Bozo Sapiens

Idi Amin: Supremacy

2012-02-02T09:53:00.001Z

The Nile crocodile looks calm, unambitious, its eyes fixed on some distant point, its jaws gently smiling as if dreaming of peace. Huge and seemingly benevolent, it tempts smaller animals to relax, dropping their guards and getting on with their lives. But all the time, that dead eye is watching, that small but devious brain anticipating the moment to strike.

Idi Amin Dada was a keen observer of wildlife. He felt an affinity with the animals of Uganda, that lush paradise where the Nile first swells into a significant river. When he was dictator, he would travel downstream in his cabin cruiser, taking the salutes of the crocodiles, hippos and elephants with unaffected pleasure. He shared their imposing physical presence: six-foot-four, nearly three hundred pounds of solid, purposeful bulk. He had been a boxer and a rugby player: “with my speed, with my weight, if you tackle me, you can harm yourself; I think you should know this.” Unschooled, he yet had that instinct for ruse and surprise – unsettling friendliness alternating with sudden, crushing violence – that makes a successful bully.

Crocodiles succeed without needing to be smart; Amin had cunning, but he was also very stupid. He joined the East African Rifles as a cook, rising through the ranks to be a warrant officer by the time Uganda approached independence. His British officers called him “a splendid man by any standards,” praising his toughness and discipline, but mentioned that he was “virtually bone from the neck up.” He thrived in the army because it gave life such obvious structure, with simple orders and operations, ranks and medals. When the British left in 1961, they made him a lieutenant – he reached major general a few years later.

Clever people are often fatally wrong about stupid people, mistaking lack of intelligence for lack of ambition or assuming that the doctrinaire will also be loyal. The new rulers of independent Uganda considered Amin much as the British had: as a tool that could be relied upon not to act for itself. President Milton Obote used him to sweep away the traditional power in the land, the king of Buganda, and to assist in a range of corrupt schemes and tribal suppressions. It was not until too late that Obote noticed how Amin had packed the army with his own people from the far north-west of the country. In the false security of his own intelligence, Obote delayed doing anything about this troublesome servant until he came back from a Commonwealth leader’s summit – but the big man moved faster, seizing power in a matter of hours on this date in 1971. His initial announcements were typically humble, claiming that he was a simple soldier and that he would soon reinstate democracy, having released all political prisoners and cleaned out corruption. In fact, he was already slaughtering all Obote’s fellow Lango tribesmen in the army. It was the beginning of eight years of horror.

What is power for? What, having the chance to accomplish things, will you do with it? This is not a question that troubles stupid people. Power is power; the important thing is to have it. “I dreamed I would be the mosty, highesty, head of state in the world. And when I dream, it is the truth.” Amin had to be the top in all things, small as well as large. When the cabinet swam with him in the presidential pool, they had to race and he had to win. When the jazz band of the Suicide Mechanized Brigade played for his parties, the songs had to be about him and he had to lead them on the accordion. When dance troupes praised him in leaping dances, he was soon among them, leaping higher. He judged his foreign alliances on similar terms. The Israelis had originally helped him with arms and training as a useful counter to Muslim Sudan: “Golda Meir was very much my friend because she gave me good entertainment. General Dayan would offer lunch, dinner, and bring the Air Force band.” But Amin wanted Phantom jets to attack Tanzania – and the Israelis demurred. Soon it was, “Hitler was a great leader. I enjoy very much having breakfast with some Syrians, and Iraqi breakfast in their tanks.” Gaddafi’s Libya proved his most reliable ally, with the Soviets providing arms and the East Germans help with his burgeoning secret police establishment. Meanwhile, rank succeeded rank: in 1975, Amin made himself Field Marshal, then “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hajji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.” His military tunic extended to his knees to accommodate all his medals.

Meanwhile, some 300,000 people were being murdered, swept up by the corrupt paramilitary police, the drunken, looting army, or the terrifying, sunglasses-wearing torturers of the State Research Bureau. Schoolteachers, professors, government ministers, the Chief Justice, the Anglican Archbishop, or people unlucky enough to be the boyfriends of women that took the leader’s eye – all disappeared, leaving only a pair of shoes by the side of the road or, occasionally, a bloated corpse among the crocodiles.

The power structure of Amin’s Uganda was tall but tottery, shored up only by terror and the bribery of the armed forces. In time everyone had had enough and, when Tanzania invaded in 1979, his support folded; he flew off to exile in Libya and then Saudi Arabia. He was not the only hideous dictator in Africa, past or present – but his story is not intrinsically African, whatever historians may say about the continent’s colonialist legacy or its “big man” political culture. Amin would have felt at home in 1950s Central America, in Ceaucescu’s Romania, or in China’s warlord era. For power is the same in all cultures, as it is for all species.

The Wankel Engine: Elegance

2012-02-01T10:00:00.001Z

Borrowed from mathematics, the idea of “elegance” in engineering has nothing to do with brushed aluminum fascias, carbon fiber shift knobs, or soft Corinthian leather. It is the essential fitness of the solution to the problem, the absence of extraneous fiddles and fixes, the surprise of novel insight, and the fruitfulness of the approach, spawning further answers. A turbine is elegant; so is a safety razor; so is velcro.

The conventional car engine, however, is not elegant. Speaking as a man who (thanks to a faulty temperature sensor) once reduced four cylinders of German automotive excellence to a single fused lump of metal, I can see good arguments for simplifying and rationalizing its layout. The rumbling thing under the hood is an object shaped by history, not logic, borrowing many of its basic structures from the steam engine – which, for reasons no longer valid, borrowed them from the water pump. Trying to turn wheels by starting with a series of explosions in pipes is like translating poetry through three intermediate languages; it’s no wonder that even modern engines convert only 20% of their fuel’s energy into motion. The rest goes in heat, friction, internal pumping, and the cat’s cradle of troublesome and rackety chains, push-rods, and rocker-arms by which a motor keeps its top in touch with its bottom. Any first-year student who presented this as a project would get a “C."

You can imagine, then, with what joyful relief the proprietors of the NSU Motorenwerke greeted their engineer Felix Wankel’s invention, which first whirred into life on this day in 1957. The Wankel rotary principle is wonderfully elegant, substituting pure trigonometry for that almost accidental assemblage of pistons, crankshafts, and valve gear by which we previously got around. Look at the diagram: the rotor (an epitrochoid triangle, a form you could trace using one of the lesser-known holes on your Spirograph) draws in the fuel-air mixture, compresses it, and expels the exhaust, all by its shape alone. The gear in its middle drives the transmission directly. There are only three main parts. It is simple, it is smooth, it is small. Engineers everywhere gasped with delight; Wankel’s engine was licensed almost immediately by carmakers from Rolls Royce to Mercedes to Citroën to Jeep, by motorcycle makers, airplane-engine companies, and, as a final insult to the steam-engine, pump manufacturers. In the 1960s and early 70s, the future was clearly rotary.

So why is the Wankel engine now only available in one model of sports car from Mazda? Because its performance has never lived up to its elegance. That epitrochoid rotor needs to fit exactly in its housing, or vapor will seep past it and efficiency be lost. The design and materials of the seals, which would seem a minor issue, was in fact a critical one – one that defeated the engineers. The motor’s poor fuel economy and tendency to accumulate soot bankrupted NSU (it’s now part of Audi). It helped bankrupt Citroën. Mercedes and Rolls Royce dropped it. And Mazda – which had committed to an all-Wankel product line just before the 1973 oil crisis tripled gasoline prices – escaped collapse by the thinnest of margins. The company persists in championing Wankel's design out of a very Japanese loyalty and love of beauty, not business logic.

The point is that an inelegant solution shaped by history can respond to history. Like a traditional government, the bits and pieces from which the traditional engine is composed have well-understood behaviors and offer many points at which to tinker and adjust. As gasoline changes in price; as consumers alternately favor speed, economy, or hauling capacity; as lawmakers shift their attention from soot to NOx to CO2, there are ways to respond, producing – if not an optimal solution – at least a relative improvement. The Wankel engine, on the other hand, is the perfect answer to a question we have not been asking.

Now, say Wankel’s partisans, the right question may at last be coming up. For good thermodynamic reasons, the rotary engine runs particularly well on hydrogen – and now history matters less. The fix in which we have put ourselves means we shall have to endure several embryonic engine technologies – battery, hybrid, hydrogen, fuel-cell – none of which will be as convenient as the fill-er-up-and-drive-away system we have now. The fact that the most elegant solution is not the best no longer matters: it could be the least bad.

The Tet Offensive: Morale

2012-01-31T09:53:00.000Z

Forty years ago, the evening news had a sacramental quality. People would sit, fully clothed, eyeing the tube from a respectful distance, before them a special folding-legged table bearing such canonical TV dishes as Salisbury steak or chicken pot pie. Through the night air arrived the glowing images of America’s newsmen: Cronkite, Sevareid, Huntley and Brinkley – men mature and grave, with scotch-and-cigarette baritones and experience-pouched eyes. They were magisterial, trusted; often concerned, but never confused. They typified another lost American archetype: the grownup.

Then, today in 1968, everything changed. The blurry reversal film flown in from Southeast Asia showed inexplicable, unimaginable sights: figures wearing “black pyjamas” running and shooting in the US embassy gardens in Saigon. The stately, calm old capital, Hue, in flames. Mortar shells raining down on Da Nang. Fighting suddenly erupting in every large town and major base across South Vietnam, in 155 simultaneous battles. Nearly 85,000 communist fighters magically appearing as if they had climbed up from trap-doors in the ground (as indeed some of them had). Today was the beginning of Tet, the lunar new year holiday; this was the Tet offensive.

It came as a complete surprise – officially. Soldiers on the ground had an inkling that the North Vietnamese and their Southern allies, the Viet Cong, were planning something big: “We kept seeing things, documents, we’d never seen before. ‘You know what? I think Tet, they’re coming.’ Couldn’t get anybody to believe us.’” At the top, General Westmoreland later claimed he knew; but, in his tortuous, politically-motivated way, he never said it – or not in a way others could understand. Instead, he told the National Press Club that the communists were essentially beaten and “unable to mount a major offensive.” His eyes were fixed on his chosen battle, Khe Sanh, where an isolated Marine base was pegged like a sacrificial goat to draw the North Vietnamese Army into open, disadvantageous combat. He was also waging an intense argument with the CIA, the Defense Department, and the White House – not about how many Viet Cong soldiers there were, but about how many the American public should be told there were. 1968 was, after all, an election year.

The Americans were not alone in finding political emotion driving their military logic: the North Vietnamese leadership was embroiled in similar disputes. A poor country, made poorer by doctrinaire communist economics, it depended heavily on its two big friends, the Soviet Union and Maoist China. The Soviets offered heavy weapons, but wanted North Vietnam to combine fighting with negotiation, making peace at least possible. The Chinese offered rice and small arms, linked with the demand for a protracted guerilla war on Long March principles. The Viet Cong reported that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and hated, its army a hollow shell; conditions were ripe for an uprising. Vietnamese are a proud and self-regarding people, never pleased to be dictated to, even by a friendly power. The prospect of a single, revolutionary eruption, freeing them from all foreign occupation and advice, was beguiling. The fact that every military calculation on which they based their plans was wrong was politically incidental.

For the Tet offensive, though a shock to the defenders, was a complete and colossal failure. Those scurrying figures in the embassy gardens never got into the building; they were all dead or captured in hours. Most of the 155 attacks failed within three days. The South Vietnamese army took the brunt of the battle, and held; the Americans were able to fly in reserves wherever needed. There was no general uprising. The communist forces lost about 45,000 dead: the Viet Cong disappeared as an effective fighting force.

That’s not, though, how things seemed across the TV table. A public that had accepted over-cozy assessments of the military situation now felt betrayed by the apparent confusion and obvious brutality of war. On February 27, Walter Cronkite summed up the news: “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past… To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. … It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” The trusted sage had spoken, and announced the war was lost.

American opinion, already stunned, now sagged. The Defense Department retreated from its demand for more troops. The President, fearful of the financial and social costs of escalation, made no more confident predictions of victory and soon dropped out of the race for reelection. Reporters in Vietnam, guided by their editors at home, told no more military success stories; “Everybody wanted atrocities: ‘have you killed any civilians?’” Soldiers on home leave found their own families telling them that they had lost the Tet campaign. It must be so: it was on TV.

Truth is war’s first casualty, and its last is the will to fight – for, without it, surrender soon follows. The communists lost all Tet’s battles and tens of thousands of troops, with no effect on their will; America gained the nominal victory, but the wound to its self-confidence eventually proved fatal.

Charles I: Accountability

2012-01-30T11:30:00.000Z

The Banqueting House is virtually all that remains of Whitehall, the old palace of the English kings. Designed by Inigo Jones, it is an Italianate block of perfect classical proportions, sufficient unto itself and entirely different from the higgledy-piggledy of brick galleries and mews, tilt-yards, brew-houses, and tennis-courts that once surrounded it. The ceiling, painted by Rubens, was commissioned by Charles I: it shows his father (recognizable by the red face and goggling eyes) being welcomed fraternally into heaven by the Almighty – a vision of kingship as unlike England’s legal tradition as the Hall was unlike the rest of the palace.

Charles had not been expected to be king; his tall and clever elder brother Henry had been trained for the job, his court a little college, but had died of typhoid at eighteen, leaving the spindly boy with the big head to take up the expectations of the country. Charles was not clever; worse, he was obdurate: his mind had room for only one or two ideas – but once in, they never left.

His principal idea was this: “Kings are not bound to give an account of their actions but to God alone.” As a creed, it has the advantage of being internally consistent and universally applicable (moreover, having to speak only with God would doubtless be a great relief to a shy man with a stutter and a thick Scottish accent). What God apparently wanted of Charles was for him to rule according to his conscience, without interference or opposition (God had, apparently, similar arrangements with the Kings of France and Spain and the Czar of Russia).

This simple plan went awry for the old, unavoidable reasons: money and religion. English kings always lacked the personal income to rule without Parliament; and Parliament, unlike God, was loath to give Charles a free hand. It wanted him to fight Spain – but cheaply, as a naval war, with the hopeful chance that piracy might make it self-financing. Charles wanted to fight on land, to give his friend the Duke of Buckingham a chance to gain military glory. The war went badly, Parliament tightened the purse strings, Charles threatened and blustered, Parliament remonstrated and obstructed. Dismissing this awkward and quarrelsome body, Charles tried to rule on his own – but a poverty-stricken autocrat is never a happy one.

And yet – Charles was also King of Scotland, a country that could supply a powerful army led by tough and experienced commanders. If he could agree terms with the Scots, he could use them as a threat to make Parliament more accommodating. Unfortunately, Charles’ other big idea was religious: God wanted him to establish a uniform pattern of worship throughout his kingdoms, controlled by bishops and reporting, conveniently, to him. Scotland, as Charles should have known, is Calvinist: every conscience its own minister, every kirk its own community; no saints, no ceremony, no priests, no bishops, no king as head of the faith. Charles’ cack-handed attempts to impose his orthodoxy north of the border did indeed bring out the Scottish army – against him. His attempts at defense failed for lack of money; he had to recall Parliament; Parliament chided him for his autocratic ways; he foolishly attempted to cow it by a show of force – and the country collapsed into civil war.

Beaten in battle and a prisoner, Charles still refused to parley with his opponents (kings not being bound to account, etc., etc.). Put on trial for misusing the office of king, he denied anyone’s power to try him: he was the office; his crown and head were one. His very stubbornness forced into the open the contradiction between old, personal titles of power and the reality of power under law: its abstraction from the individual, where sovereignty and the sovereign are two separate things. His very mulishness helped shape the modern model of government – we ought to be grateful to him.

But new ideas could find no place in Charles’ mind. On this day in 1649, he stepped out from the window of the Banqueting Hall onto a scaffold. The air was chilly; the small man wore two shirts, lest the crowd should see him shiver and think it fear. He spoke, for once, to his people – but his message remained the same: “I shall go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be.” In a moment, that large, proud, impenetrable head fell from his neck.

Sergius III: Ambition

2012-01-29T20:33:00.000Z

In the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor at St.Peter’s. Rome seemed to be recovering its ancient dignity and power; this descendant of Frankish barbarians – martial, clever, sober, and nearly literate – had reassembled and extended the empire of the Caesars, promising to establish order under law and orthodoxy in faith. No wonder the modern European Union so often invokes his name.

