Sunday, June 30, 2013

The Forbidden City for the masses


That's what my reaction to my first day at Walt Disney World was.

By no means was this meant as a snobbish put-down. When it comes to Forbidden Cities, I am one of the masses.

Phil Paine on Metis democracy

http://academia.edu/1649062/The_Hunters_Who_Owned_Themselves

Saturday, June 22, 2013

You are history

A friend of mine wrote this perceptive piece.  An excerpt:
“I want to make sure we get everything back to where it belongs,” [An institutional librarian] said.
I nodded. “You know, you should get some deacidification spray and treat each page. Also, make a note as to when you drew them, and sign them.”
He looked at me like I was nuts. Deacidification spray is expensive. “Why, they’re just sketches for my own use.”
I smiled. “No, they are wonderful documentation of exactly how each of these rooms was arranged in early 2013.”
“So?”
“So now you use them, treat them, and then file them away in one of your flat files. They’ve just become part of the history of this place, and in a couple hundred years some researcher will delight in holding these simple drawings of yours.”
He looked down at the sketches in his hand. “Huh.”
"Yeah, you’re history.”

Friday, June 21, 2013

A Tribe Called Red

Contemporary Native Canadian music out of Ottawa as broadcast on CBC's Q.

Who has the heavy horses?

In the last generation, many medieval military historians have applied and adapted the idea of a military revolution to the era of the Hundred Years War. One element of that supposed revolution was the deemphasis of cavalry and new emphasis on infantry, especially infantry using projectile weapons. A few years back at the Kalamazoo conference there was a rather humorous session in which a well-known scholar felt it necessary to argue the cavalry was not completely useless, and he received a rather jocular reception.

Exactly how cavalry was used in the high Middle Ages, how useful it was, and how its role changed in the later Middle Ages and the early modern period is a difficult question, or series of questions. However, I feel on very solid ground to assert that horsemanship and fighting on horse back were considered by contemporaries to be an essential element of noble identity. A man at arms, a warrior of high standing, was a cavalryman, and – here's a practical note – was paid more than men on foot, gens de pie, were.

Here's another interesting story relevant to this matter. It comes of course from my favorite text, the Chronicle of the Good Duke, written in 1429 but in this case claiming to report an incident of 1388. Once again the Duke of Brittany and the Constable of France were fighting. The Duke had brought up a substantial army and the Constable was outnumbered. Here's what happened next, according (probably) to a survivor of this campaign, Jean de Chastelmorand.

The Duke of Brittany seeing the battle order of the Lord of Clisson told his men, "My lords and companions, see Clisson there, who has arranged his companies and desires nothing but battle. I would not refuse it at all. willingly but I see that he has put together a great wing of his men who are mounted on great coursers of superior quality. Our horses are small; those over there will come charge us and we will not be able to withstand them; and things will be the worse for us."
Some of my readers will know the catchphrase "who gets the horse?" that came out of recent discussions of Charny's questions. Here we have "who has the heavy horses?"

Update: somewhat later, the Lord of Clisson says something of this sort:

Beaumanoir will lead the remaining men of my household and I don't want you to have more than about 150 men at arms for you are plenty for 600 horses of Bretons. And I swear to God that the horse of the Bretons are worth nothing and it seems to me that you will not fail to find your adventure and you will be able to take it looking good and complete it.
 Further update:

When it came to the middle of the day, the Lord of Clisson said to his men, “My good Lords, you are well mounted, the horses of those over there are small; charge into these Bretons and push them into the battalion of the Duke.” And they did it just so and in this melee both a good 100 Bretons of the Duke’s party were killed and a good 100 horses gained; 

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Secret History of the Bill of Rights

This Salon article reveals the messiness of early American constitutional history:
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_secret_history_of_the_bill_of_rights/

An excerpt:

Ironically, it is to the pressure of the slave-holding oligarchy on Virginia’s federal representatives that we owe the Bill of Rights. To be specific, in running for the first Congress in 1788 James Madison beat his rival James Monroe by only 336 votes out of 2,280. This near-death experience led Madison to do a classic political flip-flop, trying to co-opt his opponents by embracing their cause, the addition of a bill of rights to the Constitution. Pennsylvania’s Sen. Robert Morris sneered that Madison “got frightened in Virginia and wrote a book” — the amendments that became the Bill of Rights.
...
In introducing his proposed amendments to Congress, Madison acknowledged that his bill of rights was an incoherent philosophical and legal mess:
...
Madison’s bill of rights was a hodgepodge slapped together hastily to try to conciliate former opponents of the newly ratified federal Constitution.  This was a typical case of damage control by a reluctant politician trying to head off a more radical alternative by enacting a watered-down substitute. Madison would have been proud to be remembered as “the Father of the Constitution.” But he would have been appalled to be told that without his Bill of Rights the U.S. would be a tyranny. That was the rhetoric of the Anti-Federalists whom he reluctantly sought to appease.
History has vindicated the skepticism about bills of rights shared by Hamilton and Madison and a majority of the drafters and ratifiers of the U.S. Constitution. Mere paper guarantees of rights have never been enough to secure liberty, in periods when the public is panicked — think of Lincoln’s excessive suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, or FDR’s wartime internment of Japanese-Americans. And the American system of checks and balances has repeatedly, if belatedly, worked to check imbalances of power, as it did when Congress reined in “the imperial presidency” in the 1970s.
In the contemporary debate about civil liberties and government surveillance, absolutist civil libertarians routinely claim that “the Founders” viewed the Bill of Rights as essential to American liberty. But paranoid rhetoric about our allegedly tyrannical government is closer to the rhetoric of the Anti-Federalists who denounced the U.S. Constitution than to the thinking of the Constitution’s drafters, ratifiers and supporters. The real Founders thought little of lists of abstract rights, putting their faith instead in checks and balances and accountability through elections. In the spirit of the real Founders, we should be debating what kind of system of congressional and judicial oversight of executive intelligence activity can best balance individual liberty with national security — and we should leave anti-government paranoia to today’s Anti-Federalists.
Years ago when I was reading on the revolutionary movements in the late 18th-century, I also noticed that practically the only Americans to use the word democracy in a positive sense during the constitutional debates of the 1780s were white South Carolinans who saw their brand of local autonomy as a laudable democracy. These people were a tiny minority of slavers who controlled a large slave population.

