The Bell

Conch fisher: New Providence, Nassau, Bahamas: 4/4/10

Flying – or fleeing – from Boston Wednesday, on my way from a nascent gambling paradise to a burgeoning one, three articles in The Boston Globe struck me.

***

On the front page, the lead story is headlined, ‘Wynn Drops Casino Proposal’.  On Tuesday, voters in Foxboro added two gambling opponents to its Selectmen.  This killed the last minute entry in the eastern Massachusetts casino derby by gambling mogul Steve Wynn and New England Patriots owner and real estate developer Bob Kraft.

Foxboro has had generally a good relationship with the ever-expanding Patriot world. But the casino resort proposal was too much to absorb, especially in just a few months.

The vote also reveals how unpopular privatised gambling is in Massachusetts.  By limiting the neighborhoods in Boston and the towns that can vote on a casino, the legislature and the Deval Patrick administration anticipated the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) reaction.

‘Boardwalk Empire’ may be set in the 1920s, but it is a telling metaphor for New Jersey today.  And voters know it.

 ***

On page B3 in the Metro section, a headline reads, ‘Gaming Panel Head is Pressed to Reveal Terms of Settlememt’.  The just formed Massachusetts gaming commission already has a scandal on its hands.

Its choice for its acting executive director settled a civil suit alleging sexual abuse of a child in 2007.  The commission did not reveal this when it announced Carl Stanley McGee’s appointment.  Nor did it leap to disclose details of the settlement when word of it spread.  In fact,

The gambling commission has defended the decision to hire McGee, saying the allegations were unproven, but the panel’s chairman acknowledged that the board did not conduct its own investigation. On Monday, chairman Stephen Crosby stated that McGee deserved “the presumption of innocence’’ and that the settlement did not change that.

McGee, who resigned the day this story ran, ‘helped craft the state’s casino law’.  The follow-up story on May 10 said:

 Board chairman Stephen Crosby … had staunchly defended McGee’s appointment and had called the 2007 abuse allegations meritless and warrantless….

 He cited McGee’s “substantial knowledge and expertise’’ in gaming and policy making and his reputation among his peers, but concluded that “his serving in this role would impede the commission’s ability to accomplish its mission.’’

 McGee is expected to return to his job as assistant secretary for policy and planning in the Patrick administration.

 The question of the Patrick Administration’s knowledge of the sexual abuse settlement hasn’t, apparently, arisen.  But suffice it to say that the McGee scandal hardly signals that a fine attention to transparency will characterise the Commission’s – or the Administration’s – deliberations or dealings.

 ***

On to the Business Section on p. B8 where the story at the top of the page is headlined, ‘Yahoo director to leave board amid CEO flap’.  Here are its first two ‘graphs:

 The flap over a bogus college degree on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s official biography has claimed its first casualty – the director who led the committee that hired him four months ago.

 Patti Hart will surrender her Yahoo board seat at the company’s still-unscheduled annual meeting. She framed her decision as a commitment to focus on her job as CEO of gambling-machine maker International Game Technology, while allowing Yahoo’s board to deal with the fallout from the recent revelations about Thompson’s inaccurate academic credentials.

 ***

  Neither I nor The Globe connected these stories.  But they are pieces in a mosaic whose figures are all too clear.

Castleton, VT.: St. Mark's Episcopal Church 4/15/12

Once in a very long while – four times in my life – an actor leaps from the screen and into my deepest fears.  I can never look at them objectively again.

Yes, I know the difference between acting and actors.  But in my experience these performances are very different from mere great acting.  In the order I saw them, they are:

 • Ronald Reagan as the man who sets off the killings in the remake of ‘The Killers’ (1964);

 • Fred MacMurray as the cowardly intellectual in ‘The Caine Mutiny’ (1954);

 • Anjelica Huston as the spurned mistress in ‘Crimes & Misdemeanors’ (1990); and

 • Juliet Stevenson as the revenging daughter and wife in the BBC4 miniseries ‘The Politician’s Wife’ (1995)

           Watching ‘The Good Wife’, a current favorite, often brings to mind ‘The Politician’s Wife’.  So, last night I watched it again.

Both wives learn of their husbands’ betrayals and suffer the indignities of political ‘management’.  Both have a son and a daughter they try to protect.  And, both were more important to their husbands’ successes than they realised before they became objects of media frenzies.

The British show has a very different shape and story arc from the American.  The first half of its 180 minutes could be the back story of ‘The Good Wife’, how Alicia dealt with the early days of her husband’s disgrace.

But the betrayals of ‘The Politician’s Wife’ are far more profound than that of ‘The Good Wife’.  As she realises the dimensions of her figurative and literal rape and of her sale by her father, she begins a transformation that will take her from ankle length baggy country dresses to above-the-knee tailored suits.  Bright red lipstick will become her.

‘The Politician’s Wife’ becomes as implacable as the protagonists of the great Jacobean dramatists – Beaumont & Fletcher, John Webster and John Ford.[1]  Her triumph is complete, terrifying and modern.

As ‘The Politician’s Wife’ Juliet Stevenson is well-beyond ‘convincing’.  So far beyond is she that watching her play a wise-cracking and wise dresser in ‘Being Julia’ (2004), a superb light-hearted comedy of revenge, I kept expecting Stevenson to destroy her mistress.  Her presence troubles me even after multiple viewings.

‘The Politician’s Wife’ is not for the squeamish or prudish.[2]  It offers none of the comforts, the softness or the diversions of ‘The Good Wife’.  But what a story!  And, what a performance!!

Notes

1.  Like the Jacobean plays on which it draws, some grounding in the day’s politics – the late Thatcher and John Major years – will help understanding considerably.  So will a dictionary of English political terms.