A mere 104 years later, on this date, a straggling procession passed through the ruins of the great city – now the world’s largest spoil-heap – watched in mute disinterest by a scattering of armed louts and starving beggars. A new pope, Sergius III, was being enthroned – but this was something that happened too often to be worth noticing: there had been nine popes in nine years. And what popes! John VII had been clubbed to death by members of his entourage. Formosus had been a reasonable, pious old man, but he had favored the Lombards over the Franks: his successor had him dug up, put on trial, condemned, deprived of his blessing fingers and tossed in a common grave. The next year, a further successor dug him up again, clad him in papal vestments, and returned him to St. Peter’s. At the moment, two ex-popes languished simultaneously in the dungeons of the Castel Sant’Angelo: Leo V and Christopher… except that Christopher was an anti-Pope. No, he wasn’t. Yes, he was (this issue was not settled until the twentieth century).

How had things come to such a pass? Misfortune on misfortune’s head: the ninth century had been Europe’s nadir, as bad a time as any since the retreat of the ice. The Xanten Annals, one of the few surviving accounts, lists earthquakes, famines, locusts, gangrenous plagues, and the constant, repeated ravaging of the Vikings; eventually it dwindles to a sentence per year, such as “it is revolting to say more of this matter.” The Saracens sacked Rome and burned St. Peter’s; when it later caught fire again, the demoralized people could think of nothing better to do about it than to curse the saint and warn him that if he allowed his basilica to burn, no one would believe in Christ. The Universal City had become a mediæval Mogadishu, in which local warlords battled for turf from the fortified remnants of Hadrian’s tomb, Caracalla’s baths, and the Coliseum. Horizons narrowed, hopes dwindled, hearts hardened.

Into all this came Sergius III, son of a prominent Roman family and supporter of the Counts of Tusculum, local mafiosi who had taken the ancient titles of consul, senator, and patrician. The count’s wife Theodora was a powerful woman, named as “senatress and patricienne” in her own right. She was rumored to have taken a previous pope as her lover, and her daughter, the 15-year-old Marozia, was apparently Sergius’ mistress. Sergius quickly got into the swing of his duties, digging up Formosus again, beheading him, and throwing him in the Tiber. He ordered the imprisoned ex-popes to be strangled and fathered a son with Marozia (who later became Pope John XI). If this was not enough to distinguish him, he was also the first pope to wear the distinctive triple-crowned papal tiara and he restored the Lateran Palace, which had collapsed in an earthquake. Most impressively, he died six years later of natural causes – unlike a dozen popes and anti-popes in the succeeding century.

The time that followed is known as the saecula obscura, the dark age of the papacy. It is true that our picture of it is colored by the prejudices of our sources – particularly the irascible Luitprand of Cremona, whose celibate rage at the influence of women in politics gave him a particularly lurid idea of others’ sex lives. Nevertheless, it was one of those chaotic collective nightmares into which groups of otherwise reasonable people so easily fall. Power, unfortunately, is infinitely sub-divisable: there is no advantage too small to fight, cheat, or kill for. As we see in failed and failing states around the world, the world of Sergius is easy to enter but hard to leave. Trying to return to order – and the trust on which order depends – is like driving in a labyrinthine village, edging into ever narrower alleys in the hope of finding a place with room to turn around. Part of Christ’s message, of course, was the hopelessness of such zero-sum seeking after power – but then the papacy has always been more Roman than Christian.

Antarctica: Indifference

2012-01-28T10:28:00.000Z

On this day in 1820, Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, an officer in the Russian Navy, battled once more through the storms that whirl below the 60th parallel to see, glowing blue-white through his telescope, something that was neither wave nor cloud. This, at last, was the great Southern continent that human logic had long assumed to exist as a balance to the populous and diverse North: Antarctica. Naming his find the Alexander Coast (now Island) after his distant Czar, Bellingshausen quickly returned to more welcoming latitudes, leaving the seals and penguins to contemplate their new allegiance.

Antarctica is a land of negative superlatives: the least heat, the least moisture, the least precipitation, the fewest landscape features, the fewest plant species, the fewest people. It is a nowhere bigger than Europe, a windy void where place-names like Mount Terror, Cape Disappointment, and Exasperation Inlet seem entirely appropriate. “Great God! This is an awful place!” wrote Robert Scott, who gave his life in an ill-judged but inspiring race to the South Pole. The awe remains; Providence may have arranged for this planet to support human life – but it’s always a touch-and-go proposition in Antarctica.

This extreme lack of hospitality has made it hard to explain exactly why we should go there. Some reasons are obvious: the barren land is bordered by one of the world’s richest seas, in which we still chase whales, out of sight of all but the most determined protesters. We hunted the fur seal to near-extinction, although fewer whales have meant the seal population has rebounded. We pursue, often illegally, the planet’s last sizable fish (if it says “Chilean seabass” on the menu, this is actually the Patagonian toothfish; the conscientious should avoid it). Soon, a hungry world may be sitting down to plates of aesthetically-improved krill.

On land, we have come up with three reasons why mankind should break in upon this vast and ancient solitude. Science is one: at the Pole, where Roald Amundsen planted the Norwegian flag and turned his dogs northward, a $153 million stilt-borne structure shelters American researchers. It has a medical bay, pool-room, arts and crafts center, and a high-school style cafeteria where you can watch CNN. An airstrip allows Air Force LC-130s to bring in supplies. The US presence here dates back to the exploits of Admiral Richard Byrd, a Senator’s son who commanded Operation Highjump, a puzzling expedition that brought 4,700 men, thirteen ships, and a score of aircraft to the continent in 1946 for no clear purpose, except that the Navy had a budget to justify.

The second reason is sovereignty. Scott marched through the blinding snow for the sake of Empire; seven countries now claim overlapping slices of Antarctic territory and six more “reserve the right” to carve out chunks for themselves. Argentina has flown pregnant women in to its base to establish a "native" population. Britain’s section is self-supporting, thanks to its sale of stamps. Russia has casually announced that it might claim all territories “discovered by Russians” – which presumably means the whole continent. Nor are worldly powers the only ones represented; Byrd’s chaplain, Father William Menster, helpfully consecrated Antarctica; the Russians have gone one better and shipped in a fully-staffed church.

Finally, there’s tourism, the restless urge to go somewhere your sister-in-law has not already been. More than 40,000 people visited Antarctica last year; the number is set to double in the next couple of years, as bigger ships and helicopters arrive and more people, having watched The March of the Penguins, decide to see it for themselves. No such actions can be without consequences.

Ah, well. There are now days when thirty people are simultaneously standing on the summit of Everest, when the Atacama desert rings to the assembled motor-whine of the 500 participants in the Paris-Dakar rally. Parking is the biggest issue in Yosemite (except for the bubbling supervolcano that lurks beneath it). Our irritable search for significance or redemption takes us into the world’s empty places, where we increasingly bring our irritations with us – and leave a few of them behind.

There are few things (God, I suppose, being one) about which people talk more nonsense than the wilderness. As lively and social apes, we can't accept its indifference, but instead assume either that it is challenging us to tame it, inviting us to exploit it, or teaching us some personal lesson about the harmony of the cosmos or the indomitability of the human spirit. In truth, it has no message for us. We talk, we do, we think. It is.

Mozart: Anticipation

2012-01-27T09:32:00.000Z

“If only I could impress Mozart's inimitable works on the soul of every friend of music as deeply, with the same musical understanding and with the same deep feeling, as I understand and feel them, the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel.” This speaker knew something of what he described: it was Haydn, who happily admitted that he heard Mozart in his dreams.

It’s no surprise that so many have followed Haydn in praising the wonder born today in Salzburg in 1756 – what is striking, though, is that the most disparate people use the same terms to describe his music. Composers and musicians who agree on nothing else will talk in one voice of his purity and perfection; how the slightest change would diminish the effect. They mention his dance-like grace and the physical sensuality of his line. They marvel at the density of his content, the restless inspiration; and the constant pleasurable surprise, “escaping the frame,” unpredicted by the expert yet entirely natural and unforced.

Clarity, balance, perfection – depth, daring, surprise. A vision of a better world; a synthesis between the humane and the divine, between feeling and form, ever fresh, ever true. How does he do it?

My playing of Mozart gives pleasure to nobody but myself; I don't presume to hold a secret unknown to musicologists – but I do know about an odd phenomenon of human cognition that may help explain why our response to Mozart is so uniform and un-subjective. It comes from that little-known province of the academic world where literature and neurophysiology intersect.

Philip Davis of the University of Liverpool has long been interested in the electric shimmer that accompanies the comprehension of an obscure but well-turned phrase – particularly in the works of Shakespeare, like Mozart a daring boy who climbs far out along the boughs of grammar to perform his capers among its thinnest twigs:

“I had a specific intuition – about Shakespeare: that the very shapes of Shakespeare’s lines and sentences somehow had a dramatic effect at deep levels in my mind. For example – Macbeth at the end of his tether:

And that which should accompany old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have, but in their stead

Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath

Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.

I’ll say no more than this: it simply would not be the same, would it, if Shakespeare had written it out more straightforwardly.”

Davis and other colleagues set up an experiment to see what happens in the brain in these moments of grammatical ambiguity but semantic revelation. They chose a favorite trope of Shakespeare’s, the dragooning of nouns into service as verbs – something that works wonderfully for him (“I could out-tongue your griefs”) if less well in modern usage (“she could podium again for sure”). Subjects were given electro-encephalogram (EEG) scans, during which they read sentences that fell into four categories:

1) grammatically and semantically unexceptional: “I said you would accompany me”

2) grammatically and semantically incorrect: “I said you would charcoal me”

3) grammatically fine but semantically wrong: “I said you would incubate me”

4) Shakespearian – that is, grammatically unexpected but semantically valid: “I said you would companion me.”

What the scans revealed was something that neuroscientists and linguists have known about for years but somehow kept secret from the English department: the P600 and N400 effects. These are modulations of brain-wave patterns in response to verbal cues. The P600, as the name suggests, is a positive modulation that appears around 600 milliseconds after a word that apparently violates grammatical rules; the N400 responds negatively, 400 milliseconds after something that defies comprehension. “I said you would charcoal me” sets both responses going; “I said you would accompany me,” neither. The experience of Shakespeare’s shift in word roles, though, is a regular tickling of the P600 with no corresponding N400: it sets up a tremor between “huh?” and “ah!” as the brain integrates conflicting views of the sentence. Nothing is laid out for us: we make the sense for ourselves, just as we make the missing shape in an optical illusion – and, for the same reason, this new sense glows all the more brightly.

This active, lively mode of perception seems to give us pleasure: good jokes work on the same principle, breaking local rules in the interest of a wider, skewed meaning. Music can also set the P600 response going, according to its own semantic structures of repetition and transformation, tension and resolution. Well-behaved Salieri, say, hardly troubles either wave-form, but Mozart constantly challenges the expectations of an educated ear: “can he do that?”; “he did!” Even in his earliest works, written when he was six, he sets up musical assumptions and then confounds them with sudden melodic twists, making us follow in delighted wonder toward new cadences.

A surprising resolution of semantic tension, an intelligent messing around with expectation – works that manage this trick have the essential quality of being unimaginable in prospect but inevitable in retrospect: the mark of Mozart.

The Cullinan Diamond: Value

2012-01-26T09:28:00.000Z

Frederick Wells, the surface manager, was working his way down the ladder past the first layer of blue ground when he saw it: an irregular lump stuck in the face some ten feet above him, glittering in the last light of a setting sun. “Someone’s having his little joke,” he thought. The lump was so big, nearly 1 1/3 pounds, that it must be glass. He’d certainly leave a stiff word with the foreman… yet it would take only a moment to test… and once tested… good God! The thing was prodigious! Colossal! The largest gem diamond ever unearthed! Found today in 1905, named for the mine’s owner, bequeathed by a loyal Transvaal to King Edward VII, and split by Antwerp’s finest cutters, if now emits its spectral fire from the Royal Scepter, the Crown of State, and a further seven eye-popping fragments that adorn Britain’s monarch, thereby setting her apart from thee and me.

Diamond, related to coal and graphite, is a crystalline arrangement of carbon atoms with the power to scratch most other materials and soften the brains of otherwise canny people. Graphite is actually the more interesting form of carbon: a super-stable lattice that can be peeled apart into sheets just one molecule thick, electrically conductive and immensely strong. De Beers may tell you that “a diamond is forever,” but it isn’t. In only a few billion years, your engagement ring will become graphite, which will be forever. Diamonds are not even particularly rare, assuming you are willing to travel 100 miles under the earth’s surface to get them; they form naturally in such conditions of enormous heat and pressure. It is the particular type of volcano, very deep but not too explosive, necessary for bringing diamonds to the surface, that is hard to find. These ancient “pipes” appear only in a few countries, where they bring momentary joy and lasting unhappiness.

Few great gems have as simple and relatively happy histories as the Cullinan. The Hope, a deep-blue diamond smuggled from the Mughal court, brought misfortune to Nicholas Fouquet, Marie Antoinette, George IV, Lord Francis Hope, and Sultan Abdul the Damned, and now glows malignly from its darkened case at the Smithsonian Institution; the Agra, wrenched from the headdress of a dying Nawab and spirited from India in the stomach of a horse; the Indore Pears, gift of a murderous Maharaja; and the Idols’ Eye, with which the reclusive Mrs. May Bonfils Statton used to breakfast alone each morning. To stare into the fiery heart of a brilliant-cut gem is to lose forever a little of one’s sanity.

Humans have a powerful weakness for good stuff – things that have only potential usefulness, from the red sports car to the stiletto-heel slingback pumps. We visualize a life in which all our things could be so perfect: we ourselves shall become as uncompromisingly attractive and valued as these rare objects of desire. Thus many elderly matrons studded with glittering rocks secretly believe that this visual top-dressing takes the place of personal beauty or even charm. Men (by far the most usual buyers of jewels) value them for their portability, their anonymous discretion, and their cold, remote beauty – few gems are cute; few are even feminine without a good deal of artful setting. The marketing of diamonds has always recognized this male quality of unsettling challenge and exploited it, making the expression of love in carat form a competitive sport. Seventy years ago, De Beers hired the advertising agency N. J. Ayer to “promote the diamond as one material object which can reflect, in a very personal way, a man's ... success in life.” It went on to introduce diamonds as romantic pledges in cultures, like Japan’s, where they had never been known. People are now going into debt, spending thousands, for something their parents never wanted. Warlords in Africa are arming their militias with the proceeds of gemstones: “blood diamonds.” And a fluke of our psyches – an irrational preference for the rare – keeps the whole system going.

People once valued amber for its capacity to take complex shapes and its lustrous golden transluscence; plastic does the job better now, so we no longer care. People told that a caviar is “rare” or a wine “expensive” will choose it strongly over the same sample labeled “common” or “cheap.” This effect is what gives diamonds their dangerous allure – and it takes in even the knowledgeable. About the time the Cullinan came to light, the diamond billionaire Barney Barnato was dining with some business associates. The champagne flowed, the courses followed each other in luxurious profusion, the bill mounted inexorably – but all eyes were on Barnato’s tiepin, a gobstopper of a gem that would seem, well, vulgar on anyone else. Finally, one guest ventured to ask about it. “Tell you what,” answered Barnato, “I’ll give it to the man who pays for tonight." They clamored, pleaded, and fought to be allowed to take out their checkbooks. When one finally prevailed and got the pin, he repeated, “now tell me all about it.” “This? I bought it in the Portobello Road on my way here. For a shilling. It’s glass.”

Robert Burns: Cordiality

2012-01-25T08:56:00.000Z

From the heights of Tarbolton, you can look about you – if you’re not blown over: far from Vergil’s sun-blessed Palatine, this is the cold, wind-whipped hill country of Ayrshire, with a stiff acre to plow before addressing a hot bowl of colcannon in the low, smoky bothy. It’s a landscape where God has a habit of taking the stuffing out of you, alternating His sleety blasts with sudden, luminous moments of beauty – and where Man stands out, a striding dot on the horizon, when not huddled in sociable groups out of sight and out of the wind.

Robert Burns was born in a blizzard on this day in 1759. Thereafter, he was always seeking warmth – praise and companionship, mercy and love. Whether defying gloom with a ranting crew at the fireside or practicing the arts of tenderness with a willing lass in the snug box-bed, his was an open, questing heart: even his weakest verses show the frank sincerity that endears him to readers from Nova Scotia to Novosibirsk.

