamed I would be the mosty, highesty, head of state in the world. And when I dream, it is the truth.” Amin had to be the top in all things, small as well as large. When the cabinet swam with him in the presidential pool, they had to race and he had to win. When the jazz band of the Suicide Mechanized Brigade played for his parties, the songs had to be about him and he had to lead them on the accordion. When dance troupes praised him in leaping dances, he was soon among them, leaping higher. He judged his foreign alliances on similar terms. The Israelis had originally helped him with arms and training as a useful counter to Muslim Sudan: “ Golda Meir was very much my friend because she gave me good entertainment. General Dayan would offer lunch, dinner, and bring the Air Force band.” But Amin wanted Phantom jets to attack Tanzania – and the Israelis demurred. Soon it was, “Hitler was a great leader. I enjoy very much having breakfast with some Syrians, and Iraqi breakfast in their tanks.” Gaddafi’s Libya proved his most reliable ally, with the Soviets providing arms and the East Germans help with his burgeoning secret police establishment. Meanwhile, rank succeeded rank: in 1975, Amin made himself Field Marshal, then “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hajji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.” His military tunic extended to his knees to accommodate all his medals.
Meanwhile, some 300,000 people were being murdered, swept up by the corrupt paramilitary police, the drunken, looting army, or the terrifying, sunglasses-wearing torturers of the State Research Bureau. Schoolteachers, professors, government ministers, the Chief Justice, the Anglican Archbishop, or people unlucky enough to be the boyfriends of women that took the leader’s eye – all disappeared, leaving only a pair of shoes by the side of the road or, occasionally, a bloated corpse among the crocodiles.
The power structure of Amin’s Uganda was tall but tottery, shored up only by terror and the bribery of the armed forces. In time, everyone had enough and, when Tanzania invaded in 1979, his support folded; he flew off to exile in Libya and then Saudi Arabia. He was not the only hideous dictator in Africa, past or present – but his story is not intrinsically African, whatever historians may say about the continent’s colonialist legacy or its “big man” political culture. Amin would have felt at home in 1950s Central America, in Ceaucescu’s Romania, or in China’s warlord era. Power is the same in all cultures, as it is for all species.
Borrowed from mathematics, the idea of “elegance” in engineering has nothing to do with brushed aluminum fascias, carbon fiber shift knobs, or soft Corinthian leather. It is the essential fitness of the solution to the problem, the absence of extraneous fiddles and fixes, the surprise of novel insight, and the fruitfulness of the approach, spawning further answers. A turbine is elegant; so is a safety razor; so is velcro.
The conventional car engine, however, is not elegant. Speaking as a man who (thanks to a faulty temperature sensor) once reduced four cylinders of German automotive excellence to a single fused lump of metal, I can see good arguments for simplifying and rationalizing its layout. The rumbling thing under the hood is an object shaped by history, not logic, borrowing many of its basic structures from the steam engine – which, for reasons no longer valid, borrowed them from the water pump. Trying to turn wheels by starting with a series of explosions in pipes is like translating poetry through three intermediate languages; it’s no wonder that even modern engines convert only 20% of their fuel’s energy into motion. The rest goes in heat, friction, internal pumping, and the cat’s cradle of troublesome and rackety chains, push-rods, and rocker-arms by which a motor keeps its top in touch with its bottom. Any first-year student who presented this as a project would get a “C."
You can imagine, then, with what joyful relief the proprietors of the NSU Motorenwerke greeted their engineer Felix Wankel’s eponymous invention, which first whirred into life on this day in 1957. The Wankel rotary principle is wonderfully elegant, substituting pure trigonometry for that almost accidental assemblage of pistons, crankshafts, valvegear, baling twine, rubber bands, spit, and sticky tape by which we previously got around. Look at the diagram: the rotor (an epitrochoid triangle, a form you could trace using one of the lesser-known holes on your Spirograph) draws in the fuel-air mixture, compresses it, and expels the exhaust, all by its shape alone. The gear in its middle drives the transmission directly. There are only three main parts. It is simple, it is smooth, it is small. Engineers everywhere gasped with delight; Wankel’s engine was licensed almost immediately by carmakers from Rolls Royce to Mercedes to Citroën to Jeep, by motorcycle makers, airplane-engine companies, and, as a final insult to the steam-engine, pump manufacturers. In the 1960s and early 70s, the future was clearly rotary.
So why is the Wankel engine now only available in one model of sports car from Mazda? Because its performance has never lived up to its elegance. That epitrochoid rotor needs to fit exactly in its housing, or vapor will seep past it and efficiency be lost. The design and materials of the seals, which would seem a minor issue, was in fact a critical one – one that defeated the engineers. The motor’s poor fuel economy and tendency to accumulate soot bankrupted NSU (it’s now part of Audi). It helped bankrupt Citroën. Mercedes and Rolls Royce dropped it. And Mazda – which had committed to an all-Wankel product line just before the 1973 oil crisis tripled gasoline prices – escaped collapse by the thinnest of margins. The company persists in championing Wankel's design out of a very Japanese loyalty and love of beauty, not business logic.
The point is that an inelegant solution shaped by history can respond to history. Like a traditional government, the bits and pieces from which the traditional engine is composed have well-understood behaviors and offer many points at which to tinker and adjust. As gasoline changes in price; as consumers alternately favor speed, economy, or hauling capacity; as lawmakers shift their attention from soot to NOx to CO2, there are ways to respond, producing – if not an optimal solution – at least a relative improvement. The Wankel engine, on the other hand, is the perfect answer to a question we have not been asking.
Now, say Wankel’s partisans, the right question may at last be coming up. For good thermodynamic reasons, the rotary engine runs particularly well on hydrogen – and now history matters less. The fix in which we have put ourselves means we shall have to endure several embryonic engine technologies – battery, hybrid, hydrogen, fuel-cell – none of which will be as convenient as the fill-er-up-and-drive-away system we have now. The fact that the most elegant solution is not the best no longer matters: it could be the least bad.
