Stacie Marshall Confronts her Family's Past

Stacie Marshall has taken over the running of her family's farm in Dirt Town Valley, Georgia. She is excited by the chance to bring the farm back to life using organic methods, but also worried about about the legacy she has inherited. Two ruined sharecropper's shacks still stand on the farm, memories of a time when the owning family relied on black labor. In 1860, they owned seven slaves. According to family lore they bought their first slave as a wetnurse, when the farmer's wife couldn't produce enough milk for her baby. Not only that, but they acquired the farm in 1833 in a lottery of land stolen from the Creek Indians.

This is a story that could easily come across as ridiculous, but Stacie Marshall is clearly not a ridiculous person, and the telling by Times reporter Kim Severson is nuanced and open-minded. What would it mean to cleanse the land of such a history? To redeem a family? Here is an excerpt:

If anyone in the valley could help Ms. Marshall begin her self-styled healing project, it was Melvin Mosley. He had been the assistant principal at her high school. He is also her father’s best friend.

The two men met as boys, when Mr. Mosley’s uncle lived in one of the shacks on the Scoggins farm and worked for Ms. Marshall’s grandfather. Mr. Scoggins went to the white school, Mr. Mosley the Black one. Every book at Mr. Mosley’s school was a hand-me-down from the white school, but the boys didn’t understand that their educations were different until they started comparing notes.

“One day he asks me, ‘Did you choose white milk or chocolate milk today?’” Mr. Mosley said. “Man, we didn’t have a choice. We didn’t have chocolate milk. I didn’t even know what a spit wad was because we never got straws.”

Chattooga County integrated its schools in 1966, when the boys were in seventh grade. In interviews, the men talked about how unfair segregation was, but their perspectives on the past are profoundly different. Both recalled joining the adults as they baled hay for Mr. Scoggins’s father, and breaking for midday dinner. The Black workers ate outdoors. The white workers went into the house.

“My mama would call them to come in the house, but they said, ‘No, ma’am,’ and stayed out by that wall there,” Mr. Scoggins said. “They were humble.”

To Mr. Mosley, eating outside wasn’t about humility. “We did what we did because that’s what you did,” he said. “That was a sign of the times.”

For decades, he taught in public schools and prisons. At 67, he is a preacher, and lives with his wife, Betty, on 50 acres near Ms. Marshall’s farm.

On a summer day in 2019, Ms. Marshall sat in their yard and told them she wanted to start sharing the whole, hard story of Dirt Valley, and make some kind of amends. She asked if she was on the right path.

Mr. Mosley always considered her a bright girl who should go to college — as he told her after sending her to detention for kissing a boy in the school mechanic shop. His advice now was simple.

“Let’s say that’s the water under the bridge,” he said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” All she needed to do was to pour as much love on their valley as she could.

“In all of our families, Black or white, there are some generational things that are up to us to break,” he told her. “And when we break it, it is broken forever.”

Remember. Contemplate. Pour love onto the world. That is my formula, too.

Self Portraits by Young Artists

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Self-Portrait at the Age of 18, 1847; Arthur Hughes, Self-Portrait at the Age of 18, 1851; Frederic Leighton, Self-Portrait at the Age of 18, 1848; Edgar Degas, Self-Portrait at the Age of 20, detail; Pablo Picasso, Self Portrait at the Age of 15; Rembrandt, Self Portrait at the Age of 20-22. Frederic Leighton's curly locks are especially amusing if you recall his mature appearance.

The Bloody History of Dundrennan Abbey, Carved in Stone

Dundrennan Abbey in southern Scotland was founded in the 12th century. None of its records survive and little is known about its history.

It's best known sculpture is this depiction of an abbot.

During recent restoration efforts, attention was drawn to this carving. Does that dagger on the abbot's chest show that he was stabbed to death?

At the abbot's feet is this second figure, expiring from a stab wound in the belly. The scholars who made this announcement want it to be a story of an assassination, with the abbot depicted triumphant in the afterlife over the man who ended his time on earth.

Maybe. I mean, we know nothing about this place's history, so why not go with the most fun interpretation?

