Category: Culture

Catherine the Great


Helen Mirren in HBO’s Catherine the Great

The sets and costumes and colors are lavish. Helen Mirren is, as always, a remarkable actress. But one episode of Catherine the Great was all I can take.

Just as every story with a classical structure needs a villain, so every story needs at least one decent human being. In this story, there aren’t any. There’s no one to like, including Catherine the Great. It’s all debauchery and treachery and cruelty, all the time.

It has never mattered to me whether a story is “true to life.” I prefer the opposite, actually, because to me stories are about escape and imagination. Life itself is true to life, and that’s enough. HBO’s mini-series about Catherine the Great may be true to life, and true to history, for all I know. If I cared enough, I’d read a history. But, as a story, there was no one in it worth caring about — except, maybe, the Russian people, who, at least in episode 1, never appear.

Recently I wrote a book review here on the history of tyrants. Of the three types of tyrants that Waller Newell describes, Catherine the Great was a “reforming tyrant.” She did Russia proud. Is there something about the Russian people that they can be led only by tyrants? Or is it that tyrants are all the Russian people have ever known? I don’t know enough Russian history to try to answer the question. But I think I’m glad that I’m not Russian.

Nigel Tranter

I wish I could say that the prolific historical novelist Nigel Tranter left us with a rich and readable lode of historical novels set in Scotland. Unfortunately, I cannot say that, having just finished Sword of State.

Sword of State opens in the year 1214, when the young Patrick, the 5th Earl of Dunbar, is sent by his father to take a message to the even younger King Alexander II of Scotland, who has just ascended to the throne. The two young royals immediately become fast friends. For the remainder of his life, Patrick was friend and fixer to King Alexander.

Tranter cranked out something like 90 novels in his long life. He died in 2000 at the age of 90. Sword of State has a 1999 copyright. Tranter wrote this novel when he was approaching 90 years old.

As a novel, Sword of State fails. Many of the most important ingredients of a good novel — mystery, subplot, suspense, emotion, complexity — are missing. What kept me going is that I greatly liked the characters, and it mattered that they were once real. Tranter’s career as a writer started with an interest in castles. So there is plenty of castle atmosphere. Clearly Tranter also was fascinated with maps and terrain, and my guess is that he visited and was familiar with most of the settings. Detailed topographical maps of Scotland would make a handy guide when reading Tranter. As with Tolkien, I learned new words for types of terrain and water, such as “mull,” “kyle,” and “burn.” This novel would be quite rewarding to a reader whose main interest is what life might have been like in 13th Century Scotland. But its weakness as a novel is that the narrative, long on exposition and short on action, follows a simple and single trajectory as Tranter checks off the main events in the lives of Patrick and Alexander. Characterization, and some of the dialogue, is pretty good, though.

According to the Wikipedia article on Tranter, his novels are “deeply researched.” No doubt that is true, though I wonder what his sources were. This taste of Tranter left me wanting to know more about early Scottish history.

If this novel has a villain, it’s the church. This does not surprise me. My guess would be that Tranter would agree that the Celtic world would have been vastly better off if the church had never existed. Tranter’s churchmen are greedy for land, money, and power. Popes should have names such as Avarice III or Ruthlessness VI rather than, say, Celestine IV.

I was angry when I finished this book, because of how Patrick died — miserably and uselessly, far from his Scottish home. He was killed in the Seventh Crusade. This crusade was sponsored by Pope Innocent IV, who pressured kings, including of course Alexander, to send money and men to fight “the infidels.” This particular bit of madness and genocide by the church cost 1.7 million lives.

Pope Innocent IV, by the way, was executing a decree written by Innocent III, Quod super his: “Innocent decides that if a non-believer refuses to accept and adopt the teachings of Christ, he is not truly a full human being and therefore is undeserving of humane treatment and subject to force.” This decree was used in the 19th Century to justify American genocide against native Americans. Some kinds of people never change. Today’s politics and the theologies that go along with it didn’t just come out of nowhere, did they?

Drag queens reading to children?


Photo credit: dragqueenstoryhour.org

What is it about the conservative mind that totally flips out at the idea of drag queens? Even most of us liberals, I imagine, raised our eyebrows in surprise upon first hearing about Drag Queen Story Hour. It’s edgy for sure. But, upon reflection, liberals realize that children love costumes, and that every single one of us wears a costume every single day, because, if we don’t, we’ll get arrested. And liberals like the idea of children learning that it’s the person inside the costume that really matters, and that we all get our own free choices in how we present ourselves to the world. On the other hand, where conservatives are concerned, Drag Queen Story Hour has been gasoline on the fires of the culture war.

The New Yorker has a new article with the title “David French, Sohrab Ahmari, and the Battle for the Future of Conservatism.” For those of us who try to make sense of the addled authoritarian mind, this article is a must-read. Sohrab Ahmari, who was born in Iran and who converted to Catholicism in 2016, calls Drag Queen Story Hour “a five-alarm cultural fire.” He argues that such a thing is so dangerous that conservatives should set aside the First Amendment and use whatever coercion is necessary to stop drag queens from reading to children. This must be done, he believes, to defend “traditional morality.”

