Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

May 14, 2012

Book Reviews: the Middle East

Interesting pieces in the weekend review section of the Wall Street Journal, which is always worth reading. There are no fewer than three books reviewed about the Middle East. It seems that some scholars are thinking that Islam did not originate in the desert around Mecca and Medina, but further north, in the Fertile Crescent, where the Arabs had become prosperous through trade, and that it was an ecumenical movement among monotheists including Christians and Jews, and that Muhammad may not have existed, and that if he did he was certainly not illiterate. A problem is that the Quran, unlike the Bible, is woefully short of details of places and persons, almost as if it were composed to be propaganda, avoiding hard facts. This is In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Empire, by Tom Holland.
      Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian is a collection of pieces by Bernard Lewis, who is much too good a historian to be absolutely certain of anything.
      But of most interest to me is Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup, by Christopher de Bellaigue. Mossadegh’s father was a revenue officer, and rare in a corrupt nation in being resolutely honest, teaching his son so well that when Mossadegh finally made it to his father’s office he collected unpaid taxes from his own mother. The reviewer, Sohrab Ahmari, says that Mossedegh was

an insufferable if enlightened eccentric, a self-righteous demogogue who drove his country to the brink of economic suicide and brought about his own political demise […] By the time he reached the premiership in 1951, he was an expert parliamentarian, using a combination of logical argument, procedural trickery and personal wrangling to get his every way. […] Time and again, Mossadegh swooned, fainted and wept his way out of political impasses.

He sounds like a Persian version of Lyndon Johnson.
      Above all, Mossadegh wanted his country to be free of foreign dominance, whether Russian or British. He had nationalized Iran’s oil industry, which made the British furious, so the British secret services and the CIA plotted Mossadegh’s downfall. President Truman was opposed to a coup, but his successor Eisenhower was a sucker for the cloak-and-dagger stuff. In particular the CIA bribed newspaper editors and organized gangs of thugs; on August 15 1953 they were unsuccessful, and the young Shah, then a consitutional monarch, fled the country, but a few days later mobs were successful, and the Shah returned, an incompetent who reigned as a cruel autocrat for a quarter of a century with American backing.
      Ahmari disagrees with the author's emphasis, saying that the mobs on August 19 “seem to have been largely spontaneous”, that Mossadegh was his own worst enemy, that domestic social forces had turned against him, and that the CIA shouldn’t necessarily get the credit for bringing him down. But if the country had turned against Mossadegh, why wasn’t the coup on August 15 successful? We do not know if a progressive and democratic Iran would have emerged all those years ago, but we do know that the CIA got a lot of credit at the time, and that bringing down the legally established government of another country was a profoundly un-American thing to do, and that we besmirched ourselves by doing so.
      One of my teachers made it very clear that she disapproved, which was brave during the McCarthy era in the USA. For decades I have thought of one of my grade school teachers, but now I realize that the coup must have still been in the news when my second year at McKinley Junior High began in early September 1953. I will never remember which teacher it was, can't even remember their names now, but I bless the memory of that disapproval.

 

May 14, 2012

Media snippets

OKAY, I did renew my subscription to Time magazine, because it was only $25 and sometimes one or two of the columnists are amusing. But last week there was a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal congratulating Time on being named magazine of the year by some trade organization. Is somebody kidding? Not only is Time a shadow of its glory days, but along comes this week’s issue with a cover showing a fully-clothed boy standing on a chair apparently sucking at his mother’s breast. The article inside says the kid is almost four years old, but in the bizarre photo he looks twice as old as that. Ethne was so disgusted she threw the mag in the garbage before I had looked at it.
      Magazine of the year? In what category?

A FAMILY of Middle-Eastern extraction was delayed in boarding an aircraft, it is reported, because their toddler’s name had turned up on a no-fly list. I’m sure we are all safer on account of that.

SINCE the 1950s the number of American workers needing an occupational licence, or government permission to pursue a trade, has grown from one in 20 to one in three, according to university studies. This varies greatly from state to state, as does the length of time and the expense of obtaining permission to shampoo other people's hair. Interior designers are licenced in three states. Cosmetologists, on average around the states, need 372 days to fulfill their training requirements, as opposed to 33 days for emergency medical technicians. None of this makes any sense, and the governor of Michigan has proposed abolishing 18 occupational licenses and eliminating nine licensing boards. We should hope that this means of saving money catches on.

STEPHEN MOORE's piece in the Wall Street Journal on May 4 about lousy service ("Your call is important to us") brought lots of clucking approval to the letters column on May 11, reminding me that the Bell Telephone Company of blessed memory saw to it that when you called Information or the Operator or the service departments, a human answered within three rings. They knew how many calls they were going to get on a Sunday or a holiday or in the middle of the night and they provided the service. It isn't done any more because the cable companies and all the rest know that we are sheep and will put up with being treated shabbily.

SCOFFLAWS DETECTED in Lehigh County reassessment, the Morning Call said on May 9. Property taxes pay for the schools, the police and fire departments, picking up the garbage, mending the holes in the road and so on, benefiting everyone equally and protecting everybody's property values; but reassessment software, aerial photos and hidden cameras will see to it that if I prefer to spend my money improving my property instead of buying beer and cigarettes, I have to pay more taxes. Such are our economic values.

BRET STEPHENS wrote an amusing pretend graduate address in the Wall Street Journal recently, but spoiled it halfway through his first paragraph: "Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president who you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm." Sure, yup, George W. Bush inherited a record surplus from Bill Clinton and squandered it in record time, telling us to go shopping while he started two wars and slashed taxes for his Wall Street pals, who drove the economy into the deepest ditch they could find, and it's all Obama's fault. Poor Bret should wipe behind his ears.

