The Bell

Son Jotham is doubling his pleasant June and July, preparing for the New York Bar (and passing it!), with a wonderful January and February, studying for the Massachusetts Bar.  He sent along this question from BARBRI’s ‘Epstein on National Contracts’:

I make the following promise to you: “Stop listening to records by Kinky Friedman (www.kinkajourecords.com) for two months and I’ll pay you $100.”  You don’t listen to Kinky Friedman records, not “Asshole from El Paso”, not “Why Did You Bob Your Nose, Girl”, not “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore”, not any of his other “classics”.  Notwithstanding your “forbearance”, I don’t pay.  You sue for breach of contract.  Is there consideration, i.e., bargained-for legal detriment for my promise to pay you $100?

Now that’s funny!  Except for the bar candidate.

The 30 seconds you spend laughing, breaks your focus.  What clues to the contract question could the song titles and the hyperlink hold?  Another 90 seconds disappear as you parse them, maybe laugh some more.  The time you could have been writing ebbs away.

So, it’s a damn good question:  Did you learn what you should have in three years of law school.  The second sentence and the hyperlink are calculated – obvious – misdirection and distraction.

Still for those of us who’ll never face another bar exam, it’s pretty funny.

Monday evening, US Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) attempted to explain in a debate amongst Republican candidates for President why he’d said Osama bin Laden should have been captured and tried, as Saddam Hussein and Adolf Eichman were.

By all accounts, he was something less than lucid.  The StateColumn.com reported him saying, in part:

 If somebody in this country, say a Chinese dissident come over here, we wouldn’t endorse the idea, well, they can come over here and bomb us and do whatever.  I’m just suggesting that there are processes that if you could follow and that you should do it.

 Politico.com heard the audience boo the self-professed Libertarian.

Paul’s position, as reported if not stated, is mine.

Whether our assassins are drones or SEALS or porpoises, America has retreated to the days in the ‘Old West’ of ‘WANTED Dead or Alive’.  Our undiscriminating shooters bring to mind Tom T. Hall’s great song from the ‘law and order’ ‘70s, ‘Hang Them All’ (hear it here):

 If they hang them all, they get the guilty;
That’s what you say we ought to do;
If they hang them all, they get the guilty;
But remember they’re gonna hang you too.

 The Bush-Obama policy brings to mind the Germans’ approach in WWII to Resistance attacks in France and Poland.  I was brought up to believe Americans didn’t do things like that.

There was a notable exception.  And, according to Politico.com’s Roger Simon, Monday night Newt Gingrich invoked him whilst criticising Ron Paul: ‘Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear idea about America’s enemies.  Kill them.’  I suspect there are about as many Cherokee registered Republicans in South Carolina as, says Simon, there are Afro-American.

So, how should Americans react to the threats of our age?

For my post on George Orwell and Winston Churchill, I read the Prime Minister’s speech to Parliament on the Fall of France, June 18, 1940, known to posterity as ‘Their Finest Hour’.  The real threats to Britain’s existence were far greater than those to which we’re subjected today.

Churchill outlined the threats to Britain – and its advantages, while exhorting his listeners.  This passage, about two thirds of the way through a 4000 word presentation, struck me:

           There remains, of course, the danger of bombing attacks, which will certainly be made very soon upon us by the bomber forces of the enemy….  I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us; but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona, and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world. Much will depend upon this; every man and every woman will have the chance to show the finest qualities of their race, and render the highest service to their cause. For all of us, at this time, whatever our sphere, our station, our occupation or our duties, it will be a help to remember the famous lines:

 He nothing common did or mean, Upon that memorable scene.

Churchill foresaw the Blitz to come.  But 70 years on, his reference to Barcelona is obscure.  He referred to the aerial attacks on the city during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).  For two years German and Italian bombers hit civilian areas in Republican Barcelona to support of General Franco.  Until Coventry, Dresden and Hiroshima, it defined the outrageous use of bombing against non-combatants.  These raids dwarfed in both number and effect the raid on Guernica Picasso memorialized. [1]

Not surprisingly, Churchill’s message is ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.  But what about his ‘famous lines’?  Where do they come from?  What do they mean?  Here, things get strange, even bizarre.

Churchill quotes Andrew Marvell, author of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ which I suffered through in grade 11.  But these lines are from his ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650).  They praise Cromwell’s successes in the just concluded English Civil War and describe the execution of King Charles I.

What field of all the civil war
Where his were not the deepest scar?
And Hampton [2] shows what part
He had of wiser art,

 Where, twining subtle fears with hope,
He wove a net of such a scope
That Charles himself might chase
To Carisbrook’s [3] narrow case,

 That thence the Royal actor borne
The tragic scaffold might adorn:
While round the armèd bands
Did clap their bloody hands.

