I’ve never really been into anything post Desire, but went through a period of intense Dylan fandom in my late teens. That’s faded, but he’s still special and I’ll never understand the haters. Personal favourites: Visions of Johanna and Absolutely Sweet Marie.
From the category archives:
History
Matthew Yglesias points to research showing that many white Southerners still refuse to concede on the Confederacy.
roughly one in four Americans said they sympathize more with the Confederacy than the Union, a figure that rises to nearly four in ten among white Southerners. […] When broken down by political party, most Democrats said southern states seceded over slavery, independents were split and most Republicans said slavery was not the main reason that Confederate states left the Union.
This is perhaps, not entirely surprising. What is more surprising to me is that this version of events is officially accepted by the United States. I became a US citizen yesterday, after spending some time over the previous few days reading the US civics study guide to study for the citizenship exam (since I am a political scientist, it would have been particularly embarrassing for me if I had failed it). For better or worse, it’s hard for me to switch off my inner social scientist. Hence, I started paying a different kind of attention when I read that ‘states rights’ is one of three acceptable answers to the civics question ‘name one problem that led to the Civil War’ (slavery and economics are the other two). My understanding, perhaps mistaken, is that ‘states’ rights’ is typically employed as an explanation by those who would prefer to forget (as Ta-Nehisi Coates notes; also here – it was one particular right, the right to own slaves – that was was really at stake in the conflict). The study guide goes on to elaborate that:
The Civil War began when 11 southern states voted to secede (separate) from the United States to form their own country, the Confederate States of America. These southern states believed that the federal government of the United States threatened their right to make their own decisions. They wanted states’ rights with each state making their own decisions about their government. If the national government contradicted the state, they did not want to follow the national government.
after which it does get into a discussion of the relationship between slavery and economic systems in North and South, and its relationship to the Civil War.
This – of course – was only a very small part of the event in question (and in any event I got asked a completely different set of questions on the day) – but it was interesting. Tests of this kind are a very useful way of gauging what is accepted, and what is not accepted as part of the official national narrative, especially when, as in the US, there is no national history curriculum. I was surprised that this was part of the accepted (or at least acceptable) narrative, alongside the expected questions on Martin Luther King, and the origins of slaves in Africa. But perhaps there is a different history of the role of states’ rights in the conflict than the limited one I know (I am obviously not an expert on US history, or on the origins of the Civil War).
I’ve got no time for a proper review, so this post is just a mention of Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer [UK Link]. The academic in me was initially put-off by the self-helpy presentation of the book. Because of this, I imagined that it would be (a) irritating and (b) unscholarly. It is only unscholarly in the good sense that it does not come across as a work of dry academic research. And Bakewell isn’t irritating at all: her writing is fluid, witty and unpretentious. The book provides a compelling psychological portrait of Montaigne, contains plenty of interesting background on the wars of religion, and nudges the reader towards the Montaignian attitude of sceptical curiosity about self, others and the world. I enjoyed it tremendously (got through the 300+ pages in a few days) and am now rooting through the real thing, the Essays. Highly recommended.
Brad DeLong writes :
bq. Karl Marx wrote that the “country that is more developed industrially… shows to the less developed the image of its own future…” Karl Marx was wrong.
Is it just me that thinks it is odd for DeLong to write this? It used to be a commonplace for people to say that Marx was wrong about this. But the people who said that he was wrong were typically _leftists_ , and their reason for saying it was the claim that Marx had failed to anticipate imperialism, the “development of underdevelopment” and all that stuff. So for them, Marx was wrong, because he thought that capitalism would develop economies everywhere, whereas they thought Lenin had shown that it would force some societies into a permanent state of underdevelopment. But DeLong is, by his own repeated admission, a “card carrying neoliberal”. And surely “card carrying neoliberals” believe in a future of globalized markets, urbanization, universal prosperity and (the cynics amongst us would add) strip malls and McDonalds. So am I missing something here? How do “card-carrying neoliberals” disagree with Marx on this point?
Actually they do a pretty good job. I particularly like the kid who not only establishes the function of the record player, but also immediately discovers scratching.
As mentioned in comments to a post the other day, Kodachrome is coming to an end on Thursday. The New York Times has a nice article about it. Of course this isn’t the end for film, or even of slide film (there’s still Velvia and a few other options). Kodachrome was always an unusual and capital intensive process. I was struck by the following sentence from the article: “At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome.” That’s a very very small number for the _peak_ . There are probably still many thousands of labs that will develop colour print (C41) film and probably dozens even in the UK that will handle the more common transparency process (E6). Still, RIP.