As you might imagine with someone who lived in San Francisco for many years, it has been my honor to have met many drag queens and transexuals. People who have been misunderstood and mistreated all their lives, if they survive with their wholeness and goodness intact, are very likely to have spent a great deal of time thinking things through and drawing some conclusions about what really matters. I have learned a great deal from them about what it means to be human. I remember reading some years ago (though I have not been able to find a reference) that studies have shown that religionless gay people generally score higher on tests for moral maturity than do priests. That does not surprise me, because, to authoritarians, thinking things through is dangerous. One’s beliefs about morality are to be received from moral authorities and are not to be questioned. But, freed from tradition and authority, one might find one’s way much more quickly to the leading edge of moral progress. During the 1980s, for example, while most of America was in a state of moral panic and moral paralysis on the matter of AIDS, it was the drag queens who stood with microphones under the lights of America’s gay bars to educate the at-risk population about what was going on and how to stay safe. No doubt they saved countless lives.

As a heretic and beneficiary of the First Amendment (which people like Ahmari would set aside), I think it is important not only to speak up for those who are different and whose differences are good and benign, but also to heap ridicule on the foolishness and hypocrisies of authoritarians. For example, Google for “Jerry Falwell Jr. and pool boy.” That’s a story worth following. Don’t miss the stories about that West Virginia bishop and his depravity: “A penthouse, limousines and private jets: Inside the globe-trotting life of Bishop Michael Bransfield.” While searching for photos for this post, I had a lot of good laughs at the photos of churchmen in their robes and finery, which I would call drag. I’ve included an example below, as well as the famous video of a priest slapping an infant during a christening.

I feel mean, and a bit guilty, when I write snarky posts like this one. But I do believe that public ridicule and public expressions of contempt are our best defense against the moral defectives who tell would people how to live. “Traditional morality” is a harder and harder sell. Why can they not see why?


Bishop Michael J. Bransfield, now disgraced. Would you trust your children to someone in this kind of costume?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dtITrtpyEE

Or this one?

Harris tweed


Vintage Harris tweed jacket bought in Stornaway

The Scottish island of Harris is remote, windswept, rainswept, and underpopulated. How, then, did it become so famous? For Harris tweed, of course.

First, a technicality. The usual way to refer to this place in the Outer Hebrides is “the isle of Lewis and Harris.” That raises the question, are we talking about one island, or two? It’s actually one island. The northern part of the island is Lewis, and the southern part is Harris. Mountains form the geographical (and, to a surprising degree, cultural) boundary between the two places.

I have never particularly been interested in textiles. But what struck me about Harris tweed, as I learned more about it, is what an incredible model Harris tweed provides for a sustainable cottage-based industry. By law, Harris tweed comes only from these islands. All Harris tweed is woven by hand by the local crofters, at home in their cottages. (A croft is a small farm with its cottage and outbuildings.)

The production of Harris tweed peaked in 1966. But there are signs that it’s making a comeback, and production is expanding. The Wikipedia article gives a good brief history of Harris tweed. Crofters have been weaving it for their own use for centuries. In the 19th Century, it was discovered by the English aristocracy, and soon everybody wanted some. Everything came from the island’s own resources — wool from blackface sheep and dyes from wild local plants. Local mills spun the yarn. Once the cloth has been woven in the crofters’ cottages, the mills inspect, wash, and press the cloth.

I walked into a Harris tweed shop in Stornaway and was shocked at the prices. For handmade products of such quality, that is not surprising. Men’s jackets started at around £400 ($500). Even simple waistcoats started at about £140. I left the shop reluctantly, priced out of the market.

But fate stepped in. Upon returning to Stornaway some days later to catch a bus to the south of the island, a local man in a coffee shop struck up a conversation with me. He was wearing a Harris tweed jacket and waistcoat. After we had talked for a while, I complimented him on his jacket, saying that I’d love to have one but that the prices were just too steep. He told me where I might find a vintage jacket for much less. In fact, the shop was right nextdoor. In the shop I found a long rack of men’s jackets. The shop’s owner helped me try them on. The one I liked best fit me perfectly. The price was only £59, so of course I bought it. The cut is remarkably smart and modern, though the jacket was made in the 1960s or 1970s for Dunn & Company. The jacket is now at the cleaners, getting its buttons tightened up, along with a good cleaning and pressing.

To the men of this island (and elsewhere), where even in summer nighttime temperatures dip into the Fahrenheit 40s, a Harris tweed jacket is a year-round, everyday-casual item. I realized that, to be properly warm, the jacket should be worn with a waistcoat and scarf. I won’t hesitate to wear it to the grocery store this winter. I wore it to dinner at Oxford.

There’s a pretty good market for vintage Harris tweed items on eBay. I plan to look for a waistcoat there.

My post on Donegal tweed, September 2020.


A Hattersley loom. It’s probable that my vintage jacket was woven on one of these. Wikipedia photo.


Blackface sheep near the village of Ardmor.


A crofter using a Hattersley loom, c. 1960. The weavers are men as often as women. Wikipedia photo.

How hatred and racism are backfiring on Republicans

Periodically I hold my nose and look at the Facebook group of the Republican Party in my county. It’s a swamp of hatred and stupidity. There’s a sample above. Notice that someone named Sam Hill calls Democrats “Demoncrats.”

Is the racism study cited above legit? I believe it is. Right-wing media made much of the study and naturally interpreted it to mean that Trump truly is making America a kinder place. That seems to be true where racism is involved, but not in the way that Republicans suppose. Trump’s true believers, a group that I’d estimate at about 35 percent of the population, are feasting on the official approval of their of hatred and meanness. But everyone else is increasingly disgusted. That disgust is liberalizing people other than Trump’s deplorables. People are seeing that racism is real and that racism is dangerous. People are seeing what Republicans are trying to do.

In other words, Trump’s endorsement of hatred and racism is backfiring, politically. While feeding red meat and meanness to the deplorables, Trump is driving all the kinder people away. Trump is far too stupid to understand this, or to care. But one would think that there are Republicans in Washington who can see that Trump actually is hastening the end of the Republican Party.

