Month: April 2022

Julia


HBO Max

Who could have guessed that one of the most unforgettable Americans to come out of the 1960s would be Julia Child? And who could have guessed that we’d be as interested in her life as in her cooking? I’ve watched only the first episode so far of this new series, but clearly it’s going to be a romp — smart, funny, and a very nice period piece as well.

In spite of her popularity, though, I can’t help but wonder just how much Julia Child ultimately affected American cooking. So many Americans can’t (and don’t) cook. City chefs struggling to distinguish themselves look much farther afield than Julia Child for inspiration. And what’s offered in provincial and backroads eateries, I would testify, has been going steadily downhill since our grandmothers’ time, with cheap ingredients and untrained, poorly paid cooks who have no concept of what good food is like and what to aim for. I don’t know if it’s true, but a friend once told me that Americans spend more time watching cooking shows than they do cooking. I can believe it, though.

Judging from the first episode, in this series we’re more likely to find Julia at the dinner table with her guests than slaving over a hot stove, the better to support the very cosmopolitan dialogue. And the English actress Sarah Lancashire very much conveys one of the important things we learned from Julia Child — that cooking is playful, fun, never fussy, and is best done with a glass of wine close at hand. By the way, what happened to conviviality in America? Once upon a time, people actually tasted each other’s cooking and could say who made the best biscuits or fried chicken.

Don’t overlook the typewriters! Take note of her cherry-red Volvo, which she washes in her Cambridge driveway because “it won’t wash itself.” Her collection of copper pots is impressive. And what a diplomat she was (like her husband).

Julia can be streamed from HBO Max.

The world we’d like to live in

A Brief History of Equality. Thomas Piketty, Harvard University Press, April 19, 2022. 274 pages.

Is much of the world better off now than it was, say, 200 years ago? Yes, undoubtedly, says Thomas Piketty. He does not use the words “the arc of justice,” but I would. The transcendentalist theologian Theodore Parker was quite right when, around 1840, he perceived the arc of justice. The great moral emergency of Parker’s time was slavery. And the exploitations of colonialism were just getting started in Parker’s time.

To see this progress in perspective, it’s necessary to be aware of just how terrible things have been for most people for most of history. That’s what the first half of Piketty’s book is about. The title of this book could as easily be “A Brief History of Inequality.” If we failed to learn about historical inequality in school, it may not be entirely the fault of our educations. There is a great deal of new research on inequality. For example, Piketty several times refers to inheritance archives from 19th Century France. The bottom 50 percent of the population, even today, inherit nothing and own almost nothing. In fact they may be deeply in debt. At this stage of history, those who have benefited most from a reduction in inequality are the 40 percent between the bottom 50 percent and the top 10 percent — the middle class.

The top 10 percent, and especially the top 1 percent, are obscenely rich, as always. The gains of the middle class are quite new, with most of that progress owed to the type of reforms that Franklin Roosevelt introduced in the U.S. after the Great Depression. There has been some backsliding since 1980, as the age of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and neoliberalism gained control. Piketty writes that neoliberalism is now discredited, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. But little progress has been made beyond neoliberalism because of political gridlock. It was, of course, the political struggles of organized progressives, going back for more than 200 years, that have made possible the gains in equality and social justice.

It is sometimes hard for caring human beings to believe that there actually are people — lots of them — who hate the idea of equality, democracy, and justice, and who fight for a jackboot world that is unequal, undemocratic, unfair, and unjust. It’s easier now, post-Trump. We know who they are, we know what they want, and we’ve had a glimpse of just how they would use power to keep people down. The ironic thing is that many of the bottom-rung infantry in the fight against justice don’t have a pot to piss in, but through the magic of fascism they buy into a politics that benefits only the top 10 percent.

In the second half of this book, Piketty outlines his thoughts on what must be done if progress is to continue. Progressive taxation, with heavy taxes on the filthy rich, is essential, as is investment in education and health care. But Piketty describes many other ideas still to be invented — for example, a universal inheritance, in which the wealth of the super-rich is taxed to provide a modest “inheritance” even for the poorest, to be paid at the age of 25, so that everyone has the means of getting a start in life.

Piketty’s ideas, I believe, provide an important and pragmatic piece of a pretty much complete theory of politics and activism. That politics, acknowledging the advances of the Enlightenment, would be heavily based on John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. The next step is to consider William A. Edmundson’s argument that only democratic socialism can meet the requirements of A Theory of Justice. From there forward, Piketty provides not only a historical base that justifies the need for a new kind of economics, but also the outlines of a blueprint on how to continue that work.