Fake Pandemic News in Brazil

Vanessa Barbara reports in the Times that Brazil is still awash in fake news stories about the pandemic. Despite hundreds of debunkings of hydroxychloroquine, many people still believe:

After all, just the other day a friend’s cousin forwarded a headline on WhatsApp claiming that all I.C.U. beds in the city of Miracatu are empty because the mayor adopted President Jair Bolsonaro’s “early treatment” — consisting of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and azithromycin — for Covid-19. OK, Miracatu does not have a hospital. But still: How can we be sure?

That’s just one of dozens of fake news stories about Covid-19 treatments circulating on social media — including one that advocates “nebulized” hydroxychloroquine, Mr. Bolsonaro’s new obsession. Well over a year into the pandemic, false claims still swirl. Is it true that face masks reduce the flow of oxygen to the lungs and can cause cancer? Is the coronavirus a biological weapon created by China? What about the involvement of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros?

Even now, after the death of half a million citizens, Brazilians are forwarding delirious claims that hospitals are empty and people are being buried alive to inflate coronavirus statistics. Last year, as daily deaths soared, stories about empty coffins and staged burials abounded. It’s almost as if Brazilians couldn’t — wouldn’t — accept that things could really be so bad and took refuge in paranoia, suspicion and conspiracy. In this, of course, they had a guide: Mr. Bolsonaro, at every turn, has sought to spread mischief and misinformation.

In my better moods I believe the US will survive the flood of false news stories on social media. The real danger is in other places; after all, India and Sri Lanka have already seen flash mob attacks on innocent people accused on Twitter of kidnapping and the like. Could there one day be a flash mob revolution, inspired by a fake story, that succeeds?

Awesome plot for a thriller, anyway. Too bad I'm busy writing a different one.

The Perilous Politics of Little Free Libraries

Two professors posted this to the Journal of Radical Librarianship:

In this article, we critique the phenomenon of Little Free Libraries® (LFL®), the non-profit organization dedicated to sharing books with one’s neighbours. Through our engagement with the discourses, narratives and geographies of the LFL® movement, we argue that the organization represents the corporatization of literary philanthropy, and is an active participant in the civic crowdfunding activities of the non-profit industrial complex. The visible positioning of these book exchanges, particularly on private property in gentrified urban landscapes, offers a materialization of these neoliberal politics at street level. Drawing primarily upon one of the author’s experiences as an LFL® steward, as well as critical discourse and GIS analysis, we offer constructive critiques of the organization and their mission, and suggest that the principles of community-led library practice can be more effectively employed to harness the enthusiasm of these self-described “literacy warriors.”

I think "The visible positioning of these book exchanges, particularly on private property in gentrified urban landscapes, offers a materialization of these neoliberal politics at street level" is the single most ridiculous sentence I have read this year.

Environmentalists Against Fighting Climate Change

European governments have decided that the way to reduce carbon in the atmosphere is to electrify everything. This requires, as we discussed a few weeks ago, massive new mines for lithium, cobalt, and other metals, and all proposals for these new mines have been fought by local environmentalists. It also requires new factories to make a lot of batteries, like the one Elon Musk is building outside Berlin. This is, however, not at all popular with many locals:

Walking along the edge of part of the site late last month , Steffen Schorcht, one of a group of residents fighting the Gigafactory, outlined some of their complaints. He says the company has not done enough to protect local wildlife and the environment. The factory is built on an area previously planted for timber and abuts a conservation area.

“Our critique is not against Tesla cars or the Tesla company,” he said. “Our critique is for them to use this area to build this factory.”

Having lost their battle to prevent felling on all but a tiny portion of the site, environmental groups lobbied for more to be done to protect and rehome hibernating bats, smooth snakes and ants.

When the first stretch of forest was cleared last year to make way for the factory, a solitary tree was left standing as some bats needed to be left until they woke from their slumber.

But now they have zeroed in on what they see as a potentially bigger environmental concern: the project’s water consumption and polluting potential.

They complain that Tesla has not been upfront during the planning process, only submitting for approval last month plans for the addition of what Musk says will be the biggest battery cell production plant in the world.

