tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55787644756988680932024-03-16T08:19:18.283-04:00bookeywookeyLiterature good and bad, theater,and neuroscience....no really.Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.comBlogger1237125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-86542575241962325522020-11-06T13:27:00.007-05:002020-11-06T13:33:55.960-05:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Critical Thinking About Political Origins in the Presence of Specious Argument (Paper No. 17)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNuWPG2O9bISGVZsksoUAuqg4PsRa0KRgeMJxCSYHhMktmUyR-MTtUct_iztOwROh-XNzj3PhkLSCvWEtotj-vSkQ-KkW4n9VTVUrfuNEv4ovz3DTZBDN3qayon9P8Y45Lhjkk5_A-1nA/s300/Alexander_Hamilton_2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="288" data-original-width="300" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNuWPG2O9bISGVZsksoUAuqg4PsRa0KRgeMJxCSYHhMktmUyR-MTtUct_iztOwROh-XNzj3PhkLSCvWEtotj-vSkQ-KkW4n9VTVUrfuNEv4ovz3DTZBDN3qayon9P8Y45Lhjkk5_A-1nA/w200-h192/Alexander_Hamilton_2.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><p>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 15. </p><p>With the 2020 Federal election still not called, and the integrity of the electoral process challenged by the incumbent president, not for a legal reason but because he cannot stand losing, I see nothing to do but soldier on with Alexander Hamilton's arguments for principled and practical government. Read along here: <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>.</i></p><p>Hamilton continues to argue against confederacy and for union in Paper No.17, claiming that the federal government could not likely be bothered to usurp the state, <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p></p><blockquote>...as it would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendour of the national government.</blockquote><p></p><p>Wow, is that how they did things then? President Trump made such a persuasive case last night for the dignity and splendour of government! Apparently Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas was absent for the class on Paper No. 17 as he claimed just this morning that the federal government should determine what Pennsylvania does in choosing its electorates. Hamilton continues, </p><p></p><blockquote>But let it be admitted for argument sake, that mere wantonness and lust of domination would be sufficient to beget that disposition, still it may be safely affirmed, that the sense of the constituent body of the national representatives, or in other words of the people of the several States would controul the indulgence of so extravagant an appetite. </blockquote><p></p><p>"Just for argument sake," Hamilton writes, because even this extraordinarily prescient framer of our Constitution and champion of its principles, could not begin to envision such "lust for domination" as we witnessed last evening, and have over the last four years. What did he envision would be the check? National representatives, who would reign in such profligacy instead of enabling it so that they might accomplish their own ends. </p><p>Even if Trump loses this race, as Biden's 4 million vote lead strongly suggests he will, it is clear that our national representatives can no longer be trusted to be the guarantors against despotism as envisioned by our Constitution's framers.<br /></p><p></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-15598399955683266842020-11-05T14:15:00.000-05:002020-11-05T14:15:30.722-05:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 16)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdS7ytNzVvy7Ka9TWbHh8gGiIyv28-wS-wD3gQIf8tJrznj6mlLa25j3sfiJPRQk4rh3KSEW6oNRqwhyphenhyphen9bTS2RGvZ9nRkcbq4u1CGcC9fypeb56-VYef4IRRtLFs2fB9FjtHdc3IKprxA/s320/Hamilton-Alexander.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="244" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdS7ytNzVvy7Ka9TWbHh8gGiIyv28-wS-wD3gQIf8tJrznj6mlLa25j3sfiJPRQk4rh3KSEW6oNRqwhyphenhyphen9bTS2RGvZ9nRkcbq4u1CGcC9fypeb56-VYef4IRRtLFs2fB9FjtHdc3IKprxA/w153-h200/Hamilton-Alexander.jpg" width="153" /></a></div><p>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 14. </p><p>As the election count continues unresolved today, political writers observe that we are polarized. We are two Americas, one wrote this morning - ya think? The split is embodied by what could end up being tied party representation in the Senate. Any tied vote will be broken by the Vice President, as yet unknown, according to Article I, Section 3, Clause 4 of the Constitution so avidly advanced in <i>The Federalist Papers. </i>In fact, in Paper No. 16 Alexander Hamilton writes about the disadvantages of splitting the Union into smaller confederacies. Read along here: <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i></p><p><i> </i>Hamilton gets on a hyperbolic horse with this paper; something we so rarely see in politics today. Confederacies are the parent of anarchy, he writes, and when the components of the Union don't fall in line the only remedy is to use force. Apparently, Donald Trump and William Barr may have read Paper No. 16, as discussed in <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-federalist-papers-project_23.html#more" target="_blank">Episode 7</a>. </p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p></p><blockquote>If there should not be a large army, constantly at the disposal of the national government, it would either not be able to employ force at all, or when this could be done, it would amount to a war between different parts of the confederacy.</blockquote><p></p><p>Those on one side of the argument would unite in defense, Hamilton predicts, and individual states would take sides against each other!</p><p></p><blockquote>Specious arguments of danger to the common liberty could easily be contrived; plausible excuses for the deficiencies of the party, could, without difficulty be invented, to alarm the apprehensions, inflame the passions, and conciliate the good will even of those States which were not chargeable with any violation, or omission of duty. </blockquote><p></p><p>Thank goodness we ratified the Constitution so that we could avoid such calamity. Hamilton continues:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>This would be the more likely to take place, as the delinquencies of the larger members might be expected sometimes to proceed from an ambitious premeditation in their rules, with a view to getting rid of all external controul upon their designs of personal aggrandizement...</blockquote><p></p><p>Well, you can't say that they didn't see it coming. </p><p></p><blockquote>When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation. The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of irritated resentment, would be apt to carry the States, against which the arms of the Union were exerted to any extremes necessary to revenge the affront, or to avoid the disgrace of submission...This may be considered as the violent death of the confederacy...if the federal system be not speedily renovated in a more substantial form. </blockquote><p></p><p>The alternative to regulation by force would be empowering a federal government to act on behalf of shared need for safety and happiness, without intervention from the state legislature, an agreement that its citizens will submit to the powers of a federal civil officer to effect justice.<br /></p><p>The shame is that those elected to serve the public by serving the Constitution in our time, have engaged in the willful dismemberment of our union - the mechanism of laws and processes put into place to avoid the use of military force - reverting our country effectively to two confederacies. The bond is broken.</p><p><br /></p><p></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-35035895720635750612020-11-04T08:11:00.002-05:002020-11-04T08:12:17.945-05:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About Our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 15)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq0ZQlYHeStnjd4LfgOow4g7gc3thi45tvPT6d5f3bnrsL2nyKT4L7bcmOVHTQBM9rrQdjCkBaQ4AvS6IKsix38PoEMFFmlSflh5QrIiVVRXy8PZ7enyNlB_9r8Uo69ddhXTHwdWJgRqw/s320/Hamilton-Alexander.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="244" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq0ZQlYHeStnjd4LfgOow4g7gc3thi45tvPT6d5f3bnrsL2nyKT4L7bcmOVHTQBM9rrQdjCkBaQ4AvS6IKsix38PoEMFFmlSflh5QrIiVVRXy8PZ7enyNlB_9r8Uo69ddhXTHwdWJgRqw/w153-h200/Hamilton-Alexander.jpg" width="153" /></a></div><p>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 13. Uncannily, Hamilton opens his 15th paper, which I read on a U.S. election day of historical proportion, saying - look, I've told you how important the union is to our safety and happiness. The opposition to union amounts to either personal ambition, greed, jealousy, or outright lying. If you still need convincing, remember this:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>...you are in quest of information on a subject the most momentous which can engage the attention of a free people:...and that the difficulties of the journey have been unnecessarily increased by the mazes with which sophistry has beset the way. It will be my aim to remove the obstacles to your progress in as compendious a manner, as it can be done...</blockquote><p></p><p> But for the words compendious and sophistry, that could have been written today. A journey "unnecessarily increased by the mazes with which sophistry has beset the way." So that's why the last four years have felt so long. Alexander, please! Remove those obstacles. And in case you wish to read along... <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i><br /> <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>If we aren't all agreed on the efficacy of a union, Hamilton begins, might we at least agree that the present confederation is flawed? </p><p></p><blockquote>We may indeed with propriety be said to have reached almost the last stage of national humiliation. There is scarcely any thing that can wound the pride, or degrade the character of an independent nation, which we do not experience. </blockquote>The list of indignities was long: we owed money to foreign nations, the confidence of creditors in the value of American assets and its ability to meet its financial obligations was weak. We wished access to lands and waterways important to our livelihood but these belonged to foreign nations. Our ability to conduct trade was weak, other nations would neither listen to our protests nor negotiate with us. In short, <br /><p></p><p></p><blockquote>We have neither troops nor treasury nor government. </blockquote><p></p><p>The difficulty was that under the Articles of Confederation, although the union could ask the states for men or money, those requests had no teeth because the federal government did not have the power to enforce individual citizens' behavior under the law. A government must be able to make laws that impinge upon its people and to exert their authority with the promise of penalty for failure to comply. In addition, Hamilton cautioned that the States themselves must, as a last resort, be subject to penalty for violation of the law.<br /></p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>There was a time when we were told that breaches, by the States, of the regulations of the federal authority were not to be expected - that a sense of common interest would preside over the conduct of the respective members, and would beget a full compliance...Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint. Has it been found that bodies of men act with more rectitude or greater disinterestedness than individuals? The contrary of this has been inferred...</blockquote><p></p><p>If states are only to be subject to some sort of loose alliance, writes Hamilton, they will observe and break those agreements as the wind blows them. </p><p></p><blockquote><p>This tendency is not difficult to be accounted for. It has its origin in the love of power.</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">A union must be binding and enforceable. A confederacy has been attempted, writes Hamilton, and it has been demonstrated not to work. <br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>The measures of the Union have not been executed; and the delinquencies of the States have step by step matured themselves to an extreme...Congress at this time scarcely possess the means of keeping up the forms of administration... Each State yielding to the persuasive voice of immediate interest and convenience has successively withdrawn its support. 'till the frail and tottering edifice seems ready to fall upon our heads and to crush us beneath its ruins.<br /></blockquote><br /><p></p><p> <br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-55393315813369757182020-11-02T08:36:00.004-05:002020-11-02T11:19:28.921-05:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About Our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 14)<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPaoRk_AbSDKIfBtfu33Hkf8cLPLyQ4jTGW6c8Bk1XlWui675m0sIEcQU9wRqr-p9iN6HbnSHNflMipFh5yJ1zCKeWRe3GhAn-EMCxIOegvhoG9lmPU8RKrRjMgPUKYrohXM31MfZ8us/s600/James_Madison.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="493" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPaoRk_AbSDKIfBtfu33Hkf8cLPLyQ4jTGW6c8Bk1XlWui675m0sIEcQU9wRqr-p9iN6HbnSHNflMipFh5yJ1zCKeWRe3GhAn-EMCxIOegvhoG9lmPU8RKrRjMgPUKYrohXM31MfZ8us/w164-h200/James_Madison.jpg" width="164" /></a></p><p>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 12. <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i></p><p></p><blockquote>We have seen the necessity of the union as our bulwark against foreign danger, as the conservator of peace among ourselves, as the guardian of commerce and other common interests, as the only substitute for those military establishments which have subverted the liberties of the old world; and as the proper antidote for the diseases of faction, which have proved fatal to other popular governments, and of which have been betrayed by our own. </blockquote><p></p><p>So, what argument remains? James Madison is not yet done in refuting the objection to union that republics are only effective in governing a small number of people living within a restricted region. Not so, he claims. That is only true of a democracy, in which people must assemble themselves to administer their government, whereas republics assign that duty to representatives. </p><p>Europe has created a mechanism of representation, Madison acknowledges, but within the context of a monarchy, so not within a government controlled by the people. Governments in antiquity were populist, but small. America is the innovator of a popular government, but within separate republics. Why not let the experiment go all the way, he asks, and allow for the comprehensivness of a central government functioning representatively?<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>It can work. It won't be that bad, he seems to say. Just remember, this government won't decide everything. It will make and execute laws only concerning shared mattters. States will retain authority over everything else. Travel among the distant parts of the union will be improved. And, Madison reminds his readers, nearly every State borders on a frontier. This means that they adjoin a foreign nation and may at times need to defend themselves. </p><p></p><blockquote><p>It may be inconvenient for Georgia or the States forming our western or north eastern borders to send their representatives to the seat of government, but they would find it more so to struggle alone against an invading enemy...