A couple of weeks ago I posted an article about the important of “junior leadership” in the military, especially, but, by extension, in all enterprises. My point was that if one lays a good, firm, foundation of “junior leadership” (tank and rifle section and troop and platoon commanders in the Army) then everything else ~ senior leadership, management, operations and even strategy ~ will probably thrive, but, if the foundation is weak, poorly laid, then success is unlikely in anything, and, if it does occur, it will be by accident.
I am reminded that back in the 1960s one of the (many) problems than then Minister of National Defence Paul Hellyer wanted to solve was pay. The Navy, Army and Air Force were having some trouble recruiting in the late 1950s and early 1960s: the post war recessions were over, the economy was growing, the threat of war seemed to be receding and military pay was quite low … all those things made recruiting and retaining the right people more difficult ~ especially for a military that was changing, rapidly, into a technologically sophisticated organization. There had been several boards and panels, reporting to both Prime Ministers Diefenbaker and Pearson, recommending new, better, higher pay scales for the military but little action had been taken because there was no public appetite for military pay raises. Paul Hellyer decided to ‘work around’ the problem by changing the definitions of “junior leadership.” Whereas, prior to the mid 1960s, the tank or infantry section commander had been a corporal (a rank that one could, theoretically, achieve after only 18 months of training ~ and 20 or 21 year old corporals were not rare, I was one) and the platoon or troop commanders were lieutenants, Mr Hellyer changed the rank of tank and section commander to sergeant (a rank that, typically, takes 10 years to achieve) and made promotion to corporal automatic, subject only to passing a trade/speciality skill course, and he made troop and platoon commanders captains and lowered the time that had to be spent as a lieutenant.
The effect was to debase the rank of corporal ~ which still retained its status as a “non commissioned officer” rank in the National Defence Act and Queen’s Regulations ~ by making privates and corporals interchangeable as “workers,” and, equally, to debase the captain rank by making captains and lieutenants interchangeable as first level combat commanders. In effect, while trying to solve one problem, Mr Hellyer created another ~ which I believe might be more serious.
Ted Campbell, “The foundation (2)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-02-21.
January 9, 2019
QotD: When the solution to one problem becomes a bigger problem
December 21, 2018
Repost – The Monkees – “Riu Chiu” HD (Official Music Video)
Uploaded on 15 Dec 2015
The Monkees perform “Riu Chiu” from Episode 47, “The Monkees’ Christmas Show”.
H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.
December 20, 2018
China’s Cultural Revolution
In Quillette, James David Banker describes the beginnings of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution:
“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao, published by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart,” wrote James Baldwin, “for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” This observation has been confirmed many times throughout history. However, China’s Cultural Revolution offers perhaps the starkest illustration of just how dangerous the “pure in heart” can be. The ideological justification for the revolution was to purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the nation more broadly, of impure elements hidden in its midst: capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, and “representatives of the bourgeoisie.” To that end, Mao Zedong activated China’s youth — unblemished and uncorrupted in heart and mind — to lead the struggle for purity. Christened the “Red Guards,” they were placed at the vanguard of a revolution that was, in truth, a cynical effort by Mao to reassert his waning power in the Party. Nevertheless, it set in motion a self-destructive force of almost unimaginable depravity.
The Cultural Revolution commenced in spirit when Mao published a letter indicting a number of Party leaders on May 16, 1966. But it was a seemingly minor event nine days later that ignited the revolution in effect: a young philosophy professor at Peking University named Nie Yuanzi placed a “big-character poster” (a handwritten propaganda sheet featuring large Chinese characters) on a public bulletin board denouncing the university president and others in the administration as bourgeois revisionists. Mao immediately endorsed her protest, which set off a chain reaction of student revolt that swept through China.
