Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Comment Elsewhere: Caffeine is the New Martini

In a discussion of the negative effects of anti-alcohol campaigns on academic life, I responded:
Isn't caffeine the new alcohol? Instead of a brain-numbing CNS depressant, we go for STIMULANTS: it has the same effect, making you feel smarter and more talkative. It's psychoactive and addictive, cool (in that herdish sort of way), comes in enough varieties now that people have specific preferences, you can be snobby or populist, there are BARS, etc, etc..

I don't disagree about the drinking age: I was a college student when the age was raised, and my student EMT friends got to pick up the pieces on a regular basis. But as an historian the Tenured Radical should know: we are a Prohibitionist society, given to moral panics and Puritan fear of almost-harmless pleasures. The alcohol laws will relax the same time that drug laws do: Bet on it.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke is dead

In a thread on the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, I wrote:
I've spent an awful lot of my life -- in retrospect -- pondering Clarke's speculations and meanderings: wonderful stuff. "9 Billion Names" is one of the most perfect short stories ever written: efficient (his writing was almost always efficient), complex, funny, striking and emotional.

I mentioned Clarke's death to my World History students yesterday, noting that SF like Clarke's is a kind of historical speculation (this is one of my favorite themes) and that the best way to not be surprised about the future is to spend some time thinking seriously about it. I quoted Clarke's Laws and pointed out that the present is the best possible time for us to live in, and the future is our natural destination. An odd position, if you think historians are nostalgists, but most of us aren't; we know the past too well to idolize it.

Ozarque notes that you can read the story here.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Comment elsewhere: Presidential romance

Over at Terry's place, in response to a discussion of presidential remarks to troops in which he said
"I must say, I’m a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

I wrote
[teacher hat] Romance actually used to mean something else entirely: if you look at "the Romantics" in literature and music, there’s actually a very powerful range of emotions going on, many of them very unromantic. The essence of Romanticism was a connection to nature and to our primal, emotional selves, and a rejection of rationality as the core human experience. There is often a fascination with violence in romanticism, as an expression of emotion and as a primal experience. So there’s a very natural connection between adventure/danger and Romanticism.

There’s also a connection between that same fascination with violence (and hyper-masculinity) and fascist aesthetics, which draw much more heavily on Romanticism ("Blood and Soil", etc.) than most people realize. Romanticism is a component of modern nationalism, though the extent of it varies. [/teacher hat]

The implications of this reading of "romantic" are pretty troubling, actually. I’d love to know if these were unscripted comments, because when he goes off script he does put his real self out there sometimes. As someone else said about the same speech, fodder for generations of psych students….

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Thursday Lyric: The Last Chance

The portions in italics are spoken, not sung.
The transcription is my own, and I am guessing about punctuation and line breaks.

The Last chance
by Leon Rosselson

It was The Last Chance.
It was a nightclub in the desert called the Last Chance
a cluttered dive of stones and wheels,
it was a refuge for the rootless of the world washed up
like driftwood on the sand
And we were there.
it seemed so long ago.

They came from nowhere.
The lost the broken and the mad, as if from nowhere
they blundered in like blind invaders
while Mahalia boomed a gospel song
and candles blurred the gloom,
they drank and argued till the dawn
had drained the night away.

Among the seekers after oil or truth or a home;
Among the businessmen, the pickpockets and whores,
among the soldiers and the tourists, Some had names, and histories
Meier, with his stone bald head built like a butcher, which he was
He made his money dealing in pork, though not on the Sabbath
They said his parents were killed in Belsen
They said he saw his sister raped
but no one really knew.
Stories swirled about like dust on the desert wind.
You never knew what was true.
but in the end it didn't really matter. There he was.
And Sam, with his mournful expression
and his mobile face like crumpled leather,
there he was, a dancer. Light, light on his feet.
Theirs was a needle match, each trying to outscore the other
Sam out of mischief
Meier out of a desire for victory.
so they came out of opposite corners of the ring in every argument --
everything was an argument.
like the Sinai campaign.
For Meier that was the time of glory.
"That was when we found out we were strong," he said.
"Strong?" shrugged Sam. "Who needs it?"
So Meier pinned his arm behind his back
and forced him to his knees.
"You do, Jew," he said.
The general opinion was that Meier won that round.


