Culture Shock

(Three Rivers, MI) While biking out in an isolated rural area I came upon these shotgun shells. Being someone born and raised in the city, they seemed an oddity.

In deer country, though, shotgun shells are as common in the woods as horse flies.

Of course, when I see empty shotgun shells side-by-side with crushed beer cans, I am glad that my travels rarely take me into areas heavily populated with November's deer hunters. Nearly as common as empty 12-gauge shells are signs declaring a particular stretch of woods as private property, so I guess I am not alone in my wariness of those drunken hunters who give the sport a bad name. I'll just make sure not to invest in outdoor chandeliers should I ever move to the country.

Kalamazoo Citizens Speak Out About Upcoming White Power Event

(Kalamazoo, MI) Over the past few days I had the opportunity to speak with dozens of residents in and around Kalamazoo, MI. I was interested in finding out the answers to several questions:

1. Are you aware that there will be a rally on Saturday, August 4 by white supremacists and neo-Nazis to protest what they claim is "black gang terrorism" and "the genocide of whites?"

2. What is your opinion of the rally?

3. Is black-on-white crime a serious problem in Kalamazoo?

In general, about one-third of the respondents expressed some knowledge of the upcoming rally. Of those who knew of the rally, none of the respondents could correctly name any of the scheduled speakers at the rally, but several volunteered such answers as "the KKK" or "The Klan." Responses tended to be along the lines of "Steve" (names changed to protect anonymity):

"Well, I guess they have freedom of speech, but no one with any sense is going to listen to them," he said. "It's a shame that these idiots who don't even live here have to come and try to start trouble here."

No respondents expressed positive views of the rally, and not one person out of 33 interviewed said that black-on-white crime was a problem, despite the efforts by New Jersey white supremacist Hal Turner to exploit the issue. Answers from the respondents generally mirrored those of "Jackie," a middle-aged white woman:

"There's crime here, but criminals don't single out people based on their race," she said. "If you live in a neighborhood with higher crime, you could be a victim, whether you are black or white."

Left: Image of dowtown Kalamazoo courtesy of Wikipedia.org

Several respondents agreed that gangs were a problem in Kalamazoo, but argued that street gangs accounted for only part of the city's crime problem.

"There's gang-bangers on my street, but they pretty much keep to themselves, selling dope or just hanging out," said "Larry," an older white man. "If you don't bother them, they won't bother you. But it was a white dude who stole my car a few years back - a**holes come in all colors."

The general trend in crime in Kalamazoo has been downward over the past twenty years, although there was a slight uptick in 2006 in overall recorded offenses. Rape and larceny declined in 2006, while there were increases in arson, burglary, auto theft, assault, and robbery. The number of murders increased from three to five in Kalamazoo in 2006.

None of the people with whom I spoke planned to attend the rally.

"I think it's a good day to go fishing," explained one man. "No sense in making it harder for the police to keep a lid on things."

Book Review: Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence

Gilbert, Felix
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965, 349 pages

Left: Francesco Guicciardini

Gilbert’s work examined the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini from several interrelated perspectives. Both men held important positions in the government of Florence, but more importantly, the views of both men reflected to some extent the people with whom they associated. In addition, Gilbert considered the interplay between politics and history, both as subjects of inquiry and as tools by which a state could be effectively governed; he believed that “history moved closer to politics” in post-Laurentian Florence. The author argued that the Machiavelli and Guicciardini should be best understood as being products of, as well as participants in, the turbulent state of affairs of the late 15th and early 16th commune of Florence, rather than by the traditional method of exegesis-through-biography.

While the author split the book into sections entitled, simply enough, “Politics” and “History,” the text does not reflect this one-dimensional outline. Nor does the assignment of Machiavelli to “Politics” or Guicciardini to “History” imply that Gilbert believed that the two men could be squeezed into narrowly-defined categories; one gets the sense that this structure was an act of editorial appeasement. Instead, Gilbert used the arbitrary divisions to set up the respective milieu of each thinker as a means of separating what was innovative theory from what was conventional belief in the writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

Gilbert argued that Machiavelli should not be viewed as an abstract theorist whose writings on politics somehow spontaneously burst onto the scene. Instead, the author believed that Machiavelli combined classical knowledge with contemporary wisdom born from experience in the war-torn Italian peninsula:

Machiavelli intended to do for politics what others had done for art, jurisprudence, and medicine: to clarify and to codify the principles which the ancients had followed. Machiavelli only wanted to state that he was applying to politics those methods which had been successful in other areas.

Gilbert was also successful in reconciling the autocratic leader of Machiavelli’s The Prince with the ideal republic of his Discourses, arguing that Machiavelli believed that both forms of government could be successful if they possessed the important characteristic of virtù.

Left: Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

The author argued that the genius of Guicciardini, like Machiavelli, was to be found in the pioneering manner in which he critically examined the works of classical writers. While he lived in a period when the antiquities were venerated, Guicciardini nonetheless did not assume that everything ancient was ideal:

The existence of particular laws or institutions in classical times was not in itself a proof of their exemplary value; the question which concerned Guicciardini was how they had functioned and what effects they had had.

Moreover, Gilbert argued that Guicciardini did not ascribe to the humanist belief that general principles about human behavior could be derived from history, but rather that “history appeals to man to become conscious of his own intrinsic value.”

Gilbert’s book introduced new archival material, but one of its strongest features is the way in which he reexamined previously-critiqued material. Records of the various Florentine government organs were scoured to demonstrate that Machiavelli and Guicciardini incorporated many ideas into their respective works that were held by the patricians. The author also included several bibliographic essays at the end of the book that scholars new to the field will find informative. The result is a book that informs, piques, and challenges the reader on a level that few authors can successfully reach.

Conditions on an English Slave Ship

Colored engraving of the slave deck of the Wildfire, a slaving ship captured by the USS Mohawk off the coast of Cuba and brought to Key West, Florida, on April 30, 1860.

Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon aboard slave ships and later the governor of a British colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone, provided this account of the Middle Passage. The following are excerpts from his original text


From the time of the arrival of the ships to their departure, which is usually about three months, scarce a day passes without some Negroes being purchased and carried on board; sometimes in small and sometimes in large numbers. The whole number taken on board depends on circumstances. In a voyage I once made, our stock of merchandise was exhausted in the purchase of about 380 Negroes, which was expected to have procured 500...

The men Negroes, on being brought aboard the ship, are immediately fastened together, two and two, by handcuffs on their wrists and by irons riveted on their legs. They are then sent down between the decks and placed in an apartment partitioned off for that purpose. The women also are placed in a separate apartment between the decks, but without being ironed. An adjoining room on the same deck is appointed for the boys. Thus they are all placed in different apartments.

But at the same time, however, they are frequently stowed so close, as to admit of no other position than lying on their sides. Nor with the height between decks, unless directly under the grating, permit the indulgence of an erect posture; especially where there are platforms, which is generally the case. These platforms are a kind of shelf, about eight or nine feet in breadth, extending from the side of the ship toward the centre. They are placed nearly midway between the decks, at the distance of two or three feet from each deck. Upon these the Negroes are stowed in the same manner as they are on the deck underneath.

In each of the apartments are placed three or four large buckets, of a conical form, nearly two feet in diameter at the bottom and only one foot at the top and in depth of about twenty- eight inches, to which, when necessary, the Negroes have recourse. It often happens that those who are placed at a distance from the buckets, in endeavoring to get to them, tumble over their companions, in consequence of their being shackled. These accidents, although unavoidable, are productive of continual quarrels in which some of them are always bruised. In this distressed situation, unable to proceed and prevented from getting to the tubs, they desist from the attempt; and as the necessities of nature are not to be resisted, ease themselves as they lie. This becomes a fresh source of boils and disturbances and tends to render the condition of the poor captive wretches still more uncomfortable. The nuisance arising from these circumstances is not infrequently increased by the tubs being too small for the purpose intended and their being emptied but once every day. The rule for doing so, however, varies in different ships according to the attention paid to the health and convenience of the slaves by the captain...

Upon the Negroes refusing to take sustenance, I have seen coals of fire, glowing hot, put on a shovel and placed so near their lips as to scorch and burn them. And this has been accompanied with threats of forcing them to swallow the coals if they any longer persisted in refusing to eat. These means have generally had the desired effect. I have also been credibly informed that a certain captain in the slave- trade, poured melted lead on such of his Negroes as obstinately refused their food...

On board some ships the common sailors are allowed to have intercourse with such of the black women whose consent they can procure. And some of them have been known to take the inconstancy of their paramours so much to heart as to leap overboard and drown themselves. The officers are permitted to indulge their passions among them at pleasure and sometimes are guilty of such excesses as disgrace human nature....

The hardships and inconveniences suffered by the Negroes during the passage are scarcely to be enumerated or conceived. They are far more violently affected by seasickness than Europeans. It frequently terminates in death, especially among the women. But the exclusion of fresh air is among the most intolerable. For the purpose of admitting this needful refreshment, most of the ships in the slave trade are provided, between the decks, with five or sick air- ports on each side of the ship of about five inches in length and four in breadth. In addition, some ships, but not one in twenty, have what they denominate wind- sails. But whenever the sea is rough and the rain heavy is becomes necessary to shut these and every other conveyance by which the air is admitted. The fresh air being thus excluded, the Negroes' rooms soon grow intolerable hot. The confined air, rendered noxious by the effluvia exhaled from their bodies and being repeatedly breathed, soon produces fevers and fluxes which generally carries of great numbers of them...

Source: Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London, 1788).

Wondering...

No, I am not a prude, but I do find some items to be of questionable value in my life. Take for example the garment known as the crotchless panty, which a site sponsor asked me to review.

It seems to me that if you need such a garment, this might be an indication that your love life is a bit too rushed. Perhaps one's passion could wait just another ten seconds until traditional undergarments have been removed - that's all I am saying.

Then again, perhaps the grey hairs on my head are indicative of my increasing lack of relevance to persons who might purchase such an item. I should probably retire to the nearest rocking chair and read a good book.

:-}

Quick Blog Note

I may be away from Internet access for the next few days, in case any of my MILLIONS OF DEDICATED READERS wonder why the blog is not updated.

:-}

Or not, if there is access at my destination near Kalamazoo, MI. It seems to be a happening city over the next wwek, and poor Kalamazooans will have quite a few unusual visitors beyond my neurotic self.

The Fall of the Weimar Republic

This is an unpublished essay that I decided to dust off and publish on the Web.

Left: 1919 image of the Weimar National Assembly

Introduction

The fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933 is often depicted as some sort of inevitable series of events, or as if the simultaneous rise of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP - commonly known as the Nazi Party) was a simple matter of cause-and-effect. Yet both of these scenarios reflect a multiplicity of influences, and furthermore the failure of German democracy and the ascension to power by the Nazis were by no means consequential or directly causative occurrences.

This essay is particularly focused on historiographical explanations for the collapse of democracy in the Weimar Republic. The author’s goal is to produce a brief overview of some of the major interpretations of the movement away from a democratic republic toward the totalitarian dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. While this essay is by no means an exhaustive summary of the literature on the Weimar Germany, readers will gain a greater appreciation for the wide variety of opinions on the failure of democracy to thrive in post-World War I Germany. For those readers seeking a comprehensive overview of the Weimar period, an excellent start is Richard Evans’s impressive The Coming of the Third Reich, while works by Eberhard Kolb and Ruth B. Henig contain historiographical essays for those seeking greater depth in the historiography of Weimar Germany. Readers interested in the cultural history of Weimar would be well advised to start with Walter Lacqueur’s Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918-1933 and Alex de Jonge’s Weimar Chronicle: Prelude to Hitler.

In one sense the Nazis themselves served as the first interpreters of the legacy of Weimar Germany, as marked by the fascist propaganda efforts during the elections of the 1930s and in the years following Hitler’s ascension to the positions of Reichskanzler and Führer. The Weimar Republic, declared the Nazis, was an alien “system” foisted on an unwilling German population by the so-called "November criminals.” The NSDAP made significant use of the Dolchstoßlegende, or “stab-in-the-back legend,” which was based upon the myth that Jews and Marxists instigated strikes among workers in key industries that deprived German soldiers of necessary supplies, and which supposedly caused Germany to lose the First World War via this internal decay. Moreover, Nazi propaganda created a mythology that these same Jews and “cultural Bolsheviks” ruled over Germany during the country’s “time of struggle” (i.e., Weimar), and that only National Socialism could save Germany from destruction by its purported foes. Thus, historians after the Second World War faced a daunting task of both separating propaganda from fact and overcoming biases honed by the relentless Nazi propaganda machine.

Historians of the Weimar Republic have approached the topic from a variety of perspectives, and one of the few consistent trends that has emerged since the Second World War has been a movement away from single-cause theories of the fall of Weimar democracy toward the approach used by this author of a multiplicity of causative factors. This essay is thus grouped into sections related to political, cultural, and economic contributors to the fall of the Weimar Republic.

Weimar: Destined for Failure by a Weak Constitution and Poor Popular Support?

A thread that runs throughout many analyses of the legacy of theWeimar Republic contains the idea that the fledgling German democracy was somehow doomed from the start. With a constitution that contained items such as Article 48 – a constitutional provision that permitted the Weimar President to rule by decree without the consent of the Reichstag – and a clause that allowed the Reichskanzler to assume office in the event of the death of the President, there were certainly structural inadequacies that, in hindsight, may not have been the wisest choices by the framers of the Weimar Constitution. Craig took aim at the consttutional inclusion of proportional representation (Verhältniswahlrecht) in elections to the Reichstag, arguing that the resultant plethora of German political parties “made for an inherent instability that manifested itself in what appeared to the bemused spectator to be a continuous game of musical chairs” in the near-constant shuffling of Weimar coalitions and ministries. Eyck described the enormous number of political parties under proportional representation as “these many cooks [who] brought forth a broth which was neither consistent nor clear.” Mommsen, however, disagreed that proportional representation was a root cause of Weimar political instability, calling Verhältniswahlrecht “at most a symptom” of the problems, and adding that the “reluctance to assume political responsibility” by Weimar political parties was the source of instability.

Left: Weimar President Friedrich Ebert

Other historians have pointed to the seeming lack of enthusiasm many Germans felt for the new government as contributing to a “doomed” Weimar. Erdmann argued that Germans faced a difficult dilemma in 1918-1919, faced with the choices of “social revolution in alliance with the forces pressing for a proletarian dictatorship,” or “a parliamentary republic in alliance with conservative elements such as the old officer corps.” McKenzie, while acknowledging that the new Republic did not have broad support, nonetheless maintained that the motivations of most Germans remained simply “the restoration of law and order and return to peacetime conditions.” Fritzsche, arguing against the idea that Germans were anti-democratic, argued that “the hostile defamations of the president of the republic were as indicative of democratization as the presidency of the good-willed Fritz Ebert himself.” Brecht disputed the notion that Germans, as a people, have somehow always been totalitarian, and cautioned against such the creation of such simplistic stereotypes to exlain the failure of Weimar democracy:

…nothing can be more devious than the opinion that the Germans have always been totalitaran and that the democratic regime served only as a camouflage to conceal this fundamental fact. The overwhelming majority of the people at the end of the imperial period and during the democratic regime were distinctly anti-totalitarian and anti-fascist in both their ideas and principles.

The rise of a culture of political violence in Weimar Germany should certainly be considered as a contributory factor in the Republic’s political instability. Beginning with the emergence of the Freikorps units immediately after the declaration of the Republic, this tendency toward violence became entrenched in Weimar politics after the 1919 assassinations of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Evans argued that “gun battles, assassinations, riots, massacres, and civil unrest” prevented Germans from possessing the “stability in which a new democratic order could flourish.” Moreover, noted Evans, all major political parties employed groups of armed loyalists whose purposes were to protect their political compatriots and to contribute to the waging of low-grade civil war:

Before long, political parties associated themselves with armed and uniformed squads, paramilitary troops whose task it was to provide guards at meetings, impress the public by marching in military parades, and to intimidate, beat up, and on occasion kill members of the paramilitary units associated with other political parties.