 He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;

 Nor call’d the Gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bow’d his comely head
Down, as upon a bed. [4]

So what is Churchill saying when he tells the British people to behave like Charles I before the headsman?  I have no idea.

As I’ve written here and here, our concepts of a fair trial, trial by jury, the right to counsel, the right to a defense and others spring from Charles’ trial.  Little else Charles did was as admirable as the way he met his fate.  But what that had to do with enduring the Luftwaffe, I can’t imagine.

But I think I know what Churchill meant in the final, immortal paragraphs of his June 18, 1940, speech:

           Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

           Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

No drone strike, no assassination can conceivably be in our ‘finest hour’.  As we abandon our principles of justice hard won in the English Civil War, we are sinking ‘into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.’

 Notes

 1.  I did not mention in my earlier post that Orwell’s revelations on totalitarianism came from his combat service to the anarchist units in the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War.  His Homage to Catalonia (1938) described the Communist war on other Loyalists and permanently severed Orwell’s relations with British Marxists.  One wonders whether Churchill knew the book.

2.  Hampton Court was the royalist seat in the early Civil War and the site of many of the failed negotiations and conspiracies.  But Cromwell appropriated it for his use and it was his favorite location.  So maybe Marvell is referring to it as we would to Buckingham Palace.   (I can’t find an authoritative note explaining Marvell’s reference.)  Www.infobritain.co.uk has a very serviceable summary of the Civil War, albeit with a Royalist bent.

3.  Charles I fled to, then was imprisoned, at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight until he was brought to London for his trial and subsequent execution.

4.  Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650), lines 45-64.

New Providence Junkanoo, Nassau, Bahamas 1/2/12

Few events affected me as much, I’ve written, as Winston Churchill’s passing on January 24, 1965.

Each year at this time, I find myself reflecting on Churchill.  This year my revisiting of George Orwell’s essays and letters turned up a short piece he wrote on Churchill.  It was the last he published.

At Orwell’s birth in 1903, Churchill was in his 30^th year and a national figure as a journalist, soldier and adventurer.  He had begun his career in the House of Commons three years before.  With much in Churchill’s career – his handling of the General Strike of 1926, his opposition to Indian independence, among many instances – would the socialist, anti-imperialist Orwell find fault.

Orwell spent the last year of his short life in hospitals as his tuberculosis ran its course.   He published just three short pieces[1] before falling silent nine months before his death on January 21, 1950.

His last publication is a review of volume two of Churchill’s World War II memoir, now called The Second World War:  Their Finest Hour (1949).  Its title comes from the final line of one of Churchill’s greatest speeches.  On June 18, 1940, with France defeated and the British Expeditionary Force evacuated, Churchill told the world:  Britain would fight on.  He concluded:

 Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

The quotable lines from this speech are many.  But read it or better yet – much better yet – listen to an excerpt.  (Link is to the most complete version I’ve found, but the reproduction is poor.)

Rarely have political figures been so honest about a nation’s desperate position.  Never has a leader spoken better – comforting, challenging, preparing his people.  Said Orwell of Their Finest Hour:

           …Churchill’s writings are more like those of a human being than of a public figure.  His present book does, of course, contain passages which give the appearance of having escaped from an election address, but it also shows a considerable willingness to admit mistakes. [2]

           ****

           Whether or not 1940 was anyone else’s finest hour, it was certainly Churchill’s.  However much one may disagree with him, however thankful one may be that he and his party did not win the 1945 election, one has to admire in him not only his courage but also a certain largeness and geniality which comes out even in formal memoirs of this type….[3]

We think of Churchill’s phrases.  But quips apart, they grace long or extremely long writings.  ‘Their finest hour’ concludes a 4372 word (probably 80 minutes) speech – which seems to have been spoken quite slowly – and is the title of the second of six very long volumes.

This speech was long for good reason.  It had not one but two urgent purposes:  to head off divisive questions about responsibility for the defeat in France and to give the British and their allies reasons to believe they could hold off the Germans.

In his first sentence, he spoke of ‘the colossal military disaster’.  The first paragraph continues, ‘…the battle in France has been lost….’  His second paragraph confirms Orwell’s judgment in all particulars.  Said Churchill:

           I am not reciting these facts for the purpose of recrimination. That I judge to be utterly futile and even harmful. We cannot afford it. I recite them in order to explain why it was we did not have, as we could have had, between twelve and fourteen British divisions fighting in the line in this great battle instead of only three. Now I put all this aside. I put it on the shelf, from which the historians, when they have time, will select their documents to tell their stories. We have to think of the future and not of the past. This also applies in a small way to our own affairs at home. There are many who would hold an inquest in the House of Commons on the conduct of the Governments–and of Parliaments, for they are in it, too–during the years which led up to this catastrophe. They seek to indict those who were responsible for the guidance of our affairs. This also would be a foolish and pernicious process. There are too many in it. Let each man search his conscience and search his speeches. I frequently search mine.

