When China’s ubiquitous state security agents want to intimidate a dissident or political activist for the first time, they usually come knocking in the middle of the night with an invitation for “a cup of tea”. Once the tea is served in some secret location, the agents explain that if their guest continues publicly to criticise Communist party rule, the likely consequences range from unemployment to long prison sentences or even “disappearance” for them, their family and friends.
So it seems somehow fitting that Bao Tong, the most senior Communist party official to be jailed as a consequence of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, should have invited me to tea at his apartment in the west of Beijing.
It was 20 years ago next week, on June 3 and 4 1989, that the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of peaceful student protesters and bystanders. As the anniversary of the bloody crackdown approaches, Bao, now 77, remains under house arrest, his apartment watched around the clock and his movements tightly restricted by state security officers. I’d originally invited him for lunch at a restaurant but, as he patiently explained, under the terms of his house arrest it would be more convenient to meet in his home.
He greets me at the door with a wry smile, jet-black hair and a lithe frame wrapped in a Princeton University sweatshirt. It is hard to believe that he spent six years of his life doing hard labour during the Cultural Revolution and then, from 1989, another seven years in solitary confinement in the notorious Qincheng political prison. When I mention the sinister-looking men at the entrance to his apartment block who asked me to explain why I’ve come to see him, his face cracks into a sly grin.
“I’m contributing to the country by stimulating domestic demand, increasing employment and helping solve the financial crisis,” he says. He speaks Mandarin with the soft consonants of a southerner and the confidence characteristic of a senior party cadre. “You only saw three people down there but if I want to go out I’m followed by three groups – one on foot, one in cars and one on motorbikes. Just think – it takes more than 30 people to keep an eye on me so if the government decided to monitor all 1.3bn people in China we could solve the unemployment problem for the whole world!”
While this kind of gallows humour and the satirical use of communist propaganda slogans is common on the anonymous internet, I have never heard a senior Chinese official, even a retired one, talk like this in public.
Bao Tong was born in 1932 in Shanghai, where his father was a clerk in an enamel factory. The young Bao was influenced by two uncles, prominent left-wing intellectuals: one became a professor at Oxford University; the other became famous for a hunger strike aimed at convincing the government of the day to fight the Japanese.
At high school in Shanghai, Bao met his future wife, Jiang Zongcao, an active member of the communist underground who was kicked out of a string of schools for organising demonstrations. She convinced him to join the Communist party in 1949, the year it came to power following a bloody civil war. Comrade Bao quickly worked his way up through the communist bureaucracy, but then in 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, he was denounced and sent to do hard labour at a re-education farm in Manchuria.
After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, many previously persecuted officials were politically rehabilitated and Bao was assigned to senior government positions. During the 1980s, he worked as a top aide to premier Zhao Ziyang, a liberal reformer who helped usher in a period of political and economic openness in the 1980s, and in 1987 was appointed to the Communist party’s central committee. He served as the minister in charge of political reform and as political secretary to the standing committee of the Politburo, the five-man group that ran the country at that time.
One of the first things I notice in his spartan, dimly lit apartment is a large photograph on his bookshelf of Zhao. Only two weeks ago, Zhao’s secret memoir, Prisoner of the State, was published in Hong Kong – a rare first-hand account of Chinese elite politics. Over the next hour, Bao gives me his own blow-by-blow account of the secret and increasingly intense power struggle that raged during the seven weeks of upheaval that ended with tanks rolling down the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing.
He begins with his verdict: the man who bears full and sole responsibility for ordering the People’s Liberation Army to turn their guns on the people is Deng Xiaoping, the Communist party elder who controlled the leadership from behind the scenes until his death in 1997. Most historians regard Deng as the father of modern China: the architect of its economic reform and opening to the world. But in 1989 his only official title was chairman of the Central Military Commission.
“Most of the students weren’t trying to depose Deng Xiaoping; they were hoping he would carry out reforms,” Bao says. “The problem was Deng felt threatened and he called in the troops. This is how the tragedy happened, a true tragedy in Chinese history.” Zhao, explains Bao, felt the students’ demands for democracy and an end to corruption were exactly what the Communist party itself claimed to stand for, and that a conciliatory approach would be the best way to end the protests.
This difference of approach ultimately proved critical. But Zhao’s struggle to avoid sending in the troops ended on May 17 1989 when, after a state visit to China by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhao’s colleagues in the Politburo forced him to resign. In the middle of the night on May 18, Zhao made his final, tearful, public appearance in Tiananmen Square, urging students to give up their struggle and return to class.