Thus, the rise of militant extremists such as the NSDAP should viewed within the context of the Weimar history of political paramilitary forces as a “normal” phenomenon. Groups such as the Stahlhelm, the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, and the Rotfrontkämpferbund had memberships much higher than did the Ordnertruppen in the early to mid-1920s, and the rise of the Sturmabteilung as the muscle behind the NSDAP reflects the recognition by the Nazis of the unwritten rules of politics in Weimar Germany.

Weimar Culture and Challenges to Tradition

The personal freedoms often associated with Weimar culture – whether seen as an inevitable, pendulum-like reaction after decades of Wilhelmine authoritarianism, or as a flowering of postwar expression – led to a period of unparalleled vibrancy in literature, the arts, architecture, and philosophy. Kolb described the period as “the eruption of a new vitality, the liberation of creative forces in a short decade of unbounded intellectual and artistic freedom.” Moreover, the Weimar period witnessed significant leaps forward in the emancipation of women, and it is not without considerable merit that many pundits have described Weimar Germany as the first modern culture.

Left: Image of cabaret production of the Haller Revue in Berlin

Yet these sudden cultural changes were far from being universally accepted by the average German, and groups on the right as well as the left decried what was perceived by many as the power of destructive internal forces. Leftists tended to focus on the bourgeois infatuation with base materialism, while many conservatives believed that republican Germany was becoming a morally decrepit nation. Hitler himself played off such sentiments in his speeches, using widespread perceptions of decadence and disaffection with modernity as springboards for his anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic philosophies. In his first public speech after accepting the post of Reichskanzler, Hitler blasted those whom he believed to have quickly led Germany to moral decay:

Communism with its method of madness is making a powerful and insidious attack upon our dismayed and shattered nation. It seeks to poison and disrupt in order to hurl us into an epoch of chaos.... This negative, destroying spirit spared nothing of all that is highest and most valuable. Beginning with the family, it has undermined the very foundations of morality and faith and scoffs at culture and business, nation and Fatherland, justice and honor. Fourteen years of Marxism have ruined Germany; one year of bolshevism would destroy her.

Chief among the evidence for the supposed moral decline cited by contemprary critics of Weimar culture was the open sexual freedom proclaimed by many younger Germans, especially in the larger cities. Berlin, in particular, became something of an international destination for people seeking its wide variety of sexual subcultures. Henig argued that the “bright lights and avant-garde cultural attraction of Berlin incurred the hostility of traditional communities in rural areas.” The Weimar era, maintained Mommsen, was a period “that was characterized by the tension between extreme modernity in a few cultural centers and the relatve backwardness of life in the provinces.” Kolb noted that “confrontation in cultural matters still further exacerbated the basic political discord among Germans in the Weimar period.” Lacqueur observed that many German artists were seemingly clueless of just how far removed their work was from the sensibilities of the average German citizen:

Strange as it may appear in retrospect, they were genuinely unaware of the fact that the distance between the avant-garde and popular taste had grown immeasurably and that the dctrines preached by the right were much more in line with popular taste.

Those who emphasize the cultural decadence of Weimar Germany, of course, run the risk of sounding prudish, or even worse, as apologists for the fascist regime that followed the demise of the Weimar Republic. Still, it is important to note that the perception of moral decay by many comtemporary Germans – on both the political right and left – was a contributing factor in the moving away from mainstream political parties by German voters and toward extremist factions such as the NSDAP and KDP. Combined with political instability and – most importantly – deleterious economic conditions, the concerns of many Germans about moral decline and social decay began to be expressed in the electoral results of 1930-32 and the eventual collapse of the republic-supporting Weimar Coalition.

Hyperinflation, Depression, and Politcial Opportunity

One of the consistent themes that underscores the period of Weimar Germany is that of economic instability, and the economic calamities that occurred throughout the history of the Republic mirror periods of political upheaval. The Weimar government, at various times, faced food shortages, hyperinflation, massive unemployment, and an unprecedented economic depression, and any analysis of the failures of democracy in Weimar Germany needs to take into account these inherently disruptive economic phenomena. Craig succinctly summed up the economic problems facing the new republic with this comment: “Its normal state was crisis.”

Left: German children playing with worthless banknotes in 1923

The debts incurred by the German government during the war and the economic downturn that followed the transition away from a wartime economy weighed down the fledgling Weimar Republic. Industrial production in 1919, noted Evans, was only 42 percent of what it had been in 1913, and grain production had fallen by over 50 percent from prewar figures. These economic factors, however, paled in comparison with the effects of the reparations demanded and received by the Allies in the Versailles negotiations. In addition, Germany suffered significant territorial losses as a result of Versailles, including Alsace-Lorraine, West Prussia, Posen, Upper Silesia, and the Saar. The terms of the Treaty called for the new German government to make an initial payment of 20 billion gold marks to the Allies by May, 1921, and the Reparations Commission eventually settled on a total reparations bill to Germany of 132 billion gold marks. John Maynard Keynes – a participant in the Versailles negotiations – accurately predicted that the onerous terms of the Treaty of Versailles were far beyond the means of the new republic:

The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable,—abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe.

The initial German economic losses due to the Treaty of Versailles were staggering. Germany lost about 13.5 percent of its territory, approximately 13 percent of its industrial productivity, and slightly more than 10 percent of its population. In addition, the loss of important mining areas such as the Saar and Upper Silesia resulted in a loss of 74 percent of German iron ore, 41 percent of the country’s pig iron supplies, and approximately 25 percent of its coal reserves.

Historians and economists have long debated the actual effects of the Treaty of Versailles on economic conditions in Weimar Germany. Fraser argued that the Treaty “was in no sense the unjust and cynical imposition that the propagandists alleged it to have been.” Eyck held that many Germans believed “that they had been duped by the armistice,” and that the effect of the heavy reparations served mostly to reinforce the Dolchstoßlegende. Craig argued that the economic conditions that followed the burden of the reparations bills resulted in ordinary Germans suffering “deprivations that shattered their faith in the democratic process and left them cynical and alienated.” Kolb noted that most of the reparations that were paid ultimately were sent by the debtor nations of Britain and France to the United States, which in turn reinvested this capital in the German economy. Webb called into question the very process of analyzing post-Treaty German economics, arguing that the effects of inflation in the early 1920s make calculations especially difficult, as inflation “altered the real value of all financial flows and confounded their measurement.”

Yet it would be naïve to dismiss the idea that reparations payments were a heavy burden on the new Weimar government. With a sputtering economy, high unemployment, and weak tax revenues, the government of Ebert found itself trying to balance the needs of German citizens with the additional debt load from the reparations bills. Moreover, to a German population that was experiencing widespread poverty and food shortages – not to mention the wartime sacrifices – reparations that were being sent to recent wartime enemies came as a shock.

The period of hyperinflation that hit the Weimar Republic in 1922-23 was on a scale seemingly without historical parallel. The mark traded at 4.2:1 to the dollar prior to the outbreak of hostilities in July 1914, and at the end of the First World War was trading at a rate of 8.9:1. By July 1921 the ratio had risen to 76.7:1, and prices more than doubled again by January 1922, as the ration of marks to the dollar climbed to 191.8:1. By the time that the Weimar government introduced the Rentenmark in November 1923, the exchange rate had risen to 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar. It comes as no surprise, then, that Hitler’s unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch of 8-9 November 1923 came at the height of hyperinflation; in the midst of such a staggering economic crisis, the NSDAP likely hoped that Weimar economic instability would be a launching pad for the attempted coup d’etat.

Assessing the causes and effects of the Weimar hyperinflation has been the subject of innumerable historical, sociological, and economic analyses, and there is far from a consensus among researchers on the short-term and long-term consequences of the astronomical price increases in 1923. One of the few areas of agreement among historians and economists is the recognition that the period of hyperinflation was part of a longer trend dating back to the start of the First World War. There has also been a shift away from the interpretation that the French invasion of the Ruhr on 11 January 1923 was the primary cause of hyperinflation; while this act certainly accelerated the the catastrophic decline in the value of the mark, the period of hyperinflation dates back at least to the fall of 1922, several months before French soldiers even set foot in Duisberg, Essen, and the other major industrial cities of the Ruhr. Eyck argued that an earlier event – the 24 June 1922 murder of foreign minister Walther Rathenau – could also be considered to be the “launching point” of Weimar hyperinflation:
But as great as was the impact of Rathenau’s death upon German domestic politics, it left an even greater mark upon the economic scene. Now the tumble of the mark could not be stopped. The dollar, still under 350 on the day of the murder, climbed to 670 by the end of July, to 2000 in August, and to 4500 by the end of October.

Left: Murdered German foreign minister Walter Rathenau

Diehard Anglophile Fraser was among those who early on suggested that the German government deliberately induced the period of hyperinflation, arguing that German finance officials “may perhaps have thought [emphasis in original] that this [inflation] was just a spectacular means of demonstrating to the Allies the impossibility of paying reparations.” While agreeing that the period of hyperinflation was “at least partly of their own making,” Evans dismissed the idea that there was a conscious effort to undermine the mark as a means of avoiding reparations payments. Craig was among those historians who understood the period of hyperinflation to owe its source to a variety of factors:
The troubles in which the country was involved were the result of the lost war and the treaty that was its price, and, if they were complicated by mistakes made by the republican governments, that contribution was insignificamt in comparison with the self-interest and irresponsibility of German business, which was known for its anti-republican posture.

Measuring the longer term effects of the years of hyperinflation is equally difficult, and it is important to avoid broad generalizations when discussing groups that may have most suffered during this time. Lacqueur held that “the middle classes who had invested their funds in state loans, shares accounts and such, like the pensioners and the working classes, suffered from the steep decline in the real value of their income.” Mommsen argued that hyperinflation also had a deleterious effect on wage earners, and that “this favored a gradual shift of power within the economy to the employers.” Widdig noted that postwar rent control policies made the financial crisis especially difficult for “those who depended on rental income.” Craig noted another pair of demographics especially hard hit by the period of hyperinflation:

The persons, however, who proved most vulnerable to the effects of the inflation were the sick and the young. The mounting cost of hospital care and the increase in doctors’ fees placed adequate medical treatment beyond the capacity of millions at a time when the ballooning price and frequent shortage of essential foodstuffs were causing widespread malnutrition and the reappearance of diseases that had been common during the worst days of the Allied blockade.

The analyses of those who gained or lost during the period of German hyperinflation is of critical concern to Weimar and NSDAP researchers, argued Kolb, given the events of the next decade:

It is of great importance since, in the opinion of many historians, a direct or indirect connection exists between the traumatic experience and social consequences of hyperinflation on the one hand and, on the other, the rise of National Socialism and Hitler’s victory. A direct connection, since the inflation turned part of the middle class into a proletariat, politically disoriented and susceptible to Nazism; and an indirect one, since during the world depression the German government dared not take the necessary measures to alleviate unemployment for fear of causing another inflation.

It was the worldwide Great Depression, however, that brought about both extreme economic catastrophe as well as political opportunities for extremist political parties in Weimar Germany. The causes of the economic collapse are the topic of another essay altogether, but of critical relevance to Weimar history was the New York stock exchange crash in 1929; investors – predominately American – who had deposited short term funds in German stocks and bonds suddenly withdrew their money to cover debts on Wall Street. Within months German firms began to declare bankruptcy, and the numbers of unemployed German workers began to skyrocket. From a level of 1.5 million in May 1928, unemployment rose to 3.1 million in September 1930, and peaked at about 5.5 million workers by July 1932. Over 30 percent of German workers were unemployed at the height of the Great Depression; Evans remarked that out-of-work Germans, however, were but a component of the larger picture of misery:

These terrifying figures told only part of the story. To begin with, many millions more workers only stayed in their jobs at a reduced rate, since employers cut hours and introduced short-time work in an attempt to adjust to the collapse in demand. Then many trained workers or apprentices had to accept menial and unskilled jobs because the jobs they were qualified for had disappeared…The problem seemed insoluble.

The collapse of the German economy created conditions ripe for those on the Weimar political extremes. The experiment in representative democracy, in the eyes of many Germans, seemed a dismal failure, and voters began to turn to groups whose presence in the Reichstag had previously been inconsequential.

Conclusions

There were inherent weaknesses in the political structure of the Weimar Republic that facilitated the rise to power of the NSDAP, and hindsight offers the modern observer plenty of areas in which the unintended consequences of constitutional provisions such as Article 48 came back to haunt the centrist creators of the Weimar Constitution. Yet it is important to remember that the unfortunate gambles of Franz von Papen and Paul von Hindenburg in 1933, the passage of the Reichstag Fire Decree, and the Enabling Act might never occurred had the German economy not gone into freefall as a result of the Great Depression.

From a mere 12 seats in the Reichstag in September 1928, the NSDAP’s fortunes grew with the continuing hardships of the Great Depression. The Nazi Party won 107 seats in the July 1930 elections, and climbed to 230 seats by March 1932. While it would be a logical fallacy to claim a cause-and-effect relationship between unemployment and Nazi gains in the Reichstag, it is clear that German voters had become disenchanted with the ability of the mainstream parties to address the economic woes of the nation. More importantly, while the unemployed themselves tended to be stronger supporters of the KDP, Hitler’s message clearly resonated across broad segments of the German electorate.

The Weimar Republic, created in the aftermath of the First World War with the idealistic hopes of creating a truly representative Germany after decades of authoritarian monarchy, was born in an environment of economic struggle. These economic woes continued to reappear in different forms throughout the duration of the 14-year republic, and even the so-called “Golden Years” of Gustav Stresseman seemed more like a reprieve between catastrophes. In the midst of unprecedented misery, the rantings of a certain ex-corporal that once seemed maniacal found receptive ears among many weary German voters.

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The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.
-- Maimonides

Book Review: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Burckhardt, Jacob
West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press, 2006, 254 pages

Swiss-born Jacob Burckhardt, with his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), attempted to expand the discourse on the late medieval city-states that dominated the Italian peninsula. Burckhardt described his work as a “history of civilization” rather than the traditional collection of narratives on great men and military battles; it is no surprise that this effort – history as it really was – came from a former student and protégé of Leopold von Ranke. The book covers topics as wide-ranging as music, etiquette, and gender relations, and Burckhardt skillfully switched throughout the text from microhistorical vignettes to sweeping vistas.

Burckhardt began the book with a section entitled “The State as a Work of Art,” which provided a political backdrop to the rest of the work. He surveyed the major rulers of the Renaissance city-states, concentrating largely on those of the 14th through 16th centuries. Like his contemporary Karl Marx, Burckhardt utilized a quasi-Hegelian analysis to describe the larger forces that, in his opinion, moved history. Unlike Marx, though, economic forces were not the primary causative agents; one might argue that Burckhardt was a proponent of dialectic culturalism, rather than the materialist orientation of his esteemed counterpart.

The author, while certainly well-read, nonetheless made a number of overgeneralizations that do not hold up well to closer scrutiny. He argued that “[a] popular radicalism in the form in which it is opposed to the monarchies of later times, is not to be found in the despotic states of the Renaissance”; this statement patently disregards such popular uprisings as the Ciompi revolt (although, admittedly, Florence was a nominal republic at the time). He also argued that “the deliberate adaptation of means to ends” was a uniquely Italian phenomenon, and that “no prince out of Italy had at that time a conception” of such pragmatic politics. This suggests a cultural bias on the part of Burckhardt, who ignored the many examples of non-Italian Machiavellianism in this period, such as that exhibited by Henry VIII in his decision to completely sever ties with Rome in 1534.