That chain reaction was accelerated by “working groups” of ideologues sent to administer schools. Under their tenure, schools became centers of activism rather than learning. Students were encouraged to create big-character posters exposing their own teachers, officials, and even parents. The accused were humiliated in daily “struggle sessions” in which their students and colleagues interrogated them and demanded confessions. The viciousness of these sessions rapidly intensified. Students beat, spat upon, and tortured — in horrifically creative ways — their often elderly teachers and professors. In one case, students demanded their biology professor stare at the sun with wide open eyes. If he blinked or looked away, they beat him. Even middle and elementary school students participated in the struggle sessions, sometimes beating their teachers to death with sticks and belt buckles.
Students were also encouraged to turn on their classmates. As the sins of one generation passed to the next, a new hierarchy was born: the children of revolutionaries on top and the children of “landlords,” “capitalists,” and “rightists” at the bottom. These students were labeled “rotten eggs” and were fair game for the same treatment meted out to their parents. The current president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, endured this fate. He was only 15 years old when his father, a loyal Maoist and one-time propaganda chief, was purged, his sister executed, and his own mother forced to denounced Xi as a reactionary. Amid the hysteria, teachers, professors, and intellectuals did not dare to stand up to the students or defend their colleagues lest they suffer similar fates. But they could not escape by being bystanders. With every word and action becoming potential evidence of capitalist sympathy, teachers and intellectuals enthusiastically joined their students in the struggle sessions and screaming rallies.
November 12, 2018
Reason magazine at 50
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Reason, the top libertarian magazine in the United States, if not the world — I’ve been a subscriber for something like thirty years now. To mark the occasion, Matt Welch recounts the story of the magazine’s founder, Lanny Friedlander.
The New Republic was launched in 1914 by three of the most famous intellectuals of the Progressive era: Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl. National Review was introduced in 1955 by an oil tycoon’s son named William F. Buckley, already notorious for provocative books criticizing Yale and defending Joseph McCarthy. The Weekly Standard was founded with Rupert Murdoch’s money 40 years later by former Dan Quayle speechwriter William Kristol, whose legendary magazine-editor father Irving was considered the godfather of neoconservatism. Prestigious journals of opinion often emanate from prestige.
Not so Reason. The magazine you are reading was the brainchild of a 20-year-old Boston University student nobody had ever heard of named Lanny Friedlander, who stapled together and mailed out the first mimeographed issues from a hopelessly disorganized room at his mother’s brick house in Brighton, Massachusetts. You will search in vain for any editor’s note in the history of The Nation or Mother Jones with a lead like this opening line from Friedlander in January 1970: “I drive a delivery van for a living.”
From these inauspicious beginnings, Reason has grown to a magazine with a circulation of over 40,000, averaging more than 4 million visits online per month and producing videos that were watched 48 million times on YouTube and Facebook in the last year — in addition to a practical-minded public policy shop that helps reform public pensions, privatize government services, and build better highways. Almost all of that achievement took place after Friedlander exited the scene. In 1970, after two thrilling but erratic years, Reason‘s founder sold the publication’s thin assets and thicker liabilities for less than $3,500 to the industrious California-based trio of systems engineer Robert W. Poole Jr., libertarian lawyer Manuel S. Klausner, and neo-Objectivist philosopher Tibor Machan. (Their significant others, who also joined the partnership at the time, were eventually bought out.) In 1978, they launched the foundation that publishes the magazine to this day.
By the time both Reason and the modern libertarian movement began to flourish, one of the key architects of both had fallen off the grid, never to return. Yet Friedlander’s distinct vision is still visible, in the form of the magazine’s lowercase, sans-serif logo, its willingness to gather in various strains of libertarianism for examination and debate, and a certain natural sympathy for outsiders, eccentrics, dreamers. “He was bold, amazingly gifted, socially uncertain,” recalls Mark Frazier, then a high school student who helped with paste-up and other tasks on some of those early editions before moving on to a long career in the free cities movement. “He followed a compass that set many different things in motion.”