They came from nowhere.
The lost the broken and the mad, as if from nowhere.
they blundered in like blind invaders
while Mahalia boomed a gospel song
and candles blurred the gloom
they drank and argued till the dawn
had drained the night away

Do you remember?
the day the Bedouins came to town
I still remember
the women waiting still as stone
their silent shapes cocooned in black against the whitewashed walls
that echoed back the sun to blind the eyes
ghosts from another world

"You know what's wrong with Israel?" said Meier one night.
"I know," said Sam, dancing in grinning. "Too many Arabs, right?"
"Wrong," said Meier, "too many Jews. Look at them.
Rabble. They don't speak Hebrew, half of them. Rabble.
Take the Yemenis: donkey riders.
Never set foot in a bus before they came here.
And their women? all whores."
"What about Rumanians?" Sam threw in obligingly.
"All thieves," said Meier.
"They say all Hungarians are bald", said Sam,
and raised his eyes to the heavens.
Meier ignored him.
"We must forge one nation," he said.
"We must weld the youth into one nation."
"Why?" said Sam. "How?" said Sam.
"In the fire," Meier went on.
"In the heat of battle, we will become one nation.
Under King Solomon, Israel was a great nation,
rich and powerful. One day she will be so again."
Sam sighed. "We are Jews," he said.
"Why should our children turn into Israelis?"
"History loves a winner," said Meier.
"No more guilt. No more fear.
No more being strangers.
No more being different."
"I like being different," Sam said, throwing his arms out.
"I want to be different."
Meier stood up and pointed a thick finger and yelled,
"He thinks he's funny. This Jew thinks he's funny.
No wonder they fed you into the gas ovens."


Do you remember?
the day the Bedouins came to town
I still remember
the women waiting still as stone
their silent shapes cocooned in black
against the whitewashed walls that echoed back the sun
to blind the eyes
ghosts from another world

across the desert,
the road carved southward to the Red Sea through the desert
a cratered moonscape made of sand.
we saw the burning fists of rock
and felt the wind that sucked us dry
and heard those urging, stirring songs:
always new lands to tame

Meier like telling stories of how,
in the War of Independence, he blew up Arab houses.
He knew Sam would become agitated.
It would turn Sam inside out.
"It was not true," he said, "you did not do that."
"Why not?" said Meier, "Facts.
Now there's nothing left for them to return to.
only stones. Let them find homes with their own kind."
"I want nothing to do with such facts," said Sam.
"Where would you be without them?" sneered Meier.
"we made this country," he said. "Before us, what was there?
Marshland, desert.
The promise was to us: the desert shall blossom like a rose."
"They were people," said Sam, "like us, with hopes and dreams."
"Hopes, dreams." Meier spat the words out.
"You think you can buy the future with dreams?"
And he took a pile of notes from his pocket
and threw them on the table.
"There," he said. "Facts, Money. Don't give me your dreams."
Sam turned away and began to find a dance with his feet,
like a child taking its first steps
while Mahalia sang on,
her voice intense with the joy and pain of believing.
But Meier wasn't finished.
"This man is full of dreams," he taunted, "full of could-have-beens:
a dancer he could have been. A mime artist he could have been."
"It's true," said Sam, as he moved and swayed to the music.
"I could have been a great mime artist."
and slowly, his mournful face upturned and his hands outstreched,
he wove a strange shuffling dance,
around the pillers and the wheels and the homemade stools,
round the stolen signpost indicatingRumna 45 kilometers away,
round the lacquered stones and pieces of driftwood
twisted, gnarled and desolated by the wind and the waves.
Meier's stone bald head seemed to swell with fury.
"Displaying himself," he said contemptously. "Where's the dignity?"
And he pushed aside his congac and pulled himself to his feet
and picked up a stone and gripped it in his bunched fist
and in his eyes was a peculiar sort of hatred.
And suddenly, the jangle of noise, the chattering, the shouting,
the laughing, fell away to a whisper; everyone turned to watch.
There was only the sound of Mahalia singing
and the shuffling steps of Sam's dance.
Could we have guessed then how it would be?
Could we have seen then in Meier's eyes those certainties,
Facts: the houses torn apart, the torture, the weeping,
the children burning, the fragmentation bombs, the phosphorous bombs.
Facts: The shortest distance between the past and the future.
But we saw only Meier, stone in his fist,
and waited in silence for what he would do.
"Sit down," he said in a low voice, "sit down."
Then he hurled the stone with all his force,
not at Sam exactly, but still, at him
It smashed against a pillar and clattered to the floor.
Sam froze, stopped dancing.
A silent shake in the candle gloom.
his mournful face crumpled and yellow
It seemed to us he was about to cry,
then he put his arms about his head as if to protect himself,
turning in on himself.
"I want to go home," he said. "I want to go home."