Forty or so years ago, the evening news had a sacramental quality. People would sit, fully clothed, eyeing the tube from a respectful distance, before them a folding-legged TV table bearing such traditional dishes as Salisbury steak or chicken pot pie. Through the night air arrived the glowing images of America’s newsmen: Cronkite, Sevareid, Huntley and Brinkley – mature and grave, with scotch-and-cigarette baritones and experience-pouched eyes. They were magisterial, trusted: often concerned, but never confused, never hysterical. They typified another lost American archetype: the grownup.
Then, today in 1968 – everything changed. The fuzzy reversal film flown in from Southeast Asia showed unimaginable, inexplicable sights: figures in “black pyjamas” running and shooting in the US embassy gardens in Saigon. The stately, calm old capital, Hue, in flames. Mortar shells raining down on Da Nang. Fighting suddenly erupted in every large town and major base across South Vietnam, in 155 simultaneous battles. Nearly 85,000 communist fighters magically appeared, as if they had climbed up from trap-doors in the ground (indeed, some of them had). Today was the beginning of Tet, the lunar new year holiday; this was the Tet offensive.
It came as a complete surprise – officially. Soldiers on the ground had an inkling that the North Vietnamese and their Southern allies, the Viet Cong, were planning something big: “We kept seeing things, documents, we’d never seen before. ‘You know what? I think Tet, they’re coming.’ Couldn’t get anybody to believe us.’” At the top, General Westmoreland later claimed he knew; but, in his tortuous, politically-motivated way, he never said it – or not in a way others could understand. Instead, he told the National Press Club that the communists were essentially beaten and “unable to mount a major offensive.” His eyes were fixed on his chosen battle, Khe Sanh, where an isolated Marine base was pegged like a sacrificial goat to draw the North Vietnamese Army into an open, disadvantageous fight. He was also waging an intense argument with the CIA, the Defense Department, and the White House – not about how many Viet Cong soldiers there were, but about how many the American public should be told there were. 1968 was, after all, an election year.
The Americans were not alone in finding political emotion driving their military logic: the North Vietnamese leadership was embroiled in similar disputes. A poor country, made poorer by doctrinaire communist economics, it depended heavily on its two big friends, the Soviet Union and Maoist China. The Soviets offered heavy weapons, but wanted North Vietnam to combine fighting with negotiation, making peace at least possible. The Chinese offered rice and small arms, along with the demand for a protracted guerilla war on Long March principles. The Viet Cong reported that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and hated, its army a hollow shell; conditions were ripe for an uprising. Vietnamese are a proud and self-regarding people, never pleased to be dictated to, even by a friendly power. The prospect of a single, revolutionary eruption, freeing them from all foreign occupation and advice, was beguiling. The fact that every military calculation on which they based their plans was wrong… was politically incidental.
For the Tet offensive, though a shock to the defenders, was a complete and colossal failure. Those scurrying figures in the embassy gardens never got into the building; they were all dead or captured in hours. Most of the 155 attacks failed within three days. The South Vietnamese army took the brunt of the battle, and held; the Americans were able to fly in reserves wherever needed. There was no general uprising. The communist forces lost about 45,000 dead: the Viet Cong effectively disappeared as a fighting force.
That’s not, though, how things seemed across the TV table. A public that had accepted over-cozy assessments of the military situation now felt betrayed by the apparent confusion and obvious brutality of war. On February 27, Walter Cronkite summed up the news: “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past… To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. … It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” The trusted sage had spoken, and announced the war was lost.
American opinion, already stunned, now sagged. The Defense Department retreated from its demand for more troops. The President, fearful of the financial and social costs of escalation, made no more confident predictions of victory and soon dropped out of the race for reelection. Reporters in Vietnam, guided by their editors at home, told no more military success stories; “Everybody wanted atrocities: ‘have you killed any civilians?’” Soldiers on home leave found their own families telling them that they had lost the Tet campaign. It must be so; it was on TV.
Truth is war’s first casualty, and its last is the will to fight – for, without it, surrender soon follows. The communists lost all Tet’s battles and tens of thousands of troops, with no effect on their will; America gained the nominal victory, but the wound to its self-confidence proved fatal.
The Banqueting House is virtually all that remains of Whitehall, the old palace of the English kings. Designed by Inigo Jones, it is an Italianate block of perfect classical proportions, sufficient unto itself and entirely different from the higgledy-piggledy of brick galleries and mews, tilt-yards, brew-houses, and tennis-courts that once surrounded it. The ceiling, painted by Rubens, was commissioned by Charles I: it shows his father (recognizable by his red face and goggle eyes) being welcomed fraternally into heaven by the Almighty – a vision of kingship as unlike England’s legal tradition as the Hall was unlike the rest of the palace.
Charles had not been expected to be king; his tall and clever elder brother Henry had been trained for the job, his court a little college, but had died of typhoid at eighteen, leaving the spindly boy with the big head to take up the expectations of the country. Charles was not clever; worse, he was obdurate: his mind had room for only one or two ideas – but once in, they never left.
His principal idea was this: “Kings are not bound to give an account of their actions but to God alone.” As a creed, it has the advantage of being internally consistent and universally applicable (moreover, having to speak only with God would be a great relief to a shy man with a stutter and a thick Scottish accent). What God apparently wanted of Charles was for him to rule according to his conscience, without interference or opposition (He had, after all, similar arrangements with the Kings of France and Spain and the Czar of Russia).
This simple plan went awry for the old, unavoidable reasons: money and religion. English kings always lacked the personal income to rule without Parliament; and Parliament, unlike God, was loath to give Charles a free hand. It wanted him to fight Spain – but cheaply, as a naval war, with the hopeful chance that piracy might make it self-financing. Charles wanted to fight on land, to give his friend the Duke of Buckingham a chance to gain military glory. The war went badly, Parliament tightened the purse strings, Charles threatened and blustered, Parliament remonstrated and obstructed. Dismissing this awkward and quarrelsome body, Charles tried to rule on his own – but a poverty-stricken autocrat is never a happy one.