Who exactly was this sui generis spark, how was he able to rise above the 1960s and ’70s din of short-lived libertarian-world newsletters, and why did he flame out so fast? These elusive questions have haunted a succession of Reason captains. Upon Friedlander’s death in 2011, Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of the magazine from 2000 through 2007, wrote that in the absence of any information, he had “started thinking of Lanny as libertarianism’s answer to Syd Barrett, the mad genius founder of Pink Floyd who got something great started and then couldn’t or wouldn’t live in the world he did so much to create.” Even people who knew Friedlander in the flesh are hazy on details, tending to project onto his sparse canvas the arc of their own life journeys.
A closer examination on the occasion of this 50th anniversary begins to fill out the picture of Reason‘s starkly minimalist origin story. Lanny Friedlander was an Objectivist who believed in big-tent libertarianism, a student protester who reviled other student protesters, and an anti-war/anti-draft activist who volunteered for the Navy. He was professionally charismatic and personally introverted, an exacting truth seeker and unreliable narrator, a systemic thinker and disheveled coordinator. (“The printed format of this issue,” he wrote when announcing the magazine’s first offset-press edition in September 1969, “does not represent a guarantee that the next issue will also be printed.”) He will likely be remembered most for his striking sense of art direction — Wired co-creator Louis Rossetto, who first encountered Reason as an undergrad at Columbia University, said in 2011 that the publication “was my gateway to good design” — yet when describing himself, Friedlander preferred the term “writer/intellectual.”
September 26, 2018
The last British carriers before the Queen Elizabeth class
This is a long, long thread from @EngageStrategy, so I’m putting it below the fold for those who aren’t interested and don’t want to scroll down for hours…
It covers the near-death experience of British carriers in the 1960s (the cancellation of the last fleet carriers), the odd evolution of the “through deck command cruisers” (Invincible, Illustrious, and Ark Royal), the development of the Harrier, and the very near-run thing that was the carriers’ share of combat duty during the Falklands War.
September 10, 2018
HMS Victorious Receives New Strike Force (1966)
British Pathé
Published on 13 Apr 2014Full title reads: “Moray Firth. ‘Victorious’ Receives New Strike Force”.
Moray Firth, Scotland.
Air view Royal Navy warship, the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious at sea refuelling from tanker. Air view ditto. Angle shot as Buccaneer fighter jets flies overhead. LV Interior of bridge. SV The Captain DL Davenport talking to Senior Officer. CU The Captain.
LV As Buccaneer comes in and lands on Victorious. LV As wings fold up. GV As it moves to side of ship. Air view as another plane comes in and lands. LV As it misses the arrester wire and overshoots. SV Men watching. Air view as the plane comes in again. CU As it hooks the arrester wire. LV As the plane comes to a halt. CU The arrester wire comes back for next plane. LV Next plane coming in. CU As it hooks wire. LV As it comes to halt.
LV The FDO (Flight Deck Officer) signalling for catapult mechanism to be fixed to aircraft. LV The aircraft preparing for take off. SV As the plane is hooked up. LV Firemen standing ready. Steam is rising from catapult mechanism. CU Firemen. CU FDO signals for take off. LV As the aircraft takes off. SV Buccaneer with wings folded on deck. GV The deck packed with Buccaneers.
(Original Neg.)
FILM ID:1795.16A VIDEO FROM BRITISH PATHÉ. EXPLORE OUR ONLINE CHANNEL, BRITISH PATHÉ TV. IT’S FULL OF GREAT DOCUMENTARIES, FASCINATING INTERVIEWS, AND CLASSIC MOVIES. http://www.britishpathe.tv/
September 9, 2018
Hunter S. Thompson, Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone
Darcy Gerow on the sudden rise and long, long decline of Rolling Stone:
The suffocating media bias of the 1960s was difficult to escape. A lethargic gray specter of middle-class America was distributed with cunning sterility through the generic, bogus smiles of cable news networks and traditional print. Despite the election and assassination of Kennedy and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, if you had turned on a T.V. this was still Eisenhower’s America: regimented, religious, conservative. And the cultural vacuum created by the Eisenhower years had began to suck even harder with Lyndon Baines Johnson at the helm.
