Month: May 2014

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New feature: Croc watch

From the humorous writings of the man who designed this blog’s namesake weapon, Da Vinci:

THE CROCODILE. HYPOCRISY. This animal catches a man and straightway kills him; after he is dead, it weeps for him with a lamentable voice and many tears. Then, having done lamenting, it cruelly devours him. It is thus with the hypocrite, who, for the smallest matter, has his face bathed with tears, but shows the heart of a tiger and rejoices in his heart at the woes of others, while wearing a pitiful face.

Moldbug

I am reminded of the tone of the famous Soviet humor magazine, Krokodil, which loved to parody the buffoonish, corrupt doings of the hooligan dissidents. Alas, Krokodil is no more. But perhaps we can remember the entire trope in which the smug and powerful mock the hooligans, peasants and barbarians as crocodile humor.

more Moldbug:

Crocodile humor is the laughter of the powerful at the powerless. It is not intended to be funny. It is intended to intimidate. Those who laugh, as many do, are those who love to submerge themselves in a mob, feel its strength as theirs, chant and shake their spears as one.

and “The Crocodile’s Toothache,” by Shel Silverstein:

The Crocodile
Went to the dentist
And sat down in the chair,
And the dentist said, “Now tell me, sir,
Why does it hurt and where?”
And the Crocodile said, “I’ll tell you the truth,
I have a terrible ache in my tooth,”
And he opened his jaws so wide, so wide,
The the dentist, he climbed right inside,
And the dentist laughed, “Oh isn’t this fun?”
As he pulled the teeth out, one by one.
And the Crocodile cried, “You’re hurting me so!
Please put down your pliers and let me go.”
But the dentist laughed with a Ho Ho Ho,
And he said, “I still have twelve to go-
Oops, that’s the wrong one, I confess,
But what’s one crocodile’s tooth more or less?”
Then suddenly, the jaws went SNAP,
And the dentist was gone, right off the map,
And where he went one could only guess…
To North or South or East or West…
He left no forwarding address.
But what’s one dentist, more or less?

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Secession lagniappe

Independence referenda began today in Donetsk and Luhansk. The U.S. will not recognize them.

Earlier this week word got out that the CEO of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Kamana‘opono Crabbe, had submitted a letter (pdf here) to Secretary of State John Kerry, asking him to clarify the status of the Hawaiian Kingdom under international law. The trustees quickly rescinded it, and Crabbe’s job may be in jeopardy. Various Hawaiian nationalists have started a petition to support him, emphasizing that, “The questions posed represent the perspectives of the broader Hawaiian and Hawai‘i community and their search for justice regarding the United States supported illegal overthrow of the constitutional Hawaiian Kingdom on Jan 17th, 1893.” According to the Hawaiian Kingdom blog, one trustee has already distanced himself from the letter rescinding Crabbe’s inquiry, and OHA has a press conference scheduled tomorrow in Honolulu to address the matter.

One of the founders of the Libertarian Party of Puerto Rico calls for “micro-independence” for the territory. Chris Roth is skeptical in light of Obama’s opposition to secession and the need to get an independence referendum through Congress.

Sarawak secession is back in the news, with one lawmaker saying 75 percent of Sarawakians would opt for separation if a vote were held today. (More commentary here.) There’s been friction between the Borneo and peninsular parts of Malaysia for some time, and the disparity in development between the two has only gotten more stark since the issue cropped up in 1966.

*****

Pat Buchanan on the War Party’s unsuccessful effort to take down Walter Jones.

Roger Busbice on the “fighting bishop” Leonidas Polk:

Louisiana seceded on January 26, 1861 with the enthusiastic support of Bishop Polk. In his homily at Christ Cathedral, he declared that secession was fully justified and indicated that, henceforth, the Book of Common Prayer would be altered to eliminate prayers for the President and Congress of the United States and that, instead, prayers would be offered for the Governor and the Legislature of Louisiana.

This edit became a source of controversy when a zealous Yankee commandant insisted the Bishop of Natchez pray for Lincoln. Bishop Elder asked for intercession from Washington, and Lincoln magnanimously intervened.

Psychedelic band blamed for Nigerian kidnapping. (Related, from the World Socialists, on AFRICOM)

We now know the name of the agent that shot Ibragim Todashev in Florida, following the Boston Marathon bombing. He appears to have an interesting history.

