Bozo Sapiens

Remarkably for a species that thrived as nomads for so many thousands of years, humans have a strong propensity for designating areas of sacred ground, from the throne of St. Peter to the bleachers at Fenway Park.  Such a spot can seem very ordinary (the Heart of Midlothian, celebrated by Walter Scott, is now merely one cobblestone among millions of others) but, once designated, becomes the focus of powerful emotions and rituals (all true Scots, passing that cobblestone, must spit on it). Occasionally the process is reversed and it is the ritual that requires the place: the Swiss Army, always in danger of fracturing into the country’s four major language groups, swears to defend as its final redoubt an uninhabited snowfield in the highest Alps: this Heart of Switzerland – aloof, cool, and uncommitted –  serves as the one intersection of that country’s multifarious mental sets.
Evolutionary psychologists would argue that the sense of sacred ground is a necessary corollary to our nomadic past, when our lives depended on a just appreciation of the Place of Good Berries, even in the off-season. Dispassionate valuation has never been our style, though. We prefer to swing between indifference and reverence, so most hunter-gatherers’ mental maps cover, not just the physical landscape, but the boundaries of powerful spiritual dominions. Paleontologists would go further, pointing out that the reservation of particular spots for certain behavior (defecation, for instance) is something we share with the lizards – which may explain why the profanation of sacred places calls up such basic reptilian responses as fear and aggression.
On this day in AD 70, the Roman Army finally reconquered Jerusalem from its determined Jewish defenders.  Titus, son of the Emperor, had had long service in the region and knew from the character of the land and its people that this would be a place Rome would have to keep reconquering unless it was rendered uninhabited and indefensible.  He set about reducing the whole place to ground level, leaving only three isolated towers so that later visitors could know how mighty a city had yielded to him.  And indeed it was mighty:  King Herod, a well-travelled man, had turned Jerusalem into the Dubai of his time, a new-built gleaming capital to impress the increasingly numerous Graeco-Roman tourists.  All was now humbled:  Herod’s palace, the quarter of the Saducees, the Antonia fortress – and the Temple, seat of the living presence, tabernacle of the almighty, cast down and dispersed so that no man might say where it had stood.
This is now the problem, for an indeterminate sacred spot leaves itself open to the interpretations of self-interest.  The whole of what had been Herod’s Temple Mount is now under the control of a Muslim foundation responsible for the upkeep of two places sacred to Islam: the Dome of the Rock, scene of Abraham’s sacrifice, and Al-Aqsa mosque, furthermost terminus of the Prophet’s mystical night ride to the seventh heaven. Opinion has been divided as to which of these occupies the site of Herod’s Temple (which stood where Solomon’s had before, on the threshing floor bought by King David), but the assumption on all sides has been that any reconstruction of Judaism’s most holy precincts, whose loss has been mourned for nearly two thousand years, would involve desecration of  Islam’s third-most important sites. Since 1967, Jews and Muslims have fenced around this issue, seeking for openings and watchful for provocations.
This may be unnecessary: an ingenious body of recent archaeological work by a Tel-Aviv architect, Tugia Sagiv, using the eyewitness observations of the fall of Jerusalem, knowledge of priestly practice, and non-intrusive ground scanning, places the Temple site on an open section of the mount, aligned with the Western (ex-Wailing) Wall.  The Dome of the Rock occupies the position of a late temple to Jupiter, itself overlying a pagan tower to Astarte. Al-Aqsa covers a storeroom for vestments and a general gathering place, the Court of the Gentiles, that was open to all (even moneychangers). For once in the Middle East, history seems to offer a way out of an intractable problem.
Will anyone take it?  Of course not; more than half the point of a sacred spot is keeping others out of it. And if any Christians among you are shaking your heads at the petty intolerance of this, be reminded of the current state of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where a ladder put out for necessary repairs sometime before 1852 has stayed there (the repairs still undone) because each group of monks refuses to let the others out onto that particular ledge. The last major fistfight among the Christians was last November at the Feast of the Holy Cross; things have been so bad for so long that the church’s hereditary caretakers are Muslim. Though we may take off our hats or our shoes, we still bring our bad habits into the place of worship.

The man stood this evening in 1978 at his usual bus stop on Westminster Bridge in London. The weather, on the cusp of seasons, was betwixt and between – cloudy yet warm, humid, almost muggy.  Rain would be welcome. When the bus pulled up there was a sudden push of people – what had happened to the famous British queue? – and the man felt a sharp pain in his thigh as something poked it.  “Sorry,” said a voice with an accent (from where?); its owner carried an umbrella. Bloody tourists.
The man, though not a tourist, was not British either; the bus was taking him to work at the BBC World Service, where he wrote and presented programs for Bulgarian listeners. His name was Georgi Markov – a writer cursed by a talent too great to ignore. When he had lived in Bulgaria, he had been one of the young artists cultivated by the Head of Government, Todor Zhivkov – a man who, though he saw no need to abandon the cult of personality in his own case, maintained cordial relations with the Soviet Union through a unquestioning, spaniel-like loyalty.  Markov was too patriotic to take this line easily; despite his efforts to conceal his ideas in the opaque style of dissident literature, the regime soon mistrusted him:  after all, when a man proposes a play about the collapse of an ironworks – the “Lenin Ironworks” – even a trainee secret policeman knows what’s intended.
The end of the Prague Spring in 1968 tightened the screws on writers from Warsaw to Sofia; deprived of an audience, Markov left the country, eventually settling in London. There his insider’s knowledge of the Zhivkov circle let him write radio programs that Bulgarians actually wanted to listen to – Radio Free Europe saw its listenership double during his 1975 series of “Distant Reports About Bulgaria.” This was noticed at home; a security service memo recorded: “'Distant Reports about Bulgaria,’ by the traitor Georgi Markov, are considered to be the most massive propaganda attack against the socialist way of life during the period under examination.” Markov was now moving on to a frank and open appraisal of Zhivkov’s character; really, this was too much. Zhivkov called his security minister, General Stoyan Savov; Savov called his friends in Moscow; the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, agreed to provide “technical support,” as long as any trail would definitely stop in Bulgaria.
The pain in his leg was not going away; when he got to work, Markov noticed a red bump where the hurt was greatest. He was feeling hotter than the day justified; thirsty… woozy. By nightfall, he was in the grip of a raging fever. Three days later, he was dead. As his body shut down, he told the doctors that he thought he had been poisoned – and, remarkably, they believed him. A post mortem found a tiny platinum-iridium sphere in his leg, a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, yet drilled through with even tinier holes. A chemical warfare expert deduced the presence of the poison ricin. And the method of delivery? The umbrella:  perfect camouflage for an airgun.
September 7th was Todor Zhivkov’s birthday; Markov’s assassination was both a birthday present for the Leader and a warning to those who dared scrutinize the actions of his brutal yet thin-skinned rule. And that might have been it, except that distressing loose ends remain from the case that resist neat tying-up. Bulgaria is now an honored colleague in the European Union. Zhivkov is dead and General Savov shot himself, yet plenty of secret policemen still float around the official bureaucracy, as they did in Poland and the ex-East Germany. A crusading writer has gone into the files so far as to find the name of the actual assassin: Francesco Giullino, an Italian petty criminal with Danish citizenship who still lives at liberty in Europe: that’s his photograph up there. And everyone knows that the KGB poison lab is still at work, if under a different name: only a few years ago, it proved its effectiveness in the death by polonium of Alexander Litvinenko – another man, also in London, with embarrassing things to say about a touchy and authoritarian regime.
It’s said that modern Europe was founded on a Pact of Amnesia, in which the hideous deeds of war were consigned to history and we could all move forward in a bland and collegial style: soyons Europaïsch! Such a statute of limitation may have made sense when so many worthy functionaries had pasts to conceal, but their generation is nearly gone.  The capacity for evil, through, remains; it’s a bad idea to stay forgetful.