The factory has already been held up for a year and who knows how long this might stretch out.

Some environmentalism is based on more or less rational fears about what we are doing to the world, whether that is CO2 emissions, plastic in the ocean, or hormone mimicking chemicals. But a lot of it is frankly aesthetic, a preference for forests over factories and parking lots. Some is a revulsion against modernity in all its forms; this is where Greens meet Tories, both wanting to preserve villages and organic farms against intrusions of big business or the state. Some is very localized, a fondness for familiar woods and fields. The Germans quoted in the Post's story insist that they are not opposed to electric cars in general, just the building of electric cars in their neighborhood. Somebody else's woods should be cut down, somebody else's water taken. (Not that Berlin is short of water.)

But keeping a few hundred trees won't, at this point, help the planet much. We need bigger actions, bigger answers, and that's going to involve its own arc of destruction.

Dissatisfaction with Democracy in an Anti-Racist Age

Some years ago, during the administration of Bush II, I read a book about Emperor Justinian. It was mildly interesting about Justinian but what stuck most firmly in my memory was author James O'Donnell's attitude toward the Middle East. He seemed to regard it as a boiling cauldron of violent hate destined to consume all its residents while spitting the occasional hot bubble of fury at the rest of us: 

The strangest section of The Ruin of the Roman Empire comes next, in which O’Donnell ponders the shape of empires and asserts that Rome was really the wrong configuration all along. The right sort of empire, in his view, is one like the Ottoman Empire or Alexander’s, that is, one that controls the entire Near East from Persia to the Aegean. O’Donnell does not really say why this would be better, beyond some unconvincing stuff about natural connections and different modes of transportation. The reason seems clear enough, though: O’Donnell longs for an empire that would encompass all the dangerous religious fanatics whose boiling anger threatens the modern world. If the Israelis and Palestinians were both under the thumb of some great ruler like Mehmet the Conqueror – a favorite of O’Donnell’s, it seems – we would not have to worry about boundaries between them or terrorist attacks by one on the other. Under these wise emperors, tolerance was the order of the day, and people of different religions and ethnicities lived harmoniously together in great cities like Alexandria, Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul. But we moderns have “failed to build a society that could bring together Europe, Africa, and reaches of Asia in neighborly respect.”

Complaints about democracy are of course as old as democracy. Today I want to focus on one: the dissatisfaction with democracy as a means of achieving equality and peace between people of different ethnic groups. Many people of our own age seem to have little regard for democracy and much more interest in “neighborly respect,” and I often read things implying that democracy not accompanied by racial equality and harmony is at best a sham but more likely something far more sinister. To people like James O'Donnell, the fact that Israel is a democracy is a ludicrous distraction from the looming crises of religious strife, terrorism, and war. Better a tyrant like Mehmet who oppresses everyone equally than a bunch of squabbling, ethnically defined democracies.

If you followed the debate that led up to the Brexit vote, you might have noticed that it was mostly about identity vs. openness, with a lot of speculation about economic benefits or harms thrown in. What is to me the real reason to oppose the EU, that it is undemocratic, got little attention. It especially got little attention among the young and liberal, for whom the vote was all about openness vs. racism. Better, to woke Britons, to be part of a multi-national empire than a small democratic state tainted by xenophobia.

One of my themes here has been the growing contempt on the left for the American Revolution. The establishment of a white man's democracy is something that just doesn't impress many people in the 21st century. For many of my contemporaries, it would have been better to remain under the thumb of King George than to establish an independent state founded on racial oppression. I regularly read articles by people who seem to know only one thing about British history before 1900, that the empire abolished slavery in 1833.

I have to admit that the record of US democracy on racial issues is bad. Our framers are celebrated for, among other things, the spirit of compromise that led to the founding of a nation encompassing diverse societies and economies. But the basis of that compromise was anti-slavery forces accepting slavery in any state that wanted it, and on counting enslaved people as 2/5 of a human for apportioning votes. Many Americans now believe that wasn't worth it, and that people opposed to slavery should have rejoined the United Kingdom or tried to form their own nation rather than compromise with enslavers. It's hard to imagine how this alternative history would have worked out, but it at least would have spared whatever free America eventually emerged from the taint of slavery.

