Scared People Running for President

Listening to the Republican candidates, you'd think the US was under siege. Rick Santorm introduced himself in the last debate by saying,

I’m Rick Santorum. And we have a lot of troubles around the world, as you see, the Middle East in flames. . . .

New Gingrich later added,

You live in a world of total warfare. . . . We live in an age when we have to genuinely worry about nuclear weapons going off in our own cities . . . . I believe this is the most dangerous president on national security grounds in American history.

Actually the age of total warfare was 1916 to 1945; we haven't had one since, and I see no prospect of one in the future.

This intense fear of Muslim terrorists is crazy. I can only think of two reasons for people to talk like this. Either they are desperately searching for some sort of issue to run on, or they have a deep-seated need for enemies they can hate and fear. I suspect both.

Terrorists do pose some risk to our lives and limbs. If they really try, they can kill Americans, as they proved on 9-11. But the risk is vastly smaller than, for example, the risk of riding in a car to work every day. We inflicted much more death and expense on ourselves by our foolish invasion of Iraq than al Qaeda ever manged to cause us. As far as a risk to our national survival, or the survival of our way of life-- please. There is no such risk. We have more nuclear weapons than al Qaeda has soldiers.

Yet in America we continue to act as if al Qaeda or other Muslim radicals pose a terrible threat to us. We are still chasing the Taliban around Afghanistan's mountains, still using drones to attack our enemies wherever we can find them, still cozying up to nasty dictators in central Asia and thuggish regimes in Africa, all part of the "War on Terror." It is more a "War of Terror," one we wage because we are frightened for no good reason. We subject ourselves to absurd anti-terrorism measures, torture our prisoners, and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on "security." We should wise up, relax, bring our soldiers home, and work on solving real problems like cancer or unemployment.

First Flowers

After a ridiculously warm February day, I came home to find my first blooming flowers.

Snow Circles

I love this design,equal parts artistic vision and having fun in the snow. Video, from Steamboat Aerials, here.

 

 

 

 

Defining Good Government

A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.

--James Madison, The Federalist no. 62

The Peacock Room

The Peacock Room is one of the most famous rooms in the world, a perfect symphony of decorative elements. It is now in the Freer Gallery in Washington. It has a great story, as the Gallery's web site explains:

The Peacock Room was once the dining room in the London home of Frederick R. Leyland, a wealthy shipowner from Liverpool, England. It was originally designed by a gifted interior architect named Thomas Jeckyll. To display Leyland's prized collection of Chinese porcelain to best advantage, Jeckyll constructed a lattice of intricately carved shelving and hung antique gilded leather on the walls. A painting by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) called La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine — or The Princess from the Land of Porcelain — occupied a place of honor above the fireplace.

Jeckyll had nearly completed his commission when he consulted Whistler — who was then working on decorations for the entrance hall of Leyland's house — about the color to paint the dining room shutters and doors. Concerned that the red roses on the leather hangings clashed with the colors in The Princess, Whistler volunteered to retouch the walls with traces of yellow. Leyland permitted Whistler to make that minor alteration and also to adorn the wainscoting and cornice with a "wave pattern" derived from the design on the leaded glass of the pantry door. Assuming the decoration of the room to be virtually complete, Leyland went back to his business in Liverpool.

In his patron's absence, Whistler was inspired to make bolder revisions. He covered the ceiling with Dutch metal, or imitation gold leaf, over which he painted a lush pattern of peacock feathers. He then gilded Jeckyll's walnut shelving and embellished the wooden shutters with four magnificently plumed peacocks. Whistler wrote to Leyland that the dining room was "really alive with beauty — brilliant and gorgeous while at the same time delicate and refined to the last degree," boasting that the changes he had made were past imagining. "I assure you," he said, "you can have no more idea of the ensemble in its perfection gathered from what you last saw on the walls than you could have of a complete opera judging from a third finger exercise!" He urged Leyland not to return to London yet, since he did not want the room to be seen before every detail was perfect.

Yet Whistler entertained visitors and amused the press in the lavishly decorated room, never thinking to ask permission of the owner of the house. His audacious behavior, coupled with a dispute over payment for the project, provoked a bitter quarrel between the painter and his patron. Leyland would not consent to pay the two thousand guineas that Whistler wanted: "I do not think you should have involved me in such a large expenditure without previously telling me of it," he wrote to the artist. Eventually Leyland agreed to half that amount, but he further insulted Whistler by writing his check in pounds, the currency of trade, when payment to artists and professionals was customarily made in guineas. A pound is worth twenty shillings and a guinea twenty-one, so the already offensive sum was also smaller than expected .