</p><p>Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America...can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens of one great respectable and flourishing empire. Hearken not to the voice which petulantly tells you that the form of government recommended for your adoption is a novelty in the political world; that it has never yet had a place in the theories of the wildest projectors, that it rashly attempts what it is impossible to accomplish... Why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected merely because it may comprise what is new? </p></blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">Here is that idea of America as a "great experiment." Awwww come on guys, says Madison, it'll be cool. He's like a teenager trying to get his date to go all the way. Really, Madison's argument in Paper No 14 boils down to the fact that he wants to be an innovator and he sees the possibility of a legacy - ever the motivator.</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><blockquote>Is it not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense...to this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights, and public happiness. </blockquote><p></p><p style="text-align: left;">And finally, if it isn't perfect, we thought of that too! There is a way for "successors to improve and perpetuate" it. With all the recent talk of eliminating the electoral college, the subject of later Papers, I have to wonder if we the people will ever decide to "improve" our mode of representation in the electoral process. And the experiment continues...<br /></p><p></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-80908269814516197542020-11-01T18:46:00.006-05:002020-11-02T11:18:06.978-05:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper Nos. 12 & 13)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHPoSMY79pfVyBhZTiXso8GKvH0xPOmYC7FPLmch1yzcxs9mYAq9aYIDlqBh4DpJECzVPrW7JeFKBqeEJ526mujos_lvrZyztlWZimv4bRzFvwAJyJqkm4bsfhbSOEJVvi_m3TT2fC1GM/s320/Hamilton-Alexander.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="244" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHPoSMY79pfVyBhZTiXso8GKvH0xPOmYC7FPLmch1yzcxs9mYAq9aYIDlqBh4DpJECzVPrW7JeFKBqeEJ526mujos_lvrZyztlWZimv4bRzFvwAJyJqkm4bsfhbSOEJVvi_m3TT2fC1GM/w153-h200/Hamilton-Alexander.jpg" width="153" /></a></div>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 11. <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i><br /><p></p><p></p><blockquote>A nation cannot long exist without revenue. Destitute of this essential support, it must resign its independence and sink into the degraded condition of a province. </blockquote><p></p><p>The Emperor of Germany, Hamilton writes, despite vast amounts of fertile land, silver, and gold mines his country boasts, lacked the power to sustain a war and, at times, had to borrow from other countries to meet his financial obligations. This is because his country failed to transform their wealth so that it supplied the treasury, something accomplished through taxes. </p><p>Given the American colony's history of taxation by the British, Americans were not well disposed towards direct taxation. Hamilton advises that excises - levied on particular goods - were a more likely means of funding the treasury. Given disunited states, he cautions, there was potential for each state to levy duties on the other both discouraging trade and requiring the expense of armed personnel to police infringements. Whereas a single government could put combined resources towards patrolling the greater amount of commerce between the united states and foreign nations. And what does Hamilton suggest being one commodity subject to duties - liquor! Not only to raise a considerable sum, but to discourage its being drunk to excess.</p><p>In Paper No. 13, we see Hamilton consider revenue from another angle. It's the economy, stupid! Actually, it's not <i>the </i>economy he writes of but <i>economy, </i>in other words, the prudent management of resources. Multiple states means multiple governments. Multiple governments means keeping track of multiple people who must be paid by each government. Moreover, states or confederacies of a certain size, require the same energy to administer as a large one.</p><p></p><blockquote>The supposition, that each confederacy into which the States would be likely to be divided, would require a government not less comprehensive, than the one proposed...Nothing can be more evident than that the thirteen States will be able to support a national government, better than one half, or one third, or any number less than the whole. </blockquote><p></p><p>As clear as the economic and administrative arguments in favor of the proposed union, in our own time so fraught with disagreement, I wonder if the Constitution uniting our 50 states were put to a vote on Tuesday, if it would pass? I think not. </p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-74893413668416089902020-10-30T10:44:00.002-04:002020-10-31T12:07:29.164-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 11)<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyTc-iK4B6IeCv93VvEwMjkfyIYsY-_U8IQI9AOTLy-sjMVepLHj0oanCk3O7jU5eGtyDEMibsm6UOT7sy2AC0Li3e2-d959I_-spHkhHjsVja1NbmYSQM_5N-lQLOApT9EfJ41_yLT0k/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyTc-iK4B6IeCv93VvEwMjkfyIYsY-_U8IQI9AOTLy-sjMVepLHj0oanCk3O7jU5eGtyDEMibsm6UOT7sy2AC0Li3e2-d959I_-spHkhHjsVja1NbmYSQM_5N-lQLOApT9EfJ41_yLT0k/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></p>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 10. <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i><p></p><p>Alexander Hamilton is less concerned in Federalist Paper No. 11 with the philosophy of governance than with strategy. It comes down to a question of size:</p><p></p><blockquote>...in a state of disunion... It would be in the power of the maritime nations, availing themselves of our universal impotence, to prescribe the conditions of our political existence...they would combine to embarrass our navigation...and confine us to a passive commerce.</blockquote><p></p><p>Hamilton has an eye to the future. In 1787 the America he spoke of consisted of 13 states occupying the eastern-most part of a much larger land mass. The balance of that land was colonized by Spain, France and Britain. It held tremendous untapped resources, had excellent access to the Atlantic Ocean, and useful interior waterways for transport, like the Ohio, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, and Great Lakes. Hamilton could see that the European colonizers were wary of potential threats by this upstart to their commercial and navigational domination. He could envision the potential for a union of states to become a prosperous player through trade. </p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>The Constitution has become a document of ideas, a template for a kind of government, but here Hamilton sells what makes it a practical document. Unity is not some sort of feel-good rallying cry, it is a strategy that would give a start-up nation the capacity to become a partner in world trade. A united states collective population topping 3 million would be a sizable market, one worth bidding for the right to do trade with. In 1787, Britain did not have commercial treaties with the American confederation. The ability to bar Britain from using American ports, would drive up the price of British goods. Of course, such prohibitive tactics would require a Navy to back them up. Another asset only attainable with the collective resources of multiple states. </p><p>There is discipline involved in the collaboration that Hamilton, Madison and Jay are advising, involving the suppression of rivalries that afforded immediate benefits to persons reaping economic or strategic advantages of their present position. First of all:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>An unrestrained intercourse between the States themselves will advance the trade of each, by an interchange of their respective productions, not only for the supply of reciprocal wants at home, but for exportation to foreign markets...Commercial enterprise will have much greater scope, from the diversity in the productions of different states...<br /></blockquote><p>Additionally:<br /></p><blockquote>Under a vigorous national government, the natural strength and resources of the country, directed to a common interest, would baffle all the combinations of European jealousy to restrain our growth... An active commerce, an extensive navigation, and a flourishing marine would then be the inevitable offspring... We might defy the little arts of little politicians to controul, or vary, the irresistible and unchangeable course of nature. </blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>Ah yes - the "little arts of little politicians," so influential still! It is clear that the advantages to be won out of unity would take longer to produce, and that some personal profits of those who reaped rewards early and easily would have to be sacrificed to the greater good. This has only been implied thus far, but we are talking of federal taxes. Some people didn't like them then either despite the advantages they afforded all Americans collectively. </p><p>Hamilton envisions opportunity for future gains from fishing and navigation rights to the Great Lakes and Mississippi River (not yet part of America). Individual states would offer little competition to the power of Spain, France, or Britain, he counsels, but the states united would.<br /></p><p>Hamilton concludes with an interesting point:</p><p></p><blockquote>The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe by her arms and by her negociations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America have successively felt her domination. The superiority, she has long maintained, has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority; and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America...It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation... Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! </blockquote><p></p><p>Hamilton says this in light of appropriating a land already occupied by established civilizations of Americans and then depriving African persons of their freedom in order to cultivate that land for their own gain. Vindicate the honor of the human race, indeed. <br /></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-21371175087388743242020-10-28T14:50:00.001-04:002020-10-29T09:22:43.333-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 10)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN9jJ6JPTTrkm0e0C3Ul-G7PM9qtROm_-8LwaKbWlpsT3NijWXsFJeG24-VNyLFWkHJuzyDJn4wTahwhfAZ0ituwGc60ZvWwOyUA0BXdot0dBo41sC09aRFJ1f3jGsAJkUJ4_rI9y0jYY/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN9jJ6JPTTrkm0e0C3Ul-G7PM9qtROm_-8LwaKbWlpsT3NijWXsFJeG24-VNyLFWkHJuzyDJn4wTahwhfAZ0ituwGc60ZvWwOyUA0BXdot0dBo41sC09aRFJ1f3jGsAJkUJ4_rI9y0jYY/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></div><br />THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 9. <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i><p></p><p></p><p>In Paper No. 10, James Madison takes the wheel for the first time, addressing the criticism of opponents to the proposed republic that public good and the rights of minorities end up being ignored in conflicts because of "the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority." I can think no paper of the ten that we have read thus far more applicable to our present political climate. </p><p>Madison parses the mechanisms that motivate and mitigate factions, defined as groups of citizens united by a common purpose that is adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the greater good. The biggest motivator it appears is human nature. </p><p></p><blockquote>As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self- love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. </blockquote><p></p><p>Egotism clouds judgment? I've never heard of such a thing! He continues:<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p></p><blockquote>A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning Government...an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to co-operate for their common good...</blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote>Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest..</blockquote><p></p><p>Different interests are desirable features of a diverse democratic society but they also divide people into groups such as political parties. It is the need to regulate competing interests that is the job of the law because, goodness knows, neither morality nor common sense can be prevailed upon for the more powerful to police themselves. </p><p></p><blockquote>No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. </blockquote><p></p><p>Clearly Paper No. 10 has not been read in some time. And as for the claim that "enlightened statesmen" will be able to govern their own interests and always act for the greater good, Madison only says:</p><p></p><blockquote>Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm...</blockquote><p></p><p>Ain't that the truth.<br /></p><p>How can a government mitigate the behavior of factions, Madison asks? Well, government can prohibit its existence altogether, even though the contrary passion is held by an opposing faction. For a contemporary example, abortion can be outlawed. Madison sees this means of control anathema to the American constitution, a case where the remedy is worse that the problem. </p><p></p><blockquote>...it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.</blockquote><p></p><p>If the idea is that the stronger political will is allowed to bully the other, we will forever seesaw between the primacy of one of the two interests, every time one side or the other gains an edge, as we witness today. </p><p>Madison explores how distinctive governmental structures act differently upon factions. "Pure Democracy," he writes, is when a small number of citizens administer government and the unchecked majority impose their will upon everyone. He is critical of such a government in that: <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>...there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property...</blockquote><p></p><p>The alternative to pure democracy is a republic, in which a larger populace assigns their governance to a small number of citizens. He sees this elected body as one...<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. </blockquote><p></p><p>We see precisely the opposite occurring today, where temporary advantage is the primary consideration of the ruling party, as in rushing a Supreme Court justice through the confirmation process. It's not unconstitutional, but it is contrary to the purpose stated here of a government considering the rights of the minority, not simply pushing through any legislation possible because they temporarily hold the upper hand. <br /></p><p>Madison anticipated that possibility too that "Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs...may betray the interests of the people." He saw the best protection in an increase in the number of representatives, but cautioned balance - a large enough number to protect against power by a cabal of zealots interested in some matter of importance only to themselves at the expense of concerns of greater scope, but a small enough number to guard against confusion. </p><p>In contrast to Montesquieu (as discussed in <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-federalist-papers-project_25.html" target="_blank">Episode 8</a>), Madison saw advantages in a republic of expansive extent, as it encompassed a greater variety of interests, making it less likely that the party in influence will "invade the rights of other citizens." This is only true when representatives actually represent a breadth of interests, something that is undone by techniques that work the system for partisan gain, such as the gerrymandering of districts. When Madison writes of a variety of parties increasing the security of our representation, it really makes a case for overthrowing strangle hold of the two-party system. The imposed either-or structure encourages binary, simpleminded thinking and discourages collaboration between parties.