skip to main |
skip to sidebar
By the 29th of November 1781, conditions had worsened further; it was time for a decision. Luke Collingwood, captain of the British slaver Zong, had not handled things well. Usually a ship’s doctor, this was his first command: a 100-ton brig, captured from the Dutch, that the owners in Liverpool had snapped up as a bargain. It was overloaded – there were more than 450 Africans on board – and fresh water was running out. His navigation had let him down: though making it across the Atlantic in the usual nine weeks, he had failed to recognize Jamaica when he saw it, overshot, and now had to claw back against the wind. Fever was spreading; he had it himself: he could barely drag himself on deck to issue his orders.
These were appalling: to save the rest from death, a quarter of the “cargo,” 134 men, women, and children, were to be thrown overboard alive. The last ten, with despairing, disdainful courage, did not wait to be pushed, but leaped manacled into the sea. As the first mate complained at the time, it was an act of “horrid brutality.”
Indeed, unusually horrid brutality. It would be as wrong as difficult to minimize the horrors of the Middle Passage, yet this is the only recorded instance of Africans being drowned except during a shipboard revolt. The reason for such restraint was simple; money. Slave-trading was profitable but capital intensive. A single expedition required on average £12,000, more than a million dollars today. A healthy African would cost £13 from the Arab traders in Dahomey and would bring in £36 in Jamaica – nearly 200% profit. It was in the owners’ interest to keep their “cargoes” alive. Slave-ship doctors were paid a bonus for a low death-rate and – despite the hideous overcrowding and poor nutrition – this averaged only a little over one-in-ten. By contrast, one in four of the doctors died – including Collingwood, who perished two days after the Zong made port.
It was money that drove the trade, and it was money that brought it down: for the Zong’s owners had insurance on their “cargo,” and brought suit in London to be paid £30 for each of the Africans Collingwood had killed. The principle was “jettison:” if a captain disposes of a portion of his cargo to overcome a dire emergency at sea, the underwriters must pay. This was part of the standard printed Lloyds of London marine insurance contract, best described as “the work of a lunatic endowed with a private sense of humor.” It was illogical, incomplete, self-contradictory, tautological – but it was the contract around which all case-law was built, so it had to remain. In cases of disagreement, lawyers had to go to court to explain what the “usage” was: that is, what everyone in the trade understood by these nonsensical phrases.
When the Zong’s case, Gregson v. Gilbert, came up, the court heard enough to chill its blood. The usage was this: Africans who died naturally – whether through disease, malnutrition, ill-treatment, or “despondency” – were not insured. Those who were killed in an emergency (like, say, an insurrection) were insured, and at their full sale price. Moreover, they were still insurable if their loss was a result of the captain’s incompetence – but only, and crucially, if they did not die natural deaths. An African dying of thirst onboard was worth £30 less than an African drowning, over the side. Collingwood, with cruel, feverish logic, was atoning for his fault in navigation by assuring his owners their insurance payout. Even the judge, though admitting the force of precedent, was shaken: “the Matter left to the Jury was simply whether the jettison was from necessity – for they had no doubt (tho’ it shocks one very much) that the Case of Slaves was the same as if Horses had been thrown over board. It is a very shocking Case.”
Shocking enough to make it into the papers, where Ottobah Cugoano, an ex-slave, saw it and brought it to the attention of Granville Sharp, an abolitionist. Sharp attempted to bring a criminal case against the ship’s owners and officers, and the effect within the legal profession was as strong as it was in the feelings of the public at large. The law of murder did seem to apply here; there was no precedent by which people ceased to be people when they were also cargo. The “usage” by which the Lloyds contract governed slave-trading was unsustainable. This opened an avenue for attacking the shameful institution that no-one could have predicted: instead of merely working on public feeling – asking increasingly tender-hearted British readers “Am I Not a Man, and a Brother?” – abolitionists could change the insurance law. This they did, tightening the conditions under which slave-traders could buy coverage until the trade itself became unprofitable. By 1807, it was both commercially and popularly acceptable to ban it altogether, isolating the slave-holding regions from their supply, forcing them either to give up slavery or fight for it. The last leap of the Zong’s doomed Africans was, in the end, a leap for freedom.
Here is a story that happened on this date in 1942, back where I come from: Barney Welansky was not exactly a crook, but he was well-connected where it mattered. He had friends in Boston’s City Hall and also among the more publicity-shy guys whom it is good to know. This broad acquaintance allowed him to take an ex-speakeasy on Piedmont Street and turn it into one of the most fashionable nightspots in the city, a place to blow the cash that now was reappearing in every pocket, as war spending flushed away memories of the great Depression. He called his place The Cocoanut Grove.
A nightclub is an intrinsically risky spot: often in an otherwise unusable basement, it tries to appear another world, one of entrancing music and inviting darkness. The Cocoanut Grove, as you’d guess, aimed at a tropical theme – just right for a raw Boston November: paper palm trees reached for a satin sky. Intimately lit booths lined the walls, while those who wanted to be seen sat in a raised enclosure, penned in by wrought-iron railings. Down in the Melody Lounge, Goody Goodelle was tinkling through the first chorus of Bell Bottom Trousers. Upstairs, Mickey Alpert’s band was starting its set with the Star-Spangled Banner; no surprise, since we were coming up to the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The place was full of uniforms.
One couple apparently found even a dim glow insufficiently intimate and had unscrewed the lightbulb in their booth; 16-year-old busboy Stanley Tomaszewski was sent to put it back in; fumbling for the socket, he lit a match. A few moments later, people saw flames race up a paper tree and spread across the ceiling, perhaps (says recent investigation) accelerated by a leak of inflammable gas from a refrigerator. Soon, fire was roaring up the stairs like a blast furnace. Couples staggered for the exit – briefly detained by the manager, who insisted that no one could leave without paying.
Many blunders and crimes contributed to making the fire so deadly. The club was holding twice its legal maximum of patrons; the only way out was through the revolving entrance door, which quickly jammed from the press of bodies behind it. Other doors had been welded shut to deter check-skippers. Those who survived were the quick or resourceful: one waiter remembered a window over the back bar, swept away the bottles and hoiked several people up and out to safety. Another group came through by shutting themselves into the walk-in freezer. These lucky survivors were few; of the thousand people in the club that night, 492 died and hundreds more were horribly injured.
Outside, patrolman William Doogan saw a smoldering sailor running screaming down the sidewalk. He radioed for help; soon the street was filled with vehicles: fire crews, police, scores of ambulances, taxis, newspaper and delivery trucks to take the injured to the hospital. For far too long, there was nothing they could do: the doors were jammed. The horror was playing out, silently, behind the smoke.
It was this feeling of helplessness that can make tough octogenarian ex-policemen start to sob at the memory; that makes the surviving members of the Boston College football team thank God that an unexpected loss to Holy Cross canceled their victory party at the club – though this makes God seem cruelly arbitrary. Yet the Cocoanut Grove is not just a tale of pointless suffering, for it taught lessons that have since been applied for good.
Boston’s hospitals had few modern drugs and little equipment to deal with such a disaster, but they did have dedicated nurses and well-trained doctors willing to live permanently on the ward for the months necessary to save their patients. Burns treatment changed radically as a result of the fire: the pioneering surgeon Oliver Cope recalled seeing the first victims die instantly under traditional methods. He and colleagues quickly improvised a new, gentler regime that recognized how burns affect the whole organism, not just the skin. Thousands of servicemen would soon benefit from this discovery. Building codes were tightened and enforced, one good reason why this remains the worst nightclub fire in history. If you wonder why the street door of every business in America opens outwards, you can thank the victims of the Cocoanut Grove.
The fluffy white snow of a dry-cold December soon fell on the charred shell in Piedmont Street. The sharp immediacy of single lives caught in moments of panic or uncanny calm blended into a general, leaden ache – then, over the years, into legend, with its more formal pity. Now it’s just a story people tell; my town’s version of the pit explosion, the flash-flood, the mudslide. But, at least, it has more meaning than many local disasters; at least good came of it.
Chemistry teaches us that, given the right initial conditions, an intrinsically energetic body can release its power, expanding to many times its original size with great suddenness. This power can be harnessed for useful purposes or can cause terrible destruction – but that is not the chemical’s concern.
Alfred Nobel was an intrinsically energetic body, packed with potential. His father was a Stockholm engineer, forced by bankruptcy to move to St. Petersburg, where he found one sure way to grow rich: feeding the Czar’s insatiable war machine. He built no more bridges and tunnels; instead, he invented the first practical naval mine. Made thus aware of the vagaries of life, Nobel had his sons educated as widely and deeply as possible. Young Alfred became fluent in five languages – he wrote his poetry in English, his letters in French – and became engrossed in chemistry, a science just moving from its amateur mix-it-and-see origins to its heroic industrial era.
Peace having unavoidably returned to Russia, the elder Nobel went bankrupt again; Alfred returned to Sweden to cast around for possibilities. His old tutor suggested he investigate a discovery by one of his chemistry professor’s other students – an explosive far more powerful than gunpowder, but with the irritating quirk that it often didn’t blow up when you wanted it to, and oftener blew up when you didn’t: nitroglycerin.