And yet – Charles was also King of Scotland, a country that could supply a powerful army led by tough and experienced commanders. If he could agree terms with the Scots, he could use them as a threat to make Parliament more accommodating. Unfortunately, Charles’ other big idea was religious: God wanted him to establish a uniform pattern of worship throughout his kingdoms, controlled by bishops and reporting, conveniently, to him. Scotland, as Charles should have known, is Calvinist: every conscience its own minister, every kirk its own community; no saints, no ceremony, no priests, no bishops, no king as head of the faith. Charles’ cack-handed attempts to impose his orthodoxy north of the border did indeed bring out the Scottish army – against him. His attempts at defense failed for lack of money; he had to recall Parliament; Parliament chided him for his autocratic ways; he foolishly attempted to cow it by a show of force – and the country collapsed into civil war.
Beaten in battle and a prisoner, Charles still refused to parley with his opponents (kings not being bound to account, etc., etc.). Put on trial for misusing the office of king, he denied anyone’s power to try him: he was the office; his crown and head were one. His very stubbornness forced into the open the contradiction between old, personal titles of power and the reality of power under law: its abstraction from the individual, where sovereignty and the sovereign are two separate things. His very mulishness helped shape the modern model of government – we ought to be grateful to him.
But new ideas could find no place in Charles’ mind. On this day in 1649, he stepped out from the window of the Banqueting Hall onto a scaffold. The air was chilly; the small man wore two shirts, lest the crowd should see him shiver and think it fear. He spoke, for once, to his people – but his message remained the same: “I shall go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be.” In a moment, that large, proud, impenetrable head fell from his neck.
In the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor at St.Peter’s. Rome seemed to be recovering its ancient dignity and power; this descendant of barbarians – martial, clever, sober, and nearly literate – had reassembled and extended the empire of the Caesars, promising to establish order under law and orthodoxy in faith. No wonder the modern European Union so often invokes his name.
A mere 104 years later, on this date, a straggling procession passed through the ruins of the great city – now the world’s largest spoil-heap – watched in mute disinterest by a scattering of armed louts and starving beggars. A new pope, Sergius III, was being enthroned – but this was something that happened too often to be worth noticing: there had been nine popes in nine years. And what popes! John VII had been clubbed to death by members of his entourage. Formosus had been a reasonable, pious old man, but he had favored the Lombards over the Franks: his successor had him dug up, put on trial, condemned, deprived of his blessing fingers and tossed in a common grave. The next year, a further successor dug him up again, clad him in papal vestments, and returned him to St. Peter’s. At the moment, two ex-popes languished simultaneously in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo: Leo V and Christopher… except that Christopher was an anti-Pope. No, he wasn’t. Yes, he was (this issue was not settled until the twentieth century).
How had things come to such a pass? Misfortune on misfortune’s head: the ninth century had been Europe’s nadir, as bad a time as any since the retreat of the ice. The Xanten Annals, one of the few surviving accounts, lists earthquakes, famines, locusts, gangrenous plagues, and the constant, repeated ravaging of the Vikings; eventually it dwindles to a sentence per year, as “it is revolting to say more of this matter.” The Saracens sacked Rome and burned St. Peter’s; when it later caught fire again, the demoralized people could think of nothing better to do than curse the saint and warn him that if he allowed his basilica to burn, no one would believe in Christ. The Universal City had become a mediæval Mogadishu, in which local warlords battled for turf from the fortified remnants of Hadrian’s tomb, Caracalla’s baths, and the Coliseum. Horizons narrowed, hopes dwindled, hearts hardened.
Into all this came Sergius III, son of a prominent Roman family and supporter of the Counts of Tusculum, local mafiosi who had taken the ancient titles of consul, senator, and patrician. The count’s wife Theodora was a powerful woman, named as “senatress and patricienne” in her own right. She was rumored to have taken a previous pope as her lover, and her daughter, the 15-year-old Marozia, was apparently Sergius’ mistress. Sergius quickly got into the swing of his duties, digging up Formosus again, beheading him, and throwing him in the Tiber. He ordered the imprisoned ex-popes to be strangled and fathered a son with Marozia (who later became Pope John XI). If this was not enough to distinguish him, he was also the first pope to wear the distinctive triple-crowned papal tiara and he restored the Lateran Palace, which had collapsed in an earthquake. Most impressively, he died six years later of natural causes – unlike a dozen popes and anti-popes in the succeeding century.
The time that followed is known as the saecula obscura, the dark age of the papacy. It is true that our picture of it is colored by the prejudices of our sources – particularly the irascible Luitprand of Cremona, whose celibate rage at the influence of women in politics gave him a particularly lurid idea of others’ sex lives. Nevertheless, it was one of those chaotic collective nightmares into which groups of otherwise reasonable people so easily fall. Power, unfortunately, is infinitely sub-divisable: there is no advantage too small to be fought, cheated, or killed for. As we see in failed and failing states around the world, the world of Sergius is easy to enter but hard to leave. Trying to return to order – and the trust on which order depends – is like driving in a labyrinthine village, edging into ever narrower alleys in the hope of finding a place to turn around. Part of Christ’s message, of course, was the hopelessness of such zero-sum seeking after power – but then the papacy has always been more Roman than Christian.
On this day in 1820, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, an officer in the Russian Navy, battled once more through the storms that whirl below the 60th parallel to see, glowing blue-white through his telescope, something that was neither wave nor cloud. This, at last, was the great Southern continent that human logic had long assumed to exist as a balance to the populous and diverse North: Antarctica. Naming his find the Alexander Coast (now Island) after his distant Czar, Bellingshausen quickly returned to more welcoming latitudes, leaving the seals and penguins to contemplate their new allegiance.