CARROLL SHELBY, designer of super-fast sports cars, has died. He spent some of his childhood in bed because of poor health, and later he had to give up driving race cars on account of his heart. He lived to be 89 years old. My Grandma Schultz lived to be 102, still complaining about her bad heart. Whatever was wrong with them, I hope I’ve got it too.

NOWADAYS in The Morning Call the cartoon strip Doonesbury appears in the editorial pages, where it is now accompanied by the tired Mallard Fillmore strip, about a right-wing duck who looks like Daffy with heartburn. This is no doubt fair-and-balanced, except that the first strip I saw was about Ryan Seacrest and Carson Daly, whose names mean nothing to me, whereas Doonesbury affectionately sends up my generation and the generations after mine, always making me laugh. Why is it a truism that the right has no sense of humor?

A HEADLINE on the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week said “Bank Ordered Flawed Trades”. This is a headline? Of course it did; that is what banks do, gambling with other people’s money, and sometimes the gamble goes bad.
      To be fair, Holman P. Jenkins, Jr. reported on the same day that two billion dollars is only 0.1% of J.P. Morgan’s assets, and only 1% of shareholder equity. This bank must one of those too big to fail. But wait! In today’s paper it is reported that the total loss is growing, and that some dismissals are expected! Could it be that the bank is accepting some responsibility for throwing away shareholders’ equity?
      And if so, how long will that last.

ON THE COVER of the TV guide that came with Saturday’s Morning Call is a photo of five gorgeous, slinky, fashionably skinny model types, all with long, beautifully coiffed hair, all draped provocatively around a sofa. They apparently play housewives in a TV series that is entering its last season. In my 70-plus years I have been known a great many housewives, a few of them carnally, but I have never seen any like these.

PERUSING a new book, Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, by David Dalton, I see that one of its early chapters is an amusing treatment of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, in which the folkies were not really folk at all, but rich kids assuming the position. The author writes about the Weavers, the folk quartet that included Pete Seeger, and “their hits of the early 1940s – ‘Goodnight Irene’ and ‘Wimoweh’.” The Weavers of course did not exist in the early 1940s, when Seeger was in the U.S. Army. “Goodnight Irene” was the second biggest Billboard hit of 1950, 13 weeks at no. 1 (the other side, “Tzena Tzena Tzena”, made no. 2), and “Wimoweh” reached the top 15 in 1953.
      Of course it’s easy to know these things if you are old enough to have been there at the time; and in any case I must not gloat. Nobody knews better than I do that any book with hard facts on every page probably has mistakes in it. I made a terrible howler in the first (hardback) printing of The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (1989) that nobody caught, but a certain music critic should have put out a contract on me.

 

May 14, 2012

The burning issue of the day? Gay marriage?

When I was a kid in school, all we got was social studies for years and years. All I remember from it is that the camel is a beast of burden. Finally, when I was a senior in high school in Kenosha (1957-58), we got American Problems. I would still like to thank Raymond Husebo for doing his best to wake me from a decade of slumber. We also got American History, where Mr Martell told us in his first, introductory lecture that the royal families of Europe had been getting stupider because they were inbred. I think I remember him talking about royals peeing in the corners of their castles, and that the mamas weren’t careful about who the papas were. This may be an old-fashioned and stereotyped view of European royalty, but it was racy stuff for high school kids back then, and I had done some independent reading, so at least I knew what he was talking about.
      Marriage was about succession, and who would be the next king. If you were the king and your wife had a baby, that was your kid, no matter what she was doing when she said she was just going out with the handmaids for a beer. (Of course if you were Henry VIII you could chop her head off, but that didn’t happen very often.) I haven’t done any research, but I suspect that noble couples got hitched in some sort of state/religious ceremony for thousands of years while most of the peasants just shacked up, and the religious authorities got more and more into the act over time, insisting on making marriage an instrument of social stability, necessary as communities became larger and more prosperous.
      It follows that gay couples were not included in the marriage scenario, because they don’t make babies. Nowadays they can and do start families and have children, by adopting them or using test tubes, but in those cases lawyers and/or doctors are involved, whereas among heterosexuals, any idiot can make a baby. (If you need proof of that, just go to the nearest shopping mall on a weekend and keep your eyes open.)
      Now President Obama has declared himself in favor of allowing gay marriage, while the state of North Carolina has voted for a (redundant) amendment to its state constitution outlawing it, and with all the problems this country has, we are going to hear about gay marriage endlessly until the election in November and no doubt for years to come.
      Of course the more silly among us liberals are already circulating screeds such as the one about the gay person in bed alone at night crying out of loneliness for his or her lover, but that’s okay, North Carolinian, “each tear will make your marriage stronger.” In fact of course there is no longer anything preventing gay people from living together and sleeping together, but there are tax and other advantages to marriage in a society as rich and complex as ours. We were making some progress toward civil unions, but not quickly enough. From the London Daily Telegraph, May 10:

While gay marriage was being endorsed in the White House, it was being quietly shelved in Westminster. [...] In America, the battle is about the vast number of legal rights--1,138 of them by one count--that are conferred on married couples but not those in same-sex partnerships. In Britain [where male homosexual behavior was illegal until the 1960s], the Civil Partnership Act 2004 granted all the rights of a married couple to anyone who registered for such a union.

But our fissiparous structure of 50 states and no grownups in charge means that we cannot solve problems like this, so now marriage has become a civil rights issue. Slaves wanted to be free, women wanted to vote, and now gays want to get married. I’m not sure about the relative value of these historical examples, but what no one seems to be pointing out is that the definition of marriage itself has changed. Marriage is no longer about blood or lineage or legal rights. It's about "me too".
      Gay marriage is here, and certain states’ dragging their feet probably means that the Supreme Court will have to deal with it sooner or later. The rest of us may die of boredom while the country's real problems go unsolved.