Author: Gil

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Jacobean Mires

This week’s book is Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, by Patrick Dillon. It’s about the British prohibition of gin in the 1730s, and has all sorts of parallels with the crack and crank “epidemics” of our time.

I came across a neat passage yesterday about the supporters of the deposed King James. Dillon discusses how, over the years, being a Jacobite is less about restoring James’ line to the throne and more about dissing the establishment (notwithstanding a minor bombing by Nixon & Killingbeck). As he writes:

Jacobitism was the fly in the ointment of Hanoverian stability; it was Britain’s loose cannon, its unfinished business. Nearly half a century after the Glorious Revolution, the Old Pretender still waited in Paris with his ridiculous court and his bogus ceremonial; whenever a French king wanted to annoy the English, he still had only to start talking about invasions and restorations. Back in England, the wounds of the Glorious Revolution had still not healed over.

All the same, Jacobitism had changed in the past few decades. The passage of half a century was bound to change something. Even in 1715, restoration had been a real possibility. There had been a real Stuart army in Britain, with real support from Jacobite aristocrats, and from at least part of the people. The replacement of the unknown fifty-five-year-old German who sat on the throne with the late Queen’s half-brother seemed perfectly plausible.

By 1736, it didn’t seem so anymore, or only to people like Robert Nixon and Samuel Killingbeck. After twenty years of Hanoverian stability, the Stuarts had receded several steps into the realm of myth. A French-speaking king didn’t seem any more desirable than a German-speaking one. And although he had ditched much of the baggage of absolutism, James Stuart had stubbornly refused to turn away from Rome. The world had moved on. The opposition had found some other ground on which to fight its battles.

Jacobitism had become something more diffuse; the king across the water was wreathed in mist. The mist was partly made up of romantic memories and partly of dreams for a better future. Nine years later, in 1745, when the mist briefly evaporated and a real Jacobite army was marching through England behind a real Stuart prince, the main emotion among English Jacobites was one of alarm. The Pretender didn’t realize it himself, but after twenty-one years Jacobitism in England had turned into something quite different from a campaign to restore him.

Instead, it had become a general form of protest against those in power. As long as there was Jacobitism, there was an alternative to the Hanoverians. Jacobitism became a way of withholding support. That way, the King of England and his ministers, like everyone else, had to live with uncertainty. It had metamorphosed into a general spirit of subversion. Disgruntled Tory squires toasted the ‘King over the Water’ to express their disenchantment with London, the times and Walpole’s ministry. Jacobite songs like ‘The King Shall Enjoy His Own Again’ became a way to cheek anyone in authority.

This has led me to think about the knee-jerk “oppositionism” that characterizes a lot of debate in the U.S. for past decade-plus. It also, as ever, puts me in mind of Orwell. From England, Your England (1941):

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is, ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me,’ like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing.

It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline into what is left of the French army. In the British army the drill is rigid and complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.

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Go, Cabal!

According to this WashPost piece by Sebastian Mallaby, Paul Wolfowitz is doing a good job at revamping the World Bank’s policies regarding lending money to despotic regimes and graft-ridden contracts:

The new boss is going to be tough on corruption, and he’s going to push this campaign beyond the confines of the World Bank; on Saturday he persuaded the heads of several regional development banks to join his anti-corruption effort. It’s amusing to see the Wolfensohn-Stiglitz left-liberal critique of narrowly economic development policy being championed by this neoconservative icon; and it’s encouraging as well.

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The Greatest and Most Natural Movement

Good article by Robert Hughes on Rembrandt, in honor of the 400th anniversary of the artist’s birth. It turns out that Hughes likes one of my least favorite R. paintings, The Polish Rider, which I saw at the Frick and was convinced was a joke.

Discussing the majesty of Peiro, Raphael and Poussin, he writes

But what you are not likely to feel is a sense of community with these magnificent products of human thought and imagination. Were there really people who looked like this, who could be seen walking the streets of Rome, Arezzo or Paris? Who could be spoken to, and answer your voice? It seems implausible. We look at them for quite different reasons. We admire their difference, and their distance, from us.

