Envying the U.K.


Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

It felt a little like Christmas morning to wake up today to the news that Britain’s Labour Party has swept the Conservative Party out of power, reducing the number of Tory seats in Parliament to its lowest number ever. At last, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher has been exorcized. Though there have been two Labour governments in the U.K. since Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Thatcher’s neoliberalism has been the governing philosophy since 1979.

Here in the U.S., President Biden has done much to lay neoliberalism to rest, though our foolish political media, interested only in political conflict rather than government, have had very little to say about it. Biden’s accomplishments are particularly notable in light of a Congress nearly paralyzed by a right wing desperate to take the U.S. back to the days of the Confederacy.

Though most of the political work of reversing neoliberalism and Thatcherism remains to be done, the intellectual work is solid. I am reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, and will write about it later. Stiglitz drives a stake into the zombie heart of neoliberal dogma. It’s a book that I hope policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic are reading. Now is a good time to become familiar with the thinking (and proposals) of progressive economists, the better to judge what Britain’s Labour Party does now that they have pretty much unchallengeable power, with 412 seats in Parliament compared with the Conservative Party’s ever-so-humiliating 112.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party lost 38 seats and retains only nine seats in the British Parliament. And in France, it’s looking like the French are going to have to learn about right-wing governments the hard way, like the United Kingdom did. And here in the U.S., we are now in a state of complete chaos and unpredictability until the Democratic Party decides what to do about President Biden. At least in Britain people can sleep easier now.

C.J. Sansom’s Shardrake novels

Novels don’t have to be masterpieces to be worthwhile, especially if, like me, you read for escape and thus prefer novels that are set in another time and another place rather than the here and now. C.J. Sansom (who died in April), was very popular, as he deserves to be.

Sansom’s Shardrake character is a solicitor in London during the time of Henry VIII. Shardrake is a hunchback, accustomed to being stared at and made fun of, though he is a gentleman. Sansom’s plots are mysteries, and they tend to be a little wooly and complicated, as they need to be if a novel goes on for more than 600 pages. But what I like best about the Shardrake novels (I have read five of them and will read the other two) is Sansom’s evocation of Tudor England. We travel all over London on foot, on horseback, and in boats on the Thames. Sovereign takes us to Yorkshire, by horse on the way up from London and by ship on the way back. Heartstone takes us to Portsmouth in July of 1545, a date you’ll be familiar with if you know what happened to Henry’s beloved ship the Mary Rose.

Sansom reminds me a bit of Winston Graham, though Sansom is not nearly as good a writer as Graham. Like Graham’s Poldark character, Shardrake is a man ahead of his time who loves justice rather than power. That is a danger. Sansom makes it quite clear how dangerous the Tudor period was, not only for those close to the court who lost their heads, but also for the ordinary people who got crossways with a divided church that was just as cruel and dangerous as Henry. Historians give estimates that vary widely, but it seems that 57,000 to 72,000 people were executed while Henry VIII was king. Sansom’s Henry VIII is a repulsive character. Other characters such as Thomas Cromwell are more complex.

At the risk of making everything political, Sansom reminds us (as does Winston Graham) how hard it can be to be ahead of the times one lives in. We are joined to such people in the past by a kind of invisible thread. We identify with them. There can be no real compensation for those who lived through the many horrors of history. Historical novels serve an important purpose by helping us to never forget.

Good government gets little attention


Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, was in the backwater city of Winston-Salem yesterday for the groundbreaking on a small project backed by the Department of Transportation — a $4.8 million pathway for bicycles and pedestrians that will link downtown with the city’s medical center. That’s small potatoes as transportation projects go. But Buttigieg is a hard-working guy.

In the turmoil that has arisen over President Biden’s debate performance last week, Buttigieg is one of the people mentioned as Biden’s replacement. Buttigieg is a wonk, a highly effective secretary of transportation, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, and a Rhodes scholar. I was happy to stand out in the July sun to see him in action.

Earlier in the day, both Buttigieg and Governor Cooper were in Raleigh for the start of a bigger project. That’s a railway project that will connect Raleigh to Richmond and then onward to Washington and beyond.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer, while in Raleigh Buttigieg dinged Trump without naming him: “Every one of those projects — and the 57,000 others that are funded, and counting, through President Biden’s infrastructure package — is really about one simple purpose, which is to make everyday life easier for the American people. … I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this is in contrast to what we’ve seen before, a prior administration that declared ‘Infrastructure Week’ every year without any results until it became a punch line, a byword for all talk and no action.”

