Margotlog: What Makes a Good General?
The more I listen to (well, read) about warfare, the more I'm learning about what makes a good general. Not a subject I'd ever have expected to fascinate me, but in the hands (well, voice) of a great historian, generalship becomes a highly lethal (or courageous, depending on your point of view) subset of leadership.
Case in point: Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August describes the opening months of World War I as diplomatic maneuvering (I'd say bullying and feinting) among the European powers, then once war is thought inevitable (there's great fear among some of losing face), the deployment of troops (and ships) along pre-determined plans.
Here a very interesting scenario unfolds among the Germans, Belgians, and French (with England eventually to be drawn in). Because the French lost Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans in the Franco Prussian war of 1870, their generalissimo Joffre organized his thinking about defense in an offensive way. Instead of considering that the Germans might well come through neutral Belgium and attending to fears from his other commanders that this indeed might take place, Joffre weighted manpower heavily on the eastern edge and, in fact, sent French troops initially into Alsace.
Meanwhile, King Albert of the Belgians, the premier commander of that small and supposedly neutral country, rallied his troops and citizens courageously against the invading force,. After initial victories, the Belgian forts could not withstand the huge "Big Bertha" mortars, which reduced the forts to rubble with the soldiers in them. This part of the story Tuchman recounts with one telling sentence: the Belgian troops in the forts often "went mad" as they waited for the next mortar to fall, knowing they'd be decimated.
According to Tuchman, the French high commander Joffre, stoic, silent, yet consumed by the notion that "elan," rather than superior force or insightful planning would win battles, fired general after general under him, for disagreeing, for caution, and of course for failure to win. As I listen to the war unfold, I expect to find that France's, i.e. Joffre's unwillingness to suspect that the German troops might mass in northwest France will cost France countless months and casualities.
This is a very interesting portrait of leadership, and reminds me of much smaller, everyday encounters where "fixed ideas" of someone at the top resist the cogent arguments of underlings. Likewise, where the "high command" puts forth one value, i.e. "elan," or spirit, heroism, etc., but follows quite another, i.e. "revanche," meaning in this case recapture of what has been previously lost, rather than attending to the reports of what is actually happening and acting accordingly.
Heaven forbid we should embark on another world war. The carnage is unbelievable, and the story of World War I has only begun. There are so many ways to suffer and die, and peacetime existence presents plenty, thank you very much. But we can learn a lot about leadership from studying the history of warfare, though several crucial differences affect the application of examples from the past: changing technology, and the differences in governments and cultures.
But humankind remains fundamentally recognizable: I applaud with Tuchman the Belgian heroic resistance to what was, after all, an enormous insult to their neutrality which had been guaranteed by all the major powers. That they took up a fight for which they were not prepared, and refused to allow Germany or France to tromp over their fairly new nation, knowing full well that their independence depended on that resistance, won the admiration of France and England at the time, and still rouses my own applause from almost a century later.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Margotlog: Collaborators
Collaborators
We just saw a filmed version of a play called “Collaborators,” by John Hodge, produced by the National Theater of London. Like the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the National Theater has several stages: “Collaborators” was produced in its most intimate, with the “stage” winding among banks of viewers.
This is a play about Stalin and a playwright named Bulgakov who actually lived during the Stalin era. In essence the play circles around a device of producing a play within a play: Stalin’s henchmen, wanting to surprise him on his birthday with a play about himself, “hire” Bulgakov to write it.
But of course Bulgakov not only finds this distasteful, though necessary to accept the assignment, but challenging because he must produce a script within a month. Enter Stalin himself, wonderfully lumbering and sly, humorous and engaging. Who would have thought one of the great dictators of all time could virtually steal the show from the artsy resister?
The first half of the play moves from despair–the playwright and his wife, wedged into a tiny apartment with another couple, and the surprise of a student who’s been billeted in their cupboard. The regime is not happy with free-thinkers and imaginists, though we soon learn that Stalin admires the work of Bulgakov and has seen one of his plays fifteen times. Bulgakov’s newest play disrupts the Bulgahov menage with long-nosed masked bandits leading the great French playwright Moliere forward to his death. Cause of death: Moliere’s hatred of the repressive French monarchy.
With the threat of his play being shut down after one performance, Bulgakov struggles to write and cannot. Enter Joseph Stalin, who of course knows all about the commissioned play, and has even begun to sketch out scenes from his life. Before the end of Act One, Stalin and Bulgakov have swapped roles: Stalin is writing the play and he’s suggested it would be only fair if B.tried running the country. Within minutes the playwright encounters a difficult conundrum: with wheat harvests low, should he require all the wheat from the peasants to feed the cities or starve the cities and leave some for peasant bread and planting next year’s harvest?
Intermission, and we’re amazed at how this is working out. “Just wait,” says my husband. By the second act, Bulgakov not only mouths the rationale of the regime but his menage is being feted with coffee, hot water, then upping the ante, a dinner party with wine and flowers, and to top it off, he’s acquired a car and driver, depriving the secret policeman who initially contacted him. When he invites the secret police and his wife to the party, and the policeman and wife worry about making a good impression on the artistes–clods that they are–we can’t help laughing.