American media was out of touch with this new generation. Elitist authoritarians were preaching their moral superiority stamped with stars and stripes to a generation of cynics. These kids didn’t have a fucking clue what they wanted, but they wanted no part of what they were being given. So rose Rolling Stone, a counterculture bible for babyboomers, co-founded by Jann Wenner.[…]
Things were different in the 1960s. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were a just cause. The catalyst for a just movement of equal rights for women and gays and minorities was free speech, of which Jann Wenner was a huge proponent. When students at U.C. Berkley marched in the streets in the 1960s, it was an attack on the elitist, authoritarians and an establishment hellbent on keeping opposing viewpoints and the ideas of personal liberty stifled. The gang of “cruel faggots” kept the official narrative running but no one under 30 was listening.
The whole goddamn world had had enough of the travesty of war in Southeast Asia. There was no ignoring the ineptitude of American politics. The only reasonable thing to do in 1969 was to drive out to Altamont for the weekend, load up on heinous chemicals, hunker down and rethink your approach to the political process.
Thompson, the then-young, liberal anti-hero, could often be found gobbling LSD and firing his guns (he was a lifetime member of the NRA) at propane bottles for a crowd of jeering burnouts or Bay area bikers at his fortified compound, Owl Farm, in Woody Creek Colorado.
It was Jann Wenner’s idea to put Hunter, with all of his fear and loathing, on to the campaign trail in 1972. Why not get the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels? Hunter was someone with a penchant for dealing with vicious thugs and sick freaks gone crazy on power, someone who could draw a parallel between Richard Nixon and Sonny Barger.
Thompson’s openly-biased, subjective and wild account of the 1972 presidential election was the red Chevy convertible of campaign coverage. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on repeat and at full volume, barrelling across the country at 110 miles an hour or so and in search of an honest politician. In Hunter’s eyes, the only one that even came close was George McGovern, the senator from South Dakota.
McGovern’s non-interventionist platform focused on a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders and a Milton Freidman-inspired, negative income tax meant to replace the bureaucratic burden of social welfare programs and a complicated tax code. Thompson’s version of events is the story of an idealistic underdog fighting against the odds only to be crushed by postmodern Americanism and the establishment incumbent, “Tricky Dick Nixon.” McGovern might have owed a White House win, in part, to Thompson’s and Rolling Stone’s relentless support had he not owed his White House loss to the mental distress of his vice-presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton.
There’s no way to properly explain how great Rolling Stone was in those early years. How well the magazine represented the anti-establishment culture, individual liberty and equality for everyone. It can’t be compared to anything else because there was nothing else, only the traditional mainstream garbage and Rolling Stone.
September 2, 2018
HMS Eagle: Royal Aircraft Carrier (1969) | Extra! | British Pathé
British Pathé
Published on 13 Apr 2014This Pathé ‘Extra!’ segment depicts the carrier HMS Eagle in 1969, which was the 15th in a long line of Royal Navy ships to carry that name. This particular ship was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier that hosted all manner of planes from the de Havilland Sea Vixen to the McDonnell Douglas Phantom.
#BritishPathé #RoyalNavy #RAF #Ships #Navy #Military
(FILM ID:2221.15)
Extra ! HMS Eagle.Aerial shot of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle of the Royal Navy. M/S of radar tower. Several shots of jet aircraft on the deck of the ship including Sea Vixens, Gannets and Phantoms. Shots of jet plane taxiing on runway. M/S to L/S of Sea Vixen taking off from the deck. M/Ss of three men working in the control tower. M/Ss of pilot sitting in cockpit of jet on the deck. Good shot of deck crew at work preparing jet plane for takeoff. L/Ss of Phantom aircraft taking-off. L/S and M/S of the aircraft in-flight. L/S of deck of ship. An aircraft lands on the deck of the ship. M/S of arrester wire. Another shot of plane landing. M/S of Westland Wessex helicopter hovering nearby. Air to air shot of phantom in-flight. M/S shots of plane landing. L/Ss of the aircraft carrier.
