Armchair Travel
Thursday, September 28, 2006
  Thorstein Veblen - Economics Made Interesting
My mom just sent me a book from my grandfather's library; that would be Charles K. Dickson, a guy who, as I have mentioned, really knew how to be a grandfather. It's an incredibly interesting book (The Wordly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbronner) about -- economics.

I know, I know, economics is terminally boring. but there's one guy who makes it interesting -- Thorstein Veblen.

Most economists assume that people make economic decisions based on rational self-interest. This is a philosophical cornerstone of the "free market" mentality, an assumption that those who provide for society's needs will benefit and continue to serve this function. It's a pathetically simplistic model, still used today.

Did you ever notice that this is actually completely untrue? That the people who supply what people need, like farmers, don't make diddly, but that the people who make what people do not need, like plastic vomit, make millions?

And -- as everyone knows -- companies that pay off the Bush administration can make billions.

Anyway, if you want a model that's a much better fit for collective human economic behavior, try Thorstein Veblen. He is incisive, he is evocative, and he doesn't give a rat's ass if you understand or believe anything he says.

That's what has convinced me, and what has convinced many other readers, that this guy is the genuine article. He's completely disinterested and he has a prodigious, acquistive mind, as well as the ability to put it all together in a way that no other human that I know of could ever do.

Veblen's model is based on the fundamental distinction, in primitive societies, between "man's work" and "women's work." Men deal with animate objects -- enemies, wild beasts, and sporting opponents. Women deal with inamimate objects. The man kills the bear; the woman chews the hide, cooks the meat, makes the claws into a necklace.

A pair of high heels or a tuxedo are a way of showing the world that you do not have to do useful work.

Veblen is famous for the "Theory of the Leisure Class" and the "Theory of Conspicuous Consumption." I might try some bite-sized insights from these books in future blogs, but I urge you to check them out for yourself. You'll see why they are impossible to summarize.

Economic decisions are based, not on rational self-interest, but on ancient, irrational, tribal notions that place one group of people above another.

The "Theory of Conspicuous Consumption" actually assumes that rich people, once they have everything that could possibly amuse them, spend money to convince other people that they are having more fun than they actually are. Is that possible, think you? If yes, you're a potential Veblen fan.

Not only that, but Veblen identifies the entrepreneur as a saboteur in the economic system, one who makes no money if everything operates as it ought to, one who exploits disruptions in the system for short-term gain, someone who has no interest whatever in the wellbeing of society.

That's enough for now, but expect more on Thorstein Veblen, the wildman of economics.
 
Thursday, September 21, 2006
  Traveling Between Eternities
I was thinking back on the wonderful hospitality I enjoyed in Ireland and came upon this bedtime prayer on a card I saved from the Clifden Station House. It might sound corny, but I believe it is completely sincere and it shows what happens when people really like the business they are in.

I love the travel business. If GoNOMAD gets one person to travel, just one, that's one more person who comes to realize that "unamerican" is not a bad word, a person far less likely to vote for a butthead like George Bush. Rick Steves (Travel Can Help Mend a Fractured World) said it so much better than I could.

The people in Irish hotels like Clifden House like being in the hospitality industry, and so do all the wonderful Polish people who staff many of them. When you like the business you are in, your job becomes a kind of mission, and a pleasure.

"Because a hotel is is a human institution to serve people and not just a profit centre," they write, "we hope that God will grant you peace and rest while you are under our roof.

"May this hotel be your 'home from home.' May those you love be near you in your thoughts and dreams...

"For we are all travelers from birth, to the end of our days we travel between eternities. May these days be pleasant for you, profitable for your communities, helpful for those you meet and joy to those who know and love you best. We make this prayer through God our Saviour."

I'm not completely against religion, you know. I believe what Jesus taught, and I believe that in Ireland, unlike many, many other places, they have got it right. Surely St. Patrick, who was once a slave, had something to do with that.

Martin Luther King said that unearned suffering is redemptive, and I believe what Martin Luther King says. So, ipso facto, Ireland has been redeemed many times over. And I can attest that they understand the age-old connection between spirituality and hospitality.
 
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
  Naked Nude Orgy
I just wanted to take the time to say what fun it is to write this blog. It's the most fun I've ever had with my pants on -- although I do occasionally blog naked.