Perhaps in retaliation, Whistler took the liberty of coating Leyland's valuable leather with Prussian-blue paint and depicting a pair of peacocks aggressively confronting each other on the wall opposite The Princess. He used two shades of gold for the design and highlighted telling details in silver. Scattered at the feet of the angry bird are the coins (silver shillings) that Leyland refused to pay; the silver feathers on the peacock's throat allude to the ruffled shirts that Leyland always wore. The poor and affronted peacock has a silver crest feather that resembles the lock of white hair that curled above Whistler's forehead. To make sure that Leyland understood his point, Whistler called the mural of the fighting peacocks "Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room." He obtained a blue rug to complete the scheme and titled the room Harmony in Blue and Gold. After concluding his work in March 1877, the artist never saw the Peacock Room again.

Money Changes Who You Are

Does it matter that our politicians are so much richer than average Americans? Maybe so. Britt Peterson:

a number of new studies suggest that, in certain key ways, people with that much money are not like the rest of us at all. As a mounting body of research is showing, wealth can actually change how we think and behave—and not for the better. Rich people have a harder time connecting with others, showing less empathy to the extent of dehumanizing those who are different from them. They are less charitable and generous. They are less likely to help someone in trouble. And they are more likely to defend an unfair status quo. If you think you’d behave differently in their place, meanwhile, you’re probably wrong: These aren’t just inherited traits, but developed ones. Money, in other words, changes who you are.

There are two ways to gauge the difference between how wealthy and nonwealthy people think: You can make people temporarily feel rich (or prompt them to think about money) and see if that creates changes, or you can sample rich and nonrich people and see if they think differently to begin with. Both kinds of studies yield results that point in the same somewhat disturbing direction. . . .

Further studies have shown that prompting people to think about money—a technique known as “priming”—makes them less likeable and friendly, and more likely to agree with statements that support an unjust, social-Darwinist status quo (for example, “Some groups of people are simply inferior to others”). In a particularly disturbing part of one study, the team primed people with money, then gauged their empathy by eliciting reactions to a theoretical scenario involving a belligerent homeless person. The researchers offered the subjects a chance to agree with statements that dehumanized others (“Some people deserve to be treated like animals”). The money-primed group was more likely to agree.

One of the most consistent findings of these studies is that the more money people make, the more likely they are to believe that the existing economic arrangements are just:

In 2009, Michael Kraus, Paul Piff, and Dacher Keltner, all then of Berkeley, published research that divided up sample groups by family income as well as self-reported socioeconomic status. People of higher socioeconomic status were more likely to explain success or failure as a result of individual merit or fault; lower-class people, on the other hand, felt less control in their own lives and were more likely to blame events on circumstance. In other words, higher-status people were more likely to feel that they’d earned their high place in society, and that poorer people hadn’t.

Rick Santorum and "Human Dignity"

Rick Santorum's friends like to say that even if he sometimes seems a little whacky about birth control and the like, he does so from a deep commitment to the sanctity of human life. Rich Lowry:

Although his critics will never credit him for it, Santorum’s social conservatism brings with it an unstinting devotion to human dignity, a touchstone for the former senator. 

Jennifer Rubin:

This should come as no surprise if one understands Santorum’s worldview. Everything stems from his allegiance to the Catholic Church’s teachings that every human life has equal value and dignity. 

Except that, as Andrew Sullivan points out, Santorum is a devoted advocate of war and torture:

It seems to me that no politician who has aggressively defended these core violations of human dignity can be described as someone for whom human dignity is a "touchstone" of his worldview. The effrontery is not that of the media; the effrontery is from Santorum when he lectured John McCain that McCain

doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.

In that very defense - in Santorum's own description of what he is defending - he is defending the "breaking" of a human person, made in the image of God. He is defending a core, absolute evil. Let us concede for the sake of argument that these are "enhanced interrogation techniques" and not "torture", as Santorum insists. There is no meaningful difference between the two whatsoever from a Catholic perspective, and Santorum's public positioning as an avowedly Catholic politician, while defending and promoting an absolute evil, is a true and immense moral scandal - in the Church's sense of the word.

In last night's debate Santorum reiterated that we would go to war to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Anyone who thinks that the using birth control is a more serious affront to human dignity than torture, or than blowing people apart with bunker-busting bombs, has serious problems of both morals and logic.

