Ten Years of Yesterdays

Tomorrow is always ephemera.

Today is a fact, is happening as we move and speak and act, is created as we live and collide like atoms in aether with others living their lives in their own ways. Today is the play we're writing as we live it, passing moment by moment into yesterday and past history.

But tomorrow is a chimera.

Much of our tomorrows is entrained by our todays. But there's always an uncertainty, a randomness that makes tomorrow nothing but a vague sort of promise half-muttered, half-heard until the remorseless wheel of Time brings it to us as the next today.

Being human we love - have always loved, probably always will love - the idea of messing about with yesterdays and tomorrows. I think it has something to do with our contrasting the mutability of tomorrow with the intransigence of yesterday, and the contrast between hope and regret.

"If we fall in the race though we win
The hoof-slide is scarred on the course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin
Remaineth forever Remorse."
~ R. Kipling

If we could only go back and change this or that yesterday; say the "right" thing instead of the wrong one, do this instead of that, love more wisely, act more quickly, fight harder, think faster...if we could just do all of that we would have saved that beloved, not lost that marriage, gotten that job, become wealthy, happier, greater than we are today, and present ourselves with an even greater tomorrow.

I got to thinking of all of this while writing the two preceding posts.

Because there was a time when if I could have I would have stopped time, reversed the spinning Earth, undone the hidden tragedy that took my elder daughter's life, diverted my world into another tomorrow where little Bryn lived and grew into that young woman who burned the offering at my grave.

But...

If Bryn had lived...

The world that cascades from that chance spins off into an infinity of mirrors.

With a living older sister my son, even if he arrives as such, becomes a different kid. And there's no guarantee that Mojo and I even have a son; perhaps our second child is another daughter. Perhaps we never have another child.

And with a living daughter, we certainly don't go through the insanely difficult and painful adoption process that finally, through some bizarre miracle comprehensible only to Loki, the God of Mischief and several junior functionaries working for the China Center for Adoption Affairs, provides us with the little girl who we know as Missy Shaomei. That little girl becomes someone else, in some other lifetime. We never know her.

And having sat up with her just last night (she was feeling quite unhappy with a sick headache from having fallen asleep with her glasses on combined with a stuffy sinus) I can't contemplate that with anything but horror.

So to change the past we change the present, and the future; to regain a lost daughter we have to lose another.

That's not an exchange I could, or would, make.

So I have to release that phantom-Bryn, that skinny girl wrapped in night-bedclothes, that stern young woman standing over my grave, to retain my very real Missy who is at this moment cuddled up with the Yellow Blanket and her beloved "stripey wubbie" watching some sort of awful Air Buddies movie her brother adores.

And - while a part of me grieves at the betrayal - the greater part of me is not displeased with that.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes that the problem with result of making the inflexible pledge of death before dishonor means that time will produce only the dead and the foresworn. I am in the unenviable position of the latter; for my living daughter I must foreswear any wish to restore my dead one.

I'm sorry about that, lovie, but the dead must bury their dead. I have a now-dear child that calls to me from this side of the Veil, and I would - even if I could, even if I had the power to change yesterday to be otherwise - go to her.

This time next year I will grieve for you again. But buried in that grief is the smaller sadness that I would now choose her over you, choose the life I have over the life that might have been, choose the messy reality of today over the unrealized promised of the tomorrow that never came.

...et pacem appelant

More ghost cities. This time, Hiroshima, 1945.I can't help thinking the same thing the woman in the article muses:

“The thing that affects me most about the photographs is what isn’t there. The absences, like the photograph of the chalk marks of the feet on the bridge. People know what we did at Hiroshima,” she says pensively, “but we just don’t want to think about it.”

We never do. We like to think we make decisions based on "facts" and "reason", that the fact that we are in "control" is a good thing. And don't get me wrong; penicillin, flush toilets, clean food...these ARE all good things.But the default setting for almost all of us - if I do it, if it benefits me in some way, it must be good - is a dangerous foolery, and we would do well to be more suspicious of our own intentions and more skeptical of our rationalizations.Because once you get to the point of standing there on the Aioi Bridge looking into the sun appearing 1,963 feet above your head, there is nothing you can do except become part of the sunrise.

Solitudinem faciunt

One of the commentors on the previous post about Verdun (thanks, Leon!) gave us this; a website showing views of the abandoned city of Pripyat, killed by the implosion of the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.While it doesn't have quite yet the same time-haunted loneliness or the loom of the awful destruction visited on Fleury-devant-Douaumont there's still something of a similar, frightening stopped-clock desolation there.

I think one of the things that frighten us so badly about these places is the awful familarity about them. We can get angry or frustrated about the destruction visited on the wild places, the Deepwater Horizons, or the Exxon Valdezes, but somehow these places don't seize our hearts and minds like the scattered homework in the Pripyat elementary schoolor the empty field where the little village of Kopachi used to bebefore ionizing radiation made it too dangerous to live in, or near, and the Soviet engineers buried it and sowed the ruins with grass and poplars...These sorts of man-made wastelands always come to mind whenever I hear some fathead (and, sorry, Republicans, but most of the fatheads saying this stuff are your fellow Republicans) talking about how the real problem is "too much regulation" and how the job creators and the Magic of the Market needs to be unleashed to get us all to the Magical Happy Money Place, or when some idiot (see Santorum, Rick) flaps his gums about what a great fucking job humans have done "controlling" their world.