In a famous photograph from that night, Wen Jiabao, now premier of China, can be seen standing next to Zhao as he addresses the demonstrators. Bao won’t be drawn on whether Wen was a Zhao sympathiser, as some historians suggest. “Who knows if he supported Zhao? Only he knows.”
His caution reminds me that every word we’re speaking is being recorded and I glance around the room involuntarily, as if I might be able to spot one of the bugs. This line of questioning is not going to do me or my host any good, so I return to 1989 and the days after Zhao’s resignation.
“Many people thought Zhao Ziyang was conspiring to launch a coup against Deng Xiaoping,” Bao says. “In fact, he and I did hatch a ‘conspiracy’ [on the day Zhao was forced to resign], which was to sing the praises of Deng Xiaoping.” Zhao believed he could avert a massacre by appealing for calm, explaining to the masses why Deng was in charge, despite holding no formal government or Communist party positions.
Bao was implicated – and later punished – for his alliance with the discredited Zhao. I ask if he regrets not having tried to plot a real coup with Zhao at that point. “Some people said Zhao Ziyang could copy Yeltsin and climb up on to a tank, but that,” says Bao, “was impossible: no single soldier would listen to Zhao, they didn’t know him at all. They listened to their officers, the officers listened to the generals and the generals listened to Deng Xiaoping.” As Mao Zedong famously said, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Bao describes the night the old men, women and children of Beijing took thermos flasks to the soldiers and begged them not to enter the city; how ordinary citizens built barricades in the streets to protect the students and how the tanks and troops stormed the city. “The tanks were roaring and the bullets were flying into people’s homes. In my building, the son-in-law of a government minister was killed as he was pouring a cup of tea in his living room.”
I look down at the untouched porcelain teacup on the table in front of me. I’ve been so engrossed I haven’t taken one sip and now I’m not sure if it’s my cup or his. Bao’s vivid description belies the fact he was not in Beijing that night and was not able to piece together the whole story until years later, with the help of smuggled western media cuttings.
On May 28 1989, Bao himself was arrested and taken to Qincheng, China’s main political prison since the 1950s. There he became number 8901 – the first prisoner to enter Qincheng in the year 1989 – and was put in a 6m by 6m cement cell with only a stiff wooden board propped on two saw horses for a bed. “I lay down on the board and went to sleep. People ask me why I wasn’t terrified. Before that moment I didn’t know when they would come for me, but now I didn’t need to worry any more.”
There was no door to his cell but a guard sat at a table propped across the entrance; two soldiers stood to attention behind him. The seated guard’s job was to record the prisoner’s every action in a notebook 24 hours a day, one entry a minute, for seven years. Bao chuckles at the frustrating boredom of the job assigned to his captors – “20.00 hours – prisoner 8901 sleeping; 20.01 hours – prisoner 8901 sleeping; 20.02 hours – prisoner 8901 sleeping and so on.”
In 1996 Bao was finally released from prison and placed under house arrest. His jaw tightens slightly as he describes the hardships his family has endured as a result of their relationship. His Princeton-educated son Bao Pu, 42, is a US citizen and the publisher of Zhao’s memoirs in Hong Kong. He is barred from entering China to visit his elderly parents.
But it is Bao Tong’s wife who has suffered the most. He describes the day Zhao Ziyang died in 2005. He and his wife wanted to pay their respects, but were blocked by people guarding the door of the lift in their apartment block, threatening them not to go out. “I explained that it was illegal for them to stop me from going.” The men instead shoved his elderly wife to the ground, breaking her hip. She spent more than two months in hospital. “The Chinese Communist party is just like the Mafia,” says Bao. “If the Mafia boss thinks you might betray him, he will just kill you or throw you into prison for as long as he likes. This is not how a political party or a government should behave.”
For all he and his family have endured, Bao considers himself lucky, compared to those even now imprisoned for supposed crimes related to the 1989 demonstrations, or to those who died in the crackdown or in the brutal witch-hunt that followed.
According to Bao, his tormentors’ niggling fear is that one day this old revolutionary insider might either be rehabilitated and return as a top Communist official or become a figurehead for a new wave of activism. Bao says he still receives a measure of protection from old friends in senior government positions. “I should count myself lucky and express my thanks with the popular slogan: ‘My eternal gratitude to the Communist party and to Chairman Mao!’”
It is in this ironic humour that one senses the real threat to the current leaders in China, even two decades after the Tiananmen massacre and 12 years after the death of Deng Xiaoping. Bao mocks their slogans and denigrates their demigods, but he is, after all, one of them. If he were to be allowed to air his views, they fear the whole authoritarian edifice could start to crumble.
