Alcohol as an institution


At the Belhaven pub, Dundee, near the fireplace

I am nine days into a dry January. We all seem to be rethinking alcohol these days, and that can only be a good thing. But, speaking only for myself, I don’t think the time has come for me to give up alcohol.

A lot of ink has been spilled of late after the Powers That Be reversed course and told us that even light drinking has no health benefits. Most of what has been written, though, has a one-size-fits-all tone and seems to forget three important things.

The first thing is that, genetically, one size does not fit all. There are genetic differences in how people metabolize alcohol. This is a little complicated, but it’s worth understanding. The differences have to do with how quickly a certain enzyme cracks apart the alcohol molecule, and how quickly a different enzyme detoxifies the cracked-apart byproduct.

The second thing is that, genetics aside, we are all very different. How old are we? How healthy are we? How stressed are we? Do we tend more toward bad habits, or more toward good habits? When we drink, what do we drink, and how much?

These are all factors that change throughout our lives. The day probably will come when, at a certain age, I will stop drinking because of my age, just as I have realized that, because of my age, I should drink less. Consider Queen Elizabeth II. Her doctors advised her, at the age of 95, to stop having her evening cocktail. She was 96 when she died. I seriously doubt that alcohol shortened her life or impaired her health, even though, on average, Britain, like most countries, has a big drinking problem.

The third thing is that alcohol is an institution. Institutions provide social glue. Alcohol as an institution has many forms — a glass of champagne at a celebration, a pint at a pub with a friend, wine with dinner, cocktails at a reception. The growing of grapes and the making of wine are an art as well as an economic institution, as is the making of fine whiskey and the brewing of beautiful ales. Pubs are a social institution of which I highly approve. These institutions are ancient. People have been making alcohol for at least 10,000 years. Even the most important of Christian sacraments requires wine.

The genetic mutation that allows humans (and some other primates) to efficiently metabolize alcohol was definitely a good thing. That mutation occurred about 10 million years ago, and it allowed our ancestors to eat fallen fruit that had started to ferment. Other fruit-eating animals can metabolize alcohol — birds, for example. Dogs are not fruit-eating animals, and they don’t have the mutation. Bees, because they consume nectar, can metabolize alcohol, and to do it they use the same enzymes as humans.

In short, for humans and some other animals, it would be perfectly correct to think of alcohol as a kind of food, even though it’s an optional food and clearly not something that we can make a diet of.

As for my dry January, my goal is January 25, not January 31. That’s because January 25 is Burns Night, an annual Scottish institution (with toasts!) that I’ve been happy to adopt. Burns Night marks the death of Robert Burns, January 25, 1759. Burns was only 37 when he died. But I don’t think it was alcohol that did him in.

Pathos vs. tragedy


Source: Gutenberg.org

I have long remembered an English professor, Emily Sullivan, elaborating on the distinction between pathos and tragedy. Pathos, she said, is merely sad. Pathos has no meaning. Pathos has none of the edifying characteristics of tragedy, such as a character’s downfall because of a fatal flaw.

If at that time I had read The Old Curiosity Shop, I think I would have asked her if the novel’s pathos made it a bad novel. I think she would have had to say yes, and I think I would have agreed.

Clearly Oscar Wilde would have agreed, too. He famously said that one would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the ending. I’m paraphrasing Wilde so as not to have a spoiler, in case you don’t know how The Old Curiosity Shop ends.

I love Charles Dickens, and thus it is hard to find that I hated The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) in much the same way I hated Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and for the same reason — endings that combine cruelty and pathos with no redeeming meaning. That sets up an interesting discussion about whether the ending of Wuthering Heights (1847) is mere pathos. I would argue that for some mysterious reason Wuthering Heights rises above mere pathos, as though Catherine and Heathcliff were ghosts all along. But that’s a discussion that could go on for an hour or two, over a bottle or two of ale.

Still, I admire 19th Century readers, even though they loved The Old Curiosity Shop. They were patient, and they were smart. But their lives were harder than ours, so maybe it was easier for them to go along with stories in which bad things happen to good people. Here I should add that the villains in The Old Curiosity Shop all got their just deserts.

One sometimes hears people defending bad stories by saying, “But that’s the way life is.”

