[Max Beerbohm imagines how H. G. Wells might have written of a Christmas-like holiday celebrated in some utopian future. This version appeared in The Saturday Review on 29 December 1906. It is described as being Chapter V of “Sitting Up For the Dawn”.]
The re-casting of the calendar on a decimal basis seems a simple enough matter at first sight. But even here there are details that will have to be thrashed out….
Mr. Edgar Dibbs, in his able pamphlet “Ten to the Rescue”,† advocates a twenty-hour day, and has drawn up an ingenious scheme for accelerating the motion of this planet by four in every twenty-four hours, so that the alternations of light and darkness shall be readjusted to the new reckoning. I think such readjustment would be indispensable (though I know there is a formidable body of opinion against me). But I am far from being convinced of the feasibility of Mr. Dibbs’ scheme. I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay—anomalous though it certainly will seem in the ten-day week, the fifty-day month, and the thousand-day year. I shouid like to have incorporated Mr. Dibbs’ scheme in my vision of the Dawn. But, as I have said, the scope of this vision is purely practical….
Mr. Albert Noaks, in a paper‡ read before the South Brixton Hebdomadals, pleads that the first seven days of the decimal week should retain their old names, the other three to be called provisionally Huxleyday, Marxday, and Gorkiday. But, for reasons which I have set forth elsewhere,§ I believe that the nomenclature which I had originally suggested||—Aday, Bday, and so on to Jday—would be really the simplest way but of the difficulty. Any fanciful way of naming the days would be bad, as too sharply differentiating one day from another. What we must strive for in the Dawn is that every day shall be as nearly as possible like every other day. We must help the human units—these little pink slobbering creatures of the Future whose cradle we are rocking—to progress not in harsh jerks, but with a beautiful unconscious rhythm….
There must be nothing corresponding to our Sunday. Sunday is a canker that must be cut ruthlessly out of the social organism. At present the whole community gets “slack” on Saturday because of the paralysis that is about to fall on it. And then “Black Monday”!— that day when the human brain tries to readjust itself—tries to realise that the shutters are down, and the streets are swept, and the stove-pipe hats are back in their band-boxes! No writer has yet done justice to the horror and the deleteriousness of Sunday….
Yet, of course, there must be holidays. We can no more do without holidays than without sleep. For every man there must be certain stated intervals of repose—of recreation in the original sense of the word. My views on the worthlessness of classical education are perhaps pretty well known to you, but I don't underrate the great service that my friend Professor Ezra K. Higgins has rendered by his discovery¶ that the word recreation originally signified a re-creating—i.e.** a time for the nerve-tissues to renew themselves in. The problem before us is how to secure for the human units in the Dawn—these giants of whom we are but the foetuses—the holidays necessary for their full capacity for usefulness to the State, without at the same time disorganising the whole community—and them.
The solution is surprisingly simple. The community will be divided into ten sections—Section A, Section B, and so on to Section J. And to every section one day of the decimal week will be assigned as a “Cessation Day”. Thus, those people who fall under Section A will rest on Aday, those who fall under Section B will rest on Bday, and so on. On every day of the year one-tenth of the population will be resting, but the other nine-tenths will be at work. The joyous hum and clang of labour will never cease in the municipal workshops….
You must figure the smokeless blue sky above London dotted all over with aeroplanes in which the holiday-making tenth are re-creating themselves for the labour of next week—looking down a little wistfully, perhaps, at the workshops from which they are temporarily banished. And here I scent a difficulty. So attractive a thing will labour be in the Dawn that a man will be tempted not to knock off work when his Cessation Day comes round, and will prefer to work for no wage rather than not at all. So that perhaps there will have to be a law making Cessation Day compulsory, and the Overseers will be empowered to punish infringement of this law by forbidding the culprit to work for ten days after the first offence, twenty after the second, and so on. But I don’t suppose there will often be need to put this law in motion. The children of the Dawn, remember, will not be the puny self-ridden creatures that we are. They will not say “Is this what I want to do?” but “shall I, by doing this, be (a) harming or (b) benefiting—no matter in how infinitesimal a degree—the Future of the Race?”
Sunday must go. And, as I have hinted, the progress of mankind will be steady proportionately to its automatism. Yet I think there would be no harm in having one—just one—day in the year set aside as a day of universal rest—a day for the searching of hearts. Heaven—I mean the Future—forbid that I should be hide-bound by dry-as-dust logic, in dealing with problems of flesh and blood. The sociologists of the past thought the grey matter of their own brains all-sufficing. They forgot that flesh is pink and blood is red. That is why they could not convert people….
The five-hundredth and last day of each year shall be a General Cessation Day. It will correspond somewhat to our present Christmas Day. But with what a difference! It will not be, as with us, a mere opportunity for relatives to make up the quarrels they have picked with each other during the past year, and to eat and drink things that will make them ill well into next year. Holly and mistletoe there will be in the Municipal Eating Rooms, but the men and women who sit down there to General Cessation High Tea will be glowing not with a facile affection for their kith and kin, but with communal anxiety for the welfare of the great-great-grandchildren of the great-great-grand-children of people they have never met and are never likely to meet.
The great event of the day will be the performance of the ceremony of “Making Way”.
In the Dawn, death will not be the haphazard affair that it is under the present anarchic conditions. Men will not be stumbling out of the world at odd moments and for reasons over which they have no control. There will always, of course, be a percentage of deaths by misadventure. But there will be no deaths by disease. Nor, on the other hand, will people die of old age. Every child will start life knowing that (barring misadventure) he has a certain fixed period of life before him—so much and no more, but not a moment less.
It is impossible to foretell to what average age the children of the Dawn will retain the use of all their faculties—be fully vigorous mentally and physically. We only know that they will be “going strong” at ages when we have long ceased to be of any use to the State. Let us, for sake of argument, say that on the average their faculties will have begun to decay at the age of ninety—a trifle over thirty-two, by the new reckoning. That, then, will be the period of life fixed for all citizens. Every man on fulfilling that period will avail himself of the municipal lethal chamber. He will “make way”….
I thought at one time that it would be best for every man to “make way” on the actual day when he reaches the age-limit. But I see now that this would savour of private enterprise. Moreover, it would rule out that element of sentiment which, in relation to such a thing as death, we must do nothing to mar. The children and friends of a man on the brink of death would instinctively wish to gather round him. How could they accompany him to the lethal chamber, if it were an ordinary working-day, with every moment of the time mapped out for them?
On General Cessation Day, therefore, the gates of the lethal chambers will stand open for all those who shall in the course of the past year have reached the age-limit. You must figure the wide streets filled all day long with little solemn processions—solemn and yet not in the least unhappy…. You must figure the old man walking with a firm step in the midst of his progeny, looking around him with a clear eye at this dear world which is about to lose him. He will not be thinking of himself. He will not be wishing the way to the lethal chamber were shorter. He will be filled with joy at the thought that he is about to die for the good of the race—to “make way” for the beautiful young breed of men and women who, in simple, artistic, antiseptic garments, are disporting themselves so gladly on this day of days. They pause to salute him as he passes. And presently he sees, radiant in the sunlight, the pleasant white-tiled dome of the lethal chamber. You must figure him at the gate, shaking hands all round, and speaking perhaps a few well-chosen words about the Future….
† Published by the Young Self-Helpers' Press, Ipswich.
‡ “Are We Going Too Fast?”
§ “A Midwife For The Millennium.” H. G. W*lls. 1905.
|| “How To Be Happy Though Yet Unborn.” H. G. W*lls. 1903.
¶ “Words About Words.” By Ezrah K. Higgins, Professor of Etymology, Abraham Z. Stubbins University, Padua, Pa., U.S.A. (2 vols.). 1906.
** “Id est”—“That is.”
[Note: This also appears in a different form in A Christmas Garland (1912).]
29 December 2013
28 December 2013
Xmas Reading: How Mr. Chokepear Keeps a Merry Christmas by Douglas Jerrold
[Mr. Chokespear is thought by some [whom?] to be an inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge]
Mr. Chokepear is, to the finger-nails, a respectable man. The taxgatherer was never known to call at his door a second time for the same rate; he takes the sacrament two or three times a year, and has in his cellar the oldest port in the parish. He has more than once subscribed to the fund for the conversion of the Jews; and, as a proof of his devotion to the interests of the established church, it was he who started the subscription to present the excellent Doctor Mannamooth with a superb silver tea-pot, cream-jug, and spoons. He did this, as he has often proudly declared, to show to the infidel world that there were some men in the parish who were true Christians. He has acquired a profound respect for Sir Peter Laurie, since the alderman’s judgments upon “the starving villains who would fly in the face of their Maker;” and, having a very comfortable balance at his banker’s, considers all despair very weak, very foolish, and very sinful. He, however, blesses himself that for such miscreants there is Newgate; and more—there is Sir Peter Laurie.
Mr. Chokepear loves Christmas! Yes, he is an Englishman, and he will tell you that he loves to keep Christmas-day in the true old English fashion. How does he keep it?
It is eight o’clock, and Mr. Chokepear rises from his goose-down. He dresses himself, says his short morning thanksgiving, and being an economist of time, unconsciously polishes his gold watch-chain the while. He descends to the breakfast parlour, and receives from lips of ice, the wishes of a happy Christmas, pronounced by sons and daughters, to whom, as he himself declares, he is “the best of fathers”—the most indulgent of men.
The church-bell tolls, and the Chokepears, prepare for worship. What meekness, what self-abasement sits on the Christian face of Tobias Chokepear as he walks up the aisle to his cosey pew; where the woman, with turned key and hopes of Christmas half-crown lighting her withered face, sinks a curtsey as she lets “the miserable sinner” in; having carefully pre-arranged the soft cushions and hassocks for the said sinner, his wife, his sons, and daughters. The female Chokepears with half the produce of a Canadian winter’s hunting in their tippets, muffs, and dresses, and with their noses, like pens stained with red ink,—prepare themselves to receive the religious blessings of the day. They then venture to look around the church, and recognising Chokepears of kindred nature, though not of name, in pews—(none of course among the most “miserable sinners” on the bare benches)—they smile a bland salutation, and—but hush! the service is about to begin.
And now will Tobias Chokepear perform the religious duties of a Christian! Look at him, how he feeds upon every syllable of the minister. He turns the Prayer-book familiarly, as if it were his bank account, and, in a moment, lights upon the prayers set apart for the day. With what a composed, assured face he listens to the decalogue—how firm his voice in the responses—and though the effrontery of scandal avows that he shifts somewhat from Mrs. Chokepear’s eye at the mention of “the maid-servant”—we do not believe it.
It is thus Chokepear begins his Christmas-day. He comes to celebrate the event of the Incarnation of all goodness; to return “his most humble and hearty thanks” for the glory that Providence has vouchsafed to him in making him a Christian. He—Tobias Chokepear—might have been born a Gentoo! Gracious powers! he might have been doomed to trim the lamps in the Temple of Juggernaut—he might have come into this.world to sweep the marble of the Mosque at Mecca—be might have been a faquir, with iron and wooden pins “stuck in his mortified bare flesh”—he might, we shudder to think upon the probability, have brandished his club as a New Zealander; and his stomach, in a state of heathen darkness to the humanising beauties of goose and apple-sauce, might, with unblessed appetite, have fed upon the flesh of his enemies. He might, as a Laplander, have driven a sledge, and fed upon walrus-blubber; and now is he an Englishman—a Christian—a carriage holder, and an eater of venison!
It is plain that all these thoughts—called up by the eloquence of Doctor Mannamouth, who preaches on the occasion—are busy in the bosom of Chokepear; and he sits on his soft cushion, with his eyelids declined, swelling and melting with gratitude for his blissful condition. Yes; he feels the glorious prerogative of his birth—the exquisite beauty of his religion. He ought to feel himself a happy man; and, glancing round his handsomely-appointed pew—he does.
“A sweet discourse—a very sweet discourse,” says Chokepear to several respectable acquaintance, as the organ plays the congregation out; and Chokepear looks round about him airily, contentedly; as though his conscience was as unseared as the green holly that decorates the pews; as though his heart was fresh, and red, and spotless as its berries.
Well, the religious ceremonies of the day being duly observed, ChokePear resolves to enjoy Christmas in the true old English fashion. Oh ! ye gods, that bless the larders of the respectable,—what a dinner! The board is enough to give Plenty a plethora, and the whole house is odoriferous as the airs of Araby. And then, what delightful evidences of old observing friendship on the table! There is a turkey—“only a little lower” than an ostrich— despatched all the wayfrom an acquaintance in Norfolk, to smoke a Christmas salutation to good Mr. Chokepear. Another county sends a goose—another pheasants—another brawn; and Chokepear, with his eye half slumbering in delight upon the gifts, inwardly avows that the friendship of friends really well to do is a fine, a noble thing.
The dinner passes off most admirably. Not one single culinary accident has marred a single dish. The pudding is delicious; the custards are something better than manna—the mince pies a conglomeration of ambrosial sweets. And then the Port! Mr. Chokepear smacks his lips like a whip, and gazes on the bee’s wing, as Herschell would gaze upon a newfound star, “swimming in the blue profound.” Mr. Chokepear wishes all a merry Christmas, and tosses off the wine, its flavour by no means injured by the declared conviction of the drinker, that “there isn’t such another glass in the parish!”
The evening comes on. Cards, snap-dragons, quadrilles, country-dances, with a hundred devices to make people.eat and drink, send night into morning; and it may be at six or seven on the twenty-sixth of December, our friend Chokepear, a little mellow, but not at all too mellow for the season, returns to his sheets, and when he rises declares that he has passed a very merry Christmas. If the human animal were all stomach—all one large paunch—we should agree with Chokepear that he had passed a merry Christmas: but was it the Christmas of a good man or a Christian? Let us see.
We have said all Chokepear’s daughters dined with him. We forgot: one was absent. Some seven years ago she married a poorer husband, and poverty was his only, but certainly his sufficient fault; and her father vowed that she should never again cross his threshold. The Christian keeps his word. He has been to church to celebrate the event which preached to all men mutual love and mutual forgiveness, and he comes home, and with rancour in his heart—keeps a merry Christmas!
We have briefly touched upon the banquet spread before Chokepear. There is a poor debtor of his in Horsemonger-lane prison—a debtor to the amount of at least a hundred shillings. Does he dine on Christmas-day? Oh! yes j Mr. Chokepear will read in The Times of Monday how the under-marshal served to each prisoner a pound of beef, a slice of pudding, and a pint of porter! The man might have spent the day in freedom with his wife and children; but Mr. Chokepear in his pew thought not of his debtor, and the creditor at least—kept a merry Christmas!
How many shivering wretches pass Chokepear’s door! How many, with the wintry air biting their naked limbs, and freezing within them the very springs of human hope! In Chokepear’s house there are, it may be, a dozen coats, nay, a hundred articles of cast-off dress, flung aside for the moth—piles of stuff and flannel, that would at this season wrap the limbs of the wretched in comparative Elysium. Does Mr. Chokepear, the respectable, the Christian Chokepear, order these (to him unnecessary) things to be given to the naked? He thinks not of them; for he wears fleecy hosiery next his skin, and being in all things dressed in defiance of the season—keeps a merry Christmas.
Gentle reader, we wish you a merry Christmas ; but to be truly, wisely merry, it must not be the Christmas of the Chokepears. That is the Christmas of the belly: keep you the Christmas of the heart. Give—give. Q
[from Punch, 25 December 1841]
Mr. Chokepear is, to the finger-nails, a respectable man. The taxgatherer was never known to call at his door a second time for the same rate; he takes the sacrament two or three times a year, and has in his cellar the oldest port in the parish. He has more than once subscribed to the fund for the conversion of the Jews; and, as a proof of his devotion to the interests of the established church, it was he who started the subscription to present the excellent Doctor Mannamooth with a superb silver tea-pot, cream-jug, and spoons. He did this, as he has often proudly declared, to show to the infidel world that there were some men in the parish who were true Christians. He has acquired a profound respect for Sir Peter Laurie, since the alderman’s judgments upon “the starving villains who would fly in the face of their Maker;” and, having a very comfortable balance at his banker’s, considers all despair very weak, very foolish, and very sinful. He, however, blesses himself that for such miscreants there is Newgate; and more—there is Sir Peter Laurie.