“China has almost erased the memory of Tiananmen by making it illegal to talk about what happened. But there are miniature Tiananmens in China every day, in counties and villages where people try to show their discontent and the government sends 500 policemen to put them down. This is democracy and law with Chinese characteristics.
“The first sentence of the Chinese national anthem goes like this: ‘Arise! All those who refuse to be slaves.’ I believe there will be real democracy in China sooner or later, as long as there are people who want to be treated equally and have their rights respected.
“ It will rely on our own efforts, it will depend on when we, the Chinese people, are willing to stand up and protect our own rights. ”
The tea is now cold and the table has been set for lunch. Bao’s family is waiting in the other room for me to leave. Even shaking the hand of a foreign journalist could expose them to criticism from the authorities and, after all they’ve been through, I don’t want to be another source of inconvenience. As I leave the lift, I turn my video camera on the security agent sitting at the desk in the lobby. He yells at me to turn it off and I leave the compound in a hurry, 30 pairs of eyes boring a hole in my back.
A few days after this interview, Bao Tong was invited on a tour of a scenic reserve in southern China by the Public Security Ministry. According to his son, he left of his own volition in the company of his security agent entourage last Monday and will not return until June 7, when the sensitive anniversary has passed.
Jamil Anderlini is the FT’s Beijing correspondent
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Bao Tong’s apartment
West Beijing, China
Tea No charge
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Key players in the bloody confrontation of 1989
Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989
Li Peng was the hardline premier of China in 1989 and Zhao Ziyang’s main opponent. Often referred to in the aftermath of the crackdown as the “Butcher of Beijing”, he was seen as instrumental in convincing Deng Xiaoping that the student demonstrators posed a threat to the Communist leadership and to Deng himself, writes Jamil Anderlini. Li retained his position as one of the most powerful leaders in China until retirement in 2002. He lives in western Beijing, not far from Bao Tong’s home.
Chen Xitong was mayor of Beijing in 1989 and also supported the military crackdown. In 1995 he was removed from office and sentenced to 16 years in Qincheng prison on charges of corruption – a result of what many political observers believe was a power grab by rivals. He was granted medical parole in 2006.
Liu Xiaobo was one of the most prominent intellectuals to support the student movement in 1989. He helped negotiate with the People’s Liberation Army to allow the last group of students left in Tiananmen Square to leave alive. He has spent the past 20 years in and out of jail for his human rights work and for criticising the Communist party. Last year he was detained for his part in organising “Charter 08”, a blueprint for introducing democracy and rule of law to China.
Wang Dan was a 20-year-old student at Peking University in 1989 and one of the most visible pro-democracy student leaders. He went into hiding after the crackdown but was caught and spent most of the next eight years in prison. In 1998 he was freed on medical parole and exiled to the US, where he gained his PhD in East Asian history last year from Harvard. He is barred from entering China.
In 1989, Wuer Kaixi, then 21, was a student at Beijing Normal University. He earned fame as the hunger striker who rebuked Li Peng on national television. After the crackdown, he was second on the government’s most wanted list but he escaped via Hong Kong to Paris with the help of Operation Yellow Bird, an exercise run jointly by the CIA, Hong Kong democracy groups and Chinese triad gangs. He later studied at Harvard and is a radio presenter in Taiwan.
Chai Ling was a 23-year-old graduate of Peking University. As a student protest leader, she controversially argued that bloodshed was necessary in order to unite China behind the democracy movement, and organised “dare to die” suicide squads. She later escaped to Paris with the help of Operation Yellow Bird. On reaching the US, she attended Princeton and received an MBA from Harvard before setting up her own internet software company. She remains a controversial figure in the Chinese dissident community.
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
31.5.09
The Brain
‘Can a machine read your mind?’ – the title of a recent (February 2009) article in the Times -- is meant to be sensational but is similar to hundreds of other articles appearing with increasing frequency, and merely repeating a story that has been familiar for the last 50 years. ‘It’s just a matter of time’ is the assumption behind such articles – just a matter of time before the gap between physical brain-stuff and consciousness is bridged. The Times article plays up the social interest angle of its story by describing experiments in which people’s brain activity is taken as proof of their guilt or innocence of crimes, or in which a computer ‘could tell with 78 per cent accuracy’ which of a number of drawings shown to volunteers was the one they were concentrating on ...