Dan Hopkins, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, writes about this at Five Thirty Eight. The article is “White Americans Say They’re Less Prejudiced.”

Hopkins writes:

But in fact, there is evidence that Trump’s election did not make Americans more racist; instead, it may have emboldened those who were already prejudiced. As FiveThirtyEight contributor Matt Grossman wrote last October, the research doesn’t show “an overall increase in racist and sexist attitudes among white voters; rather, the evidence shows that liberal-leaning voters moved away from [Trump’s] views faster than conservatives moved toward them.”

Though these are hard times for decent human beings to live through, and though the dangers are rising as Trump and his deplorables lash out, we can hope that Trump is expediting our return to a decent America, just by showing decent human beings how ugly the worst of us can be.

Some questions for the animals


Chaser. Wikipedia photo

A few days ago, the New York Times carried an obituary for a dog. The dog was Chaser, a border collie who was taught to understand 1,022 nouns. Here’s a link to the story:

Border Collie Trained to Recognize 1,022 Nouns Dies

I often wonder if I should be ashamed of my own thoughts. My thoughts in this case were that, in many cases, it is perfectly reasonable to value the life of an animal as much as the life of a human being. And — let’s admit it — we value the lives of some animals more than the lives of some human beings. Not everyone gets an obituary in the New York Times, but this dog did.

You may remember back in 2015, when Cecil the lion, a much-loved resident of a national park in Zimbabwe, was murdered in cold blood by an American big-game hunter. As outrage and grief poured out in social media, the usual small-minded moral scolds went to work, berating people for being concerned about the life an animal when so many people … [fill in the blanks with their personal cause]. I was so irked that I posted here about that at the time, with the argument that it is perfectly possible to have more than one moral concern at the same time.

One of the most mysterious subjects in metaphysics and biology is consciousness. We don’t know what consciousness is or where it comes from. But, one hopes, we have laid to rest the idea that animals are different from human beings in any essential way. They are just as conscious. They have a full range of emotions, just as we do. They love just as deeply. They are greatly troubled by fear and worry. They love their lives. The differences between human DNA and animal DNA are trivial.

Ask your average witless Christian whether animals have souls, and the answer will be that of course animals don’t have souls, that only humans have souls. Witless Christians who are more theologically inclined may then say something about how God gave us humans the fruits of the earth, to “harvest” as we please. That’s dominionism, one of the ugliest theologies there is. They actually apply the word “harvest” to animals.

But if the question of souls, whatever souls may be, is inherent in the nature of living things, as opposed to some magical ontological theological notion about which ancient and ignorant religionists knew more than we do, then it seems safe to assume that animals are not different from us in any essential way. If we have souls (a question I think we cannot answer), then they do, too. Consciousness suffices. Simply to be a living, feeling being is to have rights and claims on fairness.

According to the New York Times story, not only did Chaser know 1,022 nouns, he also understood sentences containing a prepositional object, verb and direct object. Chaser was able to learn so much language because border collies are a very smart breed and because his owner spent many, many hours teaching Chaser language. But everyone with a dog or cat knows that every dog and every cat learns enough language to manage daily routines. The more you talk to your dog or cat, and the older your pet gets, the more language your pet will learn.

My cat, Lily, now eleven years old, used to be terrified of the abbey organ because the organ can be quite loud. But after a while she developed a new routine whenever the organ is played. She goes to a table facing the organ console and watches. I soon learned that, if I play quietly, she likes the music (a collie I once had used to come and lie under the piano any time I played). And then I learned that Lily has a favorite song. That song is “Danny Boy,” which I play quite softly with velvety stops and tremulant, adding in some soft reed stops as the song develops. A couple of months ago, after I had played “Danny Boy,” I got up from the organ, and Lily was crying. She came to me, bumping her head against me, very emotional, crying the same way she had cried after I returned home from two weeks in Scotland. She understands, I believe, what that song means. It is a song about loss and grief, with the hope of reunion in some unknown world. The song expresses a feeling — a condition of the soul, if you will — and I believe that Lily understands that feeling just as well as we humans do. Because music is a universal language, she knows what “Danny Boy” means.

In John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, a book that I have mentioned here often, Rawls does not take up the issue of animal rights and fairness to animals. But he practically begs someone to do that work, which mostly remains undone. If you are familiar with Rawls, then you’re aware of his concept of “the original condition,” in which we arrange the world as though we can’t know before we come into this world what our circumstances will be — male, female, black, white, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, smart, dumb. We would want the fairest possible world. It’s not at all difficult to add another condition to Rawls’ thought experiment. What if we didn’t know whether we would be born human or animal? Whether we were a wild animal, or a farm animal, or somebody’s pet, would make no difference.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were the kind of society in which, in a presidential debate, we could talk about fairness for all living things, rather than the usual agenda based on increasingly mean and increasingly cruel right-wing talking points.

The Rawls thought experiment is incredibly easy to apply to animals. Talk to a chicken, a cow, a lion, a dog, a bird, a whale. Ask them what they want, and what they would consider fair. You know what they would say.

Clues to the future in how people talk

https://youtu.be/qUGT30gGtiI

This video has been dubbed so that Trump is speaking with a British accent. His words are the same. How many fans would Trump have if he actually talked like this?

We Americans believe that the British are excessively judgmental about how people talk (and they are). But not only are we Americans just as judgmental, some linguists say that Americans are even more judgmental than the British. Does how people talk affect our politics far more than we realize? Does it shed some light on who will prosper and who will not?