Mr. Chokepear loves Christmas! Yes, he is an Englishman, and he will tell you that he loves to keep Christmas-day in the true old English fashion. How does he keep it?
It is eight o’clock, and Mr. Chokepear rises from his goose-down. He dresses himself, says his short morning thanksgiving, and being an economist of time, unconsciously polishes his gold watch-chain the while. He descends to the breakfast parlour, and receives from lips of ice, the wishes of a happy Christmas, pronounced by sons and daughters, to whom, as he himself declares, he is “the best of fathers”—the most indulgent of men.
The church-bell tolls, and the Chokepears, prepare for worship. What meekness, what self-abasement sits on the Christian face of Tobias Chokepear as he walks up the aisle to his cosey pew; where the woman, with turned key and hopes of Christmas half-crown lighting her withered face, sinks a curtsey as she lets “the miserable sinner” in; having carefully pre-arranged the soft cushions and hassocks for the said sinner, his wife, his sons, and daughters. The female Chokepears with half the produce of a Canadian winter’s hunting in their tippets, muffs, and dresses, and with their noses, like pens stained with red ink,—prepare themselves to receive the religious blessings of the day. They then venture to look around the church, and recognising Chokepears of kindred nature, though not of name, in pews—(none of course among the most “miserable sinners” on the bare benches)—they smile a bland salutation, and—but hush! the service is about to begin.
And now will Tobias Chokepear perform the religious duties of a Christian! Look at him, how he feeds upon every syllable of the minister. He turns the Prayer-book familiarly, as if it were his bank account, and, in a moment, lights upon the prayers set apart for the day. With what a composed, assured face he listens to the decalogue—how firm his voice in the responses—and though the effrontery of scandal avows that he shifts somewhat from Mrs. Chokepear’s eye at the mention of “the maid-servant”—we do not believe it.
It is thus Chokepear begins his Christmas-day. He comes to celebrate the event of the Incarnation of all goodness; to return “his most humble and hearty thanks” for the glory that Providence has vouchsafed to him in making him a Christian. He—Tobias Chokepear—might have been born a Gentoo! Gracious powers! he might have been doomed to trim the lamps in the Temple of Juggernaut—he might have come into this.world to sweep the marble of the Mosque at Mecca—be might have been a faquir, with iron and wooden pins “stuck in his mortified bare flesh”—he might, we shudder to think upon the probability, have brandished his club as a New Zealander; and his stomach, in a state of heathen darkness to the humanising beauties of goose and apple-sauce, might, with unblessed appetite, have fed upon the flesh of his enemies. He might, as a Laplander, have driven a sledge, and fed upon walrus-blubber; and now is he an Englishman—a Christian—a carriage holder, and an eater of venison!
It is plain that all these thoughts—called up by the eloquence of Doctor Mannamouth, who preaches on the occasion—are busy in the bosom of Chokepear; and he sits on his soft cushion, with his eyelids declined, swelling and melting with gratitude for his blissful condition. Yes; he feels the glorious prerogative of his birth—the exquisite beauty of his religion. He ought to feel himself a happy man; and, glancing round his handsomely-appointed pew—he does.
“A sweet discourse—a very sweet discourse,” says Chokepear to several respectable acquaintance, as the organ plays the congregation out; and Chokepear looks round about him airily, contentedly; as though his conscience was as unseared as the green holly that decorates the pews; as though his heart was fresh, and red, and spotless as its berries.
Well, the religious ceremonies of the day being duly observed, ChokePear resolves to enjoy Christmas in the true old English fashion. Oh ! ye gods, that bless the larders of the respectable,—what a dinner! The board is enough to give Plenty a plethora, and the whole house is odoriferous as the airs of Araby. And then, what delightful evidences of old observing friendship on the table! There is a turkey—“only a little lower” than an ostrich— despatched all the wayfrom an acquaintance in Norfolk, to smoke a Christmas salutation to good Mr. Chokepear. Another county sends a goose—another pheasants—another brawn; and Chokepear, with his eye half slumbering in delight upon the gifts, inwardly avows that the friendship of friends really well to do is a fine, a noble thing.
The dinner passes off most admirably. Not one single culinary accident has marred a single dish. The pudding is delicious; the custards are something better than manna—the mince pies a conglomeration of ambrosial sweets. And then the Port! Mr. Chokepear smacks his lips like a whip, and gazes on the bee’s wing, as Herschell would gaze upon a newfound star, “swimming in the blue profound.” Mr. Chokepear wishes all a merry Christmas, and tosses off the wine, its flavour by no means injured by the declared conviction of the drinker, that “there isn’t such another glass in the parish!”
The evening comes on. Cards, snap-dragons, quadrilles, country-dances, with a hundred devices to make people.eat and drink, send night into morning; and it may be at six or seven on the twenty-sixth of December, our friend Chokepear, a little mellow, but not at all too mellow for the season, returns to his sheets, and when he rises declares that he has passed a very merry Christmas. If the human animal were all stomach—all one large paunch—we should agree with Chokepear that he had passed a merry Christmas: but was it the Christmas of a good man or a Christian? Let us see.
We have said all Chokepear’s daughters dined with him. We forgot: one was absent. Some seven years ago she married a poorer husband, and poverty was his only, but certainly his sufficient fault; and her father vowed that she should never again cross his threshold. The Christian keeps his word. He has been to church to celebrate the event which preached to all men mutual love and mutual forgiveness, and he comes home, and with rancour in his heart—keeps a merry Christmas!
We have briefly touched upon the banquet spread before Chokepear. There is a poor debtor of his in Horsemonger-lane prison—a debtor to the amount of at least a hundred shillings. Does he dine on Christmas-day? Oh! yes j Mr. Chokepear will read in The Times of Monday how the under-marshal served to each prisoner a pound of beef, a slice of pudding, and a pint of porter! The man might have spent the day in freedom with his wife and children; but Mr. Chokepear in his pew thought not of his debtor, and the creditor at least—kept a merry Christmas!
How many shivering wretches pass Chokepear’s door! How many, with the wintry air biting their naked limbs, and freezing within them the very springs of human hope! In Chokepear’s house there are, it may be, a dozen coats, nay, a hundred articles of cast-off dress, flung aside for the moth—piles of stuff and flannel, that would at this season wrap the limbs of the wretched in comparative Elysium. Does Mr. Chokepear, the respectable, the Christian Chokepear, order these (to him unnecessary) things to be given to the naked? He thinks not of them; for he wears fleecy hosiery next his skin, and being in all things dressed in defiance of the season—keeps a merry Christmas.
Gentle reader, we wish you a merry Christmas ; but to be truly, wisely merry, it must not be the Christmas of the Chokepears. That is the Christmas of the belly: keep you the Christmas of the heart. Give—give. Q
[from Punch, 25 December 1841]
27 December 2013
Quotation of the Day
Bad arguments don't get better when you use Latin.
Jeffrey Shallit (“More Philosophical Silliness)”
Xmas Reading: Christmas and the New Year, by Ambrose Bierce
In our manner of observing Christmas there is much, no doubt, that is absurd. Christmas is to some extent a day of meaningless ceremonies, false sentiment and hollow compliments endlessly iterated and misapplied. The observances “appropriate to the day” had, many of them, their origin in an age with which our own has little in common and in countries whose social and religious characteristics were unlike those obtaining here. As in so many other matters, America has in this been content to take her heritage without inquiry and without alteration, sacredly preserving much that once had a meaning now lost, much that is now an anachronism, a mere “survival.” Even to the Christmas vocabulary we have added little. St. Nicholas himself, the patron saint of deceived children, still masquerades under the Spanish feminine title of “Santa” and the German nickname of “Claus.” The back of our American coal grate is still idealized as a “yule log,” and the English “holly” is supposed in most cases fitly to be shadowed forth by a cedar bough, while a comparatively innocuous but equally inedible indigenous comestible figures as the fatal English “plum pudding.” Nearly all our Christmas literature is, longo intervallo, European in spirit and Dickensish in form. In short, we have Christmas merely because we were in the line of succession. We have taken it as it was transmitted, and we try to make the worst of it.
The approach of the season is apparent in the manner of the friend or relative whose orbs furtively explore your own, seeking a sign of what you are going to give him; in the irrepressible solicitations of babes and cloutlings; in wild cascades of such literature as Greenleaf on Evidence, for Boys (“Boot-Leg” series), The Little Girls’ Illustrated Differential Calculus and Aunt Hetty’s Rabelais, in words of one syllable. Most clearly is the advent of the blessed anniversary manifest in maddening iteration of the greeting wherein, with a precision that never by any chance mistakes its adjective, you are wished a “merry” Christmas by the same person who a week later will be making ninety-nine “happies” out of a possible hundred in New Year greetings similarly insincere and similarly insufferable. It is unknown to me why a Christmas should be always merry but never happy, and why the happiness appropriate to the New Year should not be expressed in merriment. These be mysteries in whose penetration abundance of human stupidity might be disclosed. By the time that one has been wished a “merry Christmas” or a “happy New Year” some scores of times in the course of a morning walk, by persons who he knows care nothing about either his merriment or his happiness, he is disposed, if he is a person of right feeling, to take a pessimist view of the “compliments of the season” and of the season of compliments. He cherishes, according to disposition, a bitter animosity or a tolerant contempt toward his race. He relinquishes for another year his hope of meeting some day a brilliant genius or inspired idiot who will have the intrepidity to vary the adjective and wish him a “happy Christmas” or a “merry New Year”; or with an even more captivating originality, keep his mouth shut.
As to the sum of sincerity and genuine good will that utters itself in making and accepting gifts (the other distinctive feature of holiday time) statistics, unhappily, are wanting and estimates untrustworthy. It may reasonably be assumed that the custom, though largely a survival—gifts having originally been given in a propitiatory way by the weak to the powerful—is something more; the present of a goggle-eyed doll from a man six feet high to a baby twenty-nine inches long not being lucidly explainable by assumption of an interested motive.
To the children the day is delightful and instructive. It enables them to see their elders in all the various stages of interesting idiocy, and teaches them by means of the Santa Claus deception that exceedingly hard liars may be good mothers and fathers and miscellaneous relatives—thus habituating the infant mind to charitable judgment and establishing an elastic standard of truth that will be useful in their later life.
The annual recurrence of the “carnival of crime” at Christmas has been variously accounted for by different authorities. By some it is supposed to be a providential dispensation intended to heighten the holiday joys of those who are fortunate enough to escape with their lives. Others attribute it to the lax morality consequent upon the demand for presents, and still others to the remorse inspired by consciousness of ruinous purchases. It is affirmed by some that persons deliberately and with malice aforethought put themselves in the way of being killed, in order to avert the tiresome iteration of Christmas greetings. If this is correct, the annual Christmas “holocaust” is not an evil demanding abatement, but a blessing to be received in a spirit of devout and pious gratitude.
When the earth in its eternal circumgression arrives at the point where it was at the same time the year before, the sentimentalist whom Christmas has not exhausted of his essence squeezes out his pitiful dreg of emotion to baptize the New Year withal. He dusts and polishes his aspirations, and reerects his resolve, extracting these well-worn properties from the cobwebby corners of his moral lumber-room, whither they were relegated three hundred and sixty-four days before. He “swears off.” In short, he sets the centuries at defiance, breaks the sequence of cause and effect, repeals the laws of nature and makes himself a new disposition from a bit of nothing left over at the creation of the universe. He can not add an inch to his stature, but thinks he can add a virtue to his character. He can not shed his nails, but believes he can renounce his vices. Unable to eradicate a freckle from his skin, he is confident he can decree a habit out of his conduct. An improvident friend of mine writes upon his mirror with a bit of soap the cabalistic word, AFAHMASP. This is the fiat lux to create the shining virtue of thrift, for it means, A Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted. What need have we of morality’s countless ministries; the complicated machinery of the church; recurrent suasions of precept and unceasing counsel of example; pursuing din of homily; still, small voice of solicitude and inaudible argument of surroundings—if one may make of himself what he will with a mirror and a bit of soap? But (it may be urged) if one can not reform himself, how can he reform others? Dear reader, let us have a frank understanding. He can not.
The practice of inflating the midnight steam-shrieker and belaboring the nocturnal ding-dong to frighten the encroaching New Year is obviously ineffectual, and might profitably be discontinued. It is no whit more sensible and dignified than the custom of savages who beat their sounding dogs to scare away an eclipse. If one elect to live with barbarians, one must endure the barbarous noises of their barbarous superstitions, but the disagreeable simpleton who sits up till midnight to ring a bell or fire a gun because the earth has arrived at a given point in its orbit should nevertheless be deprecated as an enemy to his race. He is a sore trial to the feelings, an affliction almost too sharp for endurance. If he and his sentimental abettors might be melted and cast into a great bell, every right-minded man would derive an innocent delight from pounding it, not only on January first but all the year long.
[from Tangential Views (1911)]
The approach of the season is apparent in the manner of the friend or relative whose orbs furtively explore your own, seeking a sign of what you are going to give him; in the irrepressible solicitations of babes and cloutlings; in wild cascades of such literature as Greenleaf on Evidence, for Boys (“Boot-Leg” series), The Little Girls’ Illustrated Differential Calculus and Aunt Hetty’s Rabelais, in words of one syllable. Most clearly is the advent of the blessed anniversary manifest in maddening iteration of the greeting wherein, with a precision that never by any chance mistakes its adjective, you are wished a “merry” Christmas by the same person who a week later will be making ninety-nine “happies” out of a possible hundred in New Year greetings similarly insincere and similarly insufferable. It is unknown to me why a Christmas should be always merry but never happy, and why the happiness appropriate to the New Year should not be expressed in merriment. These be mysteries in whose penetration abundance of human stupidity might be disclosed. By the time that one has been wished a “merry Christmas” or a “happy New Year” some scores of times in the course of a morning walk, by persons who he knows care nothing about either his merriment or his happiness, he is disposed, if he is a person of right feeling, to take a pessimist view of the “compliments of the season” and of the season of compliments. He cherishes, according to disposition, a bitter animosity or a tolerant contempt toward his race. He relinquishes for another year his hope of meeting some day a brilliant genius or inspired idiot who will have the intrepidity to vary the adjective and wish him a “happy Christmas” or a “merry New Year”; or with an even more captivating originality, keep his mouth shut.
As to the sum of sincerity and genuine good will that utters itself in making and accepting gifts (the other distinctive feature of holiday time) statistics, unhappily, are wanting and estimates untrustworthy. It may reasonably be assumed that the custom, though largely a survival—gifts having originally been given in a propitiatory way by the weak to the powerful—is something more; the present of a goggle-eyed doll from a man six feet high to a baby twenty-nine inches long not being lucidly explainable by assumption of an interested motive.
To the children the day is delightful and instructive. It enables them to see their elders in all the various stages of interesting idiocy, and teaches them by means of the Santa Claus deception that exceedingly hard liars may be good mothers and fathers and miscellaneous relatives—thus habituating the infant mind to charitable judgment and establishing an elastic standard of truth that will be useful in their later life.
The annual recurrence of the “carnival of crime” at Christmas has been variously accounted for by different authorities. By some it is supposed to be a providential dispensation intended to heighten the holiday joys of those who are fortunate enough to escape with their lives. Others attribute it to the lax morality consequent upon the demand for presents, and still others to the remorse inspired by consciousness of ruinous purchases. It is affirmed by some that persons deliberately and with malice aforethought put themselves in the way of being killed, in order to avert the tiresome iteration of Christmas greetings. If this is correct, the annual Christmas “holocaust” is not an evil demanding abatement, but a blessing to be received in a spirit of devout and pious gratitude.