Early American politics was very much dominated by elites, partly by constitutional design and partly because all societies used to be that way. When populism really emerged as a political force, under Jackson, its chief aims were breaking the power of financial elites, displacing Indians, and extending slavery. More power for regular white men was explicitly framed in opposition, not just to elites, but to people of other races. It is an old story, going back at least to the first Democracy we know much about, in ancient Athens.

It is of course routine to read that Athens was no democracy – the Greeks may have invented the word, but why should we take their word for what it means? And now it is becoming routine to say that the US was no democracy until the 1960s, if it even is today. What other word we should use for a system with 50 million voters, I don't know; seems like a lot for an oligarchy. But to many people a system that excludes any group of adults from the vote is not rule by the people.

It also strikes me that the remarkable achievement of bringing women fully into our political life seems to have very quickly lost its power to uplift. (Young, college-educated women overwhelmingly backed Obama over Hillary.) In fact all of the things we have achieved – much greater rights for women, gay people, and black people, along with the effective disappearance of any bias against or limitations on Asians – strike many Americans as pathetic compared to the distance we still have to cover. In 1924 we banned all immigration from Asia, something we did not do for Africa or the Caribbean, but in 2020 people openly said that Andrew Yang did not count as a minority candidate. Many leftists seem to be completely discounting this transformation. Because it isn't everything, it is nothing. Or maybe less than nothing, since celebrating Asian achievement seems to come with the implication that blacks ought to be doing better.

Narratives of progress on racial issues are now opposed by people who see no change that matters, just eternal, unchanging racism. Compared to this wrong, democracy seems like a sad distraction, a way for white people to secretly voice racist ideas they are ashamed to express in words.

And on the right we have Trumpists nursing grievances over the election they believe was stolen, their friends in state legislatures putting in place what look like mechanisms for undoing any vote that goes against them. Immigration is routinely portrayed as a Democratic plot to subvert the country by diluting the votes of "real Americans." Come to think of it, I don't remember ever hearing a single Republican complain that Bush v. Gore was undemocratic; their guy won, and that was that.

It's the Fourth of July, but nobody seems much in the mood to celebrate America. The Times is running an essay today about this ambivalence, taking off from the story of a man who painted a big flag on the broken-down truck behind his vegetable stand only to have many of his customers assume he was right wing. (Even worse, to me, is the unstated assumption that this ought to influence whether people shop there.) American democracy, it seems, is not something anyone much cares to celebrate for its own sake. Elections are only good and valid so long as they deliver the right result, hence "not my President." What used to be symbols of America are now taken to be signs of angry ethno-nationalism.

I can't imagine that this is good for anyone. Anger unmoored from hope seems to me a recipe for riot, destruction, and hate, whether at the Capitol or on the streets of Portland. I understand frustration with our world, which could be a lot better. But to look back across time and see no progress, no hope, and no reason to believe in democracy, seems to me utterly sad and politically defeatist.

The Internet

Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?
A little bit of everything, all of the time?
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime.
Anything and everything, all of the time.

–Bo Burnham 

Alexandra Exter

Costume design for Seven Against Thebes, 1927

Alexandra Exter (1882-1949) was Russian/French painter and designer of stage sets and costumes. Born into a wealthy family in what is now Poland, she moved to Kiev as a girl and studied painting there. Like many other Russians she initially welcomed the Revolution, designing banners for Bolshevik parades and the like, but in 1924 fled to Paris. I can't remember ever hearing of her until today, and the web sites give her titles like "Russia's least known great artist." She painted a lot of abstract canvases but they don't do much for me; I like these figural works much better.

Swordsman for Othello, 1928

In Paris Exter started signing herself "d'Exter", got involved in the Russian emigre community and did a lot of theatrical work.