Antarctica is a land of negative superlatives: the least heat, the least moisture, the least precipitation, the fewest landscape features, the fewest plant species, the fewest people. It is a nowhere bigger than Europe, a windy void where place-names like Mount Terror, Cape Disappointment, and Exasperation Inlet seem entirely appropriate. “Great God! This is an awful place!” wrote Robert Scott, who gave his life in an ill-judged but inspiring race to the South Pole. The awe remains; the Almighty (or the Anthropic Principle) may have arranged for this planet to support human life – but it’s a touch-and-go business in Antarctica.
This extreme lack of hospitality has made it hard to explain exactly why we should go there. Some reasons are obvious: the barren land is bordered by one of the world’s richest seas, in which we still chase whales, out of sight of all but the most determined protesters. We hunted the fur seal to near-extinction, although fewer whales have meant the seal population has rebounded. We pursue, often illegally, the planet’s last sizable fish (if it says “Chilean seabass” on the menu, this is actually the Patagonian toothfish; the conscientious should avoid it). Soon, a hungry world may be sitting down to plates of aesthetically-improved krill.
On land, we have come up with three reasons why mankind should break in upon this vast and ancient solitude. Science is one: at the Pole, where Roald Amundsen one planted the Norwegian flag and turned his dogs northward, a $153 million stilt-borne structure shelters American researchers. It has a medical bay, pool-room, arts and crafts center, and a high-school style cafeteria where you can watch CNN. An airstrip allows Air Force LC-130s to bring in supplies. The US presence here dates back to the exploits of Admiral Richard Byrd, a Senator’s son who commanded Operation Highjump, a puzzling expedition that brought 4,700 men, thirteen ships, and a score of aircraft to the continent in 1946 for no clear purpose, except that the Navy had a budget to justify.
The second reason is sovereignty. Scott marched through the blinding snow for the sake of Empire; seven countries now claim overlapping slices of Antarctic territory and six more “reserve the right” to carve out chunks for themselves. Argentina has flown pregnant women in to its base to establish a "native" population. Britain’s section is self-supporting, thanks to its sale of stamps. Russia has casually announced that it might claim all territories “discovered by Russians” – which presumably means the whole continent. Nor are worldly powers the only ones represented; Byrd’s chaplain, Father William Menster, helpfully consecrated Antarctica; the Russians have gone one better and shipped in a fully-staffed church.
Finally, there’s tourism, the restless urge to go somewhere your sister-in-law has not already been. More than 40,000 people visited Antarctica last year; the number is set to double in the next couple of years, as bigger ships and helicopters arrive and more people, having watched The March of the Penguins, decide to see it for themselves. No such actions can be without consequences.
Ah, well. There are now days when thirty people are simultaneously standing on the summit of Everest, when the Atacama desert rings to the assembled motor-whine of the 500 participants in the Paris-Dakar rally. Parking lots are the biggest issue in Yosemite (except for the bubbling supervolcano that lurks beneath it). Our irritable search for significance or redemption takes us into the world’s empty places, where we increasingly bring our irritations with us – and leave a little of them behind.
There are few things – God, I suppose, being one – about which people talk more nonsense than the wilderness. As lively and social apes, we cannot accept its indifference, but instead assume either that it is challenging us to tame it, inviting us to exploit it, or teaching us some personal lesson about the harmony of the cosmos or the indomitability of the human spirit. In truth, it has no message for us. We talk, we do, we think. It is.
“If only I could impress Mozart's inimitable works on the soul of every friend of music as deeply, with the same musical understanding and with the same deep feeling, as I understand and feel them, the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel.” This speaker knew something of what he described: it was Haydn, who happily admitted that he listened to Mozart in his dreams.
It’s no surprise that so many have followed Haydn in praising the wonder born today in Salzburg in 1756 – what is striking, though, is that the most disparate people use the same terms to describe his music. Composers and musicians who agree on nothing else will talk in one voice of his purity and perfection; how the slightest change would diminish the effect. They mention his dance-like grace and the physical sensuality of his line. They marvel at the density of his content, the restless inspiration; and the constant pleasurable surprise, “escaping the frame,” unpredicted by the expert yet entirely natural and unforced.
Clarity, balance, perfection – depth, daring, surprise. A vision of a better world; a synthesis between the humane and the divine, between feeling and form, ever fresh, ever true. How does he do it?
My playing of Mozart gives pleasure to no-one but myself; I don't presume to hold a secret unknown to musicologists – but I do know about an odd phenomenon of human cognition that may help explain why our response to Mozart is so uniform and un-subjective. It comes from that little-known province of the academic world where literature and neurophysiology intersect.
Philip Davis of the University of Liverpool has long been interested in the electric shimmer that accompanies the comprehension of an obscure but well-turned phrase – particularly in the works of Shakespeare, like Mozart a daring boy who climbs far out along the boughs of grammar to perform his capers among its thinnest twigs:
“I had a specific intuition – about Shakespeare: that the very shapes of Shakespeare’s lines and sentences somehow had a dramatic effect at deep levels in my mind. For example – Macbeth at the end of his tether:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have, but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.
I’ll say no more than this: it simply would not be the same, would it, if Shakespeare had written it out more straightforwardly.”
Davis and other colleagues set up an experiment to see what happens in the brain in these moments of grammatical ambiguity but semantic revelation. They chose a favorite trope of Shakespeare’s, the dragooning of nouns into service as verbs – something that works wonderfully for him (“I could out-tongue your griefs”) if less well in modern usage (“she could podium again for sure”). Subjects were given electro-encephalogram (EEG) scans, during which they read sentences that fell into four categories:
1) grammatically and semantically unexceptional: “I said you would accompany me”
2) grammatically and semantically incorrect: “I said you would charcoal me”
3) grammatically fine but semantically wrong: “I said you would incubate me”
4) Shakespearian – that is, grammatically unexpected but semantically valid: “I said you would companion me.”
