The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) A novel of the Indian Mutiiny

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	J.G. Farrell

"Farrell introduces us gradually to a large cast of characters as he paints a vivid portrait of the Victorians' daily routines that are accompanied by heat, boredom, class-consciousness and the pursuit of genteel pastimes intended for cooler climates. Even the siege begins slowly, with disquieting news of massacres in cities far away..."
Alex Wilber, Amazon book reviews.


"the rim of darkness beneath the horizon began to sparkle like a firework and immediately the air about them began to sing and howl with flying metal and chips of masonry ... then in a wave came the sound. Daubs of orange hopped at regular intervals from one end of the darkness to the other. Suddenly, a shrapnel shell landed on the corner of the veranda and all was chaos."--Farrell, "Siege of Krishnapur."

J.G. Farrell's 1973 Booker prize winning novel is about a group of British colonial officials, ordinary civilians and some Indian loyalists holding out against a determined group of "Sepoy" (Indian troops) during the Great Mutiny of 1857. It is one of three book about Imperialism, British-style, Mr. Farrell wrote in his short life. Sadly, the Oxford-educated writer, who appears to have the talents of both a genuine wit, keen psychologist and vivid historical reinactor, died in 1979 at age 44 when a wave struck him during a fishing trip on the rocks near his home in Ireland in 1979.

The main characters in the book find themselves under siege in a provincial town in northern India at the time of the Great Mutiny of the regular indigenous soldiers against the East India Company, a war triggered by the introduction of a type of cartridge for the new Enfield rifles that the Muslim troops believe contains pig fat as a grease, thus making it seem an attack on their culture.
The uprising (or revolution) at first comes to the main character of the book, Hopkins, East indian official, through dispatches and rumor and some small biscuits that suddenly appear mysteriously in a dispatch box in his office. Hopkins is known as "The Collector" in the book and he is a classic 19th Century Positivist who visited the Great Exhibition of London while on leave from his employers in 1851. His faith in science and technology from industrialization is solid, so much so that he brings out statues of Shakespeare and Keats and Socrates and other Western thinkers to decorate his office and remind him of the "superior" culture that justifys the subjugation of Indians of all races and sects.

Then bad things happen. British officers stragger from a local fort into Krishnapur, the survivors of the spreading mutiny. Many are severely wounded and others have fresh tales of cut-throat engagements with their former local-recruits: privates, corporals and sergeants who have opened fire and put the Europeans to the sword. The Sepoys make up most of the active forces in northern India and the British troops are outnumbered and spread too thin to come to any timely relief. British confidence, built up over a century of progress in subjagating northern India, is shattered.

The siege goes on for weeks. All European and Eurasian citizens crowd their way into the Residency ,where a last-ditch effort is made to survive. What was a ground for cricket games and picnics and official festivities showing off a replica of "proper" Victorian society abroad is ripped apart by shell and shot. The stench of the dead, animal and human, surrounds the besieged. The necessity of burial parties and desperate counter-attacks to fend off the enemy and capture some food and cannon shot become the new pastimes of any man not already dead or unable to stand.

The European ladies are trapped in the relative safety of the chapel, making bullets out of anything metal they can find and forbidden by prejudice from taking amore active part in the defense of their lives. The poverty-stricken natives gather outside about the perimeter of the Residency, waiting for the Union Jack to be struck down and the slaughter to commence.

Stripped away of their sense of superiority to nature and the natives by deprivation, near-starvation, and a growing lack of hope in rescue, some go off the beam while others reassess their lives and their faith either in religion or Eurpopean scientific progress; all pretense of class distinctions ebb away as well.

Farrell does an excellent job in the beginning of the novel, both in establishing the main characters and having some fun wagging at the old-style romantics of Victorian romance. There are two men who just arrive in India in the novel's first chapters: a young idealistic chap named Flurey, a romantic fellow with a head filled with Byron and Coleridge, and a brave but rather callow young officer. Both men are after a pretty young lady who they first meet in the luxury and safety of the port city of Calcutta, a bastion of British power and the place where much of the opium trade to China is situated. All three will see their world turn upside down at Krishnapur.

The young "hero" of the book is a visiting English travelling gent and university educated poet named Flurey. This is no dashing hero--more like just a smart fellow with the wrong training in the worst possible place. He has to bone up quickly on the military arts to help the British officers and Sikh loyalists in defending the residency. The book is, according to the introduction, very much in the style of the romantic and pro-colonial "Mutiny Novel" that was popular for many years in Britain, where a young soldier and a lady he fancies find themselves thrown together by the insurrection and the Indian forces outside the walls of whatever town ship are always bloodthirsty savages.

