On my obsession with odd historical and political facts

Where to start… with the morning after Election Day, 1958, when my closet-Republican Dad excitedly showed me the newspaper detailing the victory of Nelson Rockefeller and most of his ticket? Of course I knew nothing of politics or government at the time, being only seven years old, but I was quite fascinated by the lists of candidates of different parties, especially the minor ones (we even had a “Non-Partisan Party”), the patterns of incumbency and victory.  There’s a broader aspect to this – when I was that age I could stare indefinitely at maps, charts, anything with classifications and subclassifications, even if I knew nothing of what it was about. Dad’s home-repair book with its illustration of different kinds and sizes of nails, his book of gardening with its climate charts and its species and varieties of plants… Probably a personality disorder. My interest in sports was limited to understanding how the scoring and ranking worked and noticing the rise and fall of teams, not caring which team was whose or what the physical reality of the game was.  When I found out about politics I saw it largely in the same way…

By the early sixties I was following not only US elections but, increasingly, foreign ones as well. I remember hearing over a car radio about the election of Arturo Ilia in Argentina, walking home from the dentist and seeing a newspaper article on the politics of India… Exotic names were a big attraction also, like  Oginga Odinga, leader of the opposition in Kenya… Anyway, this curiosity of mine, combined with a good memory, stayed with me after I started to learn more about the realities behind these names and numbers, and to form my own opinions about what was or wasn’t good governance.

One year in the early 90’s I decided to find one country mentioned in the Times on Feb 1, a country I didn’t know so very much about,  preferably medium-sized with some experience with multiparty democracy, and spend my odd hours the rest of the month reading about its history and politics. I ended up with Colombia, which wasn’t a bad choice, I’d still like to learn more about its brief ultra- Federalist period after 1858; but more recently I decided Chile is a better fit for me, in its consistency and in the quality and quantity of available materials. So I can tell you something about Diego Portales, about the case of the sacristan and Montt-Varismo, about the odd Civil War they had between the President and Congress in 1891… but that is for another post.

New Gibson movie

Last week a friend from Ireland was telling me about British TV,  and I said that judging by what made it onto PBS over here they seemed to have a special flair for intrigue and conspiracy tales.  House of Cards and its sequels were the instances I cited;  however, in the back of my mind was the vague memory of a series I saw once about secret experiments  involving plutonium I think, a terrorist threat, no one could be trusted, and as I recall we were meant to understand that humankind is destroyed at the end. Anyway, reading the reviews of  Edge of Darkness today I suddenly realized that it’s a remake of that very same story! Now I’ll have to see it.

Here we go again.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions exactly, but this time around I did make up my mind to start doing things to enrich my life in various ways. Try out new food, go to more movies and concerts. One thing I did was reinstate my long-lapsed membership in the Museum of Fine Arts. Another was to join Facebook and start looking up people I’ve known over the years and lost touch with. Well, once there I noticed the “Notes” feature with a way to import posts from an external blog, which motivated me to try one more time to restart this one.  The idea is, during my previous efforts to do something with this WordPress blog  I know that a handful of people somehow stumbled on the thing,  but I never had a sense that there was a real audience for it. Now, all my Facebook friends constitute a potential audience.  Now let’s see what  if anything happens…

Back again

The other day I got a ping indicating that someone had actually read my post from last November on the Norman Conquest and popular history.

How does anyone find anything in blogspace?

Well actually I myself have stumbled on a number of interesting things via Google Alerts and other devices.  So there may be a point to putting stuff out here after all!

But I don’t have time at the moment. I’m going to an event celebrating a new book by my minister and his son.

Later tonight or tomorrow,  if my resolve doesn’t fade too soon I’ll put up some reflections on the new Pew report on religion, and stuff like that.

Why Arthur

A nice paper by Michel Bur at the 1980 Battle Conference traces the connection between the house of Champagne and that of Normandy, culminating in the reign of King Stephen – don’t forget that Blois and Champagne had only recently diverged; add to this the fact that until her mother ran off with Henry of Anjou and started having sons, Countess Marie, wife of Henry the Liberal, was presumptive heiress to Aquitaine… All this leads to the role of family politics in the patronage given to Chretien of Troyes’ Arthurian narratives: British legend as a counterpiece to the Capetians’ cult of Charemagne, and also replacing the Norman connection now usurped by the Angevins…

The Arrow in Harold’s Eye

I’ve always enjoyed reading history, but have never had the discipline it would take to be a professional historian; I would never be willing to spend the necessary thousands of hours poring over manuscripts in dusty libraries and the like. But increasingly over the years I have been unhappy simply reading the cut-and-dry accounts meant for a general readership or even for, say, undergraduate courses. So I’ve been delving at least a layer or two beneath that, seeking out more specialized books with thick bibliographies, tracking down papers in scholarly journals, getting to know the controversies, getting at least some sense of how history gets written.

Thus it happened that when a few days ago I stumbled upon Frank McLynn’s 1066: The Year of the Three Battles, in which the author boasts of demolishing the schoolboy version of Hastings, I had already read several articles in the Proceedings of the Battle Abbey Conference which touched on several of the precise sources he was dealing with, and could see that his version of events, while well written and plausible, represents after all just as much an oversimplification of the arguments as the schoolboy history – his reliance on the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, and his dismissal of the scene in the Bayeux tapestry traditionally taken to depict Harold grasping the arrow, are positions that have been argued both for and against with a lot more vigor and with citations of a lot more evidence than you would know from just reading McLynn.

