Casual Butchery

Windows on European Conceptions of the Native

2009-05-22T16:16:00.007-04:00

O Wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world!
That has such people in’t”
-Miranda, 5.1.181-4

The first recorded performance of The Tempest took place on Hallowmas Night 1611, “before the kinges Majestie” at the Palace of Whitehall. The production came 119 years after Columbus’s landing on the island of Guanahani, four years after the foundation of England’s first permanent colony across the sea and on the heels of the well-publicized 1609 wreck of the ship Sea Venture off the coast of Bermuda. Several accounts of this shipwreck appeared in London in 1610. Public curiosity for such chronicles and reports ran deep. A 1588 account of a trip to the colony at Roanoke by the great English polymath Thomas Hariot, containing meticulous proto-ethnographic detail about the native Algonquian Indians and illustrated by powerfully evocative woodblock prints, was translated into four languages and became a best-seller across Europe. This profusion of public fascination must have been a particular draw for audiences to The Tempest. Shakespeare capitalized on this allure - what Joseph Roach calls the play’s “vicarious tourism” – and even satirizes it in the second act, when Trinculo says that while an Englishman, “will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (2.2.32-34).

There is no question that, in order to unravel such a complex historical document as The Tempest, one must examine the context of society, time and place out of which it was conceived, but this enterprise of comprehension can also go the other way. Details about the culture and mindset of early Stuart England are preserved in the play, as an insect in amber. The Tempest provides us with an invaluable window into the early 17th century European imagination, and the ways in which the average English soldier, tailor or fishmonger might have construed the flux of information coming from the New World, at a time when the discovery and exploration of these hitherto unknown lands significantly expanded popular conceptions of the earth, humanity and knowledge. In The Tempest, Shakespeare begins to sift through the emotions aroused by these discoveries: reveling in the thrill of discovery, exploring and exploiting popular curiosities and, in the haunting and illusive character of Caliban, understandings of the native “other.” This reading of the play, in turn, reveals in the thorny contradictions of Caliban’s own discourse, not only a striking apprehension of the beautiful intelligence of the native, but also an intense resistance to invitations of community, which discounts the possibility of eventual accord.

While there is no consensus among Shakespeare scholars that Caliban is even meant to represent a Native American, textual and contextual evidence indicates that this interpretation is the most sensible explanation to his symbolic identity. The proximity of the play’s composition to Strachey’s account is reflected in Ariel’s line about Prospero calling him “at midnight to fetch dew/From the still-vexed Bermudas” (1.2.229). This line, along with Stephano’s worry that tricks are being played on him by “savages and men of Ind” (2.2.57), constitute direct allusions to contemporary explorations that would have been instantly recognizable to Shakespeare’s audience, and provide sufficient evidence for one to read The Tempest – at least in part – as a play about the encounter between the Old and New Worlds, and a consideration on future relations.

Shakespeare has designed Caliban as an intimation of a native American, with “his closeness to nature, his naiveté, his devil worship, his susceptibility to European liquor, and above all, his ‘treachery.’” Yet Shakespeare does not typecast the native, refusing to endow him with any of the obvious physical reference points (no feathers, no arrows, no tobacco, no body paint, etc.) Just as Shakespeare muddles our sense of place by overtly referencing New World exploration while explicitly setting the play’s island in the Mediterranean (between Tunis and Milan), he dissociates Caliban from the usual symbolic tropes of the native in order to present the character for the audience’s interpretation in a neutral environment. Shakespeare wants his viewer to know that Caliban represents a Native American, but is not actually one.

Perhaps the most surprising thing that Shakespeare does with Caliban is to challenge the prevailing understanding of Native Americans as being intellectually inferior to Europeans. Why else, Europeans thought, would Native Americans be without such basic technology as the wheel and metal tools? An extension of this mode of thinking was in the European belief - informed by the apparent Apotheosis of Cortés by the Aztecs and an inflated sense of their own cultural and moral supremacy – that Indians viewed them as gods. The Tempest promotes this self-deification of Europeans in the New World through Caliban’s naming of Stephano as “a brave god” (2.2.112), and its representations of Prospero’s assumption of control on the island.

Prospero’s magic becomes the force of law by which he subdues the native Caliban, just as European technology – particularly their guns – allowed them to subjugate the native peoples encountered in the New World. Prospero’s magic imbues him with the god-like abilities to conjure tempests out of thin air and summon goddesses from Greek antiquity for the masque in Act IV. Just as Native Americans first interpreted the flash of smoke and roar of thunder let off by the Europeans’ strange staffs as magic, Caliban is both wondered and cowed by these displays, contending, "I say by sorcery he got this isle;/From me he got it." (3.2.52-3). Shakespeare, however, undermines this understanding through the knowledge that Prospero’s powers come not through some innate propensity for magic, but from his books, a fact which substantially subverts the audience’s understanding of the power dynamic between Prospero and Caliban. Caliban, no fool, recognizes this as well, telling Trinculo and Stephano, “Remember/First to possess his books, for without them/He’s bot a sot, as I am,” (3.2.91-93). It is not through inbuilt primacy, but by lucky possession of material objects that Prospero has dominion over Caliban.

This symbolic reduction of European superiority would be interesting in its own right, but Shakespeare endows Caliban with the most lyrical and expressive lines in the whole of the play. In Act III, Caliban comforts Trinculo and Stephano by telling them, “Be not afeard. The island is full of noises,” and launches into a rhapsodic and emotional description of the dream-world of his home:

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again. (3.2.135-140).

Caliban’s speeches are striking in their eloquent articulation of the island’s unique and inscrutable beauty. The other characters refer to its strangeness, but the audience would have little notion of the island’s characteristics or play’s sensory setting if not for Caliban. In this way, Caliban is at once the play’s most alien character, and its chorus. As Trinculo and Stephano are the play’s representations of the common man, Caliban serves as ambassador and tour-guide not only to them, but to the audience as well. Caliban’s manifestly keen mind has not only learned the tongue of his conqueror, but has mastered it. His verbal dexterity gives him an extraordinary ability to evoke the sights, sounds, and smells of the island, and puts to shame even the words of even the educated nobles. Caliban’s denunciation of Prosper, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/For learning me your language” (1.2.366-368) is particularly compelling and consequential precisely because of his gift for language, only fully revealed to the audience, or Stephano and Trinculo. With this line, Caliban, and with him Shakespeare, reject assimilation as impossible.

Through the contrasting identities of Caliban as the “savage and deformed slave” and eloquent spokesman, Shakespeare presents the essential duality of the Native’s identity. Caliban is at once wholly human, and indelibly precluded from joining the other humans of the play by his otherness. The immense melancholy of Caliban is the diverting tragedy of The Tempest, by all other accounts a classic romance. Caliban is astute, sardonic and perspicacious; it is only the arrival of the Genoese that defines his deformity into relief and robs him of his humanity. Though he shows the capacity to learn the manners and language of these outsiders in his world, he can never be one of them. This same duality of definition seems to mark Shakespeare’s understanding of the native peoples of the New World. They are wholly human, though totally irreconcilable to the European conception of humanity. At The Tempest’s end, Caliban is left alone again, with his island and humanity his own once more. Alas the “goodly creatures” of Shakespeare’s real “brave new world” were not so lucky.

The Rise of the Crescent Moon and Fall of Constantinople

2009-05-13T17:32:00.005-04:00

On the night of May 22nd 1453, a crescent moon rose over the still waters of the Bosphorus. The people of the ancient city of Constantinople, the last vestige of the might and splendor of the Roman Empire, looked on in terror. In the Turkish camp, the hundreds of thousands of troops under Sultan Mehmet II - not yet “The Conqueror” – mustered outside the city walls looked up at the sky and launched into jubilant celebration. The Byzantine Emperor Constantine, in his palace on the Sea of Marmara, must have recognized the import of this portent. A centuries-old prophecy, dating back to the Empire’s most glorious days, held that the city would not fall until the full moon conferred a sign. What should have risen as a full moon that night, ascended as a slender sliver. Less than six days later the city’s defenses would fail, the last Greek Emperor would lay slain, and the churches and citizens of the city would endure three days of rape and pillage before calm would settle on the beleaguered city.

The young Sultan Mehmet had bold and deep-rooted ambitions, inherited from his father Murad, to capture the city of Constantinople. The former magnificence of the dazzling metropolis glimmered like a tarnished jewel straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, beguiling all who caught a glimpse. Sultan Mehmet saw in the decaying gem an opportunity for personal glory, but also for renovation. Mehmet’s fixation on Constantinople was one born of his sense of entitlement. The putrefying Byzantine dynasty gave the storied city a stench that was not becoming of its illustrious past. Mehmet believed that Constantinople deserved a rejuvenation of its old glory, and designed to impose that grandeur upon it. The crescent moon that rose above the Bosphorus that night signified to both sides that fate was the third party in the battle for Constantinople, and destiny was an accessory to Mehmet’s plans. The driving momentum behind the Ottoman’s rise was evident in the very stars themselves.

Mehmet had come to the throne two years previously, in February 1451, and immediately set out to subdue an Ottoman vassal state in Anatolia. Mehmet quickly proved himself a forceful leader with his quick victory and subsequent suppression of a mutiny by the Janissary corps, who demanded a cash bonus following the campaign. Sources inside the Ottoman court describe how Mehmet had already become consumed with the goal of capturing Constantinople. To Mehmet, and other powerful figures in the Ottoman regime, the continued sovereignty of a Christian city at the heart of the Muslim states of the Balkans and Near East was intolerable, especially in light of the Byzantine Emperors propensity for meddling in internal Ottoman power struggles. At the beginning of March 1452, Mehmet dispatched heralds to every governor in his empire, commanding each to bring an army to the Bosphorus to prepare for the final assault on Constantinople. The Sultan traveled to a spot on the Black Sea six miles from the city walls and began construction on a massive fortress, named the Rumeli-Hisari, where he awaited the ripening of his plans. The fortress was complete by August of that year, and together with a smaller castle built on the opposite side of the strait, effectively closed off passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. By September, approximately 50,000 men were encamped around the fortress.

Constantinople was already a dying city, in the throes of a prolonged and terminal decline lasting at least two centuries. Visitors describe a melancholy and moribund air enveloping the metropolis. From the close of the 12th century, the city’s population had declined from more than a million to less than a hundred thousand. The Byzantine Emperors faced challenges from both east and west. Slavic princes and Italian dukes seized territories, chunk by chunk, throughout the Balkans and Greek isles. In 1205, the Fourth Crusade occupied and looted the city instead of traveling through to Jerusalem, founding a Catholic Latin state that lasted several decades before the Greek Palaeologus dynasty was restored. At the same time, the newly ascendant Ottoman Turks rose up from the east, and captured the fertile Anatolian plains that had provided the majority of the Empire’s agricultural produce and a preponderance of its military conscripts. The Turks’ power and influence spread from Asia across into Europe, as they grew bolder in their assaults on Greek territories. In 1347, an outbreak of the Black Death left a third of the Empire’s population dead. The same year, at the coronation of Emperor John VI, spectators observed that the jewels in the Emperor and Empress’s diadems were actually made of glass. By the time of the Ottoman conquest, the Byzantines possessed an empire in name only, and the Imperial capital’s erstwhile splendor was markedly tarnished. The Imperial Palace still lacked roof tiles, melted down and sold by the previous emperor. Large tracts within the city walls were left unpopulated and reduced to rustic parkland.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the Emperor Manuel II embarked on a tour through the courts of Western Europe in order to shore up Christian support for the Byzantines in what promised to be troubling years ahead. Manuel was forced to rush back to his capital at news that the Ottoman sultan Bayezit was marching on the city, but chance saved it from destruction when Timurlane the Tartar laid siege to the Ottoman capital at Ankara, razing it to the ground in 1402. The Kings of France and England had received the Greek Emperor with pomp and deference, but his expedition had been a failure. Though his pleas for succor were met with pity, no aid was forthcoming. Quarrel and resentment colored the relationship between the Catholic Church in Rome and the Orthodox Church in Constantinople. Dogmatic disagreements played an increasingly divisive role in the relationship between Western and Eastern Christianity, and stuck a wedge between the Christians on either side of the Adriatic. The Byzantine Emperors, perceiving the mounting power of the Ottomans, aimed to bolster their position by ironing out these doctrinal differences and entering into a union with the Western Church. After years of stalled negotiations, the union of the Churches was made at the grand church of Hagia Sophia in December of 1453. This pageantry would, however, do little to save the city. The incense smoke merely obscured the inevitable as the ringing of church bells sounded the death knell of Christian Constantinople.

Within the city, public sentiment ran strong against the Union. The citizens of Constantinople treated the Hagia Sophia “as if it were a synagogue. There were no offerings, no sacrifices, no incense.” The Megas Doux, Loukas Notaras, is said to have declared that he would rather see a Turkish turban ruling over the city than a cardinal’s hat. Emperor Constantine may have hoped that the feelings of confederacy and obligations of Christian brotherhood brought about by the union would bring military reinforcements to his city from the Christian kingdoms of Europe, but little help came. Feelings about the Union in the west were no less heated than inside the city. Latin contemporaries looked at what they perceived to have been the Greek’s impure motives in entering into the Union as provoking God’s ire and bringing his wrath down upon the city.