Events like this force the local media to turn out whether they want to or not. The backwater media would much rather be writing about chicken sandwiches, petty real estate deals, and third-tier chefs in crummy and overpriced local eateries that won’t last a year.


Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina

An Omega-3 sustainability quandary

I recently came across an Omega-3 factoid — that mackerel contains almost twice as much Omega-3 as sardines. The truth is, I don’t really like either of them but see them as medicine. With mackerel, probably the richest source of Omega-3, there is a sustainability question.

There are many types of mackerel, caught in many different places. The smaller the mackerel, the lower it is in the food chain, making it less likely to contain contaminants. King Oscar says that its skinless and boneless mackerel is caught in the North Atlantic between Norway and the Faroe Islands. That sounds like a place with pretty clean water. But, according to the Marine Conservation Society, overfishing has caused a decline in the populations of North Atlantic mackerel.

Walnuts are an excellent source of Omega-3, and I already eat a lot of them. Another way to boost one’s intake of Omega-3 from walnuts is to use a toasted walnut oil as a seasoning. La Tourangelle’s roasted walnut oil isn’t all that expensive, as premium oils go, and a tablespoon of it contains 1.4 grams of Omega-3. It’s made from California walnuts. It’s very good in homemade dressings. You can get it from Amazon.

Eventually I’ll use all of the six cans of King Oscar mackerel that I bought. Other than that, I think I’ll stick with walnuts and walnut oil.


⬆︎ Pasta salad with walnuts, celery, onion, cherry tomatoes, chopped dried figs, and raisins, with a dressing of roasted walnut oil, honey, and a dash of vinegar.


⬆︎ The mackerel looks kind of gross, doesn’t it? The pesto (with lots of garlic) helps mask the (to me) unpleasant taste of the mackerel.

What in the name of Zeuss just happened?

There is much that could be said about whatever form of madness it was that happened during last night’s Biden-Trump debate. But the thing that matters most is that the media have made up their hive mind. What Trump is, what Trump has done, and what Trump intends to do no longer matters. The media, in ecstasy from the smell of blood, have found their victim, and it is Biden.

I wrote this to a friend this morning:

“I did not watch the debate last night. I am horrified at what I am reading this morning, a media ghoul feast like I’ve never seen before. The media being what it is, and the American people being what they are, I can’t imagine how Biden and the DNC can reverse this kind of press (and it must be nine times worse in the TV media). The media will do the Republican party’s work for them from here on, and Russia here we come. Everything other than Biden’s age will be drowned out; Trump’s age and what he is and what he has done doesn’t even matter anymore. We’re now in a manic psychic-epidemic mode, led and fed by a hyperventilating media, doing to Biden, and to history, what we did to Jimmy Carter, revising him into a failure. Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate for president would be a guaranteed way to lose. Nobody likes her, including me; she was a mistake in 2020. The only person who has the political ability to do what would need to be done in a mere four months is Gavin Newsome. Lots of people must have stayed up all night in Washington gaming out a plan, or at least I hope they did. Biden did great during the state of the union speech three months ago, while Trump has been rambling about sharks and not remembering people he has known for years. I don’t understand this. But it was clearly the miracle straight from hell that Republicans needed to sell Hitler to the American people. The media will be fine with it, because doomscrolling will bring back the 2016-2020 glory years. God save us.

“I feel like the world just got turned upside down. Yesterday I did something I hadn’t done in ages. I stopped at a greasy spoon and had a (terrible) breakfast. There was a group of old farmer guys talking. In the previous two election years, they’d have been angry, repeating Fox News talking points. Yesterday there wasn’t a bit of that. They were laughing, having a good time, and not a bit of anger, talking about cows, broomstraw, and how people used to know their neighbors. I was pulled toward the conclusion that Republicans simply have not been able to stir up enough rage and provide enough fear-inducing talking points to get the deplorables to bother to vote in November. Now I’m afraid that has all changed.”

There are sane voices (including Biden’s). But sane voices will be drowned out in the media stampede. This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter this morning:

“It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

“It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has.”