What the scans revealed was something that neuroscientists and linguists have known about for years but somehow kept secret from the English department: the P600 and N400 effects. These are modulations of brain-wave patterns in response to verbal cues. The P600, as the name suggests, is a positive modulation that appears around 600 milliseconds after a word that apparently violates grammatical rules; the N400 responds negatively, 400 milliseconds after something that defies comprehension. “I said you would charcoal me” sets both responses going; “I said you would accompany me,” neither. The experience of Shakespeare’s shift in word roles, though, is a regular tickling of the P600 with no corresponding N400: it sets up a tremor between “huh?” and “ah!” as the brain integrates conflicting views of the sentence. Nothing is laid out for us: we make the sense for ourselves, just as we make the missing shape in an optical illusion – and, for the same reason, this new sense glows all the more brightly.
This active, lively mode of perception seems to give us pleasure: good jokes work on the same principle, breaking local rules in the interest of a wider, skewed meaning. Music can also set the P600 response going, according to its own semantic structures of repetition and transformation, tension and resolution. Well-behaved Salieri, say, hardly troubles either wave-form, but Mozart constantly challenges the expectations of an educated ear: “can he do that?”; “he did!” Even in his earliest works, written when he was six, he sets up musical assumptions and then confounds them with sudden melodic twists, making us follow in delighted wonder toward new cadences.
A surprising resolution of semantic tension, an intelligent messing around with expectation – works that manage this trick have the essential quality of being unimaginable in prospect but inevitable in retrospect: the mark of Mozart.
Frederick Wells, the surface manager, was working his way down the ladder past the first layer of blue ground when he saw it: an irregular lump stuck in the face some ten feet above him, glittering in the last light of a setting sun. “Someone’s having his little joke,” he thought. The lump was so big, nearly 1 1/3 pounds, that it must be glass. He’d certainly leave a stiff word with the foreman… yet it would take only a moment to test… and once tested… good God! The thing was prodigious! Colossal! The largest gem diamond ever unearthed! Found today in 1905, named for the mine’s owner, bequeathed by a loyal Transvaal to King Edward VII, and split by Antwerp’s finest cutters, if now emits its its spectral fire from the Royal Scepter, the Crown of State, and a further seven eye-popping fragments that adorn Britain’s monarch and set her apart from thee and me.
Diamond is related to coal, a crystalline arrangement of carbon atoms with the power to scratch most other materials and soften the brains of otherwise canny people. Graphite, actually, is the more interesting form of carbon: a super-stable lattice that can be peeled apart into sheets just one molecule thick, electrically conductive and immensely strong. De Beers may tell you that “a diamond is forever,” but it isn’t. In only a few billion years, your engagement ring will become graphite, which will be forever. Diamonds are not even particularly rare, assuming you are willing to travel 100 miles under the earth’s surface to get them; they form naturally in such conditions of enormous heat and pressure. It is the particular type of volcano, very deep but not too explosive, necessary for bringing diamonds to the surface, that is hard to find. These ancient “pipes” appear only in a few countries, where they bring momentary joy and lasting unhappiness.
Few great gems have as simple and relatively happy histories as the Cullinan. The Hope, a deep-blue diamond smuggled from the Mughal court, brought misfortune to Nicholas Fouquet, Marie Antoinette, George IV, Lord Francis Hope, and Sultan Abdul the Damned, and now glows malignly from its darkened case at the Smithsonian Institution; the Agra, wrenched from the headdress of a dying Nawab and spirited from India in the stomach of a horse; the Indore Pears, gift of a murderous Maharaja; and the Idols’ Eye, with which the reclusive Mrs. May Bonfils Statton used to breakfast alone each morning. To stare into the fiery heart of a brilliant-cut gem is to lose forever a little of one’s sanity.
Humans have a powerful weakness for good stuff – things that have only potential usefulness, from the red sports car to the stiletto-heel slingback pumps. We visualize a life in which all things will equal their perfection: we ourselves shall become as uncompromisingly attractive and valued as these rare objects of desire. Thus many elderly matrons studded with glittering gull’s eggs secretly believe that this visual top-dressing takes the place of personal beauty or even charm. Men, by far the most usual buyers of jewels, value them for their portability, their anonymous discretion, and their cold, remote beauty – few gems are cute; few are even feminine without a good deal of artful setting. The marketing of diamonds has always recognized this male quality of unsettling challenge and exploited it, making the expression of love in carat form a competitive sport. Seventy years ago, De Beers hired the advertising agency N. J. Ayer to “promote the diamond as one material object which can reflect, in a very personal way, a man's ... success in life.” It went on to introduce diamonds as romantic pledges in cultures, like Japan’s, where they had never been known. People are now going into debt, spending thousands, for something their parents never wanted. Warlords in Africa are arming their militias with the proceeds of gemstones: “blood diamonds.” And a fluke of our psyches – an irrational preference for the rare – keeps the whole system going.
People once valued amber for its capacity to take complex shapes and its lustrous golden transluscence; plastic does the job now, so we no longer care. People told that a caviar is “rare” or a wine “expensive” will choose it strongly over the same sample labeled “common” or “cheap.” This effect is what gives diamonds their dangerous allure – one that takes in even the knowledgeable. About the time the Cullinan came to light, the diamond billionaire Barney Barnato was dining with some business associates. The champagne flowed, the courses followed each other in luxurious profusion, the bill mounted inexorably – but all eyes were on Barnato’s tiepin, a gobstopper of a gem that would seem, well, vulgar on anyone else. Finally, one guest ventured to ask about it. “Tell you what,” answered Barnato, “I’ll give it to the man who pays for tonight." They clamored, pleaded, and fought to be allowed to take out their checkbooks. When one finally prevailed and got the pin, he repeated, “now tell me all about it.” “This? I bought it in the Portobello Road on my way here. For a shilling. It’s glass.”