Of course the co-optation increases until the end when Joseph requires the ultimate of his collaborator: “Sign the death notices!” The playwright refuses and that’s the end of the play: terror reigns and the playwright collapses. Hmmm. Something is wrong here. From what I’ve read of Soviet terror–Solzinitsen’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch–the Gulag, with Senor Stalin as the major clown, really wasn’t so lively, so amusing, and the flip from resister to collaborator not so neat
As my husband and I drive home, we discuss this. It occurs to me that what’s missing in the play, what the British may not be capable of portraying, is the sado-masochistic delight in torture, in elaborating torture for millions, that fuels large-scale, and probably small-scale, systematic cruelty. This play convincingly shows a playwright selling out for food and bourgeois delights–that descent we all are quite familiar with. But to show him on the edge of enjoying torturing another, to portray Stalin as not a buffoon, but a looming menace, enough to create fear and dread–well it simply doesn’t happen, in my opinion.
Time to read Solzinitsen again.
We just saw a filmed version of a play called “Collaborators,” by John Hodge, produced by the National Theater of London. Like the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the National Theater has several stages: “Collaborators” was produced in its most intimate, with the “stage” winding among banks of viewers.
This is a play about Stalin and a playwright named Bulgakov who actually lived during the Stalin era. In essence the play circles around a device of producing a play within a play: Stalin’s henchmen, wanting to surprise him on his birthday with a play about himself, “hire” Bulgakov to write it.
But of course Bulgakov not only finds this distasteful, though necessary to accept the assignment, but challenging because he must produce a script within a month. Enter Stalin himself, wonderfully lumbering and sly, humorous and engaging. Who would have thought one of the great dictators of all time could virtually steal the show from the artsy resister?
The first half of the play moves from despair–the playwright and his wife, wedged into a tiny apartment with another couple, and the surprise of a student who’s been billeted in their cupboard. The regime is not happy with free-thinkers and imaginists, though we soon learn that Stalin admires the work of Bulgakov and has seen one of his plays fifteen times. Bulgakov’s newest play disrupts the Bulgahov menage with long-nosed masked bandits leading the great French playwright Moliere forward to his death. Cause of death: Moliere’s hatred of the repressive French monarchy.
With the threat of his play being shut down after one performance, Bulgakov struggles to write and cannot. Enter Joseph Stalin, who of course knows all about the commissioned play, and has even begun to sketch out scenes from his life. Before the end of Act One, Stalin and Bulgakov have swapped roles: Stalin is writing the play and he’s suggested it would be only fair if B.tried running the country. Within minutes the playwright encounters a difficult conundrum: with wheat harvests low, should he require all the wheat from the peasants to feed the cities or starve the cities and leave some for peasant bread and planting next year’s harvest?
Intermission, and we’re amazed at how this is working out. “Just wait,” says my husband. By the second act, Bulgakov not only mouths the rationale of the regime but his menage is being feted with coffee, hot water, then upping the ante, a dinner party with wine and flowers, and to top it off, he’s acquired a car and driver, depriving the secret policeman who initially contacted him. When he invites the secret police and his wife to the party, and the policeman and wife worry about making a good impression on the artistes–clods that they are–we can’t help laughing.
Of course the co-optation increases until the end when Joseph requires the ultimate of his collaborator: “Sign the death notices!” The playwright refuses and that’s the end of the play: terror reigns and the playwright collapses. Hmmm. Something is wrong here. From what I’ve read of Soviet terror–Solzinitsen’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch–the Gulag, with Senor Stalin as the major clown, really wasn’t so lively, so amusing, and the flip from resister to collaborator not so neat
As my husband and I drive home, we discuss this. It occurs to me that what’s missing in the play, what the British may not be capable of portraying, is the sado-masochistic delight in torture, in elaborating torture for millions, that fuels large-scale, and probably small-scale, systematic cruelty. This play convincingly shows a playwright selling out for food and bourgeois delights–that descent we all are quite familiar with. But to show him on the edge of enjoying torturing another, to portray Stalin as not a buffoon, but a looming menace, enough to create fear and dread–well it simply doesn’t happen, in my opinion.
Time to read Solzinitsen again.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Margotlog: Entangling Alliances
Margotlog: Entangling Alliances
Most of the alliances that activated World War I were known to all the parties ahead of time: Britain's crafting of Belgium neutrality and determination to protect it; France and Russia's agreement to come to each other's aid should Germany attack either; and Germany's alliance with Austria against the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Thus when Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Yugoslav nationalist in 1914, these alliances grew teeth with gunpowder at their ends.
Listening to Barbara Tuchman's magesterial Guns of August (1962), it's oh so clear that Germany was determined to be the aggressor. The murder of an heir apparent need not have provoked hostilities. Kaiser Wilhelm's irasible itch for glory, plus the German war machine, crafted by General von Molke, and the German horror of indecision, which might ruin a beautifully designed mobilization plan by delay--these as much as anything else put German aggression into motion. The German high command had taught themselves to ignore the advice of their greatest 19th-century statesman, Bismark, against fighting a war on two fronts.
Also crucial to the resentments that fueled the war was German-French hostility over Alsace-Lorraine, the areas in eastern France taken by Germany during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. In 1914, plenty of people on both sides remembered, the Parisians especially who'd had to eat their cats in order to survive the German encirclement.