Who knows at this point how the Democratic Party will respond. Democrats versus a depraved Republican Party is one thing. But Democrats versus a depraved Republican Party and a depraved and savage media is another.

Update:

A few media watchers get it right, but pretty much no one pays attention to them. Dan Froomkin at Press Watch: “CNN fails the nation.”

Illusions Perdues

How often do we get lavish period pieces based on a novel by Honoré de Balzac? I came across this on Amazon Prime Video. According to the Wikipedia article, the film (2021) lost money, though its rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 93/93. It’s a long film — two and a half hours.

According to the Wikipedia article, Balzac’s first novel (1829) imitated the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions), however, which was published in serial form between 1837 and 1843, was nothing at all like Walter Scott. Nor was Paris anything like Scotland. The only Balzac I’ve ever read was Le Père Goriot. I’ve ordered a copy of Illusions Perdues and will see if I have any French circuits left.

A very thoughtful piece of piano music is heard several times during this film — Franz Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G♭ major, opus 90. After you hear excerpts in the film, you’ll want to hear the whole piece. The finest performance of this piece I’ve found on YouTube is by Khatia Buniatishvilli:

For extra credit, and to compare performances, here it is played by Alfred Brendel (a recording of which is used in the film). Brendel, by the way, is 93 years old and is still with us.

A baby rabbit, and baby figs

I see the baby rabbit every day. It likes to hang out near the front steps and eat clover. Each year the fig crop gets better and better. I have to fight the squirrels for the apples, but it’s the birds that I have to fight for the figs. I have three Rose of Sharon trees. Each is a different color and blooms at a different time. This one grows at the edge of the woods in the backyard and seems to like it there.


Click here for high-resolution version

A lightning bug


A firely on a basil leaf

It has taken more than ten years for the abbey’s one-acre clearing in the woods to become a suitable habitat for lightning bugs. There are far fewer fireflies than there used to be because of pesticides and loss of habitat. When I was a child, there were fireflies virtually everywhere in rural places. That is no longer the case.

One of the things I have learned about fireflies is that even an acre of suitable habitat helps them to thrive. As I read up on fireflies, I was not surprised to learn that light pollution is a part of what threatens them. That makes sense. Through the 1950s, rural areas were actually dark at night. Now those horrible so-called security lights blare their ugly light all night long and cannot be turned off.

Firefly larvae (glow worms!) like to live in moist (but well drained) grassland and leaf litter. The abbey yard with its surrounding woods is the perfect environment for the larval stage. As for light pollution, the fact that the yard is 98 percent surrounded by tall trees means that light pollution from the horizon is blocked. The only light comes from directly overhead — the stars and the moon.

There are many species of fireflies, but the lightning bugs we have here in the North Carolina Piedmont and Appalachian foothills are easily recognized because of their black wing covers and the orange carapace at their heads. Starting in May, when I close my book and turn off the reading light in the bedroom, I can see the lightning bugs blinking through the bedroom window. What a privilege, to have lightning bugs in the yard!

Not exactly the High Hay


The entrance into the woods in the abbey’s front yard. The deer use it as a doorway. Click here for high-resolution version.

One of the most memorable bits of landscape in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is The Hedge, or “High Hay,” that protected the Hobbits of Buckland from the scary creatures of the Old Forest. The Hedge was very dense, and to get into the forest there was a tunnel lined with brick under the hedge, blocked with iron bars.

Fifteen years ago, I made a rough trail into the woods that leads to a huge rock that overhangs a small stream — a picturesque and magical spot where a huge beech tree grows amongst the other hardwoods, with its roots near the stream and its upper branches at the top of the canopy. I planted small arbor vitae trees on either side of the opening to decorate the trailhead, though the arbor vitaes are now being overcome by woodsy things.

The woods that adjoin the abbey are very dark, dense, moist, and cool, a place where hardly a single photon of sunlight goes to waste. Where there’s light, a leaf will grow to try to catch it. I’ve learned that, left alone, the edges of a woods are a special kind of ecosystem. At the edges of a woods, light comes from the side as well as above, so growth is exuberant. There are certain species of trees that particularly like to grow at the edge of a woods, wild persimmon trees in particular … not to mention poison oak. The edge of a woods can be very dense. Birds love it there. Here at the abbey, the deer have a door into the woods in the backyard as well as the front.