</p><p>What is apparent in Paper No. 10 is the desire of the proponents of the Constitution to attenuate the influence of the zelously partisan, the fallible, and the egotist in governance, but especially the bully, in limiting the liberty of fellow citizens who do not hold a majority and who still have a right to expect a government that represents them.</p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-6509262969454356222020-10-25T13:38:00.004-04:002020-10-29T09:21:55.687-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 9)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBIEfuci9cnf0HVoNrsF77sDsl5hKu0y-WSCEbSr9rt4h53RGrH-AVaDAd9OumbIAcchfjiodLUCTKjxei81nZSCyLuXEYCg8Vn8B5EEiPbg4vFlZepEPvl43qVXNs-LGrpEb02XRWfVk/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBIEfuci9cnf0HVoNrsF77sDsl5hKu0y-WSCEbSr9rt4h53RGrH-AVaDAd9OumbIAcchfjiodLUCTKjxei81nZSCyLuXEYCg8Vn8B5EEiPbg4vFlZepEPvl43qVXNs-LGrpEb02XRWfVk/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></div>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 8. <p><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. <br /></i></p><p></p><blockquote>It is impossible to read the history of the petty Republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions, by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration, between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.</blockquote><p></p><p>I read Hamilton's words and it is impossible for me not to reflect on the perpetual vibration of revolutionary moments. I think of another republic - Weimar Germany - so named because in 1919,
at the conclusion of World War I when the monarchy was transformed into
a republic, the National Constituent Assembly was convened in the City
of Weimar and its constitution drafted there. The Kaiser left power peacefully, but even this relatively non-violent revolution was accompanied by crippling hyperinflation, battles in the streets of Berlin, and the murder of opponents of the leading socialist party - the Communist revolutionaries Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. At this moment in America, we hear the screams of 'tyranny' from the left and 'anarchy' from the right. I think that it's fair to say we are experiencing our own form of agitation. Our framers sought stability for their burgeoning nation as they were coming out of a period of revolution, but time moves ever forward and when governments are incapable of being dynamically responsive to big societal changes, they become brittle and desperate. Witness politics 233 years after Hamilton dreamed of his united states.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>There are many flavors a republic can come in, if you are deliberately designing a government. In Paper No. 9, Hamilton looks to discredit an argument advanced by opponents of the United plan, who cited the French political philosopher Montesquieu. Montesquieu is best known for the concept of the separation of the powers of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government as a means of averting despotism. He advises republics of small territory to restrain those incapable of moderation from seeking glory and oppressing their fellow citizens. The anti-Federalists opposing Publius use this to support their argument. Hamilton counters, claiming it is not an either-or proposition. One can reduce the size of members of the Union, he writes, but nothing says they cannot be joined under the aegis of one confederacy. In fact Montesquieu explicitly proposed the formation of </p><p></p><blockquote><p>a confederate republic as the expedient for extending the sphere of popular government and reconciling... [and here Hamilton quotes Montesquieu] "the internal advantages of a republican, together with the external force of a monarchial government..."</p><p>"A republic of this kind, able to withstand an external force, may support itself without any internal corruption...If a single member should attempt to usurp the supreme authority, he could not be supposed to have equal authority and credit, in all the confederate states... Should a popular insurrection happen, in one of the confederate States, the others are able to quell it. Should abuses creep into one part, they are reformed by those that remain sound. The State may be destroyed on one side, and not on the other;"</p></blockquote><p>And here he says something that surprised me:</p><p></p><blockquote>"the confederacy may be dissolved, and the confederates preserve their sovereignty."</blockquote><p></p><p>Even Montesquieu allows for an out-clause. <br /></p><p>Hamilton clarifies that a confederacy draws the line by restricting the exercise of its authority to the "members in their collective capacities, without reaching to the individuals of whom they are composed." One guarantor of restraint is the members' voting power. The Lycian confederacy, in the 14th and 15th century BC in what is now Turkey, had a council of 23 member republics, the largest of which had three votes, the middle level two, and the smallest one. Montesquieu singled it out as his model confederate republic. <br /></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-17922829472957198212020-10-23T08:07:00.003-04:002020-10-29T09:21:15.609-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 8)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHzulaqDdDd0ncAlhVJohEtyEiilCprXnMq9C6MGx1fOiQjwJH4oWsGduL3QQHfdWwB2rZ339SKO265zFYhQ2xr8RhvpDJ7SqloYq7IvH6eFhgnP9pBRh7D1b0zb82_qQ9TtMYk9MmLM0/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHzulaqDdDd0ncAlhVJohEtyEiilCprXnMq9C6MGx1fOiQjwJH4oWsGduL3QQHfdWwB2rZ339SKO265zFYhQ2xr8RhvpDJ7SqloYq7IvH6eFhgnP9pBRh7D1b0zb82_qQ9TtMYk9MmLM0/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></div><br /> THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 7. <p></p><p><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i> </i>If we are wise enough to preserve the Union, we may for ages enjoy an advantage similar to that of an insulated situation. Europe is at a great distance from us. Her colonies in our vicinity, will be likely to continue to much disproportioned in strength, to be able to give us any dangerous annoyance. Extensive military establishments cannot, in this position, be necessary to our security. But if we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated, or which is most probably, should be thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe - our liberties would be prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other. </blockquote><p></p><p>Hamilton again writes about the superior safety of the united over the disunited model, however, he makes a novel point in Paper No. 8. European nations have a history of maintaining armies perpetually ready to fortify their borders and defend themselves against conquest, he writes. Regular skirmishes erupt to breach borders. The advantage is a recent history not of long violent wars and toppled empires, but of small towns taken and re-taken, a constant drain on resources. But the relative youth of America means that borders are not yet fortified. The result in a disunited America will be the easy victory of more populous over sparsely populated states, and a constant state of war that would be "desultory and predatory."</p><p>However, the ultimate cost here is that each American state, like the nations of Europe, will establish standing armies to defend their borders. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p></p><blockquote>Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war - the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty, to resort...to institutions, which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe they...become willing to run the risk of being less free. </blockquote><p></p><p>The smaller and naturally weaker states will have the most urgent reason to build up a large military, constantly at the ready to defend themselves, and here he makes the most vital point, this will require strengthening the executive branch of government. </p><p></p><blockquote><p>It is the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.</p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Vigorous leadership emphasizing strength, with the assistance of disciplined armies, will progress over time toward despotism, as was seen in "the old world." Monarchy is what the founding of America was trying to escape. Whether leaving for the promise of practicing a minority religion or greater economic opportunity, the antidote to restricted freedom was going to be the establishment of a system of representative government. This newly drafted constitution promised to be the next step in that process. </p><p>Hamilton vividly contrasts nations rarely exposed to invasion with those living in constant fear of them. With those rarely exposed: </p><p></p><blockquote>The laws are not accustomed to relaxations, in favor of military exigencies - the civil state remains in full vigor...the smallness of the army renders that natural strength of the community an overmatch for it; and the citizens, not habituated to look up to the military power for protection, or to submit to its oppressions, neither love nor fear the soldier...the army under such circumstances...will be unable to enforce encroachments against the united efforts of the great body of the people. </blockquote><p></p><p>vs. <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it - its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military states becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees, the people are taught to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors.</blockquote><p></p><p>Count on Alexander Hamilton writing in 1787 to put into words why Attorney General William Barr and President Donald Trump's assembling paramilitary forces composed of personnel from various Federal agencies to subdue vigorous protests is an outrageous infringement of Constitutional principle and not an invocation of "law and order" as usual. It reeks of despotism to subjugate American citizens' anger using military action carried out by forces in unmarked vehicles, wearing combat fatigues but with their insignia obscured, who are apparently not accountable to ranking military leaders. One sees in action just what Hamilton spoke of - a shifting away from Legislative and toward Executive authority. <br /></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-43006207212494464422020-10-22T15:03:00.002-04:002020-10-29T09:19:27.446-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 7)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG0pzIvlNWMOorUP0ERyjU6F0PHk13GeJDA7yYispV0mjjL6sr2q3yG4C2pSlSBUi6i9U9e-0JnaLE82Cjpf3UASVgPAjUOE_ksSJL2JQURhpnly7kpEjrYLJ9jvZ19LRRllJ58cRKuqw/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG0pzIvlNWMOorUP0ERyjU6F0PHk13GeJDA7yYispV0mjjL6sr2q3yG4C2pSlSBUi6i9U9e-0JnaLE82Cjpf3UASVgPAjUOE_ksSJL2JQURhpnly7kpEjrYLJ9jvZ19LRRllJ58cRKuqw/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></div><br />THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 6. <p></p><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i><p>Avoiding internecine conflict between states continues to occupy Hamilton's attention in Paper No. 7. He cites particularly, the likelihood of territorial disputes, given the "vast tract of unsettled territory within the boundaries of the United States," and the prevailing practice at that time of asking states to make concessions to the union that then existed in 1787 "for the benefit of the whole." However, he cautions, disuniting the states would mean that each could apply different principles,leading to more potential hostility without a "common judge to interpose between" the parties. </p><p> The same difficulty could apply to commercial disputes, and he imagines that significant objections are likely to raised by neighboring states if duties were levied by one against another. Settling the public debt of the existing Union was a particular concern as states could disagree not only to the rules governing what portion of the debt each would be responsible for, but also to policy regarding the discharging of a debt in general. </p><p></p><blockquote>There is perhaps nothing more likely to disturb the tranquility of nations, than their being bound to mutual contributions for any common object, which does not yield an equal and coincident benefit. For it is an observation as true, as it is trite, that there is nothing men differ so readily about as the payment of money. <span><a name='more'></a></span></blockquote><p></p><p>Apparently Hamilton had it right on the money. Even living under the ratified federal constitution here in question, 233 years later, the American president is arguing the value of our contribution to NATO and the United Nations. Hamilton concludes:</p><p></p><blockquote>America, if not connected at all, or only by the feeble tie of a simple league offensive and defensive, would by the operation of such opposite and jarring alliances be gradually entangled in all the pernicious labyrinths of European politics and wars; and by the destructive contentions of the part, into which she was divided would be likely to become a prey to the artifices and machinations of powers equally the enemies of them all. </blockquote><p></p><p>It saddens me as I read repeatedly about the power Publius saw vested in the Constitution. To them, it was a guarantor of a bond between Americans strong enough to encourage sacrifice of personal, party, or local advantage to the greater good of the whole. Clearly that power has dwindled and personal or party advantage reign supreme. <br /></p><p></p><p></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-85851554258254396592020-10-21T15:02:00.002-04:002020-10-29T09:18:46.848-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 6)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb2qUw-Gpd2QcgmEc59OZumBAt5x8QNh3FPUHsfR96ghX0xm5jnVnNjqB2pDeIwT0dfTneBwerZNHJiOf90UJ1NWpfiKXSgOqHl03ekm2W6WRTxaBZ2hGLk4cl4CKnSLKfA_90KeZfVvk/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb2qUw-Gpd2QcgmEc59OZumBAt5x8QNh3FPUHsfR96ghX0xm5jnVnNjqB2pDeIwT0dfTneBwerZNHJiOf90UJ1NWpfiKXSgOqHl03ekm2W6WRTxaBZ2hGLk4cl4CKnSLKfA_90KeZfVvk/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></div>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 5. <p></p><p><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. <br /></i></p><p>Alexander Hamilton takes up the pen again in the sixth paper. He writes:</p><p></p><p></p><blockquote>A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt, that if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighbourhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.</blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><p></p><p>The causes of hostility among nations are innumerable. There are some which have a general and almost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society: Of this description are the love of power or the desire of preeminence and dominion - the jealousy of power, or the desire of equality and safety. </p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>Masha Gessen reminds us in her recent book <i><a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/" target="_blank">Surviving Autocracy</a> </i>of Barack Obama's speech upon the election victory of Trump in 2016. Obama praised the democratic hallmark of a peaceful transition of power, adding:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good