Today he walked out of the woods, sporting the pacifist’s beard that looked like a fur ruff, taking the sandy Concord Road back into town: to the Emersons’ lighted house, their talkative friends, the world with all its comforts and irritations. For two years, two months and two days, he had lived out his dream of attentive independence: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to the rout all that was not life.” Thoreau’s Walden captures that inner adventure in terms as exciting as the narrative of a journey to the remotest regions of the earth; but, unlike most travel writing, it makes one’s well-stuffed armchair feel less easy, one’s climate-controlled dwelling less a home; it spurs a restless desire to simplify and unclutter, and gospel-like calls one away to a purer life.
As with all prophets, Thoreau combined the abilities to entrance and to exasperate. He was bright, lively, blessed with the gift to converse in complete paragraphs. He shared the New England Transcendentalist view that Nature, well observed, contained all the divinity mankind needs – but differed in actually going out to make the observations. His youth was, like most, a time of trial and error, but his growing self-knowledge made him give up his successes as well as his failures. Emerson took him on as a gardener and general handyman in the hope that he would soon make a career in poetry – but the early poems (superfine stuff, spangled with “aught”s and “eke”s, “fain”s and “thrins”) attracted little attention – and, besides, Thoreau had no interest in a career. Emerson feared he lacked ambition, when the truth was he shunned advancement as a snare and a distraction.
His senses were wonderfully acute, detecting the “faint wiry peep” of the baby woodcock and the odors of the individual goods on a passing freight train. Combined with his vigor and general handiness, these gave him the air of a miracle-worker to less fully engaged people. When, on a long walk, an acquaintance asked where one could find Indian arrowheads, Thoreau could answer, “everywhere” – then stoop and pick one up. He did not himself believe that he had any special powers, only that others were blinded and muffled by the trivial concerns of social existence; it was his duty to open eyes and ears. Walden is not, though some might wish it were, a serene, quasi-Buddhistic celebration of the enveloping goodness of Nature – it is a call to the unrighteous (or unthinking), latest in a tradition of Puritan rhetoric that goes back to Pilgrim’s Progress.
This is perhaps the real source of exasperation about Thoreau – he calls, but will not be joined. He exhorts, but provides an example in himself that none can imitate. He describes, in all their sweetness and specificity, our yearnings toward a more natural life and thus makes all too clear our inability ever to fulfill them. This militant hermit, living without wife, without child, without taxes, without social obligations – with only an eye to see and a pen to capture life’s passing beauties – could just begin to approach his ideal through intense self-discipline, a prodigious power to refuse, and a town-full of indulgent neighbors. And if even he returned from the woods, what hope have we to make a new life there?  The evening shaded into purple; there on the Cambridge Turnpike stood the white and welcoming house. The solitary traveler knocked, and was admitted.

On this day in 1666, the wind died down and the fire, having little left to burn, subsided. Molten lead and glass still ran in what had been the streets, but the smoke was clearing and it was now possible to estimate the damage.  This went beyond the worst fears: 13,000 houses, 87 churches (including the cathedral), 44 livery-company halls, the Custom House, the Royal Exchange, and dozens of other buildings.  Only nine people were known to have died in the fire itself, but hundreds had succumbed to shock and exposure in the improvised tent city beyond the walls. London, the most populous and wealthy place outside Asia, was gone. “Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle! such as haply the world had not seen since the foundation of it, nor can be outdone till the universal conflagration thereof.”
Catastrophic urban fires were nothing new in a world lit by tapers and fed from open hearths, but London’s single-minded devotion to the getting of wealth made it particularly vulnerable.  Warehouses packed with flammable goods, from tar to olive oil, stood eaves to eaves all along the river.  Towering structures, nearly meeting over the narrow alleys, combined the functions of dwelling, shop, atelier, storehouse, and dormitory. As in many cities, there was a large gap between the sensible strictures of the law and the practice of the people.  The poor were forbidden to build in wood and thatch, but new houses in these materials somehow sprung up like mushrooms.  The rich should not have run hazardous trades from their houses, yet somehow they did – and got away with it. Most agreed it was a bad idea to store quantities of gunpowder in a city, yet, as old soldiers of the Civil War, they did just that: disposing of it would be such a waste. Personal business took up too much time for men to think long about the common good.
In the great fire’s aftermath, the King, as good kings should, promised the people cheap bread. A Frenchman conveniently confessed to starting the blaze and was expeditiously hanged. The tale thus finished, the new question was what to do with the featureless black space where once had stood the metropolis. Christopher Wren and his friend John Evelyn saw a wonderful opportunity to replace the higgledy-piggledy medieval city with a worthy capital of Italianate piazzas, boulevards, and esplanades – but this was to reckon without the prickly Protestant self-awareness of the Londoner. These burghers did not consider the disaster to have been general and overwhelming – untold thousands of habitations, ruin beyond calculation – but exact and personal: 13,000 dwellings, including my house of fifteen hearths and twenty-two windows, and my second-best bed with the brocade hangings. These specifics were what they knew they had lost and these were what they would contribute to rebuild – not some stage-set New Rome for cockscombs to prance in.
They commissioned a man named Ogilby to produce the world’s first large-scale urban map, 52 inches to the mile: an exact representation of what was no longer there. They hired the physicist Robert Hooke to survey the charred plain and peg out the previous street plan and building lots in all their original crookedness. Within four years, most houses were back up, although now in slightly more fireproof materials and designs; Wren constructed simultaneously fifty parish churches and a new cathedral, St. Paul’s. It was a prodigious and expensive effort, not to be repeated – so the citizens put their heads together and invented private fire insurance. The companies they began in the decade after 1666 still exist today.
If mischance forces you to take a cab through the City of London today, you will have ample time sitting in traffic to wonder why such a vibrant business center should be built on the lines of an ancient slum – and now you have your answer. The complex contractual relationships between private individuals built this city’s wealth, and these proved more important than convenience, splendor, or public spirit. This remains the permanent dilemma of social organization: we may dream of open vistas and harmonious constructions, but we do our real work in ways that are huddled, intimate, and often slightly crooked.

We want our friends to understand,When they observe our car,The we’re as smart and successful and grandAs we like to think we are.
The manufacturer’s intention was that we should warble this ditty to ourselves as we zoomed down some verdant parkway in our new (had any of the poet Marianne Moore’s suggestions been accepted)  “Resilient Bullet,” “Mongoose Civique,” “Anticipator,” “Pastelogram,” or “Utopian Turtletop.”  Alas, the corporate world is rarely so sweetly surreal. All these and 17,994 other names were rejected – and our friends were never going to consider us smart or successful or grand: for we had just bought… an Edsel.
The Edsel, introduced to a breathless public today in 1957, is an interesting study in failure because it was neither particularly bad in any one way, nor did it fail for any one reason. Instead, it showed in fearsome clarity how easy it is for a large number of clever and experienced people to louse up a straightforward assignment through a fatal constellation of mistakes, each one familiar from anyone’s daily routine.
To start with the brand: “Edsel,” a Wagnerian derivative of “Atilla,” had been the name of Henry Ford’s only son – a kindly, sophisticated, suffering man who had battled against his father’s relentless philistinism in the quest for elegant, powerful cars. Dead of stomach cancer at the age of fifty, Edsel represented a lost hope among Ford executives that they could rise above the low-margin, mass-market vehicles that had built the company and create something that people would desire to buy for its innate qualities, not just its price. The success of the Thunderbird had given them encouragement, and now they aimed to fulfill Edsel’s dream of a car to rival the mid-priced titans of Chrysler and General Motors: the DeSoto and Oldsmobile. In a misty-eyed boardroom moment, they swept away the consultants’ recommendations  (“Corsair” topped the list) and went for "Edsel."  The public, tested in the following weeks, was less enthusiastic.  Many found it reminded them of “weasel;” some of “pretzel;” most simply said, “what?”
The same disconnect between the view from the asphalt and that from Executive Row appeared in the basic business premise of the car. Detroit has always been as doctrinaire in the matter of marques and price-points as the Vatican is on dogmatic truths. Lincoln must line up with Cadillac, Mercury with Pontiac. Between these, therefore, gaped a critical $700 price gap – suitable, not just for a new model, but a whole new division with new dealers. Ford, always embarrassed by its dearth of brand names, would now have a genuine stable of them. The thing is… people outside Detroit had never really understood this subtle cherub-to-archangel ranking of the badges; they simply bought as much prestige or sportiness as they could afford. The Edsel was not a bold new departure as far as they could tell; it was simply a confusion.
Technically, it wasn’t bad, with some good ideas (self-adjusting brakes) and some bad ones (putting the shift buttons in the hub of the steering wheel, so that what you thought would be a simple toot on the horn turned into a sudden leap forward or backward). Build quality wasn’t great,  but might have improved with better sales. Styling was a problem: Ford had been so coy about its new baby, not letting anyone have a glimpse of it, that people were expecting a marvel of modernity – but countess committee meetings had leached most of the originality from the concept models, leaving a big bland box with a front end that looked like a Checker Marathon sucking a lemon. Then there was a recession in 1957, chilled further by the sobering appearance of Sputnik and its promise of intercontinental nuclear missiles. And finally, Ford senselessly cannibalized its own market, putting out an up-rated version of its Fairlane that offered all the Edsel could for less, giving buyers the chance to indulge themselves with the appearance of parsimony.  After three harrowing years, Henry Ford II called a halt to the project, writing off $400,000,000.  The only thing he couldn’t write off was the unjust but indelible connection of his late father’s name with abject failure. It would have been so much better to call it the “Mongoose Civique.”

