5,000 Stolen Vases

Italian police just announced seizing "5,361 vases, kraters, bronze statues and frescoes valued at some 50 million euros" from an art dealer in Switzerland. Lots of illegal digging going on in Italy.

What happens to these objects now? No museum in Italy has room to display them, so I suppose they will disappear into some heavily guarded government warehouse. I have a suggestion: how about organizing them as a traveling exhibit that would visit places like Montana, Manitoba, Costa Rica and Kenya where people don't get to see much classical stuff? Billing them THE STOLEN CLASSICS or LOOT or some such ought to draw in the visitors.

In Thailand, the Middle Class vs. the Peasants

For twenty years Thailand has been torn by conflict between the urban middle class and the rural poor. Back in the early 90s the middle class rose up and drove the military from power, demanding democracy. At first they won the elections. But when poor people realized that the new government had no plans to help them they gave their votes to populist businessman Thaksin Shinawatra, who bacame Prime Minister in 2001. He proceeded to disperse government money to them through price subsidies for rice and other programs. This infuriated the urban elite and many of their middle class followers, and they organized massive protests (the Yellow Shirt movement) against Shinawatra's "corruption." Shinawatra's followers organized themselves as the Red Shirts to demonstrate in favor of his policies. As the country descended toward paralysis, the military came back and removed Shinawatra in a coup in 2006.

But nobody really liked the military government, and they seem not to have enjoyed holding power very much, so in 2008 they handed power to a new elected government. Both Shinawatra himself and his party had been banned, but this did not soothe the anger of poor Thais. In 2011 they voted a new party into power headed by Shinawatra's sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, and she went right back to the same redistributionist policies that had been her brother's trademark. The Yellow Shirts were predictably outraged, and they again drove the country toward paralysis until, early last year, the military again stepped in and removed Yingluck in another coup.

Having learned the lesson that they can't win elections, the Bangkok elite has shied away from democracy and supported the military's appointed legislature. Elections were recently postponed again, this time to mid 2016. And now they have moved against Yingluck Shinawatra in the same way that they drove out her brother:

The National Legislative Assembly, handpicked by the junta after the coup, voted 190 to 18 to impeach Ms. Yingluck on the grounds that the rice subsidies were a form of corruption.

The junta has not explained how people who no longer hold political office can be impeached.

Economists considered the rice program wasteful, and it angered members of the Bangkok establishment, who resented that their taxes were being used to pay farmers well above market prices for their rice. It was one of the key complaints of members of the Bangkok elite who led debilitating protests in Bangkok last year. They blocked voting in elections and pressured financial institutions to withhold payments to farmers.

Ms. Yingluck has defended the rice subsidy program as assistance for the poor. “Many governments have public policies to help farmers,” she said in testimony at the impeachment hearings. “It’s the government’s duty to look after them.”

And there you have it. Democracy cannot survive in a country where the economic and military power is concentrated on one side and the voters on the other. It may be that it can't survive if poor voters expect too much from the government. And it certainly is not a magical solution to all the problems of a troubled country.

Manfred Kielnhofer, Guardians of Time

Drones and Revolution in Yemen

For the past five years the US has been deploying drones in Yemen to attack the leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and other insurgent groups. We did this with the support of Yemen's president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who liked having American air power to strike at his domestic enemies.

Now Hadi's government has collapsed and it looks like Yemen may be partitioned between Al Qaeda and another group of rebels backed by Iran, called the Houthis. The Houthis are mainly Shiite, Al Qaeda and its allies mainly Sunni, and without any central government to hold the place together, who knows what may happen?

Behold the fruits of our drone foreign policy. Every missile we fired at Yemeni rebels has, in the end, only added to Yemen's misery. Whatever the government gained by having its enemies blown up was lost by the growing perception that Hadi was an American tool, and as he depended more and more on American backing he lost the support of Yemenis. When Houthi rebels took the capital and surrounded Hadi and his cabinet, nobody rose up to help them.

It is not yet certain that Yemen will descend even farther into chaos. Hadi's resignation seems to have been a political move aimed at forcing the Houthis who were holding his government hostage to ask him back, but it looks like they are simply going to let him go and organize a new government without him and his supporters. Who knows, they may succeed; maybe the Yemeni factions will all bond over hating the US and our drones, and so our cruel idiocy will make some positive contribution to the place after all.

Looking Across the Tracks

My view this morning at the Halethorpe MARC station while I waited for my train to Washington.

Saints, Missions, Indians, and History

When we think about history, how much bandwidth should we devote to the triumphs of heroes, and how much to the sufferings of victims?