But Farrell takes the obsolete "Mutiny novel" to a very different place, where more emphasis is made on anti-romantic, mordant humor and insecurities among the "middle managers" of empire. There are also and some flat-out hilarious passages (such as two doctors arguing over the right treatment for cholera whenever one recovers enough from the other man's treatment to argue against the cure) and the imaginative day-dreaming of Flurey, who fancies that his new -found military bravado will get him a big story in the London Illustrated News.

If Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling had teamed up to write a novel and to accommodate each others style, "The Siege of Krishnapur" might well have been a similar result. This is an older book, but one that has been reprinted several times--most recently by the New York Review of Books Press. To me, it is worth seeking out.

"Cold War" Powers Reengage in Middle East for Syrian Civil War

 

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press – 1 hour ago 

"MOSCOW (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sparked controversy this week when she accused Russia of escalating the conflict in Syria by sending it attack helicopters. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov rejected the claim, saying that Russia is only shipping air defense systems under previously signed contracts.

The State Department acknowledged Thursday that the helicopters Clinton referred to were being returned to Syria after refurbishment and are not new tools against Syrian opposition groups. Nonetheless, Russia has shipped billions of dollars' worth of missiles, tanks, artillery and other military gear to Syria over more than four decades."

*****************************

Recent events I've seen and heard make it sound as if the  United States and Russia (most of which made up the former USSR) are at it again.  Washington and Moscow used to use military equipment issues to Israel and Syria, respectively ,as a way to preserve power-blocs and hegemony in the Middle East triangle of Israel, Syria and Lebanon during and after the October 1973 "Yom Kippur" war and the rape of Lebanon in the 1970s and 80s.

So much time has passed, but what has changed?   

     

 

  Meanwhile, the 23 million people of  Syria have become the newest nation to descend into a state of insurrection.  With the "soft-coup" military crackdown reported in Egypt, it appears that the Arab Spring is over.   As the report above from the Al-Jezzera news agency last week reports, there are thousands of refugees fleeing into Turkey and some rebel fighters crossing back over the border with neighboring Syria.  

 It's doubtful to me given the sparse on-site reporting we are getting from a variety of sources that anybody really knows where these arms are winding up or who they are being used upon.  Many of the rebel groups are apparently deserters from Assad's army, some are violent sectarians and others are involved in the conflict because of hatred for the Assad Dynasty which has ruled this nation, ruthlessly when needed, since 1970.    

The State Department says the Russians and the Iranians are supplying the Assad government and other sourcess say that NATO  and other groups are supporting the various opposition forces.  Others like RT television, the main Russian government conduit to the outside world, say most of the arming and butchery is on the rebel side and the USA and NATO is to blame. 

One thing is certain:  more arms shipments from any source will NOT lead to peace!

 

 All the Security Council nations in the UN should stand aside and call for a peace program.  Finger-pointing while men are beaten, women are raped and children are being blown to pieces is less than inhumane.

 

"(Reuters) - The Syrian town of Haffeh was smoldering and nearly deserted on Thursday after days of clashes between government forces and rebels, while activists reported more army assaults on pro-opposition areas across the country.

"United Nations monitors had been trying to enter the town after several days of fighting but were forced to turn back on Tuesday when a crowd attacked them.

"They finally gained access on Thursday to find state buildings burnt down, shops abandoned and a body lying in the street. Smoke rose from destroyed buildings and burnt-out cars littered the roads. There were signs of heavy bombardment."

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14/us-syria-crisis-idUSBRE85D0IS20120614?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29

A Conspiracy of Paper

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Mystery & Thrillers
Author:	David Liss

"These financial institutions are committed to divesting our money of value and replacing it with promises of value. For when they control the promise of value, they control all wealth itself,"--Playwright and scholar Elias Gordon to his friend, "detective" Benjamin Weaver.


"A Conspiracy of Paper" is a riveting murder and crime-in-high-places mystery. It won the Edgar Award in 2001 as the Best American Mystery of the Year and also won awards for best first novel of the year. At least two other "Benjamin Weaver" books have been published.

The novel, by the American author David Liss, is set in the colorful and treacherous world of early Hanoverian London, with all its coffee houses, gin mills, theaters, gambling dens, and the emerging "new finance" capitalist engines such as the South Sea Company. It's 1719 and the South Sea Company is on the verge of losing 98 percent of its stock value, creating the first stock-driven financial panic in English history. But the public is unaware that the South Sea Company, set up to do business in South America, is about to go bust. The rivalry between "stock-jobbers" (brokers) and their over-extended clients forms the background of the story. The "new finance" groups like South Sea are also getting their hooks into the heights of the British political elite, creating rivalry with the more staid financial powers like gold traders and The Bank of England.