Carnival in Venice

The Circus, 1926

Figural Composition

Two women with a Lyre

The Meaningless Ladder

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose 

Links 2 July 2021

Gold wreath from one of the Macedonian royal tombs

For us, dreaming is private. We think, as Heraclitus wrote, "The universe for those who are awake is single and common, while in sleep each person turns aside into a private universe." But in some cultures that is not so, and dreaming people enter shared worlds or arrange to share dreams together.

Review of the evidence that exposure to lead causes crime and other social ills.

Nine-minute NY Times video about efforts to locate and preserve slave cemeteries in Louisiana. Good on the researchers' techniques but they only talked to people fighting industrial development and should have talked to some plant workers and others who support it.

Shenzhen Terraces, a multi-level park for a very urban place.

Infrastructure costs: Kevin Drum has numbers showing that the cost of building new transit projects in the US is close to the global average, except in New York City, where it is far more than any other place in the US.

Roman building found under a movie theater in Verona may have been a hotel.

Tyler Cowen on nuclear waste repositories, kicking off from the question of how to mark them as dangerous in a way people will understand in 10,000 years.

The language of cults: "Montell concludes that language is the primary means by which any group, and not just a cult, establishes a sense of shared purpose and identity."

Was "We Can Work it Out" really a song about tensions within the Beatles that they could not work out? I continue to marvel that people in the midst of intense conflicts with each other can make art together, but you see it over and over. (In case you wondered, "Straussian" means saying the required thing while hinting that you actually believe the opposite.)

Standard weights spread from some place with a rigid royal bureaucracy, likely Mesopotamia or Egypt, across the Middle East and Europe, crossing boundaries and being used in places with hardly any government at all. Marketplace pressures enforced standards even with no government backing them up. The investigators present this as surprising but you often find a reverence for law in places with weak states, so this is only what I would expect.

Woke scholar publishes paper arguing that Vikings can't possibly have settled in the New World because this is exciting to white supremacists and therefore a "problematic myth." Personally I do not regard the archaeological evidence for Vikings at sites like L'Anse aux Meadows as 100% certain, but it is pretty good, and the resolution to the debate certainly has nothing to do with how offensive we find the answers.

Up close study of fire ant rafts.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been offline since its first-line memory module failed on June 13. The Hubble has three backup memory modules and a whole backup computer, but commands intended to bring those systems into operation have had no effect. So the problem must be something that impacts all those systems, and NASA doesn't know what that might be. At the moment, of course, NASA has no rocket system that could carry astronauts to the station. Maybe Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk could send a repair mission; that would make the splash they seem to want and actually be useful. Or maybe the Russians or the Chinese could do it, by way of international goodwill etc. To me, the Hubble has been the best thing humans have sent into space since the 1970s, and it would be sad if it dies because people are busy setting up pointless moon bases or whatever.

Since I have complained so much about the F-35 program, it's only fair for me to report that it easily won the open competition for Switzerland's next generation fighter bomber on both performance and cost effectiveness metrics. Amazing what a trillion dollars will buy.

Anissa Weier, sentenced to 25 years in a mental hospital for her part in the Slenderman Attack, has been freed by a judge after 3 years. Her partner in crime Morgan Geyser is still confined. Although they were 12 years old at the time of the attack, they were tried and sentenced as adults. 

Remains of 8th century imperial palace found in Japan.

Cool relief sculpture found at fort along Hadrian's Wall.

Interesting group of Roman sarcophagi found in an olive grove near Iznik (Nicea) in Turkey.

Big metal: Nightwish, Over the Hills and Far Away; Apocalyptica, Hall of the Mountain King; Tool, 10,000 Days; Metallica, Unforgiven; AFI, Kiss My Eyes and Lay Me to Sleep.

Ryohei Tanaka

Ryohei Tanaka (1933-2019) was a Japanese printmaker much admired for the way he updated traditional Japanese scenes in a more modern style. Almost all the work you will see of his depicts rural Japan, usually forests, temples, barns, and old houses with thatched roofs. But the style is quite different from that of the early 20th century or before. Above, Persimmons.

This time I'm featuring all colored works; Tanaka also did a lot of black and white prints, which I may cover another time. Below, three illustrations from A Fool's Life by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, 1970.

