March 31, 2008

April Fools

He didn’t say, the poor man, “A child’s burden of gorse.”

He said, “A Child’s Garden of Verse,” for whatever reason.

Might have made the difference, hearing it that way, had the Uncle been so inclined or equipped. But his hearing was both imperfect and selective. Whatever it was that was said, the Uncle would hear what he would.

Of course he didn’t say “ A child’s burden of gorse,” the poor man.

Why would anyone say that?

Idiom? —”Ah, yes, in metaphor, the child’s burden of gorse weighing down even our most enchanted, carefree hours with that hard weedy freight of life from which we may never be relieved even in the proposed idylls of youth.”

Unfortunately for all concerned the Uncle’s thoughts escaped down the path of that unlikely idiom. Farther down that path he suspected the inevitable slur against his own childrearing practices, the effects of which were wandering uncertainly about the yard.

He searched for the proper riposte. Something along the lines of “Their gorse is light enough, thank you, though if I had a stick I’d measure you out a proper burden,” is what he claimed later to have formulated on the occasion. Everyone remembers him mumbling at one juncture the not unexpected phrase “… and another swift one, to boot…” familiar point along the short line of truculent points describing the common arc of the Uncle's conversation whatever the topic.

“Eh? Swift? No, no. Lamb, surely,” said the poor puzzled man.

Suddenly the Uncle perceived a reference to Swift himself. Would that he had been mistaken in this as well but the pronouncement was clear enough. Swift, the man said, Swift! Reference to The Dean always engendered the Uncle’s fury, brought on by his long, unhealthy attention to The Dean’s most shocking pamphlet.

Seeking to avoid the Uncle’s inevitable eruption, those who had regular commerce with him used alternate words like "quick" exclusively in his hearing, regularly robbing him of the opportunity that the poor man's reference now offered him.

“Swift, then!” he shouted.

The Uncle’s firm conviction was that Swift’s modest essay contained an implied slur against Irish babies. The cannibal act was made even more repugnant by the Swiftian suggestion of their Irishness:

Imagine eating babies! Ugh!

Imagine eating Irish babies on top of that! Gack! By comparison French babies, even French babies, would seem savory, no doubt.

In this regard the Uncle felt his whelp the equal of any man’s: a meal no less tragic, no less tasty.

Swift’s imputed view to the contrary would not be countenanced by the Uncle.

It was often remarked of the Uncle that he was never in any but a dispersing crowd.

“Lamb, I’m sure, would be correct,” said the hapless young scholar, unawares [In point of fact it was Stevenson, of course, though that is of little moment].

Lamb correct!” shouted the Uncle. “But when it comes to it, would you not eat my bawn before the Duke of Gloucester's?”

And so saying, he delivered up to the ignorant man a prodigious thrashing.

You gotta see this

A stunning set of Russian posters from the Soviet era. A few of them are of the obligatory worker/peasant set against a bounteous background of heroically realized production quotas sort, but for the most part they're advertisements for shows, recitals, circuses, meetings, books and movies.

Magnificent graphic design. Select "View as slideshow" and be amazed.

March 27, 2008

You're Talking To A Veteran, Asshole

Forty years ago today I was drafted into the United States Army. Back then the United States was at war in Vietnam. It was going on and on, the Vietnam War, and the solution of the people in charge of prosecuting the thing at the time was to reach down each week into the citizenry and scoop up larger and larger numbers of young men to swell the ranks of the armed forces to a size whose overwhelming force would destroy the enemy over there. The draft for the week of March 27 was the largest up to that point in the war, taking up over twenty thousand involuntary recruits in one fell swoop.

The great ladle of conscription caught me up. They sent me a letter, so I had a few weeks to mope around San Francisco before the day came and the lot of us were transported to the Oakland Induction Center, that fated day forty years past now when I began my required stint in the United States Army.

It was an inauspicious taking for the Army in my case. I gave a poor, grudging service overall, a judgment confirmed in a severe impromptu berating given me by a Lieutentant Colonel on my final day, the Fortieth Anniversary of which won't be celebrated for quite a few months now. I was crossing the yard with a handful of paperwork, sweet thoughts of impending release wafting though my otherwise empty cranium on that, my last day, than which one can get no shorter: finished with it! Done! I certainly didn't recognize the superiority of the officer approaching me from the building I was heading towards, at least in the strictly defined manner in which such recognition is executed in the military, which is to say, salute, no, admittedly I did not.