There are in fact even more extreme examples than those in the Times article of how neuro-science and social science increasingly overlap. Alan Sanfey, of the Neural Decision Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona, for example, describes a neuro-economic analysis of an Ultimatum Game in which one person is given the power over another to make an offer to split £100. If the other rejects the offer, no one gets anything. So far so familiar -- to other behavioural economics experiments that study the norms of fairness. One neuro-twist to the story, though, is that experimenters can make subjects more or less willing to accept unfair offers by subjecting their brains to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), non-invasive and painless stimulation of the brain.
At a recent meeting of a Conservative think-tank in London about the possibility of reducing concepts of moral action entirely to scientific explanations of behaviour, one politician joked about the policy applications of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation techniques. The world of understanding, cognition and even action can be managed by manipulating atoms rather than arguments ("opium of the people" in reverse -- chemicals inducing meaning, instead of meanings acting chemically). Even where such claims seem strongest and most striking, it is important to ask what exactly they amount to. Can we really move with ease from the world of atoms to the world of meanings? Or is any apparent smoothness due to the conceptual confusion involved in applying neuro-scientific discoveries to meaningful questions -- so that in the transition we inevitably lose essentially human parts of existence? These questions, newly pertinent because of scientific and social developments, have been anticipated in the philosophy of mind of the past 70 years.
In the late 1950s, philosophers like J J C Smart demanded why -- given the advances of science, and its success in establishing the identity of commonsense with scientific concepts -- specific states of consciousness (pain, seeing a yellow after-image) should not in fact ‘turn out to be’ specific brain states. Lightning has ‘turned out to be’ an electrical discharge, and heat to be molecular motion. In each case, said Smart, the scientific term obviously doesn’t mean the same as the commonsense term, but it does refer to the same phenomenon. Science tells us what lightning and heat actually are. Similarly, pain doesn’t mean brain state 7,008, and the person talking about her pain may well not know that what she is talking about is brain state 7,008 (any more than, prior to Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th century, people knew they were talking about H2O when they talked about water), but that is what she is ultimately talking about.
Biologists, neuroscientists, and scientised people in general, are often perplexed, even exasperated, that there should be any objection to some version of this Smart-type identification of brain states with mental states. They pat philsophers’ hands and tell them not to bother their clever little heads about the problem since it is a scientific one, and nothing to do with philosophy. ‘Just a matter of time’ again. But it surely is unavoidably a philosophical problem, since we need to know what exactly we’re dealing with. What would count as knowing that a brain state/mental state identity had been established? How could it be proved that brain state 7,008, for instance, is precisely the pain I’m having now? Well, is the usual answer, it’s just a matter of sophisticated technology being developed to correlate a specific site in the brain and movement of neurones etc with the occurrence of the pain, showing that each is happening at the same time, in the same place. Yes, but how can more than correlation be established? And correlation of time is hard enough, what could correlation of place come to?
Smart seemed to be conceding the correlation point when he admitted that what he postulated about brain state/mental state synchronisation could equally amount to epiphenomenalism as to identity (i.e., to the view that, with any neural event, there is also a mental, causally inactive, spin-off). Occam’s razor was his clinching argument for opting for identity – get rid of clutter and believe as simple and economic a theory as possible.
Which would be fine if, as some philosophers like Thomas Nagel have pointed out, your razor didn’t actually cut out the essential thing. How do we get rid of the sense that there always seems to be something left over from the straightforward conflation of brain state activity into mental state occurrence? In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein imagines a scenario in which scientists open someone’s head and observe his functioning brain, while he, by means of mirrors, observes it at the same time, all observers equally able to watch neurones firing, synapses opening, etc. In principle, why not? But, as Wittgenstein says, the brain-owner, unlike the scientists clustering round him, is observing, or experiencing, two things rather than one. He can observe that when he feels, or thinks about, certain things, certain activities occur in his brain at the same time. He experiences feeling or thinking in certain ways, and also he experiences observing his brain working in certain ways. The scientists only experience observing the brain working. What one could add to this is that if, at some time in the future, the subject whose brain has been observed were to see a video of what had happened during the brain-inspection, he (unless his memory were perfect or the experiment very brief) would be in the same position as the observing scientists were at the time – he would have to deduce what he had been thinking about or feeling then from what he now observes of his brain in the video.