Belgian neutrality was a crucial point in Britain's coming into the war: The Germans had decided to march through Belgium to attack France. The Belgians refused to stand aside and let them do it. Britain could not allow Germans to engage war on the French coast just opposite England. "We will see the guns!" exclaimed one member of the British cabinet.
It would be a short war, thought all parties concerned. "We'll be home when the leaves turn!" Far from it! Once the French and Germans and British were dug into their trenches, an enormously costly stalemate developed: artillery was so powerful that it made attacks across "no man's land" deadly. Steel helmets, gas masks, and eventually tanks were developed to protect and allow for assaults, but as the years dragged on, French troops especially fell apart, attempted mutiny. Interestingly, Australians on occasion pushed through to startling victories. that stopped the Germans in their tracks. Millions on both sides died. Then came the flu epidemic: millions of men fell ill in the trenches.
When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, they shored up the exhausted efforts of the Allies, and provided needed supplies. Ten thousand American troops arrived each day to aid the French/British side. Germany had been blockaded by the British fleet. Italy, initially part of the German-Austrian alliance, withdrew and fought the Austrians. The Ottoman empire crumbled, murdering a million Armenians. The Russian Revolution deposed the Russian royalty, and that country removed itself from of the war. The German people were hungry and muttering revolt.
Armistice was signed "on the 11th day, of the 11th month, at the 11th hour," 1919. Not until 1923 were all the combatants in the east and Africa brought to rest. Then began the degradation of the Germans in the Weimar Republic, which many consider the depths out of which Hitler ultimately arose to power the second war, twenty-some years later.
Most of the alliances that activated World War I were known to all the parties ahead of time: Britain's crafting of Belgium neutrality and determination to protect it; France and Russia's agreement to come to each other's aid should Germany attack either; and Germany's alliance with Austria against the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Thus when Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Yugoslav nationalist in 1914, these alliances grew teeth with gunpowder at their ends.
Listening to Barbara Tuchman's magesterial Guns of August (1962), it's oh so clear that Germany was determined to be the aggressor. The murder of an heir apparent need not have provoked hostilities. Kaiser Wilhelm's irasible itch for glory, plus the German war machine, crafted by General von Molke, and the German horror of indecision, which might ruin a beautifully designed mobilization plan by delay--these as much as anything else put German aggression into motion. The German high command had taught themselves to ignore the advice of their greatest 19th-century statesman, Bismark, against fighting a war on two fronts.
Also crucial to the resentments that fueled the war was German-French hostility over Alsace-Lorraine, the areas in eastern France taken by Germany during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. In 1914, plenty of people on both sides remembered, the Parisians especially who'd had to eat their cats in order to survive the German encirclement.
Belgian neutrality was a crucial point in Britain's coming into the war: The Germans had decided to march through Belgium to attack France. The Belgians refused to stand aside and let them do it. Britain could not allow Germans to engage war on the French coast just opposite England. "We will see the guns!" exclaimed one member of the British cabinet.
It would be a short war, thought all parties concerned. "We'll be home when the leaves turn!" Far from it! Once the French and Germans and British were dug into their trenches, an enormously costly stalemate developed: artillery was so powerful that it made attacks across "no man's land" deadly. Steel helmets, gas masks, and eventually tanks were developed to protect and allow for assaults, but as the years dragged on, French troops especially fell apart, attempted mutiny. Interestingly, Australians on occasion pushed through to startling victories. that stopped the Germans in their tracks. Millions on both sides died. Then came the flu epidemic: millions of men fell ill in the trenches.
When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, they shored up the exhausted efforts of the Allies, and provided needed supplies. Ten thousand American troops arrived each day to aid the French/British side. Germany had been blockaded by the British fleet. Italy, initially part of the German-Austrian alliance, withdrew and fought the Austrians. The Ottoman empire crumbled, murdering a million Armenians. The Russian Revolution deposed the Russian royalty, and that country removed itself from of the war. The German people were hungry and muttering revolt.
Armistice was signed "on the 11th day, of the 11th month, at the 11th hour," 1919. Not until 1923 were all the combatants in the east and Africa brought to rest. Then began the degradation of the Germans in the Weimar Republic, which many consider the depths out of which Hitler ultimately arose to power the second war, twenty-some years later.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Margotlog: The Boat House
Margotlog: The Boat House
When I began visiting a family resort near Cross River on the North Shore, a world of hidden structures and values opened up to me. Sure, I knew about the appeal of water from summers on the beaches near Charleston, South Carolina. Some of the little cabins on the pebble beach beside huge Lake Superior reminded me a bit of the sand-burr cottages near the ocean. But discounting the wide sky and expanse of waves, the comparisons stopped.
For one thing, there were huge rocks along the lake shore. Some of these boulders loomed taller than I was. Others were flat and pocked with pools. Tiny tufts of blue hare-bells, lobelia and prostrate yellow potentilla grew out of the cracks. Water-striders and even tiny minnows got trapped in the pools. One summer, making my slow way climbing rock to rock up the shore, I surprised several great blue heron fishing in a cove. This was a summer of drought--I suspected they were having trouble finding eatables elsewhere. It was the first and only time I ever saw these big birds this far north.