When the earth in its eternal circumgression arrives at the point where it was at the same time the year before, the sentimentalist whom Christmas has not exhausted of his essence squeezes out his pitiful dreg of emotion to baptize the New Year withal. He dusts and polishes his aspirations, and reerects his resolve, extracting these well-worn properties from the cobwebby corners of his moral lumber-room, whither they were relegated three hundred and sixty-four days before. He “swears off.” In short, he sets the centuries at defiance, breaks the sequence of cause and effect, repeals the laws of nature and makes himself a new disposition from a bit of nothing left over at the creation of the universe. He can not add an inch to his stature, but thinks he can add a virtue to his character. He can not shed his nails, but believes he can renounce his vices. Unable to eradicate a freckle from his skin, he is confident he can decree a habit out of his conduct. An improvident friend of mine writes upon his mirror with a bit of soap the cabalistic word, AFAHMASP. This is the fiat lux to create the shining virtue of thrift, for it means, A Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted. What need have we of morality’s countless ministries; the complicated machinery of the church; recurrent suasions of precept and unceasing counsel of example; pursuing din of homily; still, small voice of solicitude and inaudible argument of surroundings—if one may make of himself what he will with a mirror and a bit of soap? But (it may be urged) if one can not reform himself, how can he reform others? Dear reader, let us have a frank understanding. He can not.
The practice of inflating the midnight steam-shrieker and belaboring the nocturnal ding-dong to frighten the encroaching New Year is obviously ineffectual, and might profitably be discontinued. It is no whit more sensible and dignified than the custom of savages who beat their sounding dogs to scare away an eclipse. If one elect to live with barbarians, one must endure the barbarous noises of their barbarous superstitions, but the disagreeable simpleton who sits up till midnight to ring a bell or fire a gun because the earth has arrived at a given point in its orbit should nevertheless be deprecated as an enemy to his race. He is a sore trial to the feelings, an affliction almost too sharp for endurance. If he and his sentimental abettors might be melted and cast into a great bell, every right-minded man would derive an innocent delight from pounding it, not only on January first but all the year long.
[from Tangential Views (1911)]
26 December 2013
Xmas Reading: The Feast by J*s*ph C*nr*d
[Sir Max Beerbohm imagines how Joseph Conrad might tell a Christmas story]
The hut in which slept the white man was on a clearing between the forest and the river. Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. Mahamo lay rigid and watchful at the hut’s mouth. In his upturned eyes, and along the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars were reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are illusions.
The roofs of the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the lush herbage went through the farce of growth—that farce old and screaming, whose trite end is decomposition.
Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything else, only more so. Flying squadrons of mosquitoes inside its meshes flickered and darted over him, working hard, but keeping silence so as not to excite him from sleep. Cohorts of yellow ants disputed him against cohorts of purple ants, the two kinds slaying one another in thousands. The battle was undecided when suddenly, with no such warning as it gives in some parts of the world, the sun blazed up over the horizon, turning night into day, and the insects vanished back into their camps.
The white man ground his knuckles into the corners of his eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net and peered around. The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night. So far so good. The faithful servant of his employers was now at liberty to care for his own interests. He regarded himself, passing his hands over his skin.
“Hi! Mahamo!” he shouted. “I’ve been eaten up.”
The islander, with one sinuous motion, sprang from the ground, through the mouth of the hut. Then, after a glance, he threw high his hands in thanks to such good and evil spirits as had charge of his concerns. In a tone half of reproach, half of apology, he murmured—
“You white men sometimes say strange things that deceive the heart.”
“Reach me that ammonia bottle, d’you hear?” answered the white man. “This is a pretty place you’ve brought me to!” He took a draught. “Christmas Day, too! Of all the— But I suppose it seems all right to you, you funny blackamoor, to be here on Christmas Day?”
“We are here on the day appointed, Mr. Williams. It is a feast-day of your people?”
Mr. Williams had lain back, with closed eyes, on his mat. Nostalgia was doing duty to him for imagination. He was wafted to a bedroom in Marylebone, where in honour of the Day he lay late dozing, with great contentment; outside, a slush of snow in the street, the sound of churchbells; from below a savour of especial cookery. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a feast-day of my people.”
“Of mine also,” said the islander humbly.
“Is it though? But they'll do business first?”
“They must first do that.”
“And they’ll bring their ivory with them?”
“Every man will bring ivory,” answered the islander, with a smile gleaming and wide.
“How soon’ll they be here?”
“Has not the sun risen? They are on their way.”
“Well, I hope they’ll hurry. The sooner we’re off this cursed island of yours the better. Take all those things out,” Mr. Williams added, pointing to the merchandise, “and arrange them—neatly, mind you!”
In certain circumstances it is right that a man be humoured in trifles. Mahamo, having borne out the merchandise, arranged it very neatly.
While Mr. Williams made his toilet, the sun and the forest, careless of the doings of white and black men alike, waged their warfare implacable and daily. The forest from its inmost depths sent forth perpetually its legions of shadows that fell dead in the instant of exposure to the enemy whose rays heroic and absurd its outposts annihilated. There came from those inilluminable depths the equable rumour of myriads of winged things and crawling things newly roused to the task of killing and being killed. Thence detached itself, little by little, an insidious sound of a drum beaten. This sound drew more near.
Mr. Williams, issuing from the hut, heard it, and stood gaping towards it.
“Is that them?” he asked.
“That is they,” the islander murmured, moving away towards the edge of the forest.
Sounds of chanting were a now audible accompanient to the drum.
“What’s that they’re singing?” asked Mr. Williams.
“They sing of their business,” said Mahamo.
“Oh!” Mr. Williams was slightly shocked. “I’d have thought they’d be singing of their feast.”
“It is of their feast they sing.”
It has been stated that Mr. Williams was not imaginative. But a few years of life in climates alien and intemperate had disordered his nerves. There was that in the rhythms of the hymn which made bristle his flesh.
Suddenly, when they were very near, the voices ceased, leaving a legacy of silence more sinister than themselves. And now the black spaces between the trees were relieved by bits of white that were the eyeballs and teeth of Mahamo’s brethren.
“It was of their feast, it was of you, they sang,” said Mahamo.
“Look here,” cried Mr. Williams in his voice of a man not to be trifled with. “Look here, if you've—”
He was silenced by sight of what seemed to be a young sapling sprung up from the ground within a yard of him—a young sapling tremulous, with a root of steel. Then a thread-like shadow skimmed the air, and another spear came impinging the ground within an inch of his feet.
As he turned in his flight he saw the goods so neatly arranged at his orders, and there flashed through him, even in the thick of the spears, the thought that he would be a grave loss to his employers. This—for Mr. Williams was, not less than the goods, of a kind easily replaced—was an illusion. It was the last of Mr. Williams’ illusions.
[from A Christmas Garland (1912)]
The hut in which slept the white man was on a clearing between the forest and the river. Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. Mahamo lay rigid and watchful at the hut’s mouth. In his upturned eyes, and along the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars were reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are illusions.
The roofs of the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the lush herbage went through the farce of growth—that farce old and screaming, whose trite end is decomposition.
Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything else, only more so. Flying squadrons of mosquitoes inside its meshes flickered and darted over him, working hard, but keeping silence so as not to excite him from sleep. Cohorts of yellow ants disputed him against cohorts of purple ants, the two kinds slaying one another in thousands. The battle was undecided when suddenly, with no such warning as it gives in some parts of the world, the sun blazed up over the horizon, turning night into day, and the insects vanished back into their camps.
The white man ground his knuckles into the corners of his eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net and peered around. The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night. So far so good. The faithful servant of his employers was now at liberty to care for his own interests. He regarded himself, passing his hands over his skin.
“Hi! Mahamo!” he shouted. “I’ve been eaten up.”
The islander, with one sinuous motion, sprang from the ground, through the mouth of the hut. Then, after a glance, he threw high his hands in thanks to such good and evil spirits as had charge of his concerns. In a tone half of reproach, half of apology, he murmured—
“You white men sometimes say strange things that deceive the heart.”
“Reach me that ammonia bottle, d’you hear?” answered the white man. “This is a pretty place you’ve brought me to!” He took a draught. “Christmas Day, too! Of all the— But I suppose it seems all right to you, you funny blackamoor, to be here on Christmas Day?”
“We are here on the day appointed, Mr. Williams. It is a feast-day of your people?”
Mr. Williams had lain back, with closed eyes, on his mat. Nostalgia was doing duty to him for imagination. He was wafted to a bedroom in Marylebone, where in honour of the Day he lay late dozing, with great contentment; outside, a slush of snow in the street, the sound of churchbells; from below a savour of especial cookery. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a feast-day of my people.”
“Of mine also,” said the islander humbly.
“Is it though? But they'll do business first?”
“They must first do that.”
“And they’ll bring their ivory with them?”
“Every man will bring ivory,” answered the islander, with a smile gleaming and wide.
“How soon’ll they be here?”
“Has not the sun risen? They are on their way.”
“Well, I hope they’ll hurry. The sooner we’re off this cursed island of yours the better. Take all those things out,” Mr. Williams added, pointing to the merchandise, “and arrange them—neatly, mind you!”
In certain circumstances it is right that a man be humoured in trifles. Mahamo, having borne out the merchandise, arranged it very neatly.
While Mr. Williams made his toilet, the sun and the forest, careless of the doings of white and black men alike, waged their warfare implacable and daily. The forest from its inmost depths sent forth perpetually its legions of shadows that fell dead in the instant of exposure to the enemy whose rays heroic and absurd its outposts annihilated. There came from those inilluminable depths the equable rumour of myriads of winged things and crawling things newly roused to the task of killing and being killed. Thence detached itself, little by little, an insidious sound of a drum beaten. This sound drew more near.
Mr. Williams, issuing from the hut, heard it, and stood gaping towards it.
“Is that them?” he asked.
“That is they,” the islander murmured, moving away towards the edge of the forest.
Sounds of chanting were a now audible accompanient to the drum.
“What’s that they’re singing?” asked Mr. Williams.
“They sing of their business,” said Mahamo.
“Oh!” Mr. Williams was slightly shocked. “I’d have thought they’d be singing of their feast.”
“It is of their feast they sing.”
It has been stated that Mr. Williams was not imaginative. But a few years of life in climates alien and intemperate had disordered his nerves. There was that in the rhythms of the hymn which made bristle his flesh.
Suddenly, when they were very near, the voices ceased, leaving a legacy of silence more sinister than themselves. And now the black spaces between the trees were relieved by bits of white that were the eyeballs and teeth of Mahamo’s brethren.
“It was of their feast, it was of you, they sang,” said Mahamo.
“Look here,” cried Mr. Williams in his voice of a man not to be trifled with. “Look here, if you've—”
He was silenced by sight of what seemed to be a young sapling sprung up from the ground within a yard of him—a young sapling tremulous, with a root of steel. Then a thread-like shadow skimmed the air, and another spear came impinging the ground within an inch of his feet.
As he turned in his flight he saw the goods so neatly arranged at his orders, and there flashed through him, even in the thick of the spears, the thought that he would be a grave loss to his employers. This—for Mr. Williams was, not less than the goods, of a kind easily replaced—was an illusion. It was the last of Mr. Williams’ illusions.
[from A Christmas Garland (1912)]
25 December 2013
Xmas Reading: Christmas Afternoon, by Robert Benchley
Done in the Manner, if Not the Spirit, of Dickens
What an afternoon! Mr. Gummidge said that, in his estimation, there never had been such an afternoon since the world began, a sentiment which was heartily endorsed by Mrs. Gummidge and all the little Gummidges, not to mention the relatives who had come over from Jersey for the day.
In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming, gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating— and true enough she didn't—a dragging, devitalizing ennui, which left its victims strewn about the livingroom in various attitudes of prostration suggestive of those of the petrified occupants in a newly unearthed Pompeiian dwelling; an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly veiled insults, and which ended in ruptures in the clan spirit serious enough to last throughout the glad new year.
Then there were the toys! Three and a quarter dozen toys to be divided among seven children. Surely enough, you or I might say, to satisfy the little tots. But that would be because we didn't know the tots. In came Baby Lester Gummidge, Lillian's boy, dragging an electric grain-elevator which happened to be the only toy in the entire collection which appealed to little Norman, fiveyear-old son of Luther, who lived in Rahway. In came curly-headed Erne in frantic and throaty disputation with Arthur, Jr., over the possession of an articulated zebra. In came Everett, bearing a mechanical man which would no longer dance, owing to a previous forcible feeding by the baby of a marshmallow into its only available aperture. In came Fonlansbee, teeth buried in the hand of little Ormond, which bore a popular but battered remnant of what had once been the proud false-bosom of a hussar’s uniform. In they all came, one after another, some crying, some snapping, some pulling, some pushing—all appealing to their respective parents for aid in their intra-mural warfare.
And the cigar smoke! Mrs. Gummidge said that she didn't mind the smoke from a good cigarette, but would they mind if she opened the windows for just a minute in order to clear the room of the heavy aroma of used cigars? Mr. Gummidge stoutly maintained that they were good cigars. His brother, George Gummidge, said that he, likewise, would say that they were. At which colloquial sally both the Gummidge brothers laughed testily, thereby breaking the laughter record for the afternoon.
Aunt Libbie, who lived with George, remarked from the dark corner of the room that it seemed just like Sunday to her. An amendment was offered to this statement by the cousin, who was in the insurance business, stating that it was worse than Sunday. Murmurings indicative of as hearty agreement with this sentiment as their lethargy would allow came from the other members of the family circle, causing Mr. Gummidge to suggest a walk in the air to settle their dinner.
And then arose such a chorus of protestations as has seldom been heard. It was too cloudy to walk. It was too raw. It looked like snow. It looked like rain. Luther Gummidge said that he must be starting along home soon, anyway, bringing forth the acid query from Mrs. Gummidge as to whether or not he was bored. Lillian said that she felt a cold coming on, and added that something they had had for dinner must have been undercooked. And so it went, back and forth, forth and back, up and down, and in and out, until Mr. Gummidge’s suggestion of a walk in the air was reduced to a tattered impossibility and the entire company glowed with ill-feeling.
In the meantime, we must not forget the children. No one else could. Aunt Libbie said that she didn’t think there was anything like children to make a Christmas; to which Uncle Ray, the one with the Masonic fob, said, “No, thank God!” Although Christmas is supposed to be the season of good cheer, you (or I, for that matter) couldn’t have told, from listening to the little ones, but what it was the children’s Armageddon season, when Nature had decreed that only the fittest should survive, in order that the race might be carried on by the strongest, the most predatory and those possessing the best protective coloring. Although there were constant admonitions to Fonlansbee to “Let Ormond have that whistle now; it’s his,” and to Arthur, Jr., not to be selfish, but to “give the kiddiecar to Effie; she’s smaller than you are,” the net result was always that Fonlansbee kept the whistle and Arthur, Jr., rode in permanent, albeit disputed, possession of the kiddie-car. Oh, that we mortals should set ourselves up against the inscrutable workings of Nature!
Hallo! A great deal of commotion! That was Uncle George stumbling over the electric train, which had early in the afternoon ceased to function and which had been left directly across the threshold. A great deal of crying! That was Arthur, Jr., bewailing the destruction of his already useless train, about which he had forgotten until the present moment. A great deal of recrimination! That was Arthur, Sr., and George fixing it up. And finally a great crashing! That was Baby Lester pulling over the tree on top of himself, necessitating the bringing to bear of all of Uncle Ray's knowledge of forestry to extricate him from the wreckage.