Though renowned as a “people’s poet,” Burns had an education few modern graduates can match. His father, William Burness, a tenant farmer always on the edge of destitution, nevertheless took time each evening to teach his his sons reading and writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and theology (from a textbook he wrote himself). A freelance schoolmaster in the village added Latin, French, and higher mathematics to these accomplishments. Such thorough schooling was not uncommon among Scotland’s common people: Calvinism makes each man responsible for his own mind – and, in a poor, over-populated country, that mind is usually a man’s only capital. The young Burns added to this stock-in-trade an eye for telling detail and a tongue that capered to music of its own making. He worked to the point of breakdown, the one laborer on a 130 acres of stubbornly unproductive land, yet his spirit remained undulled. Each mouse and daisy, snowflake and lovely face received its admiring tribute. Each evening meeting, from the Freemasons to the Bachelor’s Club, awaited with pleasure its galloping ballad or stately ode.

Burns still catches the ear because he was not what his metropolitan contemporaries thought he was: the “heaven-taught plowman” who piped his lays in rustic innocence. He was as well read as any and could do the big bow-wow style, apostrophizing Nature and Liberty, when it suited him. Even in his most Scottish poems, he mixed the gliding Latinate phrase with the skips and stamps of vigorous dialect: “I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee/ Wi' murdering pattle” leads smoothly back to “I'm truly sorry man's dominion/ Has broken Nature's social union.” This willingness to adjust his voice to his meaning, to be “Rabbie” to one and “Sylvander” to another, proves that Burns’ humanity was no mere show: he believed in the universality of feeling. His celebrations of fraternal equality, his championing of women, his broadsides against slavery and the hypocrisy of rank – these were not mere fashionable effusions of Enlightenment political correctness. He felt most things intensely, but none so much as the leap that a warm heart gives at the levelling grasp of an honest hand.

He remained all his life, though, in the cold grip of necessity. The need for money drove him to work as an exciseman, pursuing his neighbors for their smuggling and moonshining ways; his thwarted hope to reach warmth at last, emigrating to Jamaica, was – by cruel irony – to take up a post as bookkeeper to slave-owners. The literary figures who fêted him in Edinburgh were generous in their praise but not their guineas. The “blue devils” of depression pursued him; his health, undermined by toil and its treacherous comforter, drink, gave way; he died at 37.

Tonight, though, as you pipe in the haggis and enjoy the unaccustomed draftiness of the kilt, you should put aside sad memories and recall instead the man who sang so well, with such skillful artlessness, of love and beauty, bravery and self-respect, liberty and sociability. All these, like whisky an’ freedom, gang thegither - and if that doesn’t make you feel warm, nothing can.

Shoichi Yokoi: Survival

2012-01-24T10:52:00.002Z

“It is with great embarrassment that I return alive.” Shoichi Yokoi, a frail, bird-like man, stepped once more onto the soil of Japan, returning to the Emperor he had served for more than thirty years, twenty-seven of them alone in the jungle on the island of Guam. He carried his rifle, rusted beyond use, because he wished to return it to Their Majesties with a characteristic apology: '”I deeply regret that I could not serve you well. The world has certainly changed, but my determination to serve you will never change.”

Yokoi, once a village tailor’s apprentice, was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1941. He had served in Manchuria before arriving in Guam, the only United States territory to be occupied by a foreign power since the War of 1812. Japanese behavior here was not good. A combination of brutal military rule and forcible attempts to Nipponify the island’s culture (“Guam” became “Omiya-jima;” local people were taught the intricacies of bowing) showed them at their most sanctimonious and violent. So, after the Americans recaptured the island in 1944 – indeed, even after he was certain that the war was over – Yokoi remained a fugitive: condemned both by his belief that the natives would kill him and the army’s creed that anything was preferable to the dishonor of surrender. It was pure accident that, on this day in 1972, he was spotted and captured near his underground shelter.

How do you live alone in the wilderness for thirty years? By abandoning all modern sense of time, in which things are begun and completed. The task of survival was perpetual, getting food “a continuous hardship.” Yokoi trapped shrimp, gathered breadfruit, stewed coconuts, captured and devoured crabs, snails, eels, birds and rats. Rat liver was good, but the idea of liking one food or another was immaterial – he ate everything. He wove clothes from bark fiber and sewed them with wire needles into which, over months, he had drilled eyes. He boiled all his water, washed daily, took such good care of his teeth that he had no cavities: “I continued to live for the sake of the Emperor and the Japanese spirit.”

The “Japanese spirit,” like the emperor, was an ever-present but invisible abstraction during Yokoi’s youth. It incorporated the self-denial and service-unto-death ethic of bushido, the Warrior’s Way. It celebrated the mute determination of ganbaru, a tenacious persistence through adversity, to which phrases like “buckling down” or “seeing it through” are but faint echoes. When he returned to Japan, a time-traveler from a less questioning past, Yokoi became a source of mingled pride and shame to his countrymen: a reminder of values so strong that they could maintain life through three hungry decades, yet so weak that they could not survive prosperity. Yokoi married, settled, and became a well-known advocate for simple living. Japan listened to him with respect, but did not follow his advice – for, just as there is more to life than survival, there is more to society than discipline. We are not yet, nor may ever be, alone in the jungle.

The Greenbrier Ghost: Testimony

2012-01-23T11:39:00.000Z

Greenbrier County, West Virginia used to be a hunting ground of the Shawnee Indians, but they were unwilling to stay there long. They said It covered the graves of an ancient and vengeful people who only permitted transitory visits. If anyone dared settle, the dead would rise from the earth and the living start to kill each other. It’s a country of deep hollows, steep hills, labyrinthine caves, and impassable woods. Even now, the county town of Lewisburg feels cut off from the busy world outside. Family and place names echo each other, both showing the quirks of spelling that come when people arrive before literacy.

Elva Zona Heaster lived near Livesay’s Mill – her photographs show a fierce, direct beauty that owes everything to bone structure and nothing to expression. She had reason to appear guarded: in 1895, when she was 22, she had an illegitimate child. The people she lived among were clannish, superstitious, and self-protective; it would be easy to become the shunned one.

The next year seemed to offer salvation: into town blew Erastus Stribbling “Trout” Shue, a tall, strong, big-talking man in his early thirties who was the opposite of clannish. He’d been raised on Droop Mountain in neighboring Pocahontas County: far enough away for no one to know a thing about him. He took work at the blacksmith’s – a lucrative trade in a land of bad roads – and settled in. Shue had a look about him, one that could rouse passion in a girl with few options, and suspicion in her mother, who had seen more of life. Zona and Shue clove together like magnets and were soon married.

Three months later, on this day in 1897, Shue sent a boy, Anderson Jones, home from work with a message; Jones found Zona lying at the foot of the stairs, her feet together, one hand on her stomach, dead. Dr. Knapp took at least an hour to arrive, by which time he found that Shue, in a touching display of grief, had carried the body upstairs to bed, dressed it in a favorite high-necked dress and veil and now sat beside it, cradling Zona’s head, sobbing and praying that she return to life. The doctor was supposed to examine the body, but the muscular mourner reacted violently if he came near her. The official cause of death was put down as an “everlasting faint.”

Shue remained frantic with grief throughout the wake and funeral, stuffing a pillow and a folded sheet into the open coffin on either side of Zona’s head, so that “she could rest easier.” He kept a scarf, “her favorite,” wrapped around her neck. It was an affecting sight. Then Zona was in the cold ground and her story, it seemed, was over. True, word began filtering in from Droop Mountain about Trout Shue’s earlier life: how a first wife, Allie Estelline Cutlip, had divorced him for violence while he was serving a jail term for horse thieving; how a second, Lucy Ann Tritt, had died mysteriously. But this was mere talk; the living are safe so long as the dead stay buried.

It was then that Zona’s mother, Mary Jane, started receiving her visitations. She had been praying for justice since the funeral; and now, on four successive dark nights, her daughter came to visit her – cold to the touch, but flesh and blood, wearing the dress she’d been buried in. Zona said that Shue was a violent man who had throttled her because she’d cooked no meat for supper; her neck was broken. She proved this by turning her head all the way round to the back as she left the cabin. Mary Jane took this story to the County Prosecutor and talked with him all one afternoon. A courteous and conscientious man, he was willing at least to check the cause of death – and, after hearing Dr. Knapp’s account, to order an autopsy. In the chilly February air the grave was opened and in a few hours the examiners found matters to be just as the night visitor had said: Zona had died because a pair of powerful hands crushed her neck.

It is the “trial where a ghost testified” – although that’s not quite the case. The prosecution kept to the circumstantial evidence; it was the defense that tried to discredit the case by asking Mary Jane about her “visions.” Her testimony, recorded in the local paper, is a textbook example of straight rebuttal: these were not dreams; she was not superstitious; she believed in the Scriptures. Her unshakeable firmness and simplicity made her incredible testimony more credible. The jury took just an hour to convict Shue and only a quick-thinking sheriff prevented his lynching.

Trout Shue died in the penitentiary three year later. Mary Jane Heaster lived until 1916, maintaining stoutly the fact of her daughter’s return from the grave. The “Greenbrier Ghost” has entered into local folklore. It is only recently that a writer, Katie Letcher Lyle, has uncovered an extra feature to the case: on the same day that Zona’s death was reported, the Greenbrier Independent also carried a story about a murder in Australia, in which an eyewitness, threatened with killing if he told what he knew, invented a story about the ghost of the victim pointing to his secret grave – so successfully that other people claimed to have seen this, too. Mary Jane may have believed that a similar tale could offer her a chance at justice… in a country where the dead take their own revenge.

Isandlwana: Victory

2012-01-22T21:36:00.000Z

Even now, to the tourists who have driven over from the “luxurious Lodge” a few miles away, the place seems haunted and uncanny: a lonely mesa separated from the surrounding hills, overlooking the plain like a guardian sphinx. Isandlwana (the name apparently refers to “a portion of bovine intestinal anatomy”) has unsettling topography. Other places can feel like a refuge or an outlook – this feels like a spot you've been backed into.

Not that the British force encamped here on this day in 1879 was afraid – they’d had plenty of experience of war in unknown country. The officers of the 24th Warwickshires improvised a party to commemorate the regiment’s worst disaster, the Battle of Chillianwala, where they lost 500 men and their colors. The toast was, “may we not get into such a mess again this time!”

“This time” seemed a routine war of colonial conquest, one of the many knight’s moves by which the Empire neatened its borders. The governor in Capetown planned to do to South Africa what he had just done to Canada: assemble a bunch of provinces into a single administrative unit. His two obstacles were the Boers and the Zulu. Tackling the apparently easier task first, he planned to subjugate the Zulu kingdom according to the usual routine: object to a border incursion, post a set of unacceptable demands, send an ultimatum, dispatch a column of troops. The Zulu king, Cetshwayo kaMpande, knew what was going on, but had no answer to the political attack; once it came to fighting, though, he was on familiar ground. The Zulu, too, were new arrivals, colonist invaders from the north. Their whole society ran on military lines: boys were born into regiments; a young man could not marry until he had killed an enemy in battle. They made Prussians seem amateurish.

The two commanders had opposite problems: Lord Chelmsford had to drag in his supplies painfully by wagon over broken country; Cetshwayo’s army could jog, in perfect order, twenty miles a day – but couldn’t manage a long campaign, as there were cattle to tend at home. The British had the flat-footed but crushing power; the Zulu would have to slip and jab. When Chelmsford left a camp full of materiel at Isandhlwana, he thought that he still had the main Zulu army in front of him; it wasn’t necessary to entrench. All seemed routine until, on the morning of this day, a British patrol crested a nearby hill to find 20,000 Zulu warriors crouched in perfect silence, waiting to attack.

The fatal decisions were made at the very beginning: without protection, the British attempted to defend too large a perimeter, leaving gaps through which the attackers could rush during lulls in the firing. If you have seen the movie Zulu, forget it: this was not a human wave of self-sacrificing fanatics, but a disciplined force that used every piece of cover to advantage, forcing the British to keep up a constant, heavy fire, in which ammunition supply and jamming guns soon became critical problems. When the cannon roared, the attackers derisively shouted, “wind!”; when the rifles rattled, they called out, “catch the hailstones!” When a boy’s battalion seemed pinned down, an older prince strode upright among them in his leopard skin, shouting that these were not their orders. They pushed on; he fell dead, his job done.

In an hour or so the battle ended, a solar eclipse darkening the field. Thirteen hundred English soldiers lay dead; there were no prisoners. The 24th was decimated, its colors lost once more (although they were found later in a nearby river). It was the heaviest British defeat by a native army.

And it changed nothing; for, as Cetshwayo realized, such a victory meant his ruin. Chelmsford pressed forward, both to erase his army's shame and to restore his reputation. In six months, the Zulu kingdom was no more.

Strangely, the defeat at Isandlwana seemed to create a new respect between the combatants. The moment that British soldiers found out that the Zulu had a regimental system, each with its own motto and muster-book, it is as if all sense of foreignness disappeared. The white men did not “punish” the “savages” in revenge for the loss; there was no Wounded Knee to go with this Little Big Horn. Instead, they wrote, “it is comforting to know that our unfortunate countrymen met their deaths at the hands of a foe in every respect worthy of their steel.” They even excused the Zulu habit of disemboweling the dead as “customary.”

What, then, was the cause in which all those bones were spread across the plain? What purpose was served by deaths that brought as much sadness to a thousand Zulu kraals as to a thousand English cottages? War, like accident or natural disaster, only makes sense to those outside it. From within, it is a chaotic experience of terrible intensity – and thus shared with your enemy just as much as with your comrades.

Jeff Koons: Kitsch

2012-01-21T08:23:00.000Z

If you were living near York, Pennsylvania in the late nineteen-sixties, you might have answered the door to find a smiling, slightly moony youth on your porch, selling candy or wrapping paper and ribbons. “Oh, your living room is so Scandinavian! That’s neat! I like how your table is shaped like a bean.” The boy seemed all surface – unthreatening, earnest, naïve – and chances are you’d buy something from him; something kitschy but, you know… cheerful. This was the young Jeff Koons, whose birthday is today.

Trying on styles (as his father did in his interior-decoration showroom); isolating and emphasizing the brightly colored ephemera of low culture; selling hard. Nothing has changed since for Koons except his prices, and the fact that he now controls the means of production: a team of seventy technicians in a west Manhattan factory who actually make the paintings and sculpture. “I’m basically the idea person.” In this regard Koons compares himself to Raphael and Rubens.

After art school, Koons came to New York, basically just to be in the milieu. He worked on the admissions desk at the Museum of Modern Art, where he had to hand out flyers inviting people to join. Other would-be artists might have shuddered at the task; Koons put on clown clothes and wore blow-up toys around his neck. Again, little has changed. Whether they feature floating basketballs (on which “I recently worked with Nobel prize winner Richard P. Feynman”), huge chrome-plated balloon sculptures, cute puppies reproduced in living plants, Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles in Meissen porcelain, or the anus of Koons’ then wife, the porn actress Ilona Staller, his shows parody the emptiness of the contemporary art world by presenting an even more vacuous reality. The “discourse” with which the critical, gallery and auction-house clacque keeps the market going is unnecessary. We don’t need to know what “issues” the artist is “engaging with” – it’s neat! I like how the full-size locomotive is hanging upside-down over our heads.

Koons was the inspiration for a generation of showman-artists, chief among whom is the British phenomenon Damien Hirst, whose shark in formaldehyde made $15 million at Sotheby’s. This is part of Koons’ appeal: sellability. Since there’s nothing to discuss, even the most inarticulate oligarch knows what he’s buying; in Hirst’s words, art now has a license “to celebrate crap! To enjoy junk! To make money, for fuck's sake!” I recently sat next to an investment banker who had bought a gallery and, although she had never heard of Cézanne, definitely knew who Koons was; “his prices are very stable.” So I guess the real answer to “what’s his work about?” is, “about five million dollars, for a big piece.”

Koons describes art as being “about self-acceptance;” but then he says that advertising "defines how to interact with others,” and that happiness is “a full box of cereal and a full carton of milk.” When he claims that his work has a social, indeed a “humanitarian” purpose (“showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog”), the message actually boils down to “art can help you have a happy day.”

It might be just possible to sustain higher aspirations. Art is "about self-acceptance" only in the sense that everyone in this kindergarten is "special." It isn’t just neat: art does require some knowledge to be worthwhile, although that knowledge need not be about art – life will do. The experience of creation and disappointment, of complexity and confusion, of courage and fear, transcendence and despair, belief and disillusionment, obsession and inattention; this forms the grounding true artists expect from us. Life – unmediated – makes us open to the best in art, because we are prepared to see and feel on many levels simultaneously. Life mediated, though – through advertising, marketing, background music, computer-generated reality, or gallery chatter – makes us receptive to kitsch, to fashion, and to imposture.