Given the world's experience of political democracy up to that date – think the Greek polis – you can see why they thought that was a reasonable label.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Foreign Policy on democratic transitions

I have been reading the magazine Foreign Policy recently, and despite the fact that is understandably American-centric, it does tend to take a broader than usual view of world events.


2. On elections, "Fake it till you make it."
A clear lesson from our case studies is that elections -- even sham elections -- lead to greater success in the transition to substantive democracy. International observers often denounce flawed elections as meaningless attempts to dress authoritarian rule in the trappings of democracy, but elections can also sow the seeds of public expectations that over time blossom into democratic demands that cannot be ignored.
Mexico offers a great example of the unintended consequences of controlled elections. In the 1970s, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party took its quest for electoral legitimacy so far that when the loyal opposition failed to field a presidential candidate in 1976, the government revised the election laws to make it easier for the opposition to gain a few seats. To the party's surprise, when the economic crisis of the early 1980s hit, the opposition was able was able to use this opening to marshal civil society organizations in a campaign for more transparent elections.
In Brazil, the military regime likewise tolerated an opposition it believed it could control. But as economic crisis led to widespread discontent in the early 1980s, the military began to lose its grip on the political situation. Having won their place in the political arena, the opposition was now poised to win a surprisingly large victory in the 1982 elections for Congress and state governors. The earlier "rigged" election had set the stage for the military's downfall in the presidential election of 1986.
Other quantitative evidence confirms that authoritarian regimes with partial political openness are the likeliest to become more democratic, especially if they provide for multiparty electoral competition. So go ahead, support the vote, even if it's not perfect.
Of course, I am still waiting for the article that talks about the problems (!!!) in the United States and elsewhere, where democratic institutions are clearly failing. I have my own theory on this, which I hope to talk about soon.ff

One of many walls in the world

Cosmo Sarson's mural of Jesus breakdancing on the wall beside The Canteen, Bristol, England.One of many great walls on this edition of The Big Picture.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

The Good Duke speaks

Duke Louis of Bourbon proposes a plan when he hears that the English army, besieging a Spanish city, is dying of disease:

Since they are dying, it would be a good thing to go help them to die some more.

Monday, June 03, 2013

A hillside settlement in Sichuan


George RR Martin, master storyteller

This blog post is dedicated to the proposition that George RR Martin is objectively a major figure in the literature of the early third millennium.

I speak as someone who has read the Ice and Fire books, some of them more than once, but has not been following the TV series week by week. I like many others have criticized Martin in the past for brutalizing his readers and for letting his story grow uncontrollably as he follows many many characters at greater length. I like others have before me the terrible example of Robert Jordan, another author wrote a huge fantasy series but died before he finished it. Pictures of George RR Martin made me think he doesn't follow the healthiest of lifestyles.

Nevertheless, George RR Martin has become a major force in contemporary storytelling. Four times now he has made thousands, indeed millions, scream.

Some years ago, the book version of the death of Ned Stark shocked thousands of fans, many of whom rushed to log on to fan forums and express their passionate response.

Some years later, readers had a similar reaction to the Red Wedding in its original written form.

The TV version of these events have motivated millions to express themselves, to the point that some people said that last night the reaction to the video version of the Red Wedding "broke the Internet."

Anyone who can do that is a master storyteller.

(This may seem to undervalue the contribution of screenwriters, directors and others in the TV version of Game of Thrones, but my reading of interviews with the actors convinces me that they see themselves as following Martin's vision.)

Now this may all be a flash in the pan. There are other TV series that are making a big impact, getting serious discussion in other media, being lauded as cultural touchstones of our era. But I feel it necessary to admit, publicly, that Martin is really something.

Sunday, June 02, 2013

Good news from Iraq

The marshes are coming  back!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22706024

The BBC article shows a town hall made of reeds, just like in the old, old days.