And finally Mrs. Gummidge passed the Christmas candy around. Mr. Gummidge afterward admitted that this was a tactical error on the part of his spouse. I no more believe that Mrs. Gummidge thought they wanted that Chrismas candy than I believe that she thought they wanted the cold turkey which she later suggested. My opinion is that she wanted to drive them home. At any rate, that is what she succeeded in doing. Such cries as there were of “Ugh! Don't let me see another thing to eat!” and “Take it away!” Then came hurried scramblings in the coat-closet for overshoes. There were the rasping sounds made by cross parents when putting wraps on children. There were insincere exhortations to “come and see us soon” and to “get together for lunch some time.” And, finally, there were slammings of doors and the silence of utter exhaustion, while Mrs. Gummidge went about picking up stray sheets of wrapping paper.
And, as Tiny Tim might say in speaking of Christmas afternoon as an institution, “God help us, every one.”
What an afternoon! Mr. Gummidge said that, in his estimation, there never had been such an afternoon since the world began, a sentiment which was heartily endorsed by Mrs. Gummidge and all the little Gummidges, not to mention the relatives who had come over from Jersey for the day.
In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming, gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating— and true enough she didn't—a dragging, devitalizing ennui, which left its victims strewn about the livingroom in various attitudes of prostration suggestive of those of the petrified occupants in a newly unearthed Pompeiian dwelling; an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly veiled insults, and which ended in ruptures in the clan spirit serious enough to last throughout the glad new year.
Then there were the toys! Three and a quarter dozen toys to be divided among seven children. Surely enough, you or I might say, to satisfy the little tots. But that would be because we didn't know the tots. In came Baby Lester Gummidge, Lillian's boy, dragging an electric grain-elevator which happened to be the only toy in the entire collection which appealed to little Norman, fiveyear-old son of Luther, who lived in Rahway. In came curly-headed Erne in frantic and throaty disputation with Arthur, Jr., over the possession of an articulated zebra. In came Everett, bearing a mechanical man which would no longer dance, owing to a previous forcible feeding by the baby of a marshmallow into its only available aperture. In came Fonlansbee, teeth buried in the hand of little Ormond, which bore a popular but battered remnant of what had once been the proud false-bosom of a hussar’s uniform. In they all came, one after another, some crying, some snapping, some pulling, some pushing—all appealing to their respective parents for aid in their intra-mural warfare.
And the cigar smoke! Mrs. Gummidge said that she didn't mind the smoke from a good cigarette, but would they mind if she opened the windows for just a minute in order to clear the room of the heavy aroma of used cigars? Mr. Gummidge stoutly maintained that they were good cigars. His brother, George Gummidge, said that he, likewise, would say that they were. At which colloquial sally both the Gummidge brothers laughed testily, thereby breaking the laughter record for the afternoon.
Aunt Libbie, who lived with George, remarked from the dark corner of the room that it seemed just like Sunday to her. An amendment was offered to this statement by the cousin, who was in the insurance business, stating that it was worse than Sunday. Murmurings indicative of as hearty agreement with this sentiment as their lethargy would allow came from the other members of the family circle, causing Mr. Gummidge to suggest a walk in the air to settle their dinner.
And then arose such a chorus of protestations as has seldom been heard. It was too cloudy to walk. It was too raw. It looked like snow. It looked like rain. Luther Gummidge said that he must be starting along home soon, anyway, bringing forth the acid query from Mrs. Gummidge as to whether or not he was bored. Lillian said that she felt a cold coming on, and added that something they had had for dinner must have been undercooked. And so it went, back and forth, forth and back, up and down, and in and out, until Mr. Gummidge’s suggestion of a walk in the air was reduced to a tattered impossibility and the entire company glowed with ill-feeling.
In the meantime, we must not forget the children. No one else could. Aunt Libbie said that she didn’t think there was anything like children to make a Christmas; to which Uncle Ray, the one with the Masonic fob, said, “No, thank God!” Although Christmas is supposed to be the season of good cheer, you (or I, for that matter) couldn’t have told, from listening to the little ones, but what it was the children’s Armageddon season, when Nature had decreed that only the fittest should survive, in order that the race might be carried on by the strongest, the most predatory and those possessing the best protective coloring. Although there were constant admonitions to Fonlansbee to “Let Ormond have that whistle now; it’s his,” and to Arthur, Jr., not to be selfish, but to “give the kiddiecar to Effie; she’s smaller than you are,” the net result was always that Fonlansbee kept the whistle and Arthur, Jr., rode in permanent, albeit disputed, possession of the kiddie-car. Oh, that we mortals should set ourselves up against the inscrutable workings of Nature!
Hallo! A great deal of commotion! That was Uncle George stumbling over the electric train, which had early in the afternoon ceased to function and which had been left directly across the threshold. A great deal of crying! That was Arthur, Jr., bewailing the destruction of his already useless train, about which he had forgotten until the present moment. A great deal of recrimination! That was Arthur, Sr., and George fixing it up. And finally a great crashing! That was Baby Lester pulling over the tree on top of himself, necessitating the bringing to bear of all of Uncle Ray's knowledge of forestry to extricate him from the wreckage.
And finally Mrs. Gummidge passed the Christmas candy around. Mr. Gummidge afterward admitted that this was a tactical error on the part of his spouse. I no more believe that Mrs. Gummidge thought they wanted that Chrismas candy than I believe that she thought they wanted the cold turkey which she later suggested. My opinion is that she wanted to drive them home. At any rate, that is what she succeeded in doing. Such cries as there were of “Ugh! Don't let me see another thing to eat!” and “Take it away!” Then came hurried scramblings in the coat-closet for overshoes. There were the rasping sounds made by cross parents when putting wraps on children. There were insincere exhortations to “come and see us soon” and to “get together for lunch some time.” And, finally, there were slammings of doors and the silence of utter exhaustion, while Mrs. Gummidge went about picking up stray sheets of wrapping paper.
And, as Tiny Tim might say in speaking of Christmas afternoon as an institution, “God help us, every one.”
28 November 2013
Quotation of the Day
We should treat others well because we wish to be treated well. We should seek justice for others because we want justice for ourselves. We should protect the rights of others because we want our own rights protected. Our shared humanity demands it.
Ed Brayton (My Interfaith Thanksgiving Service Talk)
11 November 2013
Quotation of the Day
The eleventh day of the eleventh month has always seemed to me to be special. Even if the reason for it fell apart as the years went on, it was a symbol of something close to the high part of the heart. Perhaps a life that stretches through two or three wars takes its first war rather seriously, but I still think we should have kept the name "Armistice Day." Its implications were a little more profound, a little more hopeful.
Walt Kelly (Ten Everlovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo, p. 100)
14 October 2013
Quotation of the Day
To project modern day standards of morality and conduct onto those of the past is akin to contaminating a crime scene. Our desire to play Monday Morning Quarterback with Columbus' legacy actually does more to distort true history than anything. In the same way that each individual is to blame for his/her own tobacco addiction, we must judge Columbus by the standards of his time and according to the world as he saw it.
Brad Hart (“Why We Must Sue Native Americans This Columbus Day”)
29 September 2013
Quotation of the Day
Athena, Aphrodite, Apollo – they were interesting, and they got involved. But “God”? Blegh.
That’s why Jesus, you know. People got bored, and they wanted a god who could put bums on seats, one with some good lines. Jesus can be pretty entertaining, in a rebel without a cause way. He’s uneven, but he has moments.
Ophelia Benson (Holy Holy Holy Yawn)
14 July 2013
Quotation of the Day
Let it be noted that on this day, Saturday 13 July 2013, it was still deemed legal in the US to chase and then shoot dead an unarmed young black man on his way home from the store because you didn't like the look of him.
The killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year was tragic. But in the age of Obama the acquittal of George Zimmerman offers at least that clarity. For the salient facts in this case were not in dispute. On 26 February 2012 Martin was on his way home, minding his own business armed only with a can of iced tea and a bag of Skittles. Zimmerman pursued him, armed with a 9mm handgun, believing him to be a criminal. Martin resisted. They fought. Zimmerman shot him dead.
Who screamed. Who was stronger. Who called whom what and when and why are all details to warm the heart of a cable news producer with 24 hours to fill. Strip them all away and the truth remains that Martin's heart would still be beating if Zimmerman had not chased him down and shot him.
There is no doubt about who the aggressor was here. The only reason the two interacted at all, physically or otherwise, is that Zimmerman believed it was his civic duty to apprehend an innocent teenager who caused suspicion by his existence alone.
Gary Younge
("Open Season on Black Boys after a Verdict Like This")
14 June 2013
Quotation of the Day
It is one thing for rich people to believe intellectually that everyone depends on them. In reality, it is they who are the moochers and looters, who depend on an entire system of low-wage workers for their luxurious lifestyles.
Mano Singham (“Threatening to Go Galt, Again”)
11 June 2013
Last Republican on Death Bed and Other Predictions
I’ve been amusing myself by scanning issues of The Portholer, the shipboard publication of the U.S.A.H.S. Marigold during World War II. The Marigold, a hospital ship, is mainly remembered as the first Allied ship to arrive in Japan; according to my father, who served on it, crew members were ashore playing baseball as the surrender was signed.
One particular page, a humorous look at the Post-War World, dated January 1, 1999, caught my attention. The first story, titled "Last Republican on Death Bed":
Anyway, this is what the future looked like to somebody or other circa 26 August 1945. Enjoy.
One particular page, a humorous look at the Post-War World, dated January 1, 1999, caught my attention. The first story, titled "Last Republican on Death Bed":
Dead Pan, Nevada: Mr. Lemuel K. Olegard, 103 yrs old, known as “the vanishing American” today lay on his death bed. For a full century he voted the straight Republican ticket. In his delirium he muttered a name like “Wilkie”, no one can place it.Other stories note the discovery of vitamin Z, the unionization of the presidency (President Ickes has joined the P.O.T. [Presidents of Things] branch of the C.I.O), and the accidental destruction of the earth by the “newest cosmic bomb”. (I’m not sure how that last story, datelined Metropolis, Mars, squares with stories from Washington D.C. and Off the China Coast, but then, you know what they say about consistency and hobgoblins.)
Anyway, this is what the future looked like to somebody or other circa 26 August 1945. Enjoy.
15 May 2013
That Old Benghazi Spirit
You can’t help but be impressed by the industry with which Congressional Republicans try to whip up a scandal soufflé from a handful of revised talking points and some cherry-picked emailed phrases. It’s an uphill battle, as Sisyphus could attest, but just like him, the Republicans can surely eventually succeed. It’s a matter of having high hopes—those high apple pie in the sky hopes.
Take some inspiration from the men’s rights activists. They’ve been having a lovely month, all things considered. A man’s right to sex on demand has been asserted by none other than Toru Hashimoto, mayor of Osaka. Holding women captive as sex-slaves is sometimes necessary, he says, “[t]o maintain discipline in the military”. Men have their needs, after all. “For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That’s clear to anyone,” Hashimoto explained. I bet it would be clear to Ariel Castro.
There’s a man who lived the men’s rights dream. “I don’t know why I kept looking for another,” Ariel wrote, adding “I already had 2 in my possession.” Young women, that is, women he kept locked in his basement on account of his need for sex on demand. Two women weren’t enough for those needs, though, it turned out, and he had to kidnap a third girl, his daughter's fourteen-year-old friend whom he thought for some reason was a lot older. And what business did they have walking around freely anyway? Ahmad Shafi, leader of the Bangladeshi political party Hefajat-e-Islam gets it.
He’s gone to the mat to defend Abdul Quader Molla and his fellow war-criminals who in 1971 were involved in the mass rape of the women of Bangladesh. Calling for the execution of anybody wanting the war criminals punished, he demands the end of such “alien cultural practices” as “free mixing of the sexes”. We see where he stands on this issue. I can only assume that he would give his blessing to Ariel Castro’s solution for keeping women apart from the rest of society, given his passionate defense of those who separated young women from their families and subjected them to sexual abuse that—assuming they weren’t murdered and left in mass graves—scarred them for life.
And apparently it is all the fault of feminism. As one Groot comments “What feminists fail to see is that as men are driven more and more by their agenda to the bottom of the power and privilege scale, more and more crimes like this will be committed. Unchecked hypergamy ensures that men like these have no real chance for healthy relationships and often take through criminal efforts what alphas and the elites have access to; that being multiple women.” There, you see? If only women voluntarily chained themselves in men’s basements, there would be no need for men to do it for them. Or something.
Yeah, keep on working on that sow’s ear, boys—you’ll get a silk purse out of it some day. There’s nothing quite like that old Benghazi spirit.
Take some inspiration from the men’s rights activists. They’ve been having a lovely month, all things considered. A man’s right to sex on demand has been asserted by none other than Toru Hashimoto, mayor of Osaka. Holding women captive as sex-slaves is sometimes necessary, he says, “[t]o maintain discipline in the military”. Men have their needs, after all. “For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That’s clear to anyone,” Hashimoto explained. I bet it would be clear to Ariel Castro.
There’s a man who lived the men’s rights dream. “I don’t know why I kept looking for another,” Ariel wrote, adding “I already had 2 in my possession.” Young women, that is, women he kept locked in his basement on account of his need for sex on demand. Two women weren’t enough for those needs, though, it turned out, and he had to kidnap a third girl, his daughter's fourteen-year-old friend whom he thought for some reason was a lot older. And what business did they have walking around freely anyway? Ahmad Shafi, leader of the Bangladeshi political party Hefajat-e-Islam gets it.
He’s gone to the mat to defend Abdul Quader Molla and his fellow war-criminals who in 1971 were involved in the mass rape of the women of Bangladesh. Calling for the execution of anybody wanting the war criminals punished, he demands the end of such “alien cultural practices” as “free mixing of the sexes”. We see where he stands on this issue. I can only assume that he would give his blessing to Ariel Castro’s solution for keeping women apart from the rest of society, given his passionate defense of those who separated young women from their families and subjected them to sexual abuse that—assuming they weren’t murdered and left in mass graves—scarred them for life.
And apparently it is all the fault of feminism. As one Groot comments “What feminists fail to see is that as men are driven more and more by their agenda to the bottom of the power and privilege scale, more and more crimes like this will be committed. Unchecked hypergamy ensures that men like these have no real chance for healthy relationships and often take through criminal efforts what alphas and the elites have access to; that being multiple women.” There, you see? If only women voluntarily chained themselves in men’s basements, there would be no need for men to do it for them. Or something.
Yeah, keep on working on that sow’s ear, boys—you’ll get a silk purse out of it some day. There’s nothing quite like that old Benghazi spirit.
13 May 2013
The Mysterious Stranger: The Forgotten Version
I’ve written elsewhere (Dubious Documents: The Case of Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger) about the editorial chicanery involved in the original publication of Mark Twain’s The Chronicle of Young Satan under the title The Mysterious Stranger and the baleful effect it has had on the interpretation of these texts. What’s bugging me today, however, is another annoyance. I see the Wikipedia article on the story repeats a mistake that others (some of whom should know better) have made, in that it states there were three manuscript attempts at the story. According to the piece the three were (1) The Chronicle of Young Satan Schoolhouse Hill, and (3) No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. (I also find it annoying that the author says the “first substantial version is commonly referred to as The Chronicle of Young Satan”, in that it is commonly referred to by that title because that is the title Mark Twain gave it.) But actually there were four “substantial” versions of the story. The missing version here is Mark Twain’s very first attempt at the tale, title unknown, but referred to as the Pre-Eseldorf version by John Tuckey and as the St. Petersburg Fragment by William M. Gibson. It is listed as Version A and described on pp. 4-5 of the original publication by the University of California Press in 1969.