But this is well beyond our subject: happy birthday, Jeff Koons. Or, rather:

Abdul Ghaffar Khan: Honor

2012-01-20T09:04:00.001Z

“I despise the man who does not guide his life by nang!

The very word "nang" drives me mad!”

The words of their national poet, Khusal Khan Khattak, still resonate through the tribal lands of the Pashtun, warrior people who occupy the most troublesome areas of Afghanistan and the frontier provinces of Pakistan. Nang is something beyond honor: it is a “mythical sense of chastity,” whose bearer is equal to kings and whose loss means disgrace down the generations. Matters of nang animate every dispute in these lawless lands – and help to keep them lawless, with the rumble of permanent vendetta only punctuated by the bigger explosions that meet any intruder.

Pashtunwali, the code of the Pashtuns, has been in place for 5,000 years – perhaps; as in most illiterate highland societies, the Age of Heroes ends only in one’s grandfather’s time. Orange-bearded elders will explain that the requirements of revenge, like those of hospitality, asylum, and truce, are ingrained in the nature of the Pashtuns: relentless violence in the face of perceived insult is part of their genetic inheritance.

Only one Pashtun has dared to challenge this view and, for a moment, his challenge almost succeeded. Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born in 1890 to the Mohamdzi clan in the North West Frontier Province of British India. His father was a prominent land-owner, but an unusual one, who had renounced revenge as a way of life. The boy learned his Koran at the madrassa, but then went to the local mission school, where the Reverend E.F.E. Wigram, without challenging his Muslim faith, extended it by example to include a desire to serve all creatures created by God. Ghaffar Khan grew to be 6’3”; he planned to join the Frontier Cavalry, but was shocked and disgusted to see a British officer insulting an Indian who was his elder; he then hoped, with Wigram’s help, to go to London and study engineering, but his mother did not want him to go off to the distant lands from which nobody returns. His path, then, was set: he would restore the honor of his people, freeing them from foreign occupation – but also from the more insidious oppression of ignorance and social injustice. He began by setting up village schools and promoting literacy; it got him three years’ imprisonment.

For pashtunwali was not just a matter for Pashtuns. British control of India depended in part on maintaining an impassable border region to discourage Russian infiltration: the Great Game we know from Kipling’s Kim. The Pashtuns’ violent, clannish, dangerous ways made them ideal gatekeepers; if some idealist were to teach them the arts of peace, their lands would cease to be a bulwark and become an inviting highway. So: no education, no equality, no representation; when not conscripted to fight others, these people should be kept bubbling in their cauldron. Whatever the benefits British rule may have brought elsewhere in India, it was no gift to the Pashtuns; as one administrative report put it, “the brutes must be ruled brutally and by brutes.” Their lands were set aside from law by the Frontier Crimes Regulation Acts that removed parliamentary oversight and imposed collective punishment for any crime.

Ghaffar Khan, in prison, kept his eyes open. He talked with his fellow prisoners and read their holy books: the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Granth Sahib of the Sikhs. He came to a conclusion for which his schooling had already prepared him: that Islam and pashtunwali alike had been perverted in the interests of maintaining backwardness – that violence was an imposition on his people, not their true nature. When he emerged, he aligned himself with the pacifism of Mahatma Gandhi, but adding the Islamic principles of muhabbat (love), amal (service), and yaqeen (divine trust).

Traveling the mountain paths of the frontier province, a tall, kingly presence – the more so for the extreme simplicity of his costume and way of life – he brought a message of nonviolent resistance to oppression, of mutual aid, and of equality for women. “In the Holy Koran, you have an equal share with men. You are today oppressed because we men have ignored the commands of God and the Prophet.” His supporters, soon more than 100,000 strong, embraced and spread the new ideas. The British kept sending him to jail; this only burnished his aura. He became known as the “frontier Gandhi,” and Gandhi’s Congress movement thrice offered him its presidency, but he said “it is my ambition to end my days, not as a general, but as a soldier.” This may have been a mistake, for soldiers are often betrayed by their generals.

Nonviolence succeeded in expelling the British – but they were not the only ones who preferred a backward Pashtun population. When India and Pakistan bloodily separated, Ghaffar Khan’s supporters became outcasts in both: as Muslims in an increasingly Hinducentric India, and as traitors in Pakistan because they had stood for unity and religious tolerance. Ghaffar Khan ended up spending almost as much time in the prisons of independent Pakistan as his did under the British; the Frontier Province remains bandit country, where the Al Quaeda/Taliban perversion of Islam holds sway. Even the Frontier Crimes Regulation Act remains on the books.

Ghaffar Khan died today in 1988. He left few writings, and now that his personal qualities, his “emanation of profound integrity,” are no more, his example may be forgotten – he is certainly a non-person in Pakistan’s official history. There is, though, a lasting resonance in his message: that it takes more courage to renounce violence than to choose it; that opposing madness with sanity is the way, not just to defeat your enemy, but to make him sane; that religion can be the path to mutual respect, not hatred. These may yet be remembered among a people who so value the qualities of true heroism. For, above all, Abdul Ghaffar Khan had nang.

John Wilkes: Licence

2012-01-19T08:52:00.001Z

Liberty does not have a pretty face: observe the hollow, emaciated cheeks, the lantern jaw with its great champing teeth – and the eyes that ever point resolutely in opposed directions. John Wilkes was perhaps the ugliest man ever to hold high office; he himself said that he always needed at least twenty minutes with any new acquaintance, “to talk away my face.”

He was born in London to a prosperous tradesman’s family and, despite having been sent to gentleman’s schools and married off to a landed heiress, he retained through life the Londoner’s attachment to traditional freedoms, suspicion of royal encroachments, and deep contempt for anything from beyond the suburbs – especially Scotsmen.

Elected to Parliament in 1757, he soon found an array of worthy enemies. The new King George III, first of his family to speak English as his native tongue, had resolved to rule as a Patriot King – that is, doing whatever he felt was right, with a diligent, conscientious stubbornness that made tyranny seem a duty. He was assisted in this by his minister, the Marquess of Bute – a Scotsman – whose main qualification for the job was said to be the beauteous symmetry of his legs. Wilkes resisted this oppressive combination using the traditional weapon of the urban politician: a satirical newspaper, the North Briton. One issue, Number 45, so incensed the king that he insisted that his government issue general warrants to search out and seize anyone and anything connected with it. Wilkes’ and the printers’ homes and offices were ransacked. Fifty people were imprisoned for trial. This is not how the press should be treated in the cradle of freedom.

The London crowd came out to support its native son: “Wilkes and Liberty” was the cry on every street and “45” was chalked on every wall (one urchin even managed to write it on the shoes of the Lord Mayor, who was too fat to spot him). The city’s judges, mindful of precedent, jibbed at the idea of general warrants and royal control of the press. Wilkes seemed to be winning the argument.

The government therefore switched to a personal attack. Wilkes was a free-thinker, whose idea of liberty extended well into libertinism. He had, he said, “no small vices.” From his university days, he had a great fondness for drinking and whoring – as did many well-known men of the time. He attended the meetings of the Friars of Medmenham Abbey (or Hellfire Club), where he made “sacrifices to Bacchus and Venus” alongside government ministers like Lord Sandwich (whose devotion to the gambling table was so complete that he dined there on “two pieces of bread with something in between”) and distinguished visitors like Benjamin Franklin. He had also helped a fellow Medmenhamite write the erotic poem, An Essay on Woman, parodying Alexander Pope’s high-minded Essay on Man:

The gasp divine, th'emphatic, thrilling squeeze,

The throbbing panting breasts and trembling knees,

The tickling motion, the enlivening flow,

The rapturous shiver and dissolving, oh!

This Wilkes had injudiciously sent for private printing – and this, too, was seized by government agents. In a splendid piece of hypocrisy in the House of Lords, Sandwich held the “obscene production” in fastidious fingers and read it out in faltering voice, only proceeding when urged to “go on, go on” by their assembled lordships. On this date, Parliament accused Wilkes of seditious libel and expelled him as “unworthy to be a member.” This removed his immunity from prosecution: he fled to France.

When his money was all spent (a regular occurrence with Wilkes), he returned to face his accusers (which proved difficult, because the mob insisted on freeing him from jail, so that he had to sneak back in disguise). Over many trials and re-elections, he forced English law to recognize essential principles of constitutional freedom from which the citizens of modern democracies still benefit: that governments may not search or seize arbitrarily; that the proceedings of legislatures must be published; that parliaments cannot simply exclude duly-elected members they happen not to like. The Bill of Rights attached to the US Constitution is, largely, an explicit summary of the liberties Wilkes fought to establish.

This cross-eyed, skeletal man, so personally beguiling that even his enemies delighted in his company, deserves a marble statue on Parliament Square or in the Capitol – but has to be content with a half-share in the name of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Why do we celebrate him so little? Is it simply because he was a rake? Had he been more discreet, packing his bastards off to the orphanage as Ben Franklin did, he might at least appear on a stamp. But he was cheerfully overt about his sinning, leaving us with the uncomfortable truth that a man can be a pillar of political morality while tossing off scabrous verse and passing his evenings in carousal with light women. The “character issue,” about which so many candidates sound off, is revealed as a tinkling cymbal. As we too often see, many clean-living, well-groomed professional politicians not only lack Wilkes’ charm, they lack his commitment to constitutional principle and will sell out our freedoms for a headline. Smooth opportunists, trained in the arts of advancement, they may have pretty faces – but they do not have liberty in their hearts.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Memory

2012-01-18T09:25:00.000Z

“Ecce Eduardus Ursus scalis nunc tump-tump-tump occipite gradus pulsante post Christophorus Robinum descendens.”

Pooh speaks Latin: Pooh follows the Tao; Pooh’s Perplex extends to structuralist criticism and Jungian archetypes. Not bad for a Bear of No Brain at All. Pooh is everywhere and in everyone: we can play these variations because his theme is universal.

What is it that makes Winnie-the-Pooh, whose “official day” it is today, so universally accepted and beloved? Well, there are the E.H. Shepard illustrations, which give the occasional tweeness of the text its necessary antidote: his Pooh is entirely real, solid, and dependable – as uncles, brothers-in-law, majors, and club vice-presidents are supposed to be but so seldom are (Shephard was ferociously conscientious about character, so, though his Tigger, Piglet, Kanga and Roo are all based closely on the real Christopher Robin’s real stuffed toys, he judged the authentic Pooh too leggy for the role and based his drawings on Growler, the Shepard family bear).

There is also the wonderfully logical humor; “the more he looked inside, the more Piglet wasn’t there.” It has the knack of noticing, from the corner of the eye, the oddities of language – especially that code-language used by the respectable English – and taking them for a ride; a knack inherited from Lewis Carroll and passed on to Monty Python.

There is the awareness of childhood’s many characters and potential characters, its solemnities and ceremonies. It captures the emphasis, gravity, and careless bravado of newly-acquired speech (“they're very good flyers, Tiggers are. Strornry good flyers.”); the intense pleasures of greediness and laziness; the justifiable anxieties of Very Small Animals and the wonderful discovery that things are rarely so bad in reality as they are in prospect. Then there are the incomprehensible obsessions of adults, from making lists to counting vests to insisting on regular spoonfuls of extract of malt or asking you to spell “Tuesday.” We see the future hidden in all the characters – which Christopher Robin, that self-assured creature of the present, does not. Every extended family contains at least an Eeyore and a Tigger: which shall he be?

Most of all, the books resonate to a hidden string: the tension and affection that pass between father and son. A.A. Milne was not a devoted and indulgent parent; he was a professional writer, with all the worries and irritability of a man who must find inspiration today, withstand criticism tomorrow, and stump up cash at the end of the month. Although his first and real love was mathematics, he had trained himself up to be a contributor of humorous pieces, storming the Parnassus that was Punch magazine. It had taken years, but he had acquired the technique of concocting, through severe effort, verse and stories that appeared effortless and delightfully inconsequential. Despite his pacifist convictions, he had volunteered to serve in World War I, saw enough horrors for a lifetime, and came back realizing how sharply those dark recent memories outlined the dream days of childhood, like a sunlit glade seen from a thicket of thorns. A lost golden age called to him as to all the generation whose innocence had been tainted.

He married, now that he had some income – and then here was a son, Christopher Robin. They had hoped for a girl, Rosemary, “but I expect we shall be just as happy with this gentleman.” The boy was brought up in a suitably free-thinking, Arts and Crafts environment, with long hair, loose clothes and sandals. His nanny managed most of his life, but he had moments with his parents – awkward, well-meaning moments. His father was interested in him, but primarily as an observer. He noticed with pleasure how the boy seemed so good with his hands, explored so boldly around their weekend farmhouse in Ashford Forest, managed to solve complicated math problems but failed at simple ones – but, of course, this was a source of material as well as of pride. Young Christopher took to being a public character with aplomb for his first nine years – it was only when he was sent off to boarding school that he realized the horror of being the subject of, “Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! Christopher Robin is saying his prayers” – “the one work that has brought me over the years more toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment than any other.”

A.A. Milne’s autobiography was titled It’s Too Late Now. He would have wanted to be known for his plays – once fêted as better than Shaw’s, but preceding them into obscurity. He had hoped his social convictions would find an audience, but:

All my years of pen-and-inking

Would be almost lost among

These four trifles for the young.

Christopher Robin, now shy and harried, moved to a distant village to run a bookstore. With father and son each estranged from the work that so crystallized their mutual awkwardness, the Disney Corporation swooped on Hundred Acre Wood to carry off its inhabitants and make of them the blandly life-affirming cyborgs you can watch every Saturday morning. But in the old enchanted places, they still remain as they were: bold, tactful, open, hopeful – better, as good characters should be, than their creator or their inspiration.

Don Quixote: Devotion

2012-01-17T09:29:00.001Z

“Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did our knight see them than he announced to his squire, ‘Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.’”

You need no doctorate in seventeenth-century Spanish literature to know how that particular story comes out. On this day in 1605 the first half of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote was published and immediately became a success throughout Europe and Latin America – so popular that pirate editions instantly appeared, along with an unauthorized sequel by the distinctly less brilliant Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. Indignation at this poor aping of his genius prompted Cervantes to produce a second volume of his own, which brings the Knight of the Doleful Countenance to the end of his adventures. The combined work has given European culture a shared body of Quixotic images and Panchesque phrases: “wild-goose chase”; “mind your own business”; “too much of a good thing”; “forgive and forget”; “the pot calls the kettle black”; “tomorrow is a new day”; "honesty is the best policy" – we owe them all to Cervantes.

Don Quixote was the first novel in the Western world: the first narrative that went beyond a simple tale to investigate the play of human nature. Where older stories (such as the romances that the book parodies) put two-dimensional placeholders in fanciful situations, Don Quixote sets fully-formed characters in real, familiar predicaments, with no magic spells to extricate them. Cervantes may have started off to write a farce in familiar style (he was poor and needed a popular success), but the story ran away with him, drawing the author into a quest of his own to explore the rich possibilities of that extraordinary pair, the knight-errant of La Mancha and his squire Sancho.

Neither is the cartoonish, sugary figure that later musicals and movies give us: Don Quixote really is mad, putting himself and those around him in constant danger. The translator J. M. Cohen says that we feel about him as for “a reckless child that has strayed onto an unrailed roof with a sheer drop to the street.” Yet he is both fool and saint: his unchanging mildness, patience, and honorable intentions – though madly exercised – put one in mind of one of Dostoevsky’s divine idiots. Sancho starts off as a talking stomach, but his simple proverbial wisdom grows through the work to be not the counterpoint, but the ground bass to his master’s fantasy. Despite a life of struggle, of cruel jokes and disappointments, the two grow in moral stature, without the one becoming less mad or the other less prosaic. When, at the end, Don Quixote regains his senses, he falls into a fatal melancholy – as if realizing that he was defined by his delusions. Sancho, after all his past attempts to make the Don see things as they are, now tries to tempt him back into chivalric fancies to save his life… but in vain: the old man dies, disillusioned.