           Nowhere will one find a better example of Churchill’s ‘largeness’ – Orwell’s word – and wisdom as a political leader than in this paragraph.  And those last five sentences!

The phrases we quote from the ‘finest hour’ speech illuminate a very detailed discussion of Britain’s strengths and challenges.  They would have been so much unignited gas had most of the speech not been made up of long paragraphs like this:

           Therefore, it seems to me that as far as sea-borne invasion on a great scale is concerned, we are far more capable of meeting it today than we were at many periods in the last war and during the early months of this war, before our other troops were trained, and while the B.E.F. [British Expeditionary Force] had proceeded abroad. Now, the Navy have never pretended to be able to prevent raids by bodies of 5,000 or 10,000 men flung suddenly across and thrown ashore at several points on the coast some dark night or foggy morning. The efficacy of sea power, especially under modern conditions, depends upon the invading force being of large size; It has to be of large size, in view of our military strength, to be of any use. If it is of large size, then the Navy have something they can find and meet and, as it were, bite on. Now, we must remember that even five divisions, however lightly equipped, would require 200 to 250 ships, and with modern air reconnaissance and photography it would not be easy to collect such an armada, marshal it, and conduct it across the sea without any powerful naval forces to escort it; and there would be very great possibilities, to put it mildly, that this armada would be intercepted long before it reached the coast, and all the men drowned in the sea or, at the worst blown to pieces with their equipment while they were trying to land. We also have a great system of minefields, recently strongly reinforced, through which we alone know the channels. If the enemy tries to sweep passages through these minefields, it will be the task of the Navy to destroy the mine-sweepers and any other forces employed to protect them. There should be no difficulty in this, owing to our great superiority at sea.

In 311 words, Churchill offers a candid forecast of what Britain could expect by way of seaborne assault.  The admission the Royal Navy could do little to halt raids seems astonishing 70 years on when no American leader can acknowledge the impossibility of preventing all terrorist attacks.

As Orwell notes there was only one occasion – an insignificant one, as it turned out – ‘…throughout this period when he underrated public morale’[4], the public’s ability to accept the truth.  This was Churchill’s genius in 1940.

Churchill had another strength Orwell recognized but which is largely forgotten:

…The British people have generally rejected his policies, but they have always had a liking for him, as one can see in the tone of the stories about him that have been told throughout most of his life….  At the time of the Dunkirk evacuation… when Churchill made his often-quoted fighting speech, it was rumoured that what he actually said, when recording the speech for broadcasting, was: ‘We will fight on the beaches, we will fight in the streets….  We’ll throw bottles at the b-s, it’s about all we’ve got left’ – but, of course, the BBC’s switch-censor pressed his thumb on the key….  One may assume that this story is untrue, but at the time it was felt that it ought to be true.  It was a fitting tribute from ordinary people to the tough and humourous old man whom they would not accept as a peace-time leader but whom in the moment of disaster they felt to be representative of themselves. [5]

This last essay was not Orwell’s only homage to Churchill.  In a review nine years ago, Simon Schama noted:

 Though in 1939 Orwell had been suspicious of Churchill’s belligerent rhetoric and ominous potential for a personality cult of his own, by the time [1948] he came to write 1984, it was not Big Brother who would be baptized Winston but the doomed renegade, “the last man.”

 For the one thing on which Orwell and Churchill agreed was the imperative to fight totalitarianism, both Nazi and Communist.  As Churchill said on June 18, 1940:

I have thought it right upon this occasion to give the House and the country some indication of the solid, practical grounds upon which we base our inflexible resolve to continue the war. There are a good many people who say, ‘Never mind. Win or lose, sink or swim, better die than submit to tyranny–and such a tyranny.’ And I do not dissociate myself from them.

In death, Orwell and Churchill seem to me linked.  The anniversary of Orwell’s death (January 21, 1950) falls three days before Churchill’s.  They rest 17.5 miles apart, in modest churchyards about equidistant from Oxford University.

Notes

           1. The first of the three is, I think, his greatest essay: ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ published in The Partisan Review in January 1949.  Of that masterpiece, I’ll have more to say another day. The second is a note, almost a letter to the editor, on Ezra Pound.  George Orwell, ‘The Question of the Pound Award’ (1949), as reprinted in Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus, eds, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4 In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 490.

2.  George Orwell, ‘Review of Their Finest Hour by Winston S. Churchill’ (1949), as reprinted in Id., pp. 491, 492.

3.  Id., p. 494.

4.  Id., p. 494.

5.  Id., pp. 494-95.

Northfield, VT.: Former Grade School now Offices. 6/4/11

Most people encounter Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) when they read about the London’s plague in 1665 or its great fire in 1666.  His Diary holds the best first-hand account of both.