So when Google decided to downgrade my blog from a five to a four, I decided I wouldn't let that change anything. I'll just go on bringing you fascinating writers like Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, George F. Kennan, Armand de Caulaincourt and Marcel Proust -- well not him, he's too boring -- but lots of other high-brow kind of authors.

While some other guy might try to resort to cheap tricks to boost his Google ranking, I'm going to just keep on keeping on. "Go with what you know," as they say. You know why?

Because writing this blog is as much fun as a naked nude orgy. I have never been to a naked nude orgy, and I don't know anyone who has been to one, that I know of... Still I feel confident that the amount of fun I have writing this blog is equivalent to or greater than the fun that people have at a naked nude orgy.
 
  The Life of Ernie Pyle
I have a photo on this blog of Omar Bradley and Dwight D. Eisenhower with Ernie Pyle, and if you look closely, you can see the two generals are kind of sheepish. That's because they're getting their picture taken with Ernie Pyle.

It's hard to explain what a big deal that was at that time. I guess one way to do it would be to say that Ernie Pyle was recognized by millions of American soldiers as the guy who was telling their story.

They had contempt for journalists who went in for "hero stuff." They hated it. They hated war and destruction and the smell of death, and cursed the men who started it.

Ernie wrote about real people in real situations who were facing incredible carnage and deprivation and still getting the job done.

After the Allied victory in Tunisia, the First Armored Division presented Ernie with a captured Volkswagen "for sweating it out with us at Faid Pass." He had to give it back later, but that says a lot.

Ernie was also recognized by many millions of Americans at home as they guy who explained things to them in language they could understand. We had some excellent war correspondents, but not one could compare with Ernie Pyle in their ability to communicate with the soldiers (and nurses and medics and engineers, etc.) and with the American public.

But Ernie, then in his fifties, had a jump on all the other journalists. He had been writing an "on-the-road" column for five years and had covered the blitz in London. His writing abilities had been finely honed and he had become, in my view, the finest American writer after Lincoln.

His description of the Christmas firebombing of London and his explanation of the American defeat at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa are among the finest pieces of writing that I have ever seen.

And every one of his dispatches is another example of what a decent man can do if he also happens to be a brilliant writer. But don't take my word for it; read them! There are thousands. You could start with his books: Here is Your War and Brave Men.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Amerlia Earhardt were devoted fans. Ernie's first book was made into a movie with Ernie played by Burgess Meredith. And Ernie wound up getting rich! His books sold like hotcakes. Alas, this was his undoing.
 
Monday, September 18, 2006
  The Destruction of Rome
I mentioned before that the best work I have seen about the destruction of Rome in the time of Nero is Quo Vadis by Heinrich Sienckiwcz. At that time I said you have to read his account of the fire, that there was no way to summarize it; and that is true.

But I just noticed one very effective device he uses that gives the modern reader some idea of the horror of that experience: as the fire spreads, more and more wild beasts break out of the "vivaria" where they are kept, so there are elephants and lions among the desperate crowds of people seeking safety.

He follows one crowd, fleeing wild animals and collapsing buildings, down one of Rome's avenues until they meet up with another desperate crowd, pursued by wild beasts and by the conflagration, coming from the opposite direction! AIEEE!
 
  A Wild Ride With The Crazy Finn
I love reading about the ancient world. It shows you that there is nothing new under the sun. In the most ancient literary work that we know of, the Epic of Gilgamesh, this guy says to Gilgamesh, "Don't go searching for immortality. Take delight in good food and wine and the embrace of your wife and the child who holds your hand." No one, in four thousand years, has come up with better advice than this.

If you stick to what we actually know through archaeology and written sources, the picture is pretty fuzzy, compared to the picture we get from a literary source like Gilgamesh or Homer -- not Homer Simpson, the blind Greek guy.

That's why when someone lights into the unknown territory of the ancient world with a barrelful of imagination, I'm ready to cut him all the slack he wants and just take off and enjoy the ride. Can you count all the mixed metaphors in that last sentence? They could apply only to the imaginative Finn Mika Waltari who wrote The Egyptian, The Roman, The Etruscan and numerous other works.

Besides Homer, and the author of Gilgamesh, and Thucydides, and Xenophon and people like that, no one has done more to stimulate my imagination about the ancient world than Mika Waltari. If you see one of his books, grab it and read it.