Here were the right conditions: shame at bankruptcy; resentment at being taken away from the intellectual speculations he enjoyed to concentrate on business; unhappiness at the failure of several early love affairs. With melancholic fervor, Nobel threw himself into the problem of “the devil’s oil.” Laboratories regularly exploded around him – his brother was killed – but he slowly got to grips with this capricious monster, learning how to awaken it without angering it. He mixed it on barges anchored in lakes; he forbade his workers shoes, so they could strike no sparks from the nails; he gave them one-legged stools to rest on, so they could not snooze through the subtle danger signals of a runaway reaction. His life was spent on the grim and isolated beaches to which his business was banished by fearful towns – and this turned out to be another favorable condition; for when his German factory blew up yet again and he returned to rebuild it, he could experiment with the local diatomaceous earth, kieselguhr, as a possible stabilizer for his nitroglycerin. It worked: the terrifying oil was now an inert dough, into which you could fire a gun without fear, easily formed into sticks. Here was power – the Greek dynamis – in marketable form, so he called it “dynamite.”
The subsequent expansion was sudden and overwhelming. Nobel companies opened in every major country. In an age of shaky patent rights and sharp practices, Alfred had to travel constantly, setting up local businesses, pursuing lawsuits, demonstrating his invention – creating, incidentally, the world’s first holding company. He bought a palace in Paris, but got to spend little time there: “ My home is where I work, and I work everywhere.” Commercially, he was a great success; he had avoided the old story of the guileless inventor swindled by money-men, retaining control and majority income from all his companies. Did he enjoy it? No, not at all: he called business “the slavery to which for years I have submitted against my will… about which I know little more than the man in the moon.” He was dyspeptic, lonely, and unhappy in the manner that neither expects nor even seeks a change for the better. At 43, he called himself “an old wreck;” a “pitiful halfling,” whose only virtues were keeping his nails clean and not being a burden, and to whom nothing important had ever happened. His one relief from melancholy was writing blank verse in the Shellean-Byronic style, all vague ideals and brooding sarcasm; what oft was thought – but, sadly, oft less ill expressed. His five-act play, Nemesis, was translated into Esperanto and, from there, into Slovenian. He remained alone, a misanthropic philanthropist.
The myth of Nobel is that he was tortured by the destructive power of his invention and therefore instituted the prizes that bear his name. This may be an exaggeration. He hated war in the abstract – but when, late in life, he became homesick for Sweden, he bought an arms company there as an excuse to return. He said that he wished he could have done medical research and made discoveries useful for mankind but, really, he just wanted to get back to the lab and work – on the new blasting jelly or the smokeless gunpowder. In this, he was as most scientists still are: absorbed in the fascination of the immediate problem, not in its ultimate purpose. When he re-wrote his will on this date in 1895, he was not expiating a great guilt – at most, he was offering an incentive: changing, as a scientist, science’s initial conditions.
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governour sent foure men on fowling, that so we might after a speciall manner rejoyce together, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoyt, with some ninetie men, whom for three dayes we entertained and feasted.” Thus arose, on some unknown date in the fall of 1621, the one American holiday that has nothing to sell, continuing much as it began: a time to feast among friends and reflect on the things (beyond pumpkin pie and sage-and-sausage stuffing) we should be grateful for.
The Puritans rejected such un-biblical innovations as Christmas, but a service of thanks at harvest-time had the appropriately Old Testament ring: recognizing the special providence that had brought them out of bondage and secured them in their new home. It had been a near thing. Half the ship’s company died in the first winter; the staple crops they brought from England found the poor, sandy soil uncongenial and soon withered away. Though fish were plentiful, these inland farmers lacked the tackle and skills to reap the sea’s great bounty. Yet, look here: less than a year after their arrival in December’s dark, wind, and sleet, they had a harvest: Indian corn, squash, pumpkins, beans – as well as the ducks and turkeys with which the ponds and forests abounded. The "governour," William Bradford, was relieved: “they had all well recovered in health & strength, and had all things in good plenty.”
Massasoit, too, had reasons to be thankful. His tribe had recently been decimated by smallpox; his lands lay empty, inviting attack by stronger neighbors: the Squaw Sachem of the Massachusetts, the fierce Narragansett, the sea-raiding Abenaki. Yet here were arrivals – a mere fifty of them – who paid for all they took, left the women alone, and supported his warriors with their impressive armament, in return only for his allegiance to some distant deity called “King James.” He could see a better future coming; this was certainly worth a party.
Both sides were well aware of how unlikely their good fortune was. The Indians had seen enough of Europeans to know that not all were like these sober, punctilious new neighbors. The Puritans knew that Massasoit could easily have attacked them when they were sick and had but six men able to stand; that they might not have arrived at the very place where last year’s corn was stored beneath ground; that they might not – most wonderful of all – have met coming over the dunes Tisquanto, a Wampanoag who spoke perfect English, knew London well, and willingly taught them the Indian techniques for making this wilderness bloom. Such luck went beyond deserving, no matter how godly they strove to be – it was grace.
This is the lesson that makes Thanksgiving such a durable festival: the things for which are most grateful are those things we cannot deserve – not so much because of our own private faults and indignities, but because we live in a world of chance. There is no guaranteed quid pro quo; we cannot make fate come through for us. We do our best only because it is right to do it – and can but hope that some figure will come over the dunes to us, speaking friendly words in a language we understand.
These are the gifts that come without deserving: to be where we are – wherever it may be – and be nowhere worse; to have the love of others whom we might never have met. To learn what we had not known, and come to be skilled in what we once thought impossible. To see the blue ocean tossing through the crisp-limbed birches, smell the warm savor of roasting venison through the tang of wood-smoke, hear voices raised in cheer, not discord… is all this not grace – grace abounding?
Tomorrow is Black Friday, when we shall go back to the ceremonies of spending. And, yes, the story we commemorate at Thanksgiving played out badly, as successive waves of immigration washed away the fragile trust between Indian and Puritan. Broken troth, high-handedness, treachery, brutality, war: things often turn out that way … but they don’t have to; not always. Today, at least, we can celebrate the exceptions to history’s grim rules – and give thanks that we are each, in our ordinary ways, beneficiaries of the rare.
“Ahh! It’s nice and warm in here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, dear, it's lovely – hang on, I’ll take my mac off.”
“That’s a proper fog brewing out there. I shouldn’t be surprised if the buses stop running.”
“Never you mind about that, my girl; I’ve brought my torch. See us safe home.”
“You are clever, Bert. Well,what d’you think? Box of chocolates? Make a night of it?”
“Well, we do still have this week’s coupons… all right, then. Maybe a port and lemon at the interval as well.”
“Ooh, you’re a devil, you are! Now: who do you reckon did it? Sixpence says its the dark foreigner.”
“No, it’s always the butler, isn’t it? Stands to reason.”
“Go on – there is no butler! It said so in in the review!”
“Don’t be so sure: he could be in disguise…”
On this date in 1952 – in those lost, dank days of modest pleasures – Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap opened in London’s Ambassadors Theatre. It has since run continuously for over 24,000 performances; by now, everyone in London could have seen it. Nearly 400 actors have appeared, slogging their way through another night as bluff Major Metcalf (David Raven performed this more than 4,500 times) or the exotically louche Mr. Paravicini. The producers gleefully tell us that more than 120 miles of shirts have been ironed and 420 tons of ice cream sold to keep this venerable franchise going. The unfortunate Nancy Seabrooke spent 15 years on the show – as an understudy.
1952 was the year the present Queen ascended the throne – the year in which 12,000 people died as a result of one pea-soup fog – but The Mousetrap (a reference to Hamlet) was outdated even for then. It had been conceived as an 80th birthday gift to Queen Mary, consort of George V, and it consciously embodied the comfortable certainties that had been lost during a traumatic war and wearying peace. The luxurious, snowbound Edwardian country house; the camp, “high-strung” young artist; the mannish, be-suited woman; the muscular, boyish policeman arriving on skis – here was a picture, preserved as if in a confectioner’s Easter egg, of a life even then lost beyond retrieval. Audiences watched and forgot the damage and dinginess all around them, imagining days when people in well-cut clothes strode in, helped themselves to mounds of scrambled egg (real eggs!) and deviled kidneys, and remarked, “I say, that dago chap’s a bit rum, don’t you think?” It expressed an irrecoverable confidence. Agatha Christie herself said, “It is the sort of play you can take anyone to. It is not really frightening. It is not really horrible. It is not really a farce, but it has a little bit of all these things, and perhaps that satisfies a lot of different people.”
It still satisfies today, although the people are yet more different:
“I thought this place was air-conditioned. Feels pretty hot to me.”
“Yeah, but at least we’re off our feet. Those lines at Madame Tussaud’s! Jesus, what a rip-off that was!”
“Dad, why are the seats so narrow?”
“It’s an old building, sweetheart; folks were smaller then. Jake! Put that back, honey – it belongs to the theater. Now: who do you think did it? The butler?”
Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away. We say we love the passing show and thrill to the drama that is our age and ours alone – yet we, too, feel a sense of nostalgia as the vague potentialities of the future corrode the settled beliefs of the past. Like high Mass, The Mousetrap offers the perennial comforts of certainty and repetition – sempiternal, unwavering, to endless years the same.
Such is this power of ritual that the play’s audience has agreed after every performance for fifty-seven years not to reveal the plot’s twist ending; but I scorn such sheep-like obedience and will therefore tell you that the real murderer is actually – aaaaaaarrrrggh.
When a sincere man loses his heart, he loses it completely and forever. When he loves a beautiful, passionate, yet vain and self-dramatizing mistress, only trouble can come of it. Erskine Childers was a sincere man; orphaned at an early age, he gave his first allegiance to those who had taken him in: the Bartons, his mother’s family – and the British Empire, in the guise of Haileybury School. Sadly for him, these two became impossible to hold together in one affection.