The Diary’s ten volumes (1660-69) – well over 2000 pages – record a crucial decade in British (and therefore American) constitutional, political and social history: the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II.  He wrote from just outside the inner circle of government.  He rarely left greater London, virtually never took a day off.

I find fascinating Pepys’ picture of upper middle class as lived by a well-educated man on the rise, on the make.  It’s the often rich detail that keeps me reading day after day, year after year.

I’m reviewing what I noted over the past year in Pepys’ diary for 1664.  Pepys is now 31.  This passage from July 25^th suggests how little life has changed.

 …Mr. Cole (my old Jack Cole) comes to see and speak with me, and his errand in short to tell me that he is giving over his trade; he can do no good in it, and will turn what he has into money and go to sea, his father being dead and leaving him little, if any thing. This I was sorry to hear, he being a man of good parts, but, I fear, debauched. I promised him all the friendship I can do him, which will end in little, though I truly mean it, and so I made him stay with me till 11 at night, talking of old school stories, and very pleasing ones, and truly I find that we did spend our time and thoughts then otherwise than I think boys do now, and I think as well as methinks that the best are now. He supped with me, and so away, and I to bed. And strange to see how we are all divided that were bred so long at school together, and what various fortunes we have run, some good, some bad.

           Source: Robert Latham & William Matthews, eds, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume V, 1664 [1971] (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 2000), pp. 221-22.  See also www.PepysDiary.com, an easy way to access the diary and to read an entry a day.

What do Jack Benny, John D. Rockefeller and Robert Frost have in common?

Each achieved greatness in a fiercely competitive field.  Each was born in the 19^th century.  Each lived to a great age.  Each died still on top.  Each rests in a relatively unpretentious, but distinctive, grave in a uniquely beautiful cemetery.

Beyond that, I can’t come up with anything they have in common.  Except this: Visitors have littered each of their graves with coins.

When I saw change along the side of Jack and Mary Benny’s mausoleum, I thought they were an inappropriate, but fond, recognition of Jack’s famous skinflint role.  The mess seemed especially jarring in the meticulous modern setting of Hillside Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Eighteen months later, on Memorial Day weekend 2010, I passed John D. Rockefeller’s grave in Lake View Cemetery which refers to itself as ‘Cleveland’s Outdoor Museum and Arboretum’.  (I would insert before ‘Outdoor’ ‘Stunning, Moving’.)  At the base of Rockefeller’s obelisk was a litter of coins.

Ten months later on a cold, bright early spring afternoon, I visited Robert Frost’s family plot in a hillside graveyard in Bennington, Vermont, that dates to the Revolution.  In a fine short essay in the Dec. 22 New York Review of Books, April Bernard describes what I found:

A recent swing by his grave in the Old First Church cemetery, less than a mile from my house, turned up another bizarre feature of the afterlife of American poets. One is, of course, familiar with the custom of pebbles left on gravestones as a mark of respect or prayer—I believe that it was originally a feature of Eastern European Jewish mourning culture, but it has become more widespread in recent times. I was, however, unprepared for what greeted me adorning Frost’s flat marble marker, about the size of a single bed, engraved with his line “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Instead of pebbles, recent visitors had left—pennies, nickels, and dimes. Quite possibly they had made wishes.

I have heard of coins placed on the eyes of the newly dead.  I’ve read about corpses buried with coins in their mouths to pay the boatman for their trip across the River Styx.  But coins on the graves of the famous?  I haven’t a clue what this hideous practise means.

Anyone have any ideas?

H/T

 1.  Thank You

I don’t know when again I’ll have an opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to the staffs at the Hillside Cemetery in Culver City, California, and the Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio.

These institutions could not be more different physically.  Apart from their purposes and beauty, it’s hard to come up with anything they have in common – except friendly, competent, helpful staff who cared deeply about their missions.

Thank you to all of them for making journeys of homage and mourning almost joyous.

2.  Jack Benny’s Epitaph

Jack Benny posed all his career as a miser and a skinflint.  In reality he was generous.  He also famously billed himself as ‘Star of Stage, Screen & Radio’.  But beneath his name on his tomb are only these lines:

Beloved Husband, Father and Grandfather

A Gentle Man

Merck Forest Sheepdog Trials, E. Rupert, VT 7/9/11

Economic policy in the West looks like an Iditarod race.

Long lines of tightly harnessed economists, bankers and politicians strain to pull sleds into a frozen, trackless, horizonless waste.  Hide-encased drivers – Merkel, Obama, et al. – staring through tiny slits in their masks have left their smartest, least tractable lead dogs – Krugman, Stiglitz, et al. –  tethered at their ivy-covered igloos to howl in frustration as the mad teams fly away.