In the spring of 1453, Mehmet left his capital at Edirne, where he had spent the previous winter, and returned to his camp with the intent of taking Constantinople. A fleet of three hundred Turkish ships had gathered. Though the Greeks had only about thirty vessels, they had strung a massive chain across the harbor, equipped their galleys with battering rams, and lined them up behind the margin to close up the mouth of the Bosphorus. The enterprising Mehmet ordered eighty of his ships rolled across greased timbers from the Bosphorus, behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. Enormous cannons were also wheeled overland, and in the beginning of March, heavy bombardment began on the city’s walls. For the next three months, the walls and towers that had long kept the city safe were assailed and battered. Among the Turkish artillery were the largest guns yet built, testament to the technical expertise of the Ottomans. By April, the number of Mehmet’s soldiers had swelled to over 150,000.

The Greek forces were dwarfed in number, but resolute. The Megas Doux stood guard over the harbor with four hundred horsemen, who could be dispatched anywhere in the city where they might be needed. Giovanni Giustiniani, a Genoese noble who had arrived in the city with seven hundred men in January, as one of the few foreigners to answer Emperor Constantine’s entreaties for aid, took an informal position of command over the city’s defenses. The daily pounding by the Turkish cannon had brought down several sections of wall and a tower of the gate of Saint Romanus on the outer Theodosian Walls, which had been considered unassailable and kept the city secure since their construction more than a thousand years before. The Emperor became convinced of the hopelessness of his situation, and deigned to seek accord with the Sultan. Constantine sent out an embassy to the Ottoman camp with instructions to offer Mehmet an extravagant yearly tribute, and proffer to submit to whatever terms the Sultan might vouchsafe in order to spare the city. Mehmet is said to have replied with austerity:

It is impossible for me to withdraw. Either I shall capture the city, or the city shall capture me, alive or dead. If you are willing to leave it, I shall allow you to live at peace in the Peloponnese, and I shall give your brothers other provinces to rule over, and we shall be friends. But if you prevent me from entering in peace, and I have to fight my way in, I shall put you and all your nobles to the sword, and I shall give all the rest of your people to my soldiers, to be their slaves; and for myself I shall keep only the city.

The Turkish Sultan’s stony-hearted proposal was no overture to Constantine, who could not give up the city without the loss of all honor and dignity. The Emperor could not however, have anticipated a magnanimous response. The cards were stacked in the Turk’s favor, and time was against the Greeks. The Ottoman blockade, which only a few audacious ships had been able to penetrate, deprived the city of much needed food, supplies, and reinforcements. With both sides determined that they were left with no option but to play through to battle, the final weeks of the siege began in earnest.

On May 16th, defenders along the city’s defenses heard noises from below, and discovered that the Turks had tunneled nearly half a mile under the foundations of the city’s walls. The Megas Doux and Emperor were informed, and work was begun on their own tunnel. When the Greeks intercepted the infiltrators’ mine, they cast fire into it, burning the tunnel’s foundations and burying the Turks inside under a mountain of earth. The meager forces of the Greeks and their Italian allies pinned their hopes on the strength of their defenses, which despite the constant pummeling received from the Turkish guns, had been repaired daily with earthworks and the tumbled stones.

Looking to the city’s east on the night of May 22nd, the dark sky and cobalt water displayed two perfect crescent moons. The city’s defenders lamented this ill omen, while the Turks, massed in their camp outside the city’s walls, rejoiced. Mehmet ordered torches to be lit throughout every tent and every ship in the fleet, and for the men to howl and yell. The effect in the city was one of great dread and dismay. Mehmet determined that the city’s walls had been damaged enough to launch his final assault. The Greek defenders took their places: the Emperor and Guistiniani with three thousand men, between the outer and inner walls by the breach in the gate of Saint Romanus, the Megas Doux in the palace with five hundred men, and the same number of archers and crossbowmen along the sea walls and ramparts. Before dawn on the morning of the 29th of May, the Sultan himself rode out with a contingent of his elite janissary corps and launched his general attack at the gate of Saint Romanus. Mehmet ordered forward throngs of troops, upon which the defenders hurled heavy rocks and flaming sulfur. Countless Turks were killed, but Mehmet did not intend on giving the Greeks a chance to rest and kept up the onslaught in a determination to broach the walls. At sunrise, the popular Giovanni Guistiniani, fighting near the frontlines on the battlements, was wounded by an arrow in the side. When the other defenders noticed the wounded Guistiniani and let down their guard, the Turkish attackers seized on this lull and climbed onto the walls. Panic seized the Christians. As the Greek and Italian defenders retreated back toward the inner walls, the Turks swarmed over the ramparts and seized control of them. After the breaching of the walls, the Turks’ appreciable advantage of numbers overwhelmed the defenders. The victorious and euphoric Ottomans ran through the city, plundering its remaining riches, raping its women, and carrying gold, jewels and captives back to their camp. The Ottoman navy made landfall behind the city to try to capture their share of loot, and some defenders and inhabitants were able to escape by sea. However, most people left within the city were either killed, or captured and sold into slavery. The Emperor was killed too, under uncertain circumstances. Blood flowed through the city’s streets like water during a storm and the corpses of Greeks and Turks alike filled the Dardanelles straits, floating out to sea like rotten melons.

After the orgy of death and destruction that followed the opening of the city’s gates, Mehmet undertook a massive project of reconstruction designed both to restore the city’s former splendor and to Turk-ify it. When Mehmet first rode into the city, he toured the great buildings and bazaars with his retinue, ending at the Hagia Sophia. The largest cathedral in the world and seat of the Orthodox Christian faith, the Hagia Sophia had deteriorated to the point where only its dome was left intact. Constantinople became known by its Turkish name Istanbul, meaning “the city.” Mehmet ordered the construction of the opulent Topkapi Palace, and an enormous Grand Bazaar, but his restoration and conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque was his most important project. The brilliant gold mosaics depicting Byzantine royals and Christian saints were plastered over, minarets were constructed, and the Ayasofya - as it became known - became the centerpiece of the glorious Ottoman Renaissance that flowered in the ancient city, until the thrust of fortune abandoned the Turks, and the Ottoman Empire fell into its own decline five centuries later.

Who's the Dingo Now?

2009-04-29T01:26:00.004-04:00

Ayers Rock is an island mountain, an august mountain of radiant red rising more than a thousand feet from the horizontal plain near the geographic center of the Australian continent. Around it in every direction stretch seemingly endless miles of orange, white and yellow sand, interspersed by roughly hewn waddies, desultory copses of desert oak and tussocks of spinifex. The Rock is renowned for its propensity to change color spectacularly through the day, from twilight’s inscrutable bluish violet to midday ochre to a brilliant glowing crimson at sunset. The Rock’s centrality to Australia is not merely geographic, but laden with symbolism. It has long been a central actor in Aboriginal creation myths and has emerged as an emblem of Australia and Australian-ness, both domestically and abroad. In short, something about Ayers Rock - or Uluru as it is known by Australia’s native Aboriginal peoples - has long engaged, beguiled, and mystified mankind, as an entity both familiar and arcane.

In the shadow of the Rock, a cry escaped through the hot heady air shortly after eight p.m. on the night of August 17th, 1980. Sitting around a barbecue in Ayers Rock’s sole campground, Michael Chamberlain, a 36 year-old preacher on vacation for the August school recess with his wife and three children, heard the sound and leaned over to his wife Lindy and asked, “was that the baby?” Lindy Chamberlain walked down the footpath to their tent; a minute later the campers heard her cry, “My God, My God, the dingo’s got my baby!” A swiftly assembled search party of policemen, park rangers, tourists and Aboriginal trackers fanned out over the area that night, but that cry remains the last thing ever heard from nine-week old Azaria Chamberlain.

The disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, the ensuing trial and public condemnation of her parents for her murder, and their eventual exoneration was a shared experience - with little comparison - which brought Australians together and tore them apart during the twentieth century’s penultimate decade. Professor Stuart Piggin of the University of Wallongong’s history department posited in the late 1980’s that Lindy Chamberlain might be the most hated person in Australia’s two hundred year history. Julie Marcus, a professor of anthropology at the University of Adelaide wrote that, “[f]or months it was impossible to discuss any other topic and still, eight years later, in spite of the final outcome in the courts, everyone still has a theory…on whether the dingo could, or could not, have perpetrated such a dastardly deed.” The pervasive appeal of this case across Australian society as a cultural phenomenon constitutes an often-inscrutable puzzle for the outsider peering in, but the Chamberlain case, in all its singularity, can perhaps be best understood in terms of it having chafed at the raw nerves of Australian society. The fountainhead of this intensity of absorption lies far away from Ayers Rock in the post-war development of Australia and its efforts at foundational realignment as a multicultural society, built on religious, gender, and ethnic parity.

Lost in Translation

What might have been a simple summer eve’s snack for a dingo at the center of the Australian continent - stealthily snatched, ingloriously eaten, and swiftly forgotten - set off a veritable circus of human activity, conjecture and emotion, which would consume a nation for close to a decade and that remains a contentious issue to this day. Coverage of Azaria’s disappearance began with a short and unassuming column on the third page of the August 19th edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. The report is succinct, methodical and impassive, much as one would expect from a news story about a missing child, presumably dragged off by a wild animal to be, but its style stands in marked contrast to the flurry of ensuing media coverage. Something about the case immediately caught the public’s attention, and interest in the story soon snowballed across the nation. Lindy’s claim that a dingo had taken her baby was met with skepticism from the outset, and by October Lindy was telling the media, “I feel that I am the victim of a medieval witch-hunt.” The Australian press mobbed the Northern Territory government’s inquest into the disappearance and of Azaria, and coroner Denis Barritt took the unprecedented step of broadcasting the findings of the inquest on live television in February 1981. One story told by Chamberlain in her book, Through My Eyes, is useful in communicating the extent of public absorption in the case:
We also discovered later that the girls on the switchboard of a large well-known hospital in Brisbane, desperately wanted to watch the telecast of Barritt’s summary so they took a portable television into work, just in case the could catch the inference of a few words during phone calls. One of the girls told me later that normally the only time the switchboard was quiet in the whole year was during the running of the Melbourne Cup. Much to their surprise, as soon as the coroner started his actual telecast, the switchboard went silent and not one phone call came through until the end of his summation (This was about twenty minutes).

Taken out of its specific context, this passage is staggering in its implications, and invariably prompts one to ask, “why?” Public interest and media coverage would indeed continue unadulterated for the remainder of the decade. Before I set about answering this question, let me present another point of opacity that I find even more puzzling.

After the first inquest corroborated the Chamberlains’ version of events, public outrage and lingering suspicions led to a second inquest, which overturned the original findings and charged that Lindy had murdered Azaria. The Chamberlains were incarcerated on February 2, 1982, and after a sensational seven-week trial, a pregnant Lindy was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. Based on a close reading of the case and examination of the body of evidence turned up by the seven official inquiries into Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance, it does not surprise me that the fate of Azaria remains unresolved: no body has ever found, and key pieces of evidence contradict each other. The Chamberlains’ story of a dingo carrying Azaria away in its mouth poses some significant problems, but surely it is no more difficult to believe than the Crown’s claim that Lindy Chamberlain carried her baby from the barbecue to the car, slit her throat, zipped the body into her husband’s camera bag, only to return serenely to the gathering around the fire. Unless Azaria’s body is eventually found, it seems very unlikely that we will ever know for certain what happened on the night of August 17th. That being said, Lindy’s conviction by a jury “of her peers” as guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt” is confusing, even troubling. Our status as outsiders to the world where these events took place somehow obfuscates the coherence of this chain of events. For reasons that are opaque to the culturally uninitiated, Australians were enthralled by this case, which they found as mysteriously captivating and teeming with symbolism as Uluru - that reticent monolith of red rock at their nation’s heart - itself. As National Times reporter Frank Moorhouse wrote in a December 1981 report on the “Dingo Baby” case:
All this folk fiction doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the death of Azaria, but it tells us a lot about ourselves: we are not only talking about the case, we are talking about ourselves.

Dingo Baiting

The previously referenced August 19th Sydney Morning Herald article provides us with a convenient and revealing point of entry. The story appears as a straightforward, fairly innocuous, news report:
Azaria Chamberlain, the 10-weeks-old daughter of Mr Michael Chamberlain, 36, and his wife, Lindy, 32, was taken from her carry basket in a tent near the Rock. Mr Chamberlain, as Seventh Day Adventist minister from Mr Isa, and his wife saw “a shape just like a dingo” slinking out of the tent at about 8:30 am on Sunday.

The author of the article introduces the religious affiliation of the Chamberlains within the first hundred words of the column, in a way that – especially when taken together with the queerly worded citation of “shape just like a dingo” seems to qualify the reliability of Michael Chamberlain’s testimony. This detail could easily be altogether innocent, though when viewed in the context of the subsequent suspicion and vitriol heaped on the Chamberlains because of their heterodox religious ideology, it begins to look suspicious. An examination of related documents, which, when taken in accordance with wider socio-historical trends, reveal numerous illustrations of similar implicit chauvinism on the part of “mainstream” Australian society against what were perceived as cultural outsiders: specifically, members of non-mainstream religious sects and women.

The circumstances of the Azaria Chamberlain case couched it in terms that were subjectively challenging to traditional Australian hegemonies. The facts of the case were profuse with symbols that themselves conveyed Australian-ness - Ayers Rock, dingoes, the camping trip in the Outback – such that the case itself became affiliated, and came to help define Australia both at home and internationally. Secondly, the trial involved, and forced Australians to engage with two different groups of cultural outsiders - members of non-mainstream religious sects and women – and their own perceptions of them. Irrespective of the guilt or innocence of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, it was their mischance to step inadvertently into a maelstrom of symbolic intimations and innuendos that uncovered tensions and prejudices buried deep under the surface of the Australian psyche.