Given the brain’s material object status, it wouldn’t, and, for identity theorists, shouldn’t, matter whose brain is being observed, and by whom, owner or non-owner, when it comes to ‘recognising’ mental states as brain states, and vice versa. But of course, it does matter – it makes all the difference. Also, as it should seem too juvenile to add, suppose the brain-owner were an expert on the history of the Restoration, and had been thinking about his new research during the experiment, the observers at the time would become no whit more knowledgeable about Restoration England. Oh well, might be the riposte, if we knew the entire history of the brain-owner’s history-acquisition, then we could read off from the lighted-up areas of his brain … etc. ‘Read off’ is still ‘deduce’, and it would require a lot of separate learning on the part of the brain-observer for her to be able to catch up with the brain-owner’s knowledge.
The observer (of the brain or brain-scan) has to infer a brain/mental state correlation, relying on the brain-owner’s report, and/or on induction – observation of similar brains in similar contexts, with a mass of correlations and brain-owners’ reports being accumulated and compared. In the examples in the Times article mentioned above, the experimenter needed to infer from movements (or lack of movements) in parts of the brain to the guilt or innocence of the brain-owner, or to rely on the experimental subject’s confirmation as to whether the drawing she seemed to be concentrating on actually was the drawing she was concentrating on. Reliance on both inference and induction surely makes ‘mind-reading’ by brain-scan open to the same sort of problems as the notoriously suspect lie-detector tests that already exist – that the experimenter’s deduction can be mistaken due to ways in which the experimental subject’s brain is (or does things) different to what is standard or expected. Anyway, the initial expectation of identity theorists that the regular coincedence of a particular type of brain state with a particular type of physical state could eventually be established (not just regular in one individual brain but across individuals’ brains in general) has largely been abandoned as impossible to achieve.
Leibniz made the same point as Wittgenstein when asking us to imagine somehow being able to wander about inside someone else’s (or it could be your own) brain. You can observe all sorts of things pulling and pushing, he says, but cannot observe the thoughts. Which is why spatial correlation of a brain state with a mental state sounds even more disorientatingly weird than temporal correlation, horribly like a category mistake. To claim, as Smart does, that sensations and thoughts are just processes in the brain makes sense in one way -- without brain movements consciousness wouldn’t happen; but what the consciousness is of, the content of consciousness (the beach on Formentera in 1983, some of your religious beliefs or disbeliefs, the difficulty of solving problems of consciousness) – is that in the brain exactly? And isn’t your pain felt in your tooth and your pleasure located in your breasts?
Just as you couldn’t pick out the precise area in a brain where a practising Jew’s disbelief in the resurrection of Jesus (or a physicalist’s disbelief in mind-body dualism, or an enamoured man’s feeling of love) is located, or that becomes activated when Jesus’s resurrection (or dualism, or the beloved) is mentioned, nor more could you get the practicing Jew to believe in the resurrection while preserving his other beliefs, or convert the physicalist into a dualist, or get the man to fall out of love, by tampering with or obliterating specific parts of her or his brain activity. A belief is part of a whole theory or system of beliefs, a feeling of love part of life history, memories, beliefs, etc. Given what is called the holism of the mental, a holism both of abstract belief systems, and of concrete, personal life histories, you couldn’t alter either just by tampering piecemeal. (obviously you could by damaging the brain so severely that the person became incapable of coherent thought or speech, actually wiping out wholesale the capacity to remember, believe, feel as others normally do, and the person specifically had done.) Another reason why at best you get correlation or causation, not identity.
It seems more feasible, perhaps, to seek to establish mental state/brain state correlations in the case of visceral, body-related mental states, like pain, than in the case of contentful (‘intentional’) mental states that overarch, and invoke, other parts of a person’s life and belief-systems. Apart from the obvious fact that there is no neat division here but overlap and further diversity, these two sorts of mental state have at least one thing in common – can either ‘a thought [or this particular thought] about the beach in Formentera’, for instance, or ‘pain [or this particular sensation of pain]’, be on a par with lightning, heat or water? How far is consciousness comparable to any physical phenomenon? Smart seems to have an uneasy inkling of their non-comparablity when he makes a point of seeking to ‘forestall irrelevant objections’ by pointing out that he is not talking about ‘the publicly observable physical object, lightning’ but about the sense datum or the brain state (which are, as he is of course arguing, one and the same) that are caused by lightning. Surely he is stressing this very obvious distinction because he has a worrying sense (anticipating Saul Kripke (see especially lecture 3) that there is not an equivalence between the equation: ‘lightning = an electrical discharge’ and the equation: ‘this particular (or this type of) mental state = this particular (or this type of) brain state.