You'd think that "conservatives", who are supposed to be skeptical of human altruism and motives and grounded in a realistic assessment of human failings, would be the first to look at places like this and demand that there always be a second, disinterested, opinion about the gains and costs of human risktaking.

But, as humans always have, we will probably continue to fuck up and then blame everything but ourselves. Being optimists, we will believe ourselves to live in the best of all possible worlds.

Being a pessimist, I tend to agree.

Evergreen

My neighbors to the north just declared the shocking fact that boys who like boys like to get married to boys and girls who like girls like to get married to girls and that's pretty much okay with them.

Now I understand that the "conservative" enemies of all things not-heterosexual are declaring that they will "refer" this new law to the ballot in November so the homo-hatin' good people of Washington state can hate them on some homos and save the precious institution of marriage for other good people like the Kardashians.

Or something.

And then the people who want to get married will file a lawsuit. And then the entire damn thing will get played out in court. Over and over, all the way up to the Supreme Court, I assume, who will probably in the sort of steal-bread-and-sleep-under-bridges wisdom they are famed for will decide they don't know what the good people of Washington should do but that homos eating wedding cake is icky.

Well, fuck.

Is there a point where we can stop going through this ridiculous kabuki? I mean, pretty much every constitution from the federal on down says "you don't get to pick legal rights based on X" where X includes race, religion, hat size, etc.So the eventual defense for these sorts of lets-write-our-bigotry-into-law always seems to come down to "ooooh, icky!" (Dahlia Lithwick sums up the particular version used in the defense of CA Prop.8 nicely here)

The Supremes will continue to tap dance around this so long as the SCOTUS reactionaries draw breath, but eventually somebody will have to accept that the constitutions say what they say, and that if you extend the legal right to co-sign a loan to the hets you gotta do the same thing for the gays and pretty much everyone else of legal age. How freaking hard is that?That civil and criminal law, that government-provided penalties and services shouldn't be based on what you think is icky but merely what serves the people of the United States, and the various states, best, and that a legal contract - and let's just call it "marriage" because, well, that's what it is - is a legal contract, regardless of how squicky the things that the co-signers do in bed makes you feel.

It won't mean that the Catholic Church, or any other church that hates them on some icky homos, will have to marry them.Just that a church that doesn't, can, and the scrap of paper they will get will carry the full faith and credit of the issuing authority and let them do all the things that any other couple can; spend stupid money on crap they don't need, have screaming fights that piss off the neighbors and frighten the cat, raise a loving family, get old together, and end up broke in a rundown retirement home changing each others' adult diapers.

So in effect the only real, long-term result of this ridiculous bullshit waste of time is that a lot of gay people will have to ride in the back of the bus for many years.And how effed up is that?

All the Troubles in the World

...are listed here - the source of the graphic below:I find it interesting to note that some of what we think as truly appalling human conditions - chattel slavery, for example - last for years, decades, even centuries...and yet take a relatively small toll in human lives compared to, say, World War 2, which many of us still consider a Good War and one of the United States' "great adventures".

Which, I think, points up the caution needed in placing a price on horror in death alone. Slavery has always been considered one of the truly heinous human acts because of the wealth of misery it contains. There are, indeed, "fates worse than death" and few of them are remitted the slave.

What I do find interesting to note is the apparent increase in horror over the past hundred years or so. But then you stop for a moment and think of the centuries of human atrocity that have simply disappeared into the memory hole. Rome alone fought nearly constantly during her Republican and Imperial periods - Plutarch says

"[Janus] also has a temple at Rome with double doors, which they call the gates of war; for the temple always stands open in time of war, but is closed when peace has come. The latter was a difficult matter, and it rarely happened, since the realm was always engaged in some war, as its increasing size brought it into collision with the barbarous nations which encompassed it round about. But in the time of Augustus it was closed, after he had overthrown Mark Antony; and before that, when Marcus Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls, it was closed a short time..."

I wonder; what will some future Plutarch write about our own country in our own time?

Blind Spot

I deleted a post today.

That's something I don't know if I've ever done in the history of this blog, and it bugged me enough to make me want to write about it.

Yesterday I wrote two posts about "Veteran's Day", one of which is still up, the Sassoon quote, and unexceptional as such. Just the usual sort of thing I think about on these "God and the soldier we adore..." sorts of "holidays".

But the other was a rumination on the lot of women in war, and made particular mention of the horrors visited on the women of Germany in 1945. And the very first and only comment took me to task, implicitly, for being a traitorous Hun-lover and explicitly for not mentioning all the nasty things that the Nazis did in Poland and Russia and the fascist Japanese did in China, the Philippines, Honolulu and Wake (Wake?) (and, rather ridiculously in my opinion, that the Al Qaeda thugs did in New York City - and the Pentagon, which is like giving the 8th Air Force shit for bombing Luftwaffe HQ - as if the murderous individual acts of nasty criminals were the equivalent of international war) along with the bad stuff that happened to "enemy" women.