***

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz lacks an audience amongst the political classes – everywhere, so far as I can tell.  He howls mightily and rightly in the new Vanity Fair.  Here’s an excerpt via Mike Allen’s ‘Playbook’ for December 13 on Politico.com:

 THE BIG READ — Joseph Stiglitz writes “The Book of Jobs” for Vanity Fair — Web subhead: “Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression-the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work-the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the ‘real’ economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.” — “The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support. … It was absurd to think that fixing the banking system could by itself restore the economy to health. … Government spending [during World War II] unintentionally solved the economy’s underlying problem: it completed a necessary structural transformation, moving America, and especially the South, decisively from agriculture to manufacturing. …

 “The millions of jobless former factory workers once employed in cities such as Youngstown and Birmingham and Gary and Detroit are the modern-day equivalent of the Depression’s doomed farmers. … Of four major service sectors-finance, real estate, health, and education-the first two were bloated before the current crisis set in. The other two, health and education, have traditionally received heavy government support. But government austerity at every level-that is, the slashing of budgets in the face of recession-has hit education especially hard. … What we need to do instead is embark on a massive investment program-as we did, virtually by accident, 80 years ago-that will increase our productivity for years to come, and will also increase employment now. … We have to transition out of manufacturing and into services that people want-into productive activities that increase living standards, not those that increase risk and inequality.” http://vnty.fr/s 8YoQ5

           Increasing risk and inequality is what domestic policy – Republican and Democratic – has been all about since the Reagan Tax Reform in 1986.  Remove welfare and social services and flatten tax rates downward:  What do individuals get?

***

I’ve suspected since my first condo refinancing that We, the People, were being conned.  I wanted the lower mortgage rate – less than 2/3 what I began paying.  The broker pushed me hard to take equity out – ‘Don’t you want a new car?’ – since the condo’s value had doubled.  I didn’t.  I’ve thanked my gut many times since 2008.

I came to believe, as some others did, that ‘conservative’ economic policy depended on the illusion of free money from real estate appreciation – coupling ‘the American Dream’ with a rainbow’s ‘pot-o’-gold’.

Until it was too late politically, free money hid the lower standards of living deindustrialization and deunionization brought, as well as the upward transfers of wealth welfare and entitlement reform, tax reform and tort reform represented.

The real estate bubble helped the victims of deindustrialization from Youngstown and Detroit to relocate like their Okie and Great Migration ancestors to today’s Hoovervilles and migrant camps: Phoenix, Ft. Myers and Las Vegas.  Now that they’re there, bound like medieval serfs to their mortgaged homes, what happens to them?

***

‘This time, it’s different.’  That’s what we hear just before bubbles burst.  And, of course, it isn’t.  Since 2008′s loud pop, we’ve heard the same thing as western economies continued to crater.

The cause of the last bubble was different; it always is.  But the remedies for resurrecting economies are tried – at least since Keynes – and true.  They could even be sold over the counter.  The determination not to apply them is new.

Worse, Stiglitz sees that this time is different from other post-WWII downturns.  He sees a fundamental change in our economy and political economy.  The formulation of the remedies requires thought and compassion.  But their shape is as clear as it was to Keynes and his successors: revive demand and educate people for new challenges.

***

Climate change, social change, economic change: all are occurring at the same instant.  Doing less, much less, than we did a moment ago – the nostrum on offer in the EU and US – is the worst remedy imaginable.

Unlike ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ in the Sherlock Holmes mystery, we have dogs barking.  We should heed them.

Bennington, Vt.: Robert Frost & Family Monument 4/3/11

In ‘Why I Write’ (1946), George Orwell begins:

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

          Ah!  ‘Settle down and write books’: so simple, so easy.  And from one who wrote in awful – sometimes dangerous, ultimately fatal – physical and mental circumstances, one of which he captured in this great first sentence from ‘England, Your England’ (1940):

As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

           In high school, my more dismal essays were returned with this legend in large red letters: ‘Semper Orwellum!’  I took it as my motto, though I learnt, over time, it was a standard I could live up to neither as a writer nor as a person.

If one takes nothing else from Orwell the writer, it is the virtue of self-discipline.  In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes the smelly, cold Paris garret in which he wrote just after World War I.  But after a day of writing, he went home.  Orwell was home.

I think of Orwell when, as this morning, I chase topics across the internet like a beagle distracted by many scents.

From The Balance Sheet (The American Prospect) I clicked through to a lengthy Economist essay on the lessons of the ‘30s: ‘There could be trouble ahead’ (well worth a read).  Accompanying it is a picture of a line of marchers in the ‘30s walking down a rural road bearing a banner ‘Jarrow Crusade’.

I’ve been to Jarrow, a hard, poor town opposite Newcastle at the mouth of the River Tyne.  I was there because, fifteen hundred years ago, Jarrow was the site of an important monastery.  The most famous of its monks was the Venerable Bede, the first British historian.