From the heights of Tarbolton, you can look about you – if you’re not blown over: this is far from Vergil’s sun-blessed Palatine, but the cold, wind-whipped hill country of Ayrshire, with a stiff acre to plow before addressing a hot bowl of colcannon in the low, smoky bothy. It’s a landscape where God has a habit of taking the stuffing out of you, alternating His sleety blasts with sudden, luminous moments of beauty – and where Man stands out, a striding point on the horizon, when not huddled in sociable groups out of sight and out of the wind.
Robert Burns was born in a blizzard on this day in 1759. Thereafter, he was always seeking warmth – praise and companionship, mercy and love. Whether defying gloom with a ranting crew at the fireside or practicing the arts of tenderness with a willing lass in the snug box-bed, his was an open, questing heart: even his weakest verses show the frank sincerity that endears him to readers from Nova Scotia to Novosibirsk.
Though renowned as a “people’s poet,” Burns had an education few modern graduates can match. His father, William Burness, a tenant farmer always on the edge of destitution, nevertheless took time each evening to teach his his sons reading and writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and theology (from a textbook he wrote himself). A freelance schoolmaster in the village added Latin, French, and higher mathematics to these accomplishments. Such thorough schooling was not uncommon among Scotland’s common people: Calvinism makes each man responsible for his own mind – and, in a poor, over-populated country, that mind is often one’s only capital. The young Burns added to this stock-in-trade an eye for telling detail and a tongue that could caper to music of its own making. He worked to the point of breakdown, the one laborer on a 130 acres of stubbornly unproductive land, yet his spirit remained undulled. Each mouse and daisy, snowflake and lovely face received its admiring tribute. Each evening meeting, from the Freemasons to the Bachelor’s Club, awaited with pleasure its galloping or stately ode.
Burns still catches at the ear because he was not what his metropolitan contemporaries thought he was: the “heaven-taught plowman” who piped his lays in rustic innocence. He was as well read as any and could do the big bow-wow style, apostrophizing Nature and Liberty, when it suited him. Even in his most Scottish poems, he mixed the gliding Latinate phrase with the skips and stamps of vigorous dialect: “I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee/ Wi' murdering pattle” leads smoothly back to “I'm truly sorry man's dominion/
Has broken Nature's social union.” This willingness to adjust his voice to his meaning, to be “Rabbie” to one and “Sylvander” to another, proves that Burns’ humanity was no mere show: he believed in the universality of feeling. His celebrations of fraternal equality, his championing of women, his broadsides against slavery and the hypocrisy of rank – these were not mere fashionable effusions of Enlightenment political correctness. He felt most things intensely, but none so much as the leap that a warm heart gives at the grasp of an honest hand.
He remained all his life, though, in the cold grip of necessity. The need for money drove him to work as an exciseman, pursuing his neighbors for their smuggling and moonshining ways; his thwarted hope to reach warmth at last, emigrating to Jamaica, was – by cruel irony – to take up a post as bookkeeper to slave-owners. The literary figures who fêted him in Edinburgh were generous in their praise but not their guineas. The “blue devils” of depression pursued him; his health, undermined by toil, gave way; he died at 37.
Tonight, though, as you pipe in the haggis and enjoy the unaccustomed draftiness of the kilt, you should put aside sad memories and recall instead the man who sang so well, with such skillful artlessness, of love and beauty, bravery and self-respect, liberty and sociability. All these, like whisky an’ freedom, gang thegither - and if that doesn’t make you feel warm, nothing can.
“It is with great embarrassment that I return alive.” Shoichi Yokoi, a frail, bird-like man, stepped once more onto the soil of Japan, returning to the Emperor he had served for more than thirty years, twenty-seven of them alone in the jungle on the island of Guam. He carried his rifle, rusted beyond use, because he wished to return it to Their Majesties with a characteristic apology: '”I deeply regret that I could not serve you well. The world has certainly changed, but my determination to serve you will never change.”
Yokoi, once a village tailor’s apprentice, was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941. He had served in Manchuria before arriving in Guam, the only United States territory to be occupied by a foreign power since the War of 1812. Japanese behavior here was not good – a combination of brutal military rule and forcible attempts to Nipponify the island’s culture (“Guam” became “Omiya-jima;” local people were taught the intricacies of bowing) showed them at their most sanctimonious and violent. So, after the Americans recaptured the island in 1944 – indeed, even after he was certain that the war was over – Yokoi remained a fugitive: condemned both by his belief that the natives would kill him and the army’s creed that anything was preferable to the dishonor of surrender. It was pure accident that, on this day in 1972, he was spotted and captured near his underground shelter.
How do you live alone in the wilderness for thirty years? By abandoning all modern sense of time, in which things are begun and completed. The task of survival was perpetual, getting food “a continuous hardship.” Yokoi trapped shrimp, gathered breadfruit, stewed coconuts, captured and devoured crabs, snails, eels, birds and rats. Rat liver was good, but the idea of liking one food or another was immaterial – he ate everything. He wove clothes from bark fiber and sewed them with wire needles into which, over months, he had drilled eyes. He boiled all his water, washed daily, took such good care of his teeth that he had no cavities: “I continued to live for the sake of the Emperor and the Japanese spirit.”
The “Japanese spirit,” like the emperor, was an ever-present but invisible abstraction during Yokoi’s youth. It incorporated the self-denial and service-unto-death ethic of bushido, the Warrior’s Way. It celebrated the mute determination of ganbaru, a tenacious persistence through adversity, to which phrases like “buckling down” or “seeing it through” are but faint echoes. When he returned to Japan, a time-traveler from a less questioning past, Yokoi became a source of mingled pride and shame to his countrymen: a reminder of values so strong that they could maintain life through three hungry decades, yet so weak that they could not survive prosperity. Yokoi married, settled, and became a well-known advocate for simple living. Japan listened to him with respect, but did not follow his advice – for, just as there is more to life than just survival, there is more to society than just discipline and loyalty. We are not yet, nor may ever be, alone in the jungle.