Cervantes knew well how life and imagination jog on together, odd companions in victory and disaster. Born to a poor but intellectually lively family, he was a valiant soldier, losing a hand at Lepanto, then captured and enslaved by Algerian pirates. He helped supply the Great Armada and then worked as a tax collector, spending time in jail when his books failed to balance. He was modern, in that he realized, as Shakespeare did, how one’s mind and one’s station in life don’t necessarily align. In reality, most of us are the sort of character who appears only marginally in a novel: the friendly innkeeper, the fussy lawyer, the fellow-passenger with the trope of winking when he makes a joke. Yet, within, we are the heroines and heroes of romance. Our poor wits are the Rocinantes we ride, our hopes are the Dulcineas we serve. Our inner quest is no less real to us for being absurd by the world’s standards.

That is why Don Quixote de la Mancha continues to capture hearts when Roland, Bayard, Tristan, and Amadis the Gaul are forgotten. We know the power illusion holds for us: looking from our window, we may all one day see a gaunt figure – at once fierce and tender, proud and pitiable – gesturing with undaunted lance at the horizon… and recognize ourselves.

The Shuttle Columbia: Significance

2012-01-16T09:35:00.000Z

This afternoon in 2003, after many delays, the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral. At 81.9 seconds into the flight, a piece of insulating foam about the size of a briefcase and weighing roughly 1.5 pounds broke off from a strut attaching the orbiter to its external fuel tank (the piece was called the “left bipod foam ramp,” of no proven function, but better safe, NASA thought, than sorry); it struck the wing of the spacecraft. No one noticed this until the video was reviewed the next day – at which point the question arose, “how significant is this?” This is a question that should always be taken seriously.

Imagine if it were your responsibility. You’d want to know several things: how fast did it hit? Force, after all, varies with acceleration (well remembered). Where exactly did it hit? The surface of the orbiter is covered with many different materials, ranging from tough membranes to brittle moldings that mark with a thumbnail. What risk does it represent? NASA has a hierarchy of unpleasant events, ranging from “in-family” – recognizable, unthreatening – to the informal but self-explanatory “horrible.” How confident are we about our assessment? For all that opinion may seem subjective, probability offers a precise and useful science of confidence in factual statements that most scientists use – when they are not talking to reporters. And, at the end: what information would help us be more sure?

These are clear forensic steps that any responsible organization would go through; and, at the lower levels of NASA, engineers were doing just that. Budget cuts meant that there were no pictures of the impact that clearly defined the damage. Getting enough information to make an informed assessment about potential disaster would therefore mean either going outside the Agency to ask the Department of Defense for classified imagery or requesting that mission controllers get the astronauts to add an extra spacewalk to examine the impact site. Inevitably, the neat, number-driven questions ran into the sand of politics.

NASA was under a great deal of pressure in early 2003; its new Administrator had gained his job on the promise that America’s contribution to the core of the International Space Station would be complete in February; every computer in Houston had been issued with a screen-saver that counted down the seconds to Core Completion. Columbia’s delays had threatened this schedule, and if the foam strike were to be a genuine problem – an “in-flight anomaly” – then subsequent launches would also suffer, compromising the Agency’s whole raison d’être. This meant that the key constraints – that is, the political ones – at higher levels of NASA were entirely different from those in the room where the Debris Assessment Team was meeting. At the top level, the important things to emphasize were that “foam-shedding incidents” had happened many times (although they were never supposed to happen), that requests for images outside the agency risked “spinning the community up about potential problems that have not been fully vetted;" and that the astronauts should be briefed on possible questions from journalists during their orbital press conference: “This item is not even worth mentioning other than wanting to make sure that you are not surprised by it in a question from a reporter.”

NASA was, as institution, an interesting study in percolation during those fourteen days. It was if a piece of filter paper had been inserted between its higher and lower levels. At the bottom, there were people constantly exercised by the basic engineering questions – how hard did it hit? what damage could that do? – and at the top, managers whose field of enquiry was entirely different: what delays could this impose? how can we categorize this issue? Experts in the middle found that their sentences were being split in two: “this impact will not pose a problem / if it does not have certain physical aspects, about which we do not have enough information.” Only the first half made it through the filter paper.

In the end, what was it: what information produced the final decision to cease investigating the damage and approve landing, condemning seven men and women to their deaths? A PowerPoint slide. Edward Tufte, whose work does for data presentation what Strunk and White did for descriptive prose, analyzes the critical information with the care due to an autopsy: five uses of the word “significant,” each meaning something different – but none reflecting scientific, statistical significance. Misleading top-line titles, implying that the calibration of the engineering model somehow determines the reality of the incident. All the critical information hidden in the lowest-ranking bullet points. The filter-paper had already done its job: no one, looking at this slide from a darkened room, could read through it to the real anxieties keeping NASA’s engineers awake at night.

And, to add a further fillip to disaster: the presentation that determined the final decision was described in emails as as “the Boeing PowerPoint Pitch.” The… Pitch? Yes, a sharp intake of breath would not be amiss here. So advertorial has American corporate culture become that we have pitches to determine whether people are likely to die. Think back yourself: how many times, when you have you been sitting in a room with one person on his or her feet, have you actually been working honestly through a complex problem – rather than witnessing the presentation of an alternate, preferable reality? It is no surprise that the United States has begun to lag behind in critical fields: our national industry has now become the management of expectations.

Nelson and Lady Hamilton: Attraction

2012-01-15T09:50:00.001Z

Listen well to the story, at once sweet and tart, 

Of Emma (once Amy), née Lyon (then Hart). 

Who found out, too late, that the word of a man

 Is a thing of no value: maids, heed me who can!

Born… somewhere, to someone, she acquired her fame

For the beauty that made up for lack of a name. 

Rake and roué remarked, as around her they’d swarm, 

“What freshness!” “What grace!” “And – by God! – what a form!”

She appeared as the Goddess of Health, so it's said, 

Boosting Graham’s Electric Fertility Bed; 

And made all men dream, as they gazed on the show,

Of matters celestial and – things here below.

Th’ Hon. Charles, Sir Harry competed, these two 

To be her “protector” – well, what could she do? 

What if one was a ninny, the other a boor? 

A heart is a luxury when you are poor.

From model to actress she passed for a time, 

Being known for her “attitudes” – something like mime,

Where she posed en deshabille to Bacchic applause, 

A roseate vision in transparent gauze.

But models and mistresses set the wrong tone 

When a man has to seek a rich bride of his own. 

Hon. Charles, shedding tears like to Jupiter Pluvius, 

Packed her off to his uncle, who lived near Vesuvius.

William Hamilton (uncle), esteemed connoisseur, 

Had seen plenty of treasures – but none to match her. 

No marble was whiter, carnelian redder – 

Rounding out his collection, he instantly wed her.

In Naples they kept up a brilliant salon, 

And might still have done, had not cruel Fate brought on 

The one-handed clasp and the near-toothless smile, 

Of Horatio Nelson, Pride of the Nile.

Their eyes met (all three); Emma swooned – Nelson sighed, 

As the troubles that faced them they jointly descried: 

Bittersweet, to discover the love of your life 

When you still have a husband and he has a wife.

Yet Hamilton proved a true friend to the pair:

 He welcomed Lord Nelson; he blessed their affair, 

And a cozy ménage all observed the three made – 

The hero, the nymph, and the fellow who paid.

Sadly, Nelson – his troth never sealed with a ring –

Left the arms of his love to bear arms for his King. 

Emma’s looks lost their luster, its trimness her figure: 

She waited and wept, and grew bigger and bigger.

But, then! Britain’s hero fell struck on the deck! 

Emma’s name and finances alike joined the wreck! 

Finding no-one to help her she fled, dogged by debt, 

To languish at Calais, in rum and regret.

Mortality comes both to belle and to beau

 And so poor lovely Emma must pass from this show 

With her pitiful moral: maids, never believe! 

Never trust in the men who love, lavish, and leave.

Though your face be your fortune, it’s gone in a flash.

Best to think of the future – and turn it to cash.

McDonalds: Satisfaction

2012-01-14T10:06:00.000Z

“Son of a bitch, these guys have got something.”

The traveling salesman stepped from his stifling car and looked across the dusty crossroads at a sight almost as remarkable as if a flying saucer had dropped in the middle of workaday San Bernardino: a white and glass cube, capped at each end by golden neon-trimmed arches, with a line of people – families – waiting to pass through. Inside, a team of youths in spotless uniforms handed out bags of hamburgers and fries with baffling speed. There was no wait; there was no dirt; there were no chairs, no knives nor forks. To the salesman, a self-described “connoisseur of kitchens,” it was perfect; no wonder these guys had ordered enough mixers to make 48 milkshakes simultaneously.

“These guys” were the McDonald brothers, who had come out to LA to make it in the movie business and, finding that their laced-up Vermont characters did not exactly fill the big screen, had stayed on to run a burger stand. They lacked charisma, but had deep reserves of that grim Yankee thoroughness and obsession with Doing The Thing Right. Their operation was honed to a perfect edge; there were only nine items on the menu, so that each could be made fresh to order, without wasting a crumb of beef or a tick of time.

The salesman, Ray Kroc, had wider horizons: “When I was a little boy, my father took me to a phrenologist. I was told that I would make my best living either in the food business or as a musician. You know, I've done both.” He was an ambulanceman (with Walt Disney) in World War I, then thumped out a living playing piano in Chicago restaurants – but, realizing that all businesses must diversify, also sold his employers paper cups. He was ebullient and hopeful, but deeply aware of the thin margins between success and failure. Right now, he knew that his mixer business was heading for failure. He was 52 – getting on. The McDonald brothers would bring him his next success.

That was in 1954; and the astounding growth of McDonald’s – to where it now employs 1.5 million people and serves a further 45 million every day, is America’s largest purchaser of beef, pork and potatoes, and the world’s most-recognized brand – is down to a combination of the brothers’ obsessive concentration and Kroc’s wide horizons. Both worked to give us exactly what we want – although whether that’s the right thing to want is another matter.

A Big Mac, fries and shake is a perfectly balanced combination of fat, sugar, salt and meaty flavor (less so, now that the fries are no longer cooked in beef tallow). Humans have always craved these to an unreasonable degree, because they are both essential and rare in our ancestral African environment. To find them all together, fresh and hot, in a clean, well-lighted place, with welcoming colors and unthreatening staff – well, this is our cave-dweller brain’s idea of paradise. No wonder one man, Dave Gorske, has eaten 23,000 of them.

Thus far the McDonald brothers; Ray Kroc’s genius was to spot and ride social trends. Where the traditional burger place was urban, to catch lunchtime workers, he went to the suburbs to attract families. He developed the drive-through, both so that housewives would not have to change out of housecoat and curlers to pick up food and so commuters could assuage in their cars their guilt at not having had a hot breakfast, the way their mothers told them to. He made sure there were never cigarette machines or jukeboxes (or even pay phones) in his restaurants, so that no gangs would hang out there, making family patrons nervous. He realized that children control a family’s choice about food – so he created Ronald McDonald and set up birthday party promotions. He insisted that his franchisees contribute both money and resources to their local communities. Many countries can thank Ray Kroc for their first examples of a clean public toilet. Most of all, he enforced uniformity: when a McDonald’s opens, whether in Baltimore, Berlin, Baghdad, or Beijing, you know exactly what it will be like (though, remember: in France, they don’t say “Big Mac;” they say “Royale”).

Kroc’s showman instinct served him well; he realized early that employees, like performers, don’t work only for the pay. They crave a response, some ostensible meaning in what they do. McDonald’s employs, at some time in their lives, at least an eighth of the US workforce, almost always at or near the minimum wage; yet a surprising number of people come out of the experience saying that they grew in it – that the mantra of “quality, service, cleanliness” gave them their first experience of doing something responsibly and getting a result. Kroc himself certainly took this aspect very seriously: well into his late seventies, he would appear unannounced in franchises to look things over and lend a hand. Every territory has its story: Kroc on his knees, chiseling chewing gum off the tarmac in the parking lot; Kroc dishing up fries with a quip and a smile; Kroc shouting so you could hear him in the next county when he saw an un-mopped floor. It was all show business to him – and in show business, you gotta believe. He died on this day in 1984, a fulfilled and happy man.

Not all work offers such satisfactions; and, sadly, not all home-cooked food is better than a Big Mac. McDonald’s global success wasn’t imposed on humanity; it came out of our own desires – desires it is up to us to regulate. If we want our local food traditions to survive; if we want to recapture the meaning of “hearth and home,” to cut down on litter, obesity, and dead-end employment; we need to look with Ray Kroc's eye at our own habits, recognising that his proposal, “you deserve a break today,” should describe something temporary and exceptional – not a way of life.

Dr. Harold Shipman: Oneupmanship

2012-01-13T09:00:00.001Z

Hyde is one of a string of defunct textile towns spread along the Tame valley in north-west England. It’s a landscape made famous by the paintings of L.S. Lowry: gray-white skies, brick row-houses, scuttling anonymous figures and, overlooking all, the bleak and treeless hills. Hyde differs from its neighbors only in its best-known residents: the boxer Ricky Hatton; the Moors Murderers; and Dr. Harold Shipman, probably the most prolific serial killer in history.

Shipman came from a working-class Methodist background, but had advanced through a combination of scholastic achievement and strong self-belief. His mother, to whom he was very close, died of cancer when he was 17; he saw then, as relief of her pain became more and more critical, the power of medicine and its drugs to control lives. He went on to gain his doctor’s qualification at Leeds University – but there were stumbles in his career. When he made his landlord’s 17-year-old daughter pregnant, he married her, forming a bond that seemed as much against the world as for each other. Then, in his first job as a general practitioner, he was discovered to be forging prescriptions for the opiate pethidine to feed his own habit. Here, too, private solidarity saved him: taking note of his immediate confession, the BMA, the doctor’s union, let him off with a sharp letter, a small fine, and a spell in rehab. Nothing appeared on his record; he arrived in Hyde in 1977 and began work.

He was not an endearing man. He was solitary, closed-off, inscrutable behind his thick glasses and beard. He had his little jokes, more amusing to him than to their subjects. Colleagues said he could be brusque and patronizing with his patients. But this, to a degree, is a medical norm. Yes, there are many who go into doctoring for the best of motives and maintain their humility – but arrogance is surely medicine’s professional illness. Your doctor knows more than you: your “rash” is his “papulo-squamous dermatitis;” he is more committed than you: he was working 36-hour shifts as an intern while you partied your way through your entry-level career; his work matters more: nothing stacks up to life and death as measures of success. Besides, he’s wearing clothes, while you sit there in a paper nightgown with no back. And he probably makes more money than you do, too. No wonder the bedside manner tends at best to affable condescension. Elderly people in Hyde expected the worst: the mysterious, irritable demi-gods who descended from the professional class to minister to them in the days before the National Health Service. Shipman fit their skewed image of a “proper” doctor; when he opened a solo practice in 1993, it soon grew to 3,000 patients.

The thing is, so many of them were dying – almost all old women who lived alone. Their Christian names define a generation: Ivy, Norah, Winifred, Pamela, Irene. They were dying oddly, as well: suddenly, fully clothed, in their chairs or lying on their beds – or, even more unusually, in the doctor’s office. Dr. Shipman was often on hand to call, then cancel, the ambulance – he seemed unusually willing to make house calls – but his prickly manner made it awkward for family members to ask questions. “The doctor said it’s normal…” “well, you don’t like to make a fuss, do you?” In early 1998, the local funeral directors asked another doctor’s practice to call for an investigation – but the police found only that the cause of death seemed consistent with the medical history… not surprising, since Shipman was forging the medical histories of his victims after their deaths.

What was it all for? When we think of a doctor’s “power of life and death,” we tend to concentrate on “life,” or “death” as the important terms; for some, though, the issue is merely power. Shipman’s compulsive one-upmanship, he inability to resist a dig or a put-down, suggested both a strongly-suppressed anxiety about his own capabilities and a crude need to impose himself on others. Drugs, specifically diamorphine, gave him the tool to switch off lives at his will – to gain, through murder, a little victory and score another little point. The best estimate is that he did this around 250 times in his career.

He was finally caught in late 1998 through a typical underestimate of the intelligence of others. When Kathleen Grundy suddenly died at the age of 82, she left a will bequeathing all her estate to Dr. Shipman – odd, but not impossible. What was impossible, though, was the sloppy typing of the document. Mrs. Grundy had trained as a professional secretary and was known for her meticulousness in all things. Shipman assumed that an old woman would be shambolic, just as he assumed that police would be plodding and inefficient. Mrs. Grundy was exhumed and found to have been killed by diamorphine; the false medical history Shipman concocted for her, claiming suspicions of drug abuse, was quickly revealed to have been entered on his computer after her death.