The narrator is a former professional boxer, Benjamin Weaver, who has become the 18th Century equivalent of a private eye. He is known in the lingo of the time as a "thief-taker", a man who makes a living recovering stolen goods for well-off victims of crime gangs, and occasionally catching the crooks and turning them into the law courts and the nascent legal system for a reward.

Weaver is a first -generation British Jew who changed his last name from Licenzo to a more Anglicized name when he becomes a professional boxer. (He is partially based, according to the author, by the memoirs of a then-famous real-life British-Jewish boxer of the time, Daniel Mendoza. Mendoza is considered the father of modern boxing. His innovations like "boxing rings" and the science of movement and punching are still part of the sport. )

Liss' main character is hired by an rich gentile anti-semite named William Balfour to look into the death of Balfour's father. Balfour informs him that the death of Weaver's own estranged father--run down by a drunken coachman--is linked to his own father's death.

Weaver is a much sought-after "thief-taker" because he is essentially an honest man, and he is tough enough to go anywhere in the dens of London vice to ferret out criminals. (There are no police in London at this time, and only an ineffectual constabulary and a lot of crooked judges stand for anything like a system of law enforcement in the 18th Century.) Weaver's main rival is a crime lord named Jonathan Wild, who has a syndicate dedicated to promoting thievs (who then turn their goods over to Wild so he can sell them back to their original owners.) Wild, a real-life figure who was the subject of a book by Daniel DeFoe, also employs goons to cart some thieves off to Newgate Prison and face either the hangman, deportation or a stretch of the hell on earth jail could be for those without money or influence.

Weaver's tracking down of this and other important cases he takes on simultaneously weaves him into a hard-core Darwinian world of both the heigths and the depths of London. It's a city with opulent theaters and gentleman's clubs and a vibrant society, but it is also a society made nervous by the "new finance" and the stock-jobbers of Exchange Alley and this new mania for owing stock that may (or may not) make them rich--or break them.

Weaver also gets back in touch with his Jewish roots through his uncle's family. The novel is not sparing in detail and it captures very well the precarious existence of Jews (who had been banned from England from the time of Edward I in 1300 for three and a half-centuries) and how they did business and kept themselves generally both a part of the British economy and also culturally aloof due to gentile bigotry and also pressure from their elders to carry on the culture and the faith. Every good private eye novel has a pretty lady and this novel has Miriam, a widowed cousin of Weaver who both catches his eye and also leads him unwittingly into greater danger.

Given the financial dis-settlement of the last five years, "A Conspiracy of Paper" seems like familiar territory today for those who read about the financial chicanery of today. It's a fast-moving and instructive historical novel and its also a hard-boiled suspense story.

Trip to London and Environs--May 1985

This was not far from my hotel at Kensington Close. I'm pretty sure this was the first picture I took that first morning after jet lag wore off.

These pictures are some "surviving" prints from a trip I took to England in 1985. I say surviving because when I got home two of the rolls of film I took were destroyed by some machine foul-up at the local One-Hour Photo labratory I was used to going to back home.

Consequently the pictures I had of places like Regent's Park, my bus trip out to Hampton Court and a later rail trip to Winchester to see the cathedral there came out just a brownish mess! Oh, to have had a diigital camera twenty six years back.

These are some shots from the first two rolls I had. All in all it was a great trip and my wife and I plan to go to see more of England and other parts of the Isles together one of these days.

It was a very nice visit, although it could have rained more! :-)

Heart of Darkness

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Joseph Conrad

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." --Joseph Conrad.

The Heart of Darkness is a story of a story. Conrad's narrator, Marlowe, recounts his experiences in Africa and briefly, in Belgium, and his feelings about the voyage to a group of other men while waiting for a rising tide along the River Thames. In the story the narrator is going down an African river for "The Eldorado Exploring Expedition" to bring back some of the valuable caches of elephant ivory. The journey takes him down the dark waters and deep and sometimes deadly jungles. The ultimate end of the journey is a personal fiefdom of terror run by a man called Kurtz.

Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella is familiar to many. Rereading it again I was struck by how much of the story delves into Marlowe's sense of assault upon not only the native peoples and his fellow men in the steamer, but his own psyche. Marlowe is as much a victim of war as the modern soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder might be.