On September 3rd, 1929, the Big Bull Market reached its trembling, rainbow-hued peak, an expression of economic confidence so pure that it no longer needed an economy to believe in. Manufacturing was already in recession; farms were failing; the Florida property boom, which had seen minuscule parcels of swamp and salt marsh change hands for twenty year’s wages, was now deflating faster than its stoutest boosters could puff it up. Skyscrapers, though, were still sprouting; in this week, the Chrysler and Empire State buildings started their upward race. It was the close of a decade of peaceful pursuits, in which respectable Americans discovered tennis, motorboats, public dancing, and the speakeasy. Despite the retreat of traditional production, conditions seemed ripe for the sudden advance of new technologies: radio, aluminum, power generation, and, of course, the world-girdling Zeppelin.
No headline on September 3rd announced the passing of the great climacteric, warning that from this day on all would plunge together into the hidden crevasses of bankruptcy and destitution. No one could tell the hopeful buyer of RCA stock that the price he paid today would not be reached again in the remaining fifty years of the company’s existence. In retrospect we know the symptoms of a bubble (when shoeshine boys give stock tips, said Bernard Baruch; when ghetto dwellers pay for seminars in property flipping, says more recent memory), but nothing in the air of this morning revealed that the God of Prosperity had decamped overnight, putting at imminent risk the eight billion dollars the banks had lent to stock brokerages just to cover their customers’ margin buying. It was deliciously warm; Labor Day weekend ended yesterday; miniature golf had just been invented; what could go wrong?
Human adaptability has made us masters of this world.  We live at home in tropical and arctic climates; we consume with relish bamboo shoots, octopus, or wicketty grubs. That adaptability, though, comes at the price of permanent self-delusion.  Because stress and worry are so corrosive, we keep them at bay by defining any apparently static situation as “normal.”  War or peace, hardscrabble poverty or sudden paper wealth, we soon take them for granted – because thinking too much about tomorrow keeps us from dealing with today.
It’s not that we are ignorant or blind to reality; it’s that we maintain a critical difference between life in general and life that involves us. In general, we know that “things average out;” in the personal here and now, though, we believe that “this time it’s different.”  We value our own possessions more because they are ours; we favor our portfolio because we chose it, even to the point of holding on to the obvious dogs that shelter within it.  We can only gauge our well-being in relative terms; so, when your brother-in-law shows you round his McMansion, your own split-level ranch-style will suddenly feel cramped and shabby – time to trade up. We enjoy social cohesion, so we value most the advice that tells us to keep doing what everyone is already doing – nobody likes a party-pooper.
That is, until the party is well and truly over. Three years on from September 3rd, 1929, things hit bottom; leading stocks were trading well below even their post-panic levels:  AT&T at one-third its 1929 value, General Motors at one-tenth, RCA at one-fiftieth.  One would expect riots and revolution – but here self-deception showed its useful side.  We were now all poor, all righteous working people, all “forgotten men,” and thus ready to act together in the new normality of the New Deal. True, we had spent the ‘20s spouting about "creeping socialism" and the dangerous demagoguery of That Man Roosevelt – but this time it was different.

If you’ve ever received a warm personal letter from your country’s tax authorities, questioning, say, the deduction as “professional expenses” of your yearly intake of brandy and cigars, you will understand at once the appeal of the micro-nation.
Monaco and Liechtenstein exist as the fruits of successful finagling by local princelings of the conflicting ambitions of powerful neighbors. Palau and Tuvalu are isolated settlements now returned to the control of their original inhabitants. Guernsey and the Isle of Man are feudal domains under the British Crown that retain some idiosyncratic customs, if only for the sake of offshore banking. The door to tiny statehood, though, is now theoretically closed. If you want a country of your own, you will need to fight or negotiate for a piece of someone else’s.
Not necessarily, replies HRH Prince Roy I of the Principality of Sealand. Once merely Paddy Roy Bates, his Royal Highness’ plans were originally more modest than founding a country: he wanted to start a pirate radio station.  Before Britain had commercial radio, the only way to compete with the state broadcaster was to put your transmitter on a ship just outside the three-mile territorial limit, giving your slightly queasy disc jockeys the chance to beam hot tracks to a pop-starved onshore public. Bates went one better – on this date in 1967, he commandeered an abandoned gun platform constructed on two huge pillars in the North Sea: Roughs Tower.
Rough by name, rough by nature – pirate radio was not a gentleman’s game; its history was regularly marked by unfriendly takeovers on the high seas. When, therefore, government technicians appeared near the platform to service a buoy, Bates’ son Michael frightened them off by firing shots from his father’s pistol, for which he didn’t have a license. Brought to court on the mainland, the Bates family argued that English law had no jurisdiction over their 550 square meter domain. Amazingly, the judge agreed: as of 1968, the Bateses became the hereditary rulers of this wind-scoured, gull-infested speck in a snotgreen sea. By 1975, the country had a constitution, a flag, and a national anthem; composed in 3/4 time, this has a pleasing lilt between Nordic and Celtic.
Most micro-nations remain at the dressing-up stage, but a few manage to have moments of real history, just like their larger rivals. The country of New Atlantis, a moored raft owned by Ernest Hemingway’s brother, was sacked by Mexican fishermen; the Republic of Minerva was forcibly annexed by the Tongan navy. Sealand, by any measure, has had an eventful four decades of existence: in 1978, dissident citizens of German origin took over the platform and detained Prince Michael; his father mounted a helicopter assault and crushed the revolt, holding its leader to ransom. Once again, Britain claimed to have no authority. The chastened Germans now maintain a government-in-exile that divides its time between issuing defiant communiqués and promoting “Vril” technology, a vibratory panacea available only to the wealthy few.
Official Sealand has also attempted to create an economic justification for its existence. It issued stamps and currency for the collector trade; it gave out passports, but these were widely forged and re-sold, so they are now withdrawn.  It tried to establish a data haven, where servers could operate outside the usual regulatory regimes; it hopes to host online casinos.  All these reveal the hollowness of the dream of independence: though no longer fending off the taxman, the new autocrats are themselves scrabbling for revenue, just like a real government.
The dream persists, though  – the same urge for individual majesty that inspired the real-life Clunie-Rosses, Kings of the Cocos Islands, and the fraudulent Gregor MacGregor, Cazique of Poyais. It leads on the citizens of the Comune di Seborga and the fisher-folk of the Crown Dependency of Forvik.  It quickens the hearts of potential rulers from Danny I of the internet Kingdom of Lovely to Robert I of Thalossia, whose realm extends to the furthest limits of his Milwaukee bedroom.  It tempts, me, too… so would any of you like to become citizens of Bozonia?  Our motto shall be: “Brandy and Cigars for All!”