Consider the impending canonization of Father Junipero Serra, the most important founder and leader of the Spanish missions in California. Serra gave up a comfortable job as a theology professor in Spain to preach Christianity to the Indians, and he was successful in converting tens of thousands. For this, and for his generally pious and self-denying reputation, he will soon be made a Catholic saint. But what really went on in those missions?

“Serra did not just bring us Christianity. He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture,” Deborah Miranda, the author of Bad Indians, said of her ancestors and what she called “the mission mythology.”

“If he is elevated to sainthood,” said Nicole Lim, the executive director of the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center in Santa Rosa, “then he should be held responsible for the brutal and deadly treatment of native people.” Ms. Lim, a Pomo Indian, runs a website for students that she said aimed to correct the misinformation. . . .

From 1769 to 1835, 90,000 Indians were baptized along the West Coast, from San Diego to San Francisco. Once baptized, they were not allowed to leave the missions, and those who did escape were rounded up by soldiers and returned.

The Indians were forced to shed their languages, dress, religion, food and marriage customs. Thousands died from exposure to European diseases to which they had no immunity. Of the approximately 310,000 Indians in 1769 in what is now California, only one-sixth remained a hundred years later.

For an alternative view of mission life, just remember what you saw in The Mission, which depicts the Jesuit missions of Paraguay as blissful islands of peace protecting Indians from both native wars and colonial oppression. No doubt the reality was somewhere in between, or perhaps both oppression and protection and a lot of other things, too. A realist might look at it like this:

Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, who credited Father Serra with bringing “Christianity to this part of the world,” said he understood why Indians were upset, acknowledging the whippings and coercive environment. But missionaries also taught school and farming, he said.

Throughout history, a more powerful civilization “will dominate and seek to transform the weaker one,” Archbishop Cordileone said. “European powers were going to discover this continent and settle here. Were the indigenous people better off with the missionaries or without the missionaries? I would say they were better off with the missionaries.”

Which makes a certain amount of sense to me, but on the other hand would you make the architect of such a brutal compromise a saint? I would never hold any European responsible for the massive deaths of Indians from European diseases, which they did not understand and which would have happened in any case as ships got better and trade became more regular. But when a European sets about organizing Indians into little totalitarian states with the goal of protecting them from murder or enslavement by other European, that strikes me as more of a protection racket than a saintly act.

What should we remember about such events, and --- the real point of contention -- what should we teach our children? Should we make room in our hearts for people seen at the time as heroes or saints, even if they fail to meet our own standards of morality? Or is the whole point of having moral standards that you apply them to everyone in all ages? Should the heroes of our textbooks be only people who would seem upright and just in our own age? Such a standard would exclude not only almost all the settlers of America but most of the famous Indian leaders as well, since Tecumseh, Sitting Bull and so on were all terribly sexist and given to great cruelty in certain situations. Can we praise Roosevelt for the New Deal without pointing out that to get the votes of southern Democrats he had to write segregation into the programs? We have lately been trying to find heroes in history with whom every child can identify, so that, for example, histories of the American west now often mention the black cavalrymen known as Buffalo Soldiers. But is that, from the Indian perspective, just the celebration of another bunch of oppressors?

Should we make any room for things that were just amazing, whether or not they could be considered good? We seem in this moralistic age to argue a great deal over whether Columbus was a murderer, which strikes me as a minor side issue; like it or not, his voyages changed the world as profoundly as any single act ever has. I enjoy teaching about the Vikings, because they are weird and exciting, and fortunately nobody has ever insisted that I give equal time to their victims.

I never know what to think about these questions. I personally see history mainly as a fascinating, beautiful tragedy -- after all, everybody ends up dead, and what makes it interesting is the amazing things they did along the way. I dislike it when people use what I consider bad history in contemporary politics, viz., worshiping Confederate heroes as a way of opposing civil rights and the welfare state. Otherwise I have trouble understanding why people get so outraged about things that happened centuries ago. I don't think anybody in the Catholic church is talking up Father Serra as a way to attack Indians or take what's left of their land, so I can't see getting worked up about his canonization. If Indians interested in their traditional cultures don't like him, they don't have to pray to him. Human history is vast beyond anything we can absorb or understand, and there is plenty in it for everybody.

Alexander Gronsky's Russia

Alexander Gronsky (born 1980) is a Russian photographer who now lives in Riga, Latvia. I am fascinated by his images of life in Russia's industrial cities. Many more at his web site.