George Will Lectures Santorum about Unwed Motherhood

In his latest column, George Will explains why Santorum's presidential campaign is misdirected:

The entitlement state can be reformed by various known — if currently politically impossible — policy choices. But no one really knows the causes of family disintegration, so it is unclear whether those causes can be combated by government measures.

We do know the social pathologies flowing from the fact that now more than 50 percent of all babies born to women under age 30 are born to unmarried mothers. These pathologies, related to a constantly renewed cohort of adolescent males without fathers at home, include disorderly neighborhoods, schools that cannot teach, mass incarceration and the intergenerational transmission of poverty. We do not know how to address this with government policies, even though the nation has worried about it for almost 50 years.

To act like family breakdown is Obama's fault, as Santorum often does, is both wrong and unhelpful. He has offered no policy that might help, and I think cutting taxes on the rich, his main economic plank, would only further increase inequality and the social resentments that spring from it, making things worse for poor Americans.

Annals of the Obvious, Campaign Budget Edition

From the Post:

The national debt is likely to balloon under tax policies championed by three of the four major Republican candidates for president, according to an independent analysis of tax and spending proposals so far offered by the candidates.

According to the report — set for release Thursday by U.S. Budget Watch, a project of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former House speaker Newt Gingrich would do the most damage to the nation’s finances. . . .  , offering tax and spending policies likely to require trillions of dollars in fresh borrowing. Both men have proposed to sharply cut taxes but have not identified spending cuts sufficient to make up for the lost cash, the report said. By 2021, the debt would rise by about $4.5 trillion under Santorum’s policies and by about $7 trillion under those advocated by Gingrich, pushing the portion of the debt held by outside investors to well over 100 percent of the nation’s economy.

Until recently, Romney wasn't doing as badly. But then he decided that to win the nomination he had to be as crazy as his competition:

The red ink would gush less heavily under former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the report said — at least under earlier Romney proposals that paired $1.35 trillion in tax cuts with $1.2 trillion in spending reductions and would leave the debt rising on a trajectory that closely tracks current policies. But that probably changed Wednesday, when Romney tacked to the right and proposed to cut federal income tax rates by an additional 20 percent for all earners — an idea that could easily slash federal revenues by another $3.5 trillion over the next decade, said Edward Kleinbard, a University of Southern California law professor and former chief tax analyst for Congress.

Only a fringe libertarian like Ron Paul can even propose cutting spending by enough to pay for the tax cuts these candidates all support.

The Tea Party song has been "spending is the problem, spending is the problem" but the reality is that cutting taxes makes the deficit go up. Period.

The Dover Bridge Site

Today I saw an exhibit of artifacts from the Dover Bridge Site, a colonial house or tavern site in Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The main thing the archaeologists found was a bunch of pits filled with trash, including this wonderful array of artifacts. This stuff dates mainly to the early 1700s.

The most spectacular find is this nearly complete stoneware jug, from the German Rhineland.

More German stonewares.

This is an earthenware Tyg (large, multi-handled drinking vessel intended to be passed around) from the British midlands.

Wine bottles.

A Staffordshire slipware bowl.

Tobacco pipes.

My colleagues Jason (standing straight) and Greg inspect one of the tables.

I try to act like an expert.

Stoicism, Christianity, and the Pain of the World

Peter Brown, writing about the influence of ancient pagan ethics on Christian asceticism:

The ancient codes of living had never been easy. They had always called for courage in the face of bullies, for respect for the integrity of the soul in a violent and stratified society, and, above all, for the need to maintain a high-pitched hierarchy that placed the soul firmly above the body. "Dualism" is not a popular notion nowadays. The ancient insistence on the absolute superiority and separateness of the soul from the body has lost its edge. But the sharp division between mind and body served for millennia to help the desperate -- the victims of torture, of illness, and of bereavement -- to raise themselves, if only a little, above the huge pain of the world.

Nazca Bowl

This pattern is called "trophy heads," but I don't think there is any evidence about what it actually represents. The Nazca flourished between about 100 and 800 AD along the southern coast of Peru.

Michael Canning

Irish artist, born 1971. Above, Tacit.

Stem VIII, 2002.

Mercury, 2007.

Governance.

Onset.

A work shown on his web site without title. I like these a lot, although there are dozens and I have started to wonder if he is capable of painting anything else. Any of them would look great on my bedroom wall.

And a sculpture, also from his web site and also without title.