Well, that set me back on my heels.

And I re-read that post. And, sure enough, I did mention lots of places that the U.S. Army had fought in WW2, Vietnam, and the modern Middle East. Well, along with Brazzaville in the Congo and Coventry. And Hue, where the atrocities were visited upon the women of Hue by the communist invaders during Tet). But the bulk of the places I talked about were where the women of the enemies of our country had been subjected to atrocity.

And no question that while the hurricane of rape visited on Germany in 1945 was and is unequalled in modern history (the Germans themselves butchered their way through western Russia and the Ukraine but there is and never has been any suggestion of the sort of universal raping that was unleashed by the Soviet support troops in eastern Germany in the last year of WW2) overall the savagery visited on women in China and the other southeast Asian conquests by the Japanese Army, and in places like Poland and Russia by the German is orders of magnitude more bestial than anything the U.S. has visited on our enemies.

Was I, then, being overly harsh on my own nation for our conduct in war?

And, as I re-read that post, I think I was.

And rather than try and revise it or repair it I simply killed it.

Because what I would have ended up doing was trying to one-up the dead and maimed, trying to compare and contrast one atrocity against another, and that's beyond vile.

That's just despicable.

If any one thing has sickened me about war it is the unquenchable human need to trump the "enemy" suffering with one's own. You see it at it's worst in the eastern Levant, where the mutual atrocities visited on one anothers' innocents by Israelis on the one hand and the congeries of Arab states and entities on the other is endlessly paraded about to try and top the other side's grievances. So the dead of Deir Yassin or Gaza are used to try and justify the dead in a bus station bombing in Jerusalem or the kibbutz kids killed by Syrian shells or Hezbollah rockets.

All that is very human, and I am no less tempted than any other human, though I try to fight down the caveman instinct to simply assume that "Him hurt me because him bad". Some enemies ARE "bad" - the Nazis were as "bad" as any human ideal ever was. But many are just that - enemies because we want something they have, or because they want something we have, or just because we BOTH want something and can't agree to share it.

But I wondered...do I have a blind spot to "enemy" atrocities? In all my attempts to "see both sides" do I come down harder on the evil done in my name, in my country's name, than TO my country and my countrymen? Am I a secret traitor, a Hun-lover, a terrorist-hugger?

And I had to sit and think about that for a long, long time.

And here's what I think.

I think I AM harder on my own country, on my fellow soldiers, than on our enemies. I think I do stress the shame we do more than the shame done to us.

And if that makes me a treacherous enemy-embracer, then I'm OK with that.

And here's why.

Because here's the thing; our enemies often ARE our enemies because they believe and do some pretty vile and despicable things. Our history is as blotted as any nation's - we pretty much screwed the natives, and the Mexicans in the 1840's, and the Hawaiians and Filipinos in the 1890's, and the folks in Latin America pretty much all the time.

But we've also fought on the side of the angels, and more often than many nations. The fascist Japanese, the Nazi Germans, the communist Soviets or North Koreans or Chinese, the takifiri Islamists - those groups and the people who belong to them explicitly reject the notions that all men are created equal. That there should be liberty and justice for all. That people should be free from religious tyranny, from organized oppression. All the things that MY country stands or says it stands for, and I take my country at its word. And in fighting them we ARE doing a good thing in the larger sense.

Their acts, and those of their armed forces, are consistent with their beliefs; they did, and do, vile and inhumane things to weak people, women, and children, that they could have spared had they chosen to do so. That they did not disgusts and angers me, but neither surprises nor enrages me because it betrays my beliefs. I believe that those systems are vile and by their actions those who do their work confirm my beliefs.

At the same time I am proud of the promise of my own country, so when I, or others of my own breeding, do things that don't live up to that pride I am ashamed. And that shame brings with it rage at myself, for not standing up against those acts, or at those who committed them.

That is unfair, in that I am holding my own to higher standards than I hold my enemies. But I believe that in this sense our Constitution and our announced values ARE a suicide pact; if we fail to uphold them, if we judge ourselves not by our own professed values but by our merits relative to the worst beliefs we can think of, then we have indeed committed suicide. We have killed the best and the most hopeful within ourselves and our nation. I hold my nation to a higher standard as I would hold myself to a higher standard, or my own children. I would be more merciless to myself or my son for cheating, or lying, or stealing, or killing, than I would a stranger.

So if we, my country and I, kill innocents, even in error; if we torture our helpless chattels; if we seize and hold even the guilty without trial or, worse, without any sort of accountability or law whatsoever; if we do worse than we could because others have done even worse then we are guilty of not just crime but mistakes. We have made the fundamental error of losing our and our nation's ideals.

And that matters.

Because the United States is nothing if NOT an ideal. We are not Germany or France or Cambodia, a nation because of the language we speak or the way we look or the place we live in or the God we worship. We come from many places, speak many tongues, think and worship and believe many different things.

What ties us into one nation, indivisible, is the beliefs in the great words written into our national birth certificate; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

And if we forget that and become the sort of people we have chosen for our enemies and visit among them the sorts of cruelty they would visit upon us, then we are, indeed, in danger of perishing from the Earth. And while I live, I will resist that to the extent I can. And therefore I see no value in judging my acts, and those of my fellow veterans, by the worst mankind has to offer.