It is not polite to quote an author’s last paragraph. But in this case I’m going to do it, because it captures so well why I think it is important to read this book:

This … will also require active citizens. The social sciences can contribute to this, but it goes without saying that they will not suffice. Only powerful social mobilizations, supported by collective movements and organizations, will allow us to define common objectives and transform power relationships. By what we ask of our friends, our networks, our elected officials, our preferred media, our labor union representatives, and by our own actions and participation in collective deliberation and social movements each of us can make socioeconomic phenomena more comprehensible and help grasp the changes that are occurring. Economic questions are too important to be left to others. Citizens’ reappropriation of this knowledge is an essential stage in the battle for equality. If this book has given readers new weapons for this battle, my goal will have been fully realized.

It’s true that Piketty’s densely academic style is not easy to read. But this book, unlike Piketty’s massive previous books, is only 274 pages.

Why do the media try to scare liberals?


Presidents Macron and Biden in Cornwall, June 2021. White House photo. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Before the people of France voted on Sunday, the media were filled with stories suggesting that Marine Le Pen just might win. Bunk. Marine Le Pen was never going to win. The result was 58.5 to 41.5. In the United States, an election like that would be considered a historic landslide.

Now that the election is over, the media are filled with stories over-emphasizing the obstacles that Macron faces in France. And the Atlantic — the Atlantic! — has a silly piece today saying that Le Pen won even though she lost: Macron Won. And So Did the Far Right.

Bunk, bunk, bunk, and bunk.

And by the way I worry about the Atlantic, which increasingly is running clickbait in its online edition.

The people of France have not lost their minds. I would argue that the results of the French election show that, even though the French people have some issues with Macron, they are far from damned-fool enough to hand the country over to a right-winger. In the first round of voting, remember, the candidate who placed third was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, often identified as a leftist firebrand. In the first round, Mélenchon got 22 percent of the vote, just short of Le Pen, who got 23.2. In other words, the solid left in France is as strong as the solid right. And in the final election, with Macron’s strong support from the center, did anyone really think that all those leftists would vote for Le Pen?

I’m all for keeping voters on their toes and vigilant about the threat from the right. But can we keep it real?

One of the reasons this matters is that the same thing is happening in the United States. The media still maintain that Trump is going to run again in 2024. Trump scare stories are guaranteed clickbait. As I have said before, there is not a snowball’s chance that Trump will run again in 2024. If he did (in a fair election, anyway), he’d lose even more of the popular vote than he lost in 2016 and 2020. Whatever the MAGA crowd may think, most Americans know what Trump is. A slim majority, at least, have always known what Trump is, and Americans increasingly despise him. Even Republicans in Congress despise him, though they still have to kiss Trump’s … uh, ring. After the January 6 committee in the U.S. House hold their hearings on Trump’s coup attempt and the indictments start, Trump’s future will be prison, not the White House.

Sure, like the French with Macron, some Americans have issues with Biden. Young people, according to a new poll, have little enthusiasm for Biden. But who can believe that young people eager for progress would vote for a Trump because they have issues with Biden?

Unless the right-wing inability to adapt to change and to understand an ever-more-complex world causes right-wing huns to go extinct the way the Neanderthals did, we’re always going to have to deal with a certain percentage of right-wing huns in the population and people like Trump who will try to deceive them, inflame them, and ride them to power.

But we are a majority, and huns cannot win unless multiple failures happen at the same time — some form of manipulation (Julian Assange, James Comey, Vladimir Putin), a wall of lies (Rupert Murchoch), some form of legalized cheating (under development in multiple states), widespread media malpractice in the face of the right-wing wall of lies (her emails!), and undemocratic flukes such as the American Electoral College.

Republican strategy, of course, is try to try to take power through those multiple failures. Our job is to stop them, on all fronts. We failed in 2016 and succeeded in 2020. It’s not impossible that the sane-though-regressive element of the Republican Party (think Liz Cheney) will regain control after Trump goes down. But, if they don’t, the Republican Party will cook up for 2024 something just as monstrous as Trump.

Still, they can’t win unless several things go wrong at the same time. There’s a good comparison to aircraft safety. An airliner can almost always recover from a single failure. But if two or more things go wrong at the same time, watch out. As for France, its democracy is strong and its elections are fair. Our media, however, have some dangerous problems.

Update 1: Jennifer Rubin, bless her heart, gets it right in the Washington Post, even if the headline writer stayed in defensive mode: Macron may have won comfortably. But this is no time to let down our guard.