Reading the Scorched Papyri of Herculaneum

Digging into the remains of Herculaneum in 1752, archaeologists discovered something rather startling: intact, charred papyrus scrolls, possibly representing a whole library buried by hot rock and ash in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. More than 1,700 scrolls were recovered.

A few of these scrolls were in such good shape that a machine developed by Antonio Piaggio was able to unroll them intact, so that they could be read. Sadly they turned out to be books by minor and justly forgotten Epicurean philosophers. But you can't have everything, and at least we had acquired some new works from the ancient world.

One of the scrolls used in the current study

But most of the rolls were too fragile to be unrolled, not matter how slowly and carefully. So they have been sitting around for 260 years, waiting for someone to find a way to read them. X-rays were tried long ago, but to ordinary x-rays the carbon-based ink looks just like the paper, so no luck there. But these days of course our imaging technology is vastly better than it was even 20 years ago.

Using a technique called X-ray phase contrast tomography, a group of Italian researchers led by Vito Mocella has been able to read at least a few letters and words from a rolled-up scroll. Nothing exciting has yet been discovered; this is what the investigators described as a "proof of concept." Eventually we should have even faster and more precise machines, which when hooked to a supercomputer might allow reading all the surviving scrolls in a reasonable amount of time.

Plus, 2,800 square meters of the Villa of the Papyri (reconstruction at top) remain to be excavated, and some people expect to find other rooms full of scrolls, some of which might not be by justly forgotten philosophers. Almost all of the hundreds of thousands of books that circulated in the Roman world have been lost, but maybe, just maybe, these methods will allow us to recover a few of the missing ones.

The Domes

At UC Davis, a counterculture experiment lives on:

Opened in 1972 and designed by a contractor, the Domes were a pioneering low-cost student cooperative, albeit one built of artificial materials. Unlike geodesic domes, a period archetype, the fiberglass shells of these dorms were cast in one piece and then lowered by crane onto a concrete pad with prefabricated plumbing. They were meant as bulbous and iconoclastic expressions of the times, intended to inspire personal growth and an eco-friendly, grow-your-own commitment to the land.

The spirit lives on in today’s Domies, some with nose jewelry, who plant almond trees, roast chicken, make acorn flour and walk barefoot through the mulch. “The hippie movement fell through,” Douglas Doria, a senior human development major, observed over a potluck dinner announced by the ting of a metal triangle. “But there are still people wanting something outside the norm.”

I admire this because I am tired of a left that is all about nagging other people to do things they would rather not; I want to celebrate our freedom to live as we wish. Quit whining about what “the culture” is doing to people or the earth or to you; make your own culture. Stop trying to force other people to approve of your own choices; make them, and be as happy as you can with them. Nobody owes you acceptance or admiration. But if you make your own path, plenty of people will admire you for it. Be satisfied with that.

If America is too secular for you, join one of the many religious communities springing up from Oklahoma to New York. If it is too boring, go to Burning Man. If it is too corporate, start buying from organic farmers and local craftsmen. If it is too fast paced, spend the winter at the Slabs. If it is too cold, take time to make a friend or have a long talk with one you haven't seen in a while. Stop complaining and start doing.

Web site of the domes is here.

Heroism

We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

--Eleanor Roosevelt

Fairytale Landscapes by Kilian Schönberger

Kilian Schönberger (previously here) has been wandering around Germany taking pictures of things that remind him of the Brothers Grimm. More here.

What Rising Inequality Means to You

If the US had the same income distribution it had in 1979, the bottom 80 per cent of the population would have $1 trillion — or $11,000 per family — more. The top 1 per cent $1 trillion — or $750,000 — less.

 -- Larry Summers

The Age of Anxiety?

Chris Christie's State of the State address last week has been read by some as a draft stump speech for an upcoming presidential campaign. Here is the interesting part:

We are a nation beset by anxiety. And it is understandable. Economic growth is low by post-war recovery standards. America’s leadership in the world is called into question because of a pattern of indecision and inconsistency. During this time of uncertainty it seems our leaders in Washington would rather stoke division for their own political gain. And this culture of divisiveness and distrust has seeped into our communities and into our neighborhoods. And it is bipartisan in its nature. As I traveled the country over the last year - you may have heard about that. Traveled a little bit around the country in the last year. This anxiety was the most palpable emotion that I saw and felt. More than anger, more than fear, anxiety.....We need to address this anxiety head on. We need to renew the spirit and the hopes of our state, our country and our people. A renewal of our commitment to the hard-working families who are the backbone of this state. A renewal of our commitment to the simple belief that our people deserve better than a bloated national government that imposes costs on our states which in turn then suffocate our people. A renewal of our commitment to the ideal -- and the hard work to make this ideal happen -- that New Jersey’s best days do in fact lie ahead of it.