Our reactions to how people talk are largely unconscious. But, as we listen to someone talk, we are rapidly making judgments about how smart they are, how nice they are, how rich or poor they are, how educated they are, and whether they are, or are not, like us. If the way people talk marks them as a member of an out-group, then we apply the stereotypes that we associate with that out-group.

Let’s listen to the Trump supporters in the video below. I don’t think many Trump supporters read this blog. But if they did, they’d recognize the people in the video as members of their own in-group, just like everyone else at a Trump rally. Those of us who despise Trump, however, will have very different responses. We will realize — quite correctly — that the people in the video are not very smart, not very nice, not very rich, not very well educated, and not like us:

After you watch these two videos, it’s easy to see that Trump supporters like Trump because of how he talks to them. Trump comes across as just as stupid, just as mean, just as hardscrabble, and just as ignorant as they are. Thus they see Trump as one of them. Nothing else matters to them, because they don’t know and don’t care what it actually takes to manage and govern a world as complicated as the world we live in. Because they’re enraged and confused, cruelty toward out-groups seems to be their only domestic policy, their only foreign policy, and their only economic policy.

Unfortunately for Trump supporters, their ignorance makes them easy to deceive. Trump is not like them. Trump is a rich guy from New York City whose social set is the global oligarchy, an oligarchy all about money and power and that lives on the shady side of law and ethics. Trump is deceiving and exploiting his supporters for the benefit of people who are like Trump. Trump’s narcissism feeds on their adulation. In return, Trump flatters them with his attention. They believe that someone is finally speaking up for them. He assures them that they will be great again. But that is not going to happen. Trump is, if anything, expediting their obsolescence by convincing them that they don’t have to change, or learn, or be nice, or educate their children, and that it’s the rest of the world that is the problem.

After the catastrophic election of 2016, many liberals were quick to blame themselves. If only we had reached out to them! We must engage them and empathize with them! That is a delusion. Trump supporters are too far gone for liberal reaching-out, because liberals are a demonized out-group. As they see it, only one of them can save them. Trump is quite literally seen as the answer to their prayers.

But back to language. It’s a shame that linguists have had so little to say about the culture war now raging in America, because linguists have a long, long memory, for cultures as well as for languages. Most people who write about American politics invoke American history, and there they stop. But no matter how much one knows about American history, I suspect that American history is a shallow source for understanding this culture war. To my lights, the part of American history most relevant to today’s culture war is not Jefferson vs. Hamilton but the displacement of native Americans and the loss of native American culture.

Linguists have a lot to say about what occurs when one language (or culture) replaces another. It’s always complicated, but the factors tend to be similar, whether the cultural replacement occurred 5,000 years ago (as when the Indo-European languages and cultures became dominant in Europe and parts of Asia), or 2,000 years ago, as when Latin took over in western Europe. (We need to keep in mind that, though English is a Germanic language, about 60 percent of English words derive from Latin.) Among those factors are technology (going all the way back to the wheel), migration, and the kind of economic power that comes from trading, or from political or economic exploitation.

At the level of causes that can be keenly felt by every human individual, there are two factors that are pretty much always involved in cultural displacement: prestige, and its opposite, stigma.

In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, a book about how Indo-European languages swept over Europe during the bronze and iron ages, David Anthony writes:

The pre-Indo-European languages of Europe were abandoned because they were linked to membership in social groups that became stigmatized. How that process of stigmatization happened is a fascinating question, and the possibilities are much more varied than just invasion and conquest…. Negative evaluations associated with the dying language lead to a descending series of reclassifications by succeeding generations, until no one wants to speak like Grandpa anymore. Language shift and the stigmatization of old identities go hand in hand. [p. 340, sentence order inverted for emphasis]

And:

Usually language shift flows in the direction of paramount prestige and power. [p. 341]

As the world relentlessly globalizes (whether for good or for ill), something remarkable is happening with language. It is very rapid, because it has happened in our lifetimes. English is becoming the global lingua franca. Millions of people are learning English. I did not realize until I was Googling for this post that more people today speak English as a second language (more than 1 billion) than speak English as their first language (less than 400 million). Whether as a first or second language, to speak English today (as long as your accent is not stigmatized) is a matter of great prestige.

In the American culture war, what we have is not language displacement but culture displacement, driven by the usual factors — technology, economics, migration, and prestige vs. stigma. Trump’s supporters speak English, but many or most of them speak stigmatized dialects of English. When Trump speaks to his supporters, he speaks to them in a stigmatized dialect — a New York working-class dialect.

In a piece in the Washington Post, “Donald Trump’s accent, explained,” a linguist is quoted: “He wants to sound macho. As part of his whole tough-guy persona, he adopts almost a working-class style of speech.”

I lamented above that linguists haven’t had more to say about American politics and the American culture war. But I would mention two papers by linguists that are relevant:

Talking Donald Trump: A sociolinguistic study, by Jennifer Scalfani

Silencing nonstandard speakers: A content analysis of accent portrayals on American primetime television, by four linguists

What I’m arguing here is that what we are living through is not just a culture war but actually is the rage and death throes of a doomed culture — white, rural, Christian America. At the risk of making it sound facile, I’d have to say that their doom is obvious. They lack the skills, the knowledge, the intelligence, and even the will to adapt to a changing world. They are stigmatized. The world looks down on them, and they know it. Almost all of the social goods required for success and expansion in today’s world belong to the other side. As for the rage of rural white America, that is easy to understand, because, in their lifetimes, they have seen a reversal of prestige vs. stigma, aggravated by economic humiliation. In the glory days of white rural America, black people and gay people were stigmatized. White rural churchgoers had prestige. Now it is the other way around, which is why these changes seem like the end of the world and the work of the devil to them.