Artificial Wings

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) was a Japanese writer born into the era when Japan was obsessively struggling to catch up with the west. His education thus focused on European philosophy and literature. But he was, it seems, ambivalent about the experience. This is from one of his most famous works, A Fool's Life:

Twenty-nine years of human existence had offered him little illumination. But Voltaire at least equipped him with artificial wings.

Unfolding these man-made wings, easily he glided up into the sky. Bathed with reasons light, human joy and sorrow sank away beneath his eyes. Over squalid towns, letting irony and mockery fall, he soared into unobstructed space, heading straight for the sun. That with just such man-made wings, scorched by the sun's radiance an ancient Greek had hurtled into the sea, dead. He'd seemed to have forgotten. …. 

Richard Prum on Sexual Dimorphism in Birds

Tyler Cowen's interview with ornithologist Richard Prim is interesting throughout. A sample:

COWEN: If you were trying to give us the most fundamental explanation of why sexual dimorphism is different in birds compared to mammals, what would that be?

PRUM: Well, that’s actually a really big question. [laughs]

COWEN: Of course, but the most fundamental factor — what is it?

PRUM: The most fundamental factor is that most birds don’t have a penis.

COWEN: Talk me through the equilibrium there.

. . . .  

PRUM: Birds have a very rapid period of rapid development. That means that they grow up and leave the nest, and you need two parents to do that efficiently in most diets or most kinds of ecologies. That means the dad’s got to be at the nest.

We usually thought that you have social monogamy, at least two birds helping raise the young, because the young are so needy and they have to grow up quickly. But there’s another possibility, which is that they could evolve to be so needy and grow up quickly because they managed to get males at the nest.

One of the things that happened in the phylogeny of birds — you’ve got ostriches and their relatives, and you’ve got chickens and ducks, and then you’ve got the rest of birds, and that’s a bunch. That’s the vast majority of them, and in that lineage leading to the rest of birds, the penis evolved away, and the question is why. My own theory is that female birds preferred mates that did not have a penis.

One of the ancillary benefits of that, one of the correlated benefits of that is that they were no longer subject to sexual coercion or sexual violence. They could be coerced behaviorally, but they couldn’t be forcibly fertilized. That means that they have freedom of choice, and what do they do with their freedom of choice? They choose beauty. One of the reasons why birds are so beautiful is that males don’t have a penis. They have to be subject to choice in order to effect reproduction, and also they have to invest if females require it.

A Shaman's Snake Staff from Neolithic Finland

This amazing artifact was dug up at the wet site of Järvensuo in southern Finland. It measures 53.5 cm long (21 inches) and has been radiocarbon dated to around 4400 years ago, in the Neolithic period.

This site is a peat bog at the edge of a large complex of wetlands, where the land rises up into a sandy ridge. It was discovered by accident in the 1980s and has yielded pottery and a variety of preserved wooden artifacts, including a ladle and a paddle. This led archaeologists to do a scientific dig in 2020-2021, turning up this wonder.

Snakes appear regularly in the rock art of this region, much of which probably dates to this period.

And there are a couple of images of human figures holding snakes. These have traditionally been interpreted as shamans, partly because if you ask Sami elders what they are, that's what they tell you. Besides, who else would be posing with a snake in his or her hand? 

There are snakes in that part of the world, including European vipers, but there aren't very many and they are not especially important in the Sami cosmos. So why snakes? Could this have been brought from the Mediterranean world, along with pottery and farming? Fascinating.

Will Ireland be Reunited?

One of the issues raised by Brexit was what to do about the boundary between Northern Ireland and the rest of the island. During the Troubles, the IRA constantly attacked border posts, which became armed fortresses, and one of the most beautiful signs of the peace that followed the Good Friday Accords was the dismantling of those grim, concrete and barbed wire monstrosities. But the open border between the UK and the Irish Republic depended on both being in the EU. So when Britain announced it was leaving, many (including me) wondered, what would happen to that suddenly relevant border?