So, what was the ‘Jarrow Crusade’?  I Googled it and discovered it was a march on London in 1936 that started on the Tyneside to protest the Depression’s lack of work and poverty.  Like the Bonus Army in the US, I thought.

That made me think of a line from a James Keelaghan song, ‘Boom Gone to Bust’ (1989) on his brilliant ‘Timeline’ album.  He describes how his father ‘started east in the thirties’ from the prairie provinces with ‘the On to Ottawa men’.  So, the Canadians marched, too, I learnt after Googling the phrase.

Occupy Wall Street has many progenitors….  And thus passed an hour I could have been writing.

Ironically, I’d marked the morning to write on Lorin Stein’s glowing review in the NYRB (Dec. of Ben Lerner’s new novel, Leaving the Atocha Station.  I don’t read reviews of contemporary fiction because I don’t read current novels.  But a picture of Roger van der Weyden’s ‘The Descent from the Cross’ (ca. 1435) accompanied the article.  So, I read on.

You will have perceived a pattern….

Lerner’s novel is about a young poet, like Lerner, who gets a grant to do research in Spain.  There, he spends his time, mainly, getting high, wandering Madrid’s museums and drowning in internet porn – free associating, self-absorbed.

An interesting review, but then half way through I encountered this passage:

…and certain poems by Lerner sound a lot like Adam [Atocha Station’s protagonist], for instance the title poem of his most recent collection, Mean Free Path:

I finished the reading and looked up
Changed in the familiar ways. Now for a quiet place
To begin the forgetting. The little delays
Between sensations, the audible absence of rain
Take the place of objects. I have some questions
But they can wait. Waiting is the answer
I was looking for. Any subject will do
So long as it recedes.[1]

           At this point I needn’t explain why that last line hit me.  But I’m off to Porter Square Books to find Leaving the Atocha Station[2] and Mean Free Path.

I should be writing.

Notes

1.  According to Wikipedia, ‘In physics, the mean free path is the average distance covered by a moving particle (such as an atom, a molecule, a photon) between successive impacts (collisions) which modify its direction or energy or other particle properties.’  (Footnote omitted.)  Good Lord!  What an obscure, wonderful title!  And a great poem!!

2.  A few minutes dipping in to Atocha Station outside the bookstore suggested Lorin Stein understated how good it is.

Portsmouth, NH: North across the Piscataqua River and Kittery, ME 1/20/11

John Lincoln Wright, who died on December 4 at 64, could jolt a bar to life.  A country singer-songwriter and band leader, his distinctive bass voice – backed by a tight, driving band – could project the demise of mill life in New England or describe a now-over relationship as ‘almost like living in Lowell’.[1]

A fine, clear-eyed obituary by Steve Morse in Saturday’s Boston Globe captures his career and his sad decline.  It also puts a mirror in front of aging early Baby Boomers.

As one would expect of Boston’s best music critic, Morse puts Wright’s career in its New England context and illuminates it with choice quotations:

 “John never got beyond being a regional act, because he wasn’t going to stop writing songs about New England and wasn’t going to be a cracker,’’ said guitarist Glenn Shambroom, who formerly played with [John Lincoln Wright &] the Sour Mash Boys.

           I wonder about that.  Another singer with a distinctive bass voice of the previous generation, Hank Snow, had a great Nashville career, though he began his career in Nova Scotia.

The last time I saw Lincoln – as he was known, just ‘Lincoln’ – play was at a dance in some North Cambridge hall.  It must have been the late 90s.

He was drinking too much.  But when he went on….  The man could sing and that band could play and harmonize.  What that deep, rich voice could do with lyrics meant for this listener the hall’s dreary half-light and aging and aged dancers disappeared into story and sound.

I’d first seen Lincoln in the late winter of 1977.  He and a couple of Sour Mash Boys were crammed into the back of a now legendary cellar in Harvard Square called ‘Jonathan Swift’s’.

That night, I’d had more to drink than he.  By the middle of the first set, I’d forgotten my strong sense, walking down the many steep steps, that if fire broke out in that already smokey bar, I’d have as much chance as the Cocoanut Grove’s guests.

I’d grown up with country music, loved it and knew it as a fan.  If I could hear a bar band this good in Boston, this was where I was moving, I told my companions whose couch I was occupying for a long weekend.

In 1977, Lincoln and I – and the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation – had passed the great divide entering our 30s.  Then everything changed.  Morse quotes Lincoln:

 “Country music around here quieted down in the ’90s,’’ he told the Globe in 2002. “Our audience bought houses and had kids and got jobs. You couldn’t count on them to come out and get fried on a Tuesday night anymore.’’