UPDATE! – More from NYT , with pictures!
At Henry’s recommendation, I’m reading (actually, listening to on audiobook) The Half-Made World
The Library of Congress has released an amazing collection of almost 700 images of framed, Civil War-era tintypes and ambrotypes. I’ll stick a few under the fold, but you really should click over and browse the set. (Someone should make a book.)
A while back I bought America and the Tintype
Jesus Christ. Louis Michel, the former European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, is reported by the EU Observer as offering his opinions about Leopold II, King of the Belgians and one-time private owner of the Congo:
bq. “Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero,” he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. “And even if there were horrible events in the Congo, should we now condemn them?” … “Leopold II does not deserve these accusations,” continued Mr Michel, himself a descendent of the Belgian king and a “Knight, Officer and Commander” in the Order of Leopold, Belgium’s highest honour. … “The Belgians built railways, schools and hospitals and boosted economic growth. Leopold turned the Congo into a vast labour camp? Really? In those days it was just the way things were done.” …. Admitting there were “irregularities,” he said: “We can easily be tempted to exaggerate when it comes to the Congo … I feel instinctively that he was a hero, a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium.” “To use the word ‘genocide’ in relation to the Congo is absolutely unacceptable and inappropriate.”
Let’s be clear about this: what Michel has said is comparable to Holocaust-denial. If you doubt this, or even if you haven’t read it yet, then Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost should set you right. Perhaps 10 million people, perhaps half the population of the area, died during the “Free State” period, victims of Leopold’s greed for the region’s natural resources, chiefly rubber.
I was thirteen at the time of Bloody Sunday, so I can remember it just about. It is hard to know what to think about today’s report. On the one hand, it is a kind of justice, however inadequate, for the relatives; on the other, it has taken nearly forty years. And the British government has spent £200 million to tell us what we all knew anyway: that British paratroopers murdered fourteen civilians in cold blood and that a subsequent “inquiry” (Widgery) was a whitewash. Still, it is one thing knowing the truth (as we already did) and it is another to have it publicly acknowledged. Will there be prosecutions? Doubtful.
The “Belgian Congo” became formally independent on 30 June 1960. I’d made a note of this and was intending to post something at CT on or around the anniversary. But this morning’s Guardian has an amazing gallery of portraits of Congolese people by the photographer Stephan Vanfleteren, together with (in most cases) a short autobiographical statement by the subject.
British Tory-lite deputy-PM Nick Clegg, has announced a very limited programme of democratic and civil-libertarian reform in the following terms:
bq. I’m talking about the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great reforms of the 19th Century. The biggest shake up of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy, for the first time extending the franchise beyond the landed classes. Landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests. Who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.
Over at The Virtual Stoa, Chris Brooke asks
bq. If you were marking examination papers on nineteenth century British political history, what mark would you give someone who described the 1832 Reform Act in these terms?
Indeed. And see especially, Ted Vallance’s response in comments to Chris’s post.
The struggle of the suffragettes for female emancipation, the extension of the franchise after WW1, all are as nothing compared to Clegg’s plans to curb CCTV cameras and biometric passports ….. An elected second chamber, sounds good. Electoral reform – subject to a referendum in which the dominant party in the coalition will campaign for the status quo. Talk about overselling yourself.
And Scott (at IHE) is not happy with his new publisher
bq. It is true that he drew the ire of the National Rifle Association, and I have no inclination to give that organization’s well-funded demagogy the benefit of any doubt. But gun nuts did not force Bellesiles to do sloppy research or to falsify sources. That his scholarship was grossly incompetent on many points is not a “controversial” notion. Nor is it open to dispute whether or not he falsified sources. That has been exhaustively documented by his peers. To pretend otherwise is itself demagogic.
bq. If a major commercial press wants to help a disgraced figure make his comeback, that is one thing, but rewriting history is another. The New Press published many excellent books by important authors. It is out of respect for that record that I want to invite it to make a public apology for violating the trust its readers have in it.
If you are one of the people who hasn’t yet read Ian Jack's piece on the photo that symbolizes the British class system then you should. (h/t The Online Photographer .)