‘Lightning’, ‘water’ and ‘heat’ are commonsense terms for phenomena that are, for scientific purposes, more accurately called ‘electrical discharge’, ‘H2O’ and ‘molecular motion’. The lightning and water equations only seem analogous to a mental state = brain state equation, because the common sense terms ‘lightning’ and ‘water’, unlike their respective scientific terms, somehow contain (and therefore smuggle in) the sense of what lightning and water look like. Therefore, to say that lightning is an electrical discharge, or that water is H2O, adds objective knowledge of what the phenomenon really is (lightning isn’t after all something hurled by angry gods). But how can ‘irritation at his assumption that this problem can be so easily solved’ or ‘remembering how we sat under the honeysuckle near Orford’ be more illuminatingly called ‘brain state 50,987 with x neurons doing y [and however complicated and precise you want to make this description]’? What exactly would be added to your feeling or memory by discovering (if you could) that it was a movement of atoms?
Is a conscious state really equivalent to lightning, heat or water? For, as Kripke pointed out, now, once it has been discovered that water is H2O, lightning is an electrical discharge, heat is molecular motion, we all know it to be the case that whenever you get water you get H2O etc. and anyone who doesn’t is ill-informed. Only ignorance prevents the perceiver of water, lightning or heat from knowing these respective identity statements to be true. Different meanings, same reference. But that surely doesn’t apply in the case of sensations, thoughts, memories, etc.
Water seems a certain way to us, and science, in its attempt to produce what Nagel calls ‘a view from nowhere’, ignores and extracts from the seeming, in order to get at what water really is, irrespective of the viewer's race, sex, age, or other subjective idiosyncracies, irrespective in fact of any viewer whatever. But we can't subtract the viewer when dealing with consciousness. Consciousness is unavoidably subjective and about how things seem, what things seem like to the conscious person. Of course another conscious person may deduce, or be informed about and thereby make deductions about the truth and quiddity of, another conscious person’s thoughts or feelings. And of course in some way consciousness may be caused by, or correlated with, the brain's microscopic properties. But (as Nagel hardly needed to remind us) what it feels like to be conscious of something, or to be in a particular state of pain or serenity, surely goes beyond those brain properties. A scientific description of what happens in the brain when someone has a certain thought or experience seems inevitably to leave out what the thought is about or the experience is like. Once again, there’s something left over, something which, if the person were observing their own brain states, they would be having in addition to seeing neurons fire and synapses wiggling.
What more would the person conscious of pain, of the memory of Formentera in 1983, of believing in physicalism, know about the pain, the memory or the belief, either as experienced or as described, if knowing that any of these ‘is’ brain state 3,9087? In what sense ‘is’ any of them a specific brain state or set of brain states?
As Kripke said, when God (obviously metaphoric here) created the world, all he needed to do to create heat was to create molecular motion (which is what heat is) but he needed to do something extra in order to create a sensation of heat. Ditto with creating water, it was just a matter of creating H2O, but the sight, sound, taste, feel, smell(?) of water were an additional labour, actually requiring the creation of sentient organisms. (In a way, heat is in a slightly different category from lightning and water. The latter two phenomena (especially water) can be more easily imagined as unperceived entities than heat can. With heat, the objective phenomenon is much more inextricably interwoven with the subjective effect of it, which is why Kripke’s use of heat as an example can be misleading.)
The most irritating (to us lay people) aspect of philosophical and scientific attempts to reduce the mental to the neural, and to squash down human beings into being on all fours with other physical things, is that their proponents nearly always say that actually they are just putting the truth about consciousness more clearly and taking nothing away from our experience. Like politicians deviously withdrawing privileges, they expect us to be quite happy about this. Some developments of identity theory, however, are more upfront. They force consciousness into equivalence with lightning and water by impugning the ignorance of us ordinary people. The way we talk about sensations, memories and beliefs is, say eliminative materialists, hopelessly antiquated, a form of ‘folk psychology’ as hidebound and superstition-laden as talk about witches, or about epileptics being possessed by devils. ‘Folk psychology’ is a theory about how humans function, they say, that is pathetically inadequate in both describing and predicting. In time, a more scientifically sophisticated vocabulary will replace it.
Really? So we were wrong all the time about our memories and our passions? What sort of a world, I wonder, do these eliminative materialists envisage with their revised vocabulary about mental (or rather neural states). What exactly would be doing? What would be the point of training ourselves, or being trained, to report on our brain states?