A boy who has lost both parents will seek beliefs strong enough to transcend death. Religion – at least the mild, well-mannered protestantism of his forebears – would not suffice for Childers. In term-time, he absorbed the intoxicating ideals of Imperial service: action and self-sacrifice, intelligence devoted for the good of exotic nations, the transforming power of disinterested civilization. We sneer now at the generation whose eyes misted over at Kipling, but it had an integrity we too often lack: “one can set no limits to the possibilities of an alliance of the English-speaking races,” wrote Childers to a friend – and he meant it.
In vacations, he returned to the Bartons’ big house in Glendalough, County Wicklow: the wild yet reverent Valley of Saints, where the flute of the present plays always over the bass thrum of the past. The Bartons were protestant, but like many families of the Ascendancy (think of Yeats, think of Synge) had become more Irish than the Irish. They took their part in the late nineteenth-century invention of a dark and mystical Gaelic past, whose bards and heroes waited but for the moment to rise again.
Childers was a good student and followed the path of duty, getting a scholarship to Cambridge and later becoming a Clerk of the House of Commons, where his responsibility was to turn the big ideas of government into sound and workable law. He opposed Irish Home Rule, one of the dividing issues of the day, because he was sure the Empire was on the point of becoming a true family of nations, with the chance to draw from the genius of each for the benefit of all. His urge to action, never deep below his calm surface, found satisfaction in long sea-voyages in tiny sailboats.
This happy synthesis was not to last. Childers’ service in the Boer War showed him that the sworn enemies of Britain could also be sincere and admirable. His beloved Bostonian wife pointed out that Empire was not the only hope for English-speaking people. His own government was showing distressing signs of the hypocrisy and double-dealing that mark declining power. This appeared most of all in its Irish policy, where it allowed protestant Ulster politicians to import arms and drill militias while opposing all forms of catholic nationalism.
Childers’ strained allegiance came asunder – it was as if he were now two separate people. In writing The Riddle of the Sands, still one of the most exciting spy stories ever published, he performed a great service to Britain, making the public aware of the menace of approaching world war in a way no speech or editorial could do. When war came, he served faithfully as a navigation expert for Britain’s newly-invented air forces. Yet he had already begun to work for Britain’s opponents in June 1914, landing 900 rifles and 24,000 bullets for the Irish Volunteers from his yacht Asgard. These were the weapons that would be used for the Easter Rising, in which Britain’s heavy-handed brutality – Dublin bombarded by naval guns, prisoners executed without civil trial – made the “family of nations” a lost dream. When Childers saw how the peace at Versailles brought self-rule to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, but not to Ireland, he threw in his allegiance with the rebels.
He was invaluable to them; his propaganda spoke to the English in an English voice, making the case for Irish wrongs in terms that could not be dismissed with a superior smile. His knowledge of British law and government gave his new masters the ability to fight politically as well as militarily. Childers was secretary to the Irish delegation that negotiated the creation the first form of independent Ireland: the Irish Free State.
It was still a dominion, with a British king. It was not what republican idealists had fought and died for, yet the negotiators thought it worthwhile to stop fighting and dying. In this belief they were mistaken: civil war soon broke out between the Free State government and the unreconciled Irish Republican Brotherhood. Childers, now whole-heartedly devoted to complete Irish freedom, chose rebellion. His erstwhile comrades, who had so depended on his expert support, now condemned him as “a damned Englishman” and a spy.
They caught him just where you’d expect: in Glendalough. He was carrying a pistol given him by the Free State commander, Michael Collins – but, as an unlicensed weapon, it was enough to condemn him to death. On this date in 1922, they led him out to the firing squad. He greeted each rifleman individually and, in a final jest, called out “take a step or two closer, lads – it’ll be easier.” Before the execution, Childers had made his 16-year-old son promise that he would seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed his father’s death warrant. That son eventually served Ireland, the all-demanding mistress, as her fourth President.
“As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?” Seen from our glibly moralistic times, there is a refreshing frankness about the corruption of William”Boss” Tweed, Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall and arch-manipulator of New York politics in the late 1860s. Tweed had no qualms and no conscience. “Why” never bothered him; “how” was the one issue. “The only way to have power is to take it.”
A bankrupt chairmaker in 1861, he had within a decade managed to steal between fifty and two hundred million dollars (roughly $1-4 billion today) from the city of New York – a sum of Madoffian proportions. He’d done it in the great American way: being the first to discover a general truth. In Tweed’s case, this was that any social organization can also be a political one.
Coming from a Scottish family, he had started with the Masons and the Anti-Immigrant party, but realized that neither could promise a reliable majority. He therefore turned to the Irish vote, mobilized through the Americus volunteer fire department, or Big Six. This saw him into Tammany Hall, the club that controlled all nominations for the Democratic Party. Tweed was immediately at home. He never forgot a favor and was scrupulous in delivering on his promises. His only vice was eating (he would sit down with his stomach three inches from the table and stop when it reached the edge) and his only interest was power. Soon, he had the system sewn up: through Tammany, he controlled nominations; he could also provide the “Tammany repeaters,” immigrants willing to cast multiple votes in return for a city job. The officials he thus helped to office would sign over to him the jobs in their patronage, which he could then distribute. He installed his creatures as treasurer and comptroller of the city, with himself as commissioner of public works. He arranged for all three positions to be permanent and banned any scrutiny of the city books. Then the fun began.
The most notorious Tweed project was a new courthouse. Contractors were required to inflate their bills by up to fifty times so that Tweed’s men could skim off the extra. One, the “Prince of Plasterers,” billed $133,187 for two days’ work. The sum spent for chairs should have been enough to buy 315,000 of them – a line 17 miles long. The building cost twice as much as was spent to purchase Alaska – and when a committee looked into the overspend, its printed report cost a further $7,000. Tweed owned the printer’s.
Such a perfect system could only be brought down from within. Two disappointed Tammany place-seekers sent copies of the city accounts to the New York Times in April of 1870. The paper was, it’s claimed, offered $5 million not to publish. A number of leading citizens came out in favor of Tweed, in part because his methods had allowed many significant public projects to go ahead without raising taxes. Eventually, though, the smell became too strong to ignore. Thomas Nast, the cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, would issue a new caricature every issue, making Tweed appear more and more like a bearded Uncle Fester. “Stop them damned pictures,” he fumed. “I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures!”
Taking down the Tweed Ring was a difficult and messy business, particularly since so many people had been in his pay in one way or another. His tame comptroller betrayed him, allowing a deputy to be appointed at dead of night, who then seized the books at bayonet point and held off a month-long siege by Tammany policemen and unpaid voters. Tweed was imprisoned, convicted, had his sentence reduced on appeal, was freed, re-arrested, escaped, and finally delivered back from Spain – ostensibly because the Spanish saw one of those “damned pictures” and thought Tweed was a child-kidnapper. He returned to the scene of his crimes on this date in 1876 and soon died in the Ludlow Street jail. His personal papers were… somehow… lost.
George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany stalwart, once explained the distinction between “honest graft” and “dishonest graft:” dishonest graft used public money to protect criminal activity; honest graft used public money to keep capable men, like himself, interested in public affairs. As he said, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” The Tweed Ring existed to enrich its members, but it was also a tightly-run, efficient government force, able to push through charitable and public-improvement projects without opposition. When next you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, reflect that it owes its site to the bounty of Boss Tweed.
Those with a fondness for regulation often claim that corruption like Tweed’s is a natural consequence of free markets - that greed unrestrained produces monsters. This may be true in other cases, but it misses the most remarkable aspect of Tammany politics: that it was Keynesian in the broadest possible sense. Tweed’s New York used deficit spending to buy the things that the poor – its voting army – most wanted: sewers, paved streets, steady jobs in the police or fire departments. It integrated a volatile immigrant population, one that had spent the previous decade in local and general violence, into the political fabric (however soiled that fabric may have been). It used the city’s credit to transfer social risk from its own people to outside investors. Isn’t that rather what responsible governments are doing now? Just – watch out when they start building courthouses.
“Our Heroe, Captain Thatch, assumed the Cognomen of Black-beard, from that large Quantity of Hair, which like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face, and frightn'd America, more than any Comet that has appear'd there a long Time.” The meteor fell today in 1718: ambushed after a night of revelry in North Carolina's Ocracoke Creek, Blackbeard fought long and bravely on his attackers’ deck, then fell to the sword of Lieutenant Maynard of the Royal Navy. His head was fixed to the victor’s bowsprit; his body, thrown into the sea, then swam some seven times around the ship – or so they say.
“They,” in this case, are the authors of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, a splendidly lurid account, published in 1724, of the buccaneers and filibusters of the Spanish Main. Daniel Defoe may have had a hand in it and, like his descriptions of Robinson Crusoe’s marooning or the horrors of London’s Great Plague, the book has the apparent credibility of an eyewitness (although Defoe never got closer to the south seas than Lisbon – and was only six years old during the plague year).
The General History provides the basis for almost every subsequent pirate story: this is a genre with a strikingly limited footprint in history. Try to imagine a general, a sailor, or a thief, and the images vary depending on the era you choose – but, you’ll notice, all pirates look the same. The top-boots of Cromwell’s time combine with the tricorne of Washington’s (though it’s always a strange, up-and-down, first-attempt sort of tricorne). The full-skirted, gold-laced coat of the Restoration dandy assorts with the knee-breeches of the Georgians. All in all, these are style clues as specific to a moment as the jeweled head-band and two-foot cigarette holder of a 1920s flapper. Our pirates are frozen in the decade between 1714 and 1724.