faith in our fellow citizens, because that presumption of good faith is
essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.<span><a name='more'></a></span></blockquote><p></p><p>Yes it is the point. That our democracy was dependent upon good faith is abundantly clear, now that so many in power no longer practice it. One must assume from what Hamilton writes, that he sees the Constitution as imposing enough good faith among us, including those elected to office, to counter that ambitiousness, vindictivness, rapaciousness, and love of power of which he writes. He saw our formation as a union as binding us to act in good faith towards our laws and one another. Many executives and legislators have pushed the boundaries through history, but love for the law has always superseded the love of power. Until now. </p><p></p><blockquote><p></p><p></p><p></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>We the people,... in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty" do ordain and establish this Constitution... <br /></p></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">We <i>ordained</i> it. We invested it with a kind of holiness. Our founders chose their words seriously. So seriously that three men argued for 85 days to convince the citizens of New York of the value of its passage. </p><p>Those who argue that discrete states can be united through mutual interest in commerce, writes Hamilton, are not supported by examples, either from ancient history or more recent events. In fact, advantages of trade and navigation for trade can often be seen as the justification for war. Hamilton is clear eyed about the promise of our better natures motivating us to work together in harmony without being compelled to do so. </p><p></p><blockquote>...what reason can we have to confide in those reveries, which would seduce us into an expectation of peace and cordiality between the members of the present confederacy, in a state of separation? Have we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses and evils incident to society in every shape? Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct, that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?</blockquote><p></p><p>"Neighbouring nations are natural enemies...", Hamilton quotes <i>Vide Principes des Negotiations </i>by L'Abbe de Mably, "unless their... constitution prevents the differences that neighbourhood occasions, extinguishing that secret jealousy, which disposes all States to aggrandise themselves at the expense of their neighbour." It is the written rule of law, and its proper administration, that guides human nature away from its natural tendency towards selfish ambition.<br /></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-50546970137396787462020-10-20T14:06:00.000-04:002020-10-20T14:06:20.044-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 5)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7KDmAvHVdvbpuLeN9FFMbFe0j9QiOVjXHftdbP1eHgv7y0gnF62vhDmpfEbLokN8RiPH-XpRc7GidXOKATN6x0lLl686uc3StjIyPe89F-bEn0KeYy8ai0Ezpy6jb92R_Skp2xnni7gs/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7KDmAvHVdvbpuLeN9FFMbFe0j9QiOVjXHftdbP1eHgv7y0gnF62vhDmpfEbLokN8RiPH-XpRc7GidXOKATN6x0lLl686uc3StjIyPe89F-bEn0KeYy8ai0Ezpy6jb92R_Skp2xnni7gs/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></div>THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - Part 4. <p></p><p><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">A link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i></p><p>John Jay writes in Paper No. 5 of a letter that Queen Ann wrote to the Scottish Parliament in 1706 in favor of the union of England and Scotland:</p><p>An entire and perfect Union will be the solid foundation of lasting peace: It will secure your religion, liberty, and property, remove the animosities amongst yourselves, and the jealousies and differences betwixt our two kingdoms. It must encrease your strength, riches, and trade: and by this Union the whole Island, being joined in affection and free from all apprehensions of different interest, will be <i>enabled to resist all its enemies.</i></p><p>There's a sales job if there ever was one. Buy united elixir!<i> </i>It will remove blemishes, relieve tooth pain, improve the insulation of your home, and generally shower riches upon you - or it certainly will for the salesperson since she will have your revenue. However hyperbolic Queen Ann's promises, they worked! Scotland and England created a formal political union in 1707. It took only 150 years for the Scots to start campaigning for Home Rule. An independence referendum was voted on as recently as 2014 and almost 45% of Scots voted for independence. When the UK voted on Brexit, 62% of Scots voted to remain in the EU in contrast to the 48% of British citizens overall. The First Minister of Scotland claimed this as a justification for another independence referendum, but the Prime Minister declined to put it to a vote so soon after the last one.</p><p>Jay adds to the arguments he already made by using the example of the history of Great Britain to support why a united nation is preferable to a divided one, The disagreements between the three nations that previously comprised Britain, he claims, kept them in a nearly perpetual state of war centuries, weakening their ability to defend themselves from the attacks by foreign enemies. He proposes that multiple nations on the American landmass would create policy and border disputes. He cautions that these nations will not necessarily be equal in their in their strengths, as if to say, if you welcome war don't be so certain that you won't lose. </p><p>Separate nations would also have separate commercial interests, and their commerce with other countries would be regulated by separate treaties. So adjacent nations could end up taking opposing sides in a dispute with a third party, risking the dangers of war with each other. </p><p></p><p>I have always found it interesting when Americans argue - why should we care what other nations think? Clearly the founders of our government had a different idea. They understood that power is defined by the ability to defend oneself and to support oneself via commerce, and those abilities are dependent upon our relationships with other nations. </p><p></p><p></p><p>Here are links to the other installments: <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-federalist-papers-project.html" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-federalist-papers-project_18.html" target="_blank">2</a>, <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-federalist-papers-project_19.html" target="_blank">3</a><br /></p><p></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-66848635120908615962020-10-19T16:11:00.001-04:002020-10-29T09:17:13.309-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About Our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Paper No. 4)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisqmfEV0wEbNLFdvvcVvMdVDu_m2uSpu-M5thnRS0bYWWQ_agrJIB-Ejd-n1EnwCU3crFfdk7tg5Qy4G1tx6VUYfcVinFmdGX4IBirl80GR_lhhqv0VLc9cVbgGA3a_yqE9iwuchUM2zU/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisqmfEV0wEbNLFdvvcVvMdVDu_m2uSpu-M5thnRS0bYWWQ_agrJIB-Ejd-n1EnwCU3crFfdk7tg5Qy4G1tx6VUYfcVinFmdGX4IBirl80GR_lhhqv0VLc9cVbgGA3a_yqE9iwuchUM2zU/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></div>And on we go with THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT. <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">Here is that link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>. </i> <p></p><p>Did any of you read the opinion piece in today's <i>The New York Times </i>by Michael Albertus about the upcoming vote on <a href="https://nyti.ms/2T4NCAD" target="_blank">Chile's new constitution</a>? I thought it interesting to read in parallel to <i>The Federalist Papers </i>since it is about another populous focused on creating rights and delineating responsibilities of government towards citizens and citizens towards government, but they are doing so in reaction to an autocratic regime of the elite, so they are emphasizing accountability, citizen engagement, and <u>decentralization</u>, whereas Hamilton, Jay, and Madison were arguing for centralization. Chilean citizens vote to ratify or not on October 25. I wonder what they will choose and whether there are pieces in their newspapers, or other media, doing the work of <i>The Federalist Papers?</i></p><p><i> </i>In Paper No. 4, John Jay continues to consider the advantages of Federalism in ensuring the safety of Americans. He reflects on the ubiquity of war under monarchy:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenver they have a prospect of getting any thing by it, nay that absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as, a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts; ambition or private compact to aggrandize or support their particular families, or partizans. These and a variety of motives, which affect only the mind of the Sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice, or the voice and interests of his people. </p><p></p></blockquote><p>Leaders who govern based on revenge for personal affronts or aggrandizement of their families and allies? Outrageous. Thank heavens we don't have to put up with that anymore. That is only when the decisions rest on the "mind of a Sovereign," and having neither a mind nor a Sovereign at the helm of the now united states, we have nothing to fear. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Jay identifies the most likely incitement that might encourage other nations to perceive us as rivals and threaten war is commerce. He envisions that the States may engage in trade with parties such as China or India, supplying ourselves independently with their commodities rather than relying on third parties. The expansion of our own commerce, Jay writes, is likely, as our merchandise will be be preferred for its affordability and quality, although he offers no support for this assertion, perhaps a forerunner of 'Buy American!' At the time, Spain shut off access to the Mississippi River and Britain did the same for the St. Laurence, which Jay saw as presaging future jealousy of nations that could become our rivals in trade.</p><p></p><p>These circumstances could invite war and it is a strong national government, Jay argues, that will discourage it. One central government will be more competent at military defense not only because it will consolidate the best experience across the states, but it will also create a unified system of discipline. A Union can choose to act on uniform principles of policy - in other words, it will weigh the benefits toward one or another individual part, and choose to act when it most benefits the whole. and then apply the combined resources of the whole towards that defense. It is interesting that Jay chooses to remind his New Yorker readers of the reputation of the British Navy - the militia of the enemy - whose high regard he attributes to consolidated leadership and training of the Scots, Irish, Welsh and English who comprise it. </p><p>But really, he gets to the meat of the matter, when he asks what armies or fleets they could pay if they didn't combine the resources of the disunited states. Which brings up one of the key powers that the pre-constitution Articles of Confederation did not afford the government - the right to tax its citizens. Given the history of the rejection of British rule for this very reason, that omission can hardly be surprising.<br /></p><p></p><p>I can see that there are a few of you reading out there, but no comments as of yet. Take the plunge, won't you? </p><p>And if you haven't read the other installments they are here: <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-federalist-papers-project.html" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-federalist-papers-project_18.html" target="_blank">2</a> <br /></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-57688485990725965602020-10-18T15:15:00.002-04:002020-10-29T09:15:37.131-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Papers Nos. 2 & 3)<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIVBdFxGwBpxQr-ut5MjtQjS1N2UDjgP5oRnVUrVzjwQTf2g0_h5xwu0HIliSlF-3p16R60sfE4taWsPdrpSeG5r3lvVn0FZJ0k001cU1rNIWfYlmmbd05LuJA4Xig7sKuydCtWjaQ2mU/s279/Federalist_papers.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEyeQc9QBivili6kAd1kKOwJyLpkAoYwMVEsh9ixyvOSSBmGIMeX9NL1ptZOqR866kGIOT-OgFl1k7jp6BAedTPRSwhcpZueftZtSs0A8iFcNfzjr8hrBstT_0aMIhbhgtAy_tQyKQplc/s308/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="308" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEyeQc9QBivili6kAd1kKOwJyLpkAoYwMVEsh9ixyvOSSBmGIMeX9NL1ptZOqR866kGIOT-OgFl1k7jp6BAedTPRSwhcpZueftZtSs0A8iFcNfzjr8hrBstT_0aMIhbhgtAy_tQyKQplc/s0/Federalist_papers_re-size.jpg" /></a></div> <p></p><p>Welcome back to THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT, a read-along challenge with the aim of focusing attention during the lead-up and aftermath to the 2020 U.S. election on something more essential than the mess that currently passes for politics. <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">Here is a link to Project Gutenberg's free source edition of </a><i><a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">The Federalist Papers</a>.</i> </p><p>Papers numbers two and three were both written by John Jay. Jay served many roles in the formative days of the United States - he was a delegate to the Continental Congress, President of the Continental Congress, Secretary of State and of Foreign Affairs for President Washington, Governor of New York, and is probably best known for being the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was known to have written only papers numbers two through five. </p><p></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of Government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights, in order to vest it with requisite powers. </p></blockquote><p>It's worth remembering that the American Constitution did establish federalism, because the states did ultimately ratify it. This is what we signed up for and yet today candidates regularly run for federal office on "anti-government" platforms. Jay writes that the plan is "recommended not imposed," he submits it for the voters "sedate and candid consideration," but concedes that such consideration is "more to be wished than expected." It seems is that the voters of his day may have been, shall we say, as driven by passion and impulse as are some of our own. </p><p>Jay lays out the decision to be made by the voters of the time: do we look to the states to be the separate guarantors of our safety and prosperity, or do we confer that ultimate power on a consolidated union?