August 28, 2018
Stross in conversation with Heinlein
Charles Stross explains why so many Baby Boomer SF writers fall so far short when they write in imitation of Robert Heinlein:
Robert A. Heinlein at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention
Via Wikimedia Commons.
RAH was, for better or worse, one of the dominant figures of American SF between roughly 1945 and 1990 (he died in 1988 but the publishing pipeline drips very slowly). During his extended career (he first began publishing short fiction in the mid-1930s) he moved through a number of distinct phases. One that’s particularly notable is the period from 1946 onwards when, with Scribners, he began publishing what today would be categorized as middle-grade SF novels (but were then more specifically boys adventure stories or childrens fiction): books such as Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet, Red Planet, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel. There were in all roughly a dozen of these books published from 1947 to 1958, and as critic John Clute notes, they included some of the very best juvenile SF ever written (certainly at that point), and were free of many of the flaws that affected Heinlein’s later works — they maintained a strong narrative drive, were relatively free from his tendency to lecture the reader (which could become overwhelming in his later adult novels), and were well-structured as stories.
But most importantly, these were the go-to reading matter for the baby boom generation, kids born from 1945 onwards. It used to be said, somewhat snidely, that “the golden age of SF is 12”; if you were an American boy (or girl) born in 1945 you’d have turned 12 in 1957, just in time to read Time for the Stars or Citizen of the Galaxy. And you might well have begun publishing your own SF novels in the mid-1970s — if your name was Spider Robinson, or John Varley, or Gregory Benford, for example.
Then a disturbing pattern begins to show up.
The pattern: a white male author, born in the Boomer generation (1945-1964), with some or all of the P7 traits (Pale Patriarchal Protestant Plutocratic Penis-People of Power) returns to the reading of their childhood and decides that what the Youth of Today need is more of the same. Only Famous Dead Guy is Dead and no longer around to write more of the good stuff. Whereupon they endeavour to copy Famous Dead Guy’s methods but pay rather less attention to Famous Dead Guy’s twisty mind-set. The result (and the cause of James’s sinking feeling) is frequently an unironic pastiche that propagandizes an inherently conservative perception of Heinlein’s value-set.
It should be noted that Charles Stross is politically left, so calling something “conservative” is intended to be understood as a pejorative connotation, not merely descriptive.
But here’s the thing: as often as not, when you pick up a Heinlein tribute novel by a male boomer author, you’re getting a classic example of the second artist effect.
Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society.
Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars.
Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).
In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).
August 18, 2018
The collapse of Genoa’s Ponte Morandi
Austin Williams reviews what information is currently available on the collapse of one of the towers of the Morandi Bridge (Ponte Morandi) on Tuesday:
The Morandi Bridge in Genoa shortly after the collapse of one of the towers, viewed from Coronata.
Photo by Salvatore Fabbrizio via Wikimedia Commons
The appalling tragedy of the Morandi Bridge, which collapsed on Tuesday, 14 August 2018, is a disaster that is still under investigation. At the moment, there are reports of 40 lives lost, but not much is known about the causes or the wider consequences. I am loath to speculate about either, but there needs to be a wider conversation and not simply kneejerk demands for corporate manslaughter charges against the private bridge-operating company, Autostrade per l’Italia. Heads will roll – deservedly so – but we must look at wider concerns about infrastructure, per se. (I caveat all of this by saying that pre-empting the ongoing investigation may reveal me to be wide of the mark.)
Firstly, the collapse was extraordinary. The bridge – built in the mid-1960s and named after the civil engineer Riccardo Morandi – is architecturally unique, and with this comes unique stresses that may have given rise to the catastrophic failure. A similar collapse of a similar nature and magnitude has not occurred before with a cable-stayed bridge. This bridge had 90m-high concrete towers that held tensioned cables fixed at an angle to the deck (the roadway), meaning that as the cables were being stretched by the loads, the towers were being squashed by the same loads. In engineering terms, the weight of the deck (and the traffic on it) was carried by the combined structure, meaning that the towers were under tremendous compression while the cables were under tension.