With a last murmuring cheep, she was gone. Today in 1914 saw the death of Martha, named for Martha Washington – not the Mother of her Country but the last of her breed. And what a breed it was! John James Audobon watched one continuous flock of passenger pigeons pass over for three days and estimated that at times 300 million birds were flying by him every hour.  Alexander Wilson, patriarch of American ornithology, saw a flock numbering over two billion. They constituted a third of all birds in North America, with a population equivalent to that of all birds in the U.S. today. They darkened the sky at noon; their nesting grounds covered the area of a city; their cooing made conversation impossible for miles around; they stripped farms so thoroughly that the Bishop of Montreal was called in to exorcise them.
They were also good to eat. Fat and full-flavored, they were yet another edible splendor of the New World, where you could haul up a feed of silver alewives with a bucket, kill fifty ducks with one shot, and use your surplus lobster for fertilizer. If you were hungry and pigeons were passing over, you need not waste powder and shot –  you could go up the hill, pick up a piece of wood and bat your supper out of the sky. Even this was needless exertion: whole villages feasted merely on the plump squabs that fell out of nests and were gathered like mushrooms.
Such spectacular bounty confirmed the settlers’ assumption of their God-given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Such resources were meant to be used – it would be ingratitude not to exploit them to the fullest. But as the frontier advanced and the country developed, this exploitation shifted from a matter of subsistence to a business: cheap meat for the cities, gathered by rural casual labor. “When the birds appear all the male inhabitants of the neighborhood leave their customary occupations as farmers, bark-peelers, oil-scouts, wildcatters, and tavern loafers, and join in the work of capturing and marketing the game.” Producer and consumer were separated; the self-interest of both groups was to kill as many of the birds as possible for the least cost. This meant attacking nesting sites, smoking birds down with sulphur fires or tempting them with “stool pigeons,” blinded birds tied to perches.  These were techniques that killed two generations at once, but it seemed impossible to put a dent into such a gigantic population.
It turned out, though, that the passenger pigeon was a species critically dependent on enormous numbers to survive. Once flocks dwindled below a certain size, they failed to breed and became much more susceptible to predators. Laws and conservation efforts came far too late – within sixty-five years of Audobon’s death, Martha cooed her last.
The fate of the passenger pigeon is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons: when something belongs to everyone in general, it belongs to no-one in particular. If I don't get for myself the benefit of shared resources, someone else will, and I will lose out.  The result is destructive exploitation of anything good that is also free: minerals, bushmeat, fish stocks, rain forests, water resources, emissions levels. To preserve and maintain them would require self-restraint – not a natural habit for homo sapiens.
Nature, unfortunately, is largely non-linear; systems do not adjust gradually, but boom and crash. We now live in a world where many species and resources are in the position of the passenger pigeon, trembling on a balance-point between abundance and disappearance. The self-regulation necessary to prevent disaster will, if accomplished, be the greatest effort of will ever achieved by humans. To succeed in this need not mean abandoning the idea of dominion, but instead recognizing its secondary meaning: responsibility. For, if we really did own the world, we might well take better care of it.

William Tecumseh Sherman did not practice war – he was war, in its purest, most pitiless form.  Born to a happy family, adopted when orphaned into another (where he found an admirable and affectionate wife), he had no inner void to fill with knightly notions. His mind’s chief quality was clarity: he saw things as they were and did what was needed to master them. Undeceived himself, he had little time for the self-deceptions of others: “glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families.” And when he thought the anguish necessary, he would inflict it to the fullest degree.
Sherman was of the few generals ever to have been previously president of a bank and proprietor of a railroad. He understood that fighting capacity depends on much more than skill, bravery, men, or ammunition; it draws its strength from the power of economies and the resolution of civilians. He predicted at its outset to a Southern friend the entire course of the Civil War:“Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.”But Southerners did not stop and think; the national torment went ahead. Given his first important command in the Fall of 1861, Sherman did what any reasonable man might do, knowing how dreadful this war must be: he went mad. Forebodings and anxieties drove him to the point of breakdown. Though he soon recovered, the name of “lunatic” would follow him, just as “drunkard” followed his friend U.S. Grant, prompting in  both a grim, head-down determination that marked their style of warfare.
On this day in 1864, Sherman looked out over a prostrate Atlanta; all that summer he had battled and maneuvered his way down from Tennessee, showing his skill in a series of swift movements that were the first inspiration for blitzkrieg. Now he had what his style of war required: power over a whole economy, not just an opposing general. The city fathers wrote in protest at his order that all civilians be evacuated; his letter in reply was as frank and empathetic as a friend’s, yet entirely unbending: “(I) shall not revoke my orders, because they were not designed to meet the humanities of the case. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; you might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships. … But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker.” Atlanta was evacuated and burned. Sherman went on to ravage Georgia and South Carolina in a campaign that aimed to snuff out war like a fire-break: removing or destroying all the goods on which it feeds. But when peace at last came, he not only shared the last cracker, he dictated surrender terms so equitable and lenient that his own Secretary of War disavowed them.
We commit greater cruelty when we camouflage war’s inherent evils as virtues, or cloak our aggression in the raiment of liberation and brotherhood. Sherman’s March did not bring the Jubilee under the flag that makes men free; it brought pain – pain calculated to make peace possible. Step out of New York’s Plaza Hotel today and you will see him still advancing from the cover of Central Park, glaring at Bergdorf’s as if he meant to storm it: a grizzled horseman, hair as always slightly awry, tunic half buttoned, resembling a small boy suddenly aged by some dreadful curse… yet all in gold, glowing, led on by a young and lovely Victory.

Children and books:  conceived in pleasure, born in pain, sent out into the world to uncertain futures – or mourned, too soon, by one or two alone.
Mary Shelley, author and mother, was born today in 1797; perhaps coincidentally, this was the exact week that the narrator in her most famous work first saw, raging in the Arctic wastes, the monster brought to life by Victor Frankenstein.  Shelley’s whole career revolved around the passions and troubles of creation – of new life and new ideas. Her own mother, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died in bearing her; her father, the philosopher William Godwin, combined a powerful intellect, a heart of horizon-embracing liberality, and a complete unsuitability for the task of parenthood. He doted on his daughters in a woolly and distant way, giving them the run of his library but forgetting to feed them. When he re-married to an ill-tempered and loveless widow, he made little effort to protect or advance his offspring; his duty was to mankind in general.
Since Godwin was a Great Mind, young men would regularly arrive at his door to claim him as prophet and father. The most striking of these was Percy Bysshe Shelley: tall, well-to-do, seraphically benevolent, filled with Promethean fire, and utterly irresponsible. He fell for the sixteen-year-old Mary and she for him; true, he was married to someone else, but he believed in Free Love. They went off to live in miserable penury in France, since both their families disapproved of them – but Shelley was writing, so he was happy. When they returned, Mary gave birth prematurely to a daughter, who died within two weeks. The vision of the dead baby would continue to haunt her; she dreamt that it had only been cold, and had come to life with rubbing by the fire.
At the age of nineteen, sitting in the Villa Diodati in the chilly dark of the Year with No Summer, Mary listened as Byron and Shelley challenged each of their little group to write a ghost story. The others soon gave up and chaffed her for not even starting – but ideas were forming in her mind that could not find quick or easy expression. Creators and their ungrateful offspring; fiery hearts and cool, determined minds. Banished children – Adam – Lucifer – and the lost paradise of maternal love. Frankenstein still grabs the reader, not for its critique of of Enlightenment rationality, but for its powerful magnification of our most domestic emotions.
Meanwhile the men she knew, bursting with plans to make Man happy, made the people around them miserable. In the year that Frankenstein was writing, Mary’s neglected half-sister and Shelley’s abandoned wife both killed themselves. Her step-sister Claire bore Byron’s child – which he agreed to support on condition that he need never see her again; the child was consigned to a convent, and soon perished. Mary herself bore two more children whom she adored, but further epic journeys to Italy with Percy saw them both die of fever. Finally, Percy himself drowned in a sailing accident that, had it not been so romantic, would have been called foolish and lubberly by those who know the sea. His literary comrades cremated him on the beach and dispersed. Mary wrote in her journal: “at the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person – all my old friends are gone & my heart fails when I think how few ties I hold to the world.”
All the monster wanted was love and acceptance; all Frankenstein desired was a creation he could be proud of; each failed – and then destroyed – the other. In everything she wrote, Mary Shelley kept returning to a belief that compassion, sympathy, and generosity were the true keys to existence. The bold mind ranges to the fringes of the Universe; the restless soul seeks the desolation of the Pole; yet what we most need lies far closer to home.