           Yesterday, I paid homage to Lincoln by revisiting the basement which since Jonathan Swift’s demise in the early ‘80s, has been a skateboard shop, a boutique and, now, the Kofuku Japanese gift shop.  Nothing remained to hint of the wonders of that ‘cellar by starlight’.[2]

On Saturday mornings in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I’d run into him at the wondrously filthy, WHRB basement studios in Memorial Hall where ‘Cousin Lynn’ (Lynn Joiner) and ‘Cousin Sinc’ (Brian Sinclair) presided over ‘Hillbilly at Harvard’.

For all his legendary insistence on doing music his way, Lincoln was a thoughtful, generous critic.  His on-air comments were on point, acute and brief.  But the disjointed two-minute comments off-air during songs were often funny, always intelligent.

And, he could tell stories.  I remember laughing until I hurt at his tales of the road at one ‘Hillbilly at Harvard’ Christmas party.  At another, he talked with deep sadness about recent disappointments in Nashville.

Like his New England contemporary and peer, Bill Morrissey who died four months ago, he suffered from the bane of country and blues musicians.  It halted his career too early and later killed him.

If you want to understand life as it was lived in the last quarter of the last century, Lincoln’s songs would not be a bad place to start.

But since I heard Lincoln died, I’ve had in my head Bill Morrissey’s voice reading the last line of his poem, ‘North’.  A son talks about his father, a logger ‘north of the CP Line’ in Maine, who ‘lost his job at 41 and took himself out at 45.’  He watches ‘the old man’ head ‘down the tote road with his 12 gauge pump and a pint of rye’, knowing what he was going to do.

It just wasn’t in me to stop him.
Goodbye, Papa, goodbye.

Notes

1.  I believe someone else wrote the song which was a highlight for me of one raucous evening.

2.  ‘Cellars by Starlight’ was the club column in The Boston Phoenix.

'Joan Baez Vol. 2' (1961). I like the cover as much as the contents.

In September 1961, ‘Joan Baez Vol. 2‘ appeared.  Five months later, on a dark mid-February afternoon, a friend played it and ‘Joan Baez‘ (1960) for me.  Then we played the two albums again.  And again.  And again.

Fifty years later, I’m still listening to both.  All the cuts with two minor exceptions on ‘Joan Baez’ remain fresh, surprising, moving.

The songs on Volume 2 are traditional as are her almost orthodox treatments.  Her version of ‘Banks of the Ohio’ (backed by the Greenbriar Boys) sounds as if it could have been taped at WCKY or WWVA in the late 1940s maybe with the Everly family.

Yet, what a defiant album this is!  It’s as if Baez said, ‘I’ll take songs from the canon.  I’ll do them canonically.  But through the sheer force of my intelligence, my voice and my empathy, I’ll make them mine.’

One ascribes defiance to youth.  And, Joan Baez was 20 – 20! – when she released Volume 2.  But she sang with the assurance and empathy of someone ageless.  I’d be very curious how she’d treat these songs at 70.  But her focus has shifted to today’s burst of high-quality songwriting.

A favorite of mine from Volume 2 is the song she calls ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’ which dates to the early 17^th century or before.  It has a number of variants of which Baez’s is the most pared.  It’s the tale of a young woman whose father arranges her marriage to ‘a great lord’s son’.

Father, dear father,
you’ve done me great wrong.
You’ve married me to a boy who is too young.
I’m twice twelve and he is but fourteen.
He’s young, but he’s daily growing.

Many first rankers in the folk music army have covered ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’, including A.L. Lloyd (1959) Martin Carthy (1965), Pentangle (1968) (featuring the greats, Jacqui McShee and John Renbourn), Steeleye Span (1974) (with the incomparable Maddy Prior), Peter Bellamy (1979) and Eliza Carthy (1995).  No one would ever get the song the way Baez did.

Or, so I thought.

A few weeks ago, I heard Altan’s 2002 version which it titles ‘Daily Growing’.  Led by the fine Irish band’s co-founder, Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, and guest, Paul Brady, Altan does the song in the ‘call and answer’ form its words indicate:  a dialogue between the woman and her father.  Some of Ireland’s finest players augment what many think is Ireland’s best traditional group of the past quarter century.

In spirit and lyric, Altan follows Baez.  But the band retrieves from the tradition a couple of verses and adds two minutes to Baez’s 2:57.  An earlier verse Baez omitted may have been judged too risque for Americans in 1961.  As the father, Brady sings:

And so early in the morning,
at the dawning of the day,
They went into the hayfield
to have some sport and play;
And what they did there,
she never would declare;
But she never more complained of his growing.

The fun and the double entendre:  I can’t cite a comparable example in a song as sad as this one.  The verse’s absence makes the grief of Baez’s narrator less understandable.