</p><p>His arguments for Federalism begin with his observation that the landscape is physically undivided, as if to say, if god wanted it divided, he would have made it that way. He shares his belief that "Providence" not only made land and rivers of beauty and usefulness, but that he gave them: <br /></p><p></p><blockquote>to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government...This country and this people seem to have been made for each other...<br /></blockquote><p></p><p>My reaction to this is two-fold. On one hand, I feel disgust at the assumption that this land was made explicitly and exclusively for people only like himself. It was not made for the natives who inhabited it for thousands of years prior to his ancestors' arrival, nor for the Portuguese who settled it in the 16th Century, nor for the Africans who were dragged here against their will. The blithe certainty with which he writes could only be born of religion, which seems to breed certainty when humility would be more appropriate. One doesn't have to look very far to see the descendants of this sort of opinion in the United States of today. When he claims that "we have uniformly been one people...every where enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection," I can only hear the delusion of someone who believes that their own experience must be everyone's. </p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p></p><p>On the other hand, I am struck by his love for the physical attributes of America as a land. I wish that this appreciation of its beauty and bounty was a more influential priority in people who serve in office today.</p><p>In Paper No. 3, Jay argues that a centralized government affords better security against threats from "foreign arms and influence" than do separate states or confederacies. Jay does not consider so much our defense against others via arms, he first addresses whether it is a United or disunited America that itself is likely to invite war because of violation of treaties or outright violence. Imagine, he so values peace that he first considers whether America is more likely to observe our responsibilities towards <i>other </i>nations. He notes that in mediating questions of the treaties between nations, this will be more efficiently, consistently, and dispassionately accomplished by a central government than by multiple entities, where one or the other may have distinct interests. Should it come to war for a just cause, he argues, a national government will afford more robust security. Lastly, a national body will have the widest choice of expertise and talent. </p><p>What do you take away from Papers 2 and 3?</p><p>And in case you missed it, here is a <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-federalist-papers-project.html" target="_blank">link to my post of Paper 1</a>. <br /></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-33450264099408309822020-10-17T14:47:00.001-04:002020-10-17T15:05:59.043-04:00THE FEDERALIST PAPERS PROJECT - A Commitment to Deep Thinking About our Political Origins in the Presence of Noise (Intro and Paper No. 1)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz_WmhcEPKEKuO0ok1kqGp0Z2HyahA8zBRoG8lgnoAT2mJAGEGZe6j0EVzFSATwmL5WwWz9Q5rI8fhI0rLLtw5QEEwgcTare7IK0GvHyz3SiS83KvWR2Dw0fC6o__EoeWeUgO_RhNieKg/s279/Federalist_papers.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz_WmhcEPKEKuO0ok1kqGp0Z2HyahA8zBRoG8lgnoAT2mJAGEGZe6j0EVzFSATwmL5WwWz9Q5rI8fhI0rLLtw5QEEwgcTare7IK0GvHyz3SiS83KvWR2Dw0fC6o__EoeWeUgO_RhNieKg/s0/Federalist_papers.jpg" /></a></div>It has been ages since I have written here, let alone created a series, I fear that I may be out of practice. Back in 2007, I visited a poem every Friday in a series called <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/search/label/An%20Inflorescence" target="_blank">An Inflorescence</a>. That originated from a hankering to read and think about a form that would counter the statistical and scientific material that I was spending time with while earning a PhD in neuroscience. Similarly, this series is born out of a need to change the channel. <p></p><p>The clamor of politics these days is reactive, ugly, and lacks the space for reflection on or reference to our political and philosophical underpinnings. Well, nobody is going to do it for me, I thought. What would I read to counter the noise? My choice was a return to a 'classic,' that is a work that has been judged to be of established value, and that was essential to our origins as a body politic. <i> </i></p><p><i>The Federalist Papers </i>were written in 1787-88 by three founders of the United States government, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, under the joint pseudonym of Publius. They were published in three New York newspapers the <i>Independent Journal, New York Packet, </i>and <i>The Daily Advertiser</i>. <i>The Federalist Papers </i>are a collection of 85 arguments to the people of New York State that the Articles of Confederation, the original U.S. government charter, quickly written during wartime in 1777, was insufficient in granting the Federal government the authority that it required to govern. The papers advocated for the ratification of the newly written Constitution that proposed, among other things, the establishment of a federal government with executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and conferred upon that government the ability to levy taxes and regulate commerce. </p><p>Proposition: With 85 essays, most of them brief, reading about one per day skipping a few upcoming holidays, we should be able to get through them by inauguration day. I don't know about you, but I need a project that helps focus me on the original positive purpose for the establishment of these united states, that reminds me of the value inherent in a "government of laws and not of men," and that is on-going through what is left of the campaign, the election, and its results. I invite you to read along with me and share your thoughts in the comments. <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text" target="_blank">This links the full text of <i>The Federalist Papers </i>freely available on line</a>- thank you Project Gutenberg. </p><p>Caveat: Please be warned, this is <u>my</u> blog. I write what <u>I</u> think here. I am issuing an invitation for reflection on and engagement with a classic work. This is a space for civil discourse, and what is civil is determined by me. If your comments are false, excessively whiny, or unkind I will delete them. </p><p>And with the housekeeping out of the way, let's start with Hamilton's first essay. </p><p></p><blockquote><p>...it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. If there by any truth in the remark, the crisis, at which we are arrived, may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act, may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind. </p></blockquote><p>It is striking how seriously Hamilton takes the responsibility of the ratification process towards the future. One must wonder what he would think of the ability of our present society to embody good government, but his point here, I believe, is whether imperfect people can create a government that is better than they are. <br /></p><p>It is notable, too, that he begins his consideration not with the arguments for, but instead with the obstacles to passage of the new Constitution:</p><blockquote><p>the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument and consequence of the office they hold... and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandise themselves by the confusions of their country...<br /></p></blockquote><p>Time and writing styles have changed, but apparently "men" have not, a strangely comforting thought. Blaming men, Hamilton continues, for their biases is a dishonest point of view. These men likely have honorable intentions and are simply making "errors of mind led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears." There are so many reasons that a "wise and good man" can be wrong, he essentially writes. How elegant to apparently argue your opponent's honor, attributing his opposition only to misunderstanding, and to uncertainty that those who "advocate the truth" aren't motivated by greed, personal hatred or party politics. He paves the way for the role of the essays that will follow in attributing to his opponents the possibility of being influenced by them.<br /></p><p></p><p>Hamilton is aware of the passion both sides feel in the debate over ratifying the Constitution and he counsels </p><p></p><blockquote><p>nothing could be more illjudged than that intolerant spirit, which has, at all times, characterised political parties... they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations, and by the bitterness of their invectives. <br /></p></blockquote><p>Ratification in this context is about agreeing to a system of government with centralized powers, something still objected to by some today. Hamilton here makes his point of view clear:</p><blockquote><p>The vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty...</p></blockquote>I hope that I will have some reading companions to accompany me on this journey. Assuming that I do, what were your thoughts on reading the first paper? <br /><p><br /></p>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-32948903200370001472017-03-18T10:35:00.001-04:002017-03-18T10:35:48.681-04:00The Great Championer of Art (Books - Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and Civilisation by James Stourton)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Kenneth Clark, I think it is safe to say, was the most influential championer of art of his time. Art consultant to King George VI, Director of Britain's National Gallery at just 29 years-of-age, Clark maintained this role through World War II, and although the paintings were removed to protect them from German bombs, he made the museum a rallying place to bolster the spirits of the people via art and music programming. Art as an antidote to war - the antithesis to American president's decision this past week to eliminate the National Endowment of the Arts in favor of military spending. Clark was also creator of Independent Television - an alternative to the BBC, and is probably best remembered as creator and host of the landmark television series <i>Civilisation, </i>made in 1969. He was friend and patron of many artists and writers the likes of Duncan Grant, John Betjeman, and Henry Moore. It is easy to see why James Stourton was drawn to write <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kenneth-Clark-Life-Art-Civilisation/dp/0385351178/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1489844926&sr=1-1&keywords=kenneth+clark" target="_blank">Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation</a> </i>(Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) with such a compelling subject.<br />
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Stourton was thorough with the timeline of events, comprehensive in chronicling Clark's many relationships with artists, royalty and paramours, and complex in revealing his subjects contradictions - a mind described as cold and hard as a diamond, yet a nature passionate enough to break down in tears as he narrated an episode of <i>Civilisation</i> on the steps of the church door at Wittenberg. This biography would have been helped by a clearer sense of time and place. Although Clark accomplished some of his most memorable acts in war-torn London, they seem no different from those that occurred in the 1950s or 1960s. The decades slip by unnoticed, first the war, then the Ministry of Information and suddenly Clark is working in television. I found myself looking back a few pages looking for the indication that as Clark's vitae was covered that happened in the context of a world whose politics, science, art and design changed. We know that Clark made a call, wrote a letter, or sipped a drink, but the phone, the pen, the glass is invisible. If insulation from change was the point, this was unclear. The resulting biography was a series of deeds occurring in a vacuum, making a rich life feel strangely unanchored. <br />
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What comes through in Strourton's book regardless is what Clark stood for. Clark quoted Ruskin: "Great nations write their autobiography in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last." Judging by this standard, the United States in 2017 will be remembered as thoughtless, illiterate, and impoverished. <br />
Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-77547520268046294022016-09-05T08:45:00.002-04:002017-03-18T09:14:15.366-04:00Personal Mysteries Drive Forward a Story of International Law (Books - East West Street by Philippe Sands)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Once known as "little Paris of the Ukraine," the city of Lemberg (also called Lw<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%;">ó</span></span>w, Lvov and Lviv, depending on the moment in history and who was doing the calling) figures prominently in Philippe Sands's <i>East West Street </i>(Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). Invited to deliver a lecture on international law at the University, he uses the opportunity to do a little research into family history, as it is the place of his maternal grandfather's birth. In seeking answers to questions about his grandparents' immigration to Paris in 1938, he learns that three other men crossed paths in the city of Lviv. One was Hans Frank, a lawyer appointed by the Nazi's to run the Jewish ghetto, where he condemned its entire Jewish population to death. The other two men both figured prominently in Sands's own profession, Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, Both studied law in Lviv, they event studied under the same professor, and both invented key mechanisms of international law used today.<br />
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Lauterpacht conceived of crimes against humanity, which he saw as an internationally applied mechanism that uses principles of national law to protect the well-being of individuals against acts by the country in which they reside, such as enslavement, deportation, torture, or murder. Until this point the state was seen as an entity whose power was inviolate (some countries still see it this way) but Lauterpacht felt that the right of individuals to liberty and the pursuit of their pleasure was sacrosanct, and superceded a nation's sovereignty. Lemkin invented the concept of genocide. In fact, the word did not exist before he coined it. It was as a law student that Lemkin first felt a sense of outrage towards the Turkish mass slaughter of Armenians. "So it's a crime for Tehlirian to strike down one man, but not a crime for that man to have struck down one million men," Lemkin is said to have asked? Lemkin described the process via which the German state stripped Jews and others first of their nationality - severing them from the state, then dehumanizing them - removing their legal rights (since, being stateless, they no longer could claim the protection of the law), and finally by killing them spiritually, culturally, and eventually literally. Lemkin's concept was focused as a legal solution to this process, and so on crimes committed against groups rather than individuals. During the Nuremberg trials following World War II, both he and Lauterpacht vied for the use of their mechanism in prosecuting Nazis. The trial set the precedent for the trying and punishing of such offenses that were excused under the laws of their own countries, but seen as an outrage by broader humanitarian standards. Mechanisms to carry out international justice have taken a long time to put into practice. It was the late 1990s before international law had the teeth to punish individuals such as Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia, and August Pinochet, former president of Chile, for their crimes. <br />