Beside the streams which cascaded into the lake, I'd occasionally come across concrete walls which I'd have to approach from land--they were too high to climb at the water's edge. So overgrown with small trees and mouldered by freezing and cracking weather, these walls seemed to belong to the natural landscape. But they were remnants of boathouses. The early Norwegian fishermen docked their deep-hulled, planked fishing boats in these houses. Some, I later learned, even had little rooms built above the cavities for the boats. A fancy friend of mine made one into a writer's studio, but the only plumbing was the water sloshing below.
In the early days--shall we say the late 1890s--mail was delivered by dogsled after being brought north to Two Harbors by schooner. Finally when a hard-surface road was being constructed all the way to Canada in the 1950s, some families, always hard-up and ready to turn their hand to anything honest and lucrative, built little cabins down by the shore for the highway workmen. This was the origin of many small resorts along the North Shore. The first time my husband and I drove north along highway 61, the road was so narrow, that the branches of spruce reached across and almost touched the car. We felt we were entering an enchanted forest where the people lived in miniature dwellings and all the animals could talk.
The resort where I used to stay had an office right by the road. No more than a cabin itself, it allowed the wife to make arrangements with renters without having to bring strangers into her own house. At the back was another small room filled with shelves of linen, pillows, and spreads. There, if you needed a roll of toilet paper, for instance, you could stand and read lovely cards from appreciative renters. It was a good corrective to discover that friends who used to come to the resort had written such flowery thank you notes that your brief scrawls looked like chicken scratches. This was when you recognized that the owners could be made into friends one kept in touch with throughout the year, even during the winter.
Running these little resorts was definitely a family business--the wives took care of money transactions and daily cleaned vacated cabins, while the husbands mowed lawns, repaired roofs and, that worst of all possible jobs, cleaned out septic tanks. A lot of beer was consumed in the doing of that last job.
Once in late October, I reserved for a few days, the last week "my resort" was open. When I arrived, I discovered that the plumbing in every cabin by the shore had frozen. There'd even been snow. But my hosts, two agreeable friends by this time, insisted that I could stay in the "mother's house" across the driveway from their own much more modern rambler. No one lived in "mother's house" anymore, but it was filled with old-fashioned stuffed armchairs, a huge dining room table covered with a lacy tablecloth, and an array of etched glassware that rattled in the china cupboard as you walked past.
I chose to sleep upstairs at the back of the house, under a slanting roof, in a room with windows on three sides. This gave me an entirely different perspective on the lake. My eyes skimmed the tops of trees, I could look far out across the huge lake, never spying an opposite shore, of course, but feeling that if I only stepped off the roof, I could soar over the water.
Behind this very sunny and starry room, were other tiny bedrooms, the smallest of which, under the opposite eaves, had been the children's bedroom. I could no more stand up straight in this long narrow cubbyhole than I could climb the boat house walls down by the shore. But the tiny beds arranged in the cubby were still covered with patchwork quilts, and expectant teddy bears or dolls still waited for someone to touch them into life. Yet the whole cubby had a forlorn look, as if it had been years since anyone rested there. Which might have been the case, as the two daughters whom I knew were in their 50s. Yet, I bet their grandchildren visited occasionally and slept here, wanting to take home Grandma's teddy bear when they left, sensing how lonesome it would be for the bear, waiting out an entire season of snow until they came back again. Is it possible I left something of myself there too, never to be retrieved again?
When I began visiting a family resort near Cross River on the North Shore, a world of hidden structures and values opened up to me. Sure, I knew about the appeal of water from summers on the beaches near Charleston, South Carolina. Some of the little cabins on the pebble beach beside huge Lake Superior reminded me a bit of the sand-burr cottages near the ocean. But discounting the wide sky and expanse of waves, the comparisons stopped.
For one thing, there were huge rocks along the lake shore. Some of these boulders loomed taller than I was. Others were flat and pocked with pools. Tiny tufts of blue hare-bells, lobelia and prostrate yellow potentilla grew out of the cracks. Water-striders and even tiny minnows got trapped in the pools. One summer, making my slow way climbing rock to rock up the shore, I surprised several great blue heron fishing in a cove. This was a summer of drought--I suspected they were having trouble finding eatables elsewhere. It was the first and only time I ever saw these big birds this far north.
Beside the streams which cascaded into the lake, I'd occasionally come across concrete walls which I'd have to approach from land--they were too high to climb at the water's edge. So overgrown with small trees and mouldered by freezing and cracking weather, these walls seemed to belong to the natural landscape. But they were remnants of boathouses. The early Norwegian fishermen docked their deep-hulled, planked fishing boats in these houses. Some, I later learned, even had little rooms built above the cavities for the boats. A fancy friend of mine made one into a writer's studio, but the only plumbing was the water sloshing below.
In the early days--shall we say the late 1890s--mail was delivered by dogsled after being brought north to Two Harbors by schooner. Finally when a hard-surface road was being constructed all the way to Canada in the 1950s, some families, always hard-up and ready to turn their hand to anything honest and lucrative, built little cabins down by the shore for the highway workmen. This was the origin of many small resorts along the North Shore. The first time my husband and I drove north along highway 61, the road was so narrow, that the branches of spruce reached across and almost touched the car. We felt we were entering an enchanted forest where the people lived in miniature dwellings and all the animals could talk.