So rather than argue who was "worse" I deleted the first Veterans Day post. The issue of that post was the suffering of innocents, and I see no value in judging the suffering that my nation has wrought in my name by contrast to the suffering that despotisms and degraded fanatics have wrought in the name of their beliefs. The only standard I accept is the standard my nation has set for itself. If you choose another, that's your business. Start your own blog and advocate for it, or join the gang over at Powerline or Little Green Footballs; they seem to love the "more rubble, less trouble" ideal of foreign relations.

I will continue to use this space to insist that we hold ourselves to the standards I believe we stand for; that ALL men - and women - are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even those whose leaders would attack us and deprive us of those rights. Even our enemies. And to criticize myself and my country if we choose to take the low, dirty road because it's easier. That if we are to be defeated, let it be by the enemy's arms and not by the self-murder of our own ideals and the promise that has the potential to make our nation a truly pridesome thing among the nations.

And if this be treason, I will make the most of it.

Anarchy in the U.K.

“You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”



G.K. Chesterton



(h/t to slacktivist)

Queen's Peace

I used this picture to close the preceding post.Because it's rather a powerful image and let me explain why I think so.



The police officer has all the accoutrements of First World riot control circa 2011; helmet, facemask, radio, riot shield, baton, all in police blue, all very modern and urban down to her mascara.



But look at her.



Take the club out of her hand and shove a sword in it and she's 1211, not 2011, facing down Welsh rebels for King John. Or 711, fighting the Moors at Tours. Or 511BC, chasing helots out of Sparta. All our complex learning hasn't changed the simple understanding of one human standing ready to deal out brutal force against another.



For all our inventiveness, and gadgets, and indoor plumbing, for all our "civilization" and "wisdom" and "learning"...Constable Nameless with her club and shield reminds us that we haven't come all THAT far from when we were some damn pithecanthropus scratching our ass wondering whether that thing under that bush is something to eat or something that's going to eat us.

Wars and Lechery

So I'm driving to work this morning and, working where I do and living where I do, I pass the Acropolis "Steakhouse Plus" down in Southeast Portland just north of Milwaukie.First let me explain something; Portland is the nation's Strategic Titty Bar Repository.

I'm dead serious. I'm lived in some of the United States' most noxious hives of scum and villainy, from Balboa when it was part of the Canal Zone to Southern Pines, North Carolina, where cousin-marriage is both sport and tradition. And most of these places featured the usual line-up of scummy businesses; tattoo parlors, dive bars, pawnshops, check-cashing and payday-loan grifters, and girlie joints ranging from just dive-y-er bars with a pole where the bored employee would occasionally perform a bit of indifferent gyrating in hopes of attracting an otherwise unused five-spot into her undies...all the way up to the full-on, all-nude skanky juice bars where a former grocery cashier from Kuala Lumpur will attempt to corkscrew herself onto your belt buckle for a hundred bucks and an overpriced glass of Jamba Juice.

But not one of them had as many topless and nude dance places as Portland.

Because...well, first of all, because the Oregon state constitution of 1859 says "No law shall be passed restraining the free expression of opinion, or restricting the right to speak, write or print freely on any subject whatever." This has been interpreted by Oregon's courts to include public performance, and to include public performance whilst clad only in Nature's garb. A number of attempts have been made to variously limit or regulate the ecdysiasts working across the Beaver State, but the beaver has resolutely remained...unclad.

And then, of course, there is the inexorable Law of Strip Joint Supply and Demand; men with money will demand women's saucy bits, or at least a look at them, and women with that equipment and no money will supply them, or at least a look at them, in return for money.Talk about the Invisible Hand. Sheesh.

I should say up front that I've never really enjoyed most of these places. The food is usually bad, the drinks are, too, and expensive, as well. The women clearly either pity you, loathe you, or could care less about you which, in my opinion, is a fairly sound attitude seeing that you've turned up for no better reason than to look at them naked for money.

Anyway, that's not really the point of this post. The point is that no matter where you go in Portland, you're going to pass these places. You just get used to them, which is either sad or just sort of expected, but there it is.(The above photo is of the old "Sandy Jug" that is now one of them called the "Pirate's Cove". Last time I drove up Sandy their sign said "You'll treasure our chests". Well, okay, then.)

But the thing I noted as I went by today was that, along with the typical "Steak Special $5.98", and "Wow 54 Taps!" and the "Cherry Girl School Teacher!!" (okay, I made the last one up...) the Acropolis sign advised that they were "Open at 7".

Now.

Let me say that while I don't consider myself some sort of satyr I suspect I'm as lusty as the next guy, and that while my wife is not a supermodel I believe, and my casual observations reassure me, that her breasts are as lovely as the next woman's.And as it happens in my marriage as in most marriages, several relationships, and even more than a few casual hook-ups, I have had the rather pleasant experience of encountering my bride while un- or barely-clad in the early morning not long after waking.