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What Sands does so effectively in this book is mix personal stories with what could be a fairly technical narrative about the origins of international law. The result could have made the personal anecdotes trivial or the legal history dry, but instead Sands's personal drive to find out the next detail about his grandfather becomes the narrative engine. In the course of researching his book, Sands meets Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank (The Butcher of Poland). Frank's participation enriches the book with a second personal story that adds layers of human introspection and sadness, as well as an authenticity to the consideration of Hans Frank's guilt. Although the outcome of the Nuremberg trials was announced long ago, the
pages leading up to the tribunal's decision is suspenseful - tracking the development of the application of international law in light
of the lives of Lauterpacht and Lemkin, I found myself caring deeply
about whose legal work was applied and to the outcome of the trial. It is personal stakes that drove Lauterpacht and Lemkin's efforts, just as it drove Sands's curiosity, and this propels <i>East West Street </i>forward<i>. </i> <br />
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<i>East West Street </i>also illuminated how old some of the attitudes are that fueled the recent Brexit vote in the UK. In the aftermath of World War I:<br />
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President Wilson proposed a special treaty to link Poland's membership in the League of Nations with a commitment to bestow equal treatment on racial and national minorities. Wilson was supported by France, but Britain objected, fearful that similar rights would then be accorded to other groups, including "American negroes, Southern Irish, Flemings and Catalans." The new League of Nations must not protect minorities in all countries, a British official complained, or it would have "The right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from more serious problems, such as the Irish." Britain objected to any depletion of sovereignty - the right to treat others as it wished - or international oversight. It took this position even if the price was more "Injustice and oppression."</blockquote>
Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-58168882314800011272016-08-06T11:37:00.000-04:002016-08-06T20:15:59.610-04:00What is left when what we loved is gone? (Books - What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the New York art world of the 1970s, art historian, Leo Hertzberg, experiences a powerful painting. He buys it, beginning a friendship with the artist Bill Wechsler that is the center of <i>What I Loved </i>(Sceptre, 2016)<i> </i>Siri Hustvedt's deep, serious, and multifarious novel, first published in 2003<i> </i>and recently released in a beautiful new softcover edition from Sceptre.<i> </i><br />
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<i>What I Loved </i>is about many things: art, love between friends, between lovers, spouses, parents and children, and it is also very much about loss - as the title presages. It is Hustvedt's accomplishment that though this novel occurs over a span of thirty years, interrelating the psychology of hysteria and eating disorders, page-long descriptions of visual art, details of quotidian domestic existence and passionate infidelity, and moments of profound grief, and though it is told from the first-person perspective of a somewhat fusty art academic, you don't look at the brushwork. The ins, outs, and intersections of theme, of characters and of what they make - because everyone is painting, drawing, writing essays, a dissertation, cooking a meal, staging a rave (these characters are nothing if not generative) - this welter of detail gives rise to a single complexity - a work of rich substance and of emotional heft.<br />
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Art is mysterious, but selling art may be even more mysterious. The
object itself is bought and sold, handed from one person to another, and
yet countless factors are at work within the transaction. In order to
grow in value, a work of art requires a particular psychological
climate. At that moment, SoHo provided exactly the right amount of
mental heat for art to thrive and for prices to soar. Expensive work
from every period must be impregnated by the intangible - an idea of
worth. This idea has the paradoxical effect of detaching the name of the
artist from the thing, and the name becomes the commodity that is
bought and sold. The object merely trails after the name as its solid
proof.</blockquote>
The distance Leo Hertzberg, the first-person narrator, is accustomed to keeping from his experiences - his sometimes pedantic explanations, his stoic voice - are, in fact, key to the reader's appreciation of the gestalt of this novel, as well as to be being moved by it. A good art historian or critic's eye is trained to see how pieces form a whole, how small gestures lead to large impacts. That perspective helps us pull together the idea of what a painting or play or book accomplishes - to give words to the process behind what has happened to us in the appreciation of a work. Many people don't care to look further than what has happened to them, but if you do, then a good critic can become a valuable guide.<br />
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For all the intelligence and deliberateness Hustvedt gives Leo, she also gives him a beautiful, unsophisticated quirk. Leo has a private drawer where he keeps objects - talismans of profound moments and relationships. As his life progresses and his losses grow, that drawer becomes more and more full. What goes into it would be unlikely to have the same value to anyone else. The excerpt that I quoted from the novel may be speaking about art as a commodity, but it is indeed "an idea of worth" that gives anything its value. Life is full of millions of bits of information, things we must do, things we have done, but when something pierces through the membrane of consciousness, it leaves behind something that is not the thing itself, but a symbol of it. This is what art does, and really we hang onto a rock, a ticket stub, or a pocket knife for the same reason. It becomes endowed with and speaks to an experience that has formed us. It lets us be touched by it all over again.<br />
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What Hustvedt also weaves in to the story in a profound way is the subject of mental illness - she explores more than one illness of the psyche which, in the context of this novel, I couldn't help but experience as analogous to these objects of memory. The illness too is born of something formative. There are genes which lay the groundwork, but don't necessarily guarantee a specific outcome. And then there are injuries - losses of love, of security. And long after these wounds have closed, or relative security has been regained, in the afflicted person the power of the hurt remains, although taking some different form. The result is a person who experiences aspects of the world as endowed with a significance other people do not perceive. <br />
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<i>What I Loved </i>begins with Leo's discovery of letters between Bill Wechsler and the love of his life - an exemplary opening to a work that is a contemplation on what is left when what we loved is gone. But the rhythm is anything but contemplative. The engine powering the narrative is the drive of the SoHo art world - giving this penetrating work the pace of an entertainment.Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-3581058192510499302016-07-30T08:07:00.000-04:002016-07-30T08:07:05.113-04:00A harpist for whom someone else pulls the strings (Books - The Extra by A. B. Yehoshua)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A. B. Yehoshua is one of just a few Israeli writers, along with Amos Oz and <a href="http://bookeywookey.blogspot.com/2011/02/tellings-stories-to-keep-son-alive.html" target="_blank">David Grossman</a>, whose novels are regularly<i> </i>translated and make their way to the U.S. I especially enjoyed his <i>Mr. Mani, </i>a sweeping tale of six generations of a Sephardic family. His latest <i>The Extra </i>trans. Stuart Schoffman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) concerns Noga, an Israeli-born harpist, living in Holland. Following her father's death, her brother wishes their mother to leave her Jerusalem apartment and move to an assisted living facility near his home. His mother resists, so a compromise is reached - she will try out the facility for three months. Through a quirk of the law, she risks losing her Jerusalem apartment if it is not occupied by a member of the family, so Noga is asked to take a leave from her job with a Dutch orchestra and stay in Jerusalem for that period. <br />
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I have experienced Yehoshua's exploration of themes of responsibility, family, and how they intersect with professional life in other works. He is especially skilled at writing a credible family relationships - complete with the way childhood patterns make their way into adulthood, their obfuscation, their guilt. What I enjoyed especially in this novel is that Noga's brother finds her work as an extra in film and television projects. During her time in Jerusalem, as Noga mourns her recently deceased father, and is forced to confront her ex-husband and revisit the disagreements they had about whether to have children. The concept of this novel conceives of her Jerusalem stay as a sustained fantasy during which she tries on all sorts of different characters but is always in the background of someone else's story. <br />
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All the ingredients are here for a splendid creation and yet, they don't add up. Several aspects of the novel fell short for me, the biggest was the premise. Yehoshua tries his darnedest to compel Noga's presence in Jerusalem, to trap her there in order to create the sense of being trapped, of life-suspended, but I did not find the peculiar residence statute convincing (and for all I know, it's true). In some ways, Yehoshua worked too hard. I might have been more convinced had Noga compelled herself to stay, rather than make is the fault of her brother, or the fault of the law. Then the weirdness of the dream-like-period of her life would have been of her <i>own </i>making. Here it seemed a borrowed reality and, when she left it, she would escape. Part of the plot rides on Noga's revisiting her decision to not have children. She faces a tribunal of opinion - her ex-husband's, her father's, her mother's - about a decision which was ultimately her own. This was hardly lacking in reality but I found the tone strangely judgmental, as though she could have made the "right" decision and did not. The most constant impediment to my appreciation of the novel was the translation. The prose was dated and clunky, and the dialogue particularly stilted, especially given the relatively young age of the central character. Using the job of an extra as a device in this story made my mind (unsurprisingly) to the job of acting. The skeleton of one's part is determined by others - writers, directors. But it is the job of the actor to create a person with agency who is eternally confronting something new. Noga seemed to have no agency and as a result, her performance was uncompelling - a harpist, who makes an unplanned detour as an actress, but for whom someone else is pulling the strings.Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-11185053357543279382016-07-24T07:39:00.003-04:002016-07-24T07:59:03.708-04:00The Consequences of Betrayal (Books - Exposure by Helen Dunmore)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Helen Dunmore's <i>Exposure </i>(Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016) is a gently genre-defying novel - a deep and satisfying story of relationships posing as a cold war spy novel. It is as if someone were filming an espionage thriller and this is the story from the backstage perspective. The actor makes his entrance into the office to be challenged on the missing pages from the dossier, but you, the reader, are watching him as he prepares off-set, smooth back his hair prior to his entrance, and when he enters to play the scene, instead of focusing on the written dialogue, you hear a voice-over of what he is thinking while playing the scene. <br />
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Since this is the obverse of an espionage novel, the plot as such is not the point, but... it is the 1960s. Lily's husband, Simon, who works a mid-level job for British Intelligence, is asked by his superior, Giles, to return a sensitive file when Giles unexpectedly lands in the hospital. Lily unwittingly discovers it and buries it to protect her husband. Simon is just unimportant enough in the power hierarchy, and the file just important enough, that he becomes a scapegoat when its disappearance must be covered up. He home is searched. He is carted off, awaiting a courtroom trial in a jail cell and Lily and her children gradually become ostracized.<br />
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Lily came to England as a German Jewish refugee pre-World War II. As she struggles to protect her young children from the fallout of her husband's disgrace, her own memories of being a child in a threatening situation of which she has a limited understanding surface. Lily's mother speaking to her in German flows into the next sentence in which Lily speaks to her own children. Dunmore frames the novel with Simon's memory of being tormented by his
brothers as a child for being different from them. Dunmore does not announce these shifts and the result is a beautifully complex narrative that layers past and present seamlessly. That seamlessness is essential in this novel about the impact of the past on the present. <br />
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This perspective affords the reader a viewpoint of innocence. As we lose that innocence we learn that people are not only who they appear to be on the
surface. But it is not a permanent kind of learning, the past penetrates the present when the mind returns to that state in love, when we gain trust, the feeling that we know another. That secure state is one of the allures of intimacy. Each betrayal of that trust is a devastation. <br />
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This sort of betrayal is the subject of Dunmore's <i>Exposure. </i>Her<i> </i>accomplishment is the subtle juxtaposition of personal with national betrayal. The foundation of Cold War politics was mistrust - seeing duplicity everywhere. This is especially sad for being born out of the carnage of World War II. When Lily reaches England after fleeing Germany, her mother says to
her that they came to this new country so that she would never feel unsafe