Santorum's Paranoia

The currently poll-leading Republican presidential candidate has been wowing audiences with fears about Obama's alleged radicalism. ABC News:

“Remember, the greatest generation for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness, while our closest ally, Britain, was being bombed and leveled, while Japan was spreading its cancer all throughout Southeast Asia,” Santorum ominously told a packed, enthusiastic crowd at the First Redeemer Church in Cummings, Ga., Sunday, before traveling back to Ohio to campaign here today.

The audience at the church interrupted Santorum at least four times with wild applause, loving the red meat he was throwing to the conservative  crowd. “We’re a hopeful people,” he continued. “We think, well, you know it’ll get better. After a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe who’s not so good of a guy after all. … Sometimes, sometimes it’s not OK.

“It’ll be harder for this generation to figure it out. There’s no cataclysmic event,” Santorum concluded.

While Santorum conceded that Obama’s policies were not quite as horrific as Hitler’s war in Europe, the rising GOP front-runner cautioned that the president is “fundamentally restructuring America.”

Santorum especially likes to rant about Obamacare:

He accused Obama Sunday of trying to “cull the ranks of the disabled” by requiring prenatal screenings, which Santorum says often lead to abortions, to be provided for free by insurance companies under Obama’s health care law.

“Why? Because it saves money in health care. Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done,” Santorum told a receptive crowd at the Ohio Christian Alliance in Columbus. “That too is part of 'Obamacare,' another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country.”

For an even better glimpse of Santorum's nightmares, consider the way he imagines health care in the Netherlands:

Santorum said in an interview with social conservative leader James Dobson earlier this month that euthanasia makes up "ten percent of all deaths, and half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, because they are old or sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don't go into a hospital. They go to other country."

Note that this is not true;  Dutch Radio 1 called it "fact free." Santorum was just giving vent to his own fantasies about liberals and Europeans. I would like to assure him that liberals hate Hitler, too, and that one reason we want high taxes is so we can have the money to provide quality health care to everyone. If we cut taxes as much as Santorum wants, we will be throwing a lot more sick people out on the streets.

Maybe Crying Babies have Headaches

A new study shows that mothers with migraines are more than twice as likely to report colic in their babies.

I suppose this could be because mothers with migraines are a lot less tolerant of crying, but it might also be that babies cry because their heads hurt:

Mothers who suffered migraines were found to be two-and-a-half times more likely to have colicky babies. Overall, 29 percent of infants whose mothers had migraines had colic compared to 11 percent of babies whose mothers did not have migraines.

Gelfand and her colleagues believe colic may be an early manifestation of a set of conditions known as childhood periodic syndromes, believed to be precursors to migraine headaches later in life. Babies with colic may be more sensitive to stimuli in their environment just as are migraine sufferers. They may have more difficulty coping with the onslaught of new stimuli after birth as they are thrust from the dark, warm, muffled life inside the womb into a world that is bright, cold, noisy and filled with touchy hands and bouncy knees.

I am attracted to this idea because I started getting migraines in high school and even at that age it took me four or five years to figure out what was happening to me and get help for it.

Fortunately I never had a colicky baby. Before I had babies, my biggest fear was that they would be crying and I wouldn't know why or what to do about it. It turned out that when they were crying it was usually because of something I was doing to them; they were screaming, "Leave me alone!"

Is the Working Class in Crisis?

Matt Yglesias thinks that the argument over why the working class is in decline, for example between Paul Krugman and David Brooks at the Times, is wrongheaded. How do we know there is a decline?

Two related facts seem to trouble both Brooks and Krugman. Marriage rates are down, and so is male workforce participation. Brooks sees this as a cultural crisis that’s leading to declining material welfare, while Krugman sees declining male wages as driving both trends.

But what if this is a non-crisis driven by abundance? The obvious place to look for an explanation of the declining marriage rate is the vast increase in the economic opportunities available to women. Newly empowered and less dependent on male economic support, women have become somewhat choosier and are now less likely to be married than in the past. You can perhaps make the case that this is bad for kids, and that as a society we should return to total economic disempowerment of women in order to force people into two-parent households. But why not just look at progress and call it “progress”? There is evidence that family instability is hard on children, but as seen above, there’s no reason to think we’re witnessing systematic generational decline.

As for labor force participation, Krugman must be right that poor labor market conditions explain the trend over the past few years. But the long-term decline has been going on since as far back as we have data. Male labor force participation rates were declining in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and in the ‘80s, and now in the aughts.