Baez chose to end her version with what is Altan’s penultimate verse:

 At the age of fourteen, he was a married man;
At the age of fifteen, the father of a son;
At the age of sixteen, his grave it was green;
And death had put an end to his growing.

The last two lines were a gut-punch when I was 14 and are today.

Altan’s last verse is an anticlimax.  But the duet it affords Ní Mhaonaigh and Brady overcomes the damp, now trite lyrics:

I’ll buy my love some flannel
and I will make a shroud;
With every stitch I put in it,
the tears they will pour down;
With every stitch I put in it,
how the tears will flow;
Cruel fate has put an end to his growing.

           Despite the immediacy and beauty of Ní Mhaonaigh and Brady’s vocals, it is the cutting despair of Baez’s conclusion that captures the grief of a 26-year-old widowed mother.

Perhaps in Altan’s treatment I have my answer to how a more mature Baez would have treated the song.  Ní Mhaonaigh was twice Baez’s age, and she sang with more distance from the lyrics.

The band’s brilliant orchestration haunts, but it adds more distance between the lyrics and the audience.  Baez made the better choice in accompanying herself on a guitar and driving the lyrics hard with only the briefest rests between verses.

Hers is the better version.  But I now know it has a peer.

Source: The Atlantic Cities Blog, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2011/11/geography-stuck/534/

What does it mean when 78.9 percent of today’s Louisianans were born there?

Nothing good, infers Richard Florida, Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, on The Atlantic Cities blog.

States, like Ohio, where 75 percent of residents are natives, show a low degree of mobility.  ‘A high level of home-grown residents is also indicative of a lack of inflow of new people’, notes Florida.

By contrast, ‘just 24.3 percent of Nevadans, 35.2 percent of Floridians, [and] 37.2 percent of the residents of Washington, D.C.’ were born there.

Florida draws some sweeping conclusions from this state-level data:

 There is a distinctive “stuck belt” across the middle of the country running from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, down through West Virginia and into the Sunbelt states of Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Mobility is largely a bi-coastal—plus Rocky Mountain state—phenomenon.

America can be divided into two distinct classes, the stuck and the mobile. The mobile possess the resources and the inclination to seek out and move to locations where they pursue economic opportunity. Too many Americans are stuck in places with limited resources and opportunities. This geography of the stuck and mobile is a key axis of cleavage in the United States.

           Far better than ‘the Rust Belt’, a ‘Stuck Belt’ expresses a perception of life in bands of central states.  Stuck, hopelessly stuck.

The previous tenants of my first Ohio State apartment – a basement in a slum on Chittenden Ave. – had left in the bathroom mirror ‘the word for the day’ from The Lantern, the student newspaper: ‘Committing suicide in Columbus, Ohio, is redundant.’  It sure captured the Spring 1970 zeitgeist.  But it wasn’t true then or now.

I know from living in and traveling ‘the Stuck Belt’ that its explanation can be much more complex, much more local, much less subject to categorisation.  A county map reveals far more than a state map about Richard Florida’s ‘geography of stuck’.

In 1970, the Appalachian counties of Ohio were a great place to be from, while Columbus was ‘a great place to raise a family.’  Both statements are true today, as the depopulated hill country and the vibrant flat lands prove.

You could make similar intra-state generalisations about Wisconsin and some other ‘Stuck Belt’ states, but you would be hard-pressed to do so in the band from West Virginia and Kentucky to Mississippi and Louisiana, from the Ohio River’s south bank to the Gulf’s north coast.

Nonetheless, ‘[t]his geography of the stuck and mobile is a key axis of cleavage in the United States.’

‘The Stuck Belt’ more or less overlays the states dominated by big-time public university football and, to a lesser degree, basketball.  That tells you much about the attitudes toward public education and the multiple ethnic divides that also track this ‘axis of cleavage’.  You also see in its eastern reaches the remnants of the Scots-Irish ascendency.

‘The Stuck Belt’ reflects the track of the 20^th century’s American great migrations: at mid-century from subsistence farming or sharecropping regions to the industrial north and the late century the snow-bird flight from the destinations of the earlier migrations.

‘The Stuck Belt’ may reflect a broader reordering, reconception of American society.

The lessons of – if not the responsibility for – the past thirty years of economic stagnation and the consequent demise of the American notion of ‘opportunity’ may have sunk in.

Why abandon support systems if there’s no promise of a better life without them?  Why support public education when it bears no apparent reward either for the investment in taxes or for the work to get one or for the student loans it will take years to pay off?

The lessons for today’s ‘Stuck Belt’ residents bring to mind a vaudeville sketch from the 20^th century’s first great migration.  Its punch line has the rube, realising he’s been taken by a shyster’s topsy-turvy, exclaiming, ‘Dat means you is the stuckee, and I is the stuckor!’

Of such insights will be made the 21^st century’s Great Awakening.