again. I read this while visiting the UK just following the Brexit vote, One wonders if Lily and her mother would have found refuge had they tried to flee today. It seems that we are again seeing betrayal everywhere. <br />
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Giles too
time-travels through memory to earlier, more idyllic years, while ailing
in the hospital, years in which he was in love. Although Giles is a spy, his deception goes deeper than hiding his profession as Giles is gay. Living in a country where this is criminalized, his deception is constant. He not only betrays others, but also himself. As he lies in bed, Giles confronts his mortality or "Good old extinction," as he calls it.<br />
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He dreams of falling from shocking heights, and wakes with a jolt, sweating, struggling for air. Nurse Davies has left the bell within reach. He puts his finger on it, but he doesn't push the button. He knows that he's breathless from panic, not want of oxygen. If he keeps very still, his breathing will steady. He hears footsteps, and the nurses' night-time voices. They're only just outside. No need to call them. He turns his head to see the luminous hands of his travelling clock. Only ten to two, Ma C. brought in his little folding clock in its brown leather case that has been all over the world with him. Who'd have thought it would end up here? There it is, ticking away, just as it ticked in Vienna and Istanbul, My God, what sights that clock has seen.</blockquote>
The difference between Dunmore's novel and the spy novel as we know it, is that the suspense doesn't come from a breathless car chase or a scene where the protagonist sneaks into the office to photograph the papers, the tension here is of a more existential sort. The genius of <i>Exposure </i>is Dunmore's imagining of what prompts these truths to surface. Her props are almost banal - a childhood memory, a dossier tossed behind the children's clothing in a wardrobe, a travelling clock sitting by the bedside. Their familiarity, and the time Dunmore takes to set them in the commonplace world she has fashioned, prompt the reader to place themselves there and ask not ''who did what, but instead - what now. What are the consequences of this betrayal? Good question.Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-67423283332837306102016-07-17T07:28:00.002-04:002016-07-17T07:28:33.500-04:00Flat storytelling dulls new YA series (Book - Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Sylvain Neuvel's <i>Sleeping Giants </i>(Del Rey, 2016) is the first volume of a planned YA fantasy series. A young girl happens upon a giant hand at the bottom of a hole dug into the earth. It is composed of an unidentifiable metal, is several thousand years old, and sits in a square shaft whose walls are painted with symbols. Fast forward 20 years and this girl has become a scientist who joins a team of quirky experts - military and scientific - who are charged to understand the origin and purpose of the hand. Has it been placed here for good or evil? Who by, since humans were not known to be technologically advanced enough to build such an object 3,000 years ago? Unfortunately, this potentially compelling story is told as a series of diary entries or interview transcripts, the result being chapters that explain what has already happened. The narrative is fast-moving, but dull because we are at a remove from the action of the story. It is full of pseudo-profundities about the power of ultimate destruction and international relations. Even reading this during the Brexit vote while traveling in the UK did not conspire to ignite the kindling under these timely ideas. Neuvel's attempt to create suspense by having the main interviewer of each of the characters stories be an invisible but powerful presence (think Charlie in Charlie's Angels) is his best idea, but falls flat due to a prose style that manages to feel too cute and show-offy. Where Neuvel is most effective is in capturing the feeling of scientists at work on a problem. The lab sequences ring true but aren't enough to drive me to read further in this series.Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-61008220645619730662016-07-16T14:15:00.002-04:002016-07-16T14:15:38.639-04:00The Birth of a Narrative (Books - The Sky Over Lima by Juan Gómez Bárcena)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvVuyeY-SGdWGtY_GKM2BPJvUzONx-prMuffFv_IQ0biEjlGFS7khYyOYi0hLG79JXMf1-dfjWb-UqNoKwQZ_5jMrWu1xd0MgF02nR-KUtuyG1YSs5Wwb6JABJ227MqXgf8EA5TKtc52E/s1600/the_sky_over_lima.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvVuyeY-SGdWGtY_GKM2BPJvUzONx-prMuffFv_IQ0biEjlGFS7khYyOYi0hLG79JXMf1-dfjWb-UqNoKwQZ_5jMrWu1xd0MgF02nR-KUtuyG1YSs5Wwb6JABJ227MqXgf8EA5TKtc52E/s200/the_sky_over_lima.jpg" width="123" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The debut novel of Spaniard Juan Gómez B<span style="line-height: 115%;">á</span>rcena - <i>The Sky Over Lima </i>(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) <i>- </i>is a mischievous, Escher-like paean to the power of the written word. His protagonists are 20-year-old Carlos and Jos<span style="line-height: 115%;">é, the first the scion of an aristocratic family, the second of a nouveau-riche manufacturer. Both are rich enough to rent a Parisian-like garret in their home city of Lima, and, although they live with their parents, go there to live out a fantasy of being<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span>great writers. They<span style="font-family: inherit;"> have </span>a <span style="font-family: inherit;">passionate crush<span style="font-family: inherit;"> on literature, <span style="font-family: inherit;">playing a game in which <span style="font-family: inherit;">every person they encounter is turned into a character in a great novel<span style="font-family: inherit;">. Their law professor become's Tolsoy's Ivan Ilyich<span style="font-family: inherit;">. A woman of their acquaintance, <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Madam Bovary having lived into old age. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>When they learn that Ram</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">ó</span></span>n Jimin</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">éz</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">, the Nobel-winning Spanish bard that they idolize, has published a volume not available in Peru, they struggle to write a letter that will convince him to send them a copy, unsatisfied with draft upon draft, until they realize:</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">They must embellish reality, because in the end that is what poets do, and they are poets, or at least they've dreamed of being poets on many late nights like this one. And that is exactly what they are about to do now: write the most difficult poem of all, one that has no verses but can touch the heart of a true artist. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">It starts out as a joke, but then it turns out it's not a joke. One of the two say, almost idly, It would be easier if we were a beautiful woman, then Don Juan Ram</span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">ó</span></span></span></span></span>n would put his entire soul into answering us, that violet soul of his - and then suddenly he stops, the two young men look at each other a moment, and almost unintentionally the mischief has already been made. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I'm not giving much away to say that they succeed and, f</span>or the rest of the novel, are driven to perpetuate the relationship<span style="font-family: inherit;">, while being forced to deal with the <span style="font-family: inherit;">cons<span style="font-family: inherit;">e<span style="font-family: inherit;">quences of <span style="font-family: inherit;">man<span style="font-family: inherit;">ipulating a man's heart. What raises </span></span></span></span></span></span>Gómez B<span style="line-height: 115%;">á</span>rcena<span style="font-family: inherit;">'s novel </span></span></span>above being a one-trick pony is the self-aware game he plays with the act of writing. The young men must develop the character of Georgina - their young lady - in order to keep the great writer's interest. They tire of letter-writing, realizing that the classic form for full-blooded romance is that of the novel. As they weave the plot and craft the novel's structure, the reader becomes aware that that novel runs parallel with the novel we are reading. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">There are times it becomes difficult to separate </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gómez B<span style="line-height: 115%;">á</span>rcena<span style="font-family: inherit;">'s enthusiasm for literature from that of his p<span style="font-family: inherit;">rotagoni<span style="font-family: inherit;">sts. <span style="font-family: inherit;">H<span style="font-family: inherit;">e <span style="font-family: inherit;">ex<span style="font-family: inherit;">plains his thesis a few too many times: </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Do you not also, when you look upon the world, feel that <span style="font-family: inherit;">it is made from the stuff of literature.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">or</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Open your eyes, my friend; love, as you understand it, was invented by litera<span style="font-family: inherit;">ture, just as Goethe gave suicide to the Germans. We don't write novels; novels write us.<span style="font-family: inherit;">"</span></span> </span> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What separate<span style="font-family: inherit;">s the author's passion from his protagonists is what he does with it. He constructs <span style="font-family: inherit;">layers <span style="font-family: inherit;">between the narrative world of <span style="font-family: inherit;">the characters, </span>and the one invented by <span style="font-family: inherit;">G</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">ómez B<span style="line-height: 115%;">á</span>rcena <span style="font-family: inherit;">which is far more self-</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">aware<span style="font-family: inherit;">. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">One is the literal distance between the time in which the novel is set - 1904 - and our own. Th<span style="font-family: inherit;">e era is vital to the novel because there is no internet via which one can track down any book one wants. There is no tele<span style="font-family: inherit;">phone, email, or text. When one corresponds, one writes a letter <span style="font-family: inherit;">on a sheet of paper in <span style="font-family: inherit;">isolation and waits<span style="font-family: inherit;"> for a respon<span style="font-family: inherit;">se. <span style="font-family: inherit;">Our author clearly maintains a boyish r<span style="font-family: inherit;">omanticism about this time and its literature, but one thing remains pointedly the same: whether you are writing a l<span style="font-family: inherit;">etter, </span>texting or, for th<span style="font-family: inherit;">at matter, </span>blogging, it is through language one <span style="font-family: inherit;">creates persona. You may read me believing that I am a man who does theatre or neuroscience and who<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span>lives in New York, but<span style="font-family: inherit;">, unless you know me,</span> you only believe that because I wrote it. <span style="font-family: inherit;">I </span></span><i>could</i> be anyone</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>. Secondly, </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">G</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">ómez B<span style="line-height: 115%;">á</span>rcena inserts an omniscient point-of view - <span style="font-family: inherit;">emphasizing his awareness of the </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">distance<span style="font-family: inherit;"> between then and now - from time to time.</span> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Carlos stops. To bolster his thesis that everything is literature, that the entire w<span style="font-family: inherit;">orld is a text constructed o words alone, he would like to cite Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. But he cannot, because Derrida and Lacan and Foucault have not yet been born. Actually, Lacan has: he is three years old and currently playing with a j<span style="font-family: inherit;">igsaw puzz<span style="font-family: inherit;">le</span> - it's morning in Paris - <span style="font-family: inherit;">perhaps constructing future memories of what he will one day call the mirror stage. So Carols has nothing else to add.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">raises all this </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">above a clever<span style="font-family: inherit;">, adole<span style="font-family: inherit;">scent<span style="font-family: inherit;"> game is the way his protag<span style="font-family: inherit;">onists, through their prose, come to look at each other and, later, themselves. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> The game makes the novel amusing, but </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">through it G</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">ómez B<span style="line-height: 115%;">á</span>rcena tells a story about creative process. How are writers driven to make what they make? Wh<span style="font-family: inherit;">at is the source of narrative in one's self?<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The novel rises<span style="font-family: inherit;"> a<span style="font-family: inherit;">bove a <span style="font-family: inherit;">merely amusing story <span style="font-family: inherit;">because of </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">the insight these two men ga<span style="font-family: inherit;">in through their actions<span style="font-family: inherit;">. So we witness not just </span>the birth of romance but also the death of it.<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="font-family: inherit;">Growing up is a process of gaining self awareness but this novel seems to <span style="font-family: inherit;">pose the question,</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is some of that <span style="font-family: inherit;">youthful, </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">naive, playful part of us <span style="font-family: inherit;">necessary for the act<span style="font-family: inherit;"> of creating a work of art?</span></span></span></span></span>Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-50196727658118087522016-06-11T09:47:00.000-04:002016-06-11T13:28:33.509-04:00One Immigrant Who Made America Great (Books - Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbz2_6EztiDqGH2cWzyeZphkBDpOKWIW4HI7Qfn1d31kAFZ0PVTQHrT3_xPmfrclLGY8W1DriurnjoQ2If_HBC778pZm6YuF7NpYob2lhI4ZrOwYpHS5Sji0FMY06W5ECyU0XFol3WUY8/s1600/Ahamilton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbz2_6EztiDqGH2cWzyeZphkBDpOKWIW4HI7Qfn1d31kAFZ0PVTQHrT3_xPmfrclLGY8W1DriurnjoQ2If_HBC778pZm6YuF7NpYob2lhI4ZrOwYpHS5Sji0FMY06W5ECyU0XFol3WUY8/s200/Ahamilton.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>