In The Egyptian, a man is so passionately in love with a courtesan that he allows his parents to be disinterred and sells their burial plots. In The Roman, a guy gets married to a woman whose tastes are so kinky he doesn't even want to know about them. These are two great books I read a long time ago.

But the book I just reread last summer, The Etruscan, is really a corker. From it I learned about the unseen gods who rule the gods as the gods rule men. That's a big plus right there. Isn't that something you'd like to know about? Don't you get tired of sacrificing to all these gods -- a black calf here and a white bull there -- and wish you could just take care of all this automatically through the unseen gods?

Mika Waltari gives the best imaginative recreation of Etruscan religion that I have ever seen; in fact it's the only one that I have ever seen. It's just one heck of a book and I couldn't even start to sum it all up here.

My only disappointment is this: We spend the whole book finding out who the narrator's father is, and he turns out to be the only Etruscan that every English schoolboy knows by name.

And who is that? American readers may ask. Well in Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," we read "Lars Porsena, by the nine gods he swore, that the great house of Tarquin should suffer harm no more..." That's in "Horatius at the Bridge," the most famous lay of all.

So when Lars Porsena turns out to be the main character's father, I was a little disappointed, but it by no means diminished the enjoyment I derived from the book. As I said, I can't possibly summarize it. This book is a corker even if you have no interest whatever in the ancient world.

Mika Waltari, The Etruscan
 
Thursday, September 14, 2006
  Pervasive Evil
I have written before about the disgust with which Charles Dickens viewed American slavery during his first visit in 1842. He saw, just down the street from the US Capitol, the holding pens for slaves being auctioned.

He read the advertisements for runaway slaves marked by the lash and the branding iron and the axe.

He read the statements on the floor of Congress by southern statesmen declaring that anyone espousing the doctrine of abolitionism in their home states would be hanged.

He wrote about the free blacks who were arrested without cause and then sold to pay jail fees, not just in once instance, but many, many times.

He wrote about brutal public murders of black citizens in the "free" states that went unpunished.

We all know that American slavery was disgusting and deplorable and that America was infested by it and was then, as it is now becoming, a disgusting nation whose smelly putrescence made -- and makes -- a mockery of the lofty ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

But one detail that Dickens mentions reminds me that I have never considered HOW disgusting American society was at that time, in spite of its professed love of liberty.

He saw a woman in a park in Washington, D.C., whose little boy was misbehaving. He heard her tell him that if he would be good, she would buy him a whip "to beat the little n-----s with."
 
Monday, September 11, 2006
  The Seafaring Fringes
George F. Kennan, in his short, definitive work American Diplomacy 1900-1950, asks a telling question: Why were the United States, in 1900, with no navy and no army to speak of, secure against all foreign enemies, while in 1950, with the second largest army in the world and the world's largest navy, much more insecure?

What invisible hand, protecting the US from foreign foes, disappeared during that fifty-year period? The Monroe Doctrine, you say? That's a good guess, but how much help was that doctrine when the French took over Mexico during the Civil War, or when the Germans offered Mexico California, Arizona and New Mexico during World War I?

The Monroe Doctrine was as substantial as air. The answer is: the British Empire. It disappeared during World War II. In the Battle of El Alamaein in Egypt, British forces defeated the offensive of Erwin Rommel, but they were never again to dominate the world as they had before, and that's what made the United States more vulnerable.

"We can see," Kennan writes in 1950, "that our security has been dependent throughout much of our history on the position of Britain; that Canada had been a useful and indispensable hostage to good relations between our country and the British Empire; and that Britain's position, in turn, has depended upon a balance of power on the European Continent.

"Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire European land mass.

"Our interest has lain rather in some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as a land power, shatter the position of England, and enter -- as in these cirucmstances it certainly would -- an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and suported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia."

Boy does that ever sum it up -- the Thirty Years War, The Crimean War, The War of Jenkin's Ear -- the whole works.

You have to hand to it George F. Kennan, the guy who said the invasion of Iraq was inadvisable because it would upset the balance of sectarian forces in the region.

But why listen to learned statesmen like Kennan when you can take the advice of slimeball chicken hawks like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney?
 
Friday, September 08, 2006
  An Amusing Party Game
Here is a party game recommended by my uncle Nathaniel Hartshorne, who is also one of my favorite authors.

Uncle Nat used to find himself at parties where he didn't quite know what to do with himself. Maybe he still does, I don't know. Has that ever happened to you?