They came from nowhere.
The lost the broken and the mad, as if from nowhere
they blundered in like blind invaders
while Mahalia boomed a gospel song and candles blurred the gloom.
they drank and argued till the dawn had drained the night away.

It was The Last Chance.
It was a nightclub in the desert called The Last Chance
a cluttered dive of stones and wheels
it was a refuge for the rootless of the world
washed up like driftwood on the sand
And we were there.
it was so long ago.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Three Kinds of Politicians

In a Progressive Historians discussion on primary revotes I wrote:
There are three kinds of politicians: those who will sell out their own party to get elected, those who will sell out their own party after they get elected, and party hacks. It's possible to span categories, but not to transcend them.....

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Quotations from Tosh #2: For History's Sake

"Because its materials are necessarily partial , and the products emerging from individual minds more partial still, history always has posed and always will pose the sort of problems which give rise to dispute, acrimony, and the writing of hostile reviews. Why, at the very beginning of our science stands the prototype of all these arguments: history had barely begun when Thucydides attacked the methods and purposes of Herodotus. Debates among historians are coeval with the writings of history, and like the heresies of Christianity all the possible positions were worked out quite early, to be repeated in resounding counterpoint through ages of controversy." -- G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 27.

"Historical writings can do harm; they have done so; and any thoughtful historian must at times ask himself whether he has a purpose beyond his own satisfaction." -- G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 27.

"Montaigne pondered on this way of feeling, in the sixteenth century: `Is it nature, or by some error of fantasy, that the seeing of places that we know to have been, frequented or inhabited by men whose memory is esteemed or mentioned in stories doth in some sort move and stir us up as much or more than hearing their noble deeds?'" -- C.V. Wedgwood, "The Sense of the Past," (1957), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 35.

"The exact scientists are a kind of pre-Reformation clergy, and their function is to perform their miracles, to continue their Church, not to make themselves intelligible to laymen: for their control of the means of salvation and damnation makes the lay world so dependent on them that it will tolerate and subsidise them even without understanding. But the humane subjects are quite different from this. They have no direct scientific use; they owe their title to existence to the interest and comprehension of the laity; they exist primarily not for the training of professionals but for the education of laymen; and therefore if they once lose touch with the lay mind, they are rightly condemned to perish." -- H.R. Trevor-Roper, 'History: professional and lay' (1957), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 328-329.

"Lorsque, dans le silence de l’abjection, l’on n’entend plus retentir que la chane de l’esclave et la voix du dlateur; lorsque tout tremble devant le tyran, et qu’il est aussi dangereux d’encourir sa faveur que de mriter sa disgrce, l’historien parat, charg de la vengeance des peuples. [When, in the silence of abjection, one no longer hears the clanking of the chain of slavery or the voice of the informant; when everyone trembles before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to earn his displeasure, the historian appears, responsible for the people’s revenge.]" -- Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Memoires.