The eliminative materialists may base their argument on the perspicuous fact that some mental terms do trail theories behind them, and can therefore be replaced, extrapolating from this the notion that such terms can be wholesale eliminated. ‘Depression’, ‘grief’, ‘melancholia’, ‘black bile’, ‘accidie’ are, it is true, not synonymous, nor do they, probably, refer to precisely the same phenomena; but does that mean that there are no such dark phenomena? ‘Dark’ is not just purple passagey – these, like many mental states, arent exactly describable except by pictorial and other metaphors. But I wonder how eliminative materialists would replace Macbeth’s description, or expression, of depression, melancholy, black bile or whatever in the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech, or George Eliot's apercu on the insincerity of spontaneous feeling.
Metaphor bridges the gap between secluded mental states by invoking physical things that are open to all (whatever the likelihood of their being differently experienced). If indeed ‘folk psychology’ could be eradicated, along with all the metaphor and poetry that has grown up around it, then surely, with the irrepressibility of weeds, metaphor and poetry would spring up again around brain state terminology. But how would we be induced to abandon ‘folk psychology’ in the first place. Eliminativism seems to share the worst aspect of Cartesian dualism – its hopeless seclusion. Our brain states, although in principle open to anyone’s inspection, are in practice hidden. Why would we go the trouble of talking about our inner states, sensibly say objectors to dualism, unless in the context of sharable, palpable experiences? Even more ridiculous, by the same token, is the idea that we could be taught about, and discuss, brain states. Why would we ever dream of doing so?
Worse than this, would be the loss to morality and self-creation. Suppose, in a juxtaposition of eliminativism and Freudianism, a woman’s amygdala lighted up in the anger zone even as she was professing not to be angry. She is duly given the expert’s better-informed diagnosis of her state of mind. But is that an advantage, particularly if she accepts the diagnosis and acts on it. Denial of anger may sometimes be dishonesty or self-deception, but may also, even while being both, be part of the suppression of anger that is so imperative in civilised life. What about if a man objecting to a situation of social injustice were subjected to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to obliterate his present feeling of dissatisfaction and induce a feeling of pleasure? Surely what actually matters to him is the cognitive aspect of the dissatisfaction – the reason he was feeling it.
The new neuro-social-sciences are the latest of many attempts to naturalise the human---to make every aspect of our lives and selves comprehensible merely as subjects of scientific explanation. The social consequences of the naturalistic program make it especially important to understand its philosophical limits. Not only do we become experimental subjects, but we very easily become subjected -- to the particular types of control that scientific understanding invites, especially the "medical model" of the expert which offers the 'patient' diagnosis, prophylaxis, prognosis and cure. This may produce wonderful results in the right context, but should be tightly confined within the world of atoms; in the world of meanings, its essentially metaphorical status needs to be always understood. A naturalised, rather than thoughtful and deliberative politics, is not only creepy, it is incoherent. Ironically, it substitutes a medical metaphor for meaningful argument.
Hard-line identity theorists, and eliminativists above all, don’t appreciate how much they would change things if indeed we could come to believe and implement their theories. Our world would increasingly be leeched of meaning, morality, dignity and freedom, and if we rejected folk psychology in favour of scientific terminology about brain states, not only would we know less, not more, about ourselves; we would also have less to know about, because we would be less.
There are in fact even more extreme examples than those in the Times article of how neuro-science and social science increasingly overlap. Alan Sanfey, of the Neural Decision Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona, for example, describes a neuro-economic analysis of an Ultimatum Game in which one person is given the power over another to make an offer to split £100. If the other rejects the offer, no one gets anything. So far so familiar -- to other behavioural economics experiments that study the norms of fairness. One neuro-twist to the story, though, is that experimenters can make subjects more or less willing to accept unfair offers by subjecting their brains to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), non-invasive and painless stimulation of the brain.
At a recent meeting of a Conservative think-tank in London about the possibility of reducing concepts of moral action entirely to scientific explanations of behaviour, one politician joked about the policy applications of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation techniques. The world of understanding, cognition and even action can be managed by manipulating atoms rather than arguments ("opium of the people" in reverse -- chemicals inducing meaning, instead of meanings acting chemically). Even where such claims seem strongest and most striking, it is important to ask what exactly they amount to. Can we really move with ease from the world of atoms to the world of meanings? Or is any apparent smoothness due to the conceptual confusion involved in applying neuro-scientific discoveries to meaningful questions -- so that in the transition we inevitably lose essentially human parts of existence? These questions, newly pertinent because of scientific and social developments, have been anticipated in the philosophy of mind of the past 70 years.