But the wounds are totally psychological-- and not to be healed by being removed from the harrowing river journey. The mysterious, intelligent and ultimately enigmatic Mr. Kurtz, the leader of the ivory station--a highly civilized and capable man who is brilliant and at the same time savage and mad--has made him question the nature of humanity itself.
Marlowe cannot see civilization in the same way again, and has contempt for those who might judge his reactions to such terrors "with a policeman at one corner and a butcher shop on the other".

Civilization to Marlowe is a mere veneer. Its Conrad himself trying to express that difficult sense of total isolation in his own skin---he knows that London itself was a savage place to the first Romans who came to Britain. All places were savage once and parts of them can be again, without warning.

But there is something dark and evil within all men as well, and what circumstances might bring this darkness, a darkness perhaps beyond the control of the keenest intellect.

"Heart of Darkness" is a multi-layered novella that is a triumph of fiction and an authentic statement of the animal nature of human avarice.

Some think the book has a racist slant. But I believe, even if he was a man of his own time, Conrad is after something more profound than a tale of terror or a political statement on race. In condemning Kurtz and his dark deeds, and those of others along the route of colonial exploitation, Marlowe also sees something within himself, a savageness as dire as the heads of men placed on poles to encourage more ivory extraction.
Marlowe feels as alone as he was with his friends and listeners as he was back in Africa, at that ivory station hundreds or miles inland, standing over the body of the "great" Mr. Kurtz as he sums up the brutality within that heart of darkness:

"The Horror! The Horror!"

The book is based on the worst of colonies in the dire history of the great African land grab of the late 19th Century---King Leopold of Belgium's' Congo Free State of 1890. Conrad, a longtime seafarer with the French and later British Merchant services--served briefly as a fresh-water captain of a small steamship going upriver to meet up with an ivory outpost run along lines of brutality he later depicted in horrifying and psychologically subtle details.

The English Resistance: The Underground War Against the Normans

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Peter Rex

For years, what I had read about the Norman Invasion of England was summarized by the events of the Battle of Hastings in late 1066, when King Harold Godwinson and his "Saxon" forces were defeated by William the Conquerer. King Edward (the Confessor) had left no surviving heirs and the Witan council had named Harold king. His elevation to regal status was short lived.


There were three major battles that year, and all had been bloody tests for the English forces: first, the northern earls (at Fulford Gate) and for King Harold (at Stamford Bridge and Hastings) . This is from a review of this same book by Carla Neyland, and sets the stage for the rebellion to come after William of Normandy came to power in London:

"'The English Resistance' begins with a survey of the three battles of 1066. Gate Fulford was fought just south of York on 20 September, when Tostig Godwinsson and Harald Hardrada defeated Earl Edwin of Mercia and Earl Morcar of Northumbria.

"Stamford Bridge was fought east of York five days later, when Harold Godwinsson defeated and killed Tostig and Haradrada after a forced march from the south of England. Hastings was fought on 14 October on the south coast, when William of Normandy defeated and killed Harold Godwinsson (after Harold and his army had marched all the way back from Stamford Bridge)."


Harold's ships and levies of soldiers were all too taxed from a bloody battle against the Vikings in the north of the kingdom to get back to Hastings with any measure of rest and preperation. The Norman Duke knew all about Harold's troubles with the Norwegians and William was poised to strike across the Channel when he found the time just right.

Harold and his men could only march hundreds of miles-- again--- and still had reinforcements coming up when the Battle of Hastings was all over.

It was the end of the story, at least as far as popular history goes. One assumed after the victory at Hastings, William the Conquerer (or the Bastard) moved on quickly to quell most of Britain and that was that.

Peter Rex's book shows that was not all that.

For the next five to six years, and sporadically for decades after, the English (with Welsh, Scottish and Danish support) refused to accept the Normanization of their islands and their lands. While rebellion around London and the southern regions of the kingdom ended around 1067, the remaining Earls of the Saxon dynasty and the various groups of 'silvatici' (forest dwellers) was just getting started.

There were vast parts of England (Cornwall, Northumbria, many parts between thee Humber River and the Wash, et al) that hadn't seen any Normans yet and hadn't got "the memo" it seems that the fight was over and their lands were forfeit to William's fighting chums. In Wales, for example, Eadric "the Wild" gathered forces to give the Normans a warm welcome when they moved westward.