Greenbrier County, West Virginia used to be a hunting ground of the Shawnee Indians, but they were unwilling to stay there. They said It covered the graves of an ancient and vengeful people who only permitted transitory visits. If anyone dared settle, the dead would rise from the earth and the living start to kill each other. It’s a country of deep hollows, steep hills, labyrinthine caves, and impassable woods. Even now, the county town of Lewisburg feels cut off from the busy world outside. Family and place names here echo each other, both showing the quirks of spelling that come when people arrive before literacy.
Elva Zona Heaster lived near Livesay’s Mill – her photographs show a fierce, direct beauty that owes everything to bone structure and nothing to expression. She had reason to appear guarded: in 1895, when she was 22, she had an illegitimate child. The people she lived among were clannish, superstitious, and self-protective; it would be easy to become the shunned one.
The next year seemed to offer salvation: into town blew Erastus Stribbling “Trout” Shue, a tall, strong, big-talking man in his early thirties who was the opposite of clannish. He’d been raised on Droop Mountain in neighboring Pocahontas County: far enough away for no one to know the first thing about him. He took work at the blacksmith’s – a lucrative trade in a land of bad roads – and settled in. Shue had a… a look about him, one that could rouse passion in a girl with few options, and suspicion in her mother, who had seen more of life. Zona and Shue clove together like magnets and were soon married.
Three months later, on this day in 1897, Shue sent a boy, Anderson Jones, home from work with a message; the boy found Zona lying at the foot of the stairs, her feet together, one hand on her stomach, dead. Dr. Knapp took at least an hour to arrive, by which time he found that Shue, in a touching display of grief, had carried the body upstairs to bed, dressed it in a favorite high-necked dress and veil and now sat beside it, cradling Zona’s head, sobbing and praying that she return to life. The doctor was supposed to examine the body, but the muscular husband reacted violently if he came near her. The official cause of death was put down as an “everlasting faint.”
Shue remained frantic with grief throughout the wake and funeral, stuffing a pillow and a folded sheet into the open coffin on either side of Zona’s head, so that “she could rest easier.” He kept a scarf, “her favorite,” wrapped around her neck. It was an affecting sight. Then Zona was in the ground and her story, it seemed, was over. True, word began filtering in from Droop Mountain about Trout Shue’s earlier life: how a first wife, Allie Estelline Cutlip, had divorced him for violence while he was serving a jail term for horse thieving; how a second, Lucy Ann Tritt, had died mysteriously. But this was mere talk; the living are safe so long as the dead stay buried.
It was then that Zona’s mother, Mary Jane, started receiving her visitations. She had been praying for justice since the funeral; and now, on four successive dark nights, her daughter came to visit her – cold to the touch, but flesh and blood, wearing the dress she’d been buried in. Zona said that Shue was a violent man who had throttled her because she’d cooked no meat for supper; her neck was broken. She proved this by turning her head all the way round to the back as she left the cabin. Mary Jane took this story to the County Prosecutor and talked with him all one afternoon. A courteous and conscientious man, he was willing at least to check the cause of death – and, after hearing Dr. Knapp’s account, to order an autopsy. In the chilly February air the grave was opened and in a few hours the examiners found matters to be just as the night visitor had said: Zona had died because a pair of powerful hands crushed her neck.
It is the “trial where a ghost testified” – although that’s not quite the case. The prosecution kept to the circumstantial evidence; it was the defense that tried to discredit the case by asking Mary Jane about her “visions.” Her testimony, recorded in the local paper, is a textbook example of straight rebuttal: these were not dreams; she was not superstitious; she believed in the Scriptures. Her unshakeable firmness and simplicity made her incredible testimony more credible. The jury took just an hour to convict Shue and only a quick-thinking sheriff prevented his lynching.
Trout Shue died in the penitentiary three year later. Mary Jane Heaster lived until 1916, maintaining stoutly the fact of her daughter’s return from the grave. The “Greenbrier Ghost” has entered into local folklore. It is only recently that a writer, Katie Letcher Lyle, has uncovered an extra feature to the case: on the same day that Zona’s death was reported, the Greenbrier Independent also carried a story about a murder in Australia, in which an eyewitness, threatened with killing if he told what he knew, invented a story about the ghost of the victim pointing to his secret grave – so successfully that other people claimed to have seen this, too. Mary Jane may have believed that a similar tale offered her a chance at justice… in a country where the dead take their own revenge.
Even now, to the tourists who have driven over from the “luxurious Lodge” a few miles away, the place seems haunted and uncanny: a lonely mesa separated from the surrounding hills, overlooking the plain like a guardian sphinx. Isandlwana (the name apparently refers to “a portion of bovine intestinal anatomy”) has unsettling topography; some places feel like a refuge or an outlook – but this feels like a spot you've been backed into.
Not that the British force encamped here on this day in 1879 was fearful – they’d had plenty of experience of war in unknown country. The officers of the 24th Warwickshires improvised a party to commemorate the regiment’s worst disaster, the Battle of Chillianwala, where they lost 500 men and their colors. The toast was, “may we not get into such a mess again this time!”
“This time” seemed a routine war of colonial conquest, one of the many knight’s moves by which the Empire neatened its borders. The governor in Capetown planned to do to South Africa what he had just done to Canada: assemble a bunch of provinces into a single administrative unit. His two obstacles were the Boers and the Zulu. Tackling the apparently easier task first, he planned to subjugate the Zulu kingdom according to the usual routine: object to a border incursion, post a set of unacceptable demands, send an ultimatum, dispatch a column of troops. The Zulu king, Cetshwayo kaMpande, knew what was going on, but had no answer to the political attack; once it came to fighting, though, he was on familiar ground. The Zulu, too, were new arrivals, colonist invaders from the north. Their whole society ran on military lines: boys were born into regiments; a young man could not marry until he had killed an enemy in battle. They made Prussians seem amateurish.