Maybe the value of leisure is increasing? The past 70 years have seen the popularization of television, color television, cable, VCRs, mini satellites, video games, CD players, computers, DVDs, HDTVs, MP3 players, and a host of other fun gizmos. At the same time, it’s worth noting that stagnating real working-class wages are calculated by using a meaningless overall average rate of price inflation. Some things—college tuition, apartments in Manhattan, health care—have gotten more expensive much faster than average. This means that people who buy a below-average amount of those things are better off than the statistics show. A healthy person living in an unfashionable city with no student loans to pay off can get by on a fairly modest income. . . .

The short-term jobs situation is a real crisis, but the longer-term decline of work is an opportunity. If men want to tempt women back into marriage, they’ll have to use more of their free time to pitch in with housework and child care, building a more egalitarian tomorrow. If employers want to tempt people back into working, they’ll have to offer higher pay or more pleasant jobs. Most likely we’ll get some of both, and more loafing on the couch too. George Jetson, after all, only worked nine hours a week. Why should we aspire to anything less?

I would say that the problem with Yglesias' rosy view is that poor Americans are getting less happy. Certainly there is a class of young American men who don't work very hard because they don't see the point. Some of them may enjoy slacker life too much to want anything else, and that's fine. But many others are profoundly frustrated by the situation, and the reason they work less is not so much that they value leisure more than their grandparents, but that they don't think the rewards of work are worth it. To me, that implies something very wrong with our working lives.

New Species of Chameleon

Four new species of chameleon have been discovered and named in Madagascar. Above, a juvenile Brookesia micra, one of the world's smallest reptiles. Adults are just over an inch (2.9 cm) long.

Brookesia desperata.

Brookesia confidens. From National Geographic.

Real Environmentalism vs. Nimbyism

Fighting development does not make you an environmentalist. Alex Steffen:

One of the most unfortunate side effects of the urban activism of the ’60s and ’70s is the belief that development is wrong and that fighting it makes you an environmentalist. We know that dense cities are both environmentally better and dramatically more equitable places. Walkable neighborhoods are better than the suburbs for people with a wide range of incomes, and what happens in cities that don't grow is that they gentrify and poor people are pushed out. Trying to fight change makes you less sustainable and more unfair. . . .

the best thing a city can do is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this issue comes up, because it’s the only universal strategy that works. That’s the best-documented finding in urban planning—that as density goes up, trip length goes down and transportation energy use goes down.

Churchill's Obsession with the Tirpitz

The Tirpitz was the sister ship of the Bismarck, but this huge, powerful German battleship never put to sea on a grand, suicidal raid. Instead she was kept in various safe harbors, mainly in Norway, where her very existence threatened British plans and gave Winston Churchill fits. Patrick Bishop:

The shortest memorandum in the vast output of instructions, queries and exhortations generated by Winston Churchill during the Second World War is only three words long: ‘Where is TIRPITZ?’ he demanded of the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, on December 14th, 1942. The answer was that she was tucked up safely in a fjord near Trondheim as her crew hung bunting in the messes in preparation for another Christmas of inactivity.

Of all Hitler’s capital ships Tirpitz cost most and did least. Yet her existence seemed to haunt Churchill’s imagination and his desire to see the ‘Beast’, as he tellingly called her, sunk or at least disabled bordered on the obsessive. As long as she was afloat the prime minister bombarded admirals and air marshals with demands for action, emphasising that he was prepared to pay a high price to achieve her destruction. ‘The crippling of this ship would alter the entire face of the naval war and … the loss of 100 machines or 500 airmen would be well compensated for,’ he declared in another missive to Pound.

The quest to destroy Tirpitz lasted four years, soaking up a colossal amount of energy and resources and costing many lives. Between October 1940 and November 1944 she was the target of 24 major air and sea attacks. They ranged from conventional heavy bombing raids to highly innovative operations, notably the penetration of her defences by X-Craft midget submarines as she lay in Kaafjord in the far north of Norway in September 1943. . . .

Fear of her destructive potential led to one of the most notorious episodes of the war at sea. In July 1942 the belief that the battleship was at large – mistaken as it turned out – was enough for Pound to order British and American naval escorts to abandon the Russia-bound convoy PQ.17 and the merchantmen to scatter. The result was that 24 of the 35 ships were sunk, not by Tirpitz but by U-boats and aircraft.

Winston Churchill was a remarkable man, but he was also a very odd one, and some of his obsessions cost Britain dearly during the war.