Burckhardt next argued, in his section entitled “The Development of the Individual,” that the Italian Renaissance was a period in which individuals no longer saw themselves as members of a particular “race, people, party, family, or corporation,” and that the “the ban laid upon human personality was dissolved.” Perhaps this may have been true for the writers, artists, and politicians that Burckhardt cited to bolster this argument, and the author may be correct in his identification of the Italian city-states as birthplaces of nascent individualism, but what may have been true for the social elites did not necessarily hold factual for the Renaissance-era masses of the Italian peninsula. The “wealth and culture” and “municipal freedom” that Burckhardt proposed as influences on the growth of individualism were largely the province of those at or near the top of the social hierarchy, and such devices as sumptuary laws were wielded by aristocrats with considerable effectiveness to limit the ability of lower classes to express individuality.

Left: Nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt

Burckhardt made a stronger argument for the cultural contributions of Renaissance Italy in the section entitled “The Revival of Antiquity.” The author postulated that it was not merely the reintroduction of classic forms and philosophies, but “its union with the genius of the Italian people” that led to this cultural regeneration and its subsequent influence on western European thought. This “modern Italian spirit” , argued Burckhardt, was a model for the rest of the Western world to emulate. He delineated in this section the vast contributions of the Italian humanists, and he believed that, unlike their northern European contemporaries, the Italians did not engage in “mere fragmentary imitation” of the classics but rather an active dedication to “the special growth and development of the Italian mind.” The only real weakness in this analysis is Burckhardt’s faith in sources that claim there was “nobody in Florence who could not read” during the Renaissance; the brilliance of a Dante or a Ficino, however, would be lost upon an illiterate peasant or a merchant with a rudimentary education.

The book’s next section, “The Discovery of the World and Man,” describes the scientific achievements of Renaissance Italians. Part of this Burckhardt attributed to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Mediterranean, in which Italians were exposed to Islamic, African, and Asian influences. Burckhardt, however, considered this to be a matter of geography; there is little mention of the role of commerce in the development of “mental impulses different from those which governed people of the North.” Of matters scientific, Burckhardt acknowledged a lack of expertise, saying that “no one is more conscious than the author of the defects in his knowledge on this point.” He spent the rest of this section developing an interesting argument that the Italian fascination with the beauty of the external world was, in itself, an influence on the development of scientific inquiry.

In his fifth section, which Burckhardt titled “Society and Festivals,” the author argued that “social intercourse in its highest and most perfect form now ignored all distinctions of caste,” although he qualified this broad generalization later in the same paragraph with the caveat that any “mediæval distinctions” that manifested themselves were “a means of maintaining equality with the aristocratic pretensions of the less advanced countries of Europe.” He also exhibited a romantic naiveté with regard to the relations between men and women in Renaissance Italy, making claims that “women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men” or that “there was no question of ‘woman’s rights’ or female emancipation, simply because the thing itself was a matter of course.” To back up these claims, Burckhardt cited the examples of such illustrious Italian nobles as Vittoria Colonna and Caterina Sforza, women whose experiences can hardly be called typical. While Burckhardt was certainly a product of his times, this section in particular suffers from a dated patriarchal bias.

Drawing of Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, by Michelangelo

Burckhardt, in the sixth and final section, turned his attention to “Morality and Religion,” and he began his analysis of Italian morality with the stern remonstrance that “the more plainly in these matters our evidence seems to speak, the more carefully must we refrain from unqualified assumptions and rash generalizations.” Yet the author frequently fell into the very trap with which he warned others, claiming that in Italy “marriage and its rights were more often and more deliberately trampled underfoot than anywhere else.” According to Burckhardt, the noble Italian woman “disposes of herself with a freedom unknown in Northern countries,” and that “after the briefest acquaintance with her future husband, the young wife quits the convent or the paternal roof.” To his credit, Burckhardt acknowledged that “we may… be misled by the fact that we have far fuller details on such matters here [Renaissance Italy] than elsewhere.” Nonetheless, he summed up Italian morality as a function of the uniquely individual nature of the Italian Renaissance: “the fundamental vice of this [Italian] character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism.”

This individualism, according to Burckhardt, also carried over to matters of religion. He believed that religion, to the highly individualistic Renaissance Italian, was an “altogether subjective” proposition. In addition, its close proximity and relations with “Byzantium and the Mohammedan peoples” led, in Italy, to a “dispassionate tolerance which weakened the ethnographical conception of a privileged Christendom.”

Burckhardt’s work, in all fairness, should be recognized as a pioneering effort; while the book has shortcomings, it significantly advanced historical discourse. He foreshadowed Braudel and the Annales school with his attempt to present what would later be referred to as “total history.” He also brought the analysis of cultural, philosophical, and intellectual history to a more prominent place in historiography. Finally, his ideas of the state as a work of art and the Renaissance trend of the rise of individualism set him apart from his contemporaries.

This is a previously unpublished book review. There are many online transcriptions of Burckhardt's seminal work, and here is one of the better Burckhardt translations.

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People without firmness of character love to make up a fate for themselves; that relieves them of the necessity of having their own will and of taking responsibility for themselves. -- Ivan Turgenev

Possible Return of Neo-Nazis to Toledo

A site that promotes itself as "The Best Pro-White Group in Kentucky" is announcing that the neo-Nazi group ANSWP will be rallying in Toledo August 17.

ANSWP stands for the American National Socialist Workers Party, and it is headed by Bill White, who was once one of the leading lights of the National Socialist Movement before the breakup of the NSM in 2006. White was also the architect of the failed 2005 rally that sparked the North Toledo riot.

Here is the text of the post from the website purporting to speak for the Kentucky branch of ANSWP:

N**gers, beware – the ANSWP is coming to your city on August 17th. People are getting sick of your primitive behavior. Unlike the average white too coward to speak up, the ANSWP are not them. We will march in your town and you won’t stop us.

Odd, though, that the group is picking a Friday for a protest, although there have been murmurings of another ANSWP rally in Michigan on Saturday, August 18. Perhaps the group is planning a mini-tour of the Midwest, and loading up their dingy minivans for a weekend full of race-baiting, roadside diners, and cheap motels.

Or perhaps this is just another of those moments of bluster and fascist bravado that never pan out. ANSWP rallies, in general, have managed to attract few attendees, as the majority of NSM members remained with the original group. White's online ANSWP Yahoo group lists 354 members, but there is no telling how many of those avatars are antifa or law enforcement keeping watch.

Typically ANSWP "events" consist of one- or two-man protests, or the passing out of flyers on streetcorners or in mailboxes. A much-ballyhooed ANSWP event in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine district failed after the disclosure that state leader Justin Boyer is wanted on an arrest warrant for domestic violence in the state of Washington. The word on the street is that White did not want to be seen with a pathetic turnouut, and called off the march.

At any rate, I will continue to pass along on this site any information that gets forwarded to me. Feel free to leave any additional information in the comments section.

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How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong -- because someday you will have been all of these.
-- George Washington Carver

"Crying Indian" Public Service Announcement, 1971

You know that you are a geezer if you can recall seeing this video on television:



I was a wee lad of seven when this came out, but it is one of those memories that is etched into my head. This is probably in part responsible for my compulsion to want to pick up trash when I see it on the ground.

Unfortunately, the Urban Legends website indicates that the star of the spot - "Chief" Iron Eyes Cody - was not of Native American extraction, and even the tear was faked.

Go figure...

Financial Rape - A Credit Card with 62.59% Interest

Left: Usurious "Tribute Gold MasterCard" summary of terms; click to enlarge details.

(Toledo, OH) A young person I know, who shall remain nameless, applied for and received his first major credit card. Upon closer inspection of the terms, though, I was shocked to find that First Bank of Delaware - through its agent CompuCredit Corporation - will be exacting at least 62.59 percent interest on this $500 Tribute Gold MasterCard.

CompuCredit describes itself as a "provider of financial products and services to the underserved market" and as having a corporate culture that is "focused on providing the underbanked with the credit they deserve."

The annual percentage rate on this preposterous credit card is 29.99 percent, and they tack on a whopping $85 annual fee. In addition, there is a $6.50 "account maintenance fee" per month, which is $78 per year.

Let's see. If this person only charged $250 worth of goods and services today, in 12 months they would be paying 65.2 percent interest just on the annual and monthly fees, plus 29.99 percent in actual interest. That becomes 94.19 percent interest on the $250 balance.

And then there are other assorted goodies, like the $35 late payment fee, the $35 overlimit fee, and the cash advance fee of 5 percent over and above the 29.99 percent basic rate.

In-frigging-credible.

Now, admittedly, this young person has little in the way of financial savvy, and there is an important lesson here in financial responsibility that needs to occur. Still, a part of me begins to question the point at which loans to people with little or no credit (or poor credit) become outrageously usurious.

This card seems to have gone far beyond the level of acceptable standards in consumer finance, and I hope that there will one day be a day of reckoning for those who fleece the unsuspecting and the financially naïve.

And - for those of you who just stumbled across this post - be sure to read the terms and conditions of every financial document you sign. There are far too many devious corporations like First Bank of Delaware and CompuCredit Corporation that will be more than happy to rip you off.

A Termite Tale

When I was a retail business owner I bought some units that were owned by another franchisee, and in passing they mentioned that I would want to "keep up the termite spraying" at one of the stores. Having never previously experienced the phenomeon of termite infestation, I filed this piece of information in the back of my head.

Unfortuately, I did not follow the advice, and I got a call from a panicked employee one day that the termites were swarming. When I got there I couldn't believe my eyes; the critters had infested the south wall of my building, and were buzzing all over the store. After $1,000 in repairs and two days being closed, we reopened, and I was much the wiser.

Homeowners and property owners need to keep aware of the dangers of termites and their ability to destroy a real estate investment. Follow the above link to learn more about ways in which you can take control of termites before they eat the wood that keeps your building together. This was a sponsored post.

On YouTube Debates and the Commodification of the Presidency

There has been much self-congratulatory hoopla in the blogosphere today in the aftermath of the first CNN/YouTube debate. I have seen euphoric phrases like "this is a watershed moment in American politics" and "the rise of virtual democracy" and "electronic citizen activism" and "the new politics" and other such pablum.

I did like Billiam the Snowman with the global warming question, though.

Yes, this was an opportunity for average citizens to be heard, and for politicians to be forced to take seriously the concerns expressed by these video participants. Yet ignored in much of the post-debate analyses was the certainty that the eventual winner of the 2008 presidential election will simply be the candidate who can extract the most campaign cash from his or her well-heeled donors.

Races for elective office at most levels of politics have degenerated into contests of cash-grabbing, and the concept of "buying" elective office is taken for granted by many Americans. No office, however, carries a higher price tag than that of the Presidency, a position that has become especially commodified in the last decade. Most of the major 2008 candidates have already foregone federal matching funds, knowing that the MSRP sticker for the next presidential election will likely be something on the order of $500 million dollars.

So while we twitter about "virtual democratization" during the warm afterglow of the first CNN/YouTube debate, let us not forget that the contestants are being financed in large part by corporations, political action committees, and groups whose agendas might not mirror those of last night's enthusiastic submitters of video questions.

Book Review: Understanding Imperial Russia

Raeff, Marc (translated by Arthur Goldhammer)
New York: Columbia University Press, 1984

Marc Raeff received his doctorate from Harvard in 1950, and from 1961 to 1988 he was a professor of Russian history at Columbia University. The author was one of the leading experts on pre-Revolutionary Russia, and his books remain important contributions in the historiography of Imperial Russia. Based on a series of Raeff’s lectures, Understanding Imperial Russia is the author’s attempt to describe some of the social and political forces that shaped the evolution of the Russian autocracy and, ultimately, led to the Empire’s downfall in 1917. The social and political forces at work in Russia, maintained Raeff, should be thought of as an ellipse, with the autocratic sovereign on one pole and Russian society on the opposite side of the ellipse. This concept of oppositional poles runs throughout Raeff’s work, and he uses this idea to describe the ways in which Russian society and the monarchy gradually pulled apart from one another.

The author began with an examination of mid-seventeenth century Muscovy, and he described a series of factors that led to late-century decline in Muscovite society. Chief among these, argued Raeff, was the religious schism between the Old Believers and ecclesiastical reformers led by Patriarch Nikon; this split created an isolated demographic subset in Russian society that became an “enormous human potential that was allowed to go to waste” until the nineteenth century. Raeff believed that seventeenth century rebellions – especially those in 1648, 1662, and 1682 – reflected deep economic and cultural unrest in Muscovite society, and that the resultant imperial repression forced increases in government expenditures and heavy tax burdens on Russian peasants. The rise of foreign trade, argued Raeff, brought an increased awareness of Western cultural norms, and led to a tendency by Russian elites to reject traditional values. Finally, noted the author, expansionist tendencies of seventeenth-century Russian monarchs – especially the extension of Muscovite dominion to the Ukraine – led to an infusion of Western values as Ukrainian nobles assimilated into the imperial hierarchy. Due to these factors, Raeff argued that interpretations of Peter the Great’s Westernization and modernization efforts as “revolutionary” fail to consider the historical context of earlier movements away from traditional Muscovite cultural and political customs.

Russian Tsar Peter the Great

Moreover, argued Raeff, Peter was not alone in his attempts to model a reformed Russia on Western and Central European models. Members of boyar families joined the Tsar in his modernization endeavors, as did members of the burgeoning service nobility, who owed their continued livelihood to Peter’s efforts. Other important, though often overlooked, contributors to the dispersion of the ideas of Westernization and modernization included army and navy officers, military provisioners, and other state suppliers.

Yet it was these very Westernization and modernization efforts, argued Raeff, which led to a furthering of the distance in the conceptual ellipse between the Tsar and the Russian population, and this took the form of “psychological insecurity” among members of the various social groups in eighteenth century Russia:

Should the culture of the elite be Russian (i.e., Muscovite) or European? Until this question was resolved, members of the ruling elite wavered between two worlds and two systems of value and hence felt psychologically insecure and intellectually in disarray. The ravages of this situation proved traumatic for many intelligent, cultivated, and enlightened individuals who saw clearly enough that Muscovite culture was done for and yet, even though they took on Western ways, ideas, and values, continued to feel different from other Europeans – to feel, in a word, Russian, if only by dint of their religion.

The 1825 Decembrist uprising, argued Raeff, has been viewed by many historians as “a definitive repudiation of the state by educated public opinion.” Despite the fact that this thinking might dovetail with his ellipse theory, Raeff remained skeptical that the Decembrists represented a full-blown breach between Russian society and the government. Instead, the rebellion symbolized “the end of attempts by the educated elite to carve out for itself a useful public role.” This began the rise of an alienated intelligentsia that would prove to be a segment of Russian society both influential and difficult for nineteenth-century Russian autocrats to reconcile.

Russian Tsar Nicholas I

Under Nicholas I, argued Raeff, there occurred an irreparable divide in the nobility. The Decembrist revolt, he maintained, “alienated a segment of the nobility from the government and raised again the old specter of tyranny and autocracy.” The growth of agriculture in the South – especially in grain – caused many nobles to drift away from the traditional centers of power in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Finally, noted Raeff, the growth of a professional bureaucratic class created a new social group that, conversely, rejected “the class into which they had been born” :

The result was a split in the nobility, which exacerbated the feeling of nobles living on their estates that they were cut off from the government, bottle up within their own families, confined to the provinces. The middling nobles felt more and more acutely that the conflict of interest had become irreconcilable and, worse, that they had been betrayed by their own brothers, who had gone over to the state: by and by, this feeling became a settled conviction. Relations between the governmental apparatus and the provincial nobility that lived by its ownership of land became increasingly acrimonious…

Following an approach that is both chronological and thematic, Raeff provided occasional footnotes in the text, but the emphasis in this work is on the theoretical models the author developed to explain trends in the history of imperial Russia. Included are categorized bibliographies of aspects of the Russian Empire as well as a useful chronological table of important dates, and readers will find valuable Raeff’s index to the book.