Bridge design always makes allowances – contingencies – for localised failure, and therefore even the most efficient, slender structures tend to be over-designed so that the engineers can sleep at night. The bridge has to imagine, for example, wind loads, snow loads, or 250 lorries being on the bridge rather than just 250 cars. But have the owners and managers of this bridge kept up with the reality, that in the 60 years or so since this bridge was constructed, loading conditions have significantly increased owing to increased freight volumes and vehicle sizes? Has this unseen attritional damage finally come home to roost?
In this bridge design, there is only one angled ‘stay’ (made up of four steel cables) encased in a concrete covering. The idea was that the concrete would protect the steel from weathering, corrosion and failure. Maintenance work as recently as 15 or so years ago replaced some of the cable stays and recoated them in concrete. Suggestions that cracks in the concrete exacerbated the ingress of water, which speeded the corrosion of the cables, are possible, but not totally convincing.
Were the cables to snap – possibly requiring more than one to snap due to the engineering contingency discussed above – then the deck would fall and possibly overbalance the entire structure. However, the fact that the towers collapsed in such a horrific fashion – seeming to crumble – may hint that the problem may lie in the foundations, where regular maintenance work was being carried out. We just don’t yet know. As Professor Gordon Masterton, from the University of Edinburgh’s school of engineering, told the Guardian, there needs to be a ‘forensic and thorough’ investigation to get to the root cause.
June 24, 2018
Proper Model Making – a rant against the decline of good model shops
Lindybeige
Published on 1 Jun 2018A bit of a rant about how youngsters these days are making fewer models. The setting is Helsinki’s Mallikauppa.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeMy source for the information about Charles Lutman were a newspaper article and word of mouth from his grandson.
Many thanks to the shop for letting me shoot this. Here is its website: https://www.mallikauppa.fi
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
May 17, 2018
John W. Campbell Reshapes Sci-Fi – Pulp! Astounding Stories – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 15 May 2018Writer-turned-famous-editor of Astounding Stories, John W. Campbell helped usher in the golden age of science fiction, driven by a new authorial understanding of real science and real psychology.
Tom Wolfe “would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal”
In the National Post Colby Cosh explains why Tom Wolfe was so significant in the literary world almost from his first published work:
… Tom Wolfe was an educated man: unlike any of the macho novelists he was sparring with, he was entitled to adjoin an honest-to-God PhD to his byline. In the end, he could not escape the prejudices imprinted on him in youth. It is a truth universally acknowledged: a prose artist must excrete a novel to demonstrate his true mettle.
Wolfe described it this way himself in a 2008 interview. “Originally, I was only going to write one novel, to prove to myself and any random doubters that I could do it.” “Random doubters” sounds so dismissive and calm until you remember the amount of work Wolfe was proposing to undertake in order to impress them. He continued: “But that novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was such an astounding success… I’m afraid I got swept away.”
Wolfe, I suppose, was too well-raised to utter the word “money” in front of an interviewer. (The explicit subject of all his work, his journalism and fiction, is social status: but social status and money do travel together mighty closely.) Bonfire (1987) became one of the publishing events of the epoch, and he would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal. The dabbler in the novel had proved too much: he had proved that the novel really is still in a class by itself as a social phenomenon.
More novels in the vein of Bonfire — deeply researched, socially prescient, full of truculent conservative squareness — followed. I myself would not trade The Right Stuff, Wolfe’s 1979 nonfiction book about the Mercury astronauts, for the whole pile, Bonfire included. (And I say this knowing full well that there is some quantum of sheer bull in The Right Stuff.)
Wolfe continued to insist, returning to the interview already mentioned, that “Nonfiction remains the most important literary genre in American literature of the past 60 years.” He still, 20 years on from Bonfire, felt the need to half-apologize for abandoning non-fiction. My instinct is that it was indeed a mistake, but I am only a consumer of Wolfe, looking back at the corpus from without: none of us readers had to meet Wolfe’s dry-cleaning bills.