Conservatism and the Auto Bailout

Romney and Santorum are campaigning around Michigan, claiming to be both opposed to the bailout of GM and Chrysler and for the working man. Michael Gerson notes that arguing about the auto bailout is pointless:

No president — Republican or Democrat — would have allowed the economic collapse of the upper Midwest in the midst of a national economic panic. A conservatism that prefers ideology to reality is not particularly conservative.

I believe this is the first time I have ever agreed with a column by former Bush administration hack Michael Gerson. When Gerson and I agree that the Republican candidates are acting strangely, something is surely wrong with the Republican party.

Kelly Glasscock, "Jackson Hole"

If Businesses Can't Hire Skilled Workers, They Should Train Them

I hate stories like this:

as the 2012 presidential candidates roam the state offering ways to “bring the jobs back,” many manufacturers say that, in fact, the jobs are already here. What’s missing are the skilled workers needed to fill them.

A metal-parts factory here has been searching since the fall for a machinist, an assembly team leader and a die-setter. Another plant is offering referral bonuses for a welder. And a company that makes molds for automakers has been trying for seven months to fill four spots on the second shift. “Our guys have been working 60 to 70 hours a week, and they’re dead. They’re gone,” said Corey Carolla, vice president of operations at Mach Mold, a 40-man shop in Benton Harbor, Mich. “We need more people. The trouble is finding them.”

If these people really can't hire people with the skills they need, there is a simple answer: train them. How did the guys who have those jobs now learn them? On the job. How did their fathers and grandfathers learn to do factory work? On the job.

Sure, you could turn this around and ask why more young people in Ohio and Michigan aren't learning these skills in trade school or at a community college. The answer is that they just have to open their eyes to see that every time the economy weakens, guys with those skills are the first ones shoved out the door. Why would anybody pay his own money to learn a skill that will only get him laid off? These manufacturers epitomize short-term thinking. They won't make any commitment to their workers, and they wonder why workers won't make any commitment to them. I suppose they worry that if they pay for training, the people who get it will just leave for another factory that pays higher wages because they aren't spending part of their labor budget on training. But this is just more short-sightedness. Most people hate changing jobs, and if you pay them well and treat them well they will probably stay around for a long time. They could even sign their workers to long-term contracts, if they're really worried. But they won't because that would mean actually making a commitment to their people, and that they refuse to do.

Neil Gaiman Explains How to Write a Novel

Shahnameh

Ferdowsi's great poem, Shahnameh or The Book of Kings, tells the story of Persia from the creation down to the Arab conquest. It was written around AD 1000. It is enormously famous in Iran, serving as the main repository of their traditional stories. It is also among the most illustrated works of all time, with thousands of beautiful versions in existence. These are just a sample of images from the story I have found online, but they give a sample of the wonder and magic of the tale.

 

 

Charles Mann's 1493

When Columbus reached Hispaniola in 1492, he started a profound change in the world.

Life in the eastern and western hemispheres had been evolving in different directions for a hundred million years, since North America split from Europe and the Atlantic Ocean began to open. The barrier was far from absolute, and many species had been able to cross in one way or another – including people – but the ecosystems remained very different. Human cultures in the two hemispheres had been developing separately for 13,000 years, and the civilizations of Mesoamerica and Peru had arisen without any knowledge of the civilizations of the Old World that they in some ways closely resembled.

Columbus’ arrival changed all that. In his wake ships of a dozen European nations began to crisscross the world’s oceans, carrying revolution in their tiny holds. The economy of China was upended by sweet potatoes, maize, and silver from America, carried across the Pacific on Spanish galleons built in Acapulco by African and Malaysian carpenters. To Europe went more silver, along with the potato, which in the golden decades before blight and the potato beetle produced five times the calories per acre of wheat. The populations of both China and Europe doubled. Maize and manioc transformed African agriculture. The Americas were overrun with European and African people, and, tragically, their diseases. Tobacco smoke became part of the culture on every continent. The huge profits earned by managing this exchange made Europe the economic center of the world, and innovations like joint-stock companies, insurance exchanges, and commodities markets were driven forward by the needs of overseas trade.

Charles Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011) is an entertaining, thought-provoking look at this “Columbian exchange.” I found it fascinating from beginning to end. As he did in 1491, Mann judiciously summarizes a vast swath of recent scholarship, this time mainly in the cutting edge field of environmental history. The work Mann reviews is new and highly controversial, and much that Mann says may turn out not to be true. He also has a habit of sketching the possible impacts of things like European potato farming in maximal terms, making it seem like potatoes alone were responsible for the industrial revolution. This can be fascinating, but the reader should remember that Mann is carrying out thought experiments that ignore all the other variables in the equation to focus on one. With that caveat in mind, this is a great book, and reading it gave me much pleasure and taught me many new things.