There is much to recommend in Understanding Imperial Russia, as the author’s willingness to reexamine long-held assumption about Russian history – as well as his ability to develop insightful explanations for seemingly disparate phenomena – makes this book an essential read for anyone desirous of understanding the period. Yet there are throughout the text a number of annoying factual errors, such as his crediting of the quote “Es ist der Geist ser sich den Körper baut” to Goethe (it was actually Schiller), or his comment that “the decree of February 18, 1762, whereby Peter II freed the nobility from the obligation to serve the state” (this was Peter III). Finally, there is a sense of disconnection in the text, as Raeff moved from theme to theme with the briefest of transitions. This makes Understanding Imperial Russia difficult to recommend to readers who lack a basic knowledge of Russian history, though students in the field would most certainly benefit from reading this challenging and perceptive text.

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We don't want lower bread prices, we don't want higher bread prices, we don't want unchanged bread prices - we want National-Socialist bread prices! -- Party speaker at a 1931 Nazi rally to German farmers, as recorded by Peter Drucker

On Grudgingly Becoming an iPod User

Despite my previous concerns about iPods and the decline in human interaction, I have become a member of the electronically isolated world. My wife picked up a 20 GB iPod on eBay for a ridiculously low price, and I now have the ability to create a soundtrack for every waking moment in my life (hyperbole alert).

Still, there is something to be said for both commercial-free media and the ability to listen to music that can inspire you. As I write this post, the random iPod generator switched from REM's "Radio Free Europe" to Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." Where else on the planet can you find this sort of variety?

And the iPod is certainly a more efficient use of my time than rummaging through my CDs to look for the music I crave, as my teenagers - who generally consider me to be quite clueless in most matters - nonetheless raid with annoying frequency my CD collection. I once owned every major release of the Beatles on CD, but at the present moment Revolver, Help!, and Let it Be have grown legs and disappeared.

Thus, it is with a combination of reluctance and anticipation that I join the rest of the world's iPoddians, but if I start seeing Neo and Morpheus skulking around in black leather trenchcoats, rambling about DNA and matrices, I'm out of here.

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Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Book Review: Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801-1881

Saunders, David
London: Longman, 1992, 386 pages

Russian Tsar Alexander I

David Saunders is a Professor of Russian history at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform reflects the author’s lengthy interest in the history of the Russian Empire. The period in question, argued Saunders, is less attractive to historians due to its lack of a “linear theme,” and he also suggested that Soviet-era scholars faced political pressure to avoid researching the idea that Romanov rulers ever sought practical solutions to the social and political problems of the Empire. Saunders also noted that he toyed with the idea of titling the book with the phrase “Reform, Reaction, and Reform” to illustrate the pendulum-like swings of political activity in Russia during the nineteenth century.

After a brief discussion of the legacies of the reigns of Catherine II and Paul I, Saunders began his analysis of the reign of Alexander I. In general Saunders mirrored traditional accounts of the “enigmatic Tsar,” illustrating the contradictions inherent in a liberal-minded monarch who also exhibited reactionary streaks. The author attributed Alexander’s inability to achieve substantial social and political reforms to the “sheer complexity of the social problems facing” the Russian monarch.

One of the factors cited by Saunders for the political stagnation of Alexander was the instability in a nation with a history of palace coups and assassinations, and the Tsar had only look at the fate of his own father to see how quickly political winds might change in St. Petersburg. Moreover, argued the author, Alexander came to the throne during the ascendancy of Napoleon, and this fact caused the Russian tsar to focus much of his time and energy on military matters. Finally, an important consideration in the evaluation of Alexander’s accomplishments, argued Saunders, was the relative backwardness of Russia in 1801. The Russian state, despite its historical reputation for an imperious bureaucracy, contained less than one-third as many civil servants as Prussia per capita. By 1800 only 70,00 students were receiving education in primary schools, and at best literacy rates in 1797 among Russians ten and over was slightly under seven percent of the entire population.

Alexander’s reign, though, should not be viewed as an abject failure simply because sweeping reforms never occurred, maintained Saunders. The author lauded Alexander’s four-tier education system in 1803-1804, especially in the “devolution” of power to local educational authorities. Alexander’s Free Agriculturalists Law of February 1803, which granted serfs the right to buy their freedom and to purchase land, while only benefiting some 47,000 serfs, nonetheless gave weight to the precedent that emancipated serfs needed land to survive. While Russia suffered considerable military setbacks during the Napoleonic campaigns, Saunders noted that Alexander nonetheless eventually triumphed over the French emperor, and he argued that Russian authority in 1815 “was so great that they could have imposed their blueprint for the post-war world on their allies.” Finally, while the constitutional reforms for Russia pondered by Alexander were not enacted, Saunders argued that Alexander gave momentum to the idea that there should be legal limits placed on Russian absolutism.

Portrait of the Decembrist revolt, 14 December 1825

The Decembrist uprising of 1825 provided Saunders material for an intriguing look at the transition from the reign of Alexander to Nicholas I. The author assigned some of the blame for the failed revolt in part on Alexander, both for his failure to make public the manifesto transferring succession rights from Konstantin to Nicholas as well as to the late tsar’s role in the “broadening of the country’s horizons and the growth of Russian self-confidence in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.” Alexander, argued Saunders, brought Russia fully into European affairs and promoted modernization and Western political traditions, but did not comprehend the level to which these actions would inspire domestic reformists and radicals.

Saunders argued that, while some historians have overstated the importance of the Decembrist revolt, the failed coup did bring lasting effects. Nicholas, noted the author, learned more about Russia in the months of investigations than other tsars had learned during the entirety of their reigns. Moreover, argued Saunders, the threat of revolution forced Nicholas to make some concessions, and the Decembrists brought into public view ideas that had largely remained below the surface of Russian politics. Finally, the Decembrists understood the directions in which Russia was moving, and their actions set an example for the “next generation of thinking Russians.”

Saunders took a somewhat contrarian position on the legacy of Nicholas II, whose reign has been roundly criticized by historians and contemporaries as repressive and belligerent:

Yet Nicholas was not a blind reactionary. Though hostile to dramatic change, he thought seriously about the country’s administrative and social structure. The energy he displayed at the beginning of his reign was far from wholly destructive. The investigation of the Decembrist uprising had positive as well as negative ends in view.

Nicholas, argued Saunders, showed a willingness to put order into Russian law, a subject in which his reformist predecessors had expressed interest. His acceptance of an 1846 statute for St. Petersburg became the basis for the general municipal reforms of Alexander II in 1870. Despite a historical legacy suggesting that Nicholas did little for the plight of the serfs, Saunders held that his reign saw some significant initiatives toward mollifying conditions for those in servitude; among the accomplishments of Nicholas I included an 1827-28 constraint on the right of the gentry to send serfs to Siberia, the 1834 reduction in serfs’ terms of military service from twenty-five to fifteen years, and 1845-46 regulations limiting the rights of the gentry to subject serfs to corporal punishment.

Russian Tsar Alexander II

Similarly, Saunders seemed less than willing to accept the historical legacy of Tsar Alexander II as the Great Emancipator. The Russian tsar was a cautious conservative, argued the author, who only begrudgingly came to recognize that serf emancipation was the only way to avoid social upheaval, and if Alexander II was truly a radical reformer, he would have immediately freed the serfs in the midst of the domestic crises following Russian losses in the Crimean War. Pont by point, Saunders addressed the precursors to emancipation often cited as evidence that Alexander II fully intended to free the serfs from the day of his coronation:

His speech to the representatives of the Moscow gentry in 1856 was tame, his creation of a secret committee in 1857 was the traditional way to sweep calls for change under the carpet, the Nazimov Receipt envisaged a form of emancipation that would have severely damaged the peasantry, the relaxation of censorship in January 1858 was short-lived and the provincial tour of 1858 represented yet another futile attempt to persuade nobles to accept a measure they were bent on resisting.

Moreover, argued Saunders, the eventual terms of emancipation mitigated the positive social effects associated with the freeing of the serfs; the author pointed to high rents paid by the “temporarily” obligated peasants to the gentry, the 49-year peasant mortgages to the state, and the practice of “trimming” peasant landholdings as evidence of the lack of benevolent intentions toward the serfs among the Tsar and his advisors.

The author organized the text in a thematic fashion, while following a roughly chronological approach to the individual chapters. The material contains extensive endnotes for each chapter, and Saunders provided a cross-referenced index that is quite comprehensive for the period covered in the book. Illustrations are limited to a handful of maps and a family tree of the Romanovs, and clearly the author’s focus was on providing historical summaries and an introduction to the historiographical debates surrounding the themes of the individual chapters. Much of the source material for Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform is from document collections and secondary texts, though Saunders made use some primary archival sources in his research.

Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform is ideal for advanced non-specialists and informed general readers, but casual students without much background in Russian history might get lost in this book. Still, the book is to be recommended especially for its inclusion of an excellent chapter on nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history, as well as for the author’s ability to weave throughout the text thematic threads like the evolution of Russian attitudes toward serf emancipation.

Random Acts of Bling

Sarakastic over at The Average Girl’s Guide to Being a Princess is running a promotion in which bloggers who leave comments can win free jewelry. Entitled "Random Acts of Bling," the promotion is part giveaway and all fun.

Follow one of the above links to learn more about the promotion, and how you might end up winning some jewelry. This week's bling is a 1.80 carat genuine amethyst pendant set in .925 sterling silver, complete with a 16″ .925 sterling silver chain. Sarakastic describes the jewelry as "sparkly," which I suppose is an excellent quality for bling. This was a sponsored post, but don't let that stop you from checking out the fun, frivolity, and finery at The Average Girl’s Guide to Being a Princess.

Tips on Succeeding With a Small Business

This is part of a series of posts in which I dispense with knowledge and wisdom I acquired in a decade of slugging it out in the trenches as a small business owner.

For almost the entirety of the 1990s I owned and operated a group of franchised restaurants, and in that period of time I made many mistakes. As a 25-year-old entrepreneur when I jumped out on my own, I was filled with energy, enthusiasm, and - unfortunately - a lack of real-life experience beyond restaurant daily operations.

Of course, it is through the process of error that we often find our greatest insights, and I hope to pass along some of the expensive lessons I learned along the way. With this opening caveat out of the way, here are some items related to the running of a small business that I believe every business owner should take to heart.

1. Develop a monthly budget and stick to it. There will be many temptations to spend ahead, using receipts from next month. Don't fall for the allure of all that cash in your account after a big weekend: if you are at your budget, the purchase will have to wait until next month, or come out of another category.

2. You will have - and likely already do have - employees who want to rob you blind. Don't delude yourself with the idea that your employees are somehow above all that. A wise man once told me: "What gets measured, gets treasured," and you need to make sure your employees know you are always watching. Complete unannounced inventories, random audits of the books and petty cash, and regular verification of every person on the payroll. Be especially vigilant with late-night help, as they can start to think the boss is a 9-5 person.

3. You cannot possibly support every donation request. There are more people looking for donations than your business can afford, and you will have to make tough choices, especially when your customers ask for your help. If you must donate to a group, avoid giving cash if possible; merchandise will cost you less, and a small gift certificate donated to the group will require a sale to be redeemed.

4. Never, ever, mess with the IRS. Many years ago I ran into a horrible cash flow crunch, and my panicky, short-term thinking led me to defer some IRS payroll deposits. Bad move. Not only did I open myself up for outrageous interest and penalties, but I was on the hook for that money another seven years after I sold my business, slowly paying every free nickel I had to get the IRS off my back. You NEVER want the IRS as a business partner, because they can padlock you, file levies and liens, and make your life miserable.

5. Be ruthless in your wage scales and salaries. Yes, you want to change the world, and you think your people are being paid below the going rate for your industry. However, if you start increasing wages to bring your business "in line" with competitors, all you will do in the short run is drive up your costs. You are a small business owner, right? In time you will be able to pay top wages, but for now you will have to be a hawk on keeping labor costs in line.

6. Do everything you can to keep customers happy, but realize that there are a few customers you can do without. In an ultra-competitive market, business owners fear the loss of even one paying customer. Unfortunately, this thinking gets in the way of making rational decisions with regard to problem customers. Some customers simply want to screw you every way they can, and their loyalty extends only as far as your naïveté. Rectify problems when they occur, but beware of customers who have learned that they can get lots of freebies by complaining at every visit or transaction (this is especially true in retail). Keep logs of customer complaints to help you spot con artists, and feel free to encourage the scammers to visit your less-savvy competitors.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself. -- John Ruskin

Saving More Money on Utility Bills

(Toledo, OH) Our second electric bill has arrived in this, the summer we have enacted a domestic ban on air conditioning in our home, and the results continue to be encouraging. Our electric consumption dropped from an average of 61 kilowatts per day in June 2006 to a 48 kilowatts per day in July 2007.

This represents a little more than a 20 percent reduction, or nearly 350 KW chopped off of our monthy usage.

We are on pace to save about $100 a month on electricity this summer, and - coupled with our decision to hang our laundry on the clothesline - we continue to stay ahead of our goal to save $500 on utilities this summer. We racked up some huge electric bills in August and September of 2006, so I anticipate even higher savings in the next two bills.

My worries about entering another summer of underemployment, though justified, have not matched reality. Between budget cutting, odd jobs, and a flurry of June blog ads, we have not had to dip into our savings.

Interesting Thread on Voting, IDs, and Voter Fraud

I do not wish to recap all of the interesting ideas being developed in this thread, especially since I have to crank out a lengthy essay and several smaller writing projects in the next seven days, but I enjoyed the banter in this exchange at Toledo Talk on voter fraud and IDs at ToledoTalk.com.

I weighed in with a few comments, mostly in the spirit of playing devil's advocate, or perhaps to assuage the latent libertarian and anarchist streaks in me. Anyways, read on and keep the exchange of ideas going.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

There are many people who, as dogs always bark at strangers, so also often condemn and despise what they do not understand. -- Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Rapid Rhetoric: LOCHETIC

This is an irregular feature - both in frequency and oddness - dedicated to a word I came across that I have never previously used.

lochetic (loh-KEH-tik) adj. lying in wait for prey; stalking; waiting in ambush.

Typically used to describe the behavior of insects, the word "lochetic" is derived from the Greek word lochos, meaning "ambush." One suspects that the word might also have uses in the description of human activity, as well.

Debut of News Site - "The Final Edition"

I received an email today from an anonymous source touting the launching of a news site called The Final Edition. The author requested anonymity in part because the site will feature news that might bring the operators harm from powerful figures.

With the motto of "1 Candle - 1 Journalist - 1 Flame," the developers of The Final Edition note that "Greed and political power never changes ... it simply changes hands and handlers."

I look forward to seeing what gets posted on the site. To address in advance any questions, I have no connection whatsoever with The Final Edition, and I am providing a link to the site out of curiosity and in the spirit of cooperation.

On Letting Go of Anger

About a decade ago I went through a series of personal and professional crises that turned my world upside down. In the course of that time a few people brought harm in a variety of forms to me and my family, and I developed a case of righteous indignation over events beyond my ability to control.

In one sense I lived something of a charmed life in my first three decades on this Earth, and I found myself ill-equipped to cope with major stressors. I had never experienced, for example, the death of a close relative, had never been fired from a job, and virtually every goal I set for myself I achieved.

Life, however, has a way of evening these things out.