The resort where I used to stay had an office right by the road. No more than a cabin itself, it allowed the wife to make arrangements with renters without having to bring strangers into her own house. At the back was another small room filled with shelves of linen, pillows, and spreads. There, if you needed a roll of toilet paper, for instance, you could stand and read lovely cards from appreciative renters. It was a good corrective to discover that friends who used to come to the resort had written such flowery thank you notes that your brief scrawls looked like chicken scratches. This was when you recognized that the owners could be made into friends one kept in touch with throughout the year, even during the winter.
Running these little resorts was definitely a family business--the wives took care of money transactions and daily cleaned vacated cabins, while the husbands mowed lawns, repaired roofs and, that worst of all possible jobs, cleaned out septic tanks. A lot of beer was consumed in the doing of that last job.
Once in late October, I reserved for a few days, the last week "my resort" was open. When I arrived, I discovered that the plumbing in every cabin by the shore had frozen. There'd even been snow. But my hosts, two agreeable friends by this time, insisted that I could stay in the "mother's house" across the driveway from their own much more modern rambler. No one lived in "mother's house" anymore, but it was filled with old-fashioned stuffed armchairs, a huge dining room table covered with a lacy tablecloth, and an array of etched glassware that rattled in the china cupboard as you walked past.
I chose to sleep upstairs at the back of the house, under a slanting roof, in a room with windows on three sides. This gave me an entirely different perspective on the lake. My eyes skimmed the tops of trees, I could look far out across the huge lake, never spying an opposite shore, of course, but feeling that if I only stepped off the roof, I could soar over the water.
Behind this very sunny and starry room, were other tiny bedrooms, the smallest of which, under the opposite eaves, had been the children's bedroom. I could no more stand up straight in this long narrow cubbyhole than I could climb the boat house walls down by the shore. But the tiny beds arranged in the cubby were still covered with patchwork quilts, and expectant teddy bears or dolls still waited for someone to touch them into life. Yet the whole cubby had a forlorn look, as if it had been years since anyone rested there. Which might have been the case, as the two daughters whom I knew were in their 50s. Yet, I bet their grandchildren visited occasionally and slept here, wanting to take home Grandma's teddy bear when they left, sensing how lonesome it would be for the bear, waiting out an entire season of snow until they came back again. Is it possible I left something of myself there too, never to be retrieved again?
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Margotlog: The Great Mahele
Margotlog: The Great Mahele
In the late 1840s, the land system in Hawaii was changed from a system of peonage. This redistribution, remapping, resale was called the Great Mahele. Previously, most of the land on the Islands was held by local royalty, by greater kings who ruled several or all the islands, and finally by the government. Each section of land--or ahupuaa--started at the mountains and fanned out wider and wider until it met the sea. According to a surveyor, everything needful for life could be found in these sections--from the mountains came "wood, kapa for cloth, olona for fishing line, ti-leaf for wrapping paper, ie for ratan lashing, birds for food" (quoted in Shoal of Time by Gavan Daws, 1968) to the fertile land down the slopes where taro was grown, and finally to the waves where fish swam.
But by the 1840s, the Islands were over-run by foreigners--from the United States came missionaries, whalers, merchants, speculators; from China came laborers; from Europe more of the same. A central government, helpfully constituted in the 1820s by missionaries from the United States, was far more sweeping in its powers. Plus a handful of foreigners wanted to buy or at least take out long-term leases on land to form large plantations.
This redistribution offered native commoners the chance to purchase land for fee simple. What's so interesting is that many did not take advantage of this. Instead, as I read in Gavan Daws' book, they left their ancient locations and their bonds to particular local rulers, and set off to see what they could see. Consequently, they ended up disenfranchised and more impoverished than they'd been before, partly because the land they had worked for generations was frequently sold in huge swatches to outsiders. Think Dole pineapples, for instance.
Other immense changes occurred in the Hawaiian Islands around the same time. When gold was discovered in California, and hordes of U.S. citizens flocked to the West Coast, the likelihood that Hawaii would become drawn into the U.S. orbit increased. A smallpox epidemic spread from a foreign ship anchored in Honolulu harbor and despite efforts by foreign doctors to vaccinate everyone--native people and haoles (or foreigners)--many natives either faked a vaccination or simply ran away. Thousands died.
Clash of cultures, uprootedness, privation--all this sounds again and again. Sometimes the losses are immediate and obvious--such as deaths from unfamiliar or untreatable diseases. Think AIDS. Think yellow fever in the early days of the continental U.S. If 29,000 French troops sent by Napoleon to hold onto New Orleans hadn't died of Yellow Fever, it's unlikely that France would have sold the Louisiana purchase to Jefferson. It took a century before the connection between the fever and the bites of a mosquito was recognized and swamps drained, and screens put on windows.
Sometimes I think of us humans as having hugely developed brains, wonderful thumbs, but very little common sense. We often act like cattle, easily spooked, and we run toward what will kill us. Or we act like cats and crawl under the bed at the least unfamiliar sound. Or we give ourselves over to outsiders who think they know what's best, or we don't trust what outsiders are offering to help us. Maybe we need to pause and reflect. Look around. Stand back and examine carefully, think deeply, and ask what is really in our best interest. It's this kind of reflective analysis I like to encourage in myself, my friends, my family, my government.