And I am afraid to admit this, but as ravishing as she is, sashaying down the hall in Eve's raiment on the way to the bathroom, the sight of her pulchritude is unlikely to get more than a brief grunt of appreciation out of me before my first cup of coffee.

So I can't imagine why I...I can't imagine why anyone...would drive down McLoughlin Boulevard at 6:45 in the morning to look at some stranger's breasts at 7 o'clock. My inamorata's breasts? Maybe. Sure. But some boobs-for-hire? A pair of rent-a-breasts?I just don't get it.

Maybe I'm missing something. But I can't think of what.

And speaking of missing something...

The woman who works in my office is a Boston Bruins hockey fan, and that is how I come to know that after the Vancouver hockey team lost this year's Stanley Cup a part of the hockey crowd there tore up the center of the city and had to be chased off by the local constabulary after doing some free-lance burning and looting.Apparently they were upset about the outcome of the series.

You all know that, in the words of the song, I am a Timbers fan and I am an Oregonian. I know I want the Boys in Green to win, and I'm disappointed when they don't.But...it's a game, for fuck's sake. A hobby, a pastime, an entertainment. I don't actually KNOW any of the Timbers, I have no deep emotional stake in their fortunes. I love the sport, I love the team, I love to go to matches and sing and chant for them.

But to burn up my town, the city I love as much as I love both sport and team, because they lost?

There has to be something deeply wrong with you to do that. I'll bet the LaBatt's helped. And the hard times; if I was out of work and on the dole I'll bet there's a lot better chance I'd use the excuse of a lost championship to try and stuff the red flag up your hole...but...probably not.Perhaps I'm a bit overcivilized. Perhaps I'm just unwilling to spend the night in the carcel with the other drunks. But, like staring at titties at seven in the morning, there's something there that just seems deeply wrong to me.Let me know if you can figure it out.

I should add that one worthy thing did emerge from the flaming wreckage of downtown Vancouver; this snapshot.I've heard that some viewers have already stated that they dislike this image intensely, and when a friend of mine posted it and the link to the Vancouver Sun story about it on her Facebook page it drew some fairly scathing comments about drunken hoolies, public indecency, and the general decline in Western Civilization.

Again...maybe it's me, but I love this little image. The way I see it, the moment it captures helps restore my faith in human nature.

Here these two people are, caught, possibly by intent but just as likely by accident, in the midst of a sudden outbreak of violent stupidity. Just moments ago they were part of some sort of liquored-up mob whose intelligence, like all mobs, is the intelligence of the stupidest individual in the mob divided by the number of the people in the group. The mob was angry, the cops were angry, the cars are burning, the (from what I recall) pleasant city of Vancouver has become a fucking mess...and what can a man and woman do about that?

Make love, of course.

There's never a bad time to kiss, never a wrong moment to gift your lover with a tender word, a fierce embrace, a warm, strong hand, whether that hand is on a cheek for comfort, or a thigh for lust.

There's never a wrong time to get a little sugar for your bowl.So maybe there IS a reason to get up and drive down McLoughlin to see breasts...if the breasts belong to the one who can make you forget everything around you except how they make you feel. Perhaps these two felt that way. I hope so.

And I hope that perhaps they will grow old together, pass through the hard times and the dark times together, make themselves a mainland together, and in the end look back at this moment when they were the only sane and sensible people in a world gone mad and share a smile as full of savor at the memory as a midnight is dark and a silent pool is deep and still.

Love in the time of cholera

I've been reading Doris Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" off and on this spring. It's an interesting story in itself - the history of how Abraham Lincoln the politician first finessed his political foes into the Republican nomination and then coopted them into becoming members of his first Cabinet - and the telling is as worthy as the material. Goodwin has a flair for popular history and writes well, using small touches to illuminate a landscape as vanished as the Pliocene to most of us.And that's an important part of any history. Because it can be difficult, especially when the time in consideration is at some remove, to get a sense of the people of the time as...people.

The temptation is to see them either as moderns dressed in period costume, or as some sort of freakish antique, acting and thinking in ways impossible to any "real person" the reader knows.

And in understanding how they acted, and why, how they thought, how they saw the world around them, is crucial. A historian writing for the general public has to be capable, in a handful of sentences or a paragraph or two, present the past life both in itself and in its context so that the modern reader can grasp both the qualities of the person discussed and their standing with the person's times. Was she an especially bold woman, an iconoclast, or was she more typical of her contemporaries? Were his acts, or thoughts, likely to be the product of his surroundings or owe more to the inner daemon of the man?Obviously most histories are written about dramatic times and "great" events - few histories are written about the daily lives of vanished people in humdrum times. So the questions become; how did this or that person fit into the tenor of his or her time? When they acted, did they follow opinion or lead it? Did they act against the grain of their own era, or in conformance with its strictures? Did what they did tell us something useful about people, and events, and societies, that we can use in our own lives?

Goodwin's account is no different, and thus she spends some time early on establishing the characters of the central figures; Lincoln himself, obviously, his principal "rivals" (Ed Stanton, Will Seward, Sal Chase, and Ned Bates) and their various parents, wives, sons and daughters, as well as their political cronies and associates.It's a good tale, and it doesn't hurt that pretty much all of the main characters are fairly colorful. Lincoln is an ediface, a man recognized even in his time as a singularity. Stanton, Seward, and Chase are all men with immense egos and strong wills or they wouldn't have gotten where they did.