Well what he used to do was to look around for the person, generally a guy, who was saying something, but the people he was saying it to had moved away and he was talking to no one in particular and was looking around to see if anyone else was listening. You know that guy?

Then he would acknowledge the guy and listen, and nod understandingly from time to time.

The game was to see how long someone would talk to a perfect stranger who never uttered a word in reply -- well maybe a word or two, but no more -- how long would this person would carry on a completely one-sided conversation?

Uncle Nat said that eventually, after some period of time, the guy would recognize that he had been doing all the talking and would, out of courtesy, say, "So what's your name?" and UN would tell him.

"And what do you do?"

"I'm a novelist."
 
Thursday, September 07, 2006
  The Face of Battle
People always say that history books place too much emphasis on such and such a battle on such and such a date when they ought to be looking at the underlying conditions that lead to war and the impact war has, not just on soldiers, but on ordinary people.

I agree with this, to a point, but one also has to recognize that some battles reshape societies by determining who is going to run them and so they have an enormous impact that is felt for centuries. If Cortes had lost the battle of Mexico City... If the Incan emperor Atahualpa had crushed Pizzarro, as he easily could have... If Charles the Hammer... you get the idea.

Other battles, though, like the Battle of Fredericksburg, were utterly meaningless. A few hundred yards were taken and retaken, so the lines ended up where they were first thing in the morning, but 70,000 soldiers were dead. In the two world wars, of course, you had decisive and indecisive battles that were even more costly in human terms.

So the study of battles is kind of interesting if you're interested. A lot of people are. Look at all the time and trouble people put into reenactments.

When I read an account of a battle, though, when I get to the part where so and so deploys his light infantry upon an oblique with his left hinging upon a wooded ridge near the village of such and such, my eyes begin to glaze over and I start skimming. I'm interested in tactics and strategy, but I'm much more interested in what the battle was like for the grunts in the front line.

That's why I really like The Face of Battle by John Keegan. I think Keegan is brilliant and so does my friend Ed. And, incidentally, so do the New York Review of Books and the Times of London. He takes three battles Agincourt (England v. France, October 25, 1415), Waterloo (France v. England, Prussia, Russia, Austria et al., June 18, 1815) and The Battle of the Somme (Germany v. England, France et al., July 1, 1916) -- notice how Al changes sides in these things? -- and reconstructs what the battle was like for the blighters in the trenches.

This is a really really good book. At one point he explains why you can't really get a full account of a battle from any one person, even the generals. No one sees the whole thing. He gives the example of a British regiment at Waterloo known as the Inniskillings:

"They did not go into bivouac until about eleven o'clock on the morning of the battle. There, about three quarters of a mile from the front, they lay down to sleep. Many were still sleeping when at about three o'clock, after the battle had been in progress for four hours, they were ordered forward to La Haye Saint crossroads.

"Near that spot they formed columns of companies and stood until the general advance was ordered four hours later. During that four hours, over 450 of the regiment's 750 officers and men were killed or wounded by the fire of cannon several hundred yards away or by the musketry of French skirmishers in concealed positions.

"So heavy were the casualties among the officers (only one out of eighteen went untouched) that very little about those four hours was ever written down. But it seems unlikely that any Iniskilling had eyes or thoughts for much but the horror that was engulfing him and his comrades."

They went and stood behind the front lines for four hours and more than half of them were killed or maimed. You see why people who have actually seen war don't talk much about bravery or glory, and don't think much of people who do. You're standing there and the guy beside you gets blown to bits. Does that make you brave? Does that make him brave?

The only kind of person who could see glory in war would be a person who had never seen war up close, a person insecure about his manhood, a person ashamed of being a deserter (or in the case of the vice president, a shirker) who aimed to improve his own personal political position and make himself look like a man through the suffering of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands of others.

This would be the kind of person who could say, "Well thousands of children will die in the arms of their parents, and thousands of parents will die in the arms of their children, but Karl and Dick say this war will make me look like a big shot!" You know the type. You see his loathsome visage every day.

Anyway, Keegan works very hard, using a wide variety of historical sources, and considerable amounts of deduction and insight, to help the reader learn what a battle was like for the people involved from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. Another great read for a quarter.
 