Mark Twain, as was his wont, destroyed much of the manuscript, and we probably wouldn’t even know it had existed if he hadn’t reused some of the pages in The Chronicle of Young Satan. Nineteen pages survive, altered and refitted to serve the purposes of the new story. The original story was set (apparently) in St. Petersburg, the fictional town in which Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and the slave Jim lived. The first surviving page (12) starts in the middle of a speech by Satan telling the three boys who are the main characters to “Sit still and say nothing.” The narrator (whom we later learn is named George) continues:
Chapter 2 begins with an account of the improvement in Mr. Black’s fortunes:
There is a single isolated page further on, which reads:
So, then, I guess the question is, why has the notion that there were only three versions of the tale taken such root? The answer is more or less obvious: the first version was not printed as such in the definitive 1969 edition put out by the University of California press. It is there, after a fashion, in that it can be reconstructed by carefully going through the textual commentary on The Chronicle of Young Satan and noting the MS alterations (which is how I arrived at the description given above), but that is not entirely satisfactory. I suppose the fact that the MS has not survived independently may have influenced the editor, but if it had been up to me, I would have preferred that the few pages it would have cost to present it had been used for that purpose.
Mark Twain, as was his wont, destroyed much of the manuscript, and we probably wouldn’t even know it had existed if he hadn’t reused some of the pages in The Chronicle of Young Satan. Nineteen pages survive, altered and refitted to serve the purposes of the new story. The original story was set (apparently) in St. Petersburg, the fictional town in which Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and the slave Jim lived. The first surviving page (12) starts in the middle of a speech by Satan telling the three boys who are the main characters to “Sit still and say nothing.” The narrator (whom we later learn is named George) continues:
We looked up and saw Mr. Black approaching through the black walnuts. We three were sitting together in the grass, and Satan sat in front of us in the path. Mr. Black came slowly along with his head down, thinking, and stopped within a couple of yards of us and took off his hat and got his silk handkerchief out of it, and stood there mopping his face and looking as if he were going to speak to us, but he didn’t. Presently he muttered, “I can’t think what brought me here; it seems as if I were in my study a minute ago—but I suppose I have been dreaming along for half an hour and have come all this stretch without noticing; I can’t account for it; but it is no matter, it is pleasant out, to-day.” Then he went mumbling along to himself and walkedWe will soon learn that Mr. Black is a former Presbyterian minster now fallen on hard times since he became a Universalist, and that the three boys are George (the narrator), Pole, and Huck. (George is referred to as Tom Sawyer in the notes.) After a gap of several pages, the narrative resumes with a connected sequence that takes us to the end of chapter 1 and through the beginning of chapter 2. In it Satan speaks disparagingly of mankind and its possession of the moral sense, promises to return, and vanishes like a soap bubble. Mr. Black returns, observing that he has lost his wallet, and while it only contains four dollars, that is the only money he has. The boys offer to look for it, but Mr. Black finds it almost immediately, but it turns out to be stuffed with money, over a thousand dollars. The boys realize that Satan is responsible for this, but are forced to remain silent; they urge Mr. Black to take the money. Mr. Black says that some enemy might be responsible, but Huck tells him, “Mr. Black, you haven't a real enemy in the village—nor Margaret, either. And not even a half-enemy that’s rich enough to chance eleven hundred dollars at one dash to do you a mean turn. I’ll ask you if that’s so, or not?” The boys sign a paper attesting to the way that Mr. Black found the money.
Chapter 2 begins with an account of the improvement in Mr. Black’s fortunes:
It made immense talk next day, when Mr. Black paid off his mortgage in gold and bought nine hundred dollars worth of ten percent county scrip and deposited it in the bank; and lots of people called at the house to congratulate, and a heap of cool old friends warmed up and got friendly again; and Margaret was invited to a picnic, and the piano scholars that had deserted her began to book for lessons again.The boys are afraid that the gold will turn to dirt, like fairy gold, but it doesn’t, and they seek out Mr. Black to ask him about the moral sense that Satan had denigrated. This essentially brings us to the end of the surviving sequence.
And there was no mystery; the old gentleman told the whole circumstance just as it happened, and said he could not account for it, only it was the plain hand of Providence, so far as he could see; though the Presbyterians didn't take any stock in that, a body couldn't expect it. One or two said it looked more like the hand of Satan; and you know that seemed a surprisingly good guess for ignorant people like that. Some came privately and tried to get us boys to come out and “tell the truth;” and on honor promised they wouldn’t ever tell, but only wanted to know for their own satisfaction, because the whole thing was so curious. They even wanted to buy the secret, and pay money for it; and if we could have invented something that would answer—however, we couldn't; we hadn’t the ingenuity, so we had to let the chance go by, and it was a pity.
There is a single isolated page further on, which reads:
through the garden, there was Tom Andrews sitting there waiting, for it was getting toward the edge of the evening, and he would be asking Margaret to take a walk along the river with him when Peggy was done making the piano sorry the peace hadn’t been signed before the Battle came off. He was a young lawyer, and talented; and he had had a good practice and a thriving one, but it was all gone, now. Drink—that was his trouble. He got a start at it and it beat him. He was seedy, now, and he was always so prim and gentlemanlike in those other days; and proud, too, for he was of good Kentucky stock; and back of that, Virginian — F. F. V., in fact. He had been courting Mar-Where the story went after that, if anywhere, is impossible to say on the available evidence, but several things jump out. Mr. Black, whose unfortunate change in theology proved so costly to him, is clearly another caricature of Mark Twain’s brother Orion Clemens; when he metamorphoses into Father Peter (in Young Satan) the connection is less obvious, though Father Peter may still have had universalist tendencies:
But the Bishop suspended him for talking around in conversation that God was all goodness and would find a way to save all his poor human children. It was a horrible thing to say, but there was never any absolute proof that Father Peter said it …And there is no sign of the villainous Father Adolf, inspired by an Austrian politician Mark Twain loathed, Dr. Karl Lueger. When Mark Twain adapted Huck’s claim that Mr. Black had not a real enemy in the village, he had to add the key phrase “with the exception of Father Adolf” to fit the new situation.
So, then, I guess the question is, why has the notion that there were only three versions of the tale taken such root? The answer is more or less obvious: the first version was not printed as such in the definitive 1969 edition put out by the University of California press. It is there, after a fashion, in that it can be reconstructed by carefully going through the textual commentary on The Chronicle of Young Satan and noting the MS alterations (which is how I arrived at the description given above), but that is not entirely satisfactory. I suppose the fact that the MS has not survived independently may have influenced the editor, but if it had been up to me, I would have preferred that the few pages it would have cost to present it had been used for that purpose.
10 May 2013
Quotation of the Day
DC is the heroes you want to be, Marvel is the heroes you would probably be. You want to be Superman, but chances are you will be the Hulk and struggling with his rage…
Avicenna (“A Voice for Me – Once a Good Girl Goes Bad”)
11 April 2013
Warriors for Peace
One hundred forty years ago today, just south of the line that divides Oregon from California, tense negotiations were under way. The United States (represented by General Canby) was at war with part of the Modoc tribe (under the leadership of Captain Jack), and people on both sides thought that with a little effort further bloodshed could be averted. They were wrong, in hindsight, but the attempt seems worthy, noble even, something that could have paid off.
By many accounts Captain Jack believed in peace between the Modocs and the settlers. His people lived on the fringes of civilization, so to speak, hunting, gathering, and fishing on the one hand, while working as ranchhands and selling small items on the other. Some accused them of extortion and prostitution as well. The point is, they were part of the economic system, and for the most part they lived quietly on their traditional lands. It was to his advantage to keep the peace, and he usually succeeded in keeping things under control.
General Canby took the peace policy announced by President Grant seriously enough to pursue it past the point that many observers considered prudent. If there were any two men who could have reached some sort of agreement between the two sides, you would think that it would be Captain Jack and General Canby. Which, when you think about it, makes it all the more surprising that one of them should shoot the other under a flag of truce.
The thing is, the Modocs and the government were not on the same page when it came to two key issues: amnesty for all, and relocation of the Modocs. They were actually the same issue, and went back to the circumstances of the Lost River Fight, when a small detachment of soldiers and a handful of local citizens took on two villages on either side of Lost River. Modoc casualties on the side attacked by settlers inspired retaliation, and of course, as might be expected, the injured didn’t do anything halfway sane, like go after the settlers who had attacked them. No, they took their revenge on unsuspecting neighbors along the lake, murdering people who had no idea what was going on or for what cause they were dying.
At least two of the participants in the revenge attacks were men of influence—John Schonchin, spoken of as a chief among the Modocs, and Hooker Jim, who was married to the daughter of an influential shaman. Absolutely core to the Modoc position, then, was a general amnesty for all involved in the hostilities, including the settlers who had killed during the first attack, and the Modocs who had killed in revenge for it.
It would appear that the Federal authorities had no trouble with this as a concept; the trouble was that such a general amnesty was beyond the reach of their authority. Murder was (and is) an offense handled at the state level, and Oregon fully intended to prosecute some Modoc or other for the murders committed along Tule Lake in November 1872. Governor Grover made it quite clear to the Federal authorities that he had no intention of signing off on any deal that left those who murdered the settlers free and unpunished. (He was, however, apparently indifferent to the issue of justice for the Modoc dead.) Further, he was opposed to any peaceful solution to the Modoc Difficulty anyway.
Military officials had an alternative plan that would accomplish much the same thing, though without any legal amnesty. If the Modocs surrendered as prisoners of war they would be under military jurisdiction, and Oregon couldn’t touch them. They could then be transferred somewhere outside of Oregon’s reach, and so go free. The catch was that bit about going out of Oregon. The country the Modocs were fighting for lay in Oregon. The whole point of the exercise was not to give it up.
The Modoc leaders may have been willing to go further than their followers on the issue of moving. In a conference in early March, attended by both Elijah Steele (a local lawyer Modoc leaders looked to for advice) and John Fairchild (a local rancher who often employed young Modoc men as ranchhands), the two men brought back opposing reports. Steele, who had spoken mainly with the Modoc leaders, said that they were prepared to move to Arizona rather than surrender their men to settler justice. Fairchild, who had spoken mainly with the rank and file, said that the Modocs had no intention of leaving Oregon.
So, on the one side, amnesty was out of the question because of the intransigence of the Oregon authorities—faithfully reflecting the attitude of their constituents, as far as the available record shows. And on the other side relocation was out because of the intransigence of the Modoc leaders—apparently reflecting the will of their constituents. The impasse was perfect.
General Canby believed he had a way through that impasse. The Modoc leaders had to be aware that they would not do well in any all-out conflict with the troops; while they had driven them back from their stronghold in January, there were a great many more troops now, and they were much better armed and equipped. Canby decided to opt for a show of force. He moved the troops closer to the Stronghold, and kept them there. This policy of gradual compression, as he called it, was bound to bring the Modocs to their senses.
The thing is, if you put too much pressure on something, it may blow apart. The Modoc Difficulty blew apart fairly spectacularly on 11 April 1873. Negotiations seemed to be making some sort of progress; Captain Jack gave up all claim to the Modoc traditional lands in Oregon, but argued that the Modocs should retain the lava beds in California. Talks resumed that morning; present were General Canby, A. B. Meacham, the Reverend Thomas, and Commissioner Dyar, representing the Federal government, along with Frank and Toby Riddle as translators. On the other side were the Modoc chiefs, Captain Jack and John Schonchin, along with such prominent leaders as Boston Charley, Hooker Jim, Black Jim, and Bogus Charley. Negotiations lurched along slowly, with General Canby trying to emphasize his role as a peacemaker. Abruptly Captain Jack gave a signal, pulled out a gun, and fired at Canby. His first shot misfired, but the second was successful. Canby died on the spot, the only regular general to be killed in action during any of the Indian wars. At the same time Boston Charley killed the Reverend Thomas, John Schonchin shot Meacham repeatedly, and Black Jim and Hooker Jim took shots at Dyar. Dyar escaped and Meacham was left for dead, but ultimately recovered.
Postmortems would go on for at least a hundred and forty years, but neither General Canby, who died abruptly in what should have been his retirement, nor the Reverend Thomas, who had the briefest of walk-on parts in this war, would take part. The two of them died nobly, perhaps, warriors in the cause of peace. But I can’t help but feel that they didn’t have to die, that, you know, common sense might have warned them, as Frank Riddle did, not to trust any in them Indians.
By many accounts Captain Jack believed in peace between the Modocs and the settlers. His people lived on the fringes of civilization, so to speak, hunting, gathering, and fishing on the one hand, while working as ranchhands and selling small items on the other. Some accused them of extortion and prostitution as well. The point is, they were part of the economic system, and for the most part they lived quietly on their traditional lands. It was to his advantage to keep the peace, and he usually succeeded in keeping things under control.
General Canby took the peace policy announced by President Grant seriously enough to pursue it past the point that many observers considered prudent. If there were any two men who could have reached some sort of agreement between the two sides, you would think that it would be Captain Jack and General Canby. Which, when you think about it, makes it all the more surprising that one of them should shoot the other under a flag of truce.
The thing is, the Modocs and the government were not on the same page when it came to two key issues: amnesty for all, and relocation of the Modocs. They were actually the same issue, and went back to the circumstances of the Lost River Fight, when a small detachment of soldiers and a handful of local citizens took on two villages on either side of Lost River. Modoc casualties on the side attacked by settlers inspired retaliation, and of course, as might be expected, the injured didn’t do anything halfway sane, like go after the settlers who had attacked them. No, they took their revenge on unsuspecting neighbors along the lake, murdering people who had no idea what was going on or for what cause they were dying.
At least two of the participants in the revenge attacks were men of influence—John Schonchin, spoken of as a chief among the Modocs, and Hooker Jim, who was married to the daughter of an influential shaman. Absolutely core to the Modoc position, then, was a general amnesty for all involved in the hostilities, including the settlers who had killed during the first attack, and the Modocs who had killed in revenge for it.
It would appear that the Federal authorities had no trouble with this as a concept; the trouble was that such a general amnesty was beyond the reach of their authority. Murder was (and is) an offense handled at the state level, and Oregon fully intended to prosecute some Modoc or other for the murders committed along Tule Lake in November 1872. Governor Grover made it quite clear to the Federal authorities that he had no intention of signing off on any deal that left those who murdered the settlers free and unpunished. (He was, however, apparently indifferent to the issue of justice for the Modoc dead.) Further, he was opposed to any peaceful solution to the Modoc Difficulty anyway.
Military officials had an alternative plan that would accomplish much the same thing, though without any legal amnesty. If the Modocs surrendered as prisoners of war they would be under military jurisdiction, and Oregon couldn’t touch them. They could then be transferred somewhere outside of Oregon’s reach, and so go free. The catch was that bit about going out of Oregon. The country the Modocs were fighting for lay in Oregon. The whole point of the exercise was not to give it up.
The Modoc leaders may have been willing to go further than their followers on the issue of moving. In a conference in early March, attended by both Elijah Steele (a local lawyer Modoc leaders looked to for advice) and John Fairchild (a local rancher who often employed young Modoc men as ranchhands), the two men brought back opposing reports. Steele, who had spoken mainly with the Modoc leaders, said that they were prepared to move to Arizona rather than surrender their men to settler justice. Fairchild, who had spoken mainly with the rank and file, said that the Modocs had no intention of leaving Oregon.
So, on the one side, amnesty was out of the question because of the intransigence of the Oregon authorities—faithfully reflecting the attitude of their constituents, as far as the available record shows. And on the other side relocation was out because of the intransigence of the Modoc leaders—apparently reflecting the will of their constituents. The impasse was perfect.
General Canby believed he had a way through that impasse. The Modoc leaders had to be aware that they would not do well in any all-out conflict with the troops; while they had driven them back from their stronghold in January, there were a great many more troops now, and they were much better armed and equipped. Canby decided to opt for a show of force. He moved the troops closer to the Stronghold, and kept them there. This policy of gradual compression, as he called it, was bound to bring the Modocs to their senses.