The Telegraph rounds up ten micronations, including Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiania, the Hutt River Principality, and the venerable Conch Republic.

Royalist protests in Bangkok

Sacred Harp 112: ‘The Last Words of Copernicus’

Another Lomax recording, this one from the 1959 United Sacred Harp Convention.

Ye golden lamps of heav’n, farewell, / With all your feeble light, / Farewell, thou ever changing moon, / Pale empress of the night.
And thou, refulgent orb of day, / In brighter flames arrayed, / My soul which springs beyond thy sphere, / No more demands thy aid.

This is the one Springsteen based the melody of Wrecking Ball’s “Death to My Hometown” on, which is one of the more unsubtle tunes from a very unsubtle album. As you can see in this live video, featuring Tom Morello:

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Virginia vs. America

One of the best anecdotes in Virginian-Pilot columnist Guy Friddell’s charming little pitch for Virginia tourism, 1966’s What Is It About Virginia?, is a walk he takes through Colonial Williamsburg with Arnold Toynbee in 1961. Toynbee was not optimistic about the Old Dominion, and Friddell makes his case for how progressive and hopeful things are, in light of, especially, recent successes of the civil rights movement. The chapter begins, however, with a story about a different historian:

The most thorough recent investigation of Virginia was by Dr. Gottmann, a French economic geographer commissioned by philanthropist Paul Mellon to diagnose the Old Dominion.

The doctor took stock of us for 18 months, visiting every county and city, a latter-day Tocqueville, perceptive and balanced in his judgments.

At the conclusion of his research, state officials honored him at luncheon in the Hotel Richmond. The geographer had an interesting face, the listening sort, with merry quickness in his features that promised a deft riposte when he chose, a fencer’s face.

The meal droned along, the conversation about as distinctive as the mashed potatoes, and, in a lull, I leaned forward and called down the table to ask Dr. Gottmann what impressed him most about America.

“The waste!” he called back.

“I mean,” he added, “the creative waste.”

Europe, his thesis went, tends to revere things as they are simply because they have always been there. At every turn, a thousand-year-old building bars the way. But Americans, with eyes on the future, do not hesitate to turn a river, level a mountain, fill a canyon, and pull down a skyscraper only recently built to build a bigger one.

“Willingness to change is the outstanding characteristic of America,” he said.

As the company was digesting this, I asked what he found to be the outstanding characteristic of Virginia.

“Reluctance to change,” said the little Frenchman, smiling.

He viewed Virginia as an oasis of calm. Perhaps its leisurely way of life had a mission in the mellowing of America, but, fortunately for the Western World, America’s Promethian tradition had prevailed.

Fortunately?

(Above, James Kilpatrick on the left and Friddell on the right, at the Richmond News-Leader in 1952)

via Colonial Williamsburg, the reconstructed capitol's off-center cupola, which is impossible to ignore once you know the story

Notes on a brief trip to the colony

I was fortunate enough to be able to leave Washington during the White House Correspondents Dinner this weekend, though I only got as far as the Clinton satrapy and military installation once known as Virginia. I’ve just returned from Williamsburg and am catching up; it seems the President stole one of Pat Buchanan’s jokes for his routine, which is something.

My weekend was full of throwbacks — seeing Slint on Friday in Baltimore, for one of their first shows in years (they were a little before my time, but you could feel the crowd’s anticipation), followed by a visit to the former colonial capital to see old friends last night.

Williamsburg City Councilman Scott Foster is expected to win another four years in an uncontested election on Tuesday, making him one of the few municipal officials in history to be re-elected after first being elected as a student. Hard to believe it’s been four years since they were running the first campaign out of our house on campus. If you were to tell me back then that he’d be reelected largely on the strength of city voters — most of the students will have left already, but they also seem not to care as much — I wouldn’t have believed you.

In other news, supposedly the Virginian-Pilot is working on a story about university honor councils, and there’s a bill circulating in the General Assembly that would supposedly help to clarify their role. I’m excited to see what comes of it; the subject has been in the news lately, and student judicial issues will likely become more important if the Obama administration uses its new sexual assault initiative to tweak evidentiary standards or something like that. It’s of personal interest too; the most significant bit of reporting I did in college was this piece on screw-ups in William and Mary’s honor system, which won one of the Collegiate Network’s awards. As a result of those articles, a committee was convened to evaluate their procedures, the results of which were announced in August. My take on those rather inadequate revisions, and a longer version of this story, is here.