Conservative Christians often accuse opponents of treating the Bible with greater skepticism than they do any other comparable book. Those who say this probably just don’t know how skeptical the scholarly-minded are towards all sources.

What is Truth?

I don’t know about Truth with a capital T. The word is used often to express or imply the idea of some one big overriding Answer to Everything, something transcending ordinary verbal logic. I don’t know that there is such a thing, and anyway I see no reason to talk about it if it transcends verbal logic.

I do care about descriptive accuracy. It helps us in many ways to manage our lives, to predict and manipulate the flow of phenomena; and since I find some phenomena to be very pleasant, and others quite the contrary, I regard their prediction and manipulation to be a most worthy enterprise.

This has nothing to do with whether I believe it all to be Ultimately Real. As in the old limeric -

There was a faith healer from Deal
Who said, “Although pain is not real,
When I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel.”

So, you can say that for me “truth” with a small t, “truth” in the sense of descriptive accuracy, is a value. Not the only value, not an absolute ultimate value, but an instrumental value, important to me in my constant endeavor to get the other things I want.

But rather than say that there are other kinds of “truth” besides descriptive accuracy, I find it less misleading – more descriptively accurate, and so more “true” – to say that I have other values besides “truth.”

Standard Time

For years now I’ve been in the habit of turning my clocks back or forward in the morning of the time change, after getting up, rather than the night before like they tell us to do.

I figure if I’m going to gain an hour, I want to be awake to enjoy it; and if I’m to lose an hour I’d rather lose it when I can make adjustments to my routine and work around it, instead of having it come out of my sleep.

Yesterday evening I decided to try something even more unconventional. I enjoyed the extra hour yesterday morning so much I wasn’t ready to give it up, so I put my bedroom back on Daylight Savings.  Turned everything forward again, so I was reading the time that corresponded to how my body felt and the sky looked. I went to bed the same astronomical time, the same body-rhythm time as the night before; and in the wee hours of the morning, whenever I woke or half-woke  and looked at my bedside clock, it told me the time that it felt like, so I was able to get up and out comfortably by the same solar time that I was used to. Once out in the real world, I put my watch back again so I was in sync with everyone else – just up an hour earlier! It felt great, and I’m going to keep it up a few days longer if I can.

Walking for Hunger

No Deep Thoughts today. Been Walking all morning and into the afternoon. Raised well over $700 thanks to the online registration system – all I had to do was assemble a contact list, semi-personalize a message or two and click “send” and watch the money come in.

The Walk for Hunger is such a well-known institution here in Boston that  it’s easy to raise money for. I just have to say “I’m doing the Walk” and people understand, they don’t need explanations or persuasion, they may have Walked in the past themselves, or volunteered at a checkpoint or traffic crossing, or had other friends who did the Walk. Just say the word and money comes in. The Walk is bigger than the Walkers. It has a life all its own. We may walk the Walk, but at the same time the Walk is carrying us.

The weather was fine, a bit cloudier and cooler than I would have liked but cooler is OK for Walking. I met a whole lot of friendly interesting people along the way, old-timers and first-timers, white and black and India Indian. The ice cream was waiting for us at the end (unlike my first Walk three years ago, when the truck broke down on the way and the ice cream all melted). And finally at the Heart and Sole tent I met an Episcopalian woman priest whom it turned out I already knew from several years ago.

So a great Walk, and bul kogi at the Harvard Square “Mayfair” to start putting back the calories I burned up. I admit to my feet being a bit sore, but not a big deal.

Now back to Deep Thoughts.

Our friends the Turks

are having another of their recurring crises of Secularism.

You see they have a proudly, militantly secular state, founded in the 1920’s by Ataturk, who strictly limited public expressions of religious faith, de-Arabized the language, etc. As a military man he naturally had a strong authoritarian outlook, which he justified on the grounds that as long as the people were largely uneducated and under the influence of the mullahs any attempt at democracy would end up putting reactionaries back in power. In this and in other matters (like the organization of the economy) he claimed to follow the French revolutionary tradition, with its strongly centralized State.

After the death of Ataturk the dictatorship gave way to an elected government, but the people kept electing parties to power which were, though as a rule not religiously authoritarian, at least softer on religion than Ataturk was. So repeatedly the Old Guard, which still dominates the military, judiciary and civil service, has intervened in the process, overthrowing governments when they see fit.

Meanwhile the public has gotten more and more fed up with the corruption and inefficiency of the secularist parties.

So: what we get is violations of human rights and democracy in the name of secularism, while on the other side the Islamists are actually now the modernizers, trying to make the country conform to Western standards of governance.

Very odd.

Personally, I sympathize with the Islamists in this situation. Banning head-scarves from public institutions and functions is just stupid. I will defend the Islamists against militant secularism unless it becomes clear that the only alternative is in fact a return to religious authoritarianism. Given a choice between authoritarianisms, I’d prefer the secular kind, because I think at least I could learn to speak its language and deal with it. The more corrupt the better, in fact; corruption gives people some wiggle-room. Crooks can be more pragmatic, better at compromise than self-righteous saints.

But in Turkey it’s the secularists who are more afflicted with self-righteousness.