In the late 1840s, the land system in Hawaii was changed from a system of peonage. This redistribution, remapping, resale was called the Great Mahele. Previously, most of the land on the Islands was held by local royalty, by greater kings who ruled several or all the islands, and finally by the government. Each section of land--or ahupuaa--started at the mountains and fanned out wider and wider until it met the sea. According to a surveyor, everything needful for life could be found in these sections--from the mountains came "wood, kapa for cloth, olona for fishing line, ti-leaf for wrapping paper, ie for ratan lashing, birds for food" (quoted in Shoal of Time by Gavan Daws, 1968) to the fertile land down the slopes where taro was grown, and finally to the waves where fish swam.
But by the 1840s, the Islands were over-run by foreigners--from the United States came missionaries, whalers, merchants, speculators; from China came laborers; from Europe more of the same. A central government, helpfully constituted in the 1820s by missionaries from the United States, was far more sweeping in its powers. Plus a handful of foreigners wanted to buy or at least take out long-term leases on land to form large plantations.
This redistribution offered native commoners the chance to purchase land for fee simple. What's so interesting is that many did not take advantage of this. Instead, as I read in Gavan Daws' book, they left their ancient locations and their bonds to particular local rulers, and set off to see what they could see. Consequently, they ended up disenfranchised and more impoverished than they'd been before, partly because the land they had worked for generations was frequently sold in huge swatches to outsiders. Think Dole pineapples, for instance.
Other immense changes occurred in the Hawaiian Islands around the same time. When gold was discovered in California, and hordes of U.S. citizens flocked to the West Coast, the likelihood that Hawaii would become drawn into the U.S. orbit increased. A smallpox epidemic spread from a foreign ship anchored in Honolulu harbor and despite efforts by foreign doctors to vaccinate everyone--native people and haoles (or foreigners)--many natives either faked a vaccination or simply ran away. Thousands died.
Clash of cultures, uprootedness, privation--all this sounds again and again. Sometimes the losses are immediate and obvious--such as deaths from unfamiliar or untreatable diseases. Think AIDS. Think yellow fever in the early days of the continental U.S. If 29,000 French troops sent by Napoleon to hold onto New Orleans hadn't died of Yellow Fever, it's unlikely that France would have sold the Louisiana purchase to Jefferson. It took a century before the connection between the fever and the bites of a mosquito was recognized and swamps drained, and screens put on windows.
Sometimes I think of us humans as having hugely developed brains, wonderful thumbs, but very little common sense. We often act like cattle, easily spooked, and we run toward what will kill us. Or we act like cats and crawl under the bed at the least unfamiliar sound. Or we give ourselves over to outsiders who think they know what's best, or we don't trust what outsiders are offering to help us. Maybe we need to pause and reflect. Look around. Stand back and examine carefully, think deeply, and ask what is really in our best interest. It's this kind of reflective analysis I like to encourage in myself, my friends, my family, my government.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Margotlog: The Big Mac Effect
Margotlog: The Big Mac Effect
Carol Bly, that deep-thinking, acerbic Minnesota essayist, once wrote about "thinking things over at Christmas." She was living then with her husband, the poet Robert Bly and their children, on the western Minnesota prairie. There's something about facing wide stretches of snowy prairie to induce deep thoughts. I had no prairie and only minimal snow, this New Year's Day, but I was facing Minnehaha Creek from inside the red cave of Mary's living room.
"Why do you like Asia so much?" I asked this Mary. (I have so many Marys in my life, I've given them little mental badges: Mary the fiction-writer, Mary the house-boat owner, Mary the one-time dancer, Mary the religious leader, Mary with the Florida daughter, and so on). This was Mary the Japanese-gardener. Also Bali-lover and China-visitor.
She looked at me in surprise: "Why because I want to see how different people live. Isn't that why you travel?" No, not really. I travel to experience over and over the scenes and languages I love: this means Italy, Mexico, France. And Hawaii because of the ocean and mountains.
Sitting across from me in Mary's Chinese-red living room was an elegantly dressed couple, both sporting versions of black and white. They'd just seen a nature special on the melting of the polar ice cap and Greenland ice field. We agreed that because of this dangerous phenomenon, ocean levels worldwide will likely rise four feet within our lifetimes. It has been predicted by climate scientists, just as Americans are buying more SUV's than ever, and global-warming-nay-sayers are having a field day within the Republican Party.
"It's going to be very hard to wean Americans off their SUV's," said this elegant couple, shaking their heads.
"But think about it!" I countered. "Think how differently our parents and grandparents lived. When I was a kid, my parents had an icebox, only one car which my father drove to work, and neither washing machine nor dryer. Think how much less electricity and gas my family used! Couldn't we dial back to an earlier era?"
They sadly denied this was possible, sending me away brooding about the Big Mac effect.
I've never eaten a Big Mac, but I sympathize with its appeal: we'll give you DOUBLE the regular size for almost the same price. My mother, trying to counter this eye-stomach phenomenon, claimed that serving my father on smaller plates, making him think he was getting the same full, staggering amount, was a dandy way to make him lose weight without knowing it. It worked with my father, but in fly-over land, aka Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas, bigger is almost always seen as better, and we take no substitutes.