The thing is, if you put too much pressure on something, it may blow apart. The Modoc Difficulty blew apart fairly spectacularly on 11 April 1873. Negotiations seemed to be making some sort of progress; Captain Jack gave up all claim to the Modoc traditional lands in Oregon, but argued that the Modocs should retain the lava beds in California. Talks resumed that morning; present were General Canby, A. B. Meacham, the Reverend Thomas, and Commissioner Dyar, representing the Federal government, along with Frank and Toby Riddle as translators. On the other side were the Modoc chiefs, Captain Jack and John Schonchin, along with such prominent leaders as Boston Charley, Hooker Jim, Black Jim, and Bogus Charley. Negotiations lurched along slowly, with General Canby trying to emphasize his role as a peacemaker. Abruptly Captain Jack gave a signal, pulled out a gun, and fired at Canby. His first shot misfired, but the second was successful. Canby died on the spot, the only regular general to be killed in action during any of the Indian wars. At the same time Boston Charley killed the Reverend Thomas, John Schonchin shot Meacham repeatedly, and Black Jim and Hooker Jim took shots at Dyar. Dyar escaped and Meacham was left for dead, but ultimately recovered.
Postmortems would go on for at least a hundred and forty years, but neither General Canby, who died abruptly in what should have been his retirement, nor the Reverend Thomas, who had the briefest of walk-on parts in this war, would take part. The two of them died nobly, perhaps, warriors in the cause of peace. But I can’t help but feel that they didn’t have to die, that, you know, common sense might have warned them, as Frank Riddle did, not to trust any in them Indians.
08 April 2013
There Might Be Something to This
A commenter at Butterflies and Wheels observes in a discussion of FGM:
We don’t want to be imperialists and go all culturally colonialist and stuff so that leaves us with the only other option – being condescending and paternalistic.
Maybe what we need to do as the world becomes more educated and modern and egalitarian is set aside places where footbinding, FGM, stonings, beheadings, lynchings, slavery (sexual and other), shame killings and other valuable cultural traditions can be preserved.
Like maybe special World Brutality Heritage Parks or something.
23 March 2013
Quotation of the Day
It’s when things blow up that it becomes impossible not to notice that women get treated scarily, threateningly and very specifically worse. And THAT’s what SendGrid capitulated to. Their actions have been cowardly and intellectually dishonest. They could learn something from the employee they just cut loose.
Rachel Sklar according to Business Insider
28 February 2013
Quotation of the Day
I came from nothing and will die with nothing but my dignity. So why not use my life for good?
attributed to Marco McMillan
21 February 2013
Observation for the Day
… rather than making things better, our current method of handling economic problems—this Reagan-esque belief that if sufficiently pumped full of cash, businesses will explode into wealth for all—is making the world worse for us, not better. The longer we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that if we just keep ruining things more, then somehow it’ll come full circle and start to improve, the longer it’s going to take us to pull out of our nosedive, and the further apart the haves will get from the have-nots.
Crommunist (“Driving us apart”)
07 February 2013
Asininity of the Day
I think it’s important to remember, when we talk about the economy, that a private sector job and a public sector job are not the same things. They’re not equivalent. I’m not saying public sector jobs aren’t important. But a private sector job pays for itself.
Carly Fiorina
(quoted in “Paul Krugman Destroys GOP’s Talking Points On Government Jobs” by Jeff Spross)
05 January 2013
Quotation of the Day
The question everyone's asking is this: On whose backs should we balance the federal budget? One side wants higher taxes; the other wants spending cuts. And while that debate rages, the right question is being ignored: Why are we worried about balancing the federal budget at all?
Stephanie Kelton (“Forget the ‘Fiscal Cliff’”)
06 December 2012
Quotation of the Day
I’ve been having some … oh, call it “nuanced views” of our hallowed Freedom of Speech in the past year or so.
I feel strongly that all we INDIVIDUALS must have it. But I’m feeling less and less that any entity other than an individual human should be granted that same freedom. That Constitutional rights were never intended to be granted to corporations and companies, to THINGS.
Hank Fox (“Offensive on Soooo Many Levels”)
05 December 2012
Time Out in the Great Beyond
When I was a child there were certain records we weren’t allowed to touch. We had a cornucopia of recordings of all kinds—45s, LPs, 78s, 7ips reel-to-reel tapes—that we could play, but there were a handful that were off limits. Most of them belonged to my mother, and, frankly, most of them didn’t interest me—Edith Piaf, Django Reinhardt, and the like. But there was one that did—a jazz album called Time Out featuring jazz pianist Dave Brubeck.
My musical interests as a young person were primitive, bizarre, and eclectic. I liked things that stood out from the ordinary wash of music that formed the background track to our suburban post-WWII lives. The rock n roll that enamored the kids I went to school with left me cold. I liked stuff that incorporated noise, unusual instruments, exotic-sounding rhythms…
It was probably the unusual time-signatures that made me like Time Out. Most of everything playing on the radio was in the same 4/4 time, with with occasional 3/4, 6/8, or 2/4 thrown in. The 5/4, 9/8, and alternating signatures were interesting, at least, and the feeling that the music gave at times that it was just about to head over the edge into pure madness, was, well, refreshing.
For reasons that remain obscure to me I didn’t ever buy my own copy of it on vinyl, though I did acquire some other Dave Brubeck albums. I bought my first copy of Time Out decades later, when the CD era was upon us, and I replaced a lot of my old vinyl, and consciously sought out music I’d liked but never owned. I still enjoy it, even though I’ve long given up my childish ambition of playing piano like Brubeck.
Anyway, I see in the news that Dave Brubeck has passed on. His heart stopped earlier today on his way to a doctor’s appointment. Tomorrow will be his 92nd birthday. Damn it.
My musical interests as a young person were primitive, bizarre, and eclectic. I liked things that stood out from the ordinary wash of music that formed the background track to our suburban post-WWII lives. The rock n roll that enamored the kids I went to school with left me cold. I liked stuff that incorporated noise, unusual instruments, exotic-sounding rhythms…
It was probably the unusual time-signatures that made me like Time Out. Most of everything playing on the radio was in the same 4/4 time, with with occasional 3/4, 6/8, or 2/4 thrown in. The 5/4, 9/8, and alternating signatures were interesting, at least, and the feeling that the music gave at times that it was just about to head over the edge into pure madness, was, well, refreshing.
For reasons that remain obscure to me I didn’t ever buy my own copy of it on vinyl, though I did acquire some other Dave Brubeck albums. I bought my first copy of Time Out decades later, when the CD era was upon us, and I replaced a lot of my old vinyl, and consciously sought out music I’d liked but never owned. I still enjoy it, even though I’ve long given up my childish ambition of playing piano like Brubeck.
Anyway, I see in the news that Dave Brubeck has passed on. His heart stopped earlier today on his way to a doctor’s appointment. Tomorrow will be his 92nd birthday. Damn it.
04 December 2012
Quotation of the Day
Let us be clear what is going on. The oligarchy thinks that money spent on old and poor and sick people is money that they could have instead. They have long had their eyes on cutting spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other government services and regulatory agencies so that the savings generated could be used to continue their tax cuts or give them even more. In addition, they have long wanted to get their hands on the Social Security trust funds to invest in the modern casino that is the stock market. Such a massive influx of capital will undoubtedly boost stock prices and make a lot of wealthy people even more wealthy. Hence we see the repeated calls for the privatization of Social Security, the raising of the age for eligibility for Social Security and Medicare, and cuts in government programs and services. In this ‘debate’, they are aided by the media in that a proposal is only described as ‘serious’ and even ‘courageous’ if it harms a lot of poor and vulnerable people…
Mano Singham (“The ‘Fiscal Cliff’ and the ‘Grand Bargain’”)
02 December 2012
The Perils of Research
So, it seems that Chris Rodda has got her copy of the new edition of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies only to find that not only was it not published by a bigger outfit than Thomas Nelson, not only did it not contain the promised pages of new documentation for his outlandish claims, but it wasn’t even a new edition. Yes, the new edition of Barton’s work announced at Amazon was nothing but leftover copies of the Thomas Nelson edition. Chris Rodda went over it page by page and literally nothing had been changed.
God, what a disappointment. I feel quite confident that those couple dozen pages of documentation would have cleared everything up, made it all plain, and revealed to us that what he was writing was actually reasonable, rather than a dish of moldy cabbage that somehow got pushed to the back of the refrigerator. Research is like that sometimes; you expect a diamond and you get cubic zirconium; you expect enlightenment and you get Carlos Castaneda’s dissertation.
Think of the feelings of those Beatle enthusiasts when the long-lost first recording of “Please Please Me” turned up (in the back of somebody’s closet as I recall. No, that was the newspaper I kept of the first landing on the moon …) It should have been a slower, blusier, Roy Orbisonesque arrangement—but instead it was essentially identical to the version found on their second single. (The drummer was different—the moody magnificent Pete Best had been replaced by some interloper—but the same essential feel.) That must have been a real disappointment—it was for me, anyway. And so the slow version recedes into the mists of prehistory, an artefact like Jane Austen’s First Impressions, intriguing to think about, but perpetually out of reach.
Am I making sense this first Sunday of Advent in the year twelve thousand twelve of the Holocene era? I doubt it very much. We live in senseless times. Uganda fires a blow in the War on Xmas with a promise of new anti-gay laws in time for the holidays—as if the old ones weren’t severe enough. Republicans in the US Congress unveil more plans to increase the wealth of the idle bloodsucking class (or “job-creators” as they like to ironically call themselves) by robbing the nation pension fund that employees have paid into all their lives. We live in senseless times; why should I be immune to the zeitgeist?
And speaking of senseless, ever tried to follow a David Barton footnote? Footnotes are supposed to be helpful guides pointing to sources, not joke roadsigns that point you to nowhere, or useless decorations put in to give the appearance of research in the absence of evidence. Of course real research takes you off those convenient well-lit roads into the shadowy hinterland of unexamined sources. You read that such-and-such paper had a reporter at the front, you open the crumbling pages with excitement—and it turns out that the so-called reporter was only sending out political diatribes from a point some fifty miles away from the scene of action. Can’t be helped; research is like that.
Many years ago I spent considerable time and money running down a copy of the first (unrevised) edition Alfred Meacham’s Wigwam and War Path only to find that there really was no such thing. The so-called first edition is nothing but early copies of the supposedly revised edition with an errata sheet and no signature on the author’s picture in the front of the volume. There are numerous minor corrections throughout, some of which are identical to those on the errata sheet, and some of which are not, but it is manifestly the same edition, and the editorial confusion that is manifest in the volume is the same no matter which printing you use. That was a disappointment—but, as I say, research is all too often like that.
So, to recap on the David Barton saga: first, when Thomas Nelson pulled The Jefferson Lies for its inaccuracies, Barton announced that he had a bigger publisher for the book, and that it would be new and improved. Second, when a new edition was announced, the new publisher is (apparently) Barton himself, through his own Wallbuilders press. Third, when the book is actually delivered, it turns out to be published by Thomas Nelson, not by a new and bigger publisher, and it is the same old book, not new and improved. Pretty much a clean miss all the way around.
God, what a disappointment. I feel quite confident that those couple dozen pages of documentation would have cleared everything up, made it all plain, and revealed to us that what he was writing was actually reasonable, rather than a dish of moldy cabbage that somehow got pushed to the back of the refrigerator. Research is like that sometimes; you expect a diamond and you get cubic zirconium; you expect enlightenment and you get Carlos Castaneda’s dissertation.
Think of the feelings of those Beatle enthusiasts when the long-lost first recording of “Please Please Me” turned up (in the back of somebody’s closet as I recall. No, that was the newspaper I kept of the first landing on the moon …) It should have been a slower, blusier, Roy Orbisonesque arrangement—but instead it was essentially identical to the version found on their second single. (The drummer was different—the moody magnificent Pete Best had been replaced by some interloper—but the same essential feel.) That must have been a real disappointment—it was for me, anyway. And so the slow version recedes into the mists of prehistory, an artefact like Jane Austen’s First Impressions, intriguing to think about, but perpetually out of reach.
Am I making sense this first Sunday of Advent in the year twelve thousand twelve of the Holocene era? I doubt it very much. We live in senseless times. Uganda fires a blow in the War on Xmas with a promise of new anti-gay laws in time for the holidays—as if the old ones weren’t severe enough. Republicans in the US Congress unveil more plans to increase the wealth of the idle bloodsucking class (or “job-creators” as they like to ironically call themselves) by robbing the nation pension fund that employees have paid into all their lives. We live in senseless times; why should I be immune to the zeitgeist?
And speaking of senseless, ever tried to follow a David Barton footnote? Footnotes are supposed to be helpful guides pointing to sources, not joke roadsigns that point you to nowhere, or useless decorations put in to give the appearance of research in the absence of evidence. Of course real research takes you off those convenient well-lit roads into the shadowy hinterland of unexamined sources. You read that such-and-such paper had a reporter at the front, you open the crumbling pages with excitement—and it turns out that the so-called reporter was only sending out political diatribes from a point some fifty miles away from the scene of action. Can’t be helped; research is like that.
Many years ago I spent considerable time and money running down a copy of the first (unrevised) edition Alfred Meacham’s Wigwam and War Path only to find that there really was no such thing. The so-called first edition is nothing but early copies of the supposedly revised edition with an errata sheet and no signature on the author’s picture in the front of the volume. There are numerous minor corrections throughout, some of which are identical to those on the errata sheet, and some of which are not, but it is manifestly the same edition, and the editorial confusion that is manifest in the volume is the same no matter which printing you use. That was a disappointment—but, as I say, research is all too often like that.
So, to recap on the David Barton saga: first, when Thomas Nelson pulled The Jefferson Lies for its inaccuracies, Barton announced that he had a bigger publisher for the book, and that it would be new and improved. Second, when a new edition was announced, the new publisher is (apparently) Barton himself, through his own Wallbuilders press. Third, when the book is actually delivered, it turns out to be published by Thomas Nelson, not by a new and bigger publisher, and it is the same old book, not new and improved. Pretty much a clean miss all the way around.
01 December 2012
Quotation of the Day
Many mysteries remain about the origins of the universe; how rapidly it has expanded, and how all the atomic parts fit together. There is a lot left to learn. But not about whether or not the universe was created in seven days. It wasn’t. Rubio is wrong—it is not a dispute for theologians. It is not a dispute at all.
There are not two sides to every issue. Some have thirteen sides and others have one.
10 November 2012
Quotation of the Day
It long has been my opinion that, sooner or later, it is the responsibility of the Democratic party to the future of the republic and the political commonwealth to beat the Republicans so badly in so many areas that the Republicans are faced with a choice of either historical irrelevance, or wringing the craziness out of their party by enforcing a set pf party orthodoxy that does not include creationism, gay-bashing, anti-science lunacy, and the crackpot economic theory that has infected the party ever since Arthur Laffer found that cocktail napkin in the airport bar. Until that glorious day when we have proportional voting, viable third parties, and sparkling white unicorn ponies, like it or not, the Democratic party is the only political institution capable of doing that job. That it largely has shirked that job ever since the first time somebody yelled “peacenik!” at it in the late autumn of 1972 does not make the job less real, or the urgency of doing it less immediate.
Charles P. Pierce
(“How the Democrats Can Make the Republicans Pay”)
09 November 2012
Quotation of the Day
Any ideology based on the premise that facts don’t count will eventually fail. You can coast for a while on false beliefs, just as you can drive for hundreds of miles with a faulty gas gauge. But there comes a point when the tank runs dry and the best bullshit in the world won’t convince that engine to turn over. Fortunately for us, the Romney machine sputtered and died before it was able to roll over the entire nation and run the ship of state aground.