And, of course, they all say “Arrrrrrr.” In Blackbeard’s case, at least, this is probably accurate – for this endearing verbal trope is the mark of England’s southwestern counties, home to its major Atlantic ports. As a Bristol native, Thatch would have been saying “arrrrrr” since before he was weaned. This was not a habit restricted to pirates, though: Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh were both notorious “arrrrrr”-sayers.
How can it be that our view of such powerful characters, such seminal stirrers of the imagination, can be so limited in time and place? Put down the General History and look at real history and the answer comes clear: piracy was not the result of some universal human desire to cut the cable, raise the Jolly Roger, and commence slitting throats – it was a by-product of a temporary state of European politics. There were, in fact, only about eleven “notorious pyrates,” and they all knew each other. Almost all had started out as legal privateers, preying on French and Spanish shipping during Queen Anne’s long wars. In 1713, however, peace broke out: this lucrative trade disappeared. Most privateers went off to try their luck as slavers, but a few were signed up by the Governor of Jamaica, Lord Archibald Hamilton, as the nucleus of a navy to support the Jacobite claim on the British throne. The Jacobite rebellion failed in 1715, Hamilton was brought home in chains, and the privateers, now without a legitimate source of income, went rogue.
As with their modern equivalents in Somalia or the Malacca straits, it was all very business-like. The pirates had the advantage of more men per ship than the merchants or naval vessels that opposed them. They were after low-volume, high-value goods – coin, liquor, food, weapons – and they preferred to get them without a fight. Blackbeard’s terrifying but impractical trick of putting lit fuses in his hair and beard while shouting blood-chilling oaths was a sensible technique for getting a quick surrender. When the Protestant Caesar of Boston managed to fight off an attack, Blackbeard had to pursue it with his whole fleet and then burn it, simply so that no captain could boast that he was beatable. There is no record, though, of his actually killing anyone.
Blackbeard was a pirate for just five years, and captain for only one. Having built up a reasonable treasure chest in successful depredations from New England to Trinidad, he began to plan his exit strategy. It was a wonderful piece of finesse: in May, he took his ungainly fleet and boldly blockaded Charleston, plundering its passing ships and making himself seem worth buying off. He then ran his two largest ships aground in Beaufort, thus ridding himself of the majority of his unruly and expensive crew. Bearing the most portable chunk of his booty, he presented himself in North Carolina and conveniently received from the governor a general pardon for all his past sins. He married a local girl and settled down, it is rumored, to a future of modest hobby-piracy in concert with his new friend, the governor. This incensed the governor of neighboring Virginia, who then organized the entirely illegal cross-border raid that ended Blackbeard’s life and career. The terror of the Caribbees was brought low by political jealousy.
We all have moments when we would like to cast off and cruise for plunder, to abandon decorum and live a life of gold and rum – spitting, cussing, and swimming with no clothes on. Such desires are natural in our constraining world, but be warned by Blackbeard: the pirate’s life is not the way to achieve them.
How old is your family? I know we are all descended from hairy, beetle-browed bipeds with no conversation, but some of us might have as forebears primates of a finer stamp, who suppressed their belches and raised their pinkies as they gnawed their hippopotamus ribs – ape-men worthy of a name.
The names and natures of our pre-human ancestors formed an absorbing but contentious topic around the turn of the twentieth century. In the absence of the many discoveries since made in Africa, science was stymied by having so few connecting species in the fossil record between ancient apes and modern humans; it was not so much a matter of missing links as a missing chain. This sharpened the question of the order of steps by which man became less ape-like. As intellectuals, the paleontologists of the day placed great emphasis on mental development – in their view, one species of ape among many must have suddenly developed a larger, more capable brain, noticed how squalid life was, and started modifying its behavior in ways reflected later by more delicate features, smaller teeth, and so on. Recent theory, in contrast, proposes that a more easily chewed, energy-rich diet (possibly bone marrow, possibly cooked tubers) made the genetic investment in an energy-expensive big brain possible. The right fossils would easily settle the question; around 1900, finding a big cranium alongside a big jaw would make many professors very happy. There was also a touch of prickly nationalism in the field at the time. Germany had its Neanderthal and Heidelberg men; France its Cro-Magnon; even Java had a Man – yet the Land of Hope and Glory, mistress of Empire, Britain, remained un-ennobled by a craggy ancestor. For people who put such emphasis on breeding, this was an uncomfortable position.
Academic rivalries provide a strong sense of nature’s pitiless struggle for existence – with the difference that it is not necessarily the fittest who survive. Chance plays its role, particularly in the digging sciences. Being one bone to the better, finding a more productive spadeful, can make a career in the way that a lifetime of well-written observations cannot. In 1912, the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson was 48; it was not exactly that name and fame had missed him – he was a successful local lawyer and had fellowships in the Geological Society and the Society of Antiquaries – but he was not "an authority in the field." The big find still eluded him. The discoveries he was known for (a minor Cretaceous mammal; an unusual helved hand-axe) were not enough to erase the fact that he was not a University Man.
But then Fate pitied Dawson. In a roadside gravel pit near the local village of Piltdown, he came across the big find: some fragments of cranium (remarkably modern!) associated with a jawbone (remarkably ape-like!) along with several crudely-worked flint tools (evidence of a big brain!). As it happens, he had arranged to dig the site in company with a friend, Arthur Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the British Museum. The credibility of the find would not therefore depend solely on the word of a provincial amateur. Its acceptance into official paleontology was immediate and near-universal: the Piltdown discovery was quickly named Eoanthropus dawsoni: Dawson’s Dawn Man. The subsequent find of an elephant-bone tool in the rough shape of a cricket bat confirmed Woodward’s own name for the newly-uncovered ancestor: “the Earliest Englishman.”
It was not until this date in 1953 that it was definitively stated that the whole thing was a hoax – but there had always been doubts. It seemed oddly convenient that the crucial sections of jaw that would establish just how ape-like Piltdown Man was were missing. The abrasion on the teeth did not make sense to anatomists. A mere decade after the find, experts correctly claimed that here was a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth. But these experts were foreigners; within the British paleontological community, Piltdown Man was unquestioned. After all, he had produced two knighthoods – and would have made three, had Dawson not died suddenly in 1916. This is probably just as well: his minor mammal, his hand-axe, and many others of his unique discoveries have since been revealed as frauds.
Stephen Jay Gould (a name worthy to be dropped in any discussion of paleontology) proposed four reasons for the Piltdown hoax’s undeserved success: it fulfilled existing hopes; it confirmed existing bias; it offered enough mystery to fit the facts to an expectation; and, by its very contentiousness, it invited the protection of those who had an interest in its validity. It was a revelation – not of the nature of ancient humans – but of the nature of modern ones.
The face, to outsiders, was immediately off-putting: grim, unresponsive – one eye hooded and sardonic, the other fish-like and glaring. The voice was surprisingly soft, but the words brooked no compromise: “All the soul of man is resolution, which in valiant men falters never, until their last breath.” Ian Douglas Smith’s own resolution was simple: “Pushing people forward simply because of their color, irrespective of merit, would be most unfortunate and would of course lead to disaster … where the country would in no time be bankrupt.”
It would be easy to dismiss Smith, first and last leader of an independent Rhodesia, as a simple racist, anxious to reserve for white people the conqueror’s prerogative to wield the whip hand. The truth about his beliefs was more complicated – as was the truth about his face, whose immobile asymmetry was the result, not of character, but of reconstructive surgery after it had been mangled in the crash of his fighter during heroic service in World War II.
Ian Smith was the product of the ideals of Cecil Rhodes, the complex yet single-minded colonialist whose relentless ambition created British southern Africa. He had gone to one of Rhodes’ local schools, modeled on Eton, where he had been Head Prefect and top in games of all sorts. He had served the Mother Country in her time of need, but itched to return to the plains of Selukwe, to put the economics he had studied at Rhodes University to work on his farm, improving yields, enriching his district. In 1948, he became the youngest member of the parliament of Southern Rhodesia.
Rhodesia was colonialism’s special case. Its white immigrants were neither the rejected off-scourings of Europe nor piratical exploiters of natural resources; they had come to work the land, put down roots, build institutions and live, not as Englishmen in Africa, but as Rhodesians. Smith had no allegiance outside his country, but a powerful attachment to the culture the whites had brought. With a Head Prefect’s faith in the rules, he championed “a government…based on merit and that people wouldn't worry whether you were black or whether you were white.” This meant “"No forced integration. No lowering of standards. No abdication of responsible government.” It was the institutions of society, not the particular race, that held primacy. The black majority, in Smith’s mind, was simply not ready to take over those institutions – although one wonders when he thought it would be.
By the 1960s, this was not how the Mother Country saw things. Anxious to extricate herself from the colonial adventure, Britain had come to realize that the quickest and most morally defensible way to do this was to hand over power to whomever could claim to represent the majority. White people were only 5% of Rhodesians; Smith would have to back down. He didn’t – he unilaterally declared independence in 1965, beginning a period of increasingly desperate attempts to maintain his country’s exceptions in the face of UN sanctions, US pressure, British rejection and ever more vicious guerilla warfare. Remarkably, his government lasted for almost fourteen years, despite a consensus around the world that he and his view of his country’s future were out of date and would have to go. In 1979, his last support dropped away; he agreed to allow a British governor to take over, who then supervised the elections that brought Robert Mugabe to power.