君子喻於义，小人喻於利。“The better man gives heed to responsibility; the worse to self-interest;”  so said Confucius – correct on this, as on so many topics. Leaf through his Analects and you find him a flexible, curious, observant and modest character, keenly aware of the gulf between what one knows and what one does not know. No wonder China took so quickly and so thoroughly to his teachings. The problem was in the way it took to them, formalizing his hints into edicts, his doubts into prohibitions. Within a few centuries of the Master’s death, he had become the focus of a quasi-religious cult and a State bureaucratic culture, in which knowledge of his works was the only test of fitness to govern. The man whose aim was to dispel injustice and superstition by critical thinking had become the center of a universal, unchanging, unquestioned national creed.
Confucianism revealed some of its best and worst qualities in the episode known as the First Opium War, which flared up in Canton (now Guangzhou) in 1839. China’s rigorously conservative and centralized imperial system had long maintained the fiction that all foreign trade was actually a form of tribute by overseas nations to the Emperor, which he acknowledged by certain little largesses: tea, say, or silks, or porcelain. It would be highly insulting to consider that the Central Land had any need of inferior barbarian products – except, perhaps, silver, or rare medicinal herbs. The whole business was so demeaning that it was only carried on through a handful of Chinese middlemen and tucked well away from Peking on the southern Pearl River.
This posed a real problem for British merchants, eager to satisfy their home country’s voracious appetite for Chinese specialties. They could bring in silver, but Britain doesn’t produce much. Chinese restrictions prevented them from trading as they did in India, importing floods of cheap manufactured goods for the poor in exchange for local luxuries. That left medicinal herbs… well, we do own Bengal – and Bengal produces opium…  Starting in 1781, the opium trade grew with terrifying rapidity. By 1800, the imperial government recognized the dangers and banned the drug, threatening users with death – but Canton was, as it had intended, a long way from Peking. Illicit opium imports increased fivefold between 1821 and 1839, by which time there were more than 2 million Chinese addicts.
Into this alarming situation arrived a new imperial governor, Lin Tse-Hsü (Pinyin: Lin Zéxú), a Confucian to his fingertips: cultured, determined, so incorruptible he was known as “Lin the Clear Sky.” He acted quickly, establishing a detoxification clinic for addicts and demanding that all British merchants hand over their opium: the “foreign mud” was destroyed in vast trenches on the beach. The Emperor sent Lin a dinner of roebuck venison, signifying “assured promotion.”  But the settling of one issue only brought up others:  who would pay for the seized opium?  What other trade would be allowed?  Where else could merchants land cargo? Who had authority to try drunken and riotous sailors?  Lin had answers to these questions, which he summarized in his official letter of remonstrance to Queen Victoria. It combined two faces of official Confucianism – clear moral reasoning based on reciprocity (surely merchants visiting England would comply with its laws…) and an absurd and pompous bluster (“Most surely do we possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom!”). The assumption of Chinese suzerainty in all things made compromise impossible. State egoism blinded an otherwise clever man.
Queen Victoria never got the letter, but Lin’s hubris soon received its response.  He assembled his war junks and wrote the requisite couplets about “shaking the foreign tribes,” but found even armed merchantmen too much for his navy.  Ashamed to admit defeat, he reported to the Emperor “six smashing blows.”  Attacking again, he was defeated again, until, on this date in 1842, the Celestial Kingdom had to sign a humiliating treaty restoring the opium trade, opening ports, and giving the British a territorial base in Hong Kong.  “A thousand unending problems are sprouting,” wrote the Emperor to Lin; “when we think about your grievous failing, we become furious, and then melancholy.”  The righteous man, who always heeded responsibility over self-interest, was exiled among the wild Uighurs of Xinjiang.  As a Confucian, he would not have been surprised at this – for “the superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. Secure, he does not forget the possibility of ruin.”

“The whole world is watching,” they chanted; “the whole world is watching!”  Perhaps not the whole world, but America certainly was, reclining post-prandially in front of the TV – and what it saw was ugly:  Chicago police, porcine yet robotic in baby-blue helmets and gas masks, yanking kids out of the crowd and walloping them senseless with billy clubs. Not just long-hairs, either, or kooks, or ethnics – clean-cut white college boys and girls were left beaten and bloody on the street. Even that nice young newsman, Mike Wallace, was roughed up.  What on earth was going on?
Two things: the Democratic Convention and a pre-planned piece of theater. The conventional politics revolved around Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president and anointed successor" a decent Midwestern progressive tainted by association with the disastrous war in Vietnam. The left wing of the party was resentful at having Humphrey foisted on it, but President Johnson was a master at assembling majorities; Mayor Richard J. Daley, Boss of Chicago, had pledged to deliver Illinois' votes on condition that the convention came to his town. He spent $500,000 on sprucing up the venue and promised that nothing would happen.
In 1968, that was quite a promise: in January, the North Vietnamese had launched the Tet offensive – 16,000 US troops would be killed that year; in April, Martin Luther King was assassinated, sparking country-wide riots in which 46 people died; students occupied the Columbia university campus until ejected by police; in May, a civil rights camp on the Mall in Washington was violently broken up; student riots nearly brought down the French government; in June, Robert Kennedy was shot; in August, the Republican convention in Miami was marred by three deaths when police believed they were being attacked by snipers and returned fire. Nobody knew what would happen in Chicago.
One person had an idea, though: Abbie Hoffman. A complex, clever man with a manic capacity for connection and a hidden core of depression, he was older than the average hippie, one of those people over thirty one was not supposed to trust. Well-meaning political protest earned nothing but scorn from him – it was playing the Man’s game with a losing hand. No one got anywhere by being predictably outraged, or issuing 50-page manifestos; that was boring. “People that are into a very literal bag, like that heavy word scene, you know, don't understand the use of communication in this country and the use of media.” Hoffman wanted to make revolution as attractive as advertising: “we're using the tools of Madison Ave. But that's because Madison Ave. is effective in what it does.”  If the rhetoric of ads and politics could trade places, revolution would become sexy and capitalism would collapse. So Hoffman and his friends invented the idea of Yippies, people whose every action was an advertisement for counter-culture: “Yippies, sex-loving, dope-loving, commie, beatnik, hippie, freako, weirdos. That's groovy, man, that's a whole life style, that's a whole thing to be, man. I mean, you want to get in on that.” For Hoffman, the way to bring down the Party of Death was theater – guerilla theater – and he planned to open in Chicago. As a teaser, he said the Yippies would dose the city’s water supply with LSD.
Mayor Daley was not without his dramatic side, either; his audience was his voters (white, poor, respectable) and he knew their tastes.  One thirteen-year-old Chicagoan told a New York Times reporter, “they better not come down here – we’ll get scissors and cut all their hair off.”  Daley would get no applause for accommodating dissent; he put 11,500 policemen on the streets in 12-hour shifts, and called in 5,000 National Guardsmen, 1,000 FBI agents, and 6,000 infantrymen from the 101st Airborne armed with flame-throwers and bazookas (although he kept these last in the suburbs; a real artist knows how not to overdo it).  The policemen themselves expected the worst from radical hippies and liberal media alike:  “We read about them, and they spoke of causing trouble in our city for the convention. Poisoning things, having sex on the streets, and hurting delegates. It was all bad, and we could hear it coming down the pike – and smell it, too.”
All things converged to one night: tonight, forty-two years ago. The earnest protesters had largely stayed away, dissuaded by Daley’s intransigence. There were probably 4,000 people milling around Lincoln Park, drumming, getting high, practicing karate moves, chanting “Om” with Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs was there, recording things obsessively on a portable tape recorder; Jean Genet looked on, baffled but engaged. The show seemed a damp squib – but the police found the fuse and lit it, letting off the pointless tension of the preceding weeks in an explosion of violence. They beat up everybody:  yippies, hippies, priests, newsmen, even some straight-arrow kids who had come to jeer. They smashed cameras, jostled delegates, and gave the world a new concept:  the "police riot."  Abbie Hoffman finally got his media moment, although not in the way he had planned.
And all for what?  Nobody died; nobody lost his job. Humphrey was nominated, only to lose to Nixon. The war was eventually ended, not through youthful idealism, but by the cynical realpolitik of America’s Metternich, Henry Kissinger. Daley held onto Chicago; his son, also Richard, runs it now. The student leaders aged, some to become entrepreneurs, others professors at minor colleges; one married Jane Fonda. And Abbie Hoffman, finding life less and less like the pleasures of advertising, eventually committed suicide.  The world, having watched, changed channels.