Last summer Boris Johnson announced a solution: rather than rebuilding the border between the two Irish nations, a new customs and trade boundary would be established between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. This caused so much disruption that much of it had to be suspended on an "emergency" basis, and nobody thinks it is working very well, but the symbolic message was clear: Britain was ready and willing to jettison Northern Ireland if that was the price of its independence from the EU.

This has Susan McKay wondering how much longer Northern Ireland will endure:

Northern Ireland, created in 1921 when Britain carved six counties out of Ireland’s northeast, is not enjoying its centenary. Its most ardent upholders, the unionists who believe that the place they call “our wee country” is and must forever remain an intrinsic part of the United Kingdom, are in utter disarray. Their largest party has ousted two leaders within a matter of weeks, while an angry minority has taken to the streets waving flags and threatening violence. And the British government, in resolving Brexit, placed a new border in the Irish Sea. . . .

The writing is on the wall. While the process by which Ireland could become unified is complicated and fraught, one thing seems certain: There isn’t going to be a second centenary for Northern Ireland. It might not even last another decade. . . .

Northern Ireland now has borders with Britain and Ireland — and it is no longer a majority-Protestant state. The last census, in 2011, showed that the Protestant population had declined to 48 percent and the Catholic minority had risen to 45 percent. The Protestant community is aging, too: In 2011, only among those over 60 did it have a significant majority, and among schoolchildren, Catholics were the larger group. The results of a census to be published next year may well show an overall Catholic majority.

Nor can unionists count on the votes of Protestants. As a society, Northern Ireland has become more secular, more tolerant of diversity, less insular. People who reject conservative social policies have other voting options, and many young people do not vote at all. Some put their energy into global movements like climate justice and feminism — and plenty neither know nor care about the religious background of their friends. 

From the 1920s to the 1990s, Unionism in the North was fed by the huge economic, educational and social disparities between the industrialized, Protestant area around Belfast and the vast stretches of rural poverty across Catholic Ireland. But like most old manufacturing cities, Belfast has fallen on hard times, while Ireland has both boomed economically and become much less conservatively Catholic. So, as McKay says, some of the disparities on which Unionist sentiment was founded have faded away, and many young people just don't understand what all the fuss was about.

When I was younger I believed that the arrangement of nations I saw on the map was permanent, and I scoffed at the notion that Germany would ever be reunited. The division of Ireland is no more permanent than the Berlin Wall turned out to be, and I would also not be surprised to see it disappear in my lifetime.

Brood X: the Aftermath

Our 17-year cicadas are almost gone. The roar that was once, on the warmest afternoons, as loud as a gas lawnmower has faded to a whisper, and most of the cicadas you see are corpses littering the ground. But now you can clearly see the damage they do as millions of them scratch into tree branches to lay their eggs. Many trees in our neighborhood look like this, dotted with branches that have died at the tips. It looks like our small trees will all survive; there were so many in our crabapple that I was worried, but it seems fine. 

Today's Place to Daydream about: Strasbourg

Strasbourg is an ancient city, now in eastern France but for centuries part of the German empire. It has a long and event-filled history and an array of historical buildings to go with it. One of them is the fortified medieval bridge above.

Archaeology shows that this fertile land where the Ill River meets the Rhine has been settled since Neolithic times, but the city chose to celebrate its 2,000th anniversary in 1988, commemorating its first appearance in written records as the Roman camp of Argentoratum. A battle was found near the town in 357 between future Emperor Julian and German tribesmen called the Allemanni; despite being outnumbered, the Romans won a great victory. In 451 it was conquered by Attila and his Huns. 

The place to experience this history is the Archaeological Museum, full of Roman artifacts.

Merovingian Helmet from Strasbourg

Strasbourg remained a significant place through Merovingian and Carolingian times. In 842, amidst civil war among Charlemagne's three grandsons, the two younger brothers swore the Oaths of Strasbourg, promising to work together against their older brother Lothar. This is famous partly because Louis' men swore in proto-German, Charles' in proto-French, very important early texts in both languages. When the empire was partitioned, Strasbourg ended up in the portion of the older brother Lothar, for whom the region was called Lotharingia, from which the modern provincial name Lorraine derives.