(Above, via Colonial Williamsburg, the reconstructed colonial capitol, with its off-center cupola that is impossible to ignore once you know the story.)

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Happy May Day: ‘To hell with the government’

One of my favorite editorials published in The Blast — the anarchist newspaper based in San Francisco, not Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist magazine — on May Day, 98 years ago. Taken from the AK Press anthology, which is very good:

Three successive issues of THE BLAST have been vetoed by the Post Office censorship. The determination of the Washington authorities to suppress this publication is obvious. But the high muck-a-mucks of the government are too cowardly and hypocritical to inform us to that effect, honestly and frankly. That would not befit a “proud government.” By the way, who was it that said that a government always represents the lowest social level? Evidently he knew. The methods used by the Federal government, the chambermaid of the money paunches, to suppress THE BLAST are beneath contempt. We were first informed by the local post office officials that issues 9 and 10 of our paper were prohibited to pass through the mail by order from Washington. When No. 11 of THE BLAST appeared, it was again held up and we were informed that the Postmaster General had wired a SPECIAL ORDER to hold up EVERY issue of THE BLAST, and that our paper would not be permitted to pass through the mails until a copy of each issue had been forwarded to Washington, there to be passed upon its “fitness” to be circulated in this good and pious country. Accordingly, the first assistant Postmaster of this city, William Burke, informed us that he immediately forwarded a copy of No. 11 to Washington, and that he requested a reply by wire.

It would take five days, we were told, to receive the decision of the Postmaster General. At the end of that time we again got in touch with Mr. Burke. He expressed surprise that no reply had been received from Washington and promised to look into the matter. We waited a few more days and again sought information from the local postal officials. No reply had been received, we were informed, but Mr. Burke assured us that he would immediately telegraph to Washington to request the decision by wire. 

We waited another week, two weeks. Still no reply from Washington. In the absence of further instructions, the local postal authorities continued to apply the previous order excluding THE BLAST from the mails.

THE BLAST must have hit ’em pretty hard to make them so mad. But we are tired of awaiting the pleasure of His Majesty, Postmaster General Burleson, and his Comstockian censorship. Who the hell is Burleson, anyhow, to presume to dictate what is or is not “fit” to be read by the American public? As our friends, Douglas B. and Annie Bruce Carr Sterrett, of Washington D.C., so well put it in their protest to Burleson, “The Post Office was supposed to be mechanically efficient, and nothing beyond that. That it should now dictate on ethical questions is as absurd as if the railroads and street car companies were legally empowered to refuse to accept passengers whose ideas they did not like.”

To the filthy mind, all things are filthy. The Postmaster General is evidently suffering from this Comstockian disease, but we have reason to believe that the suppression of THE BLAST is not so much due to the unfortunate mental condition of Burleson, as to pressure from other quarters that have found our frank criticism “too strong” for their digestion, and very unpalatable to the powers that be. But whatever the reason or forces behind the suppression of THE BLAST, we are tired of the whole pestiferous gang and of the postal tyranny. We hereby declare our independence from the Autocrat of the Post Office and of his governmental and plutocratic chiefs. We are heartily sick of the whole canaille. We know that THE BLAST is a thorn in their side. We defy them to do their worst. We will continue to publish THE BLAST as long as we can find friends to support our resistance to this postal despotism. Rebels and liberty lovers, it is up to you to show if you are really sincere in your protestations. Help us to keep up THE BLAST. There is no greater menace to progress than the suppression of the radical press.

And let the overlords and their hirelings be warned that their craven and sneaky methods of stifling unpopular thought will but serve to drive our propaganda underground, sub rosa — as in Russia, for instance — and force it to assume more aggressive expression. In vain is the hope of the American governmental Black Hundred to suppress the Spirit of Revolt. In vain! For

Ye fools! Do I not live where ye have tried to pierce in vain?
Rests not a nook for me to dwell in every heart and every brain?
In every workshop breeding woe? In every hut that harbors grief?
Ha! Am I not the Breath of Life, that pants and struggles for relief?

‘Tis therefor I will be — and lead the people yet your hosts to meet,
And on your necks, your heads, your crowns, will plant my strong, resistless feet!
It is no boast — it is no threat — thus history’s iron law decree —
The day grows hot, O Babylon! ‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!

ALEXANDER BERKMAN