I'm not sure that Ron Chernow's <i>Alexander Hamilton </i>(Penguin Books, 2004) the bestselling biography and basis for Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway musical phenom needs any more hype, but here it goes. Chernow's book is a monument to one of America's most personally complex and influential founding figures. It is lengthy not because Chernow, as is often the case in modern biographers, can't manage to make choices about which bits of his research to share -- a toenails-and-all approach -- but because he integrates his subject's story with necessary personal and historical context. One cannot understand either the sheer amount of Hamilton's contribution to modern America: its constitution, party system, how voters are represented, how the state and federal governments relate, the system of checks and balances - nor the weight of these contributions, without understanding his role in the Revolutionary war, his relationship to George Washington (and by extension, who our first general and president was), and the opposition Hamilton faced from Thomas Jefferson (and who he was), James Madison (ditto), John Adams (ditto), and Aaron Burr (ditto), and having an overview of his most influential work <i>The Federalist Papers</i>.<br />
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What is makes <i>Alexander Hamilton </i>a great biography for this time, perhaps even more than for the one in which it was written 12 years ago, is that it captures the quintessential American story as a function of personal identity. A poor, immigrant, possibly of mixed race, born out-of-wedlock -- everything that a large section of today's political establishment abhors -- comes to America, gets himself an education, and rises through the ranks by working his tail off to end up co-creating our Constitution, our governmental and electoral systems, single-handedly creating our Coast Guard, our first bank, and the basis of our entire modern economic system. If present-day governors of numerous American states would like to know how public higher education contributes to the good of industry, economy, and state and why it should be government's duty to generously fund it - I cannot think of a better argument than Hamilton's life story.<br />
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Chernow's story of Hamilton is timeless. The story of America, given its pitiless subjugation of the people native to its soil, has always been the story of immigrants - this includes some of our founding fathers. They needed support to get started in life. It is striking that the press supporting the political party in opposition to Hamilton also decried his foreign birth, his racial identity, and his illegitimacy. <i>Plus ca change. </i>Reading <i>Alexander Hamilton </i>is comforting in the context of the current election. It is a relief to read that the men who appear on our money and to whose homes we made trips in third grade, were ruthless shits to each other, baldly lied about each others' records, manipulated the press, and spread rumors about each others personal lives. With all the energy Jefferson spent vilifying Hamilton, it is surprising that he got anything else done. <br />
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In addition, Chernow's book is simply good story telling. He frames the 700-page volume with the story of Hamilton's widow, who outlives her beloved, short-lived husband by fifty years. This not only touchingly plucks at the heartstrings -- reminding us of Hamilton's humanity, how one person's life effects many others -- it also exemplifies biography as a narrative crafted of many accounts. Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton reconstructed her husband's life through the veil of romance and grief. Newspaper accounts at the time jeered at Hamilton's rumored sympathy for the British and his personal infidelities. These are in turn unified by the point-of-view of the biographer in his own time. We add up only to what other people make of us. Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-29868773093072412392016-05-14T11:33:00.001-04:002016-05-14T13:34:01.862-04:00Small bombs, large impacts, no simple explanations (Books - The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgej8u2xsV-A7-KiLi4TBWLQ1bs4Y_0fgSGGySdUALfJcf79wF9mmhi4cXGaZdpSI8zIoREXAqoRdy1W5LrTAe4WWI5PSX9Bl92Patm5aW7vm3ps8AQ1fgj6N0cDCKQH58LcL_ivc2Ctt8/s1600/the_association_of_small_bombs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgej8u2xsV-A7-KiLi4TBWLQ1bs4Y_0fgSGGySdUALfJcf79wF9mmhi4cXGaZdpSI8zIoREXAqoRdy1W5LrTAe4WWI5PSX9Bl92Patm5aW7vm3ps8AQ1fgj6N0cDCKQH58LcL_ivc2Ctt8/s200/the_association_of_small_bombs.jpg" width="132" /></a></div>
In Karan Mahajan's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Association-Small-Bombs-Novel/dp/0525429638/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463237010&sr=1-1&keywords=the+association+of+small+bombs" target="_blank">The Association of Small Bombs</a> </i>(Viking, 2016), three boys set out on an errand one afternoon in Delhi. Only one of them returns. Tushar and Nakul, brothers, are hindu. They are killed by a terrorist's bomb. Their friend, Mansoor, is muslim. He survives, but with physical and emotional scars. Mahajan writes of the origins and the consequences of such "small" acts of devastation. They are perpetuated by just one or two individuals. The bombs are built with easily found materials and fit neatly in backpacks. The political perspective of the perpetrator and the pain of the survivors are similar in their intense myopia, but, as Mahajan writes:<br />
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The bombing, for which Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were not present, was a flat, percussive event that began under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800, though of course that detail, that detail about the car, could only be confirmed later. A good bombing begins everywhere at once.<br />
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A crowded market also begins everywhere at once, and Lajpat Nagar exemplified this type of tumult. A formless swamp of shacks, it bubbled here and there with faces and rolling cars and sloping beggars...</blockquote>
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<a name='more'></a>The origin of such acts is dispersed among thousands of indignities. The bombers act from ideology, pain, friendship, faith, ignorance, vengeance. They end up building, planning, financing, or otherwise helping by intention, and seemingly also by accident. The coexistence of the paradoxical everything-at-once-ness and the intense myopia is disorienting. Mahajan's lens pulls back to envision a network of antecedents so broad that the relationships between the people, motivations, and events seem like particle physics. It is the novel's form, alternating between the stories of the victims and the bombers, that communicates the wide-shot. Then Mahajan tightens down so closely, that we breathe more shallowly as we read. His prose fashions a tight, distinctive viewpoint via focus on off-kilter details: how Tushar and Nakul's parents lie about the errand on which they sent the boys, saying they were picking up a watch rather than a repaired television set, so that their poverty won't be obvious and they won't be perceived as irresponsible parents. Vikas, the father, thinks that if only he had chosen to be an accountant, as his family had hoped, rather than a documentarian, his children would have lived. At one particularly poignant moment, Vikas imagines himself as the bomb. Ayub, a friend of the adult Mansoor, becomes active in a political movement as much for philosophical reasons as because his girlfriend broke up with him, a scene that is poignant not for a classic fight, but for the reason she gives him: "I don't like your smell."<br />
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Mahajan's prose is littered with awkward and idiosyncratic observations, creating an intimacy with his subjects that is tender and humane. His writing is eloquent without being showy, deft at choosing a verb that characterizes through action, dispensing with the need to "describe" at all.<br />
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"It depends on the lawyer, madam," sniffled the policeman.</blockquote>
The casting director knows exactly the kind of actor he is looking for the role with the use of that verb.<br />
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<i>The Association of Small Bombs </i>uses imagination to try to understand those who commit acts of terrorism and those who suffer its consequences. It offers no excuses, neither does it oversimplify the motives, preach, nor blame. As such, it is a compassionate book, important for offering its perspective in our time.Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5578764475698868093.post-7484768812264408092016-05-01T08:06:00.002-04:002016-05-03T07:35:51.870-04:00People are more than objects in space (Books - A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7JCsvLGgVr41qiC_I8gdDLZdZKyekb5xvQ_8CneApO5l2eLuLEOZloArmargOmdEgqHxvzRmlM0J0Awq9LuCT9loI9fjCMXRC2FDe_82oyLzfXU7-KNdxsH1uo1SV1YnhvsWjw5-fcAg/s1600/A_Doubters_Almanac.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7JCsvLGgVr41qiC_I8gdDLZdZKyekb5xvQ_8CneApO5l2eLuLEOZloArmargOmdEgqHxvzRmlM0J0Awq9LuCT9loI9fjCMXRC2FDe_82oyLzfXU7-KNdxsH1uo1SV1YnhvsWjw5-fcAg/s200/A_Doubters_Almanac.jpg" width="131" /></a></div>
Ethan Canin was already one of my favorite authors for having written <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kings-Planets-Novel-Ethan-Canin/dp/0812979419/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461506668&sr=1-1&keywords=for+kings+and+planets" target="_blank">For Kings and Planets</a>, </i>and I have frequently recommended his <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Palace-Thief-Stories-Ethan-Canin/dp/0812976177/ref=pd_bxgy_14_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0KVQ8DHVQ7HA5VS6VF18" target="_blank">The Palace Thief</a> </i>and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-Air-Ethan-Canin/dp/0618004149/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461506882&sr=1-1&keywords=emperor+of+the+air" target="_blank"><i>Emperor of the Air</i></a>. With <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Doubters-Almanac-Novel-Ethan-Canin/dp/1400068266/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461506928&sr=1-1&keywords=a+doubter+s+almanac" target="_blank"><i>A Doubter's Almanac</i></a> (Random House, 2016) Canin has written a "great" book, in the sense of giving expression to profound experiences, and also, I believe, in creating something whose meaning extends beyond its exemplars - the concerns of these specific characters, the obsessions of the period in which it was written - and has the potential to be enduring. Time will tell on that second point.<br />
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In some ways, Canin is writing about the same things he has always
written - fathers and sons, success and failure, gut-smarts and brains - all within the scopes of the grandest of considerations: time and space. Time as it is experienced on a human scale, through one generation of a family experiencing another. Three generations of the Andret family are the focus of this novel. Space as it is described by a branch of mathematics called topology, which studies the interrelation of things, though not on the level they are visible in nature, on a hypothetical level of multiple dimensions. This is the focus of the work of Canin's protagonist, Milo Andret, who may be a genius in using math to describe such relationships but is profoundly disabled in forming a typical human bonds and severely limited even in insight into himself. In one scene, Canin describes Milo as having to touch his own face to understand that he was smiling.<br />
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One might call Milo a tyrant, or perhaps Aspergery for his combination of extreme intelligence and narrow focus. One can lay some blame on his severe addiction to alcohol, but Canin, despite
his medical degree, resists the neatness of diagnoses. Milo Andret is clearly a horrible father, husband, and co-worker, but not because he is a horrible man. He is a brilliant thinker, a skilled artist, vulnerable to love and to doubt. The strength of Canin's narrative is his rendering of the struggle between the irreconcilable parts of human beings, and never has that been clearer than in <i>A Doubter's Almanac</i>: Milo Andret is artist and mathematician, lover and loner, award winning genius and abject failure, child and father and grandfather. <br />
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Canin occasionally seems to doubt the clarity of his message and over-explains himself.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It
was as though he didn't see the object he was drawing but the entire
array of space instead - all things that were the object and all things
that were not the object - with equal emphasis. It was symptomatic of
something he'd noticed in himself since childhood - an inability to take
normal heed of his senses, the way other people did as they
instinctually navigated a course of being. In this way, it was like
mathematics itself: the supremacy of axiom over experience. </blockquote>
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But for the most part, his narrative, told from two different points of view, is strongly enveloping. Canin's earlier, shorter fiction has always struck me as impressive in giving voice to characters that would seem to be outside the wisdom of a younger man. Now, as a mature writer, he skillfully uses the sweep of a full-length work to look across the multiple perspectives of the son and the father. He
imagines a long-suffering mother and wife's perspective, as well as two
generations of daughters. It is the breadth of imagination that makes this a great book. Canin gets inside the feeling of success or failure both as Milo perceives it in himself and as it is perceived by his son Hans, who, in turn, fears that he may perceive it in his own children. It is only in the accumulation of wisdom across generations that the characters to gain richer understandings of each other. Hans knows, for instance, that Milo is obsessively focused on the interior mechanics of problem solving, but it is only when he compares his father's behavior to his daughter's, watching her read to extinguish the loudness of her own thoughts, that he understands what that experience is like.<br />
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The monomaniacal focus of Milo uses the language of numbers to understand the beauty of objects, which are understood in their relationships to one another. But the success of one proof can only approximate nature. Canin, in describing Milo, does so in the symbolic medium of language, another approximation - approaching but never reaching the truth. Canin through the voice of Hans describes this failure as grief. That is the overwhelming current of feeling in <i>A Doubter's Almanac. </i>I couldn't
help but feel it was Canin's own grief in the context of his creative work. His fear that his own monstrousness, as he is consumed by creating a complex vision, was for nought. But Canin's narrative is ultimately redemptive in his creation of Hans, who may lack the sheer brilliance of his father and sister, but who discovers in himself a talent of infinite worth in the realm of relationships - compassion.Tedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05511240514127283024noreply@blogger.com0