I find this interesting because Christie, I think, hits the nail on the head of our national problems but then demonstrates that agreeing on the problems implies nothing about agreeing on the solutions.

I agree that our biggest national problem is widespread, nagging anxiety: about the future, the economy, terrorism, our neighborhoods, our own prospects. But if you ask me, the obvious root cause of this anxiety is the sense that life is a lottery in which hard work is not guaranteed any significant reward, and prudent people might be plunged into poverty through illness, loss of a job, or something else completely beyond their control. How is less government any solution to this?

Honest libertarians admit that the world they want would be more stressful than our current system, not less. Their ideal is a society in which some people rise high through hard work but the lazy sink low, the threat of poverty serving as a goad to keep people working hard. Whatever the merits of this model, is absolutely does not reduce anxiety. Social democracy -- national health insurance, free college tuition, subsidized housing, and all the other measures of the "welfare state"-- does reduce anxiety by assuring people that no matter what, they will be cared for. The combination of Social Security and Medicare has drastically reduced the anxiety of America's elderly, helping to make it the happiest part of life for many people. Take that away and you add massively to the nation's pool of anxiety.

Republicans have been big promoters of anxiety in other ways, too, for example the whole apparatus of terrorism alerts, threat levels, and heated rhetoric about how al Qaeda poses an "existential threat" to the United States. Republicans have been campaigning for decades on fear of crime, fear of immigrants, fear that urban chaos will invade safe suburbs and towns.

Sure, let's have a campaign focused on reducing the anxiety of Americans. But let's be realistic about what it would really take to make people feel better about our future.

Japanese Paintings from the Freer-Sackler

Bamboo by Kishi Ganku (1749-1838).

Landscape with Moonrise by Komai Genki (1747-1797).

Two views of a seventeenth-century screen.

Winter Landscape by Shiokawa Bunrin (1808-1877)

Peacock by Mori Sosen (1747-1821)

Bird and Wild Rose by Mori Ippo (detail)

Geese, Moon, and Water Plants by Kano Tsunenobu (1636 - 1713)

Crowns

These two pictures have been making the rounds of art and history sites on Tumblr, and I spent a pleasant hour figuring out what some of them are. Sadly the third from the top along the left side, which intrigued me, seems to be from a movie. Top left is just what you think, an old Russian crown said to have belonged to Ivan the Terrible.

One thing I discovered doing my "research" is that there are A LOT of crowns in Europe. Well over a hundred, anyway. I mean, some of these families have consorts and princes and princesses and so on, Plus some of the royal families have accumulated several kingdoms, for which they have separate crowns. Above are the British imperial crown and the separate Scottish crown. There is also an imperial crown of India, which I suppose they don't wear any more. The British imperial crown includes the "Black Prince's Ruby," which is actually a red spinel, but on the other hand it actually was paid to the Black Prince in 1367 for his service as a mercenary in a civil war in Castile.

This is the Iron Crown of Lombardy, dating to the eighth century. It is said that this started as a plain iron circlet, completely unadorned; one story has it that the iron came from the nails of the True Cross, another that they came from Emperor Constantine's bit and bridle. Somehow the iron circlet ended up covered by gold schlock. No European monarch has ever had the nerve to be crowned with a plain piece of symbolic iron. Wimps.

Quite possibly the most stylish ruler in European history was Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and this is his crown in case you wanted to know what the truly fashionable wore at their coronations.

The crown of St. Stephen of Hungary, c. AD 1000. This was a present from the Byzantines. Legend has it that the Pope also sent a crown, but that his messenger was delayed, so the Byzantines got to dictate royal fashion in Hungary. Nineteenth-century photographs show the cross standing straight, so I don't know why they let it sit askew like this.

The crown of Good King Wenceslas. (Notice that carving gems to have facets is a modern habit.) In this fourteenth-century crowns you can already see crowns moving away from a sort of ring and toward a complete headpiece.

Imperial crown of Austria, eighteenth century.

Two crowns from nineteenth-century Bavaria, the king's and the famous Pearl Crown of the queen.

Modern crown from Norway.

Crown of the emperors of Brazil.

The crown of Denmark, which of all these comes closest to my childhood idea of a crown.

This thing, now in Vienna, is said to have been the ceremonial helmet of the Kings of Skanderberg in modern Albania.

And my personal favorite royal crown, the Raven Crown of the King of Bhutan. The Raven Crown sounds like something I would want to put in a story but might be too embarrassed to actually leave in. But my version would be made of iron.