Norman progress in the north toward Yorkshire was not all that smooth---newly-minted nobles were set upon and killed by the locals. York itself was attacked as soon as the Normans got their castle up in 1068 and the combined English-Danish forces drove the surviving invaders and their quislings back down to safer turf. William himself, dealing with problems in his own territory back at Normandy, had to rush back to lay siege to towns like Chester.

Only William's own leadership saved the day for the Normans in this new realm, filled with angry "outlaws" who hoped for a new Saxon king in the shape of Edgar the Atheling ( a young man gathering what forces he could in Scotland as a guest of King Malcom) or even in the hopes of a restored "Danelaw" king who could drive the Normans back to the Channel and restore the less onerous burden of Norse foreign rule.


A video on early Norman attempts to isolate and destroy resistance:



Rex's book focuses a great deal on one man in particular, Hereward the Exile or Hereward the Outlaw. He was one of the leaders of those forest dwellers and a military strategist who ranked up with William the Bastard or Harald Hardara of Norway, only without the loyal forces these monarchs enjoyed. Hereward (also called "The Wake" by a later generations) made inroads up and down the northern coast of England and at the then island of Ely near the deep marshes of the Fens. Needing to keep his restless Danish allies sated, Hereward sacked treasure from the abbeys that the Normans solely needed to finance their campaigns against rebels on both sides of the Channel. William responded in more than kind. It was, in Rex's phrase, William the Bastards' "government by punitive expedition."

It was all of course a bloody and brutal affair, but there is little evidence William expected anything else. To combat the forces of the resistance, The Bastard lead men up and down the north in a "harrying" operation that left farms burning and innocents slaughtered. The major battled at Stafford took on tactics that would be, in Rex's view from the surviving documents, precursors of German occupation atrocities 900 years later in places like occupied France.


Eventually, lacking loyal support from the Danes, who may never seriously considered taking on the Normans in a major battle, and after the Norman invasion of Scotland in 1072 sent Edgar Atheling to Flanders and safety and made Malcom a more passive neighbor, the English resistance dwindled. But Peter Rex and other historians he cites make a strong case that it took almost a decade for William to consolidate his 'total victory' at Hastings.

The last part of the book recounts the blending of English and Norman Noble families over the next few decades into a group with a increasingly independent identity from Normandy. As for Hereward the Outlaw, he apparently escaped from his last big stand at Ely as the Normans built a causeway and forced their way across. Hereward also escaped from any reliable historical account as to how he spent his last years. That he was the prototypical horse-mounted knight--likely trained at Flanders while in a previous exile imposed by the Confessor--is very likely. That he might have also served as a precursor to the legends of Robin Hood have also been proposed. Its his whereabouts with his bands after escaping Ely that makes for the intriguing speculations and where history and legend cross over into the great theme of resistance to foreign powers that characterizes English history just after 1066 and for centuries to come.

And now a word on 11th Century Norman taxation schemes, read by actor Chris Bailey . It looks a lot like what a Public Service Announcement from Bill The Bastard's New Order would "encourage" the public to prepare for :

"I Will Survive" Dancing at Auschwitz With Adolek Kohn and family

An 89 year old Jewish Holocaust survivor (Adolek Kohn) from the Second World War revisits sites in Poland where millions were gassed by the Nazis. His grandchildren accompany him to the site.

This video has drawn controversy and a rebuke from the American Jewish Anti Defamation League. I see it as a celebration of survival and the continuance of a cultural thread that goes back thousands of years.

Queen Cleopatra of Egypt: Then and Now

(above) Screen vamp Theda Bara in a still from the first film about Cleopatra, from 1917.  Only forty seconds of the film still exists sadly, as this and many of Miss Bara's other silent films are lost.

(left) Elizabeth Taylor. 

A recent exposition has come to the city of Philadelphia showing artifacts connected to the most famous queen in the ancient world. The exhibit "Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt"  is sponsored by the Franklin Institute and The National Geographic Society.   

Cleopatra (69BC--31BC) was actually the seventh monarch from the Ptolemaic Dynasty to bear that name but the first to rule by herself after the death of her brother. Her greatest achievement seems to have been the ability to play off the massive Roman Empire by beguiling two of its most powerful men in succession: first, the mighty Julius Caesar and, later, his former ally and avenger against Caesar's assassins, Marc Anthony. 

How she managed to do this mix of love and politics has made her irresistible for centuries to poets, playwrights, and history buffs.   Playwrights as famous as  Shakespeare and Shaw have found her a beguiling subject.