Shipman’s police interviews and subsequent trial were equally bizarre, in that he had no defense; he only had mannerisms. He would sigh or chuckle to himself; he delighted in catching a policeman in a mistaken date or mispronunciation. He scored little points, sometimes even off his own lawyer. He tried to establish a rapport with the jury, presenting himself by turns as avuncular, aggrieved, or long-suffering. But it was all petty – and all to no purpose. Other than insisting on his innocence, he could offer no other explanation than, “people do die suddenly of old age. They just wear out.”

On this day in 2004, Shipman hanged himself in prison. This would at least seem like justice if he did it out of guilt or shame – but the most likely reason is that he wanted to assure his wife a widow’s Heath Service pension, which she would not get if he lived past 60. It was a petty close to a petty life. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” was well-observed but perhaps not encompassing enough. Everything, even the most extreme behavior, can be banal. The dullest people can also be torturers or cannibals, while simultaneously worrying about their car payments or golf handicaps. Only in literature does passing the boundary of the normal open up a new life.

The Rainmaker Hatfield: Assurance

2012-01-12T10:07:00.000Z

When Mark Twain said, “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” he was exercising the author’s right to be a little blind – because his era was filled with people who did, or attempted to do, things about the weather. The 1890s, with its familiar combination of technical achievement and anxiety, saw the first great drought in America’s breadbasket since plow broke the virgin prairie. Under day after day of scalding blue skies, the corn withered and the farmers stared glumly at the new reapers and binders, silos and steam threshers they had incurred such debt to buy. But if technology contributed to their trouble, perhaps it could also get them out. Rainmakers soon appeared in the dusty towns, “professors of pluviculture,” each with his unique method for tempting down the sky’s bounty. Some followed ancient advice and generated terrible smells; some believed in the power of concussion and floated up balloons loaded with dynamite. From Kansas to the Pacific coast, the reluctant clouds were tempted with stinks, smokes, and booms.

Most of this effort failed and the promoters went back to selling Seminole Hair Restorer or Peruvian railroad bonds – but weather, as a quasi-random system, must inevitably throw up some rare sequences of successful prediction, just as a roulette wheel, given enough spins, must show prolonged sequences of red or black. One man, Charles Mallory Hatfield, seemed to have the knack of getting rain when all others couldn’t. Self-confident but sober, impressively technical, he billed himself as a “Moisture Accelerator.” He never claimed to make it rain – he could only promise to condense the humidity when conditions were right. When not setting his “rain stew” evaporating at the tops of high towers, he was a sewing-machine repairman, as geekily impressive a profession then as IT consultant would be now.

In 1915, Hatfield approached his home town, San Diego, with a proposition: to fill its huge Morena reservoir, all 15 billion gallons of it, for $10,000 – no fee for failure. The reservoir had never been more than half-full; the city fathers hesitated, but one of Hatfield’s supporters chided them: “There are all sorts of wonders you believe in, like wireless and automobiles. But when a man comes in with a simple, sensible idea, you treat him as though he were a lunatic!” Well, they did bill their town as “the City of Miracles;” and they were negotiating for ever-larger water allocations from the state – if they hired a rainmaker it would make their protestations of water poverty more credible. They looked around the table and, like the burghers of Hamelin, thought, “what do we have to lose?” Hatfield was hired on a handshake and went off into the hills to build his tower.

It was, in fact, already raining when he and his brother started up their evaporation pans. By January 17th, 1916, the San Diego River, normally a dry channel, had overflowed its banks. Through the downpour, Swenson the reservoir watchman called to Hatfield on his tower, “it’s sure raining now!” The rainmaker replied, “You haven’t seen anything yet.” On the 26th a huge storm began: bridges, roads, and railroad tracks were washed away, houses floated out to sea, dams burst; a whole village was destroyed and some fifty people killed. Up at the reservoir, Hatfield waited until the waters were gushing over the spillway, then packed up his tower. Only Swenson’s quick action in opening the outlet valves prevented another dam failure and thousands of deaths.

With the roads gone, Hatfield walked the sixty miles back into town, traveling under a false name because there were rumors that a lynching party was after him. He found the city council not much more welcoming. The burghers refused to pay him, claiming there was no contract; or that he could not prove the rain was due to his efforts; or that, if it were his responsibility, then all the damage was, too. The rainmaker went off convinced both of the effectiveness of his methods and of the perfidy of elected officials. When he died, on this date in 1958, he took his secret with him: his nephew said, “He saw very few people of integrity, men who stood by their words; it was too devastating a force to unleash to a group of bureaucrats who might misuse it."

San Diego has grown to the point where it would consume the entire contents of Morena Reservoir in less than a month. It draws 85% of its water from the Colorado River, that mighty torrent so weakened by human diversion that it no longer reaches the ocean. Does the desert town worry about its dependence on such distant and diminishing supplies? Listen to this comment on water conservation from the mayor’s office: “When you’re dealing with a region that is developing very quickly, you need to be able to build. If we have to go there, we will. It’s a policy decision you have to make, but to all in this community, it’s incredibly important that we grow [as] a region and we continue adding to our community.”

If you live within 50° of the equator and are not worried about water, you soon will be. And as long as there are people like the mayor of San Diego, you can expect a lot of Hatfields. It is not to the skies that we need to look for our salvation.

Fred Archer: Endurance

2012-01-11T09:54:00.001Z

The running horse wakens ancient memory. Caught by the sound of hoofbeats, the most prosaic soul resonates to old themes of saga and romance. Horses are genuine – athletes who know neither transfer values, endorsement contracts, strikes, nor silly hairstyles. The equine victor stands shivering in the winner’s circle, coat dark with sweat, veins bulging, gazing above our heads at something on the horizon; and we see the isolation of the hero, the being who has done what is beyond us – for us.

Horse-racing is a natural haven for the louche, but not everyone involved in the game is a Nicely-Nicely Johnson. Some show a greater kinship with the powerful but sensitive animal on which the whole industry depends. Look there, at that delicate-looking young man, wearing a warming jacket over his silks, his black tie with a huge pearl glowing in it like a pocket moon. He stands a full head above the bustling and clicking lads who wrangle the nodding horses out of their boxes and across the frosty yard. For Fred Archer is 5’ 10” tall – that is his tragedy.

Archer was born today in 1857 into a jockey’s family; like the circus or the stage, racing talent follows the blood. He was a bonny baby – which, though it pleases most parents, was a worry to Archer’s: far better a runt, or a muscular dwarf of simian proportions. For ever since Admiral Rouse established his weight tables for universal handicapping, jockeys have had to worry about the scales. Those who could make the then-minimum weight of 77 lbs. (including saddle) could ride any horse; those who weighed more were restricted to older horses with higher handicaps. Light jockeys ate rumpsteak; heavy ones starved.

Apprenticed at 11, Archer grew and grew; but so did his prodigious talent. He had an immediate affinity with each mount: “when he drops into the saddle, in a moment he and the horse are one.” He remembered the quirks of temperament of every animal he had ridden and of all the jockeys against whom he competed. He had intuition, confidence, coolness, nerve – but also the severe commitment to building knowledge and improving technique that earns the name “professional.” He was champion jockey at 17 and remained so every year until his death at 29. Over his whole career, he rode 2,748 winners from 8,084 rides, a staggering 29% strike rate. He won more than 200 times in each of eight years and 246 races in 1885 – many more than modern British champions can manage, despite flying from race to race in their own helicopters. He won the Derby five times, most famously in 1880 with one arm in a splint and no whip – having also lost 14 pounds in four days to make the weight.

His was a celebrity beyond most current sporting figures, approaching that of royalty. When he rode at Thirsk, the town crier announced: “Gentlemen! Come and see the wonder of the world!” People probably loved him most because he put money in their pockets – an Archer-ridden favorite was close to a sure thing – but also because he had the aura of suffering that commands respect. To dine on half an orange, a sardine, and a sip of champagne! To build a Turkish bath into one’s house to sweat away the pounds! To drink sherry-glasses of “Archer’s Mixture,” a purgative so powerful that one who tried it said, “from my own experience I should say it was made of dynamite!” He had to lose a quarter of his body weight every spring: this was not to profit from public adulation; this was to serve.

Archer made money, both from his fees and from betting (though he was so honest that he sometimes won riding against his own pick); he built a house and settled with his beloved wife Helen Rose, the niece of the trainer who employed him. But fate held more blows for him. Their first child died; Helen Rose died in giving birth to the second. Constant wasting exhausted him; when his weakness prevented his winning a close-run race, the owner thought he lost deliberately and cut him dead, saying later, “I am haunted by the look of his face when I refused to speak to him.” He contracted typhoid fever soon after; in that most dangerous moment when his condition seemed to improve slightly, he leapt up, seized a loaded revolver that, for unknown reasons, he kept in the room, and shot himself. All London came to a standstill at the news; his ghost is still regularly seen riding a pale gray horse over Newmarket Heath.

Those who suffer to entertain us earn our respect – not only because it makes us seem important, but because it confirms what we sometimes find depressingly hard to believe: that life, our life, is important. Like the horses he urged to victory, Archer was genuine; he lived with a pure urge to excel, despite the most severe handicap of a normal human frame. You will be glad to know that the minimum riding weight for British jockeys is now 118 lbs.

Thomas Paine: Evangelism

2012-01-10T10:23:00.003Z

He was revolution’s phrase-maker. He gave us "the Age of Reason" and "the Rights of Man;" he told us that “these are the times that try men’s souls” and pointed out the short step “between the sublime and the ridiculous.” John Adams said of him: “I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.” And yet Paine has no real followers, no school of thought, few statues and – despite serving three countries – no grave in any of them.

You can begin to guess why when you read the usually-suppressed second half of the quotation from John Adams: “such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief." Paine was not the only phrase-maker around, and the gifts that made him a powerful persuader also made him powerful enemies.

His greatest work in America, Common Sense, was published today in 1776. It was the spark that lit the tinder, that overcame the traditional mistrust between north and south to create and sustain a continent-wide rebellion. Its tone was, as Adams admitted, “manly” (though he also called it “a crapulous mass”); it spoke to the hopes and resentments of the populace, complaining of the “Royal Brute of Great Britain” and promising the opportunity to “begin the world over again,” under “the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth.” Its theme was freedom – and its conclusion was that freedom is impossible where the greater is set arbitrarily under the lesser: the people under a king, a continent under a distant island. The farmers, craftsmen, fishermen, and shopkeepers in his audience preferred such robust, simple reasoning to the lawyerly eloquence of their representatives. Common Sense gave the cause of independence a vivid simplicity that the facts lacked.

It may seem strange that a failed English corset-maker who had been in America for less than two years should be the one to define its quarrel. This is to forget that many far more dangerous ideas had been circulating in England itself for decades, both in the political and religious realm. Americans were cautiously contemplating a rejection of their king’s fiscal authority – the English had, in 1649, cut off their king’s head. English politics had seen every shade of opinion from the royal absolutism of Charles I to the radical communism of the Levellers; religious practice ranged from the ducal splendor of Anglican bishops to the ostentatious drabness of the Quakers. All these opinions battled continually in pamphlets, conventicles, and tavern meetings: the radical style and content of Common Sense were not exceptional for a society in such ferment – you could almost say that they were typical of a failed English corset-maker.

Life under the “noblest purest constitution” proved less easy for Paine than he had hoped; working for the new American government, he found himself caught between factions that he, as a foreigner, could neither recognize nor manage. He went back to England and then in 1789, to revolutionary France, where the French had taken up his book The Rights of Man with the same fervor the Americans has shown for Common Sense. Although he could not speak French, he was elected to the Convention – but his association with its moderate, libertarian wing earned him the suspicion of Robespierre. Paine was imprisoned during the Terror and only escaped beheading by chance.

You would have thought he had learned his lesson – but he published yet a further book, The Age of Reason, that gained him even greater unpopularity. His gist was that common sense is as important in religious as in political thought: that nonsense is no more to be revered when spoken from a pulpit than from a throne. He attacked the Old Testament as blasphemy because it blamed human bloodthirstiness on Divine commands. He rejected worship of Christ as putting a half-man between the believer and God; he mocked prayer as an attempt “to make the Almighty change his mind.” It was crude but powerful stuff, because it made obvious what we so often try to conceal: that to be libertarian is to be agnostic. A free mind respects no borders; those who reject all government except God’s are as deluded as those (like, say, Bolsheviks) who deny all beliefs except the State’s.

In the end, Paine returned to America, dying in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1809. Six mourners followed him to the grave, two of them African-American freedmen (for Paine had just taken up another unpopular cause, the nonsense of slavery). An English radical, William Cobbett, later exhumed him for more pompous interment in Britain – but unfortunately misplaced his bones. An Australian businessman now, possibly, owns his skull.

When Paine died, a contemporary rhyme said of him, “Where he has gone, or how he fares / Nobody knows and nobody cares.” This is unjust: America owes Thomas Paine its lasting gratitude because he got us to fight for something noble – true freedom – that we didn’t really believe in… nor do we yet. Despite all his efforts, common sense remains uncommon.

Peter Cook: Talent

2012-01-09T10:24:00.000Z

Peter Cook, seemingly effortless English humorist, died today in 1995; he was 57. At 17, he had written his two-man sketch, One Leg Too Few, which still sets connoisseurs throughout the world murmuring, “it’s a lovely leg for the rôle” to one another. As he said, he never produced anything better – and this was a fact that troubled everyone except, perhaps, him.

“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first call ‘promising,’” and Cook was promising from birth. Son of a colonial civil servant, he was trained up at Radley and Cambridge to be a diplomat… too late. By the time he graduated, there was no Empire to represent. The remarkable physical presence – towering height, the face of a Houyhnhnm, eyebrows permanently arched into circumflexes – never found their proper stage in the cool chancelleries of distant legations; its possessor was forced to make his mark more directly, by amusing theatre audiences.

It began at school, and his talent never lost that schoolboy quality of winning insolence. He gleefully blew up the fruity-voiced duffers of the Establishment, but his caricatures, for all their zany eccentricity, always had an element of portrait – even of affection. E.L Wisty, the mesmerizingly dull founder of the World Domination League and purveyor of “interesting facts;” Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, the mellow-toned, affable veteran of lifetimes of fruitless failure (such as trying to teach ravens to fly underwater); Dud and Pete (his double-act with Dudley Moore), two mooncalfs whose knowing-foolish speculations make one wish Samuel Beckett had Cook for a co-writer: every character he produced was full, odd, and complete, like a perpexingly-shaped but smooth-worn pebble.

Cook was discovered as an undergraduate and the contents of his mental attic quickly furnished a series of extremely successful shows, culminating in Beyond the Fringe, which first made Americans aware that you could weep with laughter at English humor. He reached the top of this little world before he was 25, appearing on stage and television, running London’s most popular comedy nightclub, The Establishment, and owning its only surviving satirical magazine, Private Eye. He could do as he wished. His wit, looks, reputation, and sheer brass neck opened all doors for him – and that was enough for him. He took to success like a final-year schoolboy: he could smoke and drink, get up when he felt like it, meet girls, and treat those around him with an affable contempt. He had no need to achieve more.

True, it’s hard to call a man who drank so much that he died of gastric bleeding entirely happy. Cook may, as he claimed, have lost all ambition at the age of 24 – but he did want his work to continue to succeed, and he was not pleased when those who had been his stooges and straight men made careers that could have been his. Dudley Moore became, for a while, the cheeky, saccharine darling of Hollywood. David Frost – who had not exactly plagiarized most of Cook’s successful Cambridge routines – took on the role of television’s master of satirical ceremonies and kept himself in front of the cameras for the next half-century (most famously interviewing Richard Nixon: another short, slightly sweaty man who had achieved through hard work and relentless ambition what his more talented contemporaries had not). The chat-show opportunity that Cook treated with too-visible disdain was taken up by a more pliable young man, Michael Parkinson, who only retired from the job in 2009. Throughout the 1970s, Cook made bad decisions, both in his career (co-starring in a deadly US sitcom, The Two of Us) and in life (philandering; spending too much time drunk, stoned, or both). Frustration bled through the cool façade: his final pairing with Dudley Moore, Derek and Clive, remains the filthiest material in the history of recorded comedy – so debasingly extreme and yet so horrifyingly funny that Petronius should have been alive to hear it.