Despite Australia’s latent inclusion in the amorphous concept of the liberal-progressive “Western” world, its geographic isolation and distinct historical development make this generalization inaccurate. The traditional mainstream of Australian society – white, Anglo, and male – had begun to slip in cultural dominance during the post-year wars, as a result of loosened immigration controls, the broadening of Australia’s religious discourse, and campaigns for women’s rights of the 1960’s and 70’s. The Chamberlain case galvanized attention, and illustrated attitudes, to these minority groups within Australian culture. These factors, combined with the questionable circumstances of Azaria’s disappearance, led many to presume the Chamberlains’ guilt.

The ardent attention to the case and whiplash public condemnation of the Chamberlains were, at least in part, the results of discomfort about the forceful momentum of cultural progressivism, which in the second half of the twentieth century began to overwhelm the cloistered and culturally autonomous mainstream Australian society, used to being able to define development in its own terms. Public reactions to the case provide a window into unresolved discomforts in the relationship between mainstream (White, Anglo-descended male) Australian society, and the country’s minority groups (women, and fringe religious groups). The articulation of feelings about the case, in turn, allowed – consciously or not – discussion and utterance of opinions on these deeper taboo topics.

Religious Heterodoxy

From the time of its founding by jailed prisoners from the British Isles in 1788, the established nation of Australia was overwhelmingly White, ethnically English, and religiously Protestant and Anglican. Lifting of the so-called “White Australia” immigration embargo for those outside of Western Europe in the 1960’s led to a swift and large-scale broadening of cultural and religious diversity in Australia. At the same time, religious diversity among “ethnic Australians” began to expand, as non-traditional Christian sects like Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism drew increasing numbers of converts at the expense of more conventional and orthodox denominations. Mainstream Australian society tended to ignore these dissenters from conventional religious norms. The result was that when Australians learned about the Chamberlains’ Adventism, their reaction was one of unfamiliarity and distrust. Adventist customs such as the observation of the Saturday Sabbath, ritual foot-washing, greeting with the “holy kiss,” temperance and vegetarianism were viewed with hesitation, as strange and anomalous behavior, clearly emblematic of their “otherness.” Mainstream Australian society, which had already marginalized and disregarded faiths they viewed as dissident, seized on symbols from the case and let the public imagination fill in for their paucity of knowledge. The Chamberlains, and indeed all Seventh Day Adventists, were characterized implicitly and explicitly as child-murdering practitioners of witchcraft. A rumor that the name Azaria actually meant some variation on “sacrifice in the desert” became so widespread and persistent that coroner Denis Barritt felt it necessary to declare in the televised announcement of his inquest’s findings, “I find that the name Azaria does not mean, and never has meant, sacrifice in the wilderness.” Religious discrimination derived from the case as well. Adventist churches were defaced by graffiti, and allegations of witchcraft and human sacrifice were extended to all members of the Chamberlains’ church.

This kind of narrow-mindedness influenced the case in a subtler, but perhaps even more detrimental way. Lindy’s calm and self-possessed demeanor throughout the trial was widely perceived as attestation of her guilt. Communications experts pointed to Lindy’s “stoney-faced reaction” to the television cameras and the dearth of “constant and profuse” tears as a main reason for the public’s hostility. It did not seem to occur to many that her “curious” faith might be what was providing her with the emotional resilience and resolve that they found so alien to their notions of what grieving should look like. This interpretation was portrayed in the American docudrama film A Cry in the Dark, which illustrates the cultural differences between Australia and the United States in its sympathetic portrait of Lindy. Portrayed by actress Meryl Streep, Lindy is presented as impregnably virtuous and sustained in her adversity by the strength of her faith.

The Case of the Castrating Bitch

A striking counterpart to the media frenzy aroused by the Chamberlain case can be found looking back two decades earlier in Australian history. In 1965, two women – Ro Bagnor and Merle Thornton, the wives of University lecturers – chained themselves to the foot rail of a Brisbane bar to protest a law that prohibited women from being served alcohol in public bars. The responding policemen’s first question to the women was, “Where are your children? Who are looking after them?” Their action set off other similar protests, in which young educated Australian women began to actively campaign against sexist and paternalistic social inequalities in the country. Another woman, Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the Commonwealth building in Brisbane. These public protests became sensationalized media events that set off strong public reactions, not dissimilar to the Chamberlain case. One Frederick White, in a letter to a paper, asked, “Would the ladies feel any guilt if some person had kidnapped one of their children while they were chained to the bar?” while a Queensland Labor MP suggested that these women’s “neglected” children should be committed to the state. Even while the Australian women’s rights movement gained considerable ground in the 1960’s and 70’s, many women were astonished to find that their outspokenness enraged their male friends, lovers and brothers, who vilified them as “castrating bitches.”

In the case of the Chamberlain trial, Lindy’s perceived dominance over her husband allowed members of the old male Australian hegemony to express their anger and resentment, no longer acceptable for explicit expression. Many men responded to the fact that Lindy was more outspoken than her more passive husband, and the suggestion that she had forced him to cover up the murder of his own child, with vitriol inspired by the earlier women’s rights movement and the concessions to women they felt has been forced upon them. Without any certitude of evidence, it seems as if many Australians felt that Lindy must be guilty for her implied crime of forsaking her maternal duty. The symbolism of witchcraft swirled around allegations that Lindy had “bewitched” her husband in order to sacrifice her daughter to the wild untamed desert. When Lindy then accused a dingo, the classic example of free and untrammeled masculine license - the emblem of both the wild and male subjugation over it – of eating her baby, she played into the symbolic discourse of male insecurity, and effectively labeled herself one of those “castrating bitches.”

Conclusion

Like Ayers Rock itself, the dingo is a symbol couched in ambiguity. In the denouement of the Chamberlain affair, an editorial cartoon published in The Age showed a dingo labeled “Northern Territory Government” dragging the lady Justice by the neck. After the Chamberlains’ exoneration from guilt, various sources were blamed for getting carried away with the truth and putting an (now presumably) innocent woman away in prison. The press, legal system, and government were all variously labeled “dingo” in an attempt to both endorse Lindy’s original story, and to assign culpability on some head other than the collective whole, who had all bought into the circus of the trial. However, what was essentially to blame for this whole confusing mess was the brazen masculinity of mainstream Australian culture’s kneejerk assault on what was viewed as an attack on its own abstruse insecurities. Who’s the dingo now, Australia?

No slurring

2009-04-28T16:06:00.004-04:00

I don't know why I find these so engrossing.

(Postmodern) Islands in the stream

2009-04-27T23:28:00.007-04:00

Lake Nicaragua

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one" - Albert Einstein

Irish dingo ate the tent

2009-04-27T16:14:00.002-04:00

Requisite procrastinatory paper-writing photobooth self-portrait

Last Few Republican Senators Form Roman Tortoise

2009-04-27T02:28:00.002-04:00

Throw Down Your Heart

2009-04-27T02:04:00.007-04:00

<...EVERYTHING I WANT...>

~Part 1~
~Part 2~

Love's A Real Thing

2009-04-25T13:24:00.006-04:00

A really excellent comp put out by David Byrne's Luaka Bop label. This is the third release in the "World Psychedelic Classics" series, and looks at a few hits from the profusion of psychedelic soul/funk/jazz hits that came out of West Africa in the 70's. Check it out. The title track in particular is really outstanding. I've got a lot more of this stuff, so I'll post more if there's interest.

Gettit 'ere

Sweet Mother

2009-04-23T17:03:00.005-04:00

Everyone should own this album. It is highlife at its best. "Sweet Mother" is still the most popular song in Nigerian history. Those Africans sure know how to get down to the tune of filial devotion.

Download it now.

Cambalache (Gardel)

2009-04-20T00:08:00.011-04:00

Que el mundo fue y será una porquería, ya lo sé,
en el quinientos seis y en el dos mil también;
que siempre ha habido chorros,
maquiávelos y estafáos,
contentos y amargaos, valores y dublé.
Pero que el siglo veinte es un despliegue
de maldá insolente ya no hay quien lo niegue,
vivimos revolcaos en un merengue
y en el mismo lodo todos manoseaos.

Hoy resulta que es lo mismo ser derecho que traidor,
ignorante, sabio, chorro, generoso, estafador.
¡Todo es igual, nada es mejor,
lo mismo un burro que un gran profesor!
No hay aplazaos ni escalafón,
los inmorales nos han igualao...
Si uno vive en la impostura
y otro afana en su ambición,
da lo mismo que sea cura,
colchonero, rey de bastos,
caradura o polizón.

¡Qué falta de respeto, qué atropello a la razón!
¡Cualquiera es un señor, cualquiera es un ladrón!
Mezclaos con Stavisky van don Bosco y la Mignon,
don Chicho y Napoleón, Carnera y San Martín.
Igual que en la vidriera irrespetuosa
de los cambalaches se ha mezclao la vida,
y herida por un sable sin remache
ves llorar la Biblia contra un calefón.

Siglo veinte, cambalache, problemático y febril,
el que no llora no mama y el que no afana es un gil.
¡Dale nomás, dale que va,
que allá en el horno te vamo a encontrar!
¡No pienses más, tirate a un lao,
que a nadie importa si naciste honrao!
Si es lo mismo el que labura
noche y día como un buey
que el que vive de las minas,
que el que mata o el que cura
o está fuera de la ley.

Dos versiónes, de Carlos Gardel y Caetano Veloso.

Afghan Opium Policy

2009-04-19T21:20:00.010-04:00

“Once we thought terrorism was Afghanistan’s biggest enemy [but now the] poppy, its cultivation and drugs are Afghanistan’s major enemy”
–Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan

In 2007 Afghanistan's poppies produced 8,200 tons, or 93% of the world's opium (United Nations). The United States and NATO have waged a long and dirty war on Afghanistan's poppy crop since their occupation of the country in 2001. The eradication of these poppy crops has become a primary objective of the Western powers operating in Afghanistan, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a smorgasbord of programs, from drug-education in schools to the bulldozing of crops. Despite this, there are 193,000 hectares, or nearly half a million acres, of opium poppies cultivated in Afghanistan, according to a 2007 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report. Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of illicit narcotics, surpassing the entire relative coca production of all of Latin America. Its exports of the drug constitute more than half of the country's GDP.

The reality of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is incompatible with the directives coming from the US and NATO. We are at an impasse: the insurgent Taliban lean heavily on illicit poppy crops to finance themselves, and the destruction of farmers’ poppies only turns the populace against the Afghan government and against the United States. General James Jones, the Supreme Commander of NATO and incoming National Security Advisor, has labeled opium “the Achilles’ Heel of Afghanistan” (DeYoung). If President-Elect Obama is serious about winning in Afghanistan, a dramatically modified strategy to combat opium production must play a central role in forging the road ahead. We can learn from the model of what was done in Turkey in the 1970’s. Instead of pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into futile and fruitless crop destruction, the United States should work with Afghan farmers and create a framework through which to purchase opium crops for use in legitimate painkillers, such as morphine and codeine.

History

Poppies have been cultivated and opium isolated from them since around 3400 BCE in Sumeria, where opium was known as gil, meaning “joy”, and the plant as hul gil, meaning “plant of joy.” Opium’s recorded use as a painkiller goes back just as far, to at least 1500 BCE when it was recommended in the Ebers Papyrus as a method to stop the “excessive crying of children.” Arab traders had brought opium to India and China by the 8th century CE, and the drug had reached all parts of Europe by the 12th century (Brownstein). It was described in highly influential treatises by the 10th century Andalusian physician, Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawihe, considered the father of modern surgery, as the most effective surgical anesthetic known to man (Opium). Sponges soaked in opium, known as spongia somnifera, or “soporific sponges” were used as anesthesia during medieval and pre-modern surgeries (Brownstein). The 14th century Ottoman physician Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu promoted opium for treatment of such painful ailments as migraines and sciatica (Opium).

The first obvious reference to the recreational use of opium comes 1483, when Chinese courtier Xu Boling wrote that it was "mainly used to aid masculinity, strengthen sperm and regain vigor” and goes on to say that it “enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies" (Opium). Opium’s potential for abuse and addiction first became patent in the 17th century, when widespread addiction to madak (a smokeable blend of opium and tobacco) spread through China. Engelbert Kaempfer, a German traveler and naturalist, writing in 1712 described madak’s addictive properties: "No commodity throughout the Indies is retailed with greater profit…than opium, which [its] users cannot do without, nor can they come by it except it be brought by the ships of the Batavians from Bengal and Coromandel” (Opium). The British East India Company’s monopoly on opium imports into China led to two wars between China and the United Kingdom, in 1840 and 1858. The First Opium War was caused when Chinese authorities seized 20,000 chests of the drug from British traders and burned them. This represented a loss of more than $20,000,000 in current values, and the British reacted by attacking and sinking the Southern Chinese Fleet, and taking control of Hong Kong and other trade concessions (Opium). The Second Opium War ended with Britain forcing China to legalize the growth and production of opium. By 1906 China produced around 85% of the world’s opium and 27% of the adult male population, some 13.5 million people, were addicted to the drug, consuming 39,000 tons every year (Opium). The highly addictive nature of opium resulted in it becoming one of the first substances to be controlled in the United States. San Francisco forced the closure of the city’s opium dens in 1875. The United States government banned imports of the drug in 1909, though it could still be obtained for medical reasons until 1924 (Opium).

Biology and Drug Development

The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) is native to Western Asia and Southeast Europe, but now grows over much of the world. The active narcotic elements of the opium poppy are located in the poppy’s seedpods, which are scored with a knife while still unripe, causing the pod to “bleed” a milky white latex. The latex dries into a sticky brown resin overnight, and is then collected the next morning. One acre of poppies harvested in this way produces between three and five kilograms of raw opium. Narcotic content of the latex differs between different varieties of poppies. For example, one of the most potent strains, Papaver somniferum L. elite, contains nearly 92% morphine, codeine, and thebaine, while “Marianne,” the variety often used for poppy seed production, has less than one fifth of that content (Opium).