Given that Trump supporters do speak English, it would be possible for them to save themselves. They could, through education, better information, better politics, and improvement in their language skills, unload some of the stigma and work to adapt. Many of their children will do that. But the older ones won’t. As they slide into minority status, they could join a coalition, as other minorities do. But they won’t do that either. Part of what Trump and the Republican Party is teaching them is not to join a coalition of, say, working class minorities. White, rural, working-class America has everything in common with black (or Hispanic), rural, working-class America. But the Republican Party has cleverly assured that today’s older Republicans will never, even if it would make them less poor and get them medical care, join a coalition that isn’t all white and waving the Christian flag. The 2016 election, I believe, is the last national election that the Republican Party will ever be able to win, unless it completely re-invents itself. Republicans lost the popular vote. Only by lying, cheating, and relying on Russian help could they pull it off. That won’t happen again. We’re onto them.

I have another suspicion here about what may be going on in the longer scheme of things. The rotting away of white, rural, Christian America is probably just an ordinary, localized event, if you look at it from a global perspective with a timeline of 100 years or so. Theirs is not the only culture that is is dying or that has recently died. But from a 2,000-year perspective, this may also be the last stand of Christian true believers. If the test of true belief is the willingness to go to war with the infidels, then only white, rural, evangelical and fundamentalist Americans are still standing. Europe, and the Catholic church, passed that point long ago. In not too many more years, good-byes may be in order not only for white, rural, Christian Americans, but also for true-believing Christianity.

What do we owe Trump supporters? We owe them what everyone is owed: equal justice, equal rights, equal opportunity, and all the goods that go with a decent society, including public education, medical care, jobs, retirement, and self-respect. Those are the very things that they would deny to others.

I am not a linguist, nor a sociologist, nor a political scientist, nor a historian (though I can read). But I do know these people. Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the church have brought out the very worst in them. Even if it had been otherwise, and if the authority they crave had brought out the best in them, I believe they still would remain in decline, because they are unfit for a changing world and cannot adapt, as a consequence of their own failings. There ought to be a word for it, because it’s something I’ve seen over and over in how dysfunctional people live their lives. They cling, as though for dear life, to the very thing that is pulling them down.

Please, somebody … just get us out of here


Jason Momoa in Apple’s “See”

The diagnosis, I feel sure, is chiefly Game of Thrones withdrawal. Whether you loved it or were disappointed, Game of Thrones ended, leaving us exposed and defenseless in the here and now.

Europe has been in an oven. The American heartland keeps flooding. Many farmers have been ruined. The water is waist deep in the Louisiana lowlands though hurricane season is just getting started. Wildfires have been raging in the arctic and in Hawaii. It’s summer in California, which means that California will soon have fires to go with its earthquakes. Monsoon flooding in India just killed 90 people and displaced more than a million. It’s too hot to go outside here unless you’re back indoors by 9:30 a.m. “Climate despair” is now a mental health diagnosis. Donald Trump’s approval rating rose a point or two as the scrutiny of his concentration camps intensified. The U.K. seems to want its own version of Donald Trump. The yield curve is inverted. Bees are dying faster than ever, though monster-size snakes and armadillos, like Trump’s base, feast and flourish in broad daylight.

Maintaining one’s sanity requires some escape. But where to? I spend more time surfing the streaming services looking for something fit to watch than I spend actually watching stuff. I have never been able to understand the appeal of stories set in the here and now. Where’s the escape in that? I’ve started a collection of the pathetic little blurbs that one finds in the streaming services while searching desperately for something to watch. Who writes these shows? Who watches them? Why do they bother to make them? For example:

• After a bad breakup, a struggling New York comedy writer tries to don a brave face and care for his dying mother in Sacramento.

• His wife wants out. His son’s a pothead. His rabbi can’t help him. Poor schlub. He could do worse, but not by much.

• What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas … when you can’t remember what the hell happened the night before.

If all stories were that useless, I would not have survived childhood, let alone have made it to my present considerable age.

Maybe Apple will help? Later this year, Apple’s streaming service will start. Lists of the shows that Apple has in production have started appearing, for example, this one. There is the now-obligatory dystopian thriller, “See,” but so far it looks like just another show in which half the budget is spent on body rugs and bad hair. At $15 million per episode, right up there with the last season of Game of Thrones, this series can afford a lot of bad hair. I’m intrigued, though, that Apple is taking on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

Based on this list, I tried to do a rough count of how many of Apple’s new shows are not set in the here and now. I came up with 12, versus 25 shows that are set in the here and now.

Occasionally I do find something that is worth watching all the way to the end. “The Stone of Destiny” (2008) is particularly relevant now that talk of Scottish independence has been renewed because of Scottish exasperation with Brexit. “Crooked House” (2017) got mediocre reviews, but I thought it was a fine production of an Agatha Christie novel, and with a superb cast.

On the other hand, I watched only about two minutes of the Netflix revival of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. I had assumed that it was a proper remake, but instead it appeared to be just a sentimental wallow and a heavy new dose of Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney for those (such as Armistead Maupin) who can’t get enough. I follow Maupin on Facebook (mostly selfies), by the way. He has become a colossal boor with nothing new to say and who hasn’t done anything since Tales of the City other than pursue his climber social life.

If anyone would care to debate me, I would be willing to defend the proposition that decent human beings are now living through the most disturbing times since April 1945, when Hitler put a gun to his head. As evidence of this, you only have to look around and see who is gloating, and why. The worst among us believe themselves to be back on top again. They also believe that God sent Trump to save the world — not from climate disaster or thermonuclear destruction or another war, but from liberals like us.