Mann has a fine eye for the telling historical detail, focusing in on certain times and places that most clearly show the effects of globalization. One of my favorite parts was his description of Mexico City in the seventeenth century, when it was the first global city. Europeans were a small minority, much outnumbered by both Indians and Africans. Fifty languages were spoken on the streets. Chinese barbers drove Spanish barbers out of business by combining bloodletting and minor surgery with acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. Another great section covers the maroon communities that were formed by runaway African slaves. From Brazil to the Great Dismal Swamp, hundreds of thousands of Africans fled slavery for the forest, often living together with displaced Indians. In a few places they set up independent kingdoms that warred with the Spanish and Portuguese authorities and even signed treaties that guaranteed their independence. In England the sack of Panama City and the seizure of mule trains loaded with silver were celebrated as the achievements of Sir Francis Drake, but really most of the men and firepower were supplied by an essentially free maroon kingdom in the Panamanian jungle. On the Mosquito Coast of what is now Honduras and Nicaragua, Africans and Miskitu Indians set up a string of four kingdoms, and with British support they maintained their independence until 1894. In these Maroon kingdoms the people practiced idiosyncratic mixtures of African, Indian, and European culture, such as the blended religions of Santeria and Voodoo. In the Brazilian Amazon, isolated maroon communities have endured down to the present day, and their right to the land they occupy was finally recognized a few years ago by the Brazilian government.

While the scholarship of these developments is exciting, much of what happened was and remains sad. Before 1800, most of the people who crossed the Atlantic did so as slaves; in the first three centuries of trans-Atlantic contact, two or three times as many enslaved Africans crossed the ocean as free Europeans. Their average life expectancy, once they boarded slave ships, may have been as little as 4 or 5 years. The great sugar planters of Brazil and the Caribbean used up Africans like another raw material, not caring how many survived as long as more could be bought. In those lands centuries passed before self-sustaining black communities could grow up. Even more awful was the fate of American Indians, 90 percent of whom may have been wiped out by European diseases. What smallpox and the measles did in North America, malaria and yellow fever did in the tropics, devastating populations, wrecking communities and obliterating whole ways of life. It took 300 years for Native American populations to develop enough resistance to those diseases to begin to rebound, and by that time most of the New World had been conquered by the Spanish, Portuguese, English and French. It is a sad story but very much part of how the modern world came to be as it is, and Charles Mann gives it an excellent telling.

Mann is remarkably fair-minded and intensely curious, he works hard, his writing is fine, and he has chosen a fascinating and important subject. I give 1493 my highest recommendation, just as I did with his earlier book, 1491.

Here We Go Again with the 70-Year Budgeting

This time it's the Economist, which usually has more sense than this. You have to wonder about a mind that thinks it can predict the state of the American economy, the cost of health care, life expectancy, and the budgetary policies of the government (all at once) 72 years into the future. I call bullshit on this and all other budget predictions that run for more than five years.

More on the Eisenhower Monument Controversy

 

The controversy over the Eisenhower Memorial is morphing into a classic Culture Wars battle. An entity that calls itself the National Civic Art Society has issued a 153-page attack on Frank Gehry's design for the memorial, which complains:

• The Memorial's only statue of Eisenhower depicts him as a life-size barefoot young boy, a shrinky-dink tikey Ikey. It is a travesty that cuts a great man down to size. Giving Eisenhower the boy treatment would be unthinkable were Eisenhower around to defend himself.
• The statue of Ike as a Kansas farmer-boy is sentimental kitsch. This Happy McMonument does not befit a statesman who defeated the Nazis and who preserved America's peace and prosperity. Leadership is not child's play.
• The Memorial's titanic "columns" tower over the puny Ike statute. The result is a Leviathan Memorial swallowing a small-fry Eisenhower. The behemoth commemorates Gehry's ego, not Eisenhower's greatness and humility.
• The Memorial's crooked-appearing "columns" and tangled "tapestries" do not befit Eisenhower's upright virtue.
• Eisenhower would be disgusted at the planning and design of his Memorial. As he lamented in 1962, "What has happened to our concept of beauty and decency and morality?"