Mugabe was also a model schoolboy, but at a Catholic mission school run by Irish priests – no friends of the British ideal; he was bad at games, unsociable, solitary, but relentlessly studious and ambitious. What he wanted then was what he later achieved during thirty years of uninterrupted power: single-party rule; predominance of his tribe, the Shona; destruction of colonial institutions; recovery of traditional lands; removal of white people. The results are … well, they are as you know.
Smith stayed on in what is now Zimbabwe; his farm, remarkably, was not taken. This could have been on the old principle that generals do not shoot at each other – or, perhaps, he was recognized as speaking, not for the colonial power, but for a declining but memorable local tribe. Ernest Mtunzi, once a fighter for majority rule, said, “ the British did not understand him because Smith is an African – he has the African mentality.” His convictions never changed; he had no other life to go to – and that inspired a grudging respect among those whom he had fought. When he died on this date two years ago, Morgan Tsvangirai, now Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, said, “ If Smith was a black man, I would say that he was the best Prime Minister that Zimbabwe ever had.”
Fifteen years ago today, the entire United Kingdom came to a halt to turn on the television and watch a minor celebrity standing next to what appeared to be a celestial washing machine. Set in motion, it churned away for a minute before disgorging six numbered balls – 3, 5, 14, 22, 30, 44 – and seven people instantly became millionaires. Since then, the National Lottery has created more than 2,300 tycoons and raised over £23 billion for “good causes.”
The British have always been keen on gambling, in part because it’s respectable. Dukes openly play the horses; White’s Club in London (far more exclusive than the College of Cardinals) maintains a set of betting books in which members wager large sums on, say, which of two raindrops will reach the bottom of the windowpane first. “Taking a flutter” is a sign of enjoying life’s variability and having the stomach for risk. 70 percent of the adult population regularly plays the Lottery – although the chances of winning the jackpot are less than those of achieving sainthood or being eaten by a shark.
38, you might like to know, is the most frequently-drawn number; unlucky 13 is the most rare – and, of course, such information means nothing, since the lottery machine has no memory. Yet people study the past results with obsessive care, trying to guess what numbers seem due for an airing next time. This notion of “being due” – sometimes called the Gambler’s Fallacy – is a mistake we make because we cannot help it. The human experience is one of coming to provisional conclusions based on insufficient evidence: reading the signs, gauging the odds. Experiments with PET scans have revealed that, even when subjects have been told they are watching a completely random sequence, the pattern-finding parts of their brains light up like the Las Vegas strip. We see faces in clouds, hear sermons in stones, find hidden messages in ancient texts. A belief that things reveal meaning through pattern is the gift we brought with us out of Eden.
Almost since they first began in the sixteenth century, lotteries have been criticized as a tax on the poor. That may be so, but we should also consider the alternative uses for the money. Ten dollars a week will make little difference to a family’s life in spending terms. Putting it away in the bank at a generous two percent return would mean only that fifty years of savings might buy an extra year or two of penury in old age. Yet the possibility, however remote, of winning real wealth provides its own rate of interest in hope and dreams. Will you buy the Ferrari first or go to Tahiti? Set up your children in houses or swank around town in a big pink limousine? Pleasurable anticipation has intrinsic value: lotteries may actually do more for those who do not win them than for those who do.
In Britain’s case, the real victim of gambling fever has been the government. The bonus income from the lottery, raised without the stigma of taxation, has been treated as free money, tempting ministers into extravagant promises. The first “good cause” was the disastrous Millennium Dome, which lost £600 million and attracted almost no visitors. Once earmarked for cultural or charitable purposes, lottery money has now trickled into areas that should be part of the conventional government budget: health spending, libraries, old-age payments, the Olympics. Individuals do the same, freely spending money they consider “extra” while treating “savings” as sacred – but you would expect Her Majesty’s Treasury to know better.
If you feel like taking a flutter yourself, there is – although no way to improve the odds of winning – at least a technique to increase the amount you would win if your numbers came up: think randomly. Most people can't resist pattern, either in personally resonant numbers or in shapes on the ticket. They draw diagonals, or choose family birthdays – so any winning sequence with 19 or 20 in it is more likely to produce multiple winners sharing the jackpot. If you can switch off the gambler’s belief in significance and revel in the randomness of choice, your numbers are more likely to be yours alone. Embrace uncertainty – since that, above all else, is our lot: things that normally happen don’t always happen; “hardly ever” could be today.
So it comes down to this – standing in the line, listening to the drone from the PA: that slurred, meandering voice you’ve followed so often through the long hot nights… is it true? That all is lost? That men will parachute in to torture the babies? That death is not a fearful thing? “We win when we go down.” “Let’s make it a beautiful day.” Then up to the guards at the oil drum. The little cup of Flavor Aid – purple, grape – and we all lie down to wait.
How could it happen? 909 people – black, white, grandmothers, babes in arms – voluntarily committing “revolutionary suicide?” At Jonestown in Guyana, thirty-one years ago today, the assembled members of the People’s Temple preceded their leader, Jim Jones, into death; it was the largest number of Americans to die outside a natural disaster until this grim record was surpassed on 9/11.
Jonestown was officially an agricultural project of the San Francisco-based People’s Temple. Jones had chosen Guyana because it offered remoteness, cheap land, and a socialist, majority black government sympathetic to his ideals. For the Temple was not a traditionally Christian group: it admired Christ for his message of universal acceptance and simple, communal living, but it also celebrated Castro and Stalin. It was “anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist” – and, following Jones’ lead, increasingly paranoid.
Jim Jones was born into a dirt-poor white Depression family – a strange child, obsessed with death. He held funerals for animals and fantasized about being a brave Soviet soldier, holding the Germans back from Stalingrad. He joined the Pentecostalist church because it was the most despised in the community. He brought back a black friend to visit his house and his father, a KKK member, threw them out. From the beginning, two forces seemed to be working within him: a violent rejection of unfairness and an urgent desire for unconditional love. He never had a real program; he left almost no writings. He wanted a world of happy equals, filling his own void with adoration.
And he found them: his preternatural desire to connect, what he called his “sensitivity,” brought in the widest variety of people – from drug dealers to district attorneys – who became devoted to Jim Jones. Starting from the position of a traditional Methodist pastor, then as a faith healer, then as an overt communist, he attracted, not mindless cult fodder, but ordinary people who felt they had some gift to offer that the world had ignored: “there is the largest group of people I have ever seen who are concerned about the world and are fighting for truth and justice.” The People’s Temple offered relief from the diseases of individualism: greed, mistrust, competition, self-doubt. It had its financial and sexual irregularities and its bullying loyalists, but for most it was a chance to give, each according to his abilities; and receive, each according to his need.
Jones’ own need, though, was stronger and darker than his followers knew; his craving for acceptance made him brood over any defections. His intense but uninformed hatred of injustice made him see plots where in truth there were only obstructions or clashes of personality – and his money allowed him to hire advisors who pandered to his paranoia: the Temple’s lawyers were all prominent conspiracy theorists. Church members had given up to Jones the responsibilities of dealing with the outside world. They were not to know that, to him, the world was a place of pain – and they were not real people but imaginary friends, to be brought into and out of existence at will.
Letters and photographs from Jonestown during its last year reveal a heartbreaking dichotomy. So much was being accomplished – functioning schools, a successful hospital, improving agriculture. The group pictures show something even now rare among Americans: people of different races totally, physically at ease with each other. It seems one of the rare experiments in communal living that is actually successful. Yet at the focus of this community sits a man whose resentment and despair are dragging the whole hopeful enterprise to its doom. The days are filled with building; the nights are long sermons about the relentless approach of enemy forces – the CIA, the defectors; the vague possibility of exodus to the Soviet Union; and the dignity of suicide. One trigger – the visit and shooting of Congressman Leo Ryan – brought it down to this: standing in line for the fatal cup.
Most of us, by definition, are not especially gifted or capable, but still we yearn to achieve purpose in life, to become necessary to something or someone. We dream of striving in unison for a higher cause, finding and offering acceptance and respect. Growing food, building houses, teaching children, nursing the sick, guarding the community: these are noble desires, but they are also naive, because they consciously ignore how our little world – this garden, this classroom – will fit into the larger, less comfortable one. Let us, of course, lend willing hearts and hands to the task; but we allow another be the head at our peril.
Perturbed at the low standard of marksmanship among urban Northern recruits during the Civil War, a group of retired generals proposed a National Rifle Association, founded on this day in 1871 and placed under the presidency of Ambrose Burnside, the militarily inept but politically connected ex-commander of the Federal armies. The organization’s purpose was to make townsmen, no longer dependent on the rifle for their dinner, more proficient in a weapon that was itself becoming more complex and demanding to use. Future wars would need capable riflemen, so the NRA organized clubs, offered instructor training, and promoted competitions to provide America with a reserve of straight-shooting conscripts.
This is not, you’ll notice, what it does now. Ensconced in its glass headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, the NRA is principally devoted to fundraising and lobbying activities, applying an annual budget of over $200 million to such projects as an “Institute for Legislative Action” and a “Civil Rights Defense Fund.”