The one who's sort of the odd man out is Bates.Here he is, a Victorian patriarch and stern paterfamilias there ever was one. You can't picture even his friends calling him "Ed" or "Eddie" or "Ned". He's a "Edward" if ever I saw one.

But that's the interesting thing. He wasn't. Ed Bates was a man passionately in love with his wife, and desperately in need of his family. Goodwin keeps on about this; Bates married Julia Coulter in 1823 and spent the rest of his life falling in love with her. He kept his hand in politics because that what what a man of his class did. But he was miserable when he had to leave his home for D.C., and his letters to Julia are full of longing and his own loneliness and melancholy apart from her.

The Bates' marriage seems to have been more than just a spiritual one; Julia bore sixteen children (sixteen! My mind reels (and my pelvis sches) at the thought...) over the next thirty years. Here she is as a sturdy matron in her forties, but her husband seems to have been just as gaga over her as the day she put on - and took off - her brideclothes.

One of the most difficult parts of human life to transport over the distance of time is emotions and the way we express them. Certainly some elements, the biological ones, are fairly immutable; so a man or woman in Celtic times, or in ancient China, or in modern Peru, must certainly feel physical lust. That desire is a built-in designed to keep little humans coming along, and certainly the Roman man looking at a comely puella, or a Victorian woman glancing at a handsome lad must have felt a touch or more of the same visceral stirrings down in the libidinous regions that you or I would.

But the difference is in the detail. What sort of thing would a Roman find intriguing...as opposed to titillating, or mysterious, salacious, or challenging? We've read about how the mere glimpse of a shapely ankle could send a straitlaced Victorian man into a paroxysm of desire. But could it, really? Does having your inamorata always covered in draperies make the ankle an erogenous zone...unless it would be for you, anyway?

Because, apes that we are, we're a very visual species. We like to look, and where people are concerned, we like to look at the people we're attracted to for the things that attract us. Being not just apes but thinking apes (well, at times and of a sort...) there's more to attraction than JUST what we see. But we still place a great deal of importance in the physical aspects we consider pleasant.

Fortunately for the species, those aspects are pretty flexible. Whether Victorian or post-modern, some of us delight in the familiar, while others are drawn to the "different". Some find certain traits desirable, others the opposite, so while one woman finds a small, neat, blackavised man to her liking another gets a frisson of pleasure looking at his lanky, sun-fair friend.

But...here again, as people's manners and mores have changed through time, so have their standards of beauty. The difficulty of trying to understand someone like Ed Bates or Julia Coulter is trying to get a clue for how they thought about each other. What was "love" to them? How did they say it? Or did they? Certainly the Victorian standards of public behavior, so much more elaborate than ours today, would imply a great disparity in the intimacy a man and woman could show in public as opposed to within the privacy of the marriage-bed. But to what degree? Looking at the man, could Julia have been calling him "Mister Bates" even in their most unguarded moments?

And what of him? Could the dignity of a Victorian gentleman relent to the pure sensual enjoyment of his beloved wife; of an endless moment with his face buried in the scented darkness of her hair, every nerve-ending shirring beneath its satiny heaviness, hearing nothing but the sound of her breathing, touching his brow to the dear curvature of her head, the one he cherished because it held the vital spark, the life and thoughts, the whole essence of the one so dear to him in that fragile orb.

Well, as I read through the section about the Bates' marriage I came across something very like this. Edward was in D.C. when his first daughter Nancy was born. His letter conveys his longing and regret at putting his office before his child. And he asks Julia to tell him all the details of "how she is - what she is - what she is like...whether she has black eyes or gray - a long nose or a pug..."

And then he writes an odd little thing. "...and above all..." he implores, "..whether she has a pretty foot." for unless she has a foot as pretty as her mother's she "could never make a fine woman."

And it was this bit of parental and husbandly foolishness that caught me. Because I am a bit of a fool for a woman's hands, and her feet. I've always enjoyed holding hands, feeling the intricate textures of bone and sinew that can hold such character.

A woman's hands (or a man's, for that matter) can speak as or more eloquently than her face, her body, or even her words, of the nature and quality of her. Well-worn or pampered, slender or square, smooth or muscular...it takes a lifetime of living within her hands, of walking the roads her feet take her, to make them, and her, the woman she is. If you cherish the woman, than every line and muscle that makes her her, becomes dear in ways that are hard to express.

Or, hell, maybe people like Ned Bates and I are just queer for feet...

But whatever the reason, that little paragraph helped me see them not as stiff pictures in a book but people, people-people. I could vividly picture this long-dead couple, these vanished people preserved in silver salts and black back in the days of their happiness, perhaps lying lazily abed with her "pretty feet" in his lap as he gently rubs them after a long day. Enjoying the feeling, enjoying the moment, just enjoying each other.Silly, isn't it? And yet, it was that little detail, as one who has often admired my own wife's neat and strong feet as I worked the lotion into her sole and heel-ball and soothed out the aches and stiffnesses of a day's work, that connected these strangers to me, that made me feel like I understood him, and her, just a bit, and through them a bit more of the time and the tides of the world that had borne them up, he and his beloved, on the long swells of a dim-lit sea an ocean of time and a world of lives ago.