The commanders had opposite problems: Lord Chelmsford had to drag in his supplies painfully by wagon over broken country; Cetshwayo’s army could jog, in perfect order, twenty miles a day – but couldn’t manage a long campaign, as there were cattle to tend at home. The British had the flat-footed but crushing power; the Zulu would have to slip and jab. When Chelmsford left a camp full of materiel at Isandhlwana, he thought that he still had the main Zulu army in front of him; it wasn’t necessary to entrench. All seemed routine until, on the morning of this day, a British patrol crested a nearby hill to find 20,000 Zulu warriors crouched in perfect silence, waiting to attack.
The fatal decisions were made at the very beginning: without protection, the British attempted to defend too large a perimeter, leaving gaps through which the attackers could rush during lulls in the firing. If you have seen the movie Zulu, forget it: this was not a human wave of self-sacrificing fanatics, but a disciplined force that used every piece of cover to advantage, forcing the British to keep up a constant, heavy fire, in which ammunition supply and jamming guns soon became critical problems. When the cannon roared, the attackers derisively shouted, “wind!”; when the rifles rattled, they called out, “catch the hailstones!” When a boy’s battalion seemed pinned down, an older prince strode upright among them in his leopard skin, shouting that these were not their orders. They pushed on; he fell dead, his job done.
In an hour or so the battle ended, a solar eclipse darkening the field. Thirteen hundred English soldiers lay dead; there were no prisoners. The 24th was decimated, its colors lost once more (although they were found later in a nearby river). It was the heaviest British defeat by a native army.
And it changed nothing; as Cetshwayo realized, such a loss demanded his ruin. Chelmsford pressed forward, both to erase the shame and to restore his reputation. In six months, the Zulu kingdom was no more.
Strangely, the defeat at Isandlwana seemed to create a new respect between the combatants. The moment that British soldiers found out that the Zulu had a regimental system, each with its own motto and muster-book, it is as if all sense of foreignness disappeared. The white men did not “punish” the “savages” in revenge for the loss; there was no Wounded Knee to go with this Little Big Horn. Instead, they wrote, “it is comforting to know that our unfortunate countrymen met their deaths at the hands of a foe in every respect worthy of their steel.” They excused the Zulu habit of disemboweling the dead as “customary.”
What, then, was the cause in which all those bones were spread across the plain? What purpose was served by deaths that brought as much sadness to a thousand Zulu kraals as to a thousand English cottages? War, like accident or natural disaster, only makes sense to those outside it. From within, it is a chaotic experience of terrible intensity – shared with your enemy as much as with your comrades.
If you were living near York, Pennsylvania in the late nineteen-sixties, you might have answered the door to find a smiling, slightly moony youth on your porch, selling candy or wrapping paper and ribbons. “Oh, your living room is so scandinavian! That’s neat! I like how your table is shaped like a bean.” The boy was all surface – unthreatening, earnest, naïve – and chances are you’d buy something from him; something kitschy but, you know, cheerful. This was the young Jeff Koons, whose birthday is today.
Trying on styles (as his father did in his interior-decoration showroom); isolating and emphasizing the brightly colored ephemera of low culture; selling hard. Nothing has changed for Koons except his prices, and the fact that he now controls the means of production: a team of seventy technicians in a west Manhattan factory who actually make the paintings and sculpture. “I’m basically the idea person.” In this regard Koons compares himself to Raphael and Rubens.
After art school, Koons came to New York, basically just to be in the milieu. He worked on the admissions desk at the Museum of Modern Art, at which he had to hand out flyers inviting people to join. Where other would-be artists might have shuddered at the task, Koons put on clown clothes and wore blow-up toys around his neck. Again, little has changed. Whether they feature floating basketballs (on which “I recently worked with Nobel prize winner Richard P. Feynman”), huge chrome-plated balloon sculptures, cute puppies reproduced in living plants, Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles in Meissen porcelain, or the anus of Koons’ then wife, the porn actress Ilona Staller, his shows parody the emptiness of the contemporary art world by presenting a yet more vacuous reality. The “discourse” with which the critical, gallery and auction-house clacque keeps the market going is unnecessary. We don’t need to know what “issues” the artist is “engaging” – it’s neat! I like how the full-size locomotive is hanging upside-down over our heads.
Koons was the inspiration for a generation of showman-artists, chief among whom is the British phenomenon Damien Hirst, whose shark in formaldehyde made $15 million at Sotheby’s. This is part of Koons’ appeal: sellability. Since there’s nothing to discuss, even the most inarticulate oligarch knows what he’s buying; in Hirst’s words, art now has a license “to celebrate crap! To enjoy junk! To make money, for fuck's sake!” I recently sat next to an investment banker who had bought a gallery and, although she had never heard of Cézanne, definitely knew who Koons was; “his prices are very stable.” So I guess the real answer to “what’s his work about?” is, “about five million dollars, for a big piece.”
Koons describes art as being “about self-acceptance;” but then he calls advertising what “defines how to interact with others,” and says that happiness is “a full box of cereal and a full carton of milk.” When he claims that his work has a social, indeed a “humanitarian” purpose (“showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog”), the message actually boils down to “art can help you have a happy day.”
It might be possible to sustain higher aspirations. Art is about self-acceptance only in the sense that everyone in this kindergarten is special. It isn’t just neat: art does require some knowledge to be worthwhile, although that knowledge need not be about art – life will do. The experience of creation and disappointment, of complexity and confusion, of courage and fear, transcendence and despair, belief and disillusionment, obsession and inattention; this forms the grounding true artists expect from us. Life – unmediated – makes us open to the best in art, because we are prepared to see and feel on many levels simultaneously. Life mediated – through advertising, marketing, background music, computer-generated reality, or gallery chatter – makes us receptive to kitsch, to fashion, and to imposture.
But this is well beyond our subject: happy birthday, Jeff Koons. Or, rather:
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