Not satisfied with attacking the design, they also try to smear both Geary himself:

In 2003, Gehry refused to help design a replacement for the Twin Towers since he was not offered enough money. That alone makes Gehry unworthy of Eisenhower, who exemplified selfless public service.

And the sculptor Geary chose to work on the barefoot boy sculpture:

The design of the boy Eisenhower statue is being advised by Charles Ray, an artist whose work sexualizes children and is obscene. 

Eisenhower may have exemplified public service, but he also believed in capitalism, and do the people behind the NCAS really want to attack Geary for charging what the market will bear?

Charles Ray has sculpted naked boys (above, The New Beetle), and I won't say anything about that except that his work is explicitly classical, and the NCAS claims to like classical art. In launching their own contest for a design of the monument, they said:

The recent selection of a Frank Gehry design for a national monument to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States and the Supreme Commander of the victorious Allied Forces in Europe in the Second World War, is deeply troubling to many Americans. Devoid of, and in defiance of, traditional aesthetic principles, the proposed design does not convey the meaning, inspiration and dignity suitable to commemorate a distinguished general and president of the United States.

Gehry's proposed basketball court-sized metal mesh screens hung between massive concrete posts over sixty feel tall would be an uncivil, brutal insult to the classical city envisioned by Pierre L'Enfant and our nation's Founders. Rather than being in harmony with Washington, the proposed monument would screen off and separate itself from the city, blocking views of the National Mall. This proposal fails Eisenhower, fails beauty, fails our capital city, and, in so doing, fails our nation.

 

Above, the entries that won first and second prize in the NCAS competition. (Seriously, a triumphal arch?)

I understand that putting up monuments to politicians is an inherently political act, but I find it sad that the question of what to put in an important public space should get bogged down in this sort of trivia. The site of the memorial is surrounded by profoundly ugly buildings and the whole neighborhood desperately needs something to liven it up. This creates a dilemma for the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. They are working for two audiences: tourists from Kansas who want a monument to a man they idolize, and the cool young people the city wants to move into its neighborhoods. A marble statue of Ike in uniform might please the tourists, but it will be mocked by the neighbors, and would probably feel foolish to the sophisticates on the commission.

My gut feeling is that Washington is so full of traditional monuments that another one would be completely ignored, just like the monuments to Farragut and McPherson and Thaddeus Kosciuszko already are. If the people at the NCAS want a monument that people will notice, they either need to support something innovative, or something gigantic. And given that Eisenhower was famously modest (for a President, anyway), gigantic won't work.

I also wonder if these critics have thought very hard about who Eisenhower really was, or about his place in American history. (Above, Eisenhower in Abilene, 1904.) Writing in the Architectural Record, Christopher Knight defends Gehry's design like this:

Eisenhower famously described himself as a plain guy from a plain Midwestern town. Between large stone reliefs depicting his achievements as general and president, a life-size sculpture would show him as a boy in Abilene, Kansas. Gehry took his cue from the general's celebrated 1945 homecoming speech, after World War II. "Because no man is really a man who has lost out of himself all of the boy," the famous speech begins, "I want to speak first of the dreams of a barefoot boy."

Homecoming signs cheered, "Welcome to Our Hero," but Eisenhower gently demurred: "I am not the hero, I am the symbol of the heroic men you people and all the United States have sent to war." Citizen-soldiers, in other words, were the true victors. That profound sentiment seems remote today, when citizens instead rely on a professionalized military-industrial complex -- one whose power Eisenhower also warned against in his presidential farewell address. Gehry and Ray should be praised, not attacked, for putting Eisenhower's conviction in the heart of his memorial. 

In an age of angry ranting, Eisenhower was calm. He refused to endorse the "missile gap", get frantic about Soviet spies in the State Department, or demonize liberal Democrats. His idea of how to defend America was to pay down the national debt. (Partly through very high taxes on the rich.) He would have hated, not this design, but the very idea of waging a political controversy over public monuments.

Eisenhower grew up on a farm, and he retired to a farm. He saw farming and small town life as central to the American experience. Is it wrong to make that understanding, rather than his military accomplishments, central to his monument? Gehry has not ignored Eisenhower's public career, and the design includes two carved reliefs depicting Eisenhower as general and Eisenhower as president. Is it wrong to concentrate the rest of the monument on his underlying vision of America? Or to design a monument that will make the neighborhood more attractive?

I like this design, and the more people like the NCAS attack it, the more I am convinced that it is the right way to go. By their strident, angry words, these critics show that they do not understand Eisenhower at all.