In my anger I allowed myself to engage in the visualization of violent forms of retribution, usually involving the swinging of a Louisville Slugger at the sources of my rage. I did not want to commit murder, but I sure felt the urge to pay back a dose of the pain that I felt, delivered via polished ash to the rib cage of my enemies.

No Freudian analysis here, please. :-}

Yet at the same time this seething inner wrath took its toll, as I began to engage in unhealthy means of handling my resentment, not the least of which was using alcohol to temporarily extinguish the misery. Over time I also developed bleeding ulcers, which put me into this bizarre cycle that went something like this: depletion of red blood cells → headache → aspirin → more bleeding ulcers → more red blood cell depletion. It got to the point that my hemoglobin level fell to 6.9 gm/dl, which was less than half the red blood cells in a healthy adult male.

All due to my difficulties in coping with crises.

So I write this post, not to wallow in bygone miseries, but to reach out to readers who might be struggling with this same sort of destructive fury. There is much to be said for letting go of the anger, and actually forgiving those who have brought you harm. Moreover, from personal experience I can attest to the fact that holding on to deep resentments - no matter how justifiable - only serves to degrade your physical health and warp your mental outlook.

Do I still get angry? Most certainly. Are there moments when I think of these old sources of pain? Sure. The difference is that today I avoid letting anger run my life and dominate my thinking, and I recognize that walking around with pent-up rage over dormant, buried events is both unproductive and unhealthy.

Move on, friend, and let go of the anger before it eats away at you.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. -- William Faulkner

On Troop Surges, Trial Balloons, and Senseless Bloodshed

Iraqi boys examining the wreckage from a car bomb that killed a pedestrian and wounded five others in western Baghdad; photo courtesy of Fadhil Maliki/Associated Press

I read with a mixture of irritation and bemusement the idea being floated about in Washington about a possible new surge in U.S. troop levels in 2008. I have to admit that the Administration certainly exhibits a stubborn tenacity in supporting its poorly-conceived Iraq War plans, a quality I might even admire were not the stakes so high.

To help support the President in his efforts to build support for a troop increase - or to help drown out the escalating criticism by Congressional critics - General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a fairly rosy assessment of the current situation in Iraq and the merits of the so-called troop "surge."

"It will because what I'm hearing now is a sea change that is taking place in many places here," he replied. "It's no longer a matter of pushing al-Qaida out of Ramadi, for example, but rather — now that they have been pushed out — helping the local police and the local army have a chance to get their feet on the ground and set up their systems."

This comes only days after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki embarassed the Bush administration with his statement that "U.S. troops could leave anytime they wanted" and would be replaced by Iraqi police and soldiers if that scenario were to occur. An aide yesterday tried to clarify al-Maliki's comments, saying that the Prime Minister meant to say that the strengthening of Iraq's security forces would continue "side-by-side with the withdrawal."

Al-Maliki, of course, continues to struggle with a political dilemma, as he must walk a fine line to avoid being scene as either a puppet of the West or as a potential Iranian stooge. If and when the United States withdraws its troops, al-Maliki wants to be in a position to lead his country, and he is trying to keep his options open for either an American or Iranian hegemony.

Meanwhile, President Bush seems to have reached a decision on the war, appearing to want to roll the dice on a last-ditch military escalation to "win" in Iraq. Unfortunately, the United States already "won" the military battle in 2003, but U.S. troops have since been hunkered down in the middle of a low-grade civil war with dozens of armed factions who have a wide variety of political, religious, and economic objectives.

So the President stands behind a failed invasion based upon poor prewar intelligence and planning out of sheer stubbornness, either from a warped hope of salvaging his legacy or because he is too thickheaded to see any other options.

Or both.

Meanwhile U.S. troops and innocent Iraqi civilians continue to die as a result of this bloody debacle, a war that never should have been launched but one in which President Bush, mule-like, persists in plodding along the same dusty path, swatting flies with his metaphorical tail but seemingly incapable of choosing another road.

Book Review: Russia in the Eighteenth Century

Lentin, Antony
London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973, 139 pages

Left: Russian Tsar Peter I, also known as Peter the Great

Lentin is a Professor of History at the Open University in Buckinghamshire whose areas of specialization include eighteenth-century Russia. Lentin’s goal in producing this text was to offer a relatively short synthesis of Russian history from Peter the Great through Catherine the Great for non-specialists, and the book follows a chronological approach to the topic. While relying more on political and military history, the text nonetheless incorporates some elements of cultural, social, and economic history in its coverage of Russia’s emergence as a European power in the eighteenth century.

After a brief introduction that included an overview of events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lentin moved into an examination of the reign of Peter the Great, who the author described as “both the agent and symbol of change” from a Russia isolated from the West to an empire that was to become an integral part of European politics. The aftermath of Peter’s defeat in 1700 at the Battle of Narva to Swedish king Charles XII, noted Lentin, was an example of the Russian monarch’s ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances:

He lacked the spectacular flair or personal magnetism of Charles. But he had the qualities that ultimately brought complete success: boundless energy and resilience, realism, singlemindedness and enterprise, the ability to learn from his mistakes, to husband his resources, to await the opportune moment and to strike only after long and thorough preparation.

Russia was at war for nearly the entirety of Peter’s reign, and the fact that the Russian tsar was often occupied with military matters created what Lentin described as a “serious problem of continuity” in government. Peter created a nine-member Senate that was expected to rule in his absence, but Lentin argued that its complete subordination to the monarch – and conflicts with the existing prikazy system Peter inherited – meant that the Russian government became an even more cumbersome, inefficient bureaucracy. The Russian tsar then created in 1718 a system of Colleges to replace the prikazy, but this approach also bogged down in “procrastination and squabbling” between state officials and between foreigners and Russians. In response to these bureaucratic logjams, Peter created a network of officials known as fiskals, or secret government agents, whose responsibility it was to bypass bureaucrats to assist the Tsar in carrying out the business of government. Ultimately, though, Lentin argued that the government’s problems could be traced to corruption:

Even so corruption proved to be a seemingly ineradicable evil. Not only was it firmly rooted in Muscovite practice, but it was an inevitable consequence of the low salaries which lack of funds made necessary. Corruption was the lubricant which kept the creaking machinery of government in motion.

Lentin argued that Peter’s views on the Russian Orthodox Church “smacked of Lutheranism,” and that he viewed the Church as a divisive force in the modernization of Russia. By leaving the office of Patriarch vacant after the death of Adrian in 1700, and then by abolishing the office altogether in 1721, Peter diminished the role of the Church in the Empire. Lentin held that Peter transformed the Church into merely an “agency through which the state extended its control over the minds of its subjects.”

Lentin disagreed with the view of the reign of Peter the Great as a revolutionary figure, arguing that the Tsar acted more in the manner of a “catalyst, speeding up policies already slowly under way.” While reforming government and introducing elements of Westernization, Russia under Peter remained an autocratic regime. Still, admitted Lentin, Peter’s methods must have seemed “revolutionary in the eyes of the vast body of the nation,” especially those policies that came into conflict with traditional beliefs and practices.

By changing the Russian succession law and with his role in the 1718 death of Tsarevich Alexei, Peter doomed Russia to what Lentin referred to as the “Age of Palace-Revolutions,” which lasted from 1725 until 1762. Moreover, Lentin argued that the Imperial Guards – created by Peter to support the autocracy – turned out to be a “sword of Damocles to his successors.” The Semyonovsky and Preobrazhensky thus became agents of coups, and their support could make or break a given Russian monarch. This period saw rulers as diverse as the Germanophile Anna Ivanovna, the beloved Yelizaveta Petrovna, as well as Ivan IV and Peter III, tsars with obvious limitations.

Left: Russian Empress Yelizaveta Petrovna

Lentin, however, disagreed with traditional assessments of the period as “abysmal decline, or a stagnat lull between the reigns of Peter I and Catherine II.” The effects of the coups, argued Lentin, were far less than those outside of Russia might have believed, and he noted that the organizers of the revolutions were more concerned with obtaining patronage and power than in restructuring the government. Moreover, added the author, by mid-century the old and new nobilities formed a “virtually united homogeneous class, firmly wedded to autocracy.” In addition, Lentin noted that earlier assumptions about widespread economic decline during this period have not held up to closer scutiny, and he pointed to the growth in the metallurgical industry and the overall growth in exports to buttress this argument. Finally, Lentin pointed to the overall strong performance of the Russian military during the Seven Years’ War as another contradiction in the “abysmal decline” theory.

The lengthiest section in Lentin’s book examined the reign of Catherine the Great, beginning with a question as to how a “German upstart and usurper without a drop of Russian blood in her veins” could become one of the most heralded and successful of Russian rulers. Catherine II, argued Lentin, possessed the qualities of “sparkling intelligence, energy, boldness, and exceptional personal magnetism,” characteristics that – in conjunction with her shrewdly calculating nature – allowed her to succeed where other sovereigns might have failed.

Left: Catherine II of Russia, also known as Catherine the Great

Not surprisingly, Lentin maintained that Catherine’s greatest triumphs were in the sphere of foreign policy, and the author noted that the territorial gains during her reign were the greatest since Ivan the Terrible. The drive by the Empress to the Black Sea certainly created new economic opportunities, observed Lentin, but more important was the Russian rise to a position in Europe as “first among equals.” Catherine also showed a willingness to pursue and shed alliances based on what she perceived as the best interests of the state, and avoided the sort of political and diplomatic stasis that accompanies obdurate adherence to tradition.

The author did not shy away from examining the seeming contradiction between Catherine’s reputation as an enlightened monarch and the plight of Russian serfs. The population of serfs, he noted, nearly doubled during her reign, in part due to territorial expansion and also a function of Catherine’s tendency to reward favorites with “lavish distributions” of serfs and land. Like many interpreters of the legacy of Catherine the Great, Lentin argued that the Pugachev Rebellion was the turning point for the Empress, as any of her dreams of enlightened reform with regard to serfdom crumbled in the face of widespread peasant revolt.

The text provides little in the way of notes, with just an occasional asterisked comment next to items that need further elucidation. Lentin provided an eight-page bibliographical essay for further reading, and the book includes several sections with illustrations and portraits of historical figures. The index is adequate to the needs of the book, but lacks much in the way of cross-referencing. While prior knowledge of Russian history is not necessary, readers should be aware that Lentin frequently quotes in French from the contemporaneous documents, and keeping a French dictionary nearby would aid in comprehension.

Russia in the Eighteenth Century lives up to the billing of its straightforward title, providing a solid overview of the century that saw the empire of the Tsars rise to become one of the great powers of Europe. Lentin’s writing style is succinct and accessible to general readers and non-specialist scholars, and the book is an excellent source to begin a program of study into the history of modern Russia. Unfortunately, the text is out of print, although used copies can be found at online retailers, and the book is carried by many public and university libraries.

Rapid Rhetoric: PERGAMENEOUS

This is an irregular feature - both in frequency and oddness - dedicated to a word I came across that I have never previously used.

pergameneous (pehr-guh-MEE-nee-uhs) adj. pertaining to or resembling parchment.

"Pergameneous" is derived from the Latin word pergamena, meaning "parchment." The Latin word, in turn, traces its origin to the Greek city of Pergamon, which was a major source of parchment paper in classical times. The term "pergameneous" is occasionally used in biology to describe surfaces that resemble parchment in texture.

Review - Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers

Brave New Films, 2006, 75 minutes

There are documentary films that open the eyes to worlds one never knew existed. Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, though, brings to light a world that a lot of people know exists, but which is so disturbing that many folks would rather not hear about.

Directed by Robert Greenwald, the film tells the story of the corporations who profit from monopolistic and cartel-like practices in the pursuit of lucrative Defense Department contracts. The film also highlights American contractors killed and wounded in Iraq, the families of whom are bitter about their loved ones being misled and harmed by the companies for which they worked.

The shady business activities of such corporations as Halliburton and its former subsidiary KBR are fairly well known to Americans, but the film also profiles some less-well known contractors as CACI, Titan Corporation, and the Blackwater USA.

The film avoids overt partisanship, although in general the GOP does not come across particularly well. Well documented in the film is the idea that many contracts get awarded to corporations without competitive bidding, and that contracts often get awarded on a cost-plus basis. Greenwald captures such lunacy as contractors burning misordered or obsolete supplies since they face no penalty for billing the government, or KBR managers driving loaded Hummers, all fully paid for by the U.S. taxpayers.

Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers is an important film, and ought to be viewed by every thinking American, regardless of political affiliation, as the unsettling questions raised by the privatization of war affect all of us.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

It goes without saying that, provided it profits it, there is no infamy which will not be presented as moral by the ruling class. From the killing of millions of young men in war to the most infamous murder of the political opponent, there is no villany which could not be reconciled with the public conscience. -- Max Horkheimer

Whence Comes the Sun

(Toledo, OH) Dark clouds covered the evening sky, and a few minutes of much-needed rain fell. While I was traveling eastbound on I-280 over the Maumee River, though, the sun momentarily broke through the clouds.

The colors in the city reappeared for a few moments, blues and reds and yellows replacing shades of gray. Rays of light from the heavens illuminated the Midwestern urban setting, and then the sun disappeared, and all was grey again.

That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.

Oil refineries now appeared on the eastern horizon, and the flare from the burnoff lit the cloudy dusk with an alien glow. I stared ahead and tried not to think about renting an Orlando vacation home.

Yet More Thoughts on Improving Your Writing

This is part of a continuing series of posts on improving your writing.

Drill comma rules through your thick skull and keep practicing the use of commas. Yes, their uses can be confusing, but commas are an integral tool in the writer's toolbox. The best way to elevate your writing to a higher level is to grasp the proper use of punctuation, and comma abuse is a part of the sordid underbelly of bad writing. Visit a quality website such as Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) to learn more about the rules of comma use.

Invest in a quality thesaurus. The thesaurus that comes with Microsoft Word is pathetic, and those who wish to develop their writing skills need the right tools. Roget's Thesaurus is one of the best, and its unique cross-referencing system ensures that you always choose the correct word to convey your thoughts.

Write every day. No matter what project you are working on, it needs daily effort to get completed. Even if you are only writing a single sentence, you are making progress on that book, article, or poem.

Get involved with a writing community. I have learned more from other writers than I ever have from books or classes. Fellow writers are an incredible source of information, support, and inspiration, and they can provide you with critical feedback on your work to help you improve.

Know your audience. I remember one of the first lengthy articles I wrote for publication, and how much time and effort I put into the research. I submitted it to an editor, and he looked me in the eye and said: "This reads like a college research paper." And he was right - in my zeal to be impeccably factual, I neglected to make the article interesting for the reader. Don't use a ton of high-fallutin' words if you are writing for regular folks, and avoid using informal speech when composing an article for an academic journal.

Remember: writing is a learned skill. Certainly there are people for whom writing is an easier process, but with enough bananas and patience, I could teach an ape how to write coherent sentences. The more effort that you put into developing your skills, the better your writing will be.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. -- Thich Nhat Hanh

Greatest Pop, Rock, or Soul Rhythm Sections

The basic rhythm section - a drummer and a bass player - is the foundation of most of the popular music recorded over the last sixty years, and a killer rhythm section can make an otherwise average band something greater.

With these opening remarks, then, I am creating a list of what I consider to be the best rhythm sections in popular music over the span of the past six decades. Sorry, jazz fans: while I appreciate the genius of a Charles Mingus or Buddy Rich, I am not including jazz rhythm sections in this post. Yes, once again the jazz world gets snubbed by pop.

:-}

10. Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, Rolling Stones: While Mick and Keith grabbed the spotlight, the rhythm section of the Stones brought out the blues, funk, and soul roots of the band and created a gritty sound unlike any of the other British Invasion bands.