Church of St. Thomas, built, says wikipedia, "1196-1521"

The ruler of Strasbourg across the early Middle Ages was its bishop. There were at least two armed revolts against him, but he remained in charge down to 1262. In 1260 a new, very aristocratic bishop, Walter von Geroldseck, issued a Manifesto of Grievances against the townspeople, saying they were not respecting the bishop's authority or paying him all the taxes due to him. By then the booming town had a lot more money and men than the bishop, so their response was, "come and collect your taxes if you can." Walter called for help from his fellow lords and bishops and raised an army. It was a tense, roughly equal standoff until one of the lords who had come to help the bishop, Charles of Hapsburg, decided to switch sides and support the town. (Those wily Hapsburgs, at it again.) 

Sarcophagus of Bishop Adeloch, died 823

Months of raiding eventually culminated in the Battle of Hausbergen. The bishop – he was the sort of bishop who commanded his own army, in full armor – thought he had caught the forces of the town at a disadvantage and ordered an immediate cavalry charge, but he was too far away and the townsmen had time to form up properly for defense. The bishop was killed and his men were so badly routed that the new bishop had to surrender all his claims over the town, which became an Imperial Free City.

In charge of their own destiny, the town' leaders immediately began rebuilding their modest, Romanesque cathedral into the imposing gothic masterpiece we know today. This marvelous building is one of those "living" cathedrals, meaning that it had continually evolved over the centuries as pieces fell down or wore out and had to be replaced. For example the roof burned in 1870 during a Prussian siege, but then the new Emperor of Germany paid for its rebuilding.

Many of the sculptures have been moved to museums during one war or another, but the reproductions you see on the building today seem to be very fine.

In 1348 Strasbourg experienced the Black Death, and in 1349 it experienced revolution. The townspeople wanted to slaughter the Jews in response to, as they saw it, the spreading of the plague. But the town council, dominated by the richest local businessmen, declined, and the bishop backed them. The people continued to demand punishment of the Jews. The government eventually arrested some Jews and had them publicly tortured, but they did not confess to plague-spreading. See, said, the authorities, we have investigated these rumors and found nothing. Not at all satisfied, a populist faction revolted and seized power, driving several councilmen into exile. Once in power they killed all the Jews they could get their hands on. 

Strasbourg in 1493

The plague devastated Strasbourg like the rest of Europe, but the town rebounded and continued to thrive. Johannes Gutenberg lived in Strasbourg in the 1440s, and experimented there with using and making movable type before deciding to set up his first press in Mainz. One of the world's first specialist eyeglass shops opened in Strasbourg in 1466. These sorts of developments were taking place all over Europe: new technologies like better ships, mechanical clocks, and printing, and new businesses like eyeglass shops, paper mills, and factories that mass-produced stoneware bottles. The modern world was stirring. This photograph shows a district known as Petite France where the town's wealthy burgers lived, now a centerpiece of all tours.

In 1518 the town witnessed a strange and still famous event, the Dancing Plague. It began when one woman started dancing in the town square and continued until dropping from exhaustion. Others joined in, and the plague lasted for about three months. People disagreed at the time about what was going on and still do. Some observers said that while people did try to fake having the condition, you could tell the difference because they simply could not dance as long as those really caught up in the Plague. Some sort of contagious hysteria seems like the most likely explanation to me. This contemporary engraving is supposed to be based on a drawing by Pieter Breughel the Elder, who witnessed the dancing first hand.

Palais de Rohan, Construction begun 1742 for a bishop of the noble Rohan clan

The town was a key site in the early days of the Reformation, and in 1605 saw one of Europe's first daily newspapers. In 1681 it was conquered by the armies of Louis XIV, becoming part of France.

In 1871 it passed back to Germany and remained German down to 1918; many new buildings were constructed then for the town government and so on.

In 1977 it became the site of the European Parliament, which was housed in this ghastly modern building. 

In 1992 the Parliament moved to this equally horrible building. The aesthetic bankruptcy of the EU is on full display here. People might not hate them so much if they knew how to design less ugly buildings.

What an extraordinary history, and how marvelous that so many monuments survive to help us remember it.