I detest that argument. Stories are stories precisely because they don’t have to be — shouldn’t be — like life. And any writer who gives heros and heroines anything other than their heart’s desire, and villains anything other than their just deserts, needs a good hard talking to. Therein is the key to tragedy. Tragic heroes fail to get their heart’s desire, because of a fatal flaw. That we understand and accept. But Nell Trent and Tess Durbeyfield did not have fatal flaws.

The Dark Enlightenment


The view from an upstairs window

It’s a bleak time for those of us who live in the world of ideas as much as in the real world. Today, unless gangs of violent and raging liberals egged on by Joe Biden storm the U.S. Capitol and try to prevent the Congress from certifying Trump as the winner of the November election, the Congress will … certify Trump as the winner of the November election. We liberals, creatures of the Enlightenment, can only grit our teeth and watch as democracy and the law take their course.

It’s a stunning piece of work. An elite of highly privileged people who openly hate democracy have used the institutions of democracy to advance their project of dismantling democracy. It takes a lot of lies to do that. It also takes a lot of people (77,303,573, to be precise) ignorant enough and foolish enough to fall for it.

And it also takes a lot of weakened institutions that could have stood in their way but didn’t, with the media, the justice department, and the courts at the top of the list.

I admit that, every day of late, I find myself pacing back and forth, from upstairs window to upstairs window, trying to figure out what is likely to happen in the next four years. But mostly, I think, what happens in the next four years is unpredictable.

We know what they want. We recoil at the horror of their ideas, best described as the Dark Enlightenment. We know that the men who are about to install themselves in the White House very much believe in this Dark Enlightenment and have a playbook.

But what’s unpredictable is what they actually will do, and to what degree the institutions of democracy remain strong enough to stand in their way. Even though they have a theoretical playbook, they have conflicting interests, and they are not nice people. We can expect them to waste a big part of their energy in conflict with each other, as opposed to conflict with the beast — the Enlightenment — that they all hate and want to overthrow. As JD Vance told a podcaster, “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”

Vance uses the word “conservatism” to describe the ideas that are threatened by the universities. I’d call it something else. It’s not just people that we’re up against. It’s also ideas, ideas that are very dark and very ugly.

For those of us who live in the world of ideas and thus know some history, these dark ideas, along with their ugly playbook, are things we’ve seen before. They want something that can’t be done without violence and a means of getting a lot of people out of their way. They’ve already used violence, and they’ve already made a lot of threats against people who are in their way. Now we will see how far they will go.

Where to find Paul Krugman now


Source: Wikimedia Commons.

On December 9, Paul Krugman wrote his last column for the New York Times. He had been writing for the Times for almost 25 years. Now more than ever, with four years of Trumpian madness ahead of us, we need intellects like Krugman’s. Krugman is still with us. He has moved to Substack.

His most recent Substack post, from December 26, is Trump’s Great Illusion: Conquest doesn’t make a modern nation — or its leader — great.

Axios reports this morning on a poll which found that two-thirds of Americans say they are limiting their intake of political news. An exception is Fox News, where viewership has increased since election day.

I can only guess what this means, but here’s my guess. Of all the low-information clodpolls who voted for Trump, Fox-watchers are the sickest and also the most highly motivated. There are not as many of them as we sometimes think. During prime time, about 2.5 million people watch Fox News. That’s far less than 1 percent of the American population. They are probably basking in post-election triumphalism.

As for the rest of us, people are exhausted.

But what about us high-information types?

I don’t think it’s just me, because it’s something that shows up constantly (as contempt and, often, as vitriol) in the comments section of political pieces in the New York Times and the Washington Post. We are fed up with MAGA-cowed both-sides “journalism” that treats MAGA depravity and disinformation as something to be taken seriously. We blame this sanewashing and the normalization of depravity and disinformation for helping Trump get back into the White House.

I have no idea why Paul Krugman retired from the New York Times, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was under pressure to both-sidesify his columns. At Substack, we will hear what Krugman is thinking knowing that mid-level editors at the New York Times, nervous for their jobs, aren’t pressuring Krugman in any way.

I am not among the many who have canceled their subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Though their political reporting is not to be trusted, those two newspapers are still the only remaining news organizations in the country with the resources to cover everything else. And, besides, we need to monitor the degree to which the corporate media are capitulating to Trump and Trumpism.