2.  The UK version could not be shown on US TV then or now.  Some moments that seem gratuitous prove essential to the character development.

Columbus, Ohio: Sign in front of Rhodes State Office Tower renamed for James A. Rhodes, the governor who sent the National Guard to Kent State in May 1970.

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen fired on Kent State students, killing four and injuring nine others.  The governor who authorized the Guard’s deployment was James A. Rhodes.  Represented in bronze, it is he who strides toward the camera, with his name below his feet.

He walks toward the State House, across the six lanes of East Broad Street.  The ever-vigilant Columbus Police would have ticketed him for J-walking had he gone directly across the street instead of walking to the end of the long block and waiting for the interminable light to change.

Rhodes name also appears behind him.  The 40-story State Office Tower, a 1975 Brutalist monsterpiece – outside and in – had its first occupants in Rhodes’ third term.  It has all the folksy warmth of Albany’s Rockefeller Plaza, in sharp contrast to its namesake.

Like his contemporary, Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, Rhodes was elected governor four times as a ‘can do’ Republican.  Neither was a small government politician.  They were builders, visionaries.  Even those of us who disagreed with both (often adamantly) respected them and resented their ability to attract votes from our side of the aisle.

Ohio in the time of John Kasich makes one yearn for the era of James Rhodes.  I never thought I’d say that.

Ernest Withers (c) 1968: Fired Memphis Sanitation Workers, All Black, Holding Signs, 'I AM A MAN'

Is it possible to see afresh Martin Luther King?  B.B. King?  Jackie Robinson?   The 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers protest?  ‘Yes’ proves the fascinating Ernest C. Withers retrospective at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts.

Ernest Withers (1922-2007)[1] is now hardly unknown.  Four volumes of his record of Memphis from WWII to the early 1990s have appeared.  Still, this genius journeyman deserves greater fame.  To learn why, you should see the Griffin’s extraordinarily well-mounted, generous selection of arresting, exquisitely composed black-and-white images.

As you approach the Griffin’s Main Gallery, you see on the far wall – at an angle and through framing partitions – a picture of Martin Luther King lying in his casket.  This disturbing introduction pays homage to Withers’ use of angles to heighten tension and draw viewers’ attention away from the art of his compositions toward his ostensible subject.

While jarring and moving, Dr. King expressionless in death is not the most remarkable picture on his murder on April 4, 1968.  It’s a picture taken from the assassin’s window.

Withers directs your eye first across the tops of unremarkable two story buildings toward a distant horizon marked at its center by a municipal water tower.  Then the eye angles downward and to the right in the very near middle distance toward a cheap motel’s balcony where a door bears a dark wreath.  For James Earl Ray – or anyone who’d ever learnt to shoot – it was so easy, so banal.

Of the music pictures, I liked the 1955 shot of Brook Benton in a Sunday suit singing in front of a stage curtain with a huge portrait of Elvis Presley in profile looming over the singer.  Benton’s audience would have been strictly segregated.

But the most intriguing of Withers entertainment pictures seems the most mundane.  Taken about 1954, its centerpiece is a Seeburg jukebox which played the new format 45 RPM singles that dominated the Baby Boomers’ formative years.  Flanking it are four white waitresses in identical checked uniforms, the two on the right with glasses, the two on the left without.  The picture is so detailed, so balanced, so evocative that I thought I smelled the grill’s grease.

My favorite baseball image and, I think, the best in the show Withers took, probably just after the 1953 Major League season, at an exhibition game at Martin Stadium, home of the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League.  He took the shot from the left field end of a grubby third-base dugout.  Its centerpieces are three future Hall-of-Famers who’d begun their careers in the Negro Leagues.

Of the players the closest to the camera, Brooklyn’s Jackie Robinson, looks intently, urgently – as I always think of him – toward the field, his uniform soiled at the left knee.  Cleveland’s Larry Doby’s left knee is also dirty, but he half-smiles at the camera looking as relaxed and confident as he always did to me.

Robinson and Doby, the first and second – seven seasons earlier – to break the Major Leagues’ color bar….

Then, almost in the distance, a much younger player reclines against a cement support looking impassively at the field.  In a most untypical pose, it’s Ernie Banks, 22, a couple of months after becoming the Cubs’ first Black player.

If that receding row of faces were all this image held, it would be a fine one.  But at the head and end of the line are boys in their best clothes.  You could teach a course in composition and perspective from this shot.

And – startlingly, arrestingly – between Robinson and Doby appears in sports clothes a short, smiling Italian-American twice Banks’ age.  As the linked 1950 story from his hometown newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut, reveals, the presence of Matty Brescia says much about the South on the eve of its great transformation.

In short, a superb image of historic significance.

The Griffin Museum exhibition establishes Ernest Withers as a great photographer.[2]  That his subjects embodied the great cultural and social issues of his time merely adds to his images’ significance.

The window of Withers’ Beale Street studio bore the painted motto, ‘Pictures Tell The Story’.  Hardly.  Withers proves they tell the stories the photographer wants to tell.  In his case, they’re great ones brilliantly told.

Notes

1.  To say the least, Withers the man has a less exalted reputation than Withers the photographer.  His is yet another example of an artist – a superb artist –  whose work does not, necessarily, reflect his character.

2.  Eighteen months ago I reviewed an exhibit of photos by Stanley Tretick, a much better known journeyman of Withers’ time.  Tretick is famous for his picture of President Kennedy behind his desk as his two-year-old son crawls beneath it.  It is no slight to that fine photojournalist to say that Withers was in another league altogether.

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.