9. Paul Thomson and Bob Hardy, Franz Ferdinand. Sure, they are Scottish, and yes, they are post-millennial. So sue me; these cats just ooze funk and groove, and give the hard-edged guitars of Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy a surprisingly danceable substructure.

8. Tony Thompson and Bernard Edwards, Chic, Power Station, and countless side projects. These men practically defined the late 1970s disco sound, and Power Station would have been a lame Duran Duran lite without the driving, pounding rhythm they provided.

7. Doug Clifford and Stu Cook, Creedence Clearwater Revival/ Revisited. Often overlooked by John Fogerty's primal Bayou scream and vibrato-laden guitars, the rhythm section of CCR laid down some serious funkiness under the band's hard rocking surface.

6. Chad Smith and Flea, Red Hot Chili Peppers. You want heavy funk? They'll give it to you at 130 miles per hour, pal, and leave you sweating on the floor in an exhausted heap.

5. John Entwhistle and Keith Moon, The Who. My sentimental favorite, though I had to drop them a few pegs because of Moon's manic inconsistencies and occasional sloppiness. Still, when Moon wasn't blasted out of his mind, they were untouchable.

4. Lowell "Sly" Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, just about every reggae band not named Bob Marley and the Wailers. If ever a rhythm section seemed born at the hip, it would be Sly and Robbie. I once saw them playing with Black Uhuru, and the playing of the Rhythm Twins was like nothing I had ever heard.

3. Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, Cream. Bruce was about the only bassist in the world who could hold his own with the inimitable Ginger Baker. Very heavy blues, but these musicians were masters at their craft.

2. The Funk Brothers, everything that was worthy out of Motown Records. Too many members to list, but James Jamerson (bass), Benny Benjamin, Uriel Jones, and Richard "Pistol" Allen (drums) are the most important of the Motown rhythmists. Unsung heroes who truly helped create the sound that put Detroit on the musical map in the 1960s.

1. John Bonham and John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin. Not my personal favorites, but undoubtedly these two were both virtuosos and - more importantly - created an unforgettable heavy sound that has been imitated by thousands of bands in many genres for almost four decades. They probably belong at the top of the list simply on the strength of their work on "When the Levee Breaks," as that cascading cannon-masquerading-as-drums sound has been sampled on almost every rap album recorded.

All right, let the angry comments begin over rhythm sections I have snubbed.

Rapid Rhetoric: HARUSPEX

This is an irregular feature - both in frequency and oddness - dedicated to a word I came across that I have never previously used.

haruspex (hah-RUH-speks or HAH-ruh-speks) n. a soothsayer, in particular one who practices the art of divination through the use of the entrails of a sacrificed animal.

The word haruspex is partly of Latin origin, from the Latin specere ("to look at"), and refers to a Roman or Etruscan priest who interpreted the will of the gods by examining the livers, spleens, and entrails of sacrificed animals, especially sheep and poultry. The plural form of the word is "haruspices," and the practice itself is known as "haruspicy."

From the excellent site on haruspicy developed by John Opsopaus:

"Haruspices" (diviners) from Etruria were consulted privately throughout the history of the Roman Empire. The Roman Senate also held haruspicy in the highest regard and consulted haruspices before all important state decisions. The emperor Claudius was a student of Etruscan language and learning, and created a "college" of 60 haruspices that existed until the beginning of the fifth century AD. In 408 they offered their services to Pompeianus, the Prefect of Rome, to save the city from the Goths; Innocent, the Christian bishop, reluctantly agreed, so long as the rites were kept secret. It is likely that in the end the rites were not performed; in any case Rome fell. The open practice of "The Etruscan Discipline" continued into the sixth century, but disappeared after that.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. -- Edward R. Murrow

Book Review: The Crimean War, 1853-1856

Baumgart, Winfried
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 244 pages

The Crimean War is perhaps one of the least studied and most poorly understood of European conflicts, in part due to the emphasis by historians of the war to focus on military action in and around the Crimean Peninsula. There were, of course, significant areas of fighting in the Baltic, the Far East, and along the Danube watershed, and Baumgart’s The Crimean War traces the evolution of the Crimean War and its aftermath within the context of its widespread zones of conflict. Moreover, Baumgart argues that the Crimean War debunks the myth of the Congress of Vienna as creating “the peace that lasted,” and suggests that this conflict had the potential to become the first world war some six decades before the beginning of World War I.

While Baumgart demonstrates an emphasis on military and diplomatic history, this book is far from the sort of narrowly-focused tome that one expects to find in a book on the history of warfare. Throughout the text are sections on social, technological, and epidemiological history; the author’s emphasis on the deadly cholera and typhus epidemics – which killed more soldiers than any other cause – makes this text stand apart from other military histories of the war. Endnotes are provided following each chapter, and Baumgart included a 14-page annotated bibliography for further reading on specific topics related to the Crimean War. The cross-referenced general and bibliographical indices are quite thorough, and this reviewer was unable to find a relevant topic or source not covered in an index.

Baumgart drew on a wide variety of Russian, British, French, Prussian, and Austrian sources for his account, avoiding the trap of documentary bias by relying too heavily on materials from only one of the belligerents. The text, though, is woefully short on primary sources from Ottoman officials, for which the author claims that “very little research has been done on the Turkish army during the Crimean War.” Finally, the author provided useful maps and diagrams for the reader that assist in understanding troop movements, international borders, and the geography of specific battles in the Crimean War.

Baumgart delineated “three main layers” of causative factors leading to the outbreak of hostilities in the Crimean War, all of which revolved around the so-called Eastern Question. The first of these is what the author described as the “internal decay” of the Ottoman Empire that struggled to maintain hegemony over a widely-dispersed collection of lands in which the Turks made up only one-third of the imperial population; Baumgart noted that the emergence of the janissaries as a “state within a state” – and their subsequent purge during the 1826 Auspicious Incident - left the Ottoman Empire without a reliable domestic security force. Baumgart pointed to rising nationalism among the ethnic peoples of the Balkans as another significant contributor to what would become the Crimean War, as groups such as the Serbs, the Greeks, and the Romanians began wresting autonomy from the Sultan in the early nineteenth century. Finally, Baumgart argued that increasing interventionism by the European great powers created a scenario ripe for international conflict in the decades leading up to the Crimean War.

Portrait of Russian Tsar Nicholas I

Baumgart downplays the role of religious issues as contributing factors in the outbreak of the Crimean War, differing from many earlier historians. Much has been made by traditional accounts of the war of the disputes between France and Russia over the status of Christians in the Ottoman Empire and control over holy sites in the Levant. Pointing to documents written in the Tsar’s own hand, Baumgart argued that religious issues for Nicholas I were “mere camouflage” for his real aims, which were mainly geopolitical and expansionist in nature. Chief among these Russian goals, the author maintained, was the expression of Russian hegemony in the Danubian Principalities, which thus made the Crimean War of paramount concern to Austria, a nation recently recovered from the instability of the Revolutions of 1848 and for whom stability in the Balkans and Central Europe was an overriding modus operandi. Baumgart also disputed the notion that religious protection for Christians in the Ottoman Empire was a major concern for Napoleon III, and he argued that the French emperor merely wanted to exploit the crisis for his own “ulterior motives.” These included gaining the support of the Catholic Church to help legitimize his new status as a monarch and currying favor with the British by supporting their efforts to stabilize the Levant as a strategic region in international trade routes. Moreover, noted Baumgart, a principal aim of Napoleon III throughout his reign was the revision of the balance of power established at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, and he hoped to use the Crimean War as a tool to improve the French position in the European power structure.

There was a moment in time, argued Baumgart, in which a swift Russian response in the early military engagements could have brought about markedly different outcomes in what became known as the Crimean War. The author believes that the reluctance to press the advantage by Russian field marshal Ivan Fedorovich Paskevich ultimately cost Nicholas I the war:

The Danubian campaign, especially the months of January to June 1854, was characterized by hesitation and indecision, the Tsar in St. Petersburg constantly goading his “father-commander” into action with innumerable letters, Paskevich in return always expressing doubts and especially fear of Austrian intervention, more or less sabotaging the commands or rather the pleas of the Tsar.

Moreover, maintained Baumgart, quick action could have forced the Allies to be on the defensive, and he laid out the following hypothetical scenario:

It may be safely said that the Russian army would, without Paskevich, have crossed the Danube more quickly, besieged the Turkish fortresses south of the river, swept down the Balkans towards Constantinople, and there dictated peace terms. As it was, he was responsible for raising the siege at Sillistria and, probably pretending to have received a wound, left his army and returned to Warsaw.

Florence Nightingale, nurse and statistician

Baumgart noted that the Crimean War was notable for many differences from then-traditional warfare, and he developed a convincing case that this conflict should be considered the first truly modern war. The author included material on the efforts of Florence Nightingale and the group of nurses that accompanied her to improve sanitation and environmental conditions in the British military hospitals, noting that in a matter of months the mortality rate among the wounded showed remarkable decreases. Baumgart also described the work of photographers Roger Fenton and James Robertson, who achieved fame as the first war photographers. While noting the presence of the telegraph as an emerging mode of communication, though, Baumgart’s work would have benefited from a lengthier analysis of the power of instantaneous communication as a revolutionary military tool.

It is as a work of military and diplomatic history that Baumgart’s The Crimean War most excels, and the author provided well-documented details on the struggles faced by generals and diplomats. The meticulously-organized text can be used as a ready reference, as Baumgart provides useful subheadings throughout that make identification of individual topics a simple matter. While specialists in nineteenth-century European warfare might find the book to be lacking in some primary material, this text is an excellent introduction to the Crimean War for non-specialist historians as well as general readers. Finally, in light of recent bungled military campaigns in the Middle East, a reading of The Crimean War might be a wise recommendation for those who make decisions on invading sovereign nations, as Baumgart’s inclusion of Sir Robert Morier’s summation of the Crimean War as a “perfectly useless” conflict has eerie parallels in 2007.

Book Review - The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire

Wheatcroft, Andrew

New York: Viking Press, 384 pages

Wheatcroft is a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Scotland’s University of Stirling, and one of his areas of specialization is in the textual and graphic presentation of the Habsburg dynasty. He has published numerous books related to the historical representation of intellectual thought in print and graphic media. In The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire Wheatcroft traced the lineage of the Habsburg dynasty from Rudolf I through the 1918 Finis Austriae and continued up to the 1993 wedding of Archduke Karl to Francesca, the daughter of Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemizza.

The author attempted to create more than a mere list of rulers and domains, but rather a cohesive narrative that captured the essence of the Habsburg mentalité and legacy. Of paramount concern to Wheatcroft was source material that contained textual and visual representations of Habsburg figures. Reminiscent of the concepts of self-fashioning developed by Stephen Greenblatt, the author argued that Habsburg rulers actively created and recreated their public personae, keeping eyes on both history and posterity. The result was a book that provides a sympathetic – but not sycophantic – examination of the House of Habsburg within a context that is both impressionistic and analytical.

The text follows a chronological approach, with chapters that revolve around a particular theme derived from noteworthy Habsburg personages. Accompanying the text are several sections of paintings and photographs covering over 600 years of Hapsburg lineage, which provide readers with visual representations of the textual analysis. One unfortunate problem with the inclusion of these beautiful images is likely an inherent editorial decision based on expediency; readers must search through the various image groupings to find the particular material being discussed. Still, one might first peruse the illustrations - gathering an impressionistic overview at the outset – and then delve into the text. The author provided footnotes throughout the book, included a 21-page bibliography, and produced detailed family trees to follow the sometimes-convoluted lineage of the various branches of the Habsburgs.

Left: Habsburg heraldry

As an avowed anti-monarchist, a social historian, and one who bristles at the mere hint of elitism and aristocracy, this reviewer approached The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire with no small degree of disdain. After all – how many texts on dead European monarchs does the world really need? Yet Wheatcroft’s work neatly avoids succumbing to the temptation of aristocratic glorification, and the author developed convincing arguments for the historicist assessments of the Habsburg rulers he profiled.

One of the Habsburgian themes explored by Wheatcroft was the concept of a universal emperor, in which the House of Habsburg (through its control over the title of Holy Roman Emperor) would be able to fulfill the Divine admonition in the Reformatio Sigismundi to “prepare the way for the Divine Order.” The Habsburgs thus viewed their status as the foremost European aristocratic house to be of Divine will, and that their mission to extend Habsburg rule over Europe and beyond to possess God’s blessing. Wheatcroft argued that the Habsburg ideal of universal emperor first became manifest with the ascension of Maximilian I as HRE in 1493; this was most evident in his decision to assume the title of Elected Roman Emperor (Erwählter Römischer Kaiser), ending the custom that the Holy Roman Emperor was required to be crowned by the pope. Wheatcroft also included a number of passages from Maximilian’s autobiographical works that demonstrate that the Emperor was keenly involved with and aware of the effort to create an image of Maximilian as an annointed ruler with a saintly lineage who would bring order to the world.

Left: Medallion of the Order of the Golden Fleece

The preoccupation of the Habsburgs with the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece is another theme dissected by Wheatcroft, and the monarch most closely associated with the Golden Fleece was Charles V. The order was founded in 1430 by Duke Philip III of Burgundy as a means to legitimize his efforts to elevate his position to that of a king, and sovereignty of the Order passed to the Habsburgs with the marriage between Habsburg Archduke Maximilian to Mary of Burgundy in 1477. Wheacroft argued that the order was conceived as an organization that blended classical and Christian elements in its textual and artistic symbolism:

The golden ram stood for the simple ideals of chivalry and presented them as an answer to the manifold exigencies of a chaotic world. The knights, like the Round Table of the Arthurian legend, would reverse the spirit of discord, would begin to restore order to a world where the forces of the Antichrist were about to conquer. (Images of the Antichrist were now often depicted with the features of the Turk, seen as coarse and cruel). These heroes, the new Argonauts, were to be the most selfless, loyal, and dedictaed men in Christendom and this new unifying power would emerge from the dukedom of Burgundy, always foremost in chivalry.

The Habsburgs, argued Wheatcroft, “expressed their mission and their objectives obliquely, through a kind of code…exchanged between those who readily understood its meaning,” and the author provided numerous examples of this Habsburgian use of images and text that functioned as a sort of dynastic cryptography. Frederick III coined the acronym AEIOU (“Alles Erdreich Ist Österreich Untertan,” or “The whole world is subject to Austria”) that appears on family crests, minted coins, and royal buildings. Upon his election as Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece, Charles V created a personal emblem with two classical columns rising from the sea with the phrase Plus Ultra (“still further”); this was seen as a transcendent symbols that defied the ancient Greek belief that ne plus ultra was etched onto the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar) as a warning to ships not to sail further to the west. Leopold I frequently commissioned artwork that drew a linkage between his reign and Divine blessing, and his artists placed the monogram of Christ (IHS – In Hoc Signo) in portraits to reiterate this desired connection. Emperor Franz Joseph developed the acronym KK (also written k.u.k or k-k for “kaiserlich und königlich”) to denote the union between Austria and Hungary after 1867.

Left: Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I

Wheatcroft’s text serves as both a useful introduction to the House of Habsburg as well as an important reinterpretation of the dynasty, and belongs on the shelves of scholars and knowledgeable general readers, although undergraduates might struggle with the more complex intellectual themes; some basic familiarity with early modern and modern European history would be helpful in the course of reading this text. One leaves The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire not with a collection of facts, dates, and trivia, but rather with heightened sense of the intellectual dynamics that shaped the formation of the evolving Habsburgian image, as well as a more literary understanding of one of Europe’s most enduring aristocratic families. Traditional scholars might disagree with some of Wheatcroft’s interpretations, but his book challenges readers to examine the active process by which the Habsburgs sought to manipulate their corporate image.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
-- Horace Mann

All You Need is Hard, Cold Cash: On Luvs, Beatles, and Crass Commercialism

I grew up listening to The Beatles, being far too young to have attended a concert but old enough for their music to have been part of the soundtrack of my youth. Thus it was with sadness I read that Luvs diapers will soon be using the Beatles song "All You Need is Love" to sell excrement-collecting undergarments.