And if that's not how a good history works, I can't think of a better.Let me leave you with the words of the Victorian lover himself;

"Oh! How I long to press you to my bosom, if only for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision - I see you with such vivd and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye. O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my sunshine."

Four Weddings and a Funeral

I said I had something to say about last weekend's events, and at the time those thoughts were prompted by the "Royal Wedding", the you-might-not-have-heard-about-it-if-you-had-been-held-captive-by-Amazonian-tribesmen-since-2008 nuptials of William Windsor and Catherine "Don't-call-me-Kate" Middleton.

But in my usual fashion of late I failed to write anything at the time and as even those hostage in a Brazilian rainforest have heard since then late Sunday night came the news that dominated the past week, the fatal houseparty hosted by the bin Ladens in their suburban pied-a-terre in the somewhat ridiculously-named Pakistani garrison town of Abbotabad, a reminder that one didn't have to be particularly gifted, cunning, or dynamic to get ahead in the old colonial empires; being white and being there was pretty much enough.The course of the subsequent news arc, though, has got me thinking of them as curiously linked, a topic on which I beg your indulgence to expound.

The Weddings: And I use the plural deliberately, since I can't really see this in the singular. Ever since the end of genuine British economic, political, and military might some time in the Forties these intermittent royal raree shows seem to function in place of how the British used to get into the news cycle, by showing up on your doorstep with a flotilla and a small but enthusiastic expeditionary force of homicidal gutter-sweepings led by equally bloodthirsty aristos to take everything you had and leave you lying lifeless in your own gutters, turn your sons into a labor force and conscript soldiery and your daughters (those not winsome enough to find work as sleeping-dictionaries) into washwomen and drudges.

These overdone broom-jumping affairs seem harmless enough, give the remaining haberdashers of Britain an excuse to sell their otherwise terrifying creations, and seem to provide great entertainment for a certain type of person in both Britain and the United States.

And yet, they don't seem to work out all that well for the couple at the center of them, going all the way back to the original "fairy-tale" British royal wedding of the current monarch and her consort in 1947.

Whilst they seem to have managed to rub along well enough, Mr. Queen, Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg seems to be something of a sour old stick, and certainly their kids seem to have been anything but fairy-tale material. Charles, the oldest, had another one of those famous fairy-tale weddings, perhaps the most fairy-taily of them all, to a young woman who turned out to be, in her own words, "thick as a brick", facile, and profoundly self-absorbed.

The fact that she became, both in her lifetime as well as since her profoundly silly death, some sort of popular culture goddess says as much about the state of public taste as it does about the attraction of the cute and nubile to the attribution of unlikely virtues.

The second son, Andrew, married a goofy party girl who, shockingly, turned out to be a goofy party girl.

At least she seemed like she could laugh at herself.

In the beginning, anyway. But the beginnings are always easy; it's the "happily-ever-after" part of the fairytale that just never seems to work out for the people.

So for all the excitement about Pippa's arsethe dresses, the idiotic hatsthe uniforms and the military pomp

(and can I say for the record that in my opinion the profusion of uniforms on the Windsor men is really just sad, the saddest bit of the whole sad act. British royalty hasn't led British troops into battle since Dettingen; the last genuinely decent commander with royal connections was probably Louis Mountbatten, and his vita is marred by Dieppe as well as his enormous, consuming vanity.

The notion of Charles Windsor wearing the uniform of an admiral in the Royal Navy is just sad, seeing that the man left the service twenty years ago as a junior officer and hasn't messed around with boats since unless you count pushing the loofah around Camilla's bottom in the Jacuzzi. It's like seeing some old soldier still dressed up in his uniform unwilling to accept that he's past it. Just sort of pathetic and irritating)

these whole "fairy-tale" royal weddings just seem like a bad idea, and especially bad news for the people at the center of them.

Instead of amused, or entertained, or charmed, all the occasion makes me think is that Bill and Kate (who seem like nice, clean, well-bred white kids) would have been better off popping 'round to the registrar on a quiet Wednesday, a deli buffet at the local fire hall afterwards, and then off to a fortnight of wandering the Greek islands barefoot before settling in to work at some solid engineering firm in Leeds.As for Britain, the expense and the excess might have been appropriate when the word of a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha swayed half the wide earth.

But now?It's like one of those old cartoons of the African headhunters with spear and loincloth wearing a celluloid shirtfront with silk top hat on. It's vaguely embarrassing, and clearly inappropriate to the actual condition of the wearer.

And why this is fascinating to anyone even distantly associated with the United States, whose entire premise is directly aimed at the fatuous notion that fitness to rule others is directly related to whose vagina you emerged from, I have no idea. Watching elephants urinate is probably quite spectacular, but I can't imagine why I'd bother to take time out to see it unless it was happening outside my window.

In fact, it seems to me that the entire notion of British royalty seems founded on a combination of romantic silliness and illogical atavism; some sort of - to me - bizarre human need to make other people into some sort of icon, to attribute to them powers of leadership and supremacy that seem completely at odds with the actual abilities and accomplishments of the persons so deified.