Stories about Vegas and Sacramento just aren’t going to cut it for me.

The history you know without knowing you know it

The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams. Oxford University Press, 2006. 732 pages.

I have a standard riddle that I thought of years ago. I don’t think anyone has ever gotten the answer:

Name something that you use every day and that you couldn’t get by without. It has never cost you anything. It was made by humans. It is thousands of years old. What is it?

The answer, of course, is language. We totally take language for granted, like free air, free water, and free cats — all of which we’d be willing to pay huge sums for, if they were scarce. (People are already figuring out how to get us to pay for water. As for cats, mine was free, like all the best things in life. This time of year, you can probably get as many free cats as you want, if you’re in need of some.)

Language is an incredible gift left to us by our ancestors. But even as we use that gift, we quickly forget our ancestors. In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony points out that many of us can’t even name all four of our great-grandmothers. That’s how fast we lose knowledge of the past, at least in most western cultures. As an elder, one of the things I’ve noticed about young people — for example my own great-nieces and great-nephews — is that they rarely express any curiosity about now-dead relatives that my generation remembers and could tell them about, if they cared to know. In only three generations, most of us will be forgotten. That’s our payback, I suppose, for forgetting those who came before us.

As I have gotten older, I have become increasingly curious about my ancestors, whose experience probably was very similar to that of your ancestors. My curiosity has been inflamed by the cultural destruction that has occurred during the Christian era, which has made it much more difficult to imagine how our ancestors lived. Those who have read this blog, or my novels, are aware of my rage at the cruelty, and ugliness, and completeness, of Christianization. Except for a very few traditions such as a midwinter pagan festival, which we now call Christmas, our memory of the pre-Christian past is gone, like the memory of our ancestors. One might accuse me of romanticizing the pre-Christian past. Not by any means do I suppose that the pre-Christian past was a utopia. But I do think it’s clear that Christianity systematically demonized and disenchanted the natural world, replacing the collective wisdom of our ancestors with theologies and texts from old cults that are shocking in their poverty and infantility. We are the way we are today because we’ve forgotten any other way to be. I strongly suspect that humanity’s survival depends on whether we can regain an awareness of our dependence on the natural world and find a way to re-enchant and preserve the natural world.

The trajectory of Christianization, unsurprisingly, included the extinction of languages. In the case of the Mayan hieroglyphs, much of the destruction was intentional and was the work of a single Catholic priest. The extinction of Gaulish probably was more a product of Romanization than of Christianization, but in the last years of the empire there was not much difference between Romanization and Christianization.

Still, even robust living languages and their words and grammars are largely fossils, with components that are extremely old. In the last 200 years, historical linguists have developed methods that are remarkably good at tracing a language backward toward its roots. This brings us to the now-extinct language that we call Proto-Indo-European. Though it is a dead language, more than half the people on the planet today speak a language that is descended from Proto-Indo-European. Modern descendants include most of the languages of Europe and some of the languages of Asia, such as Hindi. Classical languages including Greek, Latin, the Germanic languages, the Celtic languages, and Sanskrit are all descended from Proto-Indo-European. Strangely enough, Latin and Celtic are actually close cousins in the Indo-European family tree, because the Romans and the Celts were neighbors in Western Europe. It was not until the 18th Century, as Europeans started encroaching on India, that Europeans discovered that Sanskrit is a relative of Latin and Greek and of the entire Indo-European language family.

Consider the family tree of English. English is a Germanic language brought to Britain by the Saxon people, who came from what is now northern Germany and Denmark. After the Norman Conquest, as elites from what is now France gained power in old England, they brought with them a huge vocabulary of Latin words that were assimilated into English. Today, the 1,000 or so most commonly used words in English are Anglo-Saxon, but as word use expands beyond those 1,000 common words, Latin, French, and Greek start to predominate.

What makes The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European such a fascinating book is that it explains how linguists have actually reconstructed much of the grammar and vocabulary of the now-extinct Proto-Indo-European language. You’ll need to read the book to get a feel for how this is done, but obviously it involves patterns in how languages change, looking at similarities in all the surviving Indo-European languages. (Though classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit are considered dead languages, they are very well preserved and well understood through a large body of surviving literature.) The book actually contains lists of reconstructed words in Proto-Indo-European, with the equivalent English word. These lists run to 100 pages! Can linguists be absolutely sure that they’ve reconstructed these words? Of course not. But confidence is high. One linguist claims to have used the same techniques to reconstruct Latin by working backwards from the Romance languages, claiming to have reconstructed the Latin vocabulary with 95 percent confidence and Latin grammar with 80 percent confidence.

There are a great many reconstructed words from Proto-Indo-European that speakers of English will recognize, such as mūs for mouse, or werĝ for work. If you speak a modern Romance language, then you will recognize many more.

So, what do the fossils in our language tell us about our ancestors? We can learn a great deal, obviously, from what they did or did not have words for. We know that the people who spoke Proto-Indo-European, from about 4000 BC to about 2500 BC, had words for horses, for farming equipment such as plows, for oxen and sheep, for wool, for milk, for weapons, for barley, for beer and mead, and for wheels, axles, wagons, and for all sorts of wild plants and animals. Archeologists tell us that Europeans before 8000 or so BC were foragers. It is safe to assume that the Proto-Indo-European language spread across Europe and parts of Asia as farming and herding spread and as people stopped foraging for a living. Still, even as people settled down to farm, there was still a good deal of travel. There are Proto-Indo-European words for roads, wandering, going astray, and hospitality. As the people settled into agrarian lifestyles, and as cities developed along the rivers and coasts, the Proto-Indo-European language began to divide into Germanic, Greek, Latin, Celtic, and so on. The process must have been very similar to how Latin divided into the Romance languages after the fall of Rome.