 But what made her  successful in keeping her throne intact (at least until Anthony lost it all to Octavian at the Battle of Actium) took great acumen. It is likely she was one of the few rulers of Egypt descended from the Macedonian General   who took the trouble to learn the Egyptian language.  The historian Plutarch claims she knew many languages of the region, and records that she was not an incomparable beauty but rather had an excellence in speech and intelligence to go with her attractiveness. 

In other words, she was fun and no snob when it came to discoursing with barbarians. 

Today modern Egyptologists are trying to find the tombs of Cleopatra and her last love Anthony in a small settlement 30 miles west of Alexandria.   There is still questions about her mother's identity and how much she was of Greek ancestry or African blood.  But all this is pat of her fascination that has endured for centuries.  

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."--Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra 

  Her most famous incarnation was by Elizabeth Taylor  in the 1963 film, a spectacular over blown epic that made her and Richard Burton the modern Anthony and Cleopatra for the 1960's and 70's, an age of movie stars and the paparazzi who made a living off their binary star wattage. 

How real Cleopatra lasted as long as she has in history is her greatest long-term  achievement.   And if they do ever find her tomb, you can bet it will be the biggest story of  that week.  

 

 ctually 

The War That Killed Achilles:The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Caroline Alexander

"Sing, goddess, of Achilles ruinous anger
Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans,
And cast the souls of many stalwart heroes
To Hades, and their bodies to the dogs
And birds of prey." --The Iliad, Book One

"True, Homer was blind and that explains why he dated those odd-looking women."--Woody Allen.



Most of us come across Homer's epic "The Iliad" at some time in our secondary school or college careers. My time came in my first year of college, when a teacher devoted much of a Western Humanities course to this one book. At one time, knowledge of this work and the companion volume, "The Odyssey" was considered vital background for a gentleman, especially if he had learned it in Greek.

The story concerned kings of Greek fiefdoms during the Mycenaean Age (circa 1600--1200) who ruled little parts of the islands and the mainland around the Aegean Sea. They all sailed to a small Hittite City called Troy, apparently to avenge the kidnapping of the Queen of Sparta, Helen, who was whisked off--for or against her will-- by the Trojan Prince Paris. Helen was beautiful and was the prize given to Paris for picking Aphrodite over two others in some kind of Olympic beauty contest. Trouble was she was married at the time to Mendaleus, the King of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon. The latter is the titular leader of the whole show and a son of the cursed House of Atreus.

So the whole war party sails to Troy to get Helen back and all the other loot Paris and she probably ran off with. They besieged Troy for ten years (!) and the poem beings in the concluding phase of the war.


I came away from studying this book weeks later a little alienated. Yes, you could see it was a gripping story, set in that distant Bronze Age. But hardly any actual regular soldiers had speaking roles. And what was the reason for this war? One woman who may or might not have left of her own volition? Well, possibly, but Alexander points out that research into the surviving "Linear B" tablets from the ruins of Mycenaean settlements confirm that the coast of Anatolia (or modern Turkey) was a place of trade and plunder for the people who lived in the Bronze Age sites across the Aegean.


Then there were long periods of "The Iiad" with catalogues of how many ships and men each Achaean King had. The Greek Gods were in the whole mess, apparently getting amusement out of the fray but also (in the case of Ares and Apollo) sometimes coming to the battlefield to help their favorite side for the moment.

Indeed, the whole "Wrath of Achilles" aspect to the story comes from his losing a female war prize when the war chief Agamemnon gives back his captured woman to a priest of Apollo to stop a plague. Being an idiot, the King of Mycenae takes Achilles' girl for himself. Achilles is their best fighter, and he loses all interest in helping out. His tardiness from the battlefield will ultimately cost both these men dearly. Before he goes to his tent for a good sulk however, Achilles lets the leader of expedition have it,calling him a "wine-sack" and questioning his bravery. Then Achilles casts a chill on the whole raison d etre of the war:

"But why must the Argives fight
the Trojans? Why did Atreus' son assemble
and bring us? Wasn't it for Helen's sake?
Are Atreus' sons the only men who love their wives?"


Eventually Achilles decides his honor has been served enough after his friend, Patrocklus, is killed wearing Achilles special armor and so he finally sallies forth and enters the fray. He kills the Trojan Prince Hector, a good family man and possibly the one truly sympathetic figure in this story.

His speech to his wife as goes out to battle, leaving her and his son behind, is one of the most poignant summations of men doing their duty in wars they themselvess never started I've ever read:

"No man, against my fate, sends me to Hades'.
And as for fate, I'm sure no man escapes it,
Neither a good nor bad man, once he's born."