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
  You Can Learn a Lot From the Eggheads
As I mentioned in the opening posting of this blog, once in a while I go to The Bookmill in Montague and purchase a book for ten or twelve dollars, which is about twenty or twenty-four times what I ever pay for a book.

Usually these are scholarly tomes which are over my head insofar as they talk about a lot of stuff I don't understand. Archaeologists deal with pottery shards unearthed at such and such a level and they refer to other works which the reader may not have handy.

But I don't worry much about the stuff that's over my head, because I believe that the way to acquire knowledge is not to increase the energy that goes into searching for it, but to increase the soul's ability to accept and use it. Instead of trying to increase the amount of rainfall in your region, I opine, it is better to increase your capacity to store rainwater.

It seems to me that once you increase you ability to store and use knowledge, the knowledge apppears, as if by a miracle. Okay, enough of that. It's just a theory.

One of these twelve-dollar books that I acquired is one called Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times by Donald B. Redford. What I learned from this book is that we can greatly extend our knowledge of ancient history by considering the time it took, in those times, to formulate words and language.

In the modern age, and also in the post-modern age, words are coined and used, with mutual understanding -- the only effective criterion for deciding when a word has become a word -- lierally overnight. Think of radio and radar and later google and ethernet.

In the old days it took centuries for a word to become a word. Most people did not travel fifty miles in their lifetime. So that means, Redford explains, that learning a language gives us an insight that goes back several centuries or more.

He compares the most ancient languages in Egypt and in Palestine, using as an example the words for a town. In ancient Egyptian that could be a religious or tribal gathering place, a place on the high ground during the annual inundation, that is, a crop storage area, or a place where many people lived for much of the year.

In Palestine at the time, the fourth milennium (4,000 to 3,000 BCE (before the current era)), there was only one word for a town: a word that meant "a fortified place." And the word did not mean 'fortified against wild beasts'; it meant 'fortified against marauding bands of humans.'

Because Jericho is the oldest recorded human settlement of its size, I belive this confirms what we know from the most profound work of literature in the history of the human race -- no, not The Bible -- I mean The Tale of The Three Little Pigs. Pigs One and Two are history. We are the descendants of Pig Number Three.

Palestine was the crossroads between mighty empires in Africa and in Asia, and when the people weren't being oppressed by Asian and African empires, they were even more severely oppressed by the breakdown of civil order during "the time of no kings," when no vestige of civilization survives.

So, for those seeking peace in Palestine, I have to point out that there has never been peace in Palestine in six thousand years of human history, and probably a thousand years before that. But you know, if the right person sees this blog, goddamit, he or she might see the answer.

My own idea is to put all of the Holy Land under the governance of the Dalai Lama, but nobody listens to me.

Mt friend Rick goes to Palestine every year trying to promote peace. He says that in eight years he thinks he might have things straightened out. I'm saying, "Geeze, if the guy got a little help, maybe we could whittle it down to four."

We are talking about the birthplace of the guy that a lot of people call their saviour.

Considering what's at stake, can you think of any reason not to try?
 
Friday, September 01, 2006
  I Tried to Make the Letter M
Don't you hate it when foreigners say bad things about America? Like that Charles Dickens guy who came here in 1842. "This is not the republic I came to see," he said. "This is not the republic of my imagination." Like there was something wrong with America.

In fact he kind of suggested that America made him sick to his stomach. He had a pretty good time in Boston and New York, but on the train to DC he met a fellow who had just purchased a woman and her children, but not her husband, and was taking his purchases with him down to Maryland. And he seemed in a real hurry to get there, a "specimen" Dickens called him.

A lot of middle-of-the road Americans took the time and trouble to explain to him that public opinion was a strong force in ensuring that slaveholders treated their slaves decently. And he should have been content with that, as they were.

But he had the audacity to write down in his book, American Notes, some advertisements he found in the newspapers in Washington, D.C. in the very words written down -- and paid for -- by slave owners seeking to reclaim runaway slaves:

"Ran away, a negro girl called Mary, a good many teeth knocked out, has a scar on her cheek and the end of one of her toes cut off.

"Ran away, Harry, much scarred with the whip.

"Rachel, all her toes cut off,

There's more than fifty of these advertisements. I guess the one that stands out the most:

"Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M."

And this Dickens feller took all this completely out of context and tried to make out that there was SOMETHING WRONG WITH AMERICA. Foreigners, they'll do it every time.
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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