Our ghoulish hopes imagine Cook going from bad to worse, slurring his lines in ever-shabbier venues, but that was not his style – he was not a trouper; he did not see why the show must go on. He lived off the money he had made at the beginning, amusing himself: reading the papers; watching sports. Occasionally, on his own terms, he reappeared – as when, for a remarkable few weeks in 1988, a dour Norwegian named Sven would call in to late-night radio talk shows to descant on fish and his missing wife, Jutta. New characters – like Alan “Dare to Fail” Latchley, Scunny man through-and-through – leapt, full-armed, from his brow. The young comic who recorded his final performances said, “that was the staggering thing: hearing fully formed jokes just coming out… He seemed a very twinkly sort of person. You know, very conspiratorially amused.” That, you’ll admit, is no bad way to be at the age of 57.

You may possibly think that Cook’s was some truncated genius, deprived of its proper place in the Pantheon of movie stardom, or on the Parnassus of daytime television, or as presiding patriarch of a new generation of edgy, challenging satirists. Or you may choose to believe the evidence: that he was a natural wit, witty in the way he chose from youth, witty only when he wanted to be and for as long as he wanted to be – no more. That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury… is entirely a matter for you.

Disaster in Kegworth: Knowledge

2012-01-08T09:43:00.001Z

A modern jetliner can weigh 875,000 pounds at takeoff, 400,000 of which is fuel with energy equivalent to 1.7 kilotons of TNT – one-seventh of a Hiroshima bomb. The aircraft has 6 million parts, around 170 miles of cabling, seats for 524 passengers… all, you reflect morosely as you crunch your pretzel-style snack, at the mercy of two guys up front rehashing last night's Lakers game. Yes, they know their jobs – they have been selected and trained with a care few earthbound rôles demand – but what kind of knowledge is this? And (a surreptitious tug on the seatbelt) what if it fails?

British Midland Flight 092 from London Heathrow to Belfast on January 8th, 1989 was a routine shuttle route, operated by an established, safety-conscious airline using a brand new plane, a Boeing 737-400. Even after a turbine blade ruptured in the left engine during the final phase of the climb, starting an engine fire and sending severe vibrations and a smell of burning through the aircraft, the situation was far from critical: a 737 can fly well enough on one engine to seek out and land safely at an alternative airport. The only essential thing to do was to cut fuel to the ailing engine and snuff out the fire.

The pilot asked the first officer which engine had the problem. “The lef… the right,” was his fateful reply. On that basis, they then throttled back the undamaged engine (noticing, coincidentally, a reduction in the smell of burning) and headed for East Midlands airport using only the damaged one. When this finally gave out three miles from the runway, they were flying too slowly to restart the right engine and they crashed in the median strip of the M1 highway, killing 47 of the 118 passengers.

What made the first officer answer as he did, when the instruments would have shown fluctuating power in the left engine and smooth running in the right – and when anyone in the cabin could have told them there were flames in the left exhaust? Not panic, not ignorance, but knowledge: he knew that the air-conditioning systems for all 737 models (before the 400) had their intake in the right engine compressor – so a smell of burning in the cabin air would necessarily mean fire on the right. The new 400 model they were flying drew its air equally from both sides, but the first officer did not know that. He took the positive evidence to confirm a positive, wrong hypothesis.

So many of the errors we make in this complex, risky world follow the same pattern: increased familiarity with a task breeds positive hypotheses, assumptions not just about how things run normally, but about how they “normally” go wrong. In testing times, we seek and usually find confirming evidence to support one of these hypotheses – we assume the predicted – rather than asking whether an unknown cause may be responsible for the elements missing from the familiar picture. The better we get at a job and the more polished our handling of routine, the less likely we are to notice baffling anomalies: the more you know how to do with your eyes closed, the bigger your blind spot when they're open.

Machine Translation: Meaning

2012-01-07T10:33:00.000Z

“Starch,” you’ll be amused to hear, “is produced by mechanical methods from potatoes.” “A commander gets information over a telegraph.” “We transmit thoughts by means of speech.”

These, and fifty-seven other weirdly anodyne sentences came chuntering out of the teletype connected to an IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine on this date in 1954. Based on equally soporific Russian input, they represented the first serious use of a computer for anything other than computation: in this case, translating unknown phrases from a foreign language by applying six logical rules to a glossary of 250 terms. The 701 was the size of a tennis court and cost half a million dollars, but in processing power it fell far behind today’s tumble dryers. Getting it to perform its party trick required two yet more complex feats of human translation: expressing the Russian-English glossary and grammatical rules in the binary terms of machine code; and converting the technical constraints of the test into realistic expectations among the crowd of journalists who had come to watch the system at work. The first feat was accomplished flawlessly; the second was an abject failure.

Faced with a roomful of humming boxes and a list of statements about starch, the reporters, doubtless dreaming of that first sharp smack of lunch’s martini, gave free rein to speculative enthusiasm: “Robot turns Soviet language into King’s English!” “The ‘brain’ didn’t even strain its superlative versatility and flicked out its interpretation with a nonchalant attitude of assumed intellectual achievement.” For all that the scientists insisted that this was only “a Kitty Hawk moment,” and that huge amounts of work remained to be done, the public impression was that instant computer translation, like the flying car, was a technology just around the corner. Red Atom Secrets Yield to Giant Brain (or, for the more liberal, Electronic Breakthrough Opens Era of World Understanding).

Such high expectations were bound to be disappointed, especially since the 701 experiment proved something of a dead end. There was a good reason why all its input sentences had that catatonic quality: the system could not handle negation or question. It could store only two possible uses for any word. The verbs it liked – “produce, “develop,” “obtain,” “determine” – covered simple, abstract relationships, with none of the suddenness, sharpness, and subtlety of life as we see and feel it. The linguists on the project knew that to capture even the grammar of technical publications might be beyond current computing capabilities; the whole challenge required new thinking. As later attempts appeared and failed, cynical jokes began to swirl around the field: the repeated references in one machine’s output to “water sheep” – revealed in the original to be “hydraulic ram.” “Out of sight, out of mind” becoming “the blind lunatic;” “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” translated as "the vodka’s great, but the steak is lousy.”

Professional translators will recognize that these are unlikely to be machine-made mistakes, although computers are prone to giving you an avocado when you want a lawyer or telling you that your friend is in the coffee when he is in the café. The EU’s highly expensive translation system famously rendered “nous avions” ("we had") as “we aeroplanes” and “vis à vis les fermiers Normands” as “screw the Norman farmers” (which may be a more accurate representation of policy than the original).

Nowadays, though, you can get a pretty good translation of simple prose in most languages at the touch of a button – through Google Translate or any of a number of similarly free services. The reason we have left behind the era of the water sheep is that computers are now much more like brains: they have the capacity for sufficient parallel processing to interpret language through probabilistic sieves rather than by applying sequential logical operations. The brain performs 10^16 synaptic connections every second; as we listen or read, we are simultaneously parsing sentences and evaluating them for vocabulary, grammar, syntax, context, emotional force, surprise and voice: the character of the narrator. At each stage, we are making likelihood decisions, holding alternative meanings provisionally in our minds until the next clue resolves them. This active engagement with language is what makes jokes funny and poetry moving – and what allows us to recognize a characteristic style in a few words. Computers can follow us a only few rungs up this interpretive ladder (unsurprising: a computer capable of 10^16 connections per second would require its own dedicated power station) but they have their uses – discovering, for instance, that each author has a unique statistical signature: thus, statistically, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, not Bacon. Wit and poetry may always be beyond them – but at least their content is now less starchy.

Tonya Harding: Competition

2012-01-06T08:53:00.000Z

“Why? Why? Why?” sobbed the figure-skater Nancy Kerrigan on this date in 1994, after an unknown man had approached her at practice and suddenly whacked her across the knee with a collapsible baton. No one nowadays would be so naïve as to ask the question, because we all know the answer: fame, and its attendant money.

For those of you too young to remember (or better occupied at the time), the story runs thus: Kerrigan, willowy and well-groomed, came from a middle-class suburban family and had an effortless-seeming grace that always impressed the judges. Her main rival in the upcoming national championships was Tonya Harding: bleached blonde, five foot two, from a poor background. Athletic in a muscular, scrappy way, with costumes (sewed by her mother) that were maybe a little too sexy. Harding’s abilities were amazing – she was the first women to perform a triple axel in US competition – but she often made her routines look like the hard, tooth-gritting work they really are. She lacked the art that conceals art.

If this were a 1930’s Hollywood movie, we know how it would come out: “Oh, Jim – they really love me!” “ Everyone does, sweetheart. You’re America’s Cinderella!” But in this case, Jim (Gillooly, Harding’s recently estranged husband) wasn’t taking any chances. He arranged the hit on Nancy Kerrigan – and Harding knew he had. With her main threat out of the way, she went on to win the nationals and gain a place on the Olympic team.

Kerrigan, though, was also on the team, fully recovered; and by the time the Olympic finals rolled around, the whole story was in the open. All the world, it seemed, tuned in to see if justice would be done – and, apparently, it was: Kerrigan came second by a tenth of a point to the Ukrainian competitor; Harding, restarting her routine after tearfully pleading a broken bootlace, came eighth. “Beauty Crushes the Beast,” crowed Oslo’s Dagbladet; “Snow White Beats Poison Dwarf,” gloated the Irish Times. It was simply a different sort of Hollywood ending.

Yet there was more to the story: women’s figure skating at the Lillehammer Olympics got viewer ratings normally associated with a Super Bowl – the finals remain the sixth most watched television event of all time. It transformed the sport. Those who had been amateur skaters (there was such a thing in 1994) found that a lucrative career now awaited them on the professional circuit. Not Harding, though: despite the fact that her notoriety essentially created the skating boom, the amateur sport expelled her and the professional one ostracized her.

Her life gradually accumulated chaos: an aborted musical career, a sex videotape, pro wrestling, police matters, mysterious abductions, adverse drug reactions. God was found, occasionally. She now has published a book that ascribes much of her “roller-coaster life” to childhood physical abuse, which her mother denies. She is also nearly broke, which elicits a good deal of schadenfreude.

The thing is… almost every celebrity does that stuff now, and they stay on the A-list. Fame and its attendant money no longer require even a pretense at an edifying story. Adultery, addiction, gunplay, domestic violence, grotesque plastic surgery – yeah, so what? We have come to prefer our amusement laced with shock plus a dash of disgust: as the skating industry discovered, it sells. The only conclusion is that Tonya Harding has to live in a trailer and hunt for her own meat merely because of a matter of timing: she did all her tacky things too soon, before it was fashionable. Looking at the opportunities she’s missed, she might well be the one to ask, “why?”

The Tichborne Claimant: Legitimacy

2012-01-05T10:24:00.000Z

You know the daydream: a distinguished head, incongruous in cocked hat with white plumes, appears around the door-frame. “Can it be? Yes! The telltale birthmark! Majesty!” A sudden drop to one knee. You stammer, “I’m sorry?”; “The lost heir! We have found you! Come – the throne of Syldavia awaits you!”

Inheritances must have heirs just as stories must have endings: our sense of appropriateness requires that there be no dangling threads. This is, of course, unrealistic – life’s scriptwriter never learned about the three-act structure – but it is universally human, and it gives us power to perform some spectacular feats of self-deception.

The Tichborne family of Tichborne Park was old, distinguished, and possessed of lumps of money. On this day in 1829 was born the heir to all this – potentially. His father was only the younger brother of the current baronet, who had no sons. In time, perhaps, the new-born Roger would rule the wide-stretching family estates, but for the moment he had to live in genteel shabbiness with his mother, Henriette Felicity, illegitimate daughter of an English nobleman and French noblewoman.

Henriette had been a spoiled beauty when young, and retained all the vices of that transient state. She was capricious, mischievous, and headstrong. As time passed, her scope of amusements narrowed, but one pleasurable pastime remained: annoying her husband. She insisted on keeping their sons in Paris, speaking French, semi-educated by cheap tutors – all to prevent their spending any time with the English or their father’s family, whom she despised. Roger grew into a delicate, obedient, good-humored boy – if something of a noodle. His father had to resort to near-kidnapping to get him to England and to school, but by then there was little chance to make much of him. A trial spell in the cavalry proved a disaster: Roger could never remember the words of command, and his strong French accent made him the butt of the officer’s mess. When he proposed going for a year’s tour in South America, all agreed it was a good idea. He rode through the Andes, gaining confidence and common sense all the time, writing letters that showed a new masterfulness. When he embarked on the ship Bella, the Tichbornes hoped soon to see an heir worthy of the family.

But all that was found of the Bella was an upturned lifeboat. Ship, cargo, passengers, and Roger had all disappeared into the ravenous Atlantic. The heir was gone, all sensible people knew, forever. Even lawyers could find no reason not to hand the estate to Roger’s younger brother – the even less prepossessing Alfred. Henriette would not give up, though: with a stubbornness entirely characteristic, she continued to send advertisements for her lost son to newspapers all over the world, providing a raft of useful details on which a putative castaway could climb for the hopeful journey home.

“Mother I have keep your promice ever since. In writing to me please enclose your letter to Mr. Gibbes to prevent unnesersery enquiry as I do not wish any person to know me in this country. When I take my proper position and title. Having therefore made up my mind to return and face the sea once more I must request to send me the Means of doing so and paying a fue outstanding debts.” Given the obvious enticement of Henriette’s letters, it is surprising how long it took for a candidate to appear: he was a butcher in the Australian town of Wagga Wagga, working under the name Tom Castro. It is not entirely clear how he first heard of the Tichborne fortune, but he was soon the end of a chain of agents and letter-writers stretching back to Henriette, all of whom expected to do well out of this. His claim might have foundered as completely as the Bella – bankers in Sydney did not believe him enough to lend him passage-money – but then “a gentleman” who knew Roger’s father appeared, asked some personal questions (which Castro answered incorrectly, but no matter) and pronounced that there was a great family resemblance “particularly about the mouth.” They shook hands. The Tichborne Claimant was launched.

Maternal love is a wonderful thing; it blinded a mother’s eyes to the fact that her black-haired son had become brown-haired, had forgotten every word of French and had tripled in girth. Perhaps, though, this was another of Henriette’s caprices: this way, her husband’s relatives would at best lose their inheritance and at worst be severely embarrassed. Or she might have simply been spiteful to no practical purpose; many people are. Whatever her reasons, Henriette welcomed the lost boy to her bosom, even as the Tichbornes attempted to exclude him from his estate.

The trial – the trials – lasted more than a year, the longest jury service in England until this decade. London watched amazed and amused as witness after witness seemed willing to affirm that the beefy, cockney-speeched man at the plaintiff’s table was indeed the Frenchified milksop Roger. It was an extension of a mistake we all make: when asked to identify someone, we concentrate on the face before us, searching for resemblances, rather than asking how likely any resemblance would be, given the circumstances. All human faces are human; take two at random and you can always find something to connect them. It finally took the mention of Roger’s tattoos (“the birthmark!”) for the Claimant’s case to collapse. By then Henriette had died, proclaiming to the end her support for his rights.

The world will always contain more butchers than baronets – but that is not how we see it. In our less populous but livelier imaginings, every life has the potential for sudden distinction; thus we all keep an ear cocked for the rattling hooves of the royal messenger.

Albert Camus: Solidarity

2012-01-04T10:09:00.000Z

The publisher and his best-known writer sped through the night, the powerful headlights drilling cones into the future. Old friends, they hardly needed to speak; only a glowing dot and a blue wisp of smoke signaled the passenger’s presence. The Facel Vega growled in an undertone, its American brute power tamed by French elegance. Then… a patch of ice, the world swinging wildly off axis, a crunching flash, a breathless moment as all things drained away. The car was found on end, as if, absurdly, it was trying to climb the concrete light-pole. Albert Camus and his friend Michel Gallimard were dead. The uncompleted manuscript for Camus’ next book lay in the frozen mud. It was this day in 1960.

“Misery taught me that not all goes right under the sun or in the story; the sun taught me that the story is not everything.” Camus was born in a poor quarter of Algiers to a father who soon died in battle and an illiterate, deaf mother, worn through by perpetual work, whose only bond with her son was love. His early life was a tension between opposites: ugly, insistent poverty and the serene, indifferent beauty of the sun and sparkling sea; silence and the seductive pleasure of words; resentment and the release of sport. His family held him back; he rebelled, successfully – but in escaping, he found he was also exiled, never again to feel an easy fit between himself and his surroundings. His work would circle among these themes for the rest of his life, fluttering here and there like a bird that finds no perch.

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be who he is.” As a writer and a Frenchman, Camus could not simply have feelings – he had to explain them. Though his explanations gained him an international audience (and the Nobel prize), they became a self-defeating exercise. The absurdity of humanity’s desire for reason and happiness in the face of the world’s “unreasonable silence” was worth pointing out – but Camus was too genuine to stop there, lean back, and light another cigarette. He could not, like Sartre, content himself with having made everyone uncomfortable – he was uncomfortable himself, because he knew that “there is something that still means something.” But what?