The focus of all this pecuniary pressure is the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States – one of the worst-written sentences in legislative history. Here it is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Eh? A first-week intern/copyeditor at any publisher’s would be all over this with the blue pencil. Where do those commas come from? What does it mean? “Note to author: please clarify.” The copy of the Bill of Rights sent to the states for ratification improved the punctuation in a way that suggested a stronger legal connection between bearing arms and serving in the militia (at that time, a universal duty for male white citizens); but a recent Supreme Court ruling has come down on the other side of the commas, positing a fundamental right to bear arms for all Americans. The implications of any such right are now the battle-ground of gun debate.
For the NRA, gun culture is an integral part of American culture. Owning, carrying and using a firearm is both symbolic and protective of the individual freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. Shooting at things (targets, animals, and – when threatened – people) is almost sacramental: a political entitlement as basic as voting… and far more satisfying.
There are some problems with this position: the Founding Fathers, as followers of John Locke, would insist that citizens had given up their right to unrestricted self-defense when they left the state of Nature and joined society. They would probably frown on carrying concealed weapons as a violation of the contract-law requirement for “utmost good faith.” They would refute as seditious the claim by many gun-lobbyists that weapon ownership exists to defend the individual against government tyranny. But the NRA interprets American freedoms more widely, taking in the lawless frontier tradition when Colt and Winchester were the only legal authorities to which men appealed. This commits the Association to an all-or-nothing approach: no citizen can be forced to buy a trigger-lock when purchasing a handgun. All states must promise to issue concealed-carry permits to anyone who passes certain tests. The right to own a gun must include the right to own weapons visually identical to military machine guns. No city, whatever the preferences of its local voters, can ban guns from its territory. This may be good lobbying, but it’s bad politics – because it makes the fact of gun ownership into a shibboleth issue, like abortion or public health insurance, entirely divorced from the circumstances of life surrounding it.
As it happens, guns are much less important, for good or bad, than the leaders of the debate would have us believe. Districts with high levels of legal gun ownership have low levels of crime – but they tend to be in rural areas, where crime is rare anyway. Switzerland, where every house contains a military weapon, has little crime; so does Japan, where it is extremely difficult to get a gun license. The economist Steven Leavitt (he of Freakonomics) analyzed the rise and subsequent fall of violent crime in America between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s and found no correlation with any gun-related legislation, but rather with the increased availability of abortion in the 1970s. Levels of burglary and street robbery seem to vary less by how well-armed the population is and more by how well the local authorities deal with drug use.
America’s current malady is posturing. We try to ennoble our prejudices by loudly ascribing them to higher authorities – much as playground squabblers call on the help of bigger kids. Whatever the facts about the effects of gun ownership (and those facts seem amazingly neutral for such a charged issue), the NRA invites contempt for its pretense that it is defending the Constitution, when what it is actually doing is protecting social habits, informed far more by local tradition than by the founding principles of the Republic. People are comfortable with guns to different degrees in different places; one sensible rule might be not to force guns (or concealed carrying of guns, or semi-automatic guns) on communities that have no easiness with them – but that would mean the end of the big glass building in Virginia and the $200,000,000 annual budget. Disingenuous shrillness and money-based issue politics remain intrinsically wrong, no matter what the rights of their cause. They drive out decency and sensible compromise, leaving the field to zealots on either wing. It’s hard to believe that our choice is between forcing Alaskans to become vegetarian or forcing New Yorkers to claim their cabs at the point of a Browning – but that’s what the NRA would have you think. General Burnside would be yanking his whiskers.
“O Solomon, I have outdone thee!” When in 537 AD Justinian I, Roman emperor in Byzantium, first entered the newly-completed church of the Holy Wisdom, he could not contain his pride. It had taken only five years to raise this gigantic dome, springing from its four supporting apses – a symbol of the order and unity he sought in government. The previous church had burned when thousands rioted and destroyed the old city, protesting new taxes and stirred up by gang rivalry. In burying the memory of that chaos under such divine structure, Justinian felt he was reversing the entropic decline of the Empire.
The round-faced son of an Albanian peasant, brought into the palace guard because his handsome uncle had caught the glad eye of a previous Emperor, Justinian took on supreme power with the air of a man assigned to dig a ditch. Barbarians threatened on all sides; the city was settling, with a shrug, into the habits of random violence and corruption. Deprived of the chance to exercise power on earth, the élites instead fought over points of theology, debasing the thousand-year tradition of Greek debate in acrimonious squabbles over questions that had no answer.
Justinian spat on his hands, took up the levers of state, and tackled these problems one at a time, aided by a remarkably fortunate choice of ministers: Belisarius the general, John of Cappodocia the tax expert, the diplomat Peter the Patrician, Tribonius the legal scholar – and, most important of all, the Empress, the remarkable Theodora. We are unfortunate in having as a principal source for Theodora’s life the Secret History of the cleric Procopius, whose lurid accounts of the Empresses’ youthful performances on the burlesque stage seem as unlikely as they are unerotic: the crude fantasy of a celibate. It is clear that her genius was essential to the fulfillment of her husband’s plans. The daughter of an animal trainer for the Circus Games, orphaned into semi-prostitution at the age of 11, she had a survivor’s perspicacity and ruthlessness, sensing and thwarting competition or dissent. It was the perfect complement to Justinian’s dogged pursuit of transparent ambitions: she made sure nobody got a step ahead of him.
North Africa was recaptured from the Vandals; their defeated king Gelimer was marched through the victorious city, shouting “vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” The Persians, ever dangerous, were held off by a combination of local victories and general bribery. Rome itself was recaptured from the Ostrogoths: a ghost-town, cattle wallowing where Cicero had addressed the Senate, but still a symbol of resurgent empire. A series of councils settled the most pressing religious questions, from the date of Christmas to the nature of Christ. Byzantium itself rose from the charred ruins left by riots to become that focus for imaginings of exotic, gold-and-mosaic opulence that it remains today. The “unsleeping” Emperor oversaw all, discharging what he saw as his holy duty to restore order.
Most important of Justinian’s accomplishments was achieved on this date in 534: the completion of the Corpus Juris Civilis, a compendium of all civil law in the Roman world. Like Hagia Sophia, it had taken only five years to achieve – a complete blueprint of the legal structure that shaped and supported civilization.
“Vanity of vanities:” Gelimer’s quotation was from Solomon – and Justinian would have ample cause to heed the words as his his reign came to an end. Plague and famine had swept through the known world, perhaps as a result of sudden climatic change. War and tribute had exhausted the treasury. Italy had become a wasteland. The army was now staffed by barbarians to fight barbarians. Heresies abounded – and law seemed less and less pertinent to a world of rising disorder.
And yet – nearly five hundred years later, when the world seemed darkest, when centuries of battle and plunder had erased the memory of the empire’s accomplishments, a tattered monk in a chilly library found a manuscript: the Corpus Juris Civilis. Somehow, miraculously, he knew what he was holding: the drawings of the master builder, the code for civilization. Justinian’s book became the reason universities were founded and the first object of secular study in centuries. It gave us the basis for every civil law code in the modern world – and in this, at least, he has surpassed even Solomon in all his glory.
The most precious commodity for a social animal is trust, because it allows for division of labor. A primate band whose members can trust each other can also share food, or at least the knowledge of where food is abundant. The band does better than any individual or mother-child unit could do – and while it may not be immediately obvious why this helps any particular gene make it to the next generation, it buys time for all the group’s genes to achieve their full potential. If we believe that our neighbor is “one of us,” she and we all have better survival chances – assuming she reciprocates our trust.
There’s the rub: trust by its nature opens the door to cheating. If our most significant adaptive advantage depends on a behavior that itself makes us vulnerable, we will be preternaturally aware of any threat from that direction – especially in a world with, as we always believe, too few good things to go around. Indeed, the economist Samuel Bowles has suggested that our altruistic behavior to those we consider in-group is a direct result of lethal competition for resources between groups or early humans – that Us first appeared as the response to a threat from Them. Even in the most comfortable modern life, there is that tickle of potential conflict for resources: if, before the sale opens, you save places in the line for your family or friends, you’re being a good person, freeing them from the boredom of waiting – but the lady in front of you doing the same thing is cheating, holding you back in favor of her deadbeat companions who can’t even be bothered to show up. We bond against as much as with.
So how do we know who They are? It’s not always easy; ancient Israelites asked refugees to pronounce the word shibboleth; the Danish resistance in World War II preferred rødgrød med fløde (red berries with cream); Croat and Serb terror gangs checked the manner in which children crossed themselves – Orthodox right to left, Catholic left to right. At its most basic level our feeling of otherness is taken in with our first nourishment and is deeply intermingled with our sense of disgust. They eat revolting things: grubs, sheep’s eyes, raw fish, tripe, pork, beef. They smell different. They inspire disgust, then rejection, then fear.
For instance: I don’t know how you feel about the Pirese. I’m pretty tolerant. I enjoy a mixed neighborhood, I believe religion is a private matter, and as for immigration – well, like it or not, we need the skills. But these Pirese… I kind of draw the line there. I’ve got kids. Any Pirese can just keep moving on, as far as I’m concerned.
And I’m not alone: a 2006 Tárki Social Institute poll in Hungary revealed that Pirese refugees were hated even more than Romanians, Russians, Chinese or Arabs. It wasn’t so much the things they had done – they don’t leave much of a record – but what they were: dark, ugly, possessed of the evil eye, known to mix blood into their beer. And the worst of it is, they don’t exist – they were just included in the questionnaire as a statistical control.
Not even existing: typical sneaky Pirese behavior.