After Hector is dead, old King Priam comes down from Troy's walls and asks for his son's body back. Achilles, the son of a mortal man and a sea goddess, Thetis, shows pity on the man and for a time a bit of decency is restored.

This is a good book for someone, like myself, who wants to revisit this epic tale of war--the natural state of mankind it seems all too often--but wants a brisk and not-too detailed and footnoted guide. Ms. Alexander cuts through the obscure passages and brings one up to date on modern scholarship and also show how "The Iliad" echoes more recent and bloodier wars in modern times.

Illiterate of Her Own History : Cornerstone of America's Problems

I chose a segment of conservative columnist (and recent Pulitzer  Prize winner) Kathleen Parker's editorial today because it is something that has bothered me deeply. 

Parker is a "thinking conservative". By this I mean she is independent of thought on many issues, from promoting green technology to calling for Governor Sarah Palin  to step down from the position of vice-Presidential Candidate in 2008 on the sensible grounds that she was unqualified to lead the country by sheer inexperience and inability, for instance, to name a single newspaper or magazine she read regularly.   

For a country that is steeped in arguments from the Far Right about how our country should be governed more like the Founding Fathers envisioned it 230 years ago, it is important to reflect that many of the Founding Fathers like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were hostile to each other's vision of how the new nation should be governed. 

 

Hamilton, an aide-de-camp to General Washington during much of the war believed in a more British style of elitist government, with a life-time Senate (or Upper House) and a President with few controls on his power.  He later became the Secretary of the Treasury in Washington's government.

For his time Hamilton was the Conservative, a leader of the Federalist Party .  His ideas for promoting a national bank,  and the early manufacturing interests of the USA  made him the ideal "urban man" of his time. 

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, believed in a more populist government of yeoman farmers and had a dread of the banking and manufacturing interests taking hold of the country. He was the Secretary of State in that first Presidential Cabinet. His was the old Democratic Party--a party dedicated to small government and upholding individual rights.  Jefferson's ideals of freedom--albeit at the time those only concerning white males of property--clashed with  Hamilton's views.

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."
Thomas Jefferson

 Hamilton saw the need for centralized power to deal with the emerging economic power of the young republic, to consolidate the debts incurred by the thirteen states during the revolution against Britain into a federal government liability, and to deal forcefully witrh the mini-rebellions brought on by the need for the taxation and the efforts of men to avoid contribution to the common good for selfish ends.  

"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself." 
Alexander Hamilton

That Jefferson was a slave-holder and Hamilton possibly a double agent for the British while negotiating a treaty with France in the 1790's not withstanding, these men represent the core friction in American history---how to balance the democratic or Jeffersonian ideals of America with the meritocratic and proto-capitalist side of the young nation. It is still a friction today, long after George Washington had to try and keep these two men together in some form of concord in his cabinet.

To at least understand the backdrop of this argument is a prerequisite for understanding the debate we are having-today about the role of government and the influence of big business in our lives. 

But what if we cannot have a serious debate about it when the issues are clouded by ignorance  and fear.  I believe this is what is happening today. 

To Kathleen Parker's column:

"America's growing historical illiteracy is well-known to educators and policymakers, a glance at the statistics likely would surprise most Americans.

"In 2006, for instance, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute tested the civic literacy of 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. The average senior failed with a score of 54 percent.

"Also in 2006, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the "Nation's Report Card," found that only about one-sixth of students in grades four, eight and 12 are proficient in American history.

"Students are brilliant, apparently, when it comes to popular culture, something we've long known. In a 1999 survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), 98 percent of students from 55 top colleges and universities could identify the rap singer Snoop Doggy Dogg and 99 percent knew who Beavis and Butt-head were.

"It is one thing to debate the merits of American exceptionalism, though at the current rate of our growing national ignorance there soon won't be anyone with whom to argue. It is another not to know the essential facts of our founding.

"Students can't be blamed for not knowing what they haven't been taught. Another ACTA study in 2002 found that most top universities and colleges no longer require any history courses. In the lower grades, those who do study history will bump into the name George Washington far less often than did previous generations. Washington coverage in many textbooks is 10 percent of what it was 50 years ago, according to Mount Vernon executive director Jim Rees.

"Even so, adults don't know much either. A national survey of adults commissioned by the American Revolution Center found that 83 percent failed a basic test on the American Revolution.

"We may not know much, but we seem to understand, as the Founders did, that a free society can function only insofar as its citizens are well educated. The same survey found that 90 percent of Americans think that knowledge of the American Revolution is very important."