“The Representatives of the French People constituted in National Assembly, being of the view that ignorance, forgetfulness or disdain of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortune and corrupt Government, are resolved to present, in one solemn Declaration, the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man.” If you detect a fine Jeffersonian hand in the prose, you are not mistaken. When this declaration was made, today in 1789, Jefferson was the United States minister in Paris; the prime mover behind the document was his and America’s old friend, the Marquis de Lafayette. One feels that the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen was what Jefferson would have wanted to write for his own country, had be not been held back by fractious Virginia landowners and cautious Boston lawyers.
The 1789 declaration took a crucial step beyond the many charters, bills, and remonstrances that preceded it. These had all skirted the issue of universal prescriptive rights, preferring the general but vague (life, liberty, etc.) or the legally specific (habeas corpus, the King must convene Parliament every three years). There were good reasons for this tentative approach: in most countries, laws and customs had become so intertwined that they could not be separated without damage to both. So yes, it was silly to pretend that all the world’s oceans are in the parish of Cheapside, or that breach of contract is really a physical assault committed by a fictional “John à Noakes,” but that is how satisfactory results in justice were obtained – to throw all this out would risk graver injustice.
In the blissful dawn after the fall of the Bastille, though, such irrational dodges and contrivances seemed contemptible. The new Man, the Citizen, would enjoy an entirely fresh and perfect social contract, derived as surely from his essential rights as a theorem in Euclid from its axioms. So, as well as enshrining rights to liberty, to freedom of speech, to property, and so on, the Declaration affirmed that laws could only be made to address actions harmful to society; that people must be allowed to do anything that is not specifically forbidden; that taxes must be freely agreed to. The “natural, inalienable, and sacred” rights of man defined a world of sturdy libertarian individualists – much like Jefferson himself.
Once you start defining rights as natural, though, the problem is where to stop. The French declaration of 1789 was soon superseded by that of 1793, with its more communitarian terms: people now had a right to public help and a duty to help others; equality became a prescription, not just a fact. The scope of rights became social and economic, with the right to rebel against a government that did not provide them. The four years between these documents threw up fundamental questions that we are still not able to answer: do we have rights of protection from abuse or of access to goods?  Should we prescribe equality of opportunity or equality of result?  How far are we bound to “respect” others – in their persons, habits, or opinions? If you look at the currently agreed international framework of human-rights treaties, you will see that compulsory education, use of a lawyer, protection from gender discrimination, membership in trade unions, adequate standard of living, access to contraception, social insurance, and “the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health” are all now universal human perquisites – among many others.  Even Jefferson might have pared down this list a little.
We all wish to live as we choose and gratify our desires; we would also like to be thought good people. Well-regulated families or villages achieve these twin goals through good manners and mutual consideration; well-regulated countries through customs and laws. This feels natural, so we come to assume that there is a set of moral principles as universally valid as physical ones – but then turn these principles into a shopping list of desirable outcomes, or, worse, a holy creed by which to silence those whose opinions we dislike. Had the writers of the 1789 declaration stopped at “inalienable,” they would have remained in safe territory; “natural” and “sacred,” though, are terms beyond human ken.

There is more to chivalry than just owning a horse. Imagine you are a French knight of the eleventh century. Here in your tiny domain, master of a hut marginally bigger than your neighbors’, you are the only person not required to work the land; your business is the protection of those who do. Better fed, better trained and better armed than any peasant, you lend your fighting power to the village in return for deference and your keep. It is as if, in you, they owned a tank. Your only hope of improving your position is through seizing the harvest of the neighboring village – but it, too, owns a knight.
Murderous struggle, pitiless and perpetual, was the natural state.  It was only when the Crusades offered the prospect of booty beyond the neighbor’s barns that war became organized again. With that organization came a new concept of knightliness: the code of chivalry, adding to heroism the ideals of piety, nobility, and courtly love.
True, it would make no difference to an enemy whether the steel-encased figure thundering toward him were inspired by mere lust for slaughter or by devotion to Christ, Lancelot, and the Lady Cunegunda. Peasants, too, saw little change from this softening of knightly habits – indeed, now that knights fought for the costly dreams of kings, the gulf between the taxed many and the fighting few grew ever larger. The words “villain” and “vile” once merely suggested village origins; it is the sneering riders who so cavalierly gave them their current meanings.
By the fourteenth century, chivalry had become a set of assumptions as rigid as a carapace. The knight saw the world in narrow terms as if through the slit of his helmet: honor was all. It was vile to take money for fighting, to fight anyone but an equal, to refuse mercy to a vanquished foe, or to use unusual weapons.  Winning was almost a secondary goal. Like the games of cricket or court tennis,  the simple trade of slaughter had become hedged around with rules.
On this day in 1346, chivalry showed its best and worst qualities. Up there on the hill by the tiny village of Crécy stood King Edward III of England with 4,000 men at arms and 7,000 longbowmen. Down here was the cream of French nobility, 35,000 strong. Their leader, King Philip, was not sure he wanted to fight today, but nothing could restrain the impetuosity of his knights: “they that were foremost tarried, but they that were behind would not tarry, but rode forth, and said how they would in no wise abide.”  They cut through their own advance guard of Genoese crossbowmen, calling them “cowardly rascals,” and formed for the charge. Glory’s siren voice was calling to them from the hill.
Up there, the spirit was very different. Knowing his strength lay with his low-born infantry, Edward made best use of it. He set out his battalions early, let them rest without their heavy helmets, and arranged that they should have enough to eat and drink. He explained his plan of battle to all his soldiers, not merely to the noble commanders. And he made his knights leave their horses behind: though differently equipped, baron and yeoman were going to fight as a single force, rather than a collection of armed egos.
The preliminaries over, the flower of France rumbled up the slope toward the waiting archers. It never got there; a trained, disciplined bowman could let off an accurate arrow every ten seconds; a deadly shower of 60,000 steel points a minute fell on the riders and their unprotected horses. Sixteen times the cavaliers charged; each attempt merely added to the thrashing mass of wounded men and beasts that littered the field. By nightfall, even the proudest French prince knew it was time to head home.
Failure only teaches lessons to open minds. Such was the power of chivalry over French thinking that they made exactly the same mistakes in two subsequent battles with the English – Poitiers and Agincourt – during the next 70 years. Even when they adopted more successful tactics, these involved the use of guns, not of common purpose with the villeins. Some argue that it was this essential rigidness, a preference for the formal ideal over what works, that led eventually to the French Revolution. It’s certainly true that if you want to see the world as others do, you need to get off your high horse.

“Honey, I’m bored. There’s nothing to do tonight.” “I know! Why don’t we try some un-American activities?” What actually is un-American activity?  I’ve had someone accuse me of it for disparaging pro wrestling, but I’m not sure that qualifies. If we were being strictly constructionist about this, we might say that “making laws respecting an establishment of religion” was un-American; or taking the militia’s cannon away.  Or taxing tea: that’s definitely un-American.
“Un-American” implies a body of Americanness that we can isolate from its opposite – but this raises a fundamental problem: America is only a political contract; it has never been a nation in the conventional sense of the term, where ancestry, culture and politics mutually define each other. The Germans still legally recognize “blood nationality,” which automatically confers a devotion to precision engineering, currywurst, and the songs of David Hasselhoff. France gives its citizens an entire culture and history in flat-pack form which, when assembled, provides them with limitless savoir vivre – and Gaulish ancestors, even if their parents came from Senegal. We have only the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Super Bowl. On that basis, almost everything is un-American.
The question arises because today’s date marks the first appearance on America’s television screens of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, now known by its dyslexic acronym, HUAC. Initially proposed by a Vilnius-born Jewish congressman (himself, remarkably, on the Soviet payroll) as part of the fight against fascism, its job was to investigate Nazi infiltration of bodies like the KKK (although not to investigate the KKK itself; that, according to a committee member, was “an old American institution.”)  When the war ended and the Cold War began, HUAC was ready and eager to expose the Communist menace in our midst.
Was there such a menace?  Well, yes, actually – or at least there had been. Soviet intelligence was remarkably successful in cultivating idealistic young Americans during the 1930s, when the Great Depression seemed to prove the failure of capitalist institutions. In the face of America-First isolationism, only the Communists openly opposed the rise of the Nazis. Some recruits were children of Russian immigrants, retaining a romantic notion of the old country’s youthful revolutionary ardor; others liked the excitement of joining something clandestine – and of course there were always the pleasures of sleeping with new and exotic people in a good cause. The result was that significant intelligence, from atom-bomb details to plans for postwar Europe, reached Moscow by way of spies in U.S. government departments. Sadly for the many honest Americans who supported them, it's now clear that Alger Hiss, Julius  Rosenberg, and Harry Dexter White really did what they were accused of. The State Department, Treasury, OSS, and other agencies did indeed employ people who voluntarily passed secrets to the Soviets – until 1946, that is, when the defection to the FBI of Elizabeth Bentley, reported to Moscow by the British traitor Kim Philby, effectively shut down most of the network. 
The disappearance of this genuine threat left HUAC with little to talk about – an unpleasant position for any congressman – so it turned its attention to an easier target: Hollywood. The hunt after “subversive elements” and “Red propagandists” drew on such good old (though not uniquely American) traditions as distrust of the alien, anti-semitism, hatred of smart-alecks, and belief that the people need to be protected from dangerous ideas. Because it involved the entertainment industry, we all have heard a lot about this phase of the affair: the blacklisting, the finger-pointing; Lillian Hellman’s bravery and Elia Kazan’s cravenness; the damage to Arthur Miller’s career and the boost to John Wayne’s. Hundreds of people lost their jobs; the American Legion and private communist-hunting consultants told the studios whom to shun.  It was appalling and embarrassing – in part because it was so trivial compared to the real damage long since done. Stalin must have been chuckling into his mustache. 
Through its ham-fisted attempts to confine a great country into a narrow ideological compass, HUAC eventually made itself contemptible and irrelevant.  But some of the disgraceful practices it pursued in the name of patriotism still survive: cynically magnifying trivialities; bluster and innuendo; guilt by association; shameless grandstanding. Wouldn’t it be nice if these were made un-American activities?