Update 2: Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, seems to agree with me:

The fact is that, in difficult circumstances, Macron has managed to win the Presidency twice—a sign that he is resilient, despite being supposedly enfeebled, and that the political reservoir of common sense in France remains. The degree to which the American press—and, to be sure, segments of the French—insists on casting his victory as a kind of moral defeat, is genuinely bewildering.

Sir Walter Scott: a great writer, but oddly Frenchified

Once again, unable at present to find any newer fiction that seems worthwhile, I have turned to Sir Walter Scott — this time, Ivanhoe.

Reading Sir Walter Scott can be hard work for contemporary readers. Even in the early 1800s when his novels were being published, Scott’s style would have been pretty florid, I think. But somehow (if you’re stoic enough to read him) that remains part of the charm today. In Ivanhoe, at least, because it is set in England rather than in Scotland, readers won’t have to work their way through page after page of dialogue in the Scots dialect. But dialect or no, Scott is in many ways a linguist, very much aware of how he employs language and dialect for literary effect. And as a historian, Scott also would have been aware of the history of the English language itself and how the French and Anglo-Saxon languages mixed and merged into English in the miserable (unless you were Norman) years after the Norman Conquest.

Consider this conversation from the first chapter of Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe is set in 12th Century England. The conversation is between a Saxon swineheard (Gurth) and the court jester (Wamba) of a staunch Saxon noble:

“Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?” demanded Wamba.

“Swine, fool, swine,” said the herd, “every fool knows that.”

“And swine is good Saxon,” said the Jester; “but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?”

“Pork,” answered the swine-herd.

“I am very glad every fool knows that too,” said Wamba, “and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?”

“It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool’s pate.”

“Nay, I can tell you more,” said Wamba, in the same tone; “there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.”

The words at play here, of course, are bœuf for what we English speakers call cows when we eat them, and porc for what we call pigs when we eat them. My guess is that Scott is suggesting a plausible linguistic history for how it came to be that we use separate words for creatures on the hoof versus creatures on the plate.

So clearly Scott is well aware, when he writes, of whether he is using English words of French or of Anglo-Saxon origin. But here’s the sad thing. One of the reasons why Scott can be so difficult to read, and for why the rhythms of his writing can be so choppy, is that he loves English words of French origin and uses them a lot. Here’s a sample of French words (little changed from their Latin roots, of course) gleaned from just a few pages of the first chapter of Ivanhoe: misapprehension, refractory, rivulet, dejection, construed, disposition, obstreperously, proprietors, importations.

I always use Tolkien as the best example of an English writer who wisely and consciously writes out of the Anglo-Saxon half of the English language. Can you imagine Tolkien using such words as obstreperously or refractory? Of course not.

It’s as though Scott knows that it is wrong and pretentious (oops … French!) of him to do this, but he does it anyway. Proving that he knows better, he writes (again from the first chapter of Ivanhoe):

In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other.

There are other little jokes that relate to Scott’s awareness of languages. When he names a character Albert Malvoisin, for example, which is more or less French for “wicked neighbor,” you know that character is going to be a villain.

Please don’t misunderstand me, though. I love Walter Scott and enjoy reading him, Frenchified or not. But I’m going to test a theory as I continue to read Ivanhoe (I’ve just started). That is that Scott may primarily use French when he wants to be funny (he’s often hilarious), but that he sticks to Anglo-Saxon when he wants to be serious and to talk to another native speaker of English heart to heart — another thing that Scott does well, though those kinds of tender scenes, I think, tend to be near the end of his novels rather than at the beginning.

Yes. I’d encourage all lovers of English fiction to dust off their stoic-hats, take a deep breath, fortify their patience, and pick up a novel by Sir Walter Scott. At present I’m reading the Gutenberg.org edition on my Kindle, but I’ve also ordered an 1880 hardback edition from the U.K., which should be here in a couple of weeks. I’m having more shelves built for my little library room, so why not, since it’ll probably take me a month to read Ivanhoe. Antique fiction reads better somehow if you’re holding an antique book in your hands.

The Batman (2022)

If it weren’t for the occasional blockbuster, woods-dweller that I am, I’d know next to nothing about popular culture. The super-hero genre wasn’t really my thing even when I was eleven years old. But I did love comic books. Batman and Uncle Scrooge were two of my favorites. The new Batman movie will require two hours and forty-five minutes of your time. Is it worth it? I vote yes.