All through life, he sought for solidarity. He joined movements, from the Communists to the Resistance to the Existentialists, in search of a feeling rather than an idea: an unspoken generosity between hearts, a bond of courage in the face of a pitiless world, a shared acknowledgment of that world’s one gift – of beauty. He never found these: each group by its nature became absurd, tyrannical. They all demanded that he give his voice to condemn other groups, rather than to insist on the dignity of the individual. He never again gained as pure a purpose as when, alert and tense in his black sweater, he defended the goal for Racing Universitaire Algerois juniors. As he wrote wistfully to his old team-mates, “what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to soccer.”

Adolescents love to read Camus because he makes them feel brave: resist the old lies! Face up to the void! Strike – you don’t know why; drift – where? It doesn’t matter. But he has something, too, for those beyond that farouche age. “In the middle of winter I learned at last that there was in me an invincible summer.” The beauty we cannot live without, the lingering sweetness of certain nights, the truth that “comes to life and unfolds in men.” Look, there in the mud – the scattered pages, published later as The First Man, bring Camus back to the beginning: to his mother and to the sun. Explanations and ideas recede; objects, light, and flesh take the foreground. These – and the ache we feel for them – are the the source of all morals, the eternal and true companions. They allowed Camus to be at once solitaire and solidaire: alone and allied.

Joan of Arc: Simplicity

2012-01-03T23:24:00.002Z

Today in 1431 the Duke of Burgundy finally got the price he wanted and sold his prisoner Joan of Arc to the English: an early example of “extraordinary rendition.” To give the Duke his due, he had previously tried to ransom her to her old employer, Charles VII of France, but the king did not think her worth the money. The English, aware of the public-relations aspect of the case, did not deal directly with the nineteen-year-old who had caused them so much trouble; the dirty work was left to Frenchmen: the Bishop of Beauvais and a confrèrie of sixty learned ecclesiastics, lawyers, and diplomats – all graduates of the University of Paris, all expert in casuistry and hair-splitting. Thanks to Joan, each had lost either revenue or power. They were unlikely to let her off.

Europe of the time was much like global politics of today, with a large cultural gap between governors and governed. Just as the G20 leaders can happily chat together in English about Davos, Bono, and golf – even as they broker or torpedo deals on which their people’s future depends – so the treacherous complexities of the Hundred Years’ War had become mirrored in a shared high culture of cynical sophistication. Flamboyant gothic traceries; banquets of gilded cockatrices; courtly masques of multi-layered heraldic symbolism; theological arguments of superfine subtlety… it was all show, and all a world away from the simple beliefs and loyalties of common people.

Soldiers, though, are common people, and Joan’s simple refrain – that God would expel the invader and bring the King into his own again – was a chorus every fighting man could join in. The cautious court had waited until her orthodoxy was approved by at least an Archbishop, but the peasant levies had no such doubts and followed her with confidence, driving their mercenary enemies out of cities and castles from Orléans to Rheims. Confidence breeds hubris, though: seeking the honor of being the last to leave the field, Joan was captured by Burgundians – and now it was her turn to defend against this scarlet-robed phalanx arrayed before her.

Even in the untrustworthy transcript prepared by the accusers, her capacity to baffle comes through clearly. “Are you in God’s grace?” she was asked – a notorious cleft-stick puzzler, where either “yes” or “no” would be a self-damning answer. “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” The experts lined up to toss in their trickiest questions, each with its deceptive qualities of pitch and flight. Wielding the straight bat of simple orthodoxy, she blocked them all. In the end, unable to get her to admit heresy, they got the illiterate girl to sign a written confession – which shows how old that particular interrogator’s trick is.

The sophisticated know best how to play dirty, because they can explain away scruples: an ability to twist concepts to one’s liking soon leads to a willingness to twist arms. Joan’s confession had, paradoxically, cut the ground from under her accusers; to be executed, she needed to be seen to go back on her word – if only in the slightest detail. One reason she had first put on men’s clothing was to preserve the virginity she had dedicated to God. Now, she had forsworn this forbidden garb and wore a dress in prison. So, a simple stratagem: the guards threatened to rape her; she returned to male clothing – in which she was discovered during a sudden visit by the inquisitors. “Well, well: what have we here?” The path from there to the stake was a formality – if a long-drown-out, exquisitely wordy one.

Through the formal language of the transcript, we can hear Joan’s confidence beginning to crumble; there is a slight tremor in that brave, candid voice. At the end, she found that her spirit advisers were unreliable; that God seemed unable – no, unwilling – to rescue his champion from such obviously corrupt and perjured hands. Where was the moral? What was the lesson? Up to that moment, her life had been as clear and simply plotted as a ballad, but now that the denouement approached, she realized that the masters of words could write any ending they chose.

We in the West are sophisticated, ambivalent people; elsewhere, whole nations are in the process of losing their clear, comforting illusions about the world. The danger is that they see in our sophistication the cynicism of Joan’s judges – and feel her urge to arm in defense of lost simplicities.

The Bombing of Nuremberg: Retribution

2012-01-02T11:03:00.000Z

This night in 1945 was clear over southern Germany, lit by a full moon. In “normal” circumstances, this would imply safety for civilians in the cities, since it made the bombers more visible to defending aircraft – but by now there were no defenders. The pathfinders dropped their flares and soon, droning out of the west, more than 500 Lancasters of the Royal Air Force appeared over Nuremberg. In one hour, virtually the entire thousand-year-old heart of the city was destroyed: the castle dating back to Friederich Barbarossa, the Rathaus built for the parliament of the Holy Roman Empire, all the churches, and about 2,000 medieval buildings. 1,794 people were killed and a further 100,000 or so made homeless. It was, said the official report, “a near-perfect example of area bombing.”

Certain events, like grease-traps in the plumbing of history, naturally accumulate false assumptions, and the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II is one of these. Depending on one’s political position, there is a powerful urge either to maximize or minimize its importance. Compared, say, to the much-studied bombing of Britain, it was far more brutally destructive, both in length and intensity. Almost as many civilians died in Hamburg in one week in 1943 as in all of Britain during the whole Blitz; civilian bombing deaths totaled about half a million. Every German town of significant size – that is, with a larger population than Midland, Texas or Burbank, California today – suffered at least 40% destruction. We tend not to acknowledge this, in part because we don’t want to give comfort to modern Hitler-apologists who claim that there can be some balance-sheet of horror in which the Nazis come out less badly because of Allied actions – that innocent deaths can serve as counters in the game of guilt-attribution. This tu quoque argument – “who are you to call me a criminal?” – may be a fallacy, but it’s a messy and engulfing one; best not to encourage its proponents.

Indeed, there is a strong urge to go the other way and suggest that area bombing failed in its purpose of demoralizing the civilian population: that ordinary Germans maintained, in the words of Goebbels, a “community of fate,” in which they saw their struggle for existence as linked to the military effort of the Reich. This assumption was a convenient belief for many. For the German authorities at the time, it excused their failure to provide enough shelters or places for the homeless – “we all must make sacrifices.” For the civilians themselves, it helped expunge their pre-war support for the Nazis: “we were victims, too.” For the Allies, it glossed over the purpose of the bombing, making it seem an ad-hoc, unsuccessful military option, rather than a conscious and effective instrument of terror. In general, it helps us all coat those dreadful years in a layer of normality, in which military calculation, with its rules and exceptions, replaces more primitive rituals of hatred and revenge.

Nuremberg was a natural focus for such a ritual. A symbol of German nationalism since the days of Wagner, it was the stage-set on which the Nazi party played its annual pageant of might and unity. The rallies began (as does their most potent record, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) with a performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, with its warnings against foreign contamination, its apotheosis of “German art,” and its choruses of “Heil! Heil!” The city had, with little resistance, allowed its soul to be taken over by a political parasite; its symbolic link with Hitler-worship was too strong to be allowed to remain standing – and thus the innocent medieval buildings, once ornaments of a cosmopolitan Free City and witnesses to the German Renaissance, went up in flames.

And in the meantime, its people had lost that solidarity the Party proclaimed and embodied. Locals ejected outsiders from the shelters; Bavarians objected to non-Bavarians being rehoused. The encompassing unity of the Volk gave way to lesser and lesser allegiances: region, home village, street, family, and finally the hungry, frightened, wandering self. The Wagnerian version of German nationalism proved not to be bomb-proof. With its rubble cleared away, a new, diverse, and more resilient German-ness could be constructed.

Macquarie: Potential

2012-01-01T10:37:00.000Z

Through the stale fumes of last night, of last year, rises the invitation of this new day: to slough off the habits that lead always into the same corner, to open the doors passed by each hurried day, to put on the honest garb of worthwhile labor, to set off on journeys into the world of things not yet seen or learned, acknowledged or admitted.

The end of a year can seem the end of a sentence – as much in the penal as the grammatical sense. It offers the chance of parole; we are released from our prior selves with a license to start anew. But, as many ex-felons know, there are barriers to going straight, and not just of our own making. At this time of resolution, we should remember the example of one who was as determined to let others reform as to reform himself: the last autocrat of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie.

Born to a minor laird on Ulva, a rocky islet in the Inner Hebrides, Macquarie joined the army at fourteen to see what the world offered beyond sheep and kelp, sky and sea. He served in Nova Scotia, New York, Charleston, Jamaica, Bombay, and Egypt, making up for his lack of formal education with borrowed books, open eyes, and a remarkably impressionable heart for a soldier. He came to his best-known post by accident: the previous Governor, Captain Bligh of the Bounty, had suffered another mutiny – this time of the permanent military force assigned to keep order among the convicts transported to Botany Bay. By taking control of the supply of liquor (as in every prison, the substitute for currency), the soldiers had made themselves masters of the colony (many of their descendants now fill Sydney’s society columns). Bligh attempted to break their power, and failed. Lieutenant-colonel Macquarie was sent out with a regiment to support a new governor, but the new governor sickened on the way, so an offhand government in London simply passed on the job to the man on the ground. The laird’s son was now His Excellency.

Prison is intended as a purgatory, but the colony Macquarie inherited was drifting closer to hell. Women convicts found themselves on arrival in a marriage market, where they were picked out and expected to provide wifely services in exchange for protection. Floggings were daily occurrences. The Aboriginal people of the area were in constant, low-level conflict with the expanding populations of convicts and settlers. And there was still the issue of rum: basis of all power, source of all disorder.

In the style of a man who had been facing drastically new situations since the age of fourteen, Macquarie quickly set about improvements. He seized back for the government the monopoly on rum and used its profits to build a hospital, designed by himself and his wife. The “Rum Hospital” now houses the parliament of New South Wales. He laid out Sydney as a noble, Georgian city, to replace the huddle of barracks and shacks considered good enough for convicts. He created a bank and issued the first real currency. He sponsored agricultural improvements and exploration, realizing that a country with such resources and such a healthy climate would soon attract thousands of settlers. He set up the conditions to make the colony rich – and proposed a name, “Australia,” to give it a dignity on the map worthy of its real potential.

In doing this, though, he made extensive use of convict talent. His chief surgeon was a man who had been sentenced to hang in England for theft; the architect of his grand projects was once condemned to death for forging a contract. One of his new magistrates had himself stood bareheaded before the seat of judgement. Macquarie made no distinctions: those who had served their term were free. Those who were reformed gained parole. All he required of them was to act like law-abiding citizens: attending divine service, marrying properly in a church, and sending their children to school. With the Aboriginal people, though he continued with punitive raids, he also recognized their social system based on family elders: much like a Highland clan. He gave regular feasts for them and set up a school for their children – a plan not destined for success, but well-intentioned.

None of this pleased the free settlers who were arriving to claim land and make fortunes. They did not mix with the “emancipists,” those convicts who had completed their sentences. They did not approve of Macquarie’s generous dispensations – in part because settler farms depended on cheap convict labor. They saw no use either for cities or Aboriginals. One, the chief chaplain of the colony, would not attend the funeral of one who had “once been an evil-liver.” Macquarie responded hotly that he was “Happy in feeling a Spirit of Charity… which shall ever make Me despise such Unjust and Illiberal Sentiments.”

Autocratic power seems simple, but involves the autocrat in ever-more-tangled quarrels. In the end, Macquarie was called back to Britain; future Governors would have greatly reduced powers. He died believing it had all been for naught, but is now recognized as the “father of Australia;” no other person has so many things named for him in that prosperous and egalitarian country.

There is always, therefore, hope. We have all been evil-livers to a degree, and that is what prompts us to reform. Let not others – nor our own doubts – stand in the way of our Just and Liberal Sentiments; we can and shall be better. We are all emancipists… and all emancipators.

The Big Dig Connectivity

2011-12-31T10:00:00.000Z

When I was very little, I would lie awake afraid, not of boy-eating monsters under the bed, but of the Inner Belt. Officially Route 695, this would relieve traffic pressure in central Boston by connecting the city’s main radiating highways – and would, incidentally, run right through our living room, between the record player cabinet and the window overlooking Mrs. Economou’s hydrangeas.

In the event, Fate relented: the project was blocked and I got some sleep – but what ceased to be my problem became the city’s, because the lack of a central ring road dumped yet more traffic onto the only urban highway in town: a green, rusting elevated structure called, in a joyless piece of municipal irony, the Central Artery.

Central Artery! The name alone ties a granny knot in the pit of the stomach. It was central only by its unavoidable location, arterial only in the sense of that which thuds beneath a size XXXL Bruins shirt, clogged from a lifetime of pepper-steak subs “with everything” and double-chocolate frappes. It was never without its jam. Built in the infancy of highway science, it had no merge lanes; unmarked, vital turns appeared randomly on left and right. Boston drivers, constrained from performing their signature maneuvers (the Side-squeeze, the Triple Lane Weave, the Gas-station Left, the Warp Eight Pothole Flyover) reacted with doubled aggression. Visitors from out of town were left gibbering, eyes bulging with terror, fingers deeply embedded in the steering wheel. And, if they were heading for Cape Cod, their ordeal was not yet ended – escape from the Artery merely condemned them to the equally Dantean South-East Distressway. Almost from the day it was completed, this whole system was obsolete, sagging under five times its designed traffic volume.

Great problems demand great solutions, and Boston’s answer to its arterial nightmare was suitably grandiose: the Big Dig – the most complex, most expensive highway project in the history of America. Its purpose was no less than to put the whole urban highway system underground, easing traffic flow and relinking neighborhoods that had been cut off from each other for half a century. Easy to describe, difficult to do; myth claims that Boston’s labyrinthine street system was laid out by Governor Winthrop’s cows, and the picture is not much more rational underground. Buried streams, subway tunnels, power cables, water pipes, sewers, old landfill, older geology – all conspired to complicate the designer’s task. It was like trying to knit a pattern into a finished sweater.

The engineering techniques were astounding in their scale, ingenuity, and boldness. The old Artery was lifted up and welded to new temporary foundations as the tunnel advanced underneath it. Whole districts of unstable soil were frozen to prevent shifting as the route drove through. Different methods of excavation, reinforcement, or cladding became necessary every hundred yards or so. In the meantime, drivers put up with sixteen years of diversions and restrictions, hoping that the final result would make all worth while.

On this day in 2007, the Big Dig was officially over. Well, at least the digging part of it was. There were still the nagging questions that had built up over the project: the thousands of little leaks that made parts of the tunnel seem like Das Boot; the shakily installed concrete ceiling panels, one of which fell and crushed a couple heading to the airport; the substandard materials delivered by a construction industry that, in Massachusetts as elsewhere, has always had an incestuous and poorly-illumined relationship with local government. And, finally, the enormous costs: $22 billion with interest, four times the design estimate; so much that the state will be in serious debt for the next thirty years. As the local congressman asked, “Rather than lower the expressway, wouldn't it be cheaper to raise the city?” And as for traffic, there is strong evidence that all the project achieved was to move the jam slightly further out of town.

The Big Dig is a useful lesson. The challenges of the coming decades are going to involve a lot of engineering in this heroic style. Transforming our sources and transmission of energy will be the biggest task, per capita, that the world has ever undertaken. And yet we have no clean slate; we must work within the constraints of what has gone before. To succeed, we need not just ingenuity and political will, but competent, honest project management on unprecedented scales: when the world is betting its future, we can’t afford to come in four times over budget. We would lose a lot more than just sleep.