In 1806 the German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner isolated opium’s active component, and named it Morphine after Morpheus, the god of dreams. Twenty years later another active ingredient was isolated, and named Codeine. Almost immediately, morphine began to be used in place of opium in minor surgical procedures and for treatment of chronic pain (Brownstein). In 1874 an English chemist named C.R. Alder White synthesized heroin by adding an acetyl functional group to morphine through a process of boiling together anhydrous morphine alkaloid and acetic anhydride over a stove (Heroin). White never did anything with this new relative of morphine, and it was not until 1896 that Felix Hoffmann, working for Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Germany, re-synthesized heroin, and it began to be sold as a cough suppressant and, ironically, as a cure for morphine addiction (Heroin).

Opium Production in Afghanistan

The 2006 opium crop, 30% smaller than the 2007 crop previously cited, was the largest single narcotic crop in history (Schweich). Following his tour of duty, Thomas Schweich, the American Ambassador for Counternarcotics and Justice Reform in Afghanistan, wrote a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine in which he dubbed Afghanistan a “Narco-State” and related in detail the frustrating two years he spent trying to eradicate poppy crops. Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai, Schweich claims, have a vested interest in making sure nothing disrupts the country’s illegal opium trade. Not only would the country lose half of its GDP if the trade were put to an end, but many officials, and their relatives, are intimately involved in the drug trade itself. Afghanistan’s Attorney General told Schweich that President Karzai had personally directed him not to prosecute anyone on his list of twenty names of high-profile officials involved in the opium business. (Schweich). Schweich describes how he went to the Afghan ministries to recommend aerial eradication as the cheapest and most effective way to combat rising opium production, and was flat out refused.

The opium trade is not only associated with the Afghan government, but is also closely connected to the insurgent Taliban forces. Antonio Maria Costa, the Executive Director of UNODC, in describing the sharp rise in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan’s southern provinces declared “a very strong connection between the increase in the insurgency on the one hand and the increase in cultivation on the other hand” (Gall). Opium is the linchpin connecting an extensive network of drug traffickers, insurgents, terrorists, corrupt government officials, and tens of thousands of farmers simply trying to make ends meet. As Costa wrote in a 2007 editorial in the Washington Post:
Drug traffickers have a symbiotic relationship with insurgents and terrorist groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda...Opium is the glue that holds this murky relationship together. If profits fall, these sinister forces have the most to lose. I suspect that the big traffickers are hoarding surplus opium as a hedge against future price shocks and as a source of funding for future terrorist attacks, in Afghanistan or elsewhere…Instability makes opium cultivation possible; opium buys protection and pays for weapons and foot soldiers, and these in turn create an environment in which drug lords, insurgents and terrorists can operate with impunity (Costa).

“The Turkish Strategy”

In the 1960’s Turkey was the fountainhead of most of the world’s opium, supplying around 80% of the heroin in the United States (Hurst). In 1969, President Richard Nixon, newly elected in part because of campaign promises to pursue a “war on drugs,” contacted the Turkish government and told them that poppy criminalization and eradication in Turkey was a top American priority. He suggested that the United States could fund programs for reimbursing farmers for the crops they destroyed, and that if poppies were not criminalized, Turkey could jeopardize the more than $60 million in American aid it received every year. But as in Afghanistan, the poppy was culturally and economically entrenched, having been grown on the plains of Anatolia for millennia. There were more than 70,000 poppy-farming families in the country. The Turkish Prime Minister, Suleyman Demirel, replied that it would be “impossible to go to farmers and ask them to plow under their crops. We cannot control it. The poppies will just appear illegally” and that imposing a program of eradication would “bring down the government” (Hurst). In 1974, the next Prime Minister, breaking the impasse, asked the United Nations for help in building a poppy processing plant and introducing a system for monitoring and regulating drug production. Today, 600,000 Turks are employed in a “highly regulated” system through which Turkey provides medical-grade morphine and codeine to the West, with “negligible” diversion to the illegal market (Hurst).

Opponents of launching a similar “Turkish Strategy” in Afghanistan assert that Afghanistan does not have the necessary stability and government oversight to effectively regulate a legal poppy licensing system. The US Bureau of International Narcotics contends, reasonably, that “without safeguards, licit and illicit opium would be indistinguishable. Opium really destined for the black market would be produced under the pretense of a legal system” (Hurst). Though Afghanistan cannot be expected to live up to the same kind of stringent and effectual verification as Turkey, is it not better to have 20 or 30 percent of the crop diverted to illegal trade than the current 100 percent?

It has also been argued that there is simply no legitimate market capable of handling the massive amounts of opium produced in Afghanistan every month. This is patently false. Figures from the International Narcotics Control Board, which regulates all legal international trade in narcotics, show that seven Western countries account for nearly 80% of the global consumption of morphine; developing countries, with 80% of the world’s population account for only 6% of morphine use (Hurst). Turkey and India (which also has a legal trade in opium products) contend that if Afghanistan is allowed into their market, that the levels of drugs diverted to illegal trade will rise, but Costa claims that the Afghan supply alone already exceeds global demand by 30%, and that Afghan drug lords are sitting on their supplies in order to drive up prices (Costa). While demand for basic painkilling medications might be met in the United States and other Western countries, there is a dramatic dearth in supply for Third World demand. The United States could dedicate some of the $500 million it has allocated each year to Afghan counternarcotics to buying up Afghan supplies and supplying painkillers to developing countries at affordable prices.

Conclusion

A change in administrations, coupled with President-Elect Obama’s repeated vows in the campaign to refocus American attention on the war in Afghanistan, make this a moment of enormous potential to finally break the status quo of the feeble and ineffectual American drug policy in Afghanistan. In one fell swoop we have the ability to help Afghan farmers, reduce the global share of illegal opium-based drugs like heroin, cut off funding to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and court international goodwill by providing much-needed medicines to the developing world. It would be an act of criminal foolishness to blindly follow old policies that have been proven as failures when Turkey has already proven the efficacy of its legal poppy licensing system.

Pocahontas: Nature and Artifice in the American Imagination

2009-04-17T13:53:00.004-04:00

“And being ready with their clubs to beat out his brains, Pocahontas, the king’s dearest daughter, when no entreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms and laid down her own upon his to save him from death” (Smith 36).

The story of Pocahontas saving John Smith from execution has been told and retold in the four hundred years since the incident took place. It has gained the status of a folk tale, becoming part of the national mythology of America alongside Paul Revere’s ride and George Washington’s cherry tree. Considering that it is doubtful whether or not the episode even took place, the tenacity of the tale is remarkable. Pocahontas’s narrative is a compelling one to be sure, and it has been seized upon and used by sources as sundry as the Walt Disney Company, painter John Gadsby Chapman, film director Terrence Malick, and John Smith himself, in pursuit of their own agendas, and to convey their own understandings of the encounter between the Europeans and native peoples of America.

The public first encountered Pocahontas when she traveled to England with a group of other Powhatans, appearing before King James in 1616, and then in John Smith’s own account of his rescue by her in his Generall Historie of Virginia. The story metamorphosed over the years to communicate changing notions about the relationship between white settlers and Native Americans, and to incorporate romantic elements absent from Smith’s telling. 380 years later, American director Terrence Malick released his take on the story, aiming, ostensibly at least, to dispel the inaccuracies of earlier versions, and using Smith’s General History as its source to present a more historically factual version of events. The ways in which these various authors, particularly Smith and Malick, present the story and character of Pocahontas reflect an evolution in fundamental social assumptions about mankind’s relationship with the natural world, and more specifically the evolving understandings of the value of the “natural” versus “artificial” from the time of the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 until the release of Malick’s film in 2005.

The first and most prominent telling of the Pocahontas story was by John Smith in his General History of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624. Smith was actually there, the witness or the subject of many of the events he describes, but the authenticity of his account is colored by his motives in addressing his intended audience as well as by his own cultural prejudices. Smith wrote the General History at a dangerous and pivotal moment for the Virginia Company, on the heels of the Powhatan massacre of Jamestown settlers in 1622, which left about one third of the English population dead. This was a major public relations disaster for the Virginia Company, and for Virginia itself, and there were fears that immigration would drop off to a dangerously unsustainable level. The joint-stock company, operated since 1606 under a charter granted by King James, would be dissolved because of this pressure in 1624, and Virginia would become a royal colony administered by the Crown.

Smith seems to have a few primary objectives in the General History. He hopes to assuage the doubts of investors back in England, alleviate public fears about the dangers posed by starvation and Indian attack in the colony to encourage settlers to migrate to Virginia, and bolster his own reputation and personal glory. He begins with an ethnographic report of the country, in which he describes the land as plentiful, “they plant their fields and live most off acorns, walnuts, and fish…to amend their diet…[they] live upon fish, beasts, crabs, oysters, land tortoises, strawberries, mulberries, and such like” (Smith 8), as well as being free for the taking, “the land is not populous, for the men be few; their far greater number is of women and children” (Smith 5). Smith then describes the history of the settlement at Jamestown up to that point, focusing on his personal role in the colony’s affairs. The key passage comes relatively early, as Smith relays the account of his capture by Powhatan warriors while scouting for the head of the Chickahominy River. He describes fighting off “two hundred savages” before being “shot in his thigh a little…but with no great hurt, till at last they took him prisoner” (31). He says he was held by the Powhatans for seven or eight weeks (though it was actually around three) before “having feasted him after their best barbarous manner…as many as could laid hands on him” and laid his head on “two great stones” (36). At this point Pocahontas enters the narrative for the first time, saving John Smith by appealing to her father for clemency. The rest, as they say, is history. Today many scholars doubt whether this incident took place as Smith described. Smith’s two earlier accounts of his time in Virginia did not include the episode of Pocahontas saving his life, a detail it seems strange to have left out. Furthermore, Smith had already recounted a similar story of being saved by an exotic damsel at least once before. In his earlier book True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, he is saved by one Charatza Tragabigzanda after being captured by the Ottomans (Kupperman 125). It is impossible to know if Pocahontas actually saved Smith’s life as he tells it, but it does not ultimately matter very much. Whether he decided to relate the story after glossing over it in previous accounts, or if he simply fabricated it seventeen years after the fact, he included the episode in the General History for the same reason.

Pocahontas presented a vivid symbol of a charitable “savage” that could controvert the sinister picture drawn by accounts of the recent Jamestown massacre. She had accompanied her husband, as Mrs. Rebecca Rolfe, to England in 1616 on a publicity tour for the Virginia Company, intended to demonstrate to the Court and the public that the natives of Virginia were friendly, peaceful, and most importantly, amenable to religious conversion and Anglicization. Native peoples from the New World had been brought back to England with relative frequency ever since John Cabot brought three men from Newfoundland back to the court of Henry VII in the 1490’s (101). Previously, these natives had been displayed merely as artifacts from the New World, to satisfy the curiosity of England for exotic objects. They were, in other words, live specimens for the curiosity cabinets which had become hugely popular on the Continent. Pocahontas, on the other hand, was not presented as an artifact of foreignness, but for her very Englishness to be marveled at. It is hugely significant that of the several dozen Native American arrivals in England, Pocahontas was the first to have her portrait made in English pose and dress (269). Pocahontas was presented to the court of King James and to the investors of the Virginia Company as an example of what could be made of the “savages.” She had been baptized, spoke English, was clad in western dress, and was married to an Englishman. The Virginia Company subsequently voted the sum of £100 to begin a program that would convert the Chesapeake Algonquins to Christianity (271). With the addition of the rescue story to his narrative, Smith was relying on, as well as supplementing, the popular image of Pocahontas to again stress a similar point: that the natives of Virginia were not all bloodthirsty and dangerous, but could indeed be successfully converted to Western ways.
This narrative of Pocahontas, as a symbol of the friendly “docile” native, appropriately receptive to “superior” Western thinking, persists for several centuries. A notable example of this perspective of the Pocahontas story is in the painting of the Baptism of Pocahontas by John Gadsby Chapman. Chapman was commissioned in 1837 to paint a historical scene on the rotunda of the Capitol building in Washington, DC (John Gadsby Chapman). This is the image of Pocahontas that became part of America’s national mythology. Very much founded in the 17th century approach to civilizing and converting Native Americans, Pocahontas’ most significant achievement for American society is portrayed as simply receiving a baptism, the blessings of Western civilization.

Elizabethan notions of nature and undeveloped space strongly colored the attitude of the Jamestown settlers toward the land and the Native Americans they encountered. The English viewed the environment as “pure potential” that had to be improved by people, by cultivating the land and building upon it. When they encountered landscapes, as they did in Virginia, that were almost entirely untouched by the hand of man, they believed that it was because the native peoples were not able to properly develop the land, as God intended. This understanding is reflected by the contemporary slang in England, by which a person with below average intelligence would be called ‘natural.’ In contrast, artificiality was a state that should be strived for. Bringing the land to its full potential “through the application of art and intelligence” signified the fulfillment of Man’s role in the world (Kupperman 133-4). Artifice was highly valued even in English gardens, which tended to be highly ordered and managed. The estate of Chatsworth, even included an ersatz willow tree, built in 1695 and made entirely of copper and bronze, which could shoot water at unsuspecting guests out of spigots on each of its branches (Devonshire 74).