Linguistics, then, can tell us much more about our ancestors than we might at first think. There are some questions, though, to which linguistics cannot provide a definite answer. One of those questions is where the Proto-Indo-European language originated and what the migration routes were. As far as I can tell, scholarship that combined linguistics and archeology to shed light on the lives of early Europeans was fairly late to develop. As of now, the best book I know of on this subject is from 2007: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. I’ve just started reading this book and will plan to review it later. But I want to mention four books here that I have chosen to help me get a feel for how the English we speak today can be traced backwards to the lives that our European ancestors lived up to 8000 years ago, and the languages they spoke. The other three books are listed below.

J.R.R. Tolkien, you will recall, was an Oxford philologist. It is very easy to romanticize prehistoric Europe as being a lot like Tolkien’s Shire, with the land of Rohan and its horse lords being a lot like the plains (or steppes) of eastern Europe and western Asia.

Despite its length and the technicalities of linguistics, this book is surprisingly easy to read. The only thing that stumped me — the same way that the math in books on physics stumps me — is that I mostly cannot follow the marks that linguists use to indicate pronunciation, or all the terms that linguists use for different types of vocalizations, such as labials, dentals, palatals, velars, labiovelars, sibilants, laryngeals, nasals, semi-vowels, etc. You’ll be able to follow the gist of this easily enough, though. I recommend watching some YouTube lectures on Proto-Indo-European, in which the speakers are linguists who have an incredible ability to produce the sounds that occur in human languages.

⬆︎ The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. David W. Anthony. Princeton University Press, 2007. 554 pages.

I’ve just started reading this book and will have a report later.

⬆︎ The Blackwell History of the Latin Language. James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. 324 pages.

I will read this book after The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. I’m curious to know how Latin differs from Proto-Indo-European, and maybe why. We do know that Proto-Indo-European had a complex case system, like Latin. But what puzzles me is why speakers of languages such as Latin put up with such complexity. We know that the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) started out as dumbed-down Latin. All, or least most, of the Romance languages trashed or greatly simplified Latin’s six cases of nouns — nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative. It makes me dizzy just to list them.

⬆︎ The French Language. Alfred Ewert. Faber and Faber, 1933. 440 pages.

I’ve had this book for a good many years. After I learned to read French, I became curious about how French had developed from Latin. For example, where did those weird nasal vowels in French come from? Ewert attributes such things to “the persistence of linguistic habits of the Celtic population,” which is hardly surprising. But you can see that I am trying to work backward on the English branch of the language tree: English -> French -> Latin -> Proto-Indo-European. I wish I could read German. Alas, I cannot.

Here’s a little puzzle for you if you’ve read this far. Do you know the meaning of the English word adumbrate? If you do, you can give yourself an “A” and skip the next paragraph. Otherwise, let’s puzzle out how you can figure out what adumbrate means without having to go look it up.

To figure it out, you don’t even need to know the meaning of the Latin infinitive adumbrare. Nor do you need to know that the Latin word adumbrate (it’s four syllables in Latin, ah-doom-brrah-tay, I think) is the masculine participle of the verb adumbrare in the vocative case. All that is good to know. But a language-lover will see the three parts of the English adumbrate without even slowing down in reading. There is the prefix ad-, the root umbra, and the suffix –ate. I bet you’re onto it already, because you know what an umbra is — that which an umbrella has underneath it. The Latinate prefix ad– means to go toward or to draw to. The root umbra means shadow. The suffix –ate turns the word into a verb. So, adumbrate means to throw something into shadow.

Things we lost when newspapers died


Rob Morse, former metro columnist at the San Francisco Examiner. Photo: Mill Valley Patch, 2011

I am the product of an almost-extinct culture: newspaper culture. I got my first newspaper job at the age of 17, as a part-time copy boy when I was still in high school. I retired as a newspaperman in 2008. Most newspapers are now zombies, but fortunately two have survived and have even kept their souls — the New York Times and the Washington Post.

There are still newspapers in other cities and towns, of course. But their business model is wrecked. Their staffs are tiny. And whatever culture now exists in newspapers other than the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s not newspaper culture. It’s something else, something more akin to tech culture and web culture, people who use the word “content” and who probably have never even heard the old word, “copy.” The lesser newspapers have little use for old pros and the old culture. Instead they want young staffs with tech skills, tech educations, and with an unquestioned belief that the future is in social media. Blech.

It was globalization, really, that killed newspapers. Wherever globalization happens, something local is lost.

The golden era of newspapers was rooted in two monopolies or near-monopolies that were wiped out by technology.

The first monopoly was that communications bandwidth was very scarce and very expensive. In the days of the telegraph, it was only the newspapers that could support the costs of gathering news and sending it over the wires. When telephones came along, long distance calls were very expensive, but newspapers easily made enough money to bear the cost. Later, Teletype machines, operating over long-distance phone lines (and later, the early satellites), carried the “copy.” In a city of any size, the newspaper had a room full of Teletype machines. (My job as a copy boy included the care and feeding of a room full of Teletypes. What amazing machines they were!) That room full of Teletypes was pretty much the only channel into a city carrying news about events elsewhere in the world. This monopoly slowly evaporated as the Internet was born and millions of miles of fiber-optic cable was laid.

The second newspaper monopoly was local advertising. Stores and businesses bought the “display ads.” But anyone could afford a classified ad. The classified ads were where everyone went when looking for a job, or buying a house or a car. Almost overnight, craigslist killed newspapers’ monopoly on classified ads. Other sorts of advertising moved to the Internet more slowly. But even by the time I retired in 2008, newspapers’ advertising revenue had collapsed.