April 17, 2018
The renewed controversy over Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech
In Spiked, Mick Hume discusses the resurgent controversy after a BBC re-broadcast of the original Powell speech this past weekend:
Here are the news headlines. There were no reports of race riots, pogroms or waves of hate crimes across Britain on Saturday night, as the BBC broadcast a radio show marking the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s infamously anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. In other news, the US, UK and France have bombed Syria…
Why all the overblown fuss about the BBC Radio 4 programme that broadcast the full text of Powell’s 1968 speech for the first time? To judge by the political denunciations and demands for a ban and the many ‘what next – Hitler’s Mein Kampf as Book at Bedtime?’-type tweets, one might imagine that the BBC had cleared the primetime schedules to give the late Powell the full Nuremburg Rally treatment.
In fact, the radio programme, ‘50 Years On: Rivers of Blood’, presented by BBC media editor Amol Rajan, was tucked away in the quiet Saturday evening Archive on 4 slot, where few might have noticed if not for all the calls for it to be taken off air. Far from giving us the full Enoch, the speech was cut up into chunks read by an actor and interspersed with critical commentary that went on rather longer than Powell.
But then, the ruckus over this programme really had little to do with Enoch and the anti-immigrant politics of 1968. The pre-emptive backlash was more about Brexit, and the anti-working-class politics of 2018. The essential message of the protests was that if the demos today heard Powell’s words from 50 years ago, they might go straight out to attack Britain’s immigrant or ethnic-minority communities and turn the Thames or the Tees into real-life rivers of blood. They think we are all Enochs now.
Ironically, it is these leading Remainers who sound more like modern-day Enochs, echoing a PC version of his warnings about a coming race war caused by anti-immigrant feeling. If Powell’s rhetoric was overdone back then, theirs is ridiculous today.
For us colonials who may not have been fully immersed in late-60s British politics, the Wikipedia page helps put it into some sort of perspective.
The “Rivers of Blood” speech is a speech given by British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968, addressing a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The speech strongly criticised mass immigration, especially Commonwealth immigration to the UK and the then-proposed Race Relations Bill.
Powell always referred to it as “the Birmingham speech” and the expression “rivers of blood” did not appear in the original speech. The phrase is an allusion to a line from Virgil’s Aeneid quoted by Powell (“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”).
The speech caused a political storm, making Powell one of the most talked about, and divisive, politicians in the country, and leading to his controversial dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet by Conservative Party leader Edward Heath. According to most accounts, the popularity of Powell’s perspective on immigration may have played a decisive contributory factor in the Conservatives’ surprise victory in the 1970 general election, and he became one of the most persistent rebels opposing the subsequent Heath government.
March 18, 2018
QotD: National flags
If you have never investigated or thought through this odd phenomenon of national anthems, it might not occur to you that it is not OK to tamper with the lyrics. There was a time not so long ago when national flag etiquette was fairly severe. Flags were seen as essentially military emblems, and their use was informed by military protocols. When flags started to be turned into clothing and ironic art in the 1960s, and were exposed to the demoralizing effects of marketed consumer kitsch in the 1970s, these developments were greeted with unease. Not so much in Canada, of course: our flag was invented as a marketing device in a time of consumerism, and it had not been used to soak up oceans of blood, so it lacks the sobering associations other flags have. It had a virgin birth. We are quite welcome to slap it onto a backpack or a truck bumper.
The point is that flags can now be visually remixed with near-total freedom by artists and designers and inserted into all sorts of contexts with relatively little discomfort. If you want to put Donald Trump in an editorial cartoon with a gore-oozing Stars and Stripes, no contemporary American will kick up too much fuss. Yet the taboos around anthems, as Remigio Pereira discovered, seem to have grown stronger. And even as someone who was instinctively furious with him, I am not quite sure how this happened, or why.
Colby Cosh, “Let’s talk about anthems”, National Post, 2016-07-14.