The English view of the Powhatans is impacted by the lack of development they saw in the landscape. Smith describes how “their houses are in the midst of their fields and gardens” and “that a man may gallop a horse amongst those woods any way but where the creeks or rivers shall hinder” (Smith 7). The bafflement expressed here is at the lack of fences or walls in the Powhatan settlements. While this merely reflects a different understanding of land ownership and property rights, the settlers viewed the cause as a deficiency on the part of the Powhatans, making them incapable of properly developing their land. Similarly, English observers conveyed confusion concerning the Indian practice of planting multiple crops in the same field, which contrasted with the English practice of monoculture. The English saw disorder and barbarism, when in fact polyculture is a more sustainable approach to agriculture than monoculture.

The early-modern perspectives on nature and development held by the Jamestown settlers can be easily contrasted with those of today. Attitudes have almost wholly flipped in the intervening four hundred years. In America today, pristine, untouched areas of nature are set aside as National Parks to be preserved and enjoyed. Environments and vistas free from signs of human development are seen as beautiful and valuable. The rampant surplus extraction and development of land that marked much of America’s history has been repudiated in favor of preservation and conservation. This is the perspective from which Terrence Malick approaches the arrival of English settlers at Jamestown. The film opens with shots of the unspoiled natural beauty of Virginia, and throughout the film Malick’s camera lingers perceptibly on images of fields of grass, serene forests and flocks of birds filling the skies, and he depicts the natives as living perfectly in concert with these natural rhythms. This spirit is also expressed through Malick’s repeated use of the Prelude from Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which appears in both the opening and closing scenes. In the opera, the Prelude accompanies the Rhinemaidens as they swim in the Rhine, and evokes the unchanging rhythms of the river and its eternal natural tranquility. Malick portrays Smith as being taken in by this natural repose during his captivity among the Powhatans. When Smith returns to Jamestown, the settlement appears muddy and chaotic. A herd of boys, with dirty pockmarked faces, mob around Smith yelling unintelligibly. The contrast drawn with the peaceful and seemingly carefree world of Powhatan is clear, and powerful.

Malick’s aesthetic, manifested as well in his other three films, is consistently meditative and engrossed with images of natural beauty. The calm of nature is always contrasted with an element of discord generated by human society, whether criminal passion in Days of Heaven or war in The Thin Red Line. Pocahontas, portrayed by the young actress Q’orianka Kilcher, is introduced in the film as wild and animal-like, her supple movements are healthy and vigorous, and her wide eyes are curious and intelligent. At the point in the film when she transitions into wearing European dress, around the same time Smith departs Virginia, her demeanor changes prominently. For the remainder of the film she is no longer the playful, inquisitive “natural” encountered at the beginning of the film. She takes on a sort of quiet sadness, along with her petticoats. Later in the film when she visits the court of King James, she is shown alongside a bald eagle in a cage, also brought from America to be exhibited to an English public eager for artifacts from the New World. The visual metaphor is clear, that Pocahontas is a captive in this world, whose freedom has been unfairly fettered. Malick’s aesthetic is an illustrative representation of the 21st century’s perspective on “natural” versus “artificial,” that the natural embodies an ideal, well-ordered world that can never be restored once disrupted.

These depictions reflect an evolution in fundamental social assumptions about the way the natural world functions. Pocahontas’ identity as one of the first individuals to cross the immense cultural divide that separated Native Americans from the Europeans newly arrived in their land, has made her the subject of what can only really be described as propaganda. The story of Pocahontas and her role in the colony’s early development has been utilized to comment on different readings of the encounter between Native American and European, colored by remarkably different worldviews in different periods of history. She may be the most famous figure in American history of whom so little is known. Her legacy is both assured and as unconfined as the Pocahontas portrayed by Malick at the beginning of his film, but most importantly, it is always open to interpretation.

Living Thing

2009-03-30T16:43:00.003-04:00

Peter Bjorn and John, Living Thing (Almost Gold Recordings), 2 1/2 stars

If you were conscious and paying at least some passing attention to popular culture in 2006 or 2007, chances are you remember the infectious whistled hook and pitter-patter bongos of Peter Bjorn and John’s “Young Folks.” Its innate cuteness won enough hearts to pass into mainstream consciousness, and catapult the Swedish trio to relative renown. Its sheer ubiquity was perhaps best revealed when Kanye West remixed it on his mixtape “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” PB&J followed up the success of “Young Folks” with a couple pleasant but unmemorable diversions: an album of instrumentals called “Seaside Rock” and frontman Peter Morén’s surprisingly vapid solo debut “The Last Tycoon.” In January, the band’s return-to-form was announced by none other than Kanye West, who introduced the first single from PB&J’s fifth studio album, “Living Thing,” on his blog. The bumptious auteur gloated, “THEY SENT THE SONG TO ME FIRST!” and went on to wax lyrically, “DRUMS ARE CRAZY AND I LIKE THE KIDS ON THE HOOK.” Kanye is totally right. “Nothing to Worry About” is contagious and compelling, all in all, a better song than “Young Folks.” If only the rest of the songs on “Living Thing,” had come close to matching the single’s riotous energy and imagination, we would have had a real winner on our hands.

“Living Thing” starts off with the shimmering synths and brutal drum machine beats of opener “The Feeling.” Spasmodic guitars and tidy handclaps round out the atmosphere. “It Don’t Move Me” carries over the same handclaps, placing them over a piano riff borrowed from Björk’s “Human Behaviour.” Like PB&J’s last album, “Living Thing” is marked by propulsive and insistent percussion, but here the rhythm section is mixed even further to the forefront, often louder than the guitars or vocals. From the reverbed crashes of “Lay it Down,” evocative of chain-gang pick-axes, to the deeply resonated tribal drums on the dirge “4 out of 5,” the band’s meticulous attention to texture is evident in each of the twelve songs on “Living Thing.” Kanye’s caps-locked infatuation with the band is perhaps most understandable in the context of this new preoccupation with aural textures.

However the band often seems to mistake inventive production for good material. Every song on the album has interesting stylistic touches, but they frequently lack the melody and songwriting to come together into a coherent whole. While it is admirable that PB&J take an active interest in the construction of their soundscapes, one wonders if they should have spent more time replicating the winning formula of “Young Folks” before they started tweaking the details.

The band’s stylistic influences are diverse but perhaps at the sacrifice of coherence. “I Want You!” with its midtempo ambling New Wave guitar and echoed bass drum sounds like an early U2 track, and the African-inflected bass, and vocal and lyrical style of “Living Thing” directly channels Vampire Weekend’s watered-down “Graceland” vibe. As already established by Mr. West, “Nothing to Worry About” is an elation, a nearly perfectly-constructed hip-hop influenced indie-pop dance song with a nonsensical yet addicting chorus. “Lay it Down” marks the other high point of the record, with its jaunty tone and insolent chorus of “Hey shut the fuck up boy / You’re starting to piss me off” making it the stylistic twin to “Nothing to Worry About.” But just when you’re starting to join in on the rollicking angry energy, the song ends, and “Stay This Way” drags the whole mess down into plaintive misdirection as Morén sings “I don’t want to grow up/I don’t want to stay young” over a maddeningly meandering synth flute. “Blue Period Picasso” is narrated from, unsurprisingly, the point-of-view of a Blue period Picasso painting. It is as bad as it sounds. Case in point: “but I’m not just being blue…It’s just a part of what I am / It’s just a part of my beating heart.” It turns out that PB&J are far weaker when gunning for clever or thoughtful than when they’re at their most crass and impudent. This is where they seem to have the most fun, and in turn where there music is the most fun to listen to.

There’s not anything particularly offensive about most of these songs, but outside of “Lay it Down” and “Nothing to Worry About,” this album isn’t particularly interesting or memorable. Certainly, making a boring album is not the worst sin a band can commit, but Peter Bjorn and John have proven themselves capable of producing more exciting music than this. In “The Feeling” Peter Morén sings, “Been waiting for signs/Last time we got high we thought we had the puzzle worked out.” Maybe they should be doing some more stoned brainstorming, or maybe Kanye can help them out, but one hopes that Peter Bjorn and John start making the fine albums that their singles deserve.

Aguirre

2009-03-19T02:33:00.004-04:00

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Few images in film history are as hauntingly indelible as the final scene of Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Werner Herzog’s 1972 masterpiece stars Klaus Kinski as the unhinged Conquistador Lope de Aguirre, who, driven mad by the double allure of gold and power, leads a small band of Spaniards and their Indian slaves deep into the Amazon and into the depths of madness. Aguirre, now the only one left alive on his raft, aside from a herd of monkeys, dreams of reaching the sea, saying, “we’ll build a bigger ship” and seize the island of Trinidad from the Spanish Crown. As Aguirre rants about marrying his daughter and founding a “pure dynasty” to rule the entire continent, even the monkeys desert him, jumping into the river and swimming to shore to escape his doomed madness. The camera circles the raft as Aguirre is left standing there, drifting down the river, left with nothing but his illusions of grandeur.

Herzog’s film is full of delirious images like this one, yet the film’s madness is meticulously arranged. Everything about Aguirre, from Kinski’s queer loping gait to the visual dichotomies portrayed between the ladies’ and palanquins and the mud and inimical jungle, recommends a removal from our own reality and an immersion in another. In many ways, the film seems meant to transport the viewer not just to an exotic place and distant past - as films like Gladiator or Elizabeth do, telling stories based on modern ideas about storytelling and social interactions, which happen to take place in the past - but to convey the viewer to an entirely alternate mindset altogether. Herzog uses the trickery of cinema to create for his audience the illusion of themselves being a conquistador, and witnessing the cutting blade of history for oneself, and not through some coeval’s cinematic lens. The sparsity of dialogue and hypnotic quality of the film’s score - an intoxicating mingling of electronics, chants and Andean flute by the influential German progressive band Popol Vuh - sends the viewer into a fugue, in which the walls of our world seem to open up, and the boundaries separating us from the world of Aguirre and sixteenth century Peru are broken.

Aguirre opens with a shot showing an ethereal otherworld of craggy peaks, out of which emerges a ridge of mist-shrouded viridescent Andean foothills, along which a plodding, seemingly endless line of figures make their way. The score marries two sustained whorls of sound, one of human voices and the other of synthesizer, creating an eddy which sucks in the viewer and holds him immersed, just as one of the expedition’s rafts becomes trapped in an eddy on the impetuous Huallaga early in the voyage. The details of the plot - the framing device of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal’s journals, the expedition’s search for El Dorado, even the Machiavellian plotting by Aguirre to seize command from Don Pedro - are ultimately inconsequential and irrelevant. It is no criticism to say that the plot of Aguirre is not the thing one remembers about it. The film captures the profound emotional impact of arriving in a truly New World, five thousand miles away from your home, where the sound of your language has never been heard and the color of your skin has never been seen.

MATHER HAÜS

2009-03-18T14:56:00.003-04:00

This pretty much sums up everything I love, and everything I hate, about Harvard.

The Rise and Fall of Robert Owen: Intellectual Foment and Fizzle

2009-03-16T00:36:00.002-04:00

The village of New Lanark lies on the River Clyde, twenty miles southeast of Glasgow. A visitor, approaching from the north, would observe neat rows of uniform three and five storied gray stone buildings huddled together in the hilly bucolic Scottish countryside, but at first one would likely not discern the significance of the utopian proto-socialist factory community laid out before them. In many ways, Lanark was like the dozens of other mill towns that sprung up around the British isles in the years since Richard Arkwright first harnessed water to power spinning machines in the 1770s. This little industrial hamlet contained mills and factories, spinning and weaving the cotton thread which clothed Britain and constituted one of her principal exports to the rest of the world. There were tenements and houses for the approximately eighteen hundred workers and managers, a bell tower to bring the laborers to work in the morning, and send them home in the evening. However, Lanark was made peculiar by its unconventional manager and operator, the Welshman Robert Owen, who turned Lanark into a laboratory for his own revolutionary theories on business, community, and education.

If this visitor proceeded to peer inside the buildings of Lanark they might begin to see the nascent components of what Owen termed “the New Moral World.” Above each laborer’s station within the factory is a carved, painted block of wood – a “silent monitor” – whose painted faces would be turned according to the worker’s productivity, from black for deficient to white for excellence. Inside one room, uniformed schoolgirls practice a dance while an instructor looks on, under an immense map of Europe and large posters of exotic animals. Lining the walls are well-dressed patrician visitors, who have probably come to satisfy the curiosity aroused by the deluge of praise and attention lavished on Lanark by the press and important thinkers of the day. The Institute for the Formation of Character, formed in 1816, supervised the education of Lanark’s five hundred indigent child laborers. Housing, fuel, clothing and provisions were provided for the workers at low rates, and an atmosphere of communal good and religious tolerance was impressed. Robert Owen was the architect and potentate behind this entire enterprise at Lanark, and his successes here would bring him international celebrity.

Robert Owen was born the sixth of his parents’ seven children on May 14th, 1771. He was born and brought up in the small market town of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, near the English border in the west of Wales. It was a comfortable, though modest background. His father, also named Robert Owen, was a saddler and ironmonger by trade, as well as the town’s postmaster. He was a precocious and clever youth, graduating at the age of seven to schoolmaster’s assistant. The young Owen developed an early passion for reading and devoured volumes from the libraries of the town clergyman, doctor, and lawyer, from Charles Rollin’s Ancient History to the adventure of Robinson Crusoe and Christian allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress. Owen wrote later that he believed every word in these books to be true, and would often read a volume per day.” It was around the age of eight or nine that Owen turned his keen mind toward the question of religion. Upon prompting from some Methodist friends of the Owen family, he began to read tracts on the religious thought of various peoples of the world. Owen was to write that the “study of these contending faiths, and their deadly hate of other, began to create doubts” in his mind as to the accuracy or preeminence of any set of beliefs.