Speaking only for myself, I’m as eager as always to try to figure out what’s going on in the world. But it’s clear that we’re in an era in which we must give far greater weight to independent voices, and far less weight to corporate sources trying to play both sides.

Clarifying the complicated

It’s a complicated world. Fortunately there are experts who have put extraordinary efforts into understanding it. We ordinary folk must rely on those experts. In a sea of propaganda and disinformation, the trick is to find the people who know the terrain and who aren’t trying to deceive us.

Sarah C. Paine is a historian and professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College. Watching this video will require two and a half hours of your time. But I can’t imagine a quicker way to get a high-altitude view of what’s behind the conflicts that are roiling the world today, conflicts that each of us feel in our own lives, no matter how isolated we may think we are.

I have long argued that these conflicts boil down to something simple enough for anyone to understand. This also is the key to understanding the purpose of the disinformation and propaganda with which we all are targeted, disinformation and propaganda that on November 5 swung an American election and put Donald Trump, America’s Putin, back into the White House.

It boils down to this: There are those who believe that democracy and the rule of law are the best way to order societies and to create wealth. And there are those who believe that authoritarianism and corruption are the best way to order societies and to create wealth. The difference is in who gets the wealth and who holds the power — the many, or the few.

The only flaw of this video is that the interviewer is a peacock and a windbag. Sarah Paine’s answers are usually more concise than the rambling, wordy questions. So try to ignore the interviewer as best you can. Sarah Paine, though, won’t waste a second of your time.

Hat tip to Ken, who referenced this video in a recent Substack article.

Midwinter pottage


Click here for high resolution version

If C.J. Sansome was right in his Shardlake novels set in Tudor England (and I think he was), then pretty much everybody (except for Henry VIII) lived on pottage then. What was in the pottage depended of course on what you had. A good variety of garden vegetables would have made a huge difference. If you had some meat or fish, so much the better. If you could eat your pottage with a dark, hearty bread made from rye, oats, or barley, with some ale, then you were truly rich. And probably healthy as well. Butter and cheese? Princely.

Historians say that medieval peasants burned 4,000 calories a day. That would mean that they worked from dawn until dark. They probably were very thin, because that’s a lot of calories for poor people. Henry VIII weighed almost 400 pounds when he died. Thus I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t living off of pottage and that he wasn’t working from dawn until dark.

I’m 98 percent vegetarian. This was the first beef stew I’d made in more than two years. The midwinter gloom made me do it.

The beef, though, is almost like a seasoning. You don’t need much beef. It’s the vegetables that make the stew, the heavenly combination of potatoes, carrots, onions, and peas, in a sauce reddened with tomatoes. The key to good beef stew is the brown flavor, umami, which comes from browning the beef, the onions, and the flour (for thickening) before the other ingredients or any water are added.

When I think of beef stew, I automatically think of cherry pie for dessert. There was no cherry pie today, though. That’s something I’d make only for company.

Young men and the right-wing rabbit hole

⬆︎ Two Europeans who are not down the right-wing rabbit hole. Listen with headphones, or with a good sound system.

That people like Donald Trump, or Elon Musk, should be what they are makes a certain kind of sense. They have money and power, and they want more money and power. In their narcissism, they think they totally deserve what they have. They think they deserve our adulation for having it — lords of the universe.

But for young men there is no excuse. If voices like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson sound like hope, then something inside is stunted. The options outside the rabbit hole are unlimited. They’re just not as easy.

Sweet potato biscuits

If you can make good biscuits, then you can make good sweet-potato biscuits. Substitute mashed sweet potato for a roughly equal amount of flour. Biscuit dough can easily handle a one-to-two ratio of potato to flour, and probably even one-to-one.

Your biscuits will be very tender.

Many kinds of bread, actually — both quick breads and yeast breads — benefit from some potato. I think of this as German thing, though I have had sweet-potato biscuits in African-American restaurants.

Airtags: Yes!

Apple’s Airtags aren’t very expensive. But probably the best way to justify their cost is their ability to track your luggage when flying. Yesterday’s updates of Apple’s operating systems introduced a new feature — the ability to share Airtag information with airlines, because Airtag owners usually know more about where their luggage is than the airlines do.

The Washington Post recently had a piece on how potentially helpful this is, given that airlines (yikes!) lose, damage, or delay 270,000 pieces of luggage each month.