At the heart of the American psyche, lives an ever-expanding frontier. We can wring every bit of fertility out of eastern woodlands chopped down to plant corn and cotton--two very leachy crops. But that's ok, because we can pull up stakes and light out for the territories. Add to this, being protected from world politics by two enormous oceans. What happens in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Poles doesn't really belong to us. We left all that muck behind when we established the "new Jerusalem" here in the New World. Add to this the astonishing size and fecundity of the land: forests about to float away on the wings of carrier pigeons, crops of prairie wheat so enormous as to beat any other yield in the world. Our pioneer ingenuity: We can do it, better and better or bigger and better.
Though global politics and competition put the lie to these notions again and again, still we feed on them. My husband and I are watching a Timberwolves basketball game, something he often does but I almost never. Yet, here we were, snuggling up on a cold winter's night to watch men making astonishing leaps. It was fun, until the commercials when we were blasted with TRUCKS of all descriptions. TRUCKS that virtually hew down forests and drag them away. TRUCKS that you out there in basketball land, oughta own, you He-Men, you.
If it weren't so dangerous (dare I say, stupid), I'd laugh. There ain't a single hewer-down of forests that I know of within the Twin Cities, but sadly, there are more and more of these huge trucks parked on city streets and suburban lawns. It's getting hard for me to peer around corners for the huge TRUCKS parked and obscuring my view. It's the Big-Mac Effect, and if it don't clog our arteries, it'll put many millions of us around the planet under water. Just you wait and see!
Carol Bly, that deep-thinking, acerbic Minnesota essayist, once wrote about "thinking things over at Christmas." She was living then with her husband, the poet Robert Bly and their children, on the western Minnesota prairie. There's something about facing wide stretches of snowy prairie to induce deep thoughts. I had no prairie and only minimal snow, this New Year's Day, but I was facing Minnehaha Creek from inside the red cave of Mary's living room.
"Why do you like Asia so much?" I asked this Mary. (I have so many Marys in my life, I've given them little mental badges: Mary the fiction-writer, Mary the house-boat owner, Mary the one-time dancer, Mary the religious leader, Mary with the Florida daughter, and so on). This was Mary the Japanese-gardener. Also Bali-lover and China-visitor.
She looked at me in surprise: "Why because I want to see how different people live. Isn't that why you travel?" No, not really. I travel to experience over and over the scenes and languages I love: this means Italy, Mexico, France. And Hawaii because of the ocean and mountains.
Sitting across from me in Mary's Chinese-red living room was an elegantly dressed couple, both sporting versions of black and white. They'd just seen a nature special on the melting of the polar ice cap and Greenland ice field. We agreed that because of this dangerous phenomenon, ocean levels worldwide will likely rise four feet within our lifetimes. It has been predicted by climate scientists, just as Americans are buying more SUV's than ever, and global-warming-nay-sayers are having a field day within the Republican Party.
"It's going to be very hard to wean Americans off their SUV's," said this elegant couple, shaking their heads.
"But think about it!" I countered. "Think how differently our parents and grandparents lived. When I was a kid, my parents had an icebox, only one car which my father drove to work, and neither washing machine nor dryer. Think how much less electricity and gas my family used! Couldn't we dial back to an earlier era?"
They sadly denied this was possible, sending me away brooding about the Big Mac effect.
I've never eaten a Big Mac, but I sympathize with its appeal: we'll give you DOUBLE the regular size for almost the same price. My mother, trying to counter this eye-stomach phenomenon, claimed that serving my father on smaller plates, making him think he was getting the same full, staggering amount, was a dandy way to make him lose weight without knowing it. It worked with my father, but in fly-over land, aka Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas, bigger is almost always seen as better, and we take no substitutes.
At the heart of the American psyche, lives an ever-expanding frontier. We can wring every bit of fertility out of eastern woodlands chopped down to plant corn and cotton--two very leachy crops. But that's ok, because we can pull up stakes and light out for the territories. Add to this, being protected from world politics by two enormous oceans. What happens in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Poles doesn't really belong to us. We left all that muck behind when we established the "new Jerusalem" here in the New World. Add to this the astonishing size and fecundity of the land: forests about to float away on the wings of carrier pigeons, crops of prairie wheat so enormous as to beat any other yield in the world. Our pioneer ingenuity: We can do it, better and better or bigger and better.
Though global politics and competition put the lie to these notions again and again, still we feed on them. My husband and I are watching a Timberwolves basketball game, something he often does but I almost never. Yet, here we were, snuggling up on a cold winter's night to watch men making astonishing leaps. It was fun, until the commercials when we were blasted with TRUCKS of all descriptions. TRUCKS that virtually hew down forests and drag them away. TRUCKS that you out there in basketball land, oughta own, you He-Men, you.
If it weren't so dangerous (dare I say, stupid), I'd laugh. There ain't a single hewer-down of forests that I know of within the Twin Cities, but sadly, there are more and more of these huge trucks parked on city streets and suburban lawns. It's getting hard for me to peer around corners for the huge TRUCKS parked and obscuring my view. It's the Big-Mac Effect, and if it don't clog our arteries, it'll put many millions of us around the planet under water. Just you wait and see!