Already restless with his rustic surroundings, Owen obtained permission to leave home upon his tenth birthday. Thus, in 1781, Owen made the journey by coach to London, where he stayed with his brother William for six weeks before securing employment with James McGuffog, a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Owen found great pride in self-sufficiency, bragging, “from that period, ten years of age, [I] maintained myself without ever applying to my parents for any additional aid.”
Owen’s future father-in-law, Glasgow businessman and preacher David Dale, founded New Lanark in 1784. Dale selected the location due to the nearby waterfalls on the River Clyde, which would power the cotton mills he constructed on the site. New Lanark however, was remote, the roads were bad, and the area around it under-populated. Dale was forced to secure a new labor force, and transport and provide accommodations for them at New Lanark. This was achieved by procuring about 500 children from workhouses public charities, and by persuading families to move to the fledgling factory village. At this early juncture of the Industrial Revolution there was still a considerable aversion for factory labor among the general public, and the workers who arrived in New Lanark were of a less than savory nature. Owen later described them as, “destitute of friends, employment, and character.”

Owen first visited Lanark on June 15, 1798, at the age of twenty-seven. If his own version of the story is to be believed, Owen fell into an appraisal of Lanark while attempting to win the hand of Dale’s daughter, the nineteen-year-old Ann Caroline Dale. Whatever Owen’s original intentions were, he secured the purchase of the land, village, and mills of Lanark for himself and his partners, John Barton and John Atkinson, for sixty thousand pounds. Later that year, on September 30th, Owen was married to Ann Dale in Glasgow. On January 1, 1800, Owen took over as manager of the New Lanark Twist Company. He and Ann moved into one of the two large houses located in the center of the village, and Owen went about using his new role as a pulpit for some of his own theories on management and harmonious community. Owen was impressed with the spacious rooms and plentiful food afforded the child laborers at New Lanark, but found fault with Dale for having lived in Glasgow and not devoting himself fully to the well-being of his employees. Owen maintained that prior to his arrival the “population lived in idleness, in poverty, in almost every kind of crime [and] consequently, in debt, out of health, and in misery.” He was horrified to find as well that “the whole was under a strong sectarian influence, which gave a marked and decided preference to one set of religious opinions over all others.”

Owen’s first project was to provide for the education of the children at New Lanarck. Education was at the forefront of Owen’s theories for social betterment. In his own memoirs, Owen’s son Robert Dale wrote that the “New Lanark schools, and the cause of popular education generally, were the subjects which, at this period of my father’s life, chiefly engrossed his attention.” The village school taught the children at New Lanarck for five years, between the ages of five and ten, and without expense to their parents. The schools aimed to educate the children in the broad tenets of Christianity, with no specific doctrinal bent. Mrs. Thrall, a former pupil at the Owenite Lanark-modeled schools at New Harmony, recollected her time there and gives a vivid picture of the dreary monotony of the “coarse linen” uniforms, stringently enforced hours, suppers of “mush and milk again,” and being “marched together to the Community apothecary’s shop, where a dose that tasted like sulfur was impartially dealt out to each pupil.” Admittedly however, this inflexible educational regime would have been a marked improvement over the fourteen hours per day at the factory common for thousands of other British children.

Owen had developed the belief, popular at this time of the advent of the social sciences, that the character of human beings is determined by their environment experiences, and education during childhood. Owen found children to be naturally “without exception, passive and wonderfully contrived compounds.” Owen thought that the growing trend of child labor was creating members of society who were “dwarfs in body and mind,” and he became convinced that society’s ills could be cured if only children were educated before entering the labor pool, and taught intellectual curiosity and tolerance. In his autobiography, Owen applies this theory to himself. At one point, he bizarrely attributes his unique characteristics and any “favorable difference” he possessed, to have stemmed from an episode that occurred when he was around the age of five. Owen writes that once, in his rush to arrive first to school, he swallowed a scalding spoonful of flummery , which scorched his stomach and thereafter made the digestion of food decidedly difficult. By his account, this minor disability aroused in Owen “the habit of close observation and of continual reflection .”

Lanark became a spectacular success. Owen used the profits from the mills to finance new elements of his plans for the ideal society. The Institute for the Formation of Character taught singing and dancing to supplement the typical schoolwork of reading, writing and arithmetic. Owen instituted an autonomous jury system, neighborhood-based community representation, and even a fledgling social security system to provide for workers in injury and old age. Owen reduced his employees’ working day by an hour, and still earned enough profits to circumvent the persistent naysaying of his partners by buying them out in 1813. Some 20,000 visitors flocked to Lanark between 1815 and 1825 to see how Owen had so successfully paired altruism and humanitarian interests with profitability. In 1816, Owen declared that “the chief object” of his life would be to export the successes of Lanark to the world at large.

In an 1813 account of Owen’s early work at Lanark, he holds himself up as a savior to these pauper Scottish laborers. Owen held himself up as somewhere between missionary and messiah – declaring of his work at Lanark, “the population could not continue to resist a firm well-directed kindness, administering justice to all.” This likeness was carried on by many others at the time, at least to some extent as a direct result of Owen’s avid self-promotion. Owen made his first appearance as a speaker in 1812, at a dinner in Glasgow, and would eventually become best known for his many public speaking tours and engagements. In an 1824 tour of the United States he addressed a joint session of Congress in Washington, D.C., and in Cincinatti, engaged in an eight-day public debate on religion. His ideas held enough sway to gain Owen the ears of the American President, the Austrian minister Metternich, Prime Ministers and Members of Parliament. Owen’s success seems to have frozen his once vigorous and active mind. His son describes his reading habits’ atrophy, “he usually glanced over books, without mastering them; often dismissing them with some…curt remark…I never remember to have seen him occupied in taking notes from any book whatever.”

His reputation as an innovative thinker and successful manager began to be replaced however, with one for pomposity, garrulity, and a dictatorial approach in his little “new moral worlds.” Reports that Owen had himself castrated a boy who had transgressed Owen’s law against licentiousness, whether true or not, did nothing to help his public persona. The power and capacity of this sort of mass leadership seems to have gone to Owen’s head. From this point on, Owen had passed his apogee, and his fame and fortunes began to fall. Convinced of his own rectitude and philosophical infallibility, Owen continued to preach his increasingly extreme social and moral solutions. His long-held secularism turned subtly to anti-religious rants, alienating, and likely limiting, his audience. He continued to publish prolifically and held frequent speaking engagements, but he ceased to say anything new, and fewer and fewer people found what Owen had to offer interesting. His published work held such grandiloquent titles as “The Measures Which I have been Impressed from My Youth to Adopt Through Life to This Period, To Prepare the Population of the World to Change Their System of Falsehood, Ignorance, and Misery, for the System of Truth, Wisdom, and Happiness.”

Owen’s obituary, announcing his death in The Times on November 19, 1858 carries the air of a bright, but dirtied past. Owen perhaps was too similar to his signature wooden block, announcing workers’ progress: designed with the best intentions to be efficacious, but ultimately uncompromising and, above all, blockish. The legacy of Robert Owen is perhaps best reflected in these lines of verse from an 1834 edition of the Poor Man’s Guardian:
Robert Owen, wise and good,
Better known than understood;
Too often putting wisdom’s tools
In the very hands of fools.

Gay Ducks

2009-03-11T22:11:00.001-04:00

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=gay-ducks-derail-repopulation-plan-2009-03-10

On the Balkans

2009-03-08T22:45:00.003-04:00

"...It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars.

Less imaginative westerners looked down on them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions, and fearing their savage terrorists. Karl Marx called them 'ethnic trash.' I, as a footloose youngster in my twenties, adored them."

C.L. Sulzberger, "A Long Row of Candles."

a day at the beach

2009-03-08T17:12:00.008-04:00

Robert Owen: for you I do the things I do

2009-03-06T14:28:00.000-05:00

Twist and Shout

2009-03-04T18:29:00.002-05:00

this is how gibbons act.

2009-03-03T22:10:00.002-05:00

this is how i act.

Konono

2009-03-03T08:58:00.005-05:00

Plagued

2009-03-02T20:36:00.005-05:00

I'm feeling tired and achy and sick and infuriated by schoolwork.

Montevideo

2009-02-26T01:29:00.000-05:00

Tricky Dick

2009-02-24T21:27:00.001-05:00

stupid.

The Spectacle of Execution as Social Control in Ancient Rome

2009-02-24T20:19:00.011-05:00

“…the father was investigated through his slaves, and the investigation went against the accuser. The latter, deranged by his crime and at the same time terrified by a rumor among the public that they were threatening him with prison and the Rock or the penalties for parricides, withdrew from the City,” (Tacitus Annals 4.29.1-2).

The concepts of fama (reputation) and existimatio (good name) were at the center of social organization in ancient Roman society. A loss of one’s fama and existimatio, through either criminal misdeeds or breach of civil faith, resulted in infamia, a condition with both legal and social consequences (Infamia). In Book 4 of The Annals, Tacitus recounts the investigations into the “hostile disorder and disrupting the state” of two friends of the Princeps Tiberius. “The latter” is Lucius Seius Tubero, a relative of Sejanus, and a suffect counsel in 18 CE. The first, Gnaeus Lentulus was found innocent of his crimes, but Tubero’s presumed guilt results in the vulgi rumor (public rumor) that he is threatened with prison or “the Rock,” and Tubero flees. Though there appears to have been no formal adjudication of guilt, the public perception of Tubero’s culpability results in a loss of his existimatio. The threat which caused Tubero to flee was of the worst fate a Roman could suffer, the complete forfeiture of his fama and existimatio.

People were executed by precipitation from the Tarpeian Rock for crimes that are not merely against a citizen, but in some way against Rome itself. This venue, and later the Stelae Gemoniae (Gemonian Steps) were only used for the most serious crimes, which particularly offended the moral code of Roman society, and execution there results in a permanent shroud of infamia over their memory and their descendents. Traitors were most commonly executed on the Rock, following the etiological example of Tarpeia, but people were also executed there for crimes such as lying under oath, a betrayal of the city’s sacrosanct institutions, and for crimes that were as morally repugnant to Roman values as incest. In contrast, and reflecting the changing legal conditions between the Republic and Principate, the Gemonian Steps were used as a site of execution for traitors against the Emperor, and did not reflect the same kind of legality as the Rock. Capital punishment does not appear to have been commonly inflicted, especially when dealing with Roman citizens. Citizens could often choose self-banishment and exile to avoid the death penalty. Exile, or exsilium, had been institutionalized by the time of the late Republic, and in the Principate was replaced with a formal sentence (Exile). Despite the image in the popular imagination of Romans as bloodthirsty inflictors of vicious punishments and consumers of brutal bloodsport, there appears to have been a reluctance to impose capital punishment on Romans for all but the most heinous crimes.

Roman criminal law is not fully understood, and scholarly work about Roman law tends to focus on private and constitutional law. The only substantial work on the subject is Theodor Mommsen’s Römisches Strafrecht (1899), and this work does not thoroughly discuss the issue of penalties. The structure of the Roman legal system was transformed and refashioned countless times throughout Roman history. Even between the years 100 BCE and 100 CE, the organization of the courts themselves was transmuted multiple times. Trials were conducted by various different quaestiones (tribunals), usually presided over by a Praetor. Quaestiones consisted of jurors, either senators or equestrians before the lex Aurelia in 70 BCE, which created a juror pool from the three orders of senatorials, equestrians, and tribuni aerarii (Robinson 4). During the Republic there would be quaestiones perpetuae (standing courts) for each category of offense. For example, the quaestio de peculatu prosecuted the crime of embezzlement. The first quaestio perpetua was set up by the lex Appuleia, proposed by L. Appuleius Saturninus, around 103 BCE, and was responsible for prosecuting the new crime maiestas minuta populi Romani (“the diminution of the majesty of the Roman people,”) abbreviated as maiestas, (Maiestas). Other quaestiones were ad hoc and designed to deal with special offenses (Quaestiones). The quaestio Mamilia was formed in 110 BCE by tribune Gaius Mamilius Limetanus to investigate possible collaboration with Jugurtha (Mamilius). By the beginning of Tiberius’ reign some of these courts, such as those for maiestas and res repetundae seem to have disappeared, signifying that political crimes were now prosecuted by imperial authorities, while the old republican courts still handled ordinary offenses like adultery and forgery (Robinson 7). Additionally, the Senate itself regularly operated as a court during the 1st century CE, and perhaps before and after as well (Robinson 7). What is clear is that much of Roman criminal law was un-codified, at least until the time of Justinian in the sixth century CE, and that the issue of punishment was left largely to the individual judgment of the deciding authorities, which depended on the crime being prosecuted. Take, for example, the trial of Sextus Marius in 33 CE. Marius was accused of committing incest with his daughter. He was put on trial by the Senate in Rome, who found him guilty and sentenced him to be thrown off of the Tarpeian Rock, in contrast to the stated penalties of relegation or deportation, under the lex Julia de adulteries from the Severan period (Bauman 60). It appears from the facts of this case, and other similar examples, that the Senate, or any other prosecuting authority were not responsible for following legal guidelines when handing down sentences in the same way that modern justices are, but rather could base their decisions on the social status of the accused and particulars of the specific case.

The precise location of the Tarpeian Rock remains open to debate. It is known to have been on the Capitoline Hill, the tallest of Rome’s seven hills, and was probably located on its south side, overlooking the Forum Romanum, the Palantine, the Aventine and the Tiber (Macadan 70). The Capitoline, like Rome’s other six famous hills is an ignimbrite plateau, made of lithoid and lionato tuff, deposited during the eruptions of the Tuscolano-Artemisio volcano around 350,000 years ago, and then eroded by a stream, possibly an ancient course of the River Tiber (The Seven Hills of Rome). The Gemonian Steps led down from the Arx of the hill to the Forum, by the Mamertine Prison on the right and the Temple of Concord and Tabularium on the left. The Tarpeian Rock, Stelae Gemoniae and the Carcer Tullianum in the Mamertine Prison were the three most significant sites of execution in the city of Rome, and probably were all within several hundred yards of each other.