Luvs, of course, is not the first product to feature a Beatles song in its ads, as Nike's purchase of the rights to "Revolution" opened the floodgates for cashing in on the appeal of the band's music to the Baby Boomer and Generation X demographics.

Yet there is something especially galling about the appropriation of a song with such universal idealism; one might, in a moment of jaded cynicism, take issue with the optimistic sentiments of "All You Need Is Love," but John Lennon wrote the song with an eye toward making the world a better place.

Lennon was a flawed man, to be sure, but in his all-too-short life he tried to live up to his ideals, and more importantly his work inspired many other people to live lives of service to humanity. I daresay Lennon would never approve of using this song in such a base and ridiculous manner.

Idealism takes a sharp dagger in the side with the Luvs campaign, and I am sure that I will never think of the song "All You Need Is Love" in the same way again. Thanks, Madison Avenue and Proctor & Gamble, you soulless bastards.

Calling for a General Strike against the Iraq War

As a historian I am always intrigued by the parallels between the present and the past. While doing some research on the topic of general strikes, I came across a website touting the same concept, but with a timely twist: a general strike for peace.

Fed up with a Bush administration that stubbornly and stupidly stands behind its failed war, and a spineless Congress that refuses to take any meaningful action against the Iraq War, the organizers of this protest are calling for a nationwide general strike on September 21, 2007:

On 21 September 2007 we will not work and we will not spend. We will demonstrate against war. Join us. Show your support for peace. Don’t work. Don’t spend.

Yes, some of you will have some difficulty embracing a tactic of political expression that has traditionally been used by groups on the left. It is not necessary for you to grab a placard and picket the White House; just stay home that day and pray, meditate, or perhaps donate your time to support injured veterans.

I think the time is right to send such a statement to Washington, as an overwhelming majority of Americans are now against the Iraq war. Moreover, even diehard Republican politicians are calling for President Bush to admit this colossal mistake and bring home the troops.

Finally, the ultimate way to get the attention of a nation's leaders is in the pocketbook. If millions of Americans express their discontent with the bloody debacle known as the Iraq War by not working and not spending, a loud message will be delivered to President Bush and Congress.

Mark it on your calendar and spread the word.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others, however humble.
-- Washington Irving

Rapid Rhetoric: KARROO

This is an irregular feature - both in frequency and oddness - dedicated to a word I came across that I have never previously used.

karroo (kah-ROO) n. a semiarid, terrace-like plateau found in regions of South Africa.

The term "karroo" can also be used as a proper noun. Karoo regions of South Africa are divided into the North Karroo - which is along the Orange River - the Great Karroo, and the Little Karroo, which is near the Atlantic coast.

The word karroo is derived from the Khoi word karusa, meaning "dry" or "barren."

Here Comes the Heat

(Toledo, OH) We in Northwest Ohio are gearing up for what should be the hottest day of the summer so far. The deadly heat wave out West that has set records for temperatures will be arriving here today.

The forecast is calling for a high temperature of 97, with heat index radings in the 100s. The record high for July 8 in these parts is 101 degrees Fahrenheit, which we are unlikely to hit. The heat will also exacerbate conditions from the 2007 drought, which has hurt Ohio farmers. In my area, June precipitation was down over two inches from normal, and we recieved only 42% of the average rainfall for the month. This comes after a dry May, which saw this area receiving just .66 inches of rain in amonth that normally receives on average about 3.5 inches.

Anyways, if you are in an area with high temperatures today, be sure to drink plenty of water, stay out of the direct sun as much as possible, and limit strenuous activities until this heat wave passes.

I Have Been Virtually Tagged

I was tagged by KLKatz at the US History Site Blog, and I am keeping alive this virtual game of tag. This is actually of great benefit to me, as the 90-degree heat 'round here amidst our domestic ban on air conditioning this summer has me in a lazy mood, and I was without anything worthwhile to post.

These are the rules:

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

Here, then, are random facts about me that have not already been covered in my blog biography.

1. I have a permanent cap on one of my front teeth after driving my bicycle into a parked car in 1977, flying over the handlebars, and smashing my face on said stationary vehicle. Don't ask.

2. A friend once gave me Ralph Nader's personal fax number. I have never used it.

3. I once played guitar in a rock band called "The Bottom Line," composed entirely of fellow employees from Joe Louis Arena. Our biggest gig was playing a corporate function at the Fox Theater in 1989; I then moved to Toledo and my career as a rock star ended.

4. I can crack nearly every joint in my body.

5. I once engaged in dueling karaoke with Tom Noe, he of Coingate fame. It was at a Father-Daughter dance at the school at which both of our daughters attended. I sang "Yesterday," by the Beatles, and I received a solid round of applause (yes, I rock on karaoke). Noe, though, was quite the karaoke tactician; this was weeks after 9/11, and he chose to sing "New York, New York." I still think I was the better singer, but the crafty Tom Noe's choice of songs brought down the house.

6. I was born to parents who were Baptist and Episcopalian, and who settled on Presbyterianism as a compromise. I attended a Lutheran school for a few years, and then went to a Catholic high school. I dabbled in Eastern religions during the mid-1980s, curious with the mysticism in some interpretations of Buddhism and Taoism. My wife and I were married in a Unitarian-Universalist Church, I converted to Catholicism in 1987, and I frequently get accused by neo-Nazis of being a Jew ("HistoryKike" is their favorite attempt at an attack... oy vey!)

7. After losing my wallet while living in Texas, I once talked my way onto a plane at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport with no ID (I did have my ticket). This, of course, was pre-9/11, but I still consider this my finest moment of smooth-talking.

8. At the age of 16 I received a ticket for riding on the trunk of a moving vehicle. I didn't mind the fine, but I thought it was total bullshit that I got two points on my still-new driving record for a non-driving offense.

Now that I have emptied my closet of dusty skeletons, I will now tag the following bloggers: Hooda Thunkit, Stephanie, Humboldt's Clio, Historychic, Screaming Nutcase, The Man with the Muck-rake, MP, and Microdot.

Another Good Dog Finds a Happy Home

Pictured on your left is Mortimer J. Snerd, better known as "Morty," who is a miniature black poodle we have been fostering for the past month. We had to bid a tearful goodbye to Morty today, as he was formally adopted by a kind family in Perrysburg.

This goodbye was especially difficult for us, as Morty bonded well with our family. He loves being around people, and would follow me all over the house when I was home alone. Morty especially loved my wife, though, and he used to sit at the window and keep an eye out for her if she left to run errands.

Still, it is rewarding to know that we helped keep another dog from being euthanized, and also that we helped bring together a loving family and a dog. We have been working with Planned Pethood, an all-volunteer organization that rescues dogs and cats picked up by county agencies in Northwest Ohio.

For more information on pet adoption, see The Toledo Area Humane Society, Planned Pethood, or Petfinder.com.

Book Review: A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

Radishchev, Alexander; translated by Leo Wiener, with an introduction by Roderick Page Taylor

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, 286 pages

Born into a minor noble family in Moscow in 1749, Alexander Radishchev studied at the University of Leipzig and returned to Russia in 1771, carrying with him the ideals of the Enlightenment. Radishchev worked on A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow over a period of at least ten years, beginning in 1780. Despite the professed interest of Empress Catherine II in the writings of the philosophes, and her desire to create an image of herself as an enlightened monarch, post-Pugachev Russia was a nation in which radical concepts of equality and liberty were seen as dangerous quantities. Radishchev decided to publish A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in an anonymous fashion, though authorities quickly learned the identity of the author. Though Catherine commuted Radishchev’s death sentence, the writer spent six years in Siberian exile for this text, and the despondent Radishchev later committed suicide following what he saw as his failure to spark Russian reforms.

The book should be viewed as a series of parables and critiques of Russian society, rather than as a literal travel narrative. At each “stop” on the journey – which mirrored similar real-life trips that Radishchev took – the author engaged in conversations with fellow travelers, manorial serfs, and government officials. Perhaps conscious that his ideas would be seen as threatening by the imperial government, Radishchev used a variety of literary devices to distance himself from authorship.

In a lengthy passage criticizing the Russian Table of Ranks established by Peter the Great, Radishchev created characters who he “overhears” engaging in a heated debate about this despised feature of civil life. In a section critical of the vapid Muscovite aristocracy, Radishchev created a grieving father bidding goodbye to his military-bound sons, imploring them not to become like the decadent nobles with whom they were soon to associate. As narrator, Radishchev described finding on the ground a lengthy essay entitled “A Project for the Future,” which was equal parts an anti-tyrannical polemic and a vision of a future Russia. One of the most damning passages on the evils of serfdom was contained in a poem that a companion at Tver supposedly handed to Radishchev to read. It is unclear if Radishchev believed that these devices would allow him to evade the censors, but the technique is reminiscent of Montesquieu’s similar techniques in Persian Letters.

Left: Aleksandr Nikolayevich Radishchev

The text contains vignettes of people Radishchev encountered in his travels, and serve readers as indicators of social conditions in the regions the author described (or at least as examples of rural life as viewed by a Russian aristocrat). Admittedly, Radishchev created his rhetorical portraits with an eye toward illuminating his ideas, but passages such as the following help readers understand life in rural settings in eighteenth-century Russia; the author is describing the new wife of an acquaintance with questionable business dealings:

Praskov’ya Denisovna, his bride, is white and red. Her teeth are as black as coal. Her eyebrows are as thin as thread and blacker than soot. In company she sits with down cast eyes, but all day long she never leaves the window, where she stares at all the men. In the evening she stands at the gate. She has one black eye – a first-day present from her beloved bridegroom; if you are quick witted, you will know what for.

While inspired by the American Revolution and its leaders - especially George Washington, who Radishchev described as the very embodiment of Liberty – the author attacked the hypocrisy of a United States that promoted freedom and equality while simultaneously enslaving people of African descent. Radishchev’s condemnation of American slavery works as both an abolitionist jeremiad and a historical overview of the forced bondage of Africans by Europeans in the New World, closing with a prophetic admonition of the failure by Russians to heed the warning:

Having massacred the Indians at a swoop, the raging Europeans, the preachers of peace in the name of the God of truth, the teachers of meekness and charity, by acquiring slaves through purchase have grafted the cold-blooded murder of slavery upon the root of the furious murder of conquest. These unfortunate victims from the torrid banks of the Niger and Senegal, torn from their homes and families, transported to foreign lands, groaning under the heavy yoke of authority, tear up the fertile fields of the America that scorns their labors. And we call this land of destruction happy because its meadows are not overgrown with thorns and its fields abound in plants of every variety. We call that country happy, where one hundred haughty citizens wallow in luxury, while thousands have no secure subsistence nor proper protection against heat and cold. Oh, that those prosperous lands might become wilderness again! Oh, that thorns and thistles might send their roots down deep and destroy all the precious products of America! Tremble, my beloved ones, lest they say of you: “Change the name, and the story may be told of you.”

Portrait of Russian empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) by Alexei Antropov

One of the most intriguing aspects of this particular edition of A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is the inclusion by the editors of the text of notes composed by Empress Catherine II. While Catherine certainly was a writer in her own right, and something of a literary critic, it says something of the power of Radishchev’s words – and their perceived danger to Russian society – that the Russian monarch herself undertook a page-by page critique of the text. Radishchev, she declared in the introduction of her critique, was a writer “infected and full of the French madness” whose goal was to “break down respect for authority and the authorities, to stir up in the people indignation against their superiors and against the government.” Catherine believed that that Radishchev must have been a disgruntled courtier whose motive was that of a spurned outsider; Radishchev, she concluded, was merely a bitter person chagrined that “he does not have entrée to the palace.” Defending the Russian version of serfdom so derided by Radishchev, Catherine argued that “our peasants who have good masters are better off than any in the world.” Moreover, concluded Catherine, in writing this text Radishchev must have “appointed himself the leader… in snatching the scepters from the hands of monarchs,” an act of treason deserving of death. Readers get a glimpse into the mind of an eighteenth-century Russian autocrat in Catherine’s notes, and the impressions are of a micromanaging monarch who was paranoid of another peasant rebellion, and even more wary of written texts that might foment the rise of another Pugachev.

This edition contains a cross-referenced index that is helpful for readers seeking specific information, and Thaler provided a lengthy introduction that brings alive the character of Radishchev. Thaler also included a selected bibliography that includes translations of A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow as well as secondary literature on Radishchev and his works. Especially useful are the lengthy endnotes, helping readers make sense of archaic Russian terms and Radishchev’s sometimes-obscure literary references.

While the Radishchev’s prose in A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow – especially the contrived dialogue between created characters - occasionally slips into a maudlin Romanticism, the text remains an important example of early Russian radicalism, as well as a document that demonstrates the pervasiveness of Enlightenment writers such as Rousseau and Mirabeau. The revolutionary fervor that overthrew monarchies on both sides of the Atlantic spread around the globe, and unleashed a Pandoran box of ideas that continue to influence political movements in the twenty-first century. A clear line can be drawn between Radishchev and later Russian revolutionaries, and his work brought together ideas only hinted at by earlier Russian writers.

The Quote Shelf

A frequent feature on this site; feel free to comment on the quote or to supply a competing quote.

We must admit, however, with the deepest regret at the fate of human thought, that a great idea has sometimes brought forth folly. Printing gave birth to the censorship; philosophic reason in the eighteenth century produced the Illuminati.
-- Aleksander Nikolayevich Radishchev

Book Review: The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492-1867

D.A. (David Anthony) Brading
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 761 pages

Brading was a Professor of Latin American History at Cambridge until 2003, when he retired after 30 years. Prior to that, he taught at University of California-Berkeley and at Yale University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995. For this book Brading acknowledges a relative dearth of secondary sources; he claims that he “concentrated on reading primary sources, only citing those studies which positively assisted” his understanding. This text is largely, though not exclusively, concerned with intellectual history, and Brading spends a great deal of time charting the ideas that shaped the New World holdings of the Spanish. He most focuses on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, and sets the two up as contrasting models of intellectual traditions. His title, First America, is a not-so-subtle reminder to Anglophiles that the Spanish beat the British to the New World by nearly a century.

The author builds a tripartite model for the evolution of the Spanish Empire in the New World, beginning with the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Bahamas in 1492. He terms the first phase of this presence “Conquest and Empire,” which at first glance meshes with the traditional historiography. However, he reinterprets the motivations of a number of the principal players in the early years of the Spanish conquest. For example, Brading argues that the primary motivation of Columbus was not material gain or the glory of God, but his fixation on connecting with the Grand Khan. The development of an eastern ally and the opening of a second front in the ongoing war with the forces of Islam was, according to Brading, the primary purpose of the Columbian voyages. This, of course, brings the author much praise from this reviewer, who has a long-standing research interest in matters Prester John, Grand Khan, and El Gran Can.

The second phase of the Spanish presence in the New World is what Brading subtitles “Strangers in Their Own World.” Brading develops a model of criollo (American-born Spanish elite) patriots that clash with the peninsulare (Iberian-born aristocrats) elites, who are sent by the Crown to the New World viceroyalties as administrators. I will use the Spanish term criollo in this review, rather than Brading’s “creole,” because of the confusion that the latter creates for American readers, who are likely to make Caribbean or Louisiana Bayou connections with the word. This criollos / peninsulares conflict forms the crux of Brading’s analysis.