The Funeral:

Which brings us to Saudi Arabia's contribution to the pelagic food-chain of (one presumes) the Indian Ocean, the late Osama bin Laden.

I spent considerable ink on this mook over at MilPub which I won't repeat, only noting that;

1. He's dead, and well deserved, that.
2. Mind you, killing him in 2011 is sort of like finding and shooting down Isoroku Yamamoto in a Piper Cub over Brisbane in 1951. Ummm, okay.
3. And to my mind the huge alteration in global business that makes this all the more, well, sort of an asterisk, is the revolutions in the Islamic world going collectively by the term "Arab Spring"

Because, remember, the really scary part of bin Laden wasn't that he hated and attacked the United States. Other people - Hitler, George III, Tojo - didn't much like us, attacked us AND had massive armies and fleets. You know, the sorts of things that can reaaaalllly fuck your day up, instead of a bunch of ignorant back-desert fuckwards with boxcutters and a complete disregard for mortality.

No, the scary part was that he was going to transform the Middle East into this Islamofascist Caliphate; his boys were going to run amok through the "Arab street" with their patented brand of Islamic Nutso^TM that would turn the downtrodden Arab masses against our expensive dictators and general-autocrat-for-lifes. Remember?Well, by the time the man came down with a 5.56mm headache, those dictators were falling like ripe dates. And were they falling to the new Islamic jihad? Was Osama any closer to the spiritual leadership of the Islamic Caliph?No damn closer than Elizabeth Windsor is to the autocratic powers of her royal predecessors.

So the last weekend of April, 2011, seems to have featured the most recent wedding and the funeral of a couple of expensive has-beens, of one group that continues to attract attention from those who rather mindlessly revere the past while failing to see how useless they are at present, while the other individual seems to have drawn the affection of those who mindlessly dream of a ridiculous future while failing to see how useless the present has made them.

And...the banality of them all!

The British royals seem to have survived when the vast bulk of their colleagues on continental Europe have been violently tossed into the dustbin of history by becoming the most sterile of suburban bourgeousie. In their attempt to become good British gentlefolk the Windsors have lost whatever manic flamboyance playing at kings and queens once gave them. And so far as I can tell, the actual effect of the "royals" on Britain's public life today is about half of that of a well-dressed empty suit on a wealthy borough council.

For my money, if I must have a "royal family", I want the most out-there version of the breed. Mad kings, wanton queens, imperious princesses, rapacious princes...if someone is officially designated my overlord I want them to live that license to the full. Be mad, bad, and dangerous to know! What good are these bland, decent, sober-living, upper-middle-class "royals"? Even their "excesses" are tawdry, ordinary ones; the product of clitoral itch and penile prurience, of common greed and stupidity. Bah.

And I like my mad religious visionaries, well...mad! Rampaging out of the desert on a camel, writhing in ecstatic revelation, producing golden tablets and flaming swords. Not hiding in some dingy compound in the suburbs of Karachi with the phones and the Internet off and their little minions scurrying off doing dirty business dirt cheap. Living the dream of conquest and conversion, not shuttered in with the domestic staff while history passes them by.No, for all the noisy news coverage, the blood, and ink, spilled over the wedding and the funeral...it seems to me that they say something very sad, and simple about us as people; that a hell of a lot of us like the fantasy over the reality, are still convinced by the image rather than skeptical of the illusion, and care more about, are more interested in, the empty dress than the woman inside of it, and the sinking coffin than the man within.

Let The Fire Fall!

Back in the Sixties the concessionaire that ran the hotel at the top of Hosetail Falls in Yosemite National Park used to do this thing where his staff would set up this big ol' bonfire at the top of the Glacier Point cliff. As dark was falling they'd light this sucker up, get a good hot blaze going, and then...well, let's let this guy take up the story:

"At 9:00 each evening in Camp Curry, the crowd which had gathered for the nightly campfire program, would fall silent. A man would call out to the top of Glacier Point "Let the Fire Fall!", and a faint reply could be heard from the top of the mountain. Then a great bonfire of red fir bark would be pushed evenly over the edge of the cliff, appearing to the onlookers below as a glowing waterfall of sparks and fire."

This went on from the 1870s until 1968, when the Park Service came to the realization that horsing burning logs off a cliff in a wildland national park wasn't, well, very "wild".Or natural. And stopped doing it. There are people who have been grousing about this ever since.

But the thing is that it turns out that under the right conditions Yosemite's Horsetail Falls can do the same thing or better:

"If there's enough water and if the sky's clear enough to get a sunset, the setting sun will be at an angle to the falls and this causes it to glow. It's rare to get such great conditions - a lot of water and decent sky. It's pretty wild to see because, at first, you can barely make out the waterfall. As the sun starts to set, it glows yellow a bit and then, all of a sudden, it lights up and looks like lava."

Gorgeous, isn't it?But isn't that just like fucking Nature?

Instead of giving us a good show when WE want it, it makes us wait and wait and wait and wait until everything is just right before doing something spectacular. And sometimes it never does it at all.

No wonder more people go to Disneyland.