The use of the Tarpeian Rock as a site of execution by precipitation goes back to the beginning of the Roman monarchy in the days of Romulus. Livy lays out the etiological story of the use of the Tarpeian Rock in Book I of Ab urbe condita. The story takes place during the war between Romulus and Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines. Livy writes about Tarpeia, a Vestal Virgin and the daughter of the commander of the Roman citadel during the war between Romulus and Titus Tatius, who:

…had gone by chance outside the walls to fetch water for sacrifices, was bribed by Tatius, to admit some armed soldiers into the citadel. After they were admitted, they crushed her to death by heaping their arms upon her: either that the citadel might rather appear to have been taken by storm, or for the sake of setting forth a warning, that faith should never on any occasion be kept with a betrayer. The following addition is made to the story: that, as the Sabines usually wore golden bracelets of great weight on their left arm and rings of great beauty set with precious stones, she bargained with them for what they had on their left hands; and that therefore shields were heaped upon her instead of presents of gold. Some say that, in accordance with the agreement that they should deliver up what was on their left hands, she expressly demanded their shields, and that, as she seemed to be acting treacherously, she herself was slain by the reward she had chosen for herself. (Livy 1:11)

Though Tarpeia’s execution was carried out by the invading Sabines, and not by Romans, the story still sets an important precedent that traitors be executed at this particular site, given its real or imagined historical significance. The classical literary record suggests that the Rock was used regularly, if not frequently, for the purpose of executions over the next six centuries. Spurius Cassius Vecellinus, thrice Consul, in 502, 493, and 486 BCE, was executed after his last Consulship when his fellow Consul Verginius accused him of trying to become king for proposing to give land won in a recent campaign to the plebs. Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, a patrician and Consul in 392 BCE was similarly killed for supposedly aiming at kingship by nefariously lending money to debtors. Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus describes how the general is charged in the senate and nearly extra-legally executed from the Rock:

For he came and stood before them as one who would defend himself, and the people were quiet and silent in his presence. But when, instead of the more or less deprecatory language expected by his audience, he began not only to employ an offensive boldness of speech, which at last became actual denunciation, but also to show, by the tone of his voice and the cast of his countenance, that his fearlessness was not far removed from disdain and contempt, then the people were exasperated, and gave evident signs that his words roused their impatience and indignation. Upon this, Sicinius, the boldest of the tribunes, after a brief conference with his colleagues, made formal proclamation that Marcius was condemned to death by the tribunes of the people, and ordered the aediles to take him up to the Tarpeian rock at once, and cast him down the cliff below. But when the aediles laid hold of his person, it seemed, even to many of the plebeians, a horrible and monstrous act; the patricians, moreover, utterly beside themselves, distressed and horror stricken, rushed with loud cries to his aid. Some of them actually pushed away the officers making the arrest, and got Marcius among themselves…Then Sicinius, becoming calm, asked the patricians what they meant by taking Marcius away from the people when it wished to punish him. But the patricians asked in their turn: "What then is your purpose, and what do ye mean, by thus dragging one of the foremost men of Rome, without a trial, to a savage and illegal punishment? (Plutarch, Coriolanus 18).

Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, like Capitolinus and Vecellinus, was an important and respected member of Roman society, honored for his military successes against the Volscians at the battle of Corioli by his honorific cognomen. Though he was not actually killed on the Rock, Coriolanus did end up meeting a grisly end as a consequence of his “disdain and contempt” for the people. It is significant that these three cases, among some of the oldest references to executions from the Rock, all involve prominent members of Roman society who went either too far to the left by advocating social reform, or too far to the right by advocating aristocratic control, and somehow upset the delicate political balance of Roman society. Echoes of Vecellinus and Coriolanus can be seen in Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and Julius Caesar, who were also killed, though not on the Rock, for upsetting Roman social and political conventions. In these cases, executions on the Tarpeian Rock can be most legitimately regarded as a public advertisement of the consequences of stepping outside the boundaries of acceptable political action.

Meanwhile, it is probable that countless ordinary citizens, freedmen and slaves were precipitated from the Rock during this period, but most of their stories have been lost to history. The only surviving reference to the Rock in republican law is from the eighth of the 5th century BCE Twelve Tables, which states, “whoever is convicted of speaking false witness shall be flung from the Tarpeian Rock” (The Twelve Tables). Edward Gibbon explains the action of throwing the malicious witness publicly off the Rock as an attempt “to expiate his falsehood, which was rendered still more fatal by the severity of the penal laws and the deficiency of written evidence”(Gibbon 365). Many of the ancient references to killings from the rock refer to slaves or freedmen. In his Life of Sulla, Plutarch tells the story of Lucius Cornelius Chrysogenus “a freedman, suspected of having concealed one of the proscribed, and for that reason sentenced to be thrown down the Tarpeian Rock” in 80 BCE (Plutarch, Sulla 1). The 3rd century jurist Callistratus points out that “in every case of capital punishment [in omni supplicio] our ancestors punished slaves more harshly than free persons…” possibly a reference to one of the Twelve Table rules that a thief who was free would be adjudged to the victim, but a thief who was a slave would be thrown from the Rock (Bauman 134). Consequently, it can be seen that capital punishment involving the Rock was performed for a myriad of different reasons, but depended largely upon the social status of the offender. Slaves, freedmen, and other non-citizens could be executed for relatively insignificant crimes, while normally inviolable political and military elites could suffer the ultimate infamia for pressing too far on the limits of their political power.

It is unclear what caused the termination of the use of the Tarpeian Rock for executions, but the historical record shows that it was rarely used after the age of Sulla, and by the time of the Principate it appears to have been abandoned completely. Perhaps it had become too closely associated with the Republic or there had been some sort of public disavowal of the practice of precipitation in the name of humanitas, but all of this is merely conjecture. The role of the Rock appears to have been at least partially relocated to the Stelae Gemoniae (Gemonian Steps). The first mentions of the Steps occur during the reign of Tiberius, so it has been assumed that they were constructed during or shortly before his reign. They led up from the Forum to the Capitoline, with the Mamertine Prison on the on one side and the Temple of Concord and Tabularium on the other. In the chapter on Tiberius in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius relates the story of the purging and execution of Sejanus, the prefect of Tiberius’ Praetorian Guard, referring to the Stelae Gemoniae as “the Stairs of Mourning”:

Some of those who were consigned to prison were denied not only the consolation of reading, but even the privilege of conversing and talking together. Of those who were cited to plead their causes some opened their veins at home, feeling sure of being condemned and wishing to avoid annoyance and humiliation, while others drank poison in full view of the senate; yet the wounds of the former were bandaged and they were hurried half-dead, but still quivering, to the prison. Every one of those who were executed was thrown out upon the Stairs of Mourning and dragged to the Tiber with hooks, as many as twenty being so treated in a single day, including women and children (Suetonius 61.4).

Cassius Dio in his Roman History differs slightly in his account, saying that Sejanus was “executed and thrown down the Stairway, where the rabble abused it for three whole days and afterwards threw it into the river” (Cassius Dio LVIII:11). These descriptions of the murder of Sejanus seem to be typical of executions on the Steps. The accused was generally taken from the adjacent Mamertine Prison, strangled and thrown down the steps, where their body was usually left to rot and be picked apart by scavengers, before being dragged to the river and disposed with. Suetonius also tells the story of Tiberius’ daughter-in-law Agrippina, who committed suicide after the murder of her husband Germanicus. Afer her death, Tiberius “assailed her memory with the basest slanders, persuading the senate to add her birthday to the days of ill omen, and actually taking credit to himself for not having had her strangled and her body cast out on the Stairs of Mourning” (Suetonius 53.2). The Gemonan Steps are most closely associated with the violent excesses of Tiberius and the reign of the Julio-Claudians up to the Year of the Four Emperors in 69 CE. The third of those emperors, Vitellius ruled for only eight months, before being defeated by the armies of Vespasian and was dragged to the steps and killed by the invading troops of his rival (Tacitus Histories III. 84-5). Like an execution by precipitation on the Tarpeian Rock, being killed upon the Gemonian Steps, in close proximity to the Forum and in full public view, constituted the worst in infamia for a Roman.

The city of Rome was built along the natural contours of the land, with its geography playing a very strong role in the shape of the city. The Forum, for example, occupied a low point, in a valley nestled between hills, in a space originally occupied by marshland. The Capitoline Hill, just north of the Forum, is the highest of Rome’s hills, so the Tarpeian Rock, rising high above the city, was one of the most visible and prominent points in the city. Similarly, the Stelae Gemoniae must have been one of the most trafficked points in the city, located at the hub of the Forum, Tabularium, Temple of Concord, and the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus on top of the Capitoline (Macadan). The Tarpeian Rock and Gemonian Steps both evolved as sites of execution because of their location and high visibility. The decidedly public character of execution at these locations made it, in some ways, a fate worse than death, given the enormous humiliation and ignominy involved. Execution at these locales demonstrated a desire by the authorities to not only prosecute and punish crimes against the state and against themselves, but to make an example of those being punished. Callistratus describes this convention:

The practice approved by most authorities has been to hang notorious brigands on a gallows in the place which they used to haunt, so that by the spectacle others may be deterred from the same crimes, and so that it may, when the penalty has been carried out, bring comfort to the relatives and kin of those killed in that place where the brigands committed their murders (Callistratus Dig. 48.19.28.15 as quoted by Coleman 49).

The same technique can be seen in early modern Europe, where traitors’ heads were often stuck on spikes and exhibited at city gates to achieve maximum visibility for the authorities’ message of deterrence. In Kathleen Coleman’s study of the theatrical spectacle of execution employed in the Coliseum and other venues throughout the ancient Roman world she remarks that punishment can be interpreted as “the manifestation of disapproval by members of a society (or its rule-enforcing authorities) when that society’s norms are violated…” (Coleman 45).

Executions carried out at the Tarpeian Rock and Stelae Gemoniae were both generally for the loosely defined crime of treason. In the Republic treason was more widely understood to include any crime that was particularly distasteful to Roman society, whether an actual betrayal of Rome to a foreign power, an individual who offended Roman morality by committing incest, or one who made a mockery out of Rome’s civil institutions by lying under oath, but these executions generally took place within the legal framework of the quaestiones. Those executions which took place on the Stelae Gemoniae, on the other hand, seem to have always been for the more strictly defined crime of treason against the Princeps, but were largely up to the Princeps himself, or his praetorian guard to prosecute and carry out. This type of public spectacle and broadcasting of execution is alien to modern society, especially in the West, where death, even of heinous murderers and rapists takes place in private, as far away from the public eye as possible. However, the same argument is made today in favor of the death penalty, that it acts as a deterrent against future crime, as was likely used to justify the barbaric public executions that took place at the Tarpeian Rock and Gemonian Steps. Given Roman society’s preoccupation with the concepts of fama and existimatio, the deterrence offered by the threat of public infamia, carried out periodically in plain sight of the Forum at the center of the city, cannot be underestimated.

Happiness

2009-02-23T19:07:00.004-05:00

Nothing makes me happy like a good dose of amalgamated americana:

Tight Knit

2009-02-23T04:11:00.002-05:00

Vetiver
"Tight Knit" (Sub Pop) -- 4 STARS
Published On 2/27/2009 12:19:16 AM

By SPENCER BURKE
Contributing Writer

The cover of “Tight Knit” shows a silhouetted woodland scene superimposed over a stylized circular star map, reflecting a new direction for Vetiver’s music. The band has always had the quality of a hushed guitar-strumming circle in a forest clearing, but after three albums and five years, Vetiver’s “Tight Knit” makes a conscious effort to progress beyond the delicate, relaxed sing-alongs of their freak-folk origins for a more exuberant tone and perky production.

Since Vetiver’s first appearance on the national stage in 2004—when their song “Angel’s Share” kicked off the Devendra Banhart-curated compilation “Golden Apples of the Sun”—they have released three albums built along the same formula: subdued acoustic guitar folk well-rooted in the imagery and atmosphere of the natural world. The instrumentation has been tweaked and new styles experimented with, but much of what has always made Vetiver a band worth listening to is the evocative and consistent tone of their music. With song titles such as “Down at El Rio” and “Arboretum” and a species of western Indian grass as their namesake, it is not surprising that the genre of their music is self-described as “Naturalismo.”

With “Tight Knit” Vetiver is leaving the dark, comfortable environs of the forest and setting off into the new territory of the night sky. The result is a less consistently redolent and distinctive but more exciting and sociable collection of songs than we have heard from Vetiver before. Bandleader and songwriter Andy Cabic plays all of the instruments on many of the tracks, and without any of the clearly discernible collaborations of previous Vetiver records—Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Hope Sandoval—“Tight Knit” comes across very much as the work of a single voice.

“Tight Knit” is Vetiver’s debut recording for Sub Pop, the luminary king of indie pop record labels and home to the Shins and Postal Service. This move from Cabic and Banhart’s own label Gnomonsong is evident in the production of the album, with a sound that is cleaner and more expansive than Vetiver’s previous recordings. The major label seems to serve Cabic well, and he takes advantage of this to expand the instrumentation and variety of his songs.