But then there are artists whose work is not like this. They are the ones who acknowledge human imperfection and mortality. And not only acknowledge it, but in some sense glory in it, making it the prime subject of their art. For if men and women were perfect, mentally, physically, morally, spiritually, why would they need art at all?

For that, we need Rembrandt. I’ve written about his paintings a few times in the three years I’ve been keeping my virtual memories (I missed my blogiversary a few weeks ago), but I’ve only done so tentatively. The best of it was probably in this Interminably Long Ramble.

If you’re going to be in Amsterdam in the next few months, you should check out the Rembrandt-Caravaggio exhibit that Hughes’ article is plugging.

If you’re a fine art aficionado and a NASCAR fan, check out the Rembrandt 400.

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Before the flood

Just finished reading Rob Walker’s Letters from New Orleans, which I enjoyed much more than Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters. I found the latter to be far too preachy, bordering on a sort of “White Man’s Burden” for why no expense must be spared in rebuilding the city. Walker’s book, on the other hand, made me care much more for the city and what it means and has meant.

Maybe the big difference is that one writer was discussing NO,LA pre-Katrina, and the other post-Katrina.

Or maybe it’s that one writer is a journalist, and the other is a novelist.

Or maybe one guy is someone you could just chill out and have a beer with, and the other guy is a douche.

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What Would Brian Boitano Do?

I don’t write about the winter Olympics because I don’t give a crap about any of the events, except the sublimely named Super G.

Still, I had to follow this link from Drudge about some knucklehead U.S. figure skater who wore a throwback USSR warmup jacket during a practice session today. He claims to be a major Russophile, and what better way to celebrate it than to have the good ol’ CCCP across your chest?

Of course, if he’d been wearing a throwback German jersey (c. 1936), it’d be a much different story.

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Double Down

(Stories that begin with “I was a pizza delivery man” tend to go in a different direction than this one, so I apologize in advance for the letdown.)

I was a pizza delivery man one summer during my college years. My mom and I lived in southeast Pennsylvania, in a nice town close to the ivy-covered halls of Swarthmore College and one of the most depressed cities east of the Mississippi. When friends from my hometown in NJ would come to visit, they’d follow my directions from Rt. 95 and look around nervously, wondering why my mom had chosen to move to a ghetto slum. Within a mile or two, as they approached Wallingford, their moods would brighten.

When I began delivering pizzas, one of the other drivers stood beside me and pointed to the map of the delivery area. The area of Chester, PA cut off to the east by 95 was covered with cross-hatched lines. It may as well have said, “No man’s land.”

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

“We don’t deliver to that side of 95. Too many drivers got shot and had their cars stolen,” he replied.

“Uh-huh.”

“You want to buy a gun?” he asked. “I’m a licensed dealer.”

“That’s okay.”

(Keep in mind: this is within a year of my Napoleon Dynamite look)

I did carry a knife that summer, and kept a baseball bat in my car. I managed to make it through the season without getting into trouble, although I did pull out the bat once, when two guys were having a street-brawl directly in front of my car while I was on a delivery.

A year or two later, I drove a shuttle van during late-night weekend shifts for a motel near the Philadelphia International Airport. As part of that gig, I would drive the girls from the housekeeping department home when their shifts were up. They lived on The Other Side of 95. The side where there are corner bars with a line of guys 25 long waiting to get in, looking like a casting call for that bad movie-within-the-movie in The Hollywood Shuffle.

The trip was usually pretty easy, since I always knew how far I was from the highways. Still, a white guy driving a big van through Chester on a Saturday night must’ve seemed a little odd. If there were any cops on patrol, I bet they’d have been suspicious.

Why do I bring all this up? Because Chester’s getting a casino!

That’s right: this hideously depressed shipbuilding town has decided that the best way to revitalize its fortunes is to let Harrah’s come in and build a casino and racetrack.