During the Lieutenant Colonel's tirade, which picked up from the affront of going unsaluted to touch on a variety of other issues immediately arising out of my slovenly appearance (which, standing directly before him I could do little to disguise), it suddenly dawned on me: he had me on that, you see. I knew about the salute. It wasn't like I hadn't ever wended my way through a parade ground whipping the extended hand up to the forehead and smartly returning it to my side. I knew about the thing, it just hadn't occurred to me in the event. All that training for nothing in the end.

It was my privilege to suddenly see what the Lieutenant Colonel was driving at: my presence in the military was an affront to the Army. All along the affront to me that began by being drafted in March of 1968 had been uppermost in my mind, but the Lieutenant Colonel's words convinced me that there were other values and other offenses to be taken into account in addition to my own, given the circumstances.

I didn't try to fend off his remarks with the observation that it was the Army's bad recruiting that had brought all this on in the first place, a blunder soon to be rectified by my departure, although I admit I did experience a yearning to express just such a view.

Nor did I gloat out loud that my own long held suspicions regarding the slovenliness of my clothing, which I had not removed in the past 36 hours, were merely confirmed by his words, although my tendency to preen is never far removed.

No. I simply drank in the objective truth of it. The Army and I had not got on well together. The war was lost eventually, and I must acknowledge my fractional responsibility for dragging it to that end. I did my part.

I'd spent my time in a back office at Ft. Lewis, Washington, immured there doing minor harm with a keypunch machine for all my twenty-one months of active duty. I rose to the unexalted rank of Sp4 in time and never left the KP roster of Headquarters and Headquarters Company in all my 21 months. I recognized it not only as a place of imprisonment and exile, North Fort Lewis, particularly when compared to all the the ferment and frolicking going on in the San Francisco of 1968 I'd been removed from, but also as a place dissociated in its way from the actual war in Vietnam itself, tucked in a readily overlooked niche in the Army's own vast stateside bureaucracy, in a null space removed from both the lively streets and the deathly jungles of that time.

In his peroration the Lieutenant Colonel enthusiastically recommended, in the form I recognized as a direct order, that I immediately go over to that barbershop right there and get a haircut and report right back to him for inspection. Much of the rest of his address has slipped my mind in the intervening years, howevermuch I was impressed at the time by his succinctly expressed acuity in summarizing my personal failings. He nailed it, really, when all is said and done.

Anyway, that was at the sorry end of my sorry stay in the Army, which began forty years ago today.

March 24, 2008

Five years on

How the war came to be, and how it went on and on.

Via Frontline, "Bush's War" at pbs.org.

What Created This Monster?

Here's Krugman a couple of days ago, and a long NYT article that tries to describe the true shape of the mess the financial markets have created for us all.

Some of the cutting edge instruments devised to play in today's financial markets are so abstruse that only a small number of people in the world pretend to understand how they work, although that hasn't kept fund managers from vigorously rolling them out on the strength of a phone call here and an email there, completely off the books as far as the regulated part of their business is concerned, and, in the area of credit default swaps alone,


the outstanding value of the swaps stands at more than $45.5 trillion, up from $900 billion in 2001.

[…]

Bear Stearns held credit default swap contracts carrying an outstanding value of $2.5 trillion, analysts say.

—Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell, NYT, March 23, 2008



Credit default swaps are like insurance for investors against the sort of bad financial moves so often made by debtors, the kind that make it impossible for them to pay back the money they've been advanced by creditors. Except that actual insurance is a relatively regulated market with a long-standing legal obligation to come through for its policyholders, to have the scratch on hand to make good the claims on its policies that can be expected to be handled over time, and the market for credit default swaps, the one Bear Stearns had a 5% share of, has never been put through its paces, and it seems likely that the Federal Reserve, when it partnered with JP Morgan Chase to take down Bear Stearns, did it with an eye toward avoiding the unpredictable but potentially disastrous effects that firm's failure would have on just that market.

James Surowiecki goes on from there in The New Yorker.

March 20, 2008

Said to be the sad truth

The Sad Truth About Relationships

When leached of incident perhaps there's a great similarity in the envisionable story arc of any and all middle class couples; the courtship, the marriage, the nest-building, child-rearing, soon-enough-done lives expected of the sort of people who tread that path. Of course the video ignores the almost obligatory early divorce that at least half of such lives require, followed by the repetition of the first few stages of the process with other partners until at some point the permanency of marriage is either achieved or proved impossible. I haven't had the pleasure of divorce myself, but I think in deference to those who have, it would be only fair to make a version of this video that fits the normal arc of those who divorce with their unique but necessary engagements with partings and custodies and measured lasting acrimony built right into the cartoon.

March 19, 2008

Photo Op

By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, via The New Yorker.