Steven “DarkSyde” Andrew
05 November 2012
A Horse Race and a Hanging
A reader signing himself Harley writes in response to my account of the reporters’ race to cover the hanging of the Modoc leaders in October 1873 (Dubious Documents: The Unlikely Life of William Drannan):
But where to start? The Modoc war is not the best known of the conflicts between the invading Euro-Americans and the peoples they found in their path, and it was far from typical, so perhaps a few words are in order about the conflict. The Modoc people lived along the present-day California-Oregon border until 1864, when they were assigned by treaty to Klamath Reservation, and were required to abandon their ancestral lands altogether. Some of them moved there voluntarily in 1867, and the rest were taken there at the end of 1869, but they abandoned the reservation en masse in the spring of 1870. Many, perhaps most, refused to return. In November 1872 a small force of soldiers from Fort Klamath were sent to escort them there, the Modocs resisted, and fled to their traditional stronghold in today’s Lava Bed National Monument. There they holed up, resisting attempts by the army to force them out, and by peace commissioners to entice them to come out voluntarily.
February and March of 1873 were taken up with peace negotiations, and during that time newspaper correspondents set up bases at various army locations, covering the war from there. One of them, Edward Fox of the New York Herald, went so far as to ride into the Modoc encampment during one of the peace conferences to talk with the Modoc leaders, interviewing Captain Jack and John Schonchin among others. Another, H. W. Atwell of the Sacramento Record, spent an uncomfortable night at the Modoc encampment, under threat of death from some of the more volatile warriors, when he accompanied a peace commissioner during some tense negotiations.
These negotiations came to an abrupt end in April, when at a prearranged signal members of the Modoc delegation opened fire on the U. S. representatives, killing two of them and wounding others. When open hostilities resumed immediately after the Modocs were driven from their lava stronghold into the open, where they split up into small bands and were captured. Those who had taken part in the murders under a flag of truce were put on trial in July and six of them were sentenced to be hanged. Two of the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment at the last moment, but Captain Jack, John Schonchin, Black Jim, and Boston Charley were in fact hanged on 3 October 1873.
The major newspapers sent out reporters to cover the event. Fox and Atwell returned, and the San Francisco Chronicle sent out a newcomer to the scene, H. S. Shaw. (The Chronicle’s coverage had been somewhat inconsistent since its original reporter, Robert Bogart, was driven from the scene when his coverage was deemed too favorable to the Modocs.) The powerful Associated Press (not the current outfit of that name), usually represented by a reporter from the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, was conspicuous by its apparent absence.
None of the reporters took note of a Jacksonville teamster named William Turner who was working at the fort. Had they known his background, however, they might have smelt a rat. Turner was a former editor of a Jacksonville newspaper, the Oregon Sentinel, and he was not there by chance. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin had hired him to represent the interests of the press association.
Fox’s coverage was probably the most thorough, including a review of the major events of the war and final interviews with the Modoc leaders, in addition to an account of the execution itself. But the execution was the notable event, and all reporters wanted to be the first to get the news out. Being first was critical in more than one sense; it took time to telegraph information, and there was only one key available at Jacksonville; whoever got there first would quite possibly keep possession of the key long enough to keep his rivals’ stories out of the papers till the next day.
Fox’s preparations were formidable: he had nine horses spaced out along the ninety-mile road to Jacksonville, and three couriers to carry the message. He also had a secret weapon the others didn’t know about; he planned to send a dispatch describing the preliminaries first, before the execution, to seize control of the key, to which his account of the execution would be added, so that even if another reporter’s courier got their before his second message, his account would still go out first. (He had not reckoned on the local power wielded by the Associated Press, however, as we will see.)
Against this the other two reporters openly on the scene sought alternatives. Atwell decided to try for Ashland, which was closer, but the road was little better than a trail in some places, and it would be difficult to make good time. Like Fox, he set up a chain of horses and couriers along his route, and prepared for the event. Shaw decided to try for Yreka, sending his account there by carrier pigeon.
Turner kept his preparations as private as possible. He arranged secretly to clear an old trail, once used to bring supplies to the fort from Jacksonville, but now abandoned. Like the others he had multiple horses and couriers to carry his report of the execution along his chosen path. Unlike the others, he was not concerned with creating a comprehensive report, but only in getting the news of the hanging out first.
The hanging of the Modoc leaders has been described many times since then, both by eyewitnesses and by those attempting to make sense of events, but these four reporters were among the first to attempt it, and certainly were the first to get their versions into print. The events were simple enough. The troops assembled to escort them at 8:30 in the morning, at 9:30 the prisoners were brought forth, by 9:50 they were placed on the gallows, at 10:00 the sentence was read, at 10:18 the ropes were adjusted, and by 10:25 it was all over.
The reporters wrote rapidly, standing by their horses, and within minutes the reports were handed to the various couriers and the race was on. Shaw’s pigeons were launched, but seemed clueless about what they were supposed to do, and circled aimlessly about, finally settling on some nearby branches. The rest, however, were more or less successfully on their way.
Fox’s first courier, sent out well in advance with a report covering the previous day’s activities including the complete military orders for the execution, arrived first, and thus gained control of the key as he had planned. He had written “more to come” at the end of the dispatch, to indicate that this was not the complete transmission, and seemingly felt confident that that would be enough to hold the wire for him. The trouble was, Western Union was hopelessly entwined with the Associated Press; its operators had been acting as local stringers for it throughout the war, and operator had orders to send its dispatch through first if at all possible. Both Turner’s agent and Fox’s arrived before Fox’s first dispatch had been concluded, but as Turner’s agent had arrived some thirty minutes before Fox’s, the telegraph operator used that as an excuse to terminate Fox’s story at the “more to come” point, and to send Turner’s account before resuming Fox’s. The result was that Turner’s brief story became the first news of the execution to reach the outside world.
Atwell, who had tried to get his story out via Ashland, fell victim to some extremely bad luck. One of his couriers had an accident on the road and fell off his horse. (According to one account he was inebriated at the time.) This mishap caused his story to be delayed for a further day, putting him squarely behind the others in the race. And to finish things off, Shaw’s pigeons never did make it to Yreka, and his story was apparently lost. He and Fox, however, had an arrangement by which Fox’s courier carried a version of his story to go out on the Jacksonville line. It took the operator there twenty-two hours to transmit all the material provided by the various reporters.
And this, dear readers, is the story of how the news of the Modoc executions first reached the outside world from Fort Klamath. The sources include the reporters’ own accounts in their respective papers, as well as a number of pieces in the Yreka Journal, the Yreka Union, and the Oregon Sentinel. As I said in my original piece, this did make a considerable local stir at the time, but it was barely reported outside the region. In a later piece I intend to cover William F. Drannan’s account with a bit more detail, but this is as much as I can stand to do at the moment. Drannan will have to wait.
You suggest that according to Drannan’s story of the dispatch race he tried the route that was farther away—you suggest this as Ashland, Oregon, the closer location being Yreka Station (I can't find this on modern maps so is this just nearby Yreka?) Drannan's account of the dispatch race says that it was from Fort Klamath to either Ashland or Jacksonville. He suggests he went to Ashland because it was closer than Jacksonville. Drannan's numbers state this is 80 miles of trail to Ashland versus 100 miles of wagon road to Jacksonville, modern trails and roads suggest a trip of 70 miles versus 75 to 90 miles so his guesses were accurate enough. Modern day Yreka is not closer than either of these destinations, it is about 100 miles away. If the next account of this story was in 1960 then Drannan's account is the only account that can be considered either first hand, or second hand and alive as an adult at the time. The 1960 account is written solely as a history from someone who was probably not born at the time of the events.Okay, reader Harley has in fact caught me out in a major inaccuracy in my account. You see, I was writing fairly quickly (and entirely from memory) when I wrote that, and I carelessly substituted Yreka for Jacksonville. Yreka, you see, was the town that carried most of the telegraphic correspondence from the front during the Modoc war: government dispatches, reporters’ accounts, and private messages all went out primarily from that location. The hanging, however, was another matter. It took place at Fort Klamath, and the main telegraph station for dispatches from that place was Jacksonville. There are other problems with the story as I related it then, and as there is, as far as I know, no full account of events available either in print or on the internet, I thought I would take a moment to relate the story as it happened, based on contemporary accounts.
But where to start? The Modoc war is not the best known of the conflicts between the invading Euro-Americans and the peoples they found in their path, and it was far from typical, so perhaps a few words are in order about the conflict. The Modoc people lived along the present-day California-Oregon border until 1864, when they were assigned by treaty to Klamath Reservation, and were required to abandon their ancestral lands altogether. Some of them moved there voluntarily in 1867, and the rest were taken there at the end of 1869, but they abandoned the reservation en masse in the spring of 1870. Many, perhaps most, refused to return. In November 1872 a small force of soldiers from Fort Klamath were sent to escort them there, the Modocs resisted, and fled to their traditional stronghold in today’s Lava Bed National Monument. There they holed up, resisting attempts by the army to force them out, and by peace commissioners to entice them to come out voluntarily.
February and March of 1873 were taken up with peace negotiations, and during that time newspaper correspondents set up bases at various army locations, covering the war from there. One of them, Edward Fox of the New York Herald, went so far as to ride into the Modoc encampment during one of the peace conferences to talk with the Modoc leaders, interviewing Captain Jack and John Schonchin among others. Another, H. W. Atwell of the Sacramento Record, spent an uncomfortable night at the Modoc encampment, under threat of death from some of the more volatile warriors, when he accompanied a peace commissioner during some tense negotiations.
These negotiations came to an abrupt end in April, when at a prearranged signal members of the Modoc delegation opened fire on the U. S. representatives, killing two of them and wounding others. When open hostilities resumed immediately after the Modocs were driven from their lava stronghold into the open, where they split up into small bands and were captured. Those who had taken part in the murders under a flag of truce were put on trial in July and six of them were sentenced to be hanged. Two of the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment at the last moment, but Captain Jack, John Schonchin, Black Jim, and Boston Charley were in fact hanged on 3 October 1873.
The major newspapers sent out reporters to cover the event. Fox and Atwell returned, and the San Francisco Chronicle sent out a newcomer to the scene, H. S. Shaw. (The Chronicle’s coverage had been somewhat inconsistent since its original reporter, Robert Bogart, was driven from the scene when his coverage was deemed too favorable to the Modocs.) The powerful Associated Press (not the current outfit of that name), usually represented by a reporter from the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, was conspicuous by its apparent absence.
None of the reporters took note of a Jacksonville teamster named William Turner who was working at the fort. Had they known his background, however, they might have smelt a rat. Turner was a former editor of a Jacksonville newspaper, the Oregon Sentinel, and he was not there by chance. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin had hired him to represent the interests of the press association.
Fox’s coverage was probably the most thorough, including a review of the major events of the war and final interviews with the Modoc leaders, in addition to an account of the execution itself. But the execution was the notable event, and all reporters wanted to be the first to get the news out. Being first was critical in more than one sense; it took time to telegraph information, and there was only one key available at Jacksonville; whoever got there first would quite possibly keep possession of the key long enough to keep his rivals’ stories out of the papers till the next day.
Fox’s preparations were formidable: he had nine horses spaced out along the ninety-mile road to Jacksonville, and three couriers to carry the message. He also had a secret weapon the others didn’t know about; he planned to send a dispatch describing the preliminaries first, before the execution, to seize control of the key, to which his account of the execution would be added, so that even if another reporter’s courier got their before his second message, his account would still go out first. (He had not reckoned on the local power wielded by the Associated Press, however, as we will see.)
Against this the other two reporters openly on the scene sought alternatives. Atwell decided to try for Ashland, which was closer, but the road was little better than a trail in some places, and it would be difficult to make good time. Like Fox, he set up a chain of horses and couriers along his route, and prepared for the event. Shaw decided to try for Yreka, sending his account there by carrier pigeon.
Turner kept his preparations as private as possible. He arranged secretly to clear an old trail, once used to bring supplies to the fort from Jacksonville, but now abandoned. Like the others he had multiple horses and couriers to carry his report of the execution along his chosen path. Unlike the others, he was not concerned with creating a comprehensive report, but only in getting the news of the hanging out first.
The hanging of the Modoc leaders has been described many times since then, both by eyewitnesses and by those attempting to make sense of events, but these four reporters were among the first to attempt it, and certainly were the first to get their versions into print. The events were simple enough. The troops assembled to escort them at 8:30 in the morning, at 9:30 the prisoners were brought forth, by 9:50 they were placed on the gallows, at 10:00 the sentence was read, at 10:18 the ropes were adjusted, and by 10:25 it was all over.
The reporters wrote rapidly, standing by their horses, and within minutes the reports were handed to the various couriers and the race was on. Shaw’s pigeons were launched, but seemed clueless about what they were supposed to do, and circled aimlessly about, finally settling on some nearby branches. The rest, however, were more or less successfully on their way.
Fox’s first courier, sent out well in advance with a report covering the previous day’s activities including the complete military orders for the execution, arrived first, and thus gained control of the key as he had planned. He had written “more to come” at the end of the dispatch, to indicate that this was not the complete transmission, and seemingly felt confident that that would be enough to hold the wire for him. The trouble was, Western Union was hopelessly entwined with the Associated Press; its operators had been acting as local stringers for it throughout the war, and operator had orders to send its dispatch through first if at all possible. Both Turner’s agent and Fox’s arrived before Fox’s first dispatch had been concluded, but as Turner’s agent had arrived some thirty minutes before Fox’s, the telegraph operator used that as an excuse to terminate Fox’s story at the “more to come” point, and to send Turner’s account before resuming Fox’s. The result was that Turner’s brief story became the first news of the execution to reach the outside world.
Atwell, who had tried to get his story out via Ashland, fell victim to some extremely bad luck. One of his couriers had an accident on the road and fell off his horse. (According to one account he was inebriated at the time.) This mishap caused his story to be delayed for a further day, putting him squarely behind the others in the race. And to finish things off, Shaw’s pigeons never did make it to Yreka, and his story was apparently lost. He and Fox, however, had an arrangement by which Fox’s courier carried a version of his story to go out on the Jacksonville line. It took the operator there twenty-two hours to transmit all the material provided by the various reporters.
And this, dear readers, is the story of how the news of the Modoc executions first reached the outside world from Fort Klamath. The sources include the reporters’ own accounts in their respective papers, as well as a number of pieces in the Yreka Journal, the Yreka Union, and the Oregon Sentinel. As I said in my original piece, this did make a considerable local stir at the time, but it was barely reported outside the region. In a later piece I intend to cover William F. Drannan’s account with a bit more detail, but this is as much as I can stand to do at the moment. Drannan will have to wait.
04 November 2012
Quotation of the Day
There is a reason why the first thing a historian needs to learn to be a good historian is historiography, also known as the history of history. There is almost no known historical fact and there certainly isn’t any analysis of a historical fact that hasn’t been disputed at least once and, more likely, argued to death by men with beards and an unnatural appreciation for tweed.
Geds (“Menzies Contra Reality, Part 1”)
Bronze-age Goat-herders My Ass
One of the words I don’t really get is the term “construct” when used as a pejorative noun. This is a scholarly construct some Wikipedia editor will write dismissively in explaining why there should be no article on the Ebionite gospel, or the Ur-Hamlet is nothing but a modern construct.—as though that were a reason for neglecting the evidence on the subject. As Jason Thibeault points out (“Jim Garlow: Sexual orientation is a ‘modern construct’, therefore a choice”) so is gravity a modern construct, but that doesn’t mean that people could float off the earth until Isaac Newton named the force and described it in mathematical terms.
I mean, gee whiz, most things are modern constructs, if they are of any importance. Today’s Puritan Bible—the Hebrew Tanach in the Septuagint order alongside the Greek New Testament writings—is a modern construct. The second law of thermodynamics, so much beloved by the anti-evolution crowd, is a modern construct. The Rapture, for christ’s sake, is a modern construct. While the Rapture is bullshit, the second law of thermodynamics is (as far as I know) still the best scientific approximation of the truth, and the Puritan Bible at least closer to the original texts than its predecessors (though that’s not saying much), all are recent constructs viewed against the long reach of history.