For my recent trip to Scotland, I used two Airtags, one in my checked suitcase and one in my carry-on. My flight from Raleigh-Durham to Heathrow was delayed by 14 hours. The plane (a packed Boeing 777-200) had already been loaded and was ready to push back from the terminal when the pilot informed the irritable passengers that a mechanical problem was going to take hours to fix and that the plane “isn’t going anywhere tonight.” Everyone had to “deplane.” Most of us spent the night in the terminal, though some passengers made arrangements for other flights. For the luggage, this caused chaos. All the luggage was unloaded from the plane, and we were told to pick up our luggage at one of the carousels and re-check it the following morning if we chose to say on the delayed flight.

As the plane was loaded again, 14 hours late, I could see on my iPhone that my checked suitcase was on the plane, or “near me,” as the FindMy app says. The Airtags were useful again on the my train trip from Raleigh to Greensboro as I was returning home. Usually I would not check any baggage on a train, but I had arrived at the train station early and wanted to be rid of the big suitcase so that I could go out and scout for lunch. I would never have known that my suitcase went to Greensboro on an earlier train if the Airtags hadn’t told me.

Speaking of delayed and canceled flights, I bought trip insurance through American Airlines when I booked the ticket to London. The delayed flight meant that I missed my train from London to Scotland and had to spend the night in London. Using my iPhone, I hastily changed the train ticket and booked a hotel in London. I filed a claim on the travel insurance for reimbursement for the $149 that the London hotel cost. The insurance paid my claim in less than 48 hours!


The Boeing 777-200 being loaded at Heathrow for the flight to Raleigh-Durham

The New Testament in Scots

If you are a native speaker of English, then Scots is a language that you already 65 percent (more or less) understand. Totally aside from my interest in Scotland and Sir Walter Scott, I find that fact, from linguistics, fascinating. At first I conceived of Scots as just a dialect of English. But scholars see it otherwise, and now I’m convinced: Scots is its own language.

There is a second reason why the Scots language warms my heart (other than the fact that it is beautiful to listen to). It’s that speaking Scots has long been stigmatized in Scotland. To feel properly respected outside the places they grew up, people who grew up speaking Scots learn to “code switch” to standard Scottish English. This is very much like what happens with people, like me, who grew up where the Southern Appalachian English dialect is spoken. We learn to code switch to avoid stigmatization of the way we talk. Some of us can learn to mask our Southern Appalachian accents almost completely. Others retain traces that, to a careful ear, give them away. (More on that below.)

During my recent trip to Scotland, I made a pilgrimage to McNaughtan’s Bookshop in Edinburgh. It is a fascinating place, and, I think, the only seller of rare and antique books in Edinburgh. The owner is very knowledgeable and very helpful. I bought two books while I was there. I had them shipped home so that I didn’t have to deal with them as luggage. One of the books is The History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 4, from the Edinburgh University Press. I will write about that book later. The other is a translation of the New Testament into Scots, published in 1983.

To convince you that you already 65 percent understand the Scots language, I’ve included below an image from page 101. It’s Luke, chapter 2, verses 1 – 14, a section of the New Testament familiar to us all — the Christmas story. For comparison, I’ve also included the same verses from New International translation.

I suggest reading the Scots aloud, paying attention to the sound and phonetics. Most of it will be perfectly understandable, though there are some words you won’t recognize (though many are decipherable from context). I will list those words below.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Siccan a thing: Such a thing

Ilkane: Those of that ilk; that family

Haundfastit: Betrothed

Boukin gin: Very pregnant

Brocht: Brought

Barrie: A baby’s flannel coat

Heck: A slatted wood frame or rack

Hirsel: A flock of sheep

Uncolie frichtit: Extremely frightened

Liggin: Lying

Syne in a gliff: Then all of a sudden

Kythed: Appeared

Yird: Earth


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

The translator of this work was William Laughton Lorimer, a language scholar who taught Greek at St. Andrews University and who died in 1967. The translation was, of course, from the Greek.

Many people in Scotland are working to reverse the stigmatization of Scots. Sadly, Southern Appalachian English remains just as stigmatized.

I mentioned above that some traces of Southern Appalachian are detectable even in professional actors. For example, there is the tendency not to distinguish between “ken” and “kin,” and “pen” and “pin.” The actor Samuel L. Jackson, who grew up in Chattanooga, provides some good examples of this, especially in Star Wars.