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So what are we left with?  A nation that has activists yelling at one another about issues and past arguments that most of the participants only have the foggiest notion about. A nation ignorant of its own past with millions ready to be led astray by any demagogue who can throw a few half-truths into "the market-place of ideas".  A nation which cannot pretend to appreciate what the Founding Fathers themselves were arguing about and how far apart they were on many issues.  (And I left out early founders like Patrick Henry and George Mason, both of whom bolted from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia when they couldn't get the type of states-rights government they wanted.)

Why do Americans allow anyone in print or through radio or television to talk about the Founding Fathers as if they were all of one mind?  Why can't we take education in civics seriously anymore?  Why is history thrown away like this and how long can ignorant people hope to even pretend to govern themselves?     

  

Jacksonville, Oregon--Oldest Town in Southern Oregon

Along the old highway leading into town.

I took a trip up the road to Jacksonville, a town once called "Table Rock City" when it was founded in the 1850's. It still retains a good deal of its architectural past when it was rowdy and not so friendly (if you were Chinese or Native American) gold rush town. Hope you enjoy a few of the photos.



Here's a bit of video someone shot last Summer (above)

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	Karen Armstrong

"Centuries of institutional, political, and intellectual development have tended to obscure the importance of compassion in religion. All too often the religion that dominates the public discourse seems to express an institutional egotism: my faith is better than yours! As Zhuangzi noted, once people interject themselves into their beliefs, they can become quarrelsome, officious, or even unkind. Compassion is not a popular virtue, because it demands laying aside of the ego that we identify with our deepest self: so people often prefer being right to being compassionate."

Karen Armstrong is a well-known popular historian who has written a couple dozen books on religious matters. She herself is not affiliated with any one spiritual faith, but began her adult life as a nun in a convent in England from 1962 to 1969. (A time she recalls in her memoir, "The Spiral Staircase"). She found out she was more motivated to be a scholar then to be in holy orders and so she left the convent to devote herself full-time to her studies. She had a career as a writer and a television host where she explored religious and political events in the Middle East and modern Europe. She initial books were more negative toward religion and spirituality, but her current life has led her to work for international entities that try to bring people of different faiths to conferences and other projects to achieve greater understanding.

This book goes through a period that philosopher Karl Jaspers called The Axial Age, a period modernists date from roughly 900 to 200 BCE. It was in this span of time that the foundation of four great religious, social and political traditions developed that is the bedrock of much of the major cultures of the globe: Greek rationalism, Jewish monotheism, Indian religion and philosophy, and the development of the Confusion and Taoist traditions that helped united China from a group of warring states to an single unified empire.

Armstrong focuses on a great span of history and to try and cover all points of development would be a small book in itself. Suffice to say it is a great "refresher course" in ancient history. It highlights the rise (and fall) of Representative government in 5th Century Athens; the struggles and eventual loss of the Jewish independence to a variety of greta empires, the most traumatic of which was the 60-70 year Babylonian exile; the development of the Vedic religion in Indian history that , after urbanization, led to a movement away from blood rituals and into groups of "renounce-rs" and monks t leaving these environments toward an inner-self (Atman) and to a strong effort at tranquility of the soul, symbolized by Gautama (The Buddha) approaches toward an inner tranquility beyond all suffering and life vicissitudes to something called "nirvana" where ego is gone and the spirit is at rest from the struggles of rebirths and suffering. She also traces the rise of Sages like Confucius, a 6th Century sage who sought to create inner peace within society itself through a search for something called "ren", a transcendent and sacred reality that could only be achieved by discipline and renouncement of self.

Many others spiritual paths are discussed in being the historical background. Some are directed toward a universal love and acceptance of others without any recourse to a God or gods. Others paved the way for a greater emphasis on monotheism. Schools of divinity and skepticism, or idealism and idealism competed for adherents in places like the Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

This western tradition of philosophic friction had to give way with the rise of institutionalized Christian power from Rome and Byzantium. But after rediscovery of Greek traditions (much of which came from Islamic scholarship during the later Crusades, ironically) in the 12th Century the ancient learning in astronomy and physics and engineering eventually became the catalyst for the scientific movements that led to the Second Axial Age of Newton, Freud, Darwin and Einstein.

Not all religious movements were involved in imposing a faith on others---the Buddhism of the 2nd Century Emperor Ashoka of India and the early Islamic Empire are examples of a power without cohering of spirituality. It is this freedom that I believe is the greatest gift of the Axial Age-the freedom to choose from all the great sages of the past and draw what is unique and similar to find a greater inner peace and hopefully a better external life.