“Rome is fallen! Rome, mother of laws and liberties, is no more!”  It’s a powerful sentiment: living in the hills of Northumberland or the suburbs of New Jersey, one still feels the pang of loss in these words. The ideal of the Universal City retains its luster, though the reality has long gone to ruin.
Rome fell today in AD 410, the first time in eight hundred years that an alien army had breached its sacred precincts. It collapsed through its own exhaustion: a group of slaves, weary of prolonged siege, killed the guards at the Salarian Gate and let in the Visigoths of Alaric. The wider Latin world was stunned; the knot at the center of its cultural web had broken. The province of Britain received a letter from the emperor’s court explaining that, henceforth, it was on its own: Rome’s children had become orphans. The shock of the news prompted Saint Augustine to write his City of God: now only a spiritual empire could offer universal citizenship.
The reality was, of course, more complicated. The conquerors, though alien, were familiar as illegal immigrants. The empire had often called on the Visigoths for support during the scramble for diminishing power in an increasingly chaotic world. Romans relied for their own safety on the barbarians they affected to despise.  Their weakling emperor Honorius (whose one accomplishment was a decree prohibiting men from wearing trousers) left all practical power to Stilicho, his Vandal father-in-law. Within the city, people ignored their desperate situation with a combination of high-mindedness and self-indulgence. The poet Claudian mocked the threat of the barbarians by singing, “who terrifies most is himself yet more afraid,” and “quiet authority accomplishes what violence cannot” – as if phrasing something elegantly would make it so. The citizens, says Ammianus Marcellinus, spent their time obsessed with fashion, celebrities, parties, and vehicle racing; all matters that their descendants still manage particularly well. But all – poets, patrons, and pleasures – would be swept away in the sack of the year 410. 
As sacks go, it was fairly modest. The newly-converted Goths took seriously the Christian faith they shared with their victims: church treasures were spared and there was remarkably little killing or rape. The invaders were after money and, most of all, food – the long siege had left both sides starving. And since Rome’s larder was convincingly bare, the barbarians moved off after only three days in search of fuller granaries to the South.
During those days, though, something terrible happened: Gothic soldiers, perhaps feeling the effects of wine on an empty stomach, broke into the tombs of the great emperors and scattered their ashes in the Tiber mud. The sacrilege did not matter – Rome no longer being pagan – but the deed made clear what had been so long concealed: power and purpose had abandoned the city. Its rulers now were mere pygmies strutting in the dusty robes of long-dead giants.
The human mind, ever anxious to simplify a confusing world, makes much of these symbolic moments.  We attach significance to places and times because such labels call up the complex, nuanced feelings by which we imbue life with dignity and importance.  A flag, a creed, a motto – while the lively spirit still inhabits them – are indeed noble things. Without it, they become gaudy but empty husks, mere trade-marks of lost goods.  Rome, despite a dozen subsequent sacks, still exists as a beautiful layered artifact, vivid and confused as a dying king’s memory.  But it doesn’t stand for anything.  The Universal City remains fallen.

“Evviva l’Anarchìa!” Nicola Sacco took his seat in the electric chair this morning in 1927; within fifteen minutes, he and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had left this life and entered into legend.
Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of killing two shoe factory payroll guards, but it was widely felt, then as now, that they were really on trial for their beliefs. From the first, the evidence was muddled: some eyewitnesses placed them at the scene, others denied their presence. The ballistics report contained points both damning and dubious. What was sure, since they proclaimed it, was their membership in an anarchist group devoted to direct action, to bombs, guns, and revolution; if not terrorists themselves, they were terrorists' close companions. Yet they were also devoted family men, warm friends to their legal counsel, polite, sincere, and forthright – indeed, so admirable in their private characters that when the time came to pronounce them dead, the prison warder could only whisper, he was so choked up.
Judge Webster Thayer certainly gave the impression that the case went beyond the charges, freely referring in private to the defendants as “Bolsheviki” and “anarchist bastards.”  In public, he gave little indication of bias – but his known opinions were enough to turn the appeals process into a political issue. Literary figures from both sides of the Atlantic wrote letters of protest; the Sacco-Vanzetti case became and remains a dividing line in political opinion. For liberals, it is a glaring example of the establishment’s willingness to commit injustice in defense of its interests; for conservatives, it typefies liberal tendencies to ignore fact and condone crime out of bleeding-heart political correctness. Yes, fine – but they were either guilty or not guilty. How can we find out?
In a probabilistic world, it is rarely impossible to discover the balance of likelihood; it is, however, difficult – too difficult for most people to bother with. Fourteen years before the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Dean of Northwestern Law School, Henry Wigmore, published an entirely new way to study and display evidence in criminal cases: the Wigmore chart. Its purpose was to show in formal terms how evidence and arguments align, giving a clear picture of the function of each fact in the prosecutor’s or defender’s case, much as a wiring diagram clarifies the purpose of each electrical component. The connections between facts were not just the firm links of formal logic, but the sliding scales of probability. A Wigmore chart can handle testimony from dishonest witnesses, unreliable memories, debatable physical evidence and, best of all, keep open judgment. It does not, as most jurors do, make up its mind on the first day of trial because it likes one lawyer’s face better than the other’s.
Wigmore’s technique, like probability itself, is both wide-ranging and tediously painstaking; his book was popular only among insomniac judges. But now that computers can take on the numerical drudgery, it is proving its worth in just such tangled cases as Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s. The legal scholars Joseph Kadane and David Schum have applied a sophisticated extension of Wigmore’s method to the vast body of evidence from the case. Theirs is a remarkable achievement; their charts retain all the original complexities: the facts withheld or perverted, the hearsay, the lies told and disavowed on both sides, the charged political atmosphere of eighty years ago. They never discount a fact, no matter how far-fetched; they  simply give it its due weight in their dynamic structure.
Their conclusion?  Unjust though it is to summarize a book in a sentence, the balance of probability seems to favor the view expressed long ago by one of the defendants’ close companions: “everyone in the Boston anarchistic circle knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in the killing.” So, there it is: whichever side our political instincts favor, we are destined to be half wrong.
Vanzetti’s last words were: "I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me."  If we were all willing to make the extra effort to work out the probabilities, perhaps we might not need forgiveness so often.