The author finishes his analysis with a subsection entitled “Revolution and Reconquest.” He further delineates the growing rift between criollos and peninsulares, arguing that the Napoleonic disruptions of the Iberian monarchies created a power vacuum that was never fully regained by the returning Bourbon and Bragançan kings. Brading argues that this period was the true blossoming of the ideology of creole patriotism, as the distinct intellectual traditions of the criollos broke away from their European models. Arguably, Brading might be advocating a sort of neo-frontierism, in that, like the American model proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner, the New World environment of the Americas and the Old World philosophies of the criollos clashed to provide the impetus for the evolution of a unique philosophical tradition.

Left: Dominican priest and Spanish chronicler Bartolomé de las Casas

At times Brading overstates his case with his attempts to provide a general intellectual undercurrent to particular writers and events. In his chapter on Bartolomé de las Casas the author invokes sixteenth-century thinkers as diverse as Sir Thomas More, Machiavelli, and Girolamo Savonarola to paint a picture of the Dominican friar as a man who was “haunted by the remembrance of a living Utopia wantonly destroyed by the advent of the Prince.” This is grand rhetoric, and would sound melodramatic oozing from the mouth of Alistair Cooke, but this statement belies the true nature of Las Casas; he was concerned first and foremost with the abuses perpetrated against Native Americans by the lower elements of the conquistadores, and hoped to bring these injustices to the attention of Charles V, for whom he displayed great respect. Las Casas was much more concerned with the failure of Spanish administrators to carry out their evangelical mission to the Indians than he was with political reform. However, there is merit to Brading’s argument that the writings of Las Casas influenced later criollo writers by an implicit questioning of the legitimacy of the Spanish American empire.

Brading also includes a number of chapters dedicated to the traditional American and British historiography about the Spanish New World Empire. He devotes considerable space to William Hickling Prescott, and delves into the world that produced this historian. He argues that Prescott was the product of a “deep-seated Puritanism which found immediate expression in their aversion to the liturgy, monastic ideals, and hierarchical principles of the Catholic Church.”

Reviewers have generally praised the book, although Peter Bakewell of Emory University took Brading to task for the “central ambiguity” of his central subject. In Brading’s defense, though, this is intellectual history, and what can be more ambiguous than an attempt to generalize the philosophies of thousands of historical actors? I found that the chapters worked well as small vignettes of individual writers and historical events, and that there was thematic continuity from chapter to chapter. The book also follows a chronological scheme, and it is relatively easy to navigate through its pages. There are also a wide variety of obscure paintings, maps, and document covers that add visual spice to the occasionally dry narrative.

On the Inadequacies of Midweek Holidays

This year the Fourth of July fell on a Wednesday, leaving us without a natural place to create a long holiday weekend. Thus, even in my summer of underemployment, I find myself this week having to work on Tuesday and Thursday, with a short one-day holiday as a break.

True, I did spend most of it sitting around and reading, with occasional signs of work-related behaviors, such as taking out the trash or doing the dishes. Still, there is something especially envigorating about a long holiday weekend that a one-day holiday can never fill, particularly that carefree sense of routine-breaking that accompanies a four-day stretch of freedom.

So it's back to work for me today, feeling as I do a smidgen shortchanged by the calendar. I would vow to make up for the brevity of the Fourth by taking a longer Labor Day holiday, but by then school will be in session, and I am sure that I will spend most of that break grading papers, spending time on class prep, and working on the course requirements for my own classes.

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Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis

On Fireworks, AssHats, and Pyrotechnic Insanity

Let me say from the outset that I have no problem with people celebrating holidays with a few fireworks, and as a kid I used to create my share of noise with firecrackers and bottle rockets. And I still owe an apology to Mr. and Mrs. Odom, whose front door screen was damaged by an errant bottle rocket my friends and I launched one Fourth of July.

Yet last night I was unable to go to sleep because some inebriated neighborhood asshats decided that a fireworks celeberation needs to continue until 2:30 in the morning. Moreover, the pyrotechnic capabilities of these people rivaled the impressive displays one might expect at a municipal fireworks display.

Thus I listened to several hours of explosions, shrieks, and whooshes - plus the associated drunken revelry - produced by neighbors hell bent on simulated destruction. These folks had to have spent many hundreds of dollars to produce such a sustained artillery campaign.

Where, though, do they even find these types of materials? Some of these explosions were so loud that they reverberated throught the neighborhood 4-5 seconds after detonation, and the rockets the lunatics fired reached heights of several hundred feet.

Then, too, is the issue of safety. We went to a friend's house last night to watch the Sylvania municipal fireworks (where I took the above photo), and some of their neighbors had a pre-fireworks display of their own. Several of these powerful rockets misfired and landed on the ground just a few dozen feet from where young children were playing. No harm, no foul, but what if some innocent kid was injured by an errant rocket simply sitting in his backyard, minding his own business?

Supposedly one needs a permit from the ATF to possess powerful fireworks, and federal law mandates that fireworks contain less than 50-milligrams of flash or explosive powder in order to be legally sold to consumers in the United States. I'm not sure how my asshat neighbors obtained their fireworks, but these were clearly of a caliber far beyond the 50 milligram range.

I suppose, though, that my only recourse is to fire up my old weed-whacker this morning and exact a measure of payback. Perhaps if I remove the muffler on the engine I can achieve a level of noise at a bleary-eyed 8:30 am to remind these folks about neighborliness.

:-}

Oh, and a happy Fourth of July to everyone!

On Fair Weather, Peace of Mind, and Procrastination

We have been blessed in Northwest Ohio over the past four days with some especially moderate weather. The temperatures have been in the high 70s during the day and in the mid-50s overnight, cool enough where my wife and I battle for control over the cotton comforter by 3:00 am.

I am particulrly grateful for this spell of fair weather since we slogged through a mid-90s stretch last week, highlighted by several days with humidity that caused your shirt to stick to your skin if you so much as lifted an arm. Admittedly, I am a bit of a whiner when it comes to extreme heat, even more so in our summer of self-enforced domestic ban on air conditioning.

I find that I am much more productive when I am in a moderate climate, and over the past few days I made significant progress on some writing projects that had been shelved. At the risk of espousing a geographic cure for procrastination, I imagine I would be the epitome of productivity if I lived in a region that stayed in the 70s yearround.

Then again, with weather that glorious, I might never venture back into the house to finish my mountain-sized collection of unfinished writing.

On President Bush, Scooter Libby, and Our Corrupt Government

Lewis "Scooter" Libby; click for larger image

I half expected that President Bush would pardon Scooter Libby after his conviction in March of lying to authorities and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of a CIA operative's identity. Thus, news that the President would be commuting the 30-month prison sentence Libby received did not come as a complete surprise.

In fact, I think it is an indication of just how far President Bush's popularity has fallen that he felt compelled to leave the rest of the sentence in place, which includes a $250,000 fine and two years of probation. I suspect that Bush at the height of his popularity would have pulled the trigger on a complete pardon.

You can follow this link to the press release announcing clemency for Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, but this tersely-worded statement offers little insight into the President's mindset.

The President, in another statement, described Libby's prison sentence as "excessive", and depicted the former White House aide as a broken man.

"The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged. His wife and young children have also suffered immensely," the President said. "He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant, and private citizen will be long-lasting."

This is all true, but Lewis "Scooter" Libby violated the public trust and lied under oath. Perhaps he was just being a good soldier and taking the fall for his boss, Vice-President Dick Cheney, but the law is the law. If you, me, or my Uncle Bob had lied on the stand in a federal court, we would have been smacked down with similar penalties.

Except we don't have friends in high places like Scooter Libby.

Thus, another day's worth of corrupt politics draws to a close in Washington, and the collective disgust that most Americans feel for their elected representatives grows a bit deeper. It is also another dreary twilight in the presidency of President George W. Bush, a man who seemed to be the right person for the job in the weeks after 9-11, but whose administration spirals into a seemingly bottomless abyss of incompetency.

Removing a Tick From a Dog

(Toledo, OH) After returning from a lengthy walk at Wildwood Metropark, my wife noticed that one of our dogs had a tick embedded in its skin. Given the fact that we use Frontline flea and tick products, this was a first for us; despite all of the tromping around I have done in the woods, I have yet to be bitten by a tick myself.

Thus, in the spirit of shared knowledge, I am presenting for your consideration an effective method of tick removal that served me well in lo, this one opportunity to remove a tick from a dog.

1. Sterilize a pair of tweezers.
2. Get a person to help you hold down the afflicted pooch.
3. Grasp the tick with the tweezers in the fattest part of its ectoparasitical body.
4. Slowly but firmly pull back until it is removed.
5. Encase the tick in a piece of tissue and flush it down the toilet, as ticks have exoskeletons and are surprisingly resistant to being crushed. In addition, crushing the tick with your fingers can spread infectious disease, especially the dreaded Lyme disease.
6. If any pieces of the tick remain in the skin, just pull out any that protrude. Do not try to dig out any remnants of the tick that remain deep in the dog's skin.
7. Use a topical antibiotic spray, such as Bactine, on the affected area.
8. Pet the brave little pooch, and provide a nutritious treat for being so well-behaved during the tick removal process.

I have read that the old method of using a heat source, such as a match head, is not advised for tick removal. The heat can force the tick to burrow deeper, and you also run the risk of accidentally burning your pet.

I believe that the above process would work well with children, cats, and wombats, should you ever need to remove a tick from one of these. You might need an extra person to subdue a wombat, though, as I hear they do not have the most pleasant of dispositions. I am not sure, however, if this procedure would work equally well at removing one's spouse from a dedicated bout of furniture shopping. I suspect that a tick can exert much less force than can a deal-obsessed shopper.

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Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art. -- Izaak Walton

Book Review: Eugene Onegin

Pushkin, Alexander; translated by Walter Arndt

New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963 (1981), 224 pages

Alexander Pushkin was perhaps the single most influential Russian writer, and he worked in genres as diverse as poetry, fiction, and history. Eugene Onegin – which was first published in serial form between 1825 and 1833 - ranks among Pushkin’s most beloved works, and for many readers this novel-in-verse is the first work that comes to mind when his name is mentioned.

Containing some 5,600 lines in eight chapters, Eugene Onegin recounts the story of a Russian jeunesse dorée in nineteenth-century Russia. Pushkin includes himself in the story as a minor character who acts as a sort of omniscient narrator, but the experiences and thoughts of the titular protagonist have often been interpreted as a device Pushkin used to circumvent imperial censors.

Onegin inherits a mansion from his late uuncle, and strikes up a friendship with a neighboring poet, Vladimir Lensky. The young men are introduced to Olga and Tatiana Larin, sisters who are the daughters of a minor rural noble. Olga and Lensky become engaged, while Onegin rejects the declaration of love by the much younger sister with a speech that is deferential, yet somewhat patronizing.

Lensky and Onegin have a falling out, which is culminated in a duel between the former friends, and Lensky dies as a result of a gunshot wound. After fleeing and years of exile, Onegin visits Moscow and is stunned to find Tatiana hosting a gala; in the ensuing years Tatiana married a Russian general who found favor with the Tsar, and the couple is the toast of Moscow. Onegin realizes that he has always loved Tatiana, and composes verse declaring his love and the errors of his ways, but Tatiana elects to send Onegin on his way in much the same manner the he once spurned the love of the then-young Tatiana.

The verse follows a unique 14-line rhyming scheme in each stanza, following this pattern: a-B-a-B-c-c-D-D-e-F-F-e-G-G; masculine rhymes are represented with uppercase letters, while lowercase letters are used to denote feminine rhymes. There are thus three quatrains of rhyming schemes, written generally in iambic tetrameter, followed by a masculine couplet closing each stanza that often provides readers with some sort of epigram or aphorism.

(a) But then, our northern summer season
(B) Like southern winter comes, and lo,
(a) Is gone; and though for some odd reason
(B) We won’t admit it, it is so.
(c) Autumn was in the air already,
(c) The sun’s gay sparkle grew unsteady,
(D) The timeless day became more brief;
(D) The forest, long in darkling leaf,
(e) Unclothed itself with mournful rustle;
(F) The fields were wrapped in misty fleece,
(F) A raucous caravan of geese
(e) Winged southward; after summer’s bustle
(G) A duller season was at hand:
(G) November hovered oveland.

Left: Portrait of Alexander Pushkin

There are quite a few translations of Eugene Onegin in addition to Arndt’s 1963 version, which maintains the precise structure of Pushkin’s original verse. Nabokov, who previously criticized prior attempts to translate Eugene Onegin as “dove-droppings on your [Pushkin’s] monument,” denounced this translation as well, and he argued that Arndt favored aesthetically-pleasing English rhyme over the literal meaning of Puskin’s Russian verse. Nabokov then produced a 1964 translation, more exact in transliteration but which sacrificed the rhyming scheme Pushkin developed. Other well-received translations include Charles Johnston (1977), James E. Falen (1990), and Douglas Hofstadter (1999), all of which preserve the original rhyming scheme.

Eugene Onegin operates on many levels, and has value far beyond its stature as an iconic work in Russian literature. Throughout the narrative Pushkin provided ethnographic glimpses of a wide variety of lifestyles in imperial Russia, and his depictions of life on rural Russian estates demonstrates the relative poverty and backwardness of many nobles, who often lived in conditions little better than the serfs they owned. One can see, too, the variety of Western writers available to Russian intellectuals in this period, as Onegin’s book collection contained works as disparate as Byron, Rousseau, and Goethe. As Onegin returns from yet another night spent with the St. Petersburg aristocracy, morosely pondering the vapid inanities of dancing, drinking, and gossip with his fellow well-heeled elites, Pushkin pauses to describe the scene outside of Onegin’s carriage as the driver brings him home just before dawn:

The peddler struts, the merchant dresses,
The cabman to the market presses,
With jars the nimble milkmaids go,
Their footsteps crunching in the snow.
The cheerful morning sounds and hustles
Begin, shops open, stacks have puffed
Tall trunks of slate-blue smoke aloft;
The baker, punctual German, bustles
White-capped behind his service hatch
And more than once has worked the latch.

It is as a work of poetry, however, that Eugene Onegin most affects a reader, and the beauty of Arndt’s translated prose leaves this reviewer awed. After the death of Lensky, Pushkin joins the reader in speculation about what the young poet’s life might have held. After positing a number of life scenarios for Lensky, Pushkin returned to the cemetery, and Arndt’s skillful translation captures well the melancholic emptiness experienced as one gazes upon the grave of a promising young life cut down by a bullet fired in a moment of reckless stupidity:

But futile, reader, to uncover
What once his future might have held-
Dead lies our dim young bard and lover,
By friendly hand and weapon felled.
Next where the Muse’s ward resided,
Turn left: There is a place provided,
Twin firs grow there, with roots entwined,
And underneath them, freshets wind,
That water the adjacent valley.
There girls replensih by the path
Their ringing pitchers at the math,
And there the plowhands like to rally.
There, where the shaded waters lilt,
A simple monument is built.

One leaves Eugene Onegin with more than merely a greater appreciation of the literary genius of Pushkin. Throughout the text are hints of social discontent, culminated in the Decembrist uprising of 1825; certainly Pushkin’s choice of the name Lensky – derived from the river Lena in eastern Siberia – suggests a conscious, thinly-velied political commentary on the part of Pushkin, implying that idealists such as Lensky faced Siberian exile. The detached character of Onegin, who is an aristocratic intellectual aloof from society and seemingly unable to channel his idealism into useful activism, seems to be a direct influence on Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man and – to some extent - Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. Finally, Eugene Onegin is the sort of book that lends itself well to multiple readings and varied interpretations, and serves as both a textual metaphor and biting criticism of the period in Russian history it mirrors.

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I went back to my mother
I said, "I'm crazy, ma, help me!"
She said, "I know how it feels, son,
'Cause it runs in the family."

-- The Who, "The Real Me"