The album starts off with the aptly titled “Rolling Sea,” a sensitive fingerpicked ballad, decorated with piano and steel guitar, that would fit in on any previous Vetiver record. This is followed by “Sister,” a gentle appeal to a sibling “too young to be treated badly, too bored to be told.” It is a radical departure for Vetiver, with a rhythm section lifted straight out of a fifties R&B crooner. Next is the winsome “Everyday,” which sounds positively twee. With its barred strumming, steel guitar and Cabic’s sunny “doo-doo-doos,” “Everyday” could be a lost Belle & Sebastian track. “Another Reason to Go” is infused with rigorous bass and a funky horn riff that would not be out of place in a James Brown swagger, and a drum machine even shows up in “On the Other Side.” Vetiver has always had a knack for merry rollicking romps—“Amour Fou” from their 2004 self-titled debut comes to mind—though in “Tight Knit” tracks like “Everyday” and “More of This” are infused with a more clearly articulated pop sensibility.

Cabic illuminated his influences on last year’s “Thing of the Past,” in which he offered covers of seminal but relatively recondite folk artists, from Loudon Wainwright and Townes van Zandt to Derroll Adams and Bobby Charles—artists that have inspired the direction his own music has taken. Listening to “Tight Knit,” however, one wonders if the conceit behind “Thing of the Past” wasn’t entirely honest. While “Tight Knit” includes several songs—“Forest Edge” and “Down from Above”—that would fit anywhere in Vetiver’s canon, the new bearings manifest in “Tight Knit” seem to owe more to the rhythm and crunchy horns of sixties funk and the melodies and vocal style of nineties indie pop than to the Americana and “Naturalismo” of previous recordings.

The problem is that no matter how attractive and enjoyable these songs are to listen to, they have lost part of the distinctive character that made Vetiver unique. With “Tight Knit,” Vetiver have proven that they can play in other circles as well, producing their warmest and most enjoyable album yet. But they have yet to put their own stamp on these styles, and time will tell if their future recordings demonstrate that they can bridge the stylistic gap between the vivid and organic Vetiver of old and their jauntier and more playful newer material.

I must be in a good place

2009-02-22T22:47:00.004-05:00

I'm feeling silly. Very silly. And it's hard to concentrate on the serious work of being a responsible college student when you're grinning stupidly to yourself in the library.

The Rise of the Crescent Moon, Pt. 1

2009-02-22T17:20:00.003-05:00

On the night of the 22nd of May 1453, a crescent moon rose over the Bosphorus. The people of the ancient city of Constantinople, the last vestige of the might and splendor of the Roman Empire, looked on in terror. In the Turkish camp, the more than 160,000 troops of Sultan Mehmet II - not yet “The Conqueror” - massed outside the city walls saw the moon as well, and launched into jubilant celebration. The Byzantine Emperor Constantine, in his palace on the Sea of Marmara, most likely recognized the import of this portent: a prophecy held that the city would not fall until the full moon conferred a sign. What should have risen as a full moon that night, ascended as a slender sliver. Less than six days later the city’s defenses would fail, the last Greek Emperor would fall, and the churches and citizens of the city would endure three days of rape and pillage before calm would settle on the beleaguered city.

The young Sultan Mehmet had bold and deep-rooted ambitions, inherited from his father Murad, to the capture of Constantinople. He had come to the throne two years previously, in February 1451, and immediately set out to subdue an Ottoman vassal state in Anatolia. Mehmet proved himself a forceful leader with this victory, and subsequent suppression of a small mutiny by the Janissary corps, who demanded a cash bonus following the campaign. Sources in the court describe how Mehmet has already become consumed with the goal of capturing Constantinople. To Mehmet, and other powerful figures in the Ottoman regime, the continued sovereignty of a Christian city in the center of the Muslim states of the Balkans and Near East was intolerable, especially because the Byzantine Emperor provided shelter and aid to rival claimants to the Ottoman throne. Mehmet traveled to a spot on the Black Sea six miles from the city walls, and in March 1452 began construction of a massive fortress, which was called Rumeli-Hisari. It was completed by August of that year, and together with another smaller castle built on the opposite side of the strait effectively closed off passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. By September, approximately 50,000 men were encamped around the fortress, and 250 Ottoman ships lay at anchor along the Asian coast. The Greeks strung a massive chain across the harbor, and lined up galleys equipped with battering rams along the line to guard the mouth of the Bosphorus.

Constantinople was already moribund, a city that had been ebbing for generations. In 1205, the Fourth Crusade, instead of passing through the city, captured and looted it, creating a Latin Catholic state, which lasted several decades before the Greek regime was restored. At the time of the Ottoman conquest the Imperial Palace still lacked roof tiles, from the Crusader’s sack of the city. Its population had been declining steadily, so that large tracts within the city walls were unpopulated and reduced to rustic parkland. In 1347 the Black Death left a third of the Empire’s population dead. The same year, at the coronation of Emperor John VI, the jewels in the Emperor and Empress’s diadems were made out of glass. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks steadily increased their power and influence from Anatolia across into Europe, growing bolder in their assaults on Greek territories.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the Emperor Manuel II embarked on a tour of the courts of Western Europe to shore up Christian support for the Byzantines in what promised to be troubling years ahead. Quarrel and resentment colored the relationship between the Catholic Church in Rome and the Eastern Church in Constantinople. Dogmatic disagreements played an increasingly divisive role in the relationship between Western and Eastern Christianity. The Byzantine Emperors, sensing the mounting power of the Ottomans, aimed to bolster their position by entering into a union with the Western Church and ironing out their doctrinal differences. After years of stalled negotiations, the union of the Churches was made at the grand church of St. Sophia in Constantinople in December of 1453. Greek public sentiment however, ran strong against the Union, and feelings on the other side seem to have been no less tepid. Emperor Constantine may have hoped that the feelings of confederacy and obligations of Christian brotherhood brought about by the union would bring military reinforcements to his city from the Christian kingdoms of Europe, but little help came to the encircled city. Latin contemporaries looked at what they perceived to have been the Greek’s impure motives in entering into this failed union as resulting in God’s ire, as cause for him to punish the city.

In the spring of 1453, Mehmet left his capital at Edirne, where he had spent the previous winter, intent on taking Constantinople. In April, Mehmet had ships rolled across land and into the harbor of Constantinople. Enormous cannons where wheeled overland, and starting in the beginning of March, heavy bombardment began of the city’s walls. For the next three months the walls and towers that had long kept the city safe were assailed and battered. Giovanni Giustiniani, a Genoese noble who had come to the city with 700 men several months previously, took an informal position of command over the city’s defenses.

Love this guy

2009-02-18T02:19:00.001-05:00

Courtesy of the Black Lips

2009-02-16T23:12:00.001-05:00

Julius & Marge Cheeks with the Knights
Uploaded by pigfoot

Caffeine and Nicotine

2008-03-15T16:04:00.002-04:00

I love you so much that I'm going to sing Radiohead love songs to you:

you are all i need
you are all i need
i'm in the middle of the picture
lying in the leaves

it's all right
it's all wrong
it's all right
it's all wrong
it's all right
it's all wrong
it's all right

Since 1995

2008-03-05T21:00:00.004-05:00

LOLSLOTHS?

2008-03-05T18:57:00.003-05:00

The sloth-life is the life for me:

The Sloth Life, It Can Changes
Uploaded by SlothVision

PS. I really like the sweet tunes in this video.

The Catskills

2008-03-04T02:54:00.006-05:00

Well, that's essentially how I feel about life.

Listening to: Debe by Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté

Gone Fishing

2008-03-04T02:25:00.000-05:00

There's trouble a-brewing...

The First Dilemma

2008-03-04T01:42:00.000-05:00

The Lady amongst the sweet potatoes, tiny
Coal blue ashen little black flowers dust
The ground.
The ochre feet settle softly
Burning bugs in the nettles bright
Breasts hang low, reaching
Big bellied babes’ gaping grins
Barely reaching.

Amid the still blue jungle nights
As haunting yawps of muscled cries
Resound through empty pastures pillaged
Hornbills splitting heads on the sordid riverbanks.

Slovenly obsequious to new-age neon
And flat and flawless flesh
Stir me from my drunken stupor. Please
Lead me by the hand by bloated bodies
Bobbing slowly with ebb and flow
In the river, silted closed with
Corporate invocation and
Savage butchery of arms and heads and shoulders
Gold teeth and ivory shins.

Pituitaries ripped informally from plots,
Shoved wayward testes into mongrels in the night
Make a man out a beast;
A beast out a man.

The first dilemma:
Makes me wretch to see the wretched so
But pay a pithy penny to
Fill my cup with grace
And revel in Roman pleasure gardens
Drink up the sky, Caligula
Turn not up your nose.

Let the silver spoon in the backway -
Hide my desire for screen-flash of stench and decay; I
Absorb through my skin everything I ever need to know,
Secret in the dark. Smoke your cigarette.

Take me behind a bush and slit my throat
With benediction, rosewater and myrrh
Accompanied by numeric cello swells,
But Signal your intentions first.

Listening to: Come, Gone by Sonny Rollins, Way Out West

Hasid Yid

2008-03-01T22:00:00.002-05:00

The Noble Sifaka, or the Greatest Animal in the World

2008-02-29T15:41:00.000-05:00

In my humble opinion, evolution's quest to create the perfect animal finds its culmination in the form of the noble sifaka (figure A).

FIGURE A

And if that doesn't convince you, let's lay out a few important points:

lemur
lives in Madagascar
absurdly cute
"when not searching for food they spend a good part of the day sun bathing, stretched on the branches," (Wikipedia)
it's a motherfucking lemur!

I am posting this with the hope of soliciting convincing counterarguments. So my dear friends: what do you think is the world's finest creature? Don't forget to back up your assertions with evidence (preferably in video form). Let the race begin:

Listening to: Monkey Gone to Heaven by Pixies (coincidence? I think not).

Yazz

2008-02-29T05:34:00.000-05:00

This is why I smoke.

This is also why I'm playing so much Duke Ellington on my show. Wait, that's a lie. I'm playing so much Duke Ellington, because Fernanda requested him. Or rather, some cat named "Duck Ellington," and we here at WHRB do what we can to please.

Sleep > Class

2008-02-28T10:56:00.001-05:00

Untitled and Unfinished, but Absurdist without a doubt.

2008-02-28T01:13:00.000-05:00

Act 1

We find Spencer seated upon the grassy ground sorting neckties; he sifts through them; sniffing at some, discarding others with an unreasonable force from the confines of the frame; eventually after minutes of uninterrupted silence Sean enters, brandishing the fork of a pitchfork

Sean: You bloody fucker. You stole my neckties. I’m going to tear your fucking spleen out and eat it raw, you godless cunt.

Spencer: Excuse me? I did nothing of the sort. You must have mistaken me.

Sean: How could I have mistaken you, you armless twat, you’re sitting there, your arms full of ties.

Spencer: Your eyes must be failing you.

Sean: My eyes see not, but my heart knoweth god’s own truth.

With that, Sean launches himself at Spencer, who cries out in horror and desperation

Sean: I have ripped a man apart in Brixton with less than this!

The violent struggle continues, in a wild flurry of limbs on the ground for a minute or so before Spencer being throttled on the ground exclaims…

Spencer: My, look at that cloud!

Sean: What does it look like to you?

Spencer: It’s a wash basin of course

Sean: No, you simple-minded charlatan. It’s Hieronymus Bosch

Spencer: Looks nothing like him

Sean: Well, it’s only in profile.

Spencer: You’re wrong, you know.

Sean (with introspection): Yes, it’s been said before.

After a moment of silence, the two staring at each other with narrowed eyes

Sean: I like talking to you. My respect grows with each passing day.

Spencer: You’ve only known me for this morning.

Sean: Have I? It feels like ages, doesn’t it?

Spencer: I suppose….if you want to look at it that way.

Sean: What is time but semantics anyway. Time is not reality, but a fictional construct meant to obscure our eyes from the glowing radiance of truth

Spencer looks confused, but counters by breaking into tuneless singing:

Spencer (singing): I'm singing in the rain
Just singing in the rain
What a glorious feelin'
I'm happy again
I'm laughing at clouds

Sean: Ha!

Spencer ((continuing to sing)): So dark up above
The sun's in my heart

Sean: Naiveté, that’s all that is if you ask me

Spencer (continuing to sing): And I'm ready for love
Let the stormy clouds chase
Everyone from the place
Come on with the rain
I've a smile on my face
I walk down the lane
With a happy refrain
Just singin' and dancin’
in the rain

Sean: How can you be happy when you’re singing all the time?

Spencer: How can you be happy when you’re sad all the time?

Sean: You sir, have just broken a man’s heart.

Sean sits down, forlorn. Spencer looks at him questioningly, with perhaps a glint of pity in his eye

Sean (picking at the grass): I don’t even know what I’m doing here anymore. What are any of us doing here anymore?

Spencer: Don’t you remember?

Sean (after a moment): Oh yes, of course.

With a start, Sean stands up, and tackles Spencer once again, throttling him, back to where they left off a moment ago.

Sean: You hollow little nightingale of a fuck!

Spencer: How do you know the ties weren’t mine to begin with?

Sean: Because you sir are a thief. (Struggling for words) And thieves steal things…from people who own things. (Regains his fervor, and begins throttling Spencer once again, while choking out the rest of the dialogue in short spurts). Since you are now in possession of the neckties, and it being a well-known fact that you are a thief, it is logical to conclude that the neckties are stolen, and therefore they are not nor ever have been yours. Since I am so far the only claimant to the pilfered neckwraps, they therefore resort to my ownership immediately...

Preface

2008-02-28T00:36:00.001-05:00

THE Poem, which is here offered to the Public, does not pretend to instruct by deep researches of reasoning; its aim is simply to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature in the order, as the Author believes, in which the progressive course of time presented them.