It’s visually spectacular, though often the detail of the spectacle is half-obscured in darkness. Even when a scene is lit by sunlight, there is a heavy overcast, fog, and often rain. The scenes of Gotham City at night are reminiscent of the city scenes in Bladerunner — bright lights, squalor, and rain, rain, rain. The soundtrack and music are superb. This must have been an easy role for Robert Pattinson, with his face masked most of the time and always the same wooden expression. What an unhappy life Pattinson’s Batman must have had.

The plot is complicated, and I’m not sure that I followed every detail of it. The theme is corruption and the fragility of the good. Batman may be dark and eccentric, but he is 100 percent morally sane. Just in case the message of bravery in the face of corruption and wickedness is insufficiently clear, the screenwriters give Batman a soliloquy, which surprised me since otherwise his lines were few. With luck, Generation Z will get the message, as some of us did many years ago when we were eleven.

Batman can be streamed from HBO Max.

Everything is turning green

The lettuce actually was planted by Ken last fall. It wintered over in a cold frame. Yesterday, during a cold rain, I picked it while it was at the peak of perfection. I washed it, chilled it, and ate it 40 minutes after it came in out of the rain. Who knew that lettuce could be so good? Lettuce may seem watery and light, but when you cut the stalk of good homegrown lettuce, a rich milky juice bubbles out.

Most of the winter’s mustard was crushed by a heavy snow because I foolishly left the top of the cold frame open. But enough mustard survived for one potfull for later this week.

I could happily live off of bread and cheese and wine. With the addition of fresh fruit and some super-green salad, even pizza probably would be healthy.

Anthropoid

Particularly now, with Russia attempting to crush and take over Ukraine, it is important to know the history of World War II. The film Anthropoid is based on events that occurred in Czechoslovakia in 1942 under German occupation. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile (in London) sent highly trained Czechoslovak soldiers into Czechoslovakia by parachute to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi in charge of the German occupation. Heydrich, a principle architect of the Holocaust, was called the Butcher of Prague. The secret military operation was called Operation Anthropoid.

This is not a film for the squeamish. After the film was released in the U.S. in 2016, its score on Rotten Tomatoes was only 66. This puzzles me. It is a far better film than that, with an excellent script, excellent dialogue, and a superb cast.

Back in 2020, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Even in 2020, I tried to make the case for the importance of reading this book, as authoritarians (and worse) ran roughshod over America and worked to destabilize Europe. In 1939, Europe pretty much abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Today, Ukraine is getting help. But we have seen this movie before, both the cruelty on one side and the bravery on the other.

Anthropoid can be streamed from Amazon Prime Video.

If you were a deer, would you be scared?

It irks me that I have to uglify my day lily bank to try to keep the deer from eating the day lilies. This year, they started eating them very early, without waiting for the flower stalks and blooms. With luck and good rain, this bank will be a green jungle of day lilies by early June.

The lilac bush has struggled, but each year it looks a little better. It probably needs a good feeding and a little pruning. Speaking of pruning, I pruned the apple trees fairly aggressively this winter, but the pruning has really improved the shape of the trees, not to mention my ability to mow under the trees without getting scraped off the mower. The fig trees, which are doing well, have just started putting out their leaves, but there’s already a baby fig. I have never seen a baby fig this early.

Twitter, schmitter. And Musk, schmusk.


A breakdown of Twitter content. Source: Wikipedia.

From its beginning, the whole idea of Twitter seemed ridiculous to me. How could 140 characters possibly convey anything useful or meaningful? Surely the contemporary attention span can handle at least 190 characters! And (glory be!) now we’re up to a breathtaking 280 characters, doubling the speed at which world peace, universal understanding, and techno-utopia can be attained.

And yet Twitter took off. I have a friend (to be a little more honest, a former friend) who insists that there is no source of news better than a “well curated” Twitter feed. He was not sparing in his disdain — I would even say sneering disdain — for the fact that I still read newspapers. I was horrified when, around 2015 or so, Paul Krugman stopped blogging and moved to Twitter. (Krugman still writes his twice-weekly column in the New York Times.) It is frequently said that Twitter killed blogging almost overnight and that blogging “is so 2010.”

But what do I know, given that I’m so 2010? People flocked to Twitter and its 140 characters. Even those of us who were left behind in 2010 had to figure out what “#” and “@” meant. According to Omnicore, whoever that is, Twitter today has 217 million “monetizable” daily active users. And yet, back in 2020, a study by Carnegie Mellon University estimated that 45 percent of the tweets about the Covid virus came from bots. Many of the real people who had flocked to Twitter couldn’t tell the difference (or didn’t care), which says a lot about the real people who flocked to Twitter. By the American election of 2016, Twitter had become a creepy pit of disinformation and manipulation. There were Trump bots by the gazillions, no doubt. And there was “the real Donald Trump,” so’s we could distinguish his disinformation from that of the bots.