It would be hard to stay humble if your name translated to “Holy Merciful Holy (Foot) Lord Holy Best of Men Lion-jaw Sacred-great-hero-warrior” – but then King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia was not born for humility. A deva raja, god-king – brought up among adoring women in the palace quarters, trained as a dashing cavalryman and boulvardier in pre-war France – Sihanouk embodied and hoped to reconcile two unrelated species of charisma: the near-divinity of a traditional Asiatic ruler with the populist power of a modern politician. Over a more than forty-year career, he remained Cambodia’s head of state, although in many guises: King, prince, prime minster, president, chief-in-exile. The Guinness Book of Records claims that no one has held a greater variety of political offices (although, in fact, Sihanouk may have been surpassed by the admirable Seumas McSporran, who until recently occupied thirteen official positions simultaneously on the Hebridean island of Gigha).
Watch him in the shadowy, gorgeous film of a 1950s royal cortege, a lissome figure in silken pedal-pushers and improbable pagoda-crown reclining on his palanquin as the narrator intones: “Ô King, all who believe in you, who love you and venerate you, are here! So that your August Person deigns to appear! The gates of gold and light, opening, join the people to the heart!” Gongs jangle, angel-girls undulate in reptilian postures. How splendidly, sincerely exotic! Yet look at the credits: “A NORODOM SIHANOUK production, directed by NORODOM SIHANOUK.” The King’s home movies constituted Cambodia’s film industry, many starring himself and his wife: love stories; comedies of manners; and the thriller Shadow Over Angkor, in which a glamorous prince thwarts a CIA plot to topple the government. Sihanouk was also a prolific jazz songwriter; you may see him performing some of his hits here (the vocals are slightly shaky, but then he is well over eighty). Where other rulers chose the old or the new, to resist change or embrace it, Sihanouk wanted to play the lead in both.
Culturally, this might eventually have produced a delicious fusion of Khmer and Parisian, but politically it was extremely perilous. Sihanouk’s sinuous style had allowed him to finesse Cambodian independence from France in 1955, but his country had old, dangerous neighbors in both Vietnams and in China – and soon, as the Vietnam war got going, a demanding new stranger in the United States. Sihanouk’s only goals were continued independence for his people and a leading rôle for himself, so he attempted to play off all against all. He mounted a coup against his own constitutional government and proclaimed himself prime minister to himself. Communist China made the least inconvenient ally, so the king’s rhetoric moved well to the left, playing up his populist affections and suggesting he be addressed as “Prince Comrade” or “Lord Dad.” At the same time, he encouraged his army violently to suppress peasant revolts. He let the Vietnamese he hated set up military bases and supply lines in his country – then let the Americans he despised attack those bases in a “secret” bombing campaign that dropped on Cambodia more tons of explosive than were used Europe during World War II and killed at least 100,000 civilians. The increasingly unhappy lives of country people led to a brutal civil war, eventually won by the extreme leftists to whom Sihanouk and his Chinese friends had given their support: the Khmers Rouges.
Did he know that in agreeing to be a puppet for Pol Pot, he was condoning the murder of nearly two million of his people and the reduction of his country to a stone-age economy? Maybe not: at the time, he said: “I will go back and live in a small villa in Angkor like a retired country gentleman. I can be a public relations man for my country and have my jazz parties and do some filming.” In fact, he was a prisoner in the palace; several of his children and more than fifteen grandchildren joined their countrymen in the killing fields. Yet, when the Vietnamese invaded and drove the Khmers Rouges off into the jungle, Sihanouk merely noted that Pol Pot was now very polite and used the correct court terms of address. He himself escaped into exile, returning to the 60-room palace built for him in Pyongyang by friend and fellow film buff, Kim Jong-Il.
After long exile, Norodom Sihanouk returned to Phnom Penh today in 1991; his people, whose adoration is tinged with remarkable forgiveness, welcomed him to a much changed and chastened Cambodia, still independent – but poor, exhausted and deeply bruised. What had it all been about? What had been the point of these royal power plays? The journalist Oriana Falacci said of Sihanouk: “the more you listen to him, the more you follow his actions, the less you understand.” He himself has admitted, with an old, tired man’s clarity, “I may seem devious and twisting in my diplomatic maneuvers; my intentions may seem diabolical; but the truth is I can’t even manage to be shrewd.”
To the man in yellow spectacles, the world soon ceases to be yellow; it is primrose, honey, goldenrod, gamboge – these distinctions are important and, when taken together, apparently cover all there is to see. To the man’s dog, all colors are equally unimportant – but smells reveal a world of fascinating individuals, each leaving its characteristic mark for others as on a wall of graffiti. This is the way with experience: if we were actually to sense the world in all its manifold richness, the moment would be as obliterating as seeing a god undisguised. Our perception therefore operates as an editor, not just a reader, preparing a digest of external reality under the headings we naturally find most important. For humans, the top category is “meaning:” we shun the random and the chaotic, preferring our facts to come with a good story.
Thus the lives of “primitive” people are filled with agency and consequence. Nothing is by chance – even the jumbled imagery of dreams, or the seemingly random matters of health and illness, are strictly caused by unseen beings or forces. Nor need one be primitive to believe such things: the Greeks of Hippocrates’ time operated sleep temples, where the sick, bolstered by good nourishment and purified by ritual, lay in deepest slumber to receive the curing visit of Asclepius. Plenty of modern sufferers fret about the state of their chi or their connection to “natural life energy.” Superstitious obsession is the rest state of human health-worry.
In late eighteenth-century Paris, the obsession was animal magnetism and the practitioner was Anton Mesmer, a superior Swiss mountebank. His luxuriously-appointed salon contained large oak tubs of “magnetized” water, whose healing properties would pass into patients through swiveling iron rods, sympathetic ropes, or the personal ministrations of Mesmer himself, staring into the subject’s eyes, grasping her knees and placing his hands on her “hypochondriacal zone” – all to the heavenly sounds of the glass harmonica. The results were remarkable: patients would go into trances, some sitting as if paralyzed, others moaning, shuddering, bursting into tears and tumbling into convulsions. The cynical might think (and did say) that what was for sale here were powerful orgasms induced by intense emotion. A royal commission, including Benjamin Franklin, established by careful experiment that Mesmer’s theories were indeed triple-distilled humbug – but that , nevertheless, there were definite, documented cures of real diseases. It was a puzzle.
So things remained until this date in 1841, when James Braid, an Edinburgh-trained surgeon, went to see the stage demonstration of Charles Lafontaine, a failed actor but highly successful Mesmerist, whose memoirs and manner formed the original for du Maurier’s Svengali. Braid didn’t buy the idea of an all-permeating life fluid, but he did feel there was something beyond mere quackery in Lafontaine’s results. As someone who operated on eyes before anaesthesia, Braid had good reasons to study the pain-free trances of mesmeric subjects. His conclusion was that the phenomenon was neither the result of unseen forces, nor of the forceful personality of of the mesmerist, nor of the desire of the subject to cooperate – but was a genuine physiological response of the human brain and nervous system to certain stimuli. He called it “hypnotism.” He used it successfully in surgery. He cured himself of agonizing rheumatism. He taught others, whose work over the intervening years has led to everything from smoking cures to pain-free childbirth.
In investigating hypnotism, students also found how prevalent its states can be, and how artificial is our definition of alertness. When we are deep in a book, or waiting, daydreaming, for a train; when we are absorbed in close and pleasurable work; when we are lost in music or caught up in physical exercise, we are literally entranced. Mesmer would have no difficulty understanding the concept of “in the zone.”
The problem we have with scientific explanation, though, is its refusal to postulate deeper meaning; science gives us the shape of the box, but is diffident about putting anything into it. It fell to a follower one of Braid’s followers, Sigmund Freud, to take hypnotism and reinvest it with the spirits and forces – Id and Ego, repression and complex – that we had lost with Mesmer’s tubs. Our illnesses (or at least our neuroses) were once more part of an age-old drama, our dreams clues to a deeper parallel world. Psychoanalysis took over the main stage; hypnotism retreated to the fringes – to side shows and “personal development” courses. Yes, it works … but it has no story.
If you were planning a pirate cruise, Jürgen Schrempp is just the stamp of man you’d choose to command. He has an unbridled relish for life: climbing the Himalayas with Reinhold Messner, challenging Garry Kasparov at chess, loping through his South African game reserve at dawn with a Glock 9mm at his hip. Unlike the traditional Doppel-Doktor Dipl.Ing. type of German executive, he rose through the ranks: starting from a mere auto mechanic to become Chief Executive of the mighty Daimler-Benz. Life, for Schrempp, is an adventure.
What qualities does a successful buccaneer require? Decisiveness, charisma… and flair: the ability to sniff out booty beyond the horizon. On this day in 1998, Schrempp led his docile Board of Directors in a characteristically daring raid, spending 36 billion dollars to acquire Detroit’s Chrysler in the largest cross-border industrial merger ever achieved. Chrysler was going through one of its spasms of profitability; it still bore the mark of the legendary Lee Iacocca, no mean swashbuckler himself. Schrempp saw the chance to mate the meticulous, slow-growing worthiness of his German operations with a venturesome, rough-and-ready, unstuffy American style. He called the deal “a marriage made in heaven.”
When the combined management of the new entity met together for the first time in a palatial hotel in Spain, Schrempp out-backslapped, out-laughed, out-sang, and out-drank all the American senior executives, finally retiring to his room with a bottle of champagne in one hand and his personal assistant slung over the other shoulder (she’s now his wife; he had another at the time). Yet he ran his meetings the next morning with consummate briskness and focus, giving new strength to the phrase “hard-headed businessman.” His co-chairman, though – his partner in this celestial marriage – seemed uncomfortable: Bob Eaton was quiet, awkward, provincial, occasionally given to tears. In the face of Schrempp’s relentless drive, he retreated into silence and isolation like a neglected spouse, soon announcing his early retirement.