Officials see the Harrah’s project as a potential economic engine that will bring new investment, service jobs and increased revenues to a Colonial-era city that has been battered by high unemployment, poverty, crime and drugs in recent decades [ . . .] While the city has not done an economic-impact study, [David N. Sciocchetti, executive director of the Chester Economic Development Authority] predicts the daily influx of visitors to Chester will prompt new restaurants, gas stations and businesses catering to tourists. He also sees an opportunity for companies that will supply the complex with goods and services.

No, seriously! The cure for their ills will consist of compulsive gamblers and track-denizens! Even better, the area upon which Harrah’s is building gets tax abatements, so the city and state won’t get as much of a benefit from the commerce!

I understand that Chester’s essentially a dead zone, and probably still doesn’t even have decent pizza delivery, but if you’re going to try to reduce crime, poverty and drug use, I’m not sure that slot machines and harness racing comprise a viable strategy.

Read all about it.

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Grouse!

Because I wasn’t the guy who got shot, I think the Cheney hunting accident is pretty funny. Maybe not as funny as Bobby Knight plugging a buddy while grouse hunting in 1999, nor beating up his son on another hunting trip (broken nose, dislocated shoulder), but still pretty good.

What I like is that it brings us to a bygone era, when the post of vice president was treated as a national joke. Chevy Chase built a career on stumbling over stuff as Gerald Ford. Bush Sr. was regarded as an imbecile (until he turned out to be a lot craftier than anyone expected from a former head of the CIA). And Dan Quayle . . . well, I’m not even going to venture there.

What I’m saying is, since I was a kid, the vice president was either a joke or an afterthought. It was only with Clinton-Gore that we got the “Team USA” treatment from the Pres/VP tandem. With the 2000 election, that morphed into the “America, Inc.” campaign, where Bush’s strength was supposed to be in his ability to assemble a great “upper management” for the country. Of course, when his HR director named himself as the best guy to be chief operating officer, a light-bulb should’ve turned on.

Still, after all the mistakes, I hope this accident is a sign that the role of VP is heading back to irrelevance. After all, it’s not like it helped Gore in 2000.

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In a barrel

Nice post by Andrew Sullivan, ripping up Stanley Fish for “post-modern claptrap”:

Yes, Fish has read Nietzsche, hence his homage in the sentence: “The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously.” But this is a distortion of liberalism, as Nietzsche’s was. The defense of free speech is not a frivolous exercise, as Fish argues. In the context of a continent where artists and writers have been threatened with death and murdered for their freedoms, it is a deadly serious task. And maintaining support for the difficult restraint that liberalism asks of us — to maintain faith if you want, but to curtail its intolerant and extreme influence in the public square — is, pace Fish, not an easy or platitudinous path. It is the difficult restraint liberty requires in modernity. Fish, however, like many postmoderns, is skeptical of such ideas of liberty and, in a pinch, seems to prefer the Taliban’s authenticity to societies where writers dare to challenge religious taboos.

This cultural jiu-jitsu put me in mind of a passage from George Orwell’s great essay, Inside the Whale. I don’t think I’ve written about this passage before. Orwell has been discussing political trends among British writers: the modernists of the 1920s — whom he characterizes largely as fascists — and the Comintern-supporting writers of the 1930s. Since I can’t write anywhere near as well as Orwell, let’s just go with an extended passage:

[W]hy did these young men turn towards anything so alien as Russian Communism? Why should writers be attracted by a form of socialism that makes mental honesty impossible? The explanation really lies in something that had already made itself felt before the slump and before Hitler: middle-class unemployment.

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can get a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps scientific research, the arts, and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in. The debunking of Western civilization had reached its Climax and “disillusionment” was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline — anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. If was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Fuehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour — all in one word, Stalin. God — Stalin. The devil — Hitler. Heaven — Moscow. Hell — Berlin. All the gaps were filled up. So, after all, the “Communism” of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.

Update: I zapped this post to Andrew Sullivan, who liked it enough to riff on it as his second Quote of the Day, and extend me a hat-tip! Much appreciated! New visitors: Enjoy the site!