The word “monetizable” gives me the creeps. I first heard that word back in 2001 or so, when consultants, who seemed to me like some kind of zombies, were let loose on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle to “monetize” the Chronicle’s “content.” I started making plans for early retirement. But it wasn’t just the monetization that made Twitter so creepy. It was partly the mere look of it on the screen, a dreadful looking typographical stew of babble, incomprehensible abbreviation, smart-alec remarks, and giphies, in which the giphies compete on juvenile silliness. Twitter’s culture is as unattractive as its typography. Even if 3.6 percent of Twitter was news, who’d be able to find it? And because 280 characters was not enough to express the full complexity of some of the thinking to be found on Twitter, the Tweetstorm was invented, quadrupling, quintupling, and even octupling the speed at which world peace, universal understanding, and techno-utopia can be attained.

This morning the Washington Post reports that Twitter’s employees (most of whom are in San Francisco) are in a state of panic and rage that Elon Musk has bought into Twitter and will now be on Twitter’s board. After all, would Musk have bought into Twitter if he hadn’t intended to use it for his own purposes? Clearly, Twitter employees think about as highly of Musk as I do. We’re probably about to witness a grand demonstration of the fruits of Musk’s libertarian philosophy colliding with social media, with a flaming crash like a self-driven Tesla. Right-wingers such as Hugh Hewitt (in the Washington Post) believe that Twitter is a “‘woke’ echo chamber” and that more right-wing and libertarian “diversity of opinion” is just the thing to fix it.

As I see, the reasons for not being on Twitter just quadrupled, and maybe even octupled.

Strathblair

This is to be a post about a 30-year-old BBC Scotland series, “Strathblair.”

But first let’s talk about a theory of stories. Orson Scott Card is the only writer I’m aware of who has a well developed theory of stories. (In mentioning Card, I should say that I respect him as a writer, though he has greatly damaged his career with his right-wing, religious-fanatic politics.) Card’s theory is that the need for stories is a basic human need and that all human beings will seek and find and consume stories much the same way we seek and find and consume food. What follows, then, is a kind of academic question: Where do people get their stories, and what kind of stories do people want and need?

Though it seems strange to me, some people like and prefer here-and-now stories with characters and themes that resemble their own lives — or, at least, their aspirations for their own lives. But such stories bore the living daylights out of me. We get a steady diet of that kind of story just by reading the news, or even just by listening to people talk in social situations. For whatever reason — and if that reason is escapism I make no apologies — it’s only stories set in another time and another place that I find worthwhile. And though I make no apologies for escapism, which I see as one of the important purposes of stories and literature, I find that I’m often apologizing for my disinterest in the here-and-now fare that makes up the bulk of what’s to be found on the streaming services (and in novels as well, the kind of novels that I never, ever read). The contrast with contemporary reality is part of the appeal of science fiction and fantasy. Those stories are almost always in another time and another place. Historical fiction, and classic fiction, are also of course set in another time and another place. Some people, I think, would bypass a series such as “Strathblair” because it’s 30 years old. But for me, that’s part of the appeal.

“Strathblair” ran for two seasons on the BBC, 1993 and 1994. It is set in the 1940s, just after World War II. The setting is rural Scotland, in the hills of Perthshire. I have watched seven episodes so far. At first I thought the series would be a kind of Scottish “Little House on the Prairie.” But it has turned out to be more adult than that, with some dark themes. Characters include newlyweds with no farming experience who move to a neglected farm; a grouchy laird; and an even more grouchy old farmer who is very much set in his ways. The series appears to be an authentic picture of rural Scottish life in that period. The credits include an agricultural adviser. There is a great deal of fascinating detail — accurate, I assume, because of the agricultural adviser — about how the farming (mostly sheep) is done. In the kitchen scenes we often see what they are cooking and eating. Whether they’re at home or in a pub, we get a view of their drinking habits (a lot). There are lots of old cars and horse-drawn farming equipment. Cows get milked. Hay gets ricked. Sheep get dipped. Dogs are a necessity. The outhouse is in full view. Chickens, though treated well, live their short lives. Even what they’re wearing is fascinating, including the tweeds in classic styles such as the laird’s Norfolk jackets.

“Strathblair” can be streamed on Amazon Prime Video.