It’s not the recentness of the construct that matters, it is its utility, or its beauty, or its ability to explain the evidence. In the case of the phrase “sexual orientation,” however, we are not even talking about a construct of any sort, but only of a different phrase for something that has been understood for centuries: different people are sexually aroused by different things.
The ancients were quite aware of this fact; there’s nothing new about it. Different things turn different people on. At present we have a more detailed understanding of human sexuality than in ancient times, and we have made categories and lists of the various possibilities; orientation is part of this and refers to the gender to which one is sexually attracted, as in same (homo) or different (hetero). The increasing precision of the terminology may be new, but the knowledge isn’t.
This character that Jason is replying to—apparently his name is Jim Garlow, though I don’t know who that is otherwise—gets the meaning wrong in his little diatribe, by the way; he says that sexual orientation is how one sees oneself, which it most emphatically is not. But that’s only the beginning of his willful ignorance; he’s trying to make a distinction between attraction and practice. As his parallel he claims that every healthy heterosexual male is naturally polygamous, but that these men don’t have to act on that natural desire. Similarly, therefore, just as men who are attracted to women other than their lawfully wedded wives don’t have to act on their attractions, so men who are attracted to other men don’t have to act on theirs. How this bizarre concept is supposed to be any sort of parallel he doesn’t explain. I mean, a man who is attracted to more than one woman can still have sex with somebody, by his reasoning, but who is the other man supposed to have sex with? Or is he supposed to remain celibate? Or what, exactly?
No, Jason nails this one, and I was with him all the way through this paragraph:
No, no, no… The iron-age urban dwellers who wrote the books that would eventually be incorporated into the bible were far from the bronze-age goat-herders whose lifestyle they idealized (and probably made up). That’s like calling Tennyson a medieval jouster because he liked to write about them. And as for the claim that modern-day homophobes get their fix from the Bible—do they really? Out of that vast collection of noble poetry, blood-drenched history, clever fables and upward of a thousand lies (as one of Mark Twain’s characters put it) there are no more than a few references to homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, Romans 1:27), and while they are nasty, they hardly constitute a major theme. One of the indications of just how desperate Bible-believing homophobes are is they way they have read homosexuality into various passages, such as the destruction of the cities of the plain by fire. No, it doesn’t look as if they get it from the Bible; rather they use the Bible as a crutch for their prejudices.
I mean, when was the last time you saw any of them complain about people who reap to the very edges of their fields, not leaving anything for the poor and the alien? But that's in there too; check out Leviticus 23:22. It's in the book, as Johnny Standley used to object to those who didn't believe in the power of Grandma's lye soap.
I mean, gee whiz, most things are modern constructs, if they are of any importance. Today’s Puritan Bible—the Hebrew Tanach in the Septuagint order alongside the Greek New Testament writings—is a modern construct. The second law of thermodynamics, so much beloved by the anti-evolution crowd, is a modern construct. The Rapture, for christ’s sake, is a modern construct. While the Rapture is bullshit, the second law of thermodynamics is (as far as I know) still the best scientific approximation of the truth, and the Puritan Bible at least closer to the original texts than its predecessors (though that’s not saying much), all are recent constructs viewed against the long reach of history.
It’s not the recentness of the construct that matters, it is its utility, or its beauty, or its ability to explain the evidence. In the case of the phrase “sexual orientation,” however, we are not even talking about a construct of any sort, but only of a different phrase for something that has been understood for centuries: different people are sexually aroused by different things.
The ancients were quite aware of this fact; there’s nothing new about it. Different things turn different people on. At present we have a more detailed understanding of human sexuality than in ancient times, and we have made categories and lists of the various possibilities; orientation is part of this and refers to the gender to which one is sexually attracted, as in same (homo) or different (hetero). The increasing precision of the terminology may be new, but the knowledge isn’t.
This character that Jason is replying to—apparently his name is Jim Garlow, though I don’t know who that is otherwise—gets the meaning wrong in his little diatribe, by the way; he says that sexual orientation is how one sees oneself, which it most emphatically is not. But that’s only the beginning of his willful ignorance; he’s trying to make a distinction between attraction and practice. As his parallel he claims that every healthy heterosexual male is naturally polygamous, but that these men don’t have to act on that natural desire. Similarly, therefore, just as men who are attracted to women other than their lawfully wedded wives don’t have to act on their attractions, so men who are attracted to other men don’t have to act on theirs. How this bizarre concept is supposed to be any sort of parallel he doesn’t explain. I mean, a man who is attracted to more than one woman can still have sex with somebody, by his reasoning, but who is the other man supposed to have sex with? Or is he supposed to remain celibate? Or what, exactly?
No, Jason nails this one, and I was with him all the way through this paragraph:
Each person in society contributes to the society most optimally when they are healthy, happy and in a career well suited to them. Finding a loving consenting partner (or multiple, if polyamory is allowed for those that so choose) to support you and to provide comfort and yes, even consensual sexual relations, is a big factor in determining whether or not someone will be happy. So it is objectively better for society if people who are naturally gay have all the same recourses toward autonomy, toward self-directed pursuit of happiness as do straights and straight-enoughs.But then, with his final paragraph, he lost me:
But these people would never see that, because some bronze-age goat herders wove their homophobia into their Bible and said God wrote it.Oh, man, bronze-age goat-herders? Did you have to go there?
No, no, no… The iron-age urban dwellers who wrote the books that would eventually be incorporated into the bible were far from the bronze-age goat-herders whose lifestyle they idealized (and probably made up). That’s like calling Tennyson a medieval jouster because he liked to write about them. And as for the claim that modern-day homophobes get their fix from the Bible—do they really? Out of that vast collection of noble poetry, blood-drenched history, clever fables and upward of a thousand lies (as one of Mark Twain’s characters put it) there are no more than a few references to homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, Romans 1:27), and while they are nasty, they hardly constitute a major theme. One of the indications of just how desperate Bible-believing homophobes are is they way they have read homosexuality into various passages, such as the destruction of the cities of the plain by fire. No, it doesn’t look as if they get it from the Bible; rather they use the Bible as a crutch for their prejudices.
I mean, when was the last time you saw any of them complain about people who reap to the very edges of their fields, not leaving anything for the poor and the alien? But that's in there too; check out Leviticus 23:22. It's in the book, as Johnny Standley used to object to those who didn't believe in the power of Grandma's lye soap.
26 September 2012
Quotation of the Day
If freedom of religion, conscience and speech are to mean anything, religious doctrines, symbols and assertions must be open to inquiry, criticism and, indeed, ridicule. Otherwise, the human thought process will be shut down by force of law in order to protect the sensibilities of the superstitious, and free inquiry into the most central issues facing humanity since the birth of the species will be effectively foreclosed.
Hussein Ibish, Blasphemy: an indispensable human right
23 September 2012
Quotation of the Day
The ‘right to religion’ is meant to be the right to a personal religion and belief. But when religion is part of the state, or judicial system, it is no longer a matter of religious belief but of political power.
In fact, religion in the state, educational system or judicial system is the end of any form of equality, choice, rights, freedoms or democratic politics.
Maryam Namazie, “This is about Politics, not Religion”
18 September 2012
Quotation of the Day
Libertarians postulate that unfettering everyone’s most self-serving economic motives is the best way to create a vibrant, egalitarian economy, just as unfettering a giant unstable slope of rocks on a steep hillside is the best way to create a stone cathedral at the base of the hill. MRAs hold that men are unfairly treated in today’s world by comparison to women, while simultaneously holding that the subjugation of women is natural and inevitable and no big deal. Libertarianism and MRAism are philosophies that will not withstand honest and rigorous investigation by a moderately bright 7-year-old, in other words, and yet the ranks of skeptics’groups are crawling with both.
Chris Clarke, “Cats, Skepticism, and MRAs”
01 September 2012
Thought for the Day
Why would anyone think that an ancient set of works, any ancient set of works, would provide moral guidance on much of anything? The Biblical writers learned their “values” from their culture. That’s how we do it too.
26 August 2012
Like on Sunday
Sitting here, in front of my computer, I feel a sudden jolt of sadness shake me. And then it crosses my mind—it’s sunday. Sunday evening. Hello darkness my old friend; LoS is back. Like on Sunday. A sense of sorrow, of regret, that all good things were coming to an end and there was nothing left to look forward to. In my journal, after trying to explain it a couple of times, I started just saying that I feel “like on sunday”, and then just abbreviating it LoS.
Originally, of course, it was about the weekend—a time that had been so bright with promise friday night reduced to ashes of might-have-beens on sunday. A time when the consequences of procrastination had to be faced and that massive assignment given two weeks ago actually had to be done in a handful of hours. A time when the demons danced and the forces of hell rejoiced.
But for most of my life sunday evening has meant no more than any other time; my schedule is as likely to involve me doing something on the weekend as doing something on weekdays. And yet, still the feeling comes. There is something basic, primeval, in this rhythm of despair. The number of times I’ve had the sense of LoS wash over me on a sunday night cannot be counted.
And therein lies the rub. Cherry-picking, confirmation bias, all that sort of thing. Does LoS really happen on schedule, appearing on the summons of a long-ago school schedule? Being more than usually self-obsessed I’ve actually kept records of this feeling, along with other irrational shafts of displeasure, and—at least while I was actually keeping the record—discovered that LoS was no more likely to happen on a sunday evening than at any other time. Nor was I particularly prone to it on a sunday. I just notice it more, apparently, when it does come then.
And yet—and yet it feels to me as if it does. Many times, like the bolt from the blues just now, I have felt the familiar stroke of a minor chord across the strings of my spirit and believed myself to be participating in a long-dead ritual set in the stones of my childhood and mindlessly perpetuated by some sort of cosmic clock. But it probably isn’t. Far more likely it is nothing more than the consequence of a choice of label given when groping for a shorthand to describe a nameless impression a long time ago.
Originally, of course, it was about the weekend—a time that had been so bright with promise friday night reduced to ashes of might-have-beens on sunday. A time when the consequences of procrastination had to be faced and that massive assignment given two weeks ago actually had to be done in a handful of hours. A time when the demons danced and the forces of hell rejoiced.
But for most of my life sunday evening has meant no more than any other time; my schedule is as likely to involve me doing something on the weekend as doing something on weekdays. And yet, still the feeling comes. There is something basic, primeval, in this rhythm of despair. The number of times I’ve had the sense of LoS wash over me on a sunday night cannot be counted.
And therein lies the rub. Cherry-picking, confirmation bias, all that sort of thing. Does LoS really happen on schedule, appearing on the summons of a long-ago school schedule? Being more than usually self-obsessed I’ve actually kept records of this feeling, along with other irrational shafts of displeasure, and—at least while I was actually keeping the record—discovered that LoS was no more likely to happen on a sunday evening than at any other time. Nor was I particularly prone to it on a sunday. I just notice it more, apparently, when it does come then.
And yet—and yet it feels to me as if it does. Many times, like the bolt from the blues just now, I have felt the familiar stroke of a minor chord across the strings of my spirit and believed myself to be participating in a long-dead ritual set in the stones of my childhood and mindlessly perpetuated by some sort of cosmic clock. But it probably isn’t. Far more likely it is nothing more than the consequence of a choice of label given when groping for a shorthand to describe a nameless impression a long time ago.
27 July 2012
Quotation of the Day
Tilting the playing field in favor of the established rich at the expense of small businesses, tax payers, along with fair competition and brilliant innovation, is not a bug, this a feature of modern day conservative policy. The conservative CEO class has looted the nation for three decades under that policy. With President Mitt Romney they can dream of one more big score, but they can absolutely count one of their own to help pull up the ladder and give them and their spoils safe passage to the gleaming offshore paradises that await, when the jig is finally up.
23 July 2012
Thought for the Day
I wish people could be OK with that, with the fact that religion isn't true. After all, they can still go to church. They can still pray. They can still observe the rituals and special days. They can still read holy books and discuss teachings. They can still imagine heaven. They can still contemplate hell. They can still fantasize about knowing, all by themselves, deep secrets of the universe.
Religion does not need to be true for people to be interested in it, inspired by it, educated by it, moved by it. But it needs to be true if people are going to learn about the universe and about people.
And it's not true, so let's not ask it to be, and let's not try to extract knowledge where there is none to be had.
03 July 2012
Quotation of the Day
A government with the power to force us to buy health insurance can also force restaurants to serve black people.
Bruce Bartlett as quoted by Andrew Sullivan
30 June 2012
Time and Timbuktu
Barbarians are smashing the tombs of the Muslim saints in Timbuktu, and nobody gives a shit. Certainly I don’t; it’s not my field. And they aren’t my saints—and I wouldn’t care if they were. Hell, you could drag the bones of Galileo and Samuel Clemens and Martin Luther King about the streets and have one merry old celebration desecrating them and it wouldn’t bother me any; let the dead take care of the dead as some old wise guy once said. You could do the same with my bones for that matter, once I’m dead and not using them any longer. It’s all one to me.
I care more about the old libraries of Timbuktu, though it’s still not my field and I couldn’t read them if I had them sitting right here in front of me. So far, if the reports be true, the old documents with their ghosts of the thoughts of the dead and forgotten are safe; the barbarians care nothing about them. But that’s the thing—who knows what a barbarian will choose to destroy next? That’s the cool thing about barbarism; it takes no effort of any kind to eradicate permanently what generations of human beings have treasured and preserved so that the memory of humankind may be kept to some limited extent alive. It takes effort to remember; none to forget.
We hear that an assault on one of these old shrines was deflected when local citizens formed a human chain to protect it from the vandals. Cynically we may suppose that they were doing it for all the wrong reasons—superstition, fanaticism, tourism. What’s the difference? It’s a magnificent gesture, a finger of light given to the darkness. Inevitably the darkness of oblivion wins, order dissolves into chaos, nothing is left but firefly glow in the darkness. Oblivion is easy; continuity is hard. Which, when you think about it, is why the barbarians can be given no quarter. There is no compromise between existence and non-existence, movement and stillness, light and darkness. Darkness inevitably wins in the long run—but we live in the short run. And there light can prevail. It’s not much—but it’s all we’ve got.
I care more about the old libraries of Timbuktu, though it’s still not my field and I couldn’t read them if I had them sitting right here in front of me. So far, if the reports be true, the old documents with their ghosts of the thoughts of the dead and forgotten are safe; the barbarians care nothing about them. But that’s the thing—who knows what a barbarian will choose to destroy next? That’s the cool thing about barbarism; it takes no effort of any kind to eradicate permanently what generations of human beings have treasured and preserved so that the memory of humankind may be kept to some limited extent alive. It takes effort to remember; none to forget.
We hear that an assault on one of these old shrines was deflected when local citizens formed a human chain to protect it from the vandals. Cynically we may suppose that they were doing it for all the wrong reasons—superstition, fanaticism, tourism. What’s the difference? It’s a magnificent gesture, a finger of light given to the darkness. Inevitably the darkness of oblivion wins, order dissolves into chaos, nothing is left but firefly glow in the darkness. Oblivion is easy; continuity is hard. Which, when you think about it, is why the barbarians can be given no quarter. There is no compromise between existence and non-existence, movement and stillness, light and darkness. Darkness inevitably wins in the long run—but we live in the short run. And there light can prevail. It’s not much—but it’s all we’ve got.
24 June 2012
Quotation of the Day
The handful of men, and smaller number of women, who have spent the last year actively trying to ruin people’s lives, and those who have recently joined them when they realized that their ass-grabbing culture was threatened as well, really have only one motivation: They don’t want to live in a world in which women can tell guys to fuck off without said woman paying a cost of some kind, being put in her place, or a threat being made against her so she will think twice about speaking up in the future.
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