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Margotlog: Writing in the Dark
Margotlog: Writing in the Dark
In the vacant Roman villas of Boscoreale and Oplontis (lst century BCE), architectural landscapes advance and retreat across room after room. On one wall, an image of a small round temple sheathed in columns rises from the top center and is capped by teal blue sky beneath a broken pediment. On either side, columned facades retreat into sudden nothingness.
Below, between red panels, an image of a birdbath pushes forward in "real" space. It looks topped with a round of glass. Fruit and leaves stud Roman red pillars nearby. Then as if the artist's hand gestured through real air, a sheaf of wheat waves across, asserting another vision of time and space.
At Torre Annunciata, we got off the Circumvesuvian railroad from Sorrento going toward Naples and walked to Oplontis. The villa, as I remember, was down steep steps from the modern, deserted street. Reaching it felt like waking into a vibrant fragment of another reality.
It was as if words like minnows crowded to the surface and then shaped themselves into sentences and rooms, cadences and colors. This is like the experience I often have, waking from darkness into astonishingly formed life, shaped who knows where, then appearing out of nothingness.
I have learned to enter this flow of words. Not to turn on a light. Never. When electric light touches my eyes, the words fall cloddish around me. But I need implements. So I rise and grope for blank paper and pen. Then crawl back into bed, position myself on an elbow with paper elevated beside me on a pillow. Then, closing my eyes, I call up the tiny glinting minnows and transcribe what they swim into being.
Oddly enough, much the same thing happens when I come to the computer to write for this blog. I wake in the dark, stretch into the warmth of the bed, and with eyes closed begin to invite whatever thoughts and phrases flow across the mind.
Blog is such a heavy word, suggestive of feet-stuck in-mud. Whereas, writing in the dark room, with only the light of the screen before me, and a cat warming the space behind me in the chair, I am drawn into a fluid relationship with the vast globe, taking words out of the dark and offering them into space. Not only of me, but of us all.
Writing on paper, especially a poem, can also offer this sense of being plucked out of time and set to work on transcribing something from deep and far. But poetry is highly musical and must be tested and retested through long uncertainty. Not so with this bloggy medium: though I revise as I go, a sense of the minnow school--its friendly fluidity, its aggregate shape--keeps me to a length I call manageable.
What I love most are the quick turns of the school, the glints off different fish, their sense of heading together into the water where they live and die. We're in this together, my readers in Russia and Canada, India and Germany, Latvia and Singapore, and of course close to home. It's humorous and energizing, liquifying and encouraging--that is, until a huge smoldering volcano not far off erupts and covers us with ash. Then we'll be no more than ruins like Oplontis, Boscoreale, and Pompeii. Awaiting the work of far distant ages to see what they can make of us.
In the vacant Roman villas of Boscoreale and Oplontis (lst century BCE), architectural landscapes advance and retreat across room after room. On one wall, an image of a small round temple sheathed in columns rises from the top center and is capped by teal blue sky beneath a broken pediment. On either side, columned facades retreat into sudden nothingness.
Below, between red panels, an image of a birdbath pushes forward in "real" space. It looks topped with a round of glass. Fruit and leaves stud Roman red pillars nearby. Then as if the artist's hand gestured through real air, a sheaf of wheat waves across, asserting another vision of time and space.
At Torre Annunciata, we got off the Circumvesuvian railroad from Sorrento going toward Naples and walked to Oplontis. The villa, as I remember, was down steep steps from the modern, deserted street. Reaching it felt like waking into a vibrant fragment of another reality.
It was as if words like minnows crowded to the surface and then shaped themselves into sentences and rooms, cadences and colors. This is like the experience I often have, waking from darkness into astonishingly formed life, shaped who knows where, then appearing out of nothingness.
I have learned to enter this flow of words. Not to turn on a light. Never. When electric light touches my eyes, the words fall cloddish around me. But I need implements. So I rise and grope for blank paper and pen. Then crawl back into bed, position myself on an elbow with paper elevated beside me on a pillow. Then, closing my eyes, I call up the tiny glinting minnows and transcribe what they swim into being.
Oddly enough, much the same thing happens when I come to the computer to write for this blog. I wake in the dark, stretch into the warmth of the bed, and with eyes closed begin to invite whatever thoughts and phrases flow across the mind.
Blog is such a heavy word, suggestive of feet-stuck in-mud. Whereas, writing in the dark room, with only the light of the screen before me, and a cat warming the space behind me in the chair, I am drawn into a fluid relationship with the vast globe, taking words out of the dark and offering them into space. Not only of me, but of us all.
Writing on paper, especially a poem, can also offer this sense of being plucked out of time and set to work on transcribing something from deep and far. But poetry is highly musical and must be tested and retested through long uncertainty. Not so with this bloggy medium: though I revise as I go, a sense of the minnow school--its friendly fluidity, its aggregate shape--keeps me to a length I call manageable.
What I love most are the quick turns of the school, the glints off different fish, their sense of heading together into the water where they live and die. We're in this together, my readers in Russia and Canada, India and Germany, Latvia and Singapore, and of course close to home. It's humorous and energizing, liquifying and encouraging--that is, until a huge smoldering volcano not far off erupts and covers us with ash. Then we'll be no more than ruins like Oplontis, Boscoreale, and Pompeii. Awaiting the work of far distant ages to see what they can make of us.
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