The cost of subscribing to a newspaper was roughly enough to pay for the paper it was printed on. All the profit was in advertising. Though there was some competition — many cities had more than one newspaper — the pie was plenty big enough to divide two or even three ways.

For a while, it was not clear whether even the New York Times would survive. It did. I was very surprised that the Washington Post has survived, because I thought we had lost it. But the Post has survived. Those are the last real newspapers standing in the U.S., and I believe it was the demand for professionally reported news that saved them.

Unless you’ve seen a budget for big-city newspaper, you might be shocked at how expensive it is to gather and print the news. Once upon a time, even the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, where I used to work, had foreign bureaus. Now, as far as I know, only the New York Times and the Washington Post do. I’m going to list those foreign bureaus, for both papers, just to help make the point that a real news operation is very expensive:

New York Times foreign bureaus: Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, Caracas, Dakar, Istanbul, Kabul, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New Delhi, Ottawa, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Shanghai, Sydney, Tehran, Tokyo, Toronto, and Warsaw. The Times also has domestic bureaus in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington.

Washington Post foreign bureaus: Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, Dakar, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London, Mexico City, Miami, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, and Tokyo.

Yes, as the Internet grew, a new niche opened up for online publications such as Politico or the now-in-decline Salon. Other online publications are mostly link aggregators that produce little or no “content” on their own, such as Huffington Post on the left and the Drudge Report on the right. But there is no substitute for a real newspaper. That’s why I have paid subscriptions to both the New York Times and the Washington Post. There are many niche sites that are worth looking at, but no one considers them worth paying for. And I think I’ll lay off of Twitter, which I find completely useless, no matter how “well curated” one’s “feed” is. Even if there’s a needle on Twitter, it’s lost in a globalized haystack.

My larger point here is that as globalization and globalized technologies killed newspapers, things that are local were lost. It’s easier now to find out about a fire at Notre Dame than a fire in your own county. Yes, local news weeklies are still around. But they’re lucky if they can afford even one reporter, and most of them fill their columns with stuff they can get for free, such as “neighborhood news” sent in by the elderly, or rubbishy little business features that they get from “partnering” with self-serving entities such as chambers of commerce. There is a frightening scarcity of coverage of local news anymore, particularly local government. Even state government flies under the news radar most of the time in most places. I live in a news desert where local news is concerned, and the odds are that you do, too. When I look at the web site of my last employer, the San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com), I am disgusted by what I see: fluff, food, technology, and traffic. It’s not a newspaper anymore. Even Politico now covers California politics better than the Chronicle does (not least because an old colleague from the Examiner and Chronicle, Carla Marinucci, now works for Politico).

But as I write this, I’m more in a sentimental mood than a grouchy mood. And that brings me at last to Rob Morse.

It wasn’t just local news that newspapers used to bring us. Most newspapers also had a local columnist. Some newspapers had a very good local columnist. (In larger cities, they were called metro columnists.) Local columnists helped to give a newspaper its personality. When collective grouching needed to be done, the columnist would lead the grouching. When local celebrating needed to be done, they’d lead the celebrating. In times of collective grief and trauma, they would provide collective therapy. I remember morning rush-hour buses in San Francisco creeping down Market Street, and virtually everyone who didn’t have to stand and hold a strap would be holding a Chronicle, reading Herb Caen. When Herb Caen died (in 1997 at age 80), all the church bells of San Francisco rang for his funeral. The Examiner’s metro columnist, Rob Morse, wrote, “We’re on our own now.” Indeed we were, and just look what has happened to San Francisco since 1997. Herb Caen had once written, “One day if I do go to heaven…I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.'” These days, I think Caen might prefer heaven.

Caen was a relentless extravert. He was always out and about, relishing the social status that his job gave him. Over at the Examiner, Rob Morse was an introvert. His columns were very much grounded in San Francisco life, but Morse was a ruminant, not a butterfly.

Morse and I were friends. He would often come and sit in my office, where he could escape the din of the newsroom, and talk with a fellow ruminant. Often his thoughts would be about whatever was in his next column. He was a touch awkward and tentative in conversation, frankly. But in writing he never was. Morse was among the very last of the great metro columnists.

I’m not the only person who wondered what happened to Morse after he took a buyout and vanished. In 2011, more than three years after I left San Francisco, the Mill Valley Patch, a little online publication, carried a piece with the title, “Rob Morse, Please Come Home.” I sometimes ask former colleagues if they ever hear from Morse, but no one ever does. He lives a very private life now, I think.

I live a pretty private life, too, and in a much remoter place than Mill Valley, California. Until my trip to the U.K. last year, I had not even done any traveling after I left San Francisco. One of the things I found shocking, whether in airports or on the street, was that these days everyone has their face in a phone almost all the time (and never a newspaper). There must be some kind of local life in those phones, but I don’t think it’s a community life. I don’t think there’s anyone in all those phones who leads the local grouching, or the local celebrating, or who provides group therapy for a group as large as a city. I don’t think there is anyone in those phones for whom all the church bells of San Francisco, or any city, will ring someday.

As Rob Morse said, we’re on our own now. Are our phones really that compelling? Or are they a poor but addictive substitute for something that has gone extinct?

Sometimes I ask myself, as a thought experiment, what I would do if I had a magic button that, if I pushed it, would take us back to the days of Teletypes. I think I would. We’d still know what was happening in Moscow. We’d still know that Notre Dame is on fire. But a now-lost local world might magically reappear.