“On another occasion also, when the blessed man was living for some days in the province of the Picts, he was obliged to cross the river Ness; and when he reached the bank of the river, he saw some of the inhabitants burying an unfortunate man, who, according to the account of those who were burying him, was a short time before seized, as he was swimming, and bitten most severely by a monster that lived in the water.” Yes, you’re right: it’s the first recorded account of the Loch Ness monster, ascribed to this date in AD 565.  The “blessed man,” St.Columba, quickly subdued the beast using the sign of the Cross, but it has come back intermittently, particularly during the 20th century, to star in films, photographs, and sonar displays – baffling visitors and boosting tourist revenues for this beautiful, remote spot.
True, St. Columba was on the river Ness, a sea estuary where killer whales are not unknown. True, plenty of early medieval saints’ legends feature quelling of water monsters; and almost all sightings of “Nessie” involve some degree of error, fraud, or essential fuzziness. What’s interesting, though, is not the monster itself – it’s our disappointment at the thought that it might not really be there.
Our favorite outdoor illusions – Nessie, Bigfoot, big cats, dragons – show that we are fundamentally naturalists, and that our brains have never really left the forest. Although our lives are increasingly dominated by the inanimate, from cars through computers to microwave ovens, designers must still work hard to imbue all this dumb stuff with subtly biological characteristics – “happy” grilles, silky skin textures, chirpy alert tones, softly yielding buttons or shift-sticks – because our brains respond differently to animals than to other moving objects.
In a recent test, people shown pairs of slightly-differing photographs were much better able to spot the changes if they involved an animal than a van, even though the van occupied much more of the picture. We can infer animal motion from remarkably few clues: a shifting pattern of white dots on a black background. When these dots mark the joints of a walking person, the observer spots it immediately and can even specify the size, sex, and indeed mood of that person with surprising accuracy. Within the brain, the sight of moving people or animals activates non-visual responses that are not activated by, say, the sight of trees or water: memory, spatial perception, emotions. So nuanced is this response that the computer-animation industry has largely given up trying to mimic human motion with software physics engines, and instead makes cartoon characters credible through “motion capture:” filming an actor in a suit with white spots on it. 
In a risky world, when we still roamed the jungle, it was wise to assume that every indistinct shape was an animate being and that it meant us no good. It would be suicide to maintain skepticism as the tiger creeps ever closer – so we bolster our assumptions to the point of certainty.  Our brains, after all, are not machines for discerning truth, but for providing answers. It is better to take any decision than none, because it is better to be wrong than lunch.
So it is not necessarily a sign of schizophrenia to see figures in the shadowy woods or hear voices in the babbling stream.  This is just our senses doing their job – inferring significance – if perhaps a little too well. When the illusion is broken and we see the truth, the world loses a little meaning for us. We laugh as the tension loosens, but deep down we are slightly disappointed. The quest for mysterious beasts is not a disreputable branch of zoology, but instead a fascinating and legitimate tool of psychology; it is on the brain’s map that we should mark, “here be dragons.”

“There is nothing more practical than a good theory,” said Leonid Brezhnev.  His theory was State Communism: achieving the liberation of the masses through constant meetings, opaque decision-making, and a compliant press. By the time he was leader, the Soviet Union had put aside its more violent political methods. The purges of the 1930s were a best-forgotten memory; the forcible imposition of Communist governments on Eastern Europe a completed task. In the late 1950s, Moscow had announced the victory of socialism, taking the proletariat off the war footing on which it had to struggle constantly against latent bourgeois tendencies. It was time to think about improving people’s standards of living and easing the international situation. That was, at least, the theory.
Alexander Dubček of Czechoslovakia was keen to put theory into action: he felt that the fruits of socialism’s victory were way overdue. What had been one of Europe’s most advanced economies long suffered under clumsy top-down control; the talents of the nation were being wasted by a Stalinist suspicion of dissent. Still an ardent and sincere Communist, he proposed in early 1968 a program of reform to make his Party’s rule more natural and effective: improving pay, opening relations with western countries, freeing the press, scaling back the secret police, allowing a “fuller life of the personality.” It even foresaw the possibility of elections. This was not to be the end of socialism, but its true beginning: “socialism with a human face.”
Brezhnev did not see it that way. Allowing all these untidy elements into political life was not at all practical (the old joke has him say: “the only problem with free elections is that you don’t know who is going to win”).  He, therefore, took all the correct steps: he got some orthodox Czechoslovak Communist Party members to write to him in horror at the reforms, asking for “fraternal military assistance;” he convened the leaders of Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria to agree an intervention; he threatened the Czechoslovak leaders about their “anti-socialist” stance; and then, on this day in 1968, he invaded with 200,000 troops from four countries – the largest armed action in Europe since the war.
Things did not evolve according to theory. Neither the Czechoslovak government nor its people were willing to fold. The radio continued to announce that the invasion was unasked-for and illegal; the President refused to replace Dubček’s cabinet with a more compliant one; people formed human chains around strategic bridges; locals rewrote all the village name-signs as “Liberty” or “ Dubčekville,” and pretended to be stupid or mute when asked directions. One Soviet soldier was on the point of tearing down the poster that said, in Russian, “the country that denies freedom to another does not deserve freedom itself,” when his comrade, better read, pointed out that this was a quotation from Karl Marx. The invaders were baffled and embarrassed; though socialist brothers, they were being shown the human face of outrage, contempt, and irony.
There is only so long that a sense of humor trumps a column of tanks, however. Dubček was soon imprisoned, then degraded to work as a forester. His replacements made Czechoslovakia a depressingly quiet place for the next nineteen years, where people sullenly said what they didn’t mean, did what they didn’t like, affected to love what they didn’t respect, and then went home to their dumplings and tripe soup. In this quiet, though, grew thoughts – best expressed in the novels of Milan Kundera – about what the Prague Spring and its downfall represented.
The opposite of State Communism is not capitalism, but living. All theory tends to tyranny: the vision of the harmonious society, where we are all brothers because we all agree, is just totalitarianism through a rosy filter. We all have an inner Brezhnev, sure that the world would be a better place if everyone did as I say, but to heed him is to deny life’s true values. The taste of coffee, the feeling of lips on the back of the neck, sunlight, tact, the unspoken… all these will always matter more than what we think about Lenin.  This is how things are – and how they should be; it is not just socialism that needs a human face.

Many people have died for certainties – God, country, universal brotherhood – but Johan de Witt died for a probability, on this date in 1672. Grand Pensioner of the States of Holland, he was responsible for the foreign and domestic policy of the new republic: a perilous position, beset by powerful enemies within and without. He was well qualified for the job, however; his countrymen called him “the Wisdom of Holland,” trained in every art and science a statesman needs. Not only did he speak several languages, know history, understand navigation, play the harpsichord and fence well, he was also an expert mathematician – but this was his undoing.
Seventeenth century governments, almost constantly at war, needed to raise large sums of money quickly. Selling annuities (a regular lifetime income paid in exchange for a single capital sum) seemed a good way to do this. Annuity buyers are essentially betting against their own early deaths; so a canny government, if possessed of the facts, can offer shorter odds than the mortality tables justify, relying on the universal human instinct that believes everyone else dies at an average age, but not me. The whole mathematical apparatus of social security actually began as an attempt to secure a house edge for the State. 
De Witt, though, was not trying to shave the odds, just even them. After reading the pioneering probability text of Christian Huygens, he produced the first mathematically correct method of calculating the present worth of an annuity based on the combined odds of dying at any given age in the future. He found that the Dutch state had, in fact, been paying out too generously and could afford to drop its annuity rate from 7% to 6% without making the investment unattractive to the public.
For this to be so, however, the public would have to be as cool and calculating as de Witt. A later historian said of him that, “with an intellect more serene than vivid, he was apt to forget how passion and feeling blind nations, like men, to their real interests.” People had become used to the cushy terms of state annuities; they took them as a right and, as soon as the new rates became public, they set up a howl about how the Grand Pensioner was conspiring to starve widows and orphans. Yes, Holland was in the middle of the richest period in its history – but newly-arrived wealth always threatens to depart. Only old money can afford to feel generous.
De Witt’s political enemies took advantage of this storm of selfish disapproval to destroy him. He was hounded from his official positions; his brother was arrested and tortured; he was drawn to his brother’s prison by a forged letter; both then were seized by an enraged mob and actually torn to pieces. The obscene indignities committed on their bodies make it hard to believe that this was Holland’s Golden Age.
The mathematics of probability seems a cold and distant science, but it governs the parts of life about which we feel the strongest emotions: death, disaster, guilt, wealth, health, and love. As the recent shouting matches over health-care reform prove, insurance is anything but a dispassionate subject.
We do not know when we will die, or how sick we will be, for how long. It is the uncertainty that is most painful; we want to know our fates for sure – or, failing that, we demand the benefit of unfair odds. This makes probability a truth that, though we may accept its validity in all general terms, we cannot accept into our private hearts.