Almost immediately, the shared venture started to run aground on the hidden reefs of culture. German managers demanded worked-out proposals, submitted through the usual channels; Americans preferred face-to-face discussions, even though these sometimes produced no decision. Germans smoked; Chrysler’s headquarters were smoke-free. Germans ordered wine at lunch and worked late every day – an uncomfortable fit with Diet Coke-drinking, Little League-coaching Americans. But then, Chrysler executives earned up to four times as much as their Daimler counterparts – but then, again, Chrysler kept a tight rein on personal expenses, while Daimler allowed unrestrained junketing. Every meeting, every conversation was an opportunity for two-way resentment.
The worst part of any unhappy marriage is an unspeakable truth – and here the truth was that, though billed as a merger, this was obviously a takeover. Daimler had the money, the reputation, and Schrempp’s global vision; any wind of change, for good or ill, would be blowing from Stuttgart to Detroit. Yet it seemed vitally important that it should not be felt that way; Daimler executives were terrified that the merger would appear as an Anschluss (and, just by saying it, I’ve shown you why). Though in command, they took a polite, hands-off stance – thus compounding resentment with bafflement. Chrysler began to leach talent; integration stalled. The business swung from a $2 billion profit to a $2 billion loss in six months. DaimlerChrysler’s share price fell 60% in two years.
Schrempp had other worries, too. His Asian strategy, involving a substantial stake in Mitsubishi Motors, was mired in debt; his eco-strategy, based on the tiny-but-chic Smart cars, was burning through cash; Mercedes, the solid foundation for all else, was proving shaky; in 2004, its reliability rated lower than Hyundai’s. Analysts pointed out, and shareholders noticed, that a portfolio of dodgy businesses does not mitigate risk, but amplifies it.
Schrempp’s old shipmates on the Board stuck with him long after investors had abandoned him, but even they had limits to their patience. He was pushed overboard in 2005; in 2007, Daimler cut the cable and let Chrysler drift into the jaws of Cerberus LLC, a private-equity company – in effect paying to get the damn thing off their hands. Chrysler is now owned by a far less charismatic figure: the US taxpayer. And Jürgen Schrempp is back in South Africa… scanning the blue horizon.
The War to End All Wars came to its end today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. A very poetic gesture – and, for once, a chance to answer the pragmatic question: “what is poetry worth?”
Those in charge of the carnage had known for at least five weeks that the end was coming. First to notice was the German commander, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff; with the thousand-year view of a Prussian officer, he saw inevitable checkmate in the sudden willingness of his soldiers to surrender rather than die for each lonely trench and dugout. He cared only for his Army: an institution that, he believed, extended beneath and beyond any temporary regime or ruler. He would willingly throw the Kaiser – and Germany itself – to their enemies if there was a chance to save this knightly Order in field-gray; so, on September 29th, he wrote to his superiors suggesting that they should accept terms.
Someone facing imminent death will think fast about alternatives – but the further away from that buzzing, pounding reality men are, the more deliberate they become. For a month, telegrams went back and forth, clarifying points, rephrasing requests. There was a lot at issue; the Allies wanted the Kaiser to abdicate, but were unsure whether making this demand immediately might stiffen German resistance. The Germans were hoping to retain some military capability, if only to suppress the communist revolts that were beginning to break out across the country. Everyone but the Americans was scrabbling to find an alternative to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a dangerously idealistic set of war aims that would mean the end of multi-ethnic empires and cozy secret diplomacy. Weeks passed. Tens of thousands died.
On November 8th, German representatives – now, after a revolution, civilian socialists – arrived at the railway car of the Allied Commander, Generalissimo Foch. More theater: “What is your purpose here? What do you want of me?” The shabby-looking trade-union leaders, surrounded by gold braid and fierce mustaches, were forced to go through the humiliating charade of begging that they be told the terms under which they might be allowed to surrender. A request for immediate cease-fire was contemptuously refused. Foch then disappeared, leaving the details to his staff; by now, the 11th had already been decided as the moment juste. The guns continued to fire.
At five in the morning on this date, the signatures were put on the document of Armistice, to come into force six hours later. A lot can happen in six hours. Even once they had received the news of imminent peace, most artillery batteries continued blasting away until the last minute, because it was more efficient to blow up a few more of the enemy than to have to cart away all those heavy shells. Some American generals, for reasons of their own, ordered their men to advance and capture the town of Sedan, the symbol of French defeat at the hands of the new German Empire in 1870. The result was furious recrimination, lasting resentment, some friendly-fire incidents, and a few hundred more casualties. A General Wright of the US 89th Division felt his men would look better for the peace parade if they were scrubbed up. He had heard there were intact baths in a nearby Belgian town, so he tried to take it: another 300 dead.
9:30 a.m.: Englishman Henry Ellison, like Ludendorff a veteran of the very first campaign of the war, was killed while investigating reports of Germans in a wood near Mons, where that campaign was fought.
10:45: Frenchman Augustin Trebuchon died while bringing his comrades the message that hot soup would be available once the firing ceased.
10:58: Canadian George Price was shot by a sniper while accepting flowers from a Belgian civilian.
10:59: American Henry Gunther, obeying who knows what conception of honor, charged a platoon of German soldiers preparing to surrender and was mown down.
All four were privates. No general died this day.
There were further deaths through blunder and accident, but they no longer counted as official casualties of war. Of these, the total for November 11th was 11,000 – more than all those killed, wounded, and missing on D-Day. That, it seems, is the price of poetry.
Two years ago today at the Ibero-American summit, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was feeling on top of the world; oil prices were heading quickly toward $100 a barrel; he had just proposed a referendum to abolish term limits, central bank autonomy, and restrictions on nationalization; he had removed his most prominent media critics by shutting down the main private television channel. He had the ear of OPEC, of the OAS, of the UN, and of his Latin American neighbors, all of whom needed his oil. He could be excused the temptation to sound off a little.
Chávez is known for his seemingly impromptu quips: intoning, as he mounted the UN podium after George W. Bush, “the Devil was here; you can still smell the sulphur.” Warning the then Secretary of State, “don’t mess with me Condoleeza; don’t mess, little girl.” Berating “Mr. Danger Bush-Hitler – a coward, a killer, a perpetrator of genocide, an alcoholic, a drunk, a liar, and an immoral person.” Condemning Halloween as a form of “terrorism.” In a sense, talk is what his Presidency is all about: he came to power through the media, cannily agreeing to abandon an attempted military coup in exchange for ten minutes on national television. His brief but electrifying speech made his name. Now, he reaches his people through a live call-in show, Aló Presidente, which promises and delivers “news, singing, jokes, and entertainment.” The program runs as long as he feels like; the record so far is eight hours.
A man with such a powerfully loquacious urge cannot suppress it without pain; so when José Luis Zapatero, the mild-mannered Spanish Prime Minister, addressed the Santiago summit, Chávez added a running commentary. He was annoyed at Spanish investment in Latin America – its money was competing with his; his socialist-populist politics take their name from Bolívar, the enemy of Spain; and he believed that the previous, conservative Spanish government had conspired against him. So he grumbled and murmured throughout Zapatero’s speech, attacking “fascists” who were “not human, but lower than snakes.” Zapatero was forced into defending his predecessor (and political enemy) as a legitimately-elected leader – but Chávez heckled on, even though the organizers had shut off his microphone. It was a classic scene: the soft-voiced lecturer losing control of the room to the mouthy kid in the back row; so the principal came down like a ton of bricks. King Juan Carlos of Spain, usually as calm and kindly as his stamps and coins portray him, leaned forward, red-faced, and addressed the rogue president: “¡¿Por qué no te callas?!" “Why don’t you shut up?” Significantly, he used the te form of address, suitable for children – or family members.
For all its violent political emotions, the Latin world values courtesy highly; the question of who played the boor in this story was immediately divisive. Domestic opposition in Venezuela seized on the king’s slap-down with glee; it appeared widely on T-shirts, YouTube videos and ringtones. Countries run by well-educated political élites generally applauded Juan Carlos; we can’t have such disruptive behavior at summits – it’s far too reminiscent of Krushchev and his shoe. Other, more popular governments defended Chávez – and not just because they shared his leftist convictions.
Demagoguery is mostly a matter of words, not deeds; leaders like Chávez seize and hold power by appealing directly to the people over the heads of all the traditional practitioners of politics. The vows they make, the airy palaces of hope they construct for the poor and mistreated, are their chief accomplishments. Unlike those he admires (Fidel, Che), Chávez has never won a war; like those he consorts with (Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, Lukashenka), he has failed to deliver the new dawn he promised. His government is fundamentally disorganized, composed of yes-men and ex-officers with no administrative ability. He himself is the kind of infuriating boss who calls you at four in the morning requiring a report on, say, the prison system by nine, then goes off on vacation having forgotten all about it.
So he talks instead – volubly, colorfully, aggressively – valiantly insulting the “empire” whose citizens, at the gas pump, provide all his finance; boasting of the Bolívarian accomplishments to come; sniping at his neighbors in Colombia; providing news, singing, jokes, and entertainment. He could never do as the King suggested – for if he ever did shut up, he would disappear.