In the late 1950s, philosophers like J J C Smart demanded why -- given the advances of science, and its success in establishing the identity of commonsense with scientific concepts -- specific states of consciousness (pain, seeing a yellow after-image) should not in fact ‘turn out to be’ specific brain states. Lightning has ‘turned out to be’ an electrical discharge, and heat to be molecular motion. In each case, said Smart, the scientific term obviously doesn’t mean the same as the commonsense term, but it does refer to the same phenomenon. Science tells us what lightning and heat actually are. Similarly, pain doesn’t mean brain state 7,008, and the person talking about her pain may well not know that what she is talking about is brain state 7,008 (any more than, prior to Alexander von Humboldt in the 19th century, people knew they were talking about H2O when they talked about water), but that is what she is ultimately talking about.
Biologists, neuroscientists, and scientised people in general, are often perplexed, even exasperated, that there should be any objection to some version of this Smart-type identification of brain states with mental states. They pat philsophers’ hands and tell them not to bother their clever little heads about the problem since it is a scientific one, and nothing to do with philosophy. ‘Just a matter of time’ again. But it surely is unavoidably a philosophical problem, since we need to know what exactly we’re dealing with. What would count as knowing that a brain state/mental state identity had been established? How could it be proved that brain state 7,008, for instance, is precisely the pain I’m having now? Well, is the usual answer, it’s just a matter of sophisticated technology being developed to correlate a specific site in the brain and movement of neurones etc with the occurrence of the pain, showing that each is happening at the same time, in the same place. Yes, but how can more than correlation be established? And correlation of time is hard enough, what could correlation of place come to?
Smart seemed to be conceding the correlation point when he admitted that what he postulated about brain state/mental state synchronisation could equally amount to epiphenomenalism as to identity (i.e., to the view that, with any neural event, there is also a mental, causally inactive, spin-off). Occam’s razor was his clinching argument for opting for identity – get rid of clutter and believe as simple and economic a theory as possible.
Which would be fine if, as some philosophers like Thomas Nagel have pointed out, your razor didn’t actually cut out the essential thing. How do we get rid of the sense that there always seems to be something left over from the straightforward conflation of brain state activity into mental state occurrence? In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein imagines a scenario in which scientists open someone’s head and observe his functioning brain, while he, by means of mirrors, observes it at the same time, all observers equally able to watch neurones firing, synapses opening, etc. In principle, why not? But, as Wittgenstein says, the brain-owner, unlike the scientists clustering round him, is observing, or experiencing, two things rather than one. He can observe that when he feels, or thinks about, certain things, certain activities occur in his brain at the same time. He experiences feeling or thinking in certain ways, and also he experiences observing his brain working in certain ways. The scientists only experience observing the brain working. What one could add to this is that if, at some time in the future, the subject whose brain has been observed were to see a video of what had happened during the brain-inspection, he (unless his memory were perfect or the experiment very brief) would be in the same position as the observing scientists were at the time – he would have to deduce what he had been thinking about or feeling then from what he now observes of his brain in the video.
Given the brain’s material object status, it wouldn’t, and, for identity theorists, shouldn’t, matter whose brain is being observed, and by whom, owner or non-owner, when it comes to ‘recognising’ mental states as brain states, and vice versa. But of course, it does matter – it makes all the difference. Also, as it should seem too juvenile to add, suppose the brain-owner were an expert on the history of the Restoration, and had been thinking about his new research during the experiment, the observers at the time would become no whit more knowledgeable about Restoration England. Oh well, might be the riposte, if we knew the entire history of the brain-owner’s history-acquisition, then we could read off from the lighted-up areas of his brain … etc. ‘Read off’ is still ‘deduce’, and it would require a lot of separate learning on the part of the brain-observer for her to be able to catch up with the brain-owner’s knowledge.
The observer (of the brain or brain-scan) has to infer a brain/mental state correlation, relying on the brain-owner’s report, and/or on induction – observation of similar brains in similar contexts, with a mass of correlations and brain-owners’ reports being accumulated and compared. In the examples in the Times article mentioned above, the experimenter needed to infer from movements (or lack of movements) in parts of the brain to the guilt or innocence of the brain-owner, or to rely on the experimental subject’s confirmation as to whether the drawing she seemed to be concentrating on actually was the drawing she was concentrating on. Reliance on both inference and induction surely makes ‘mind-reading’ by brain-scan open to the same sort of problems as the notoriously suspect lie-detector tests that already exist – that the experimenter’s deduction can be mistaken due to ways in which the experimental subject’s brain is (or does things) different to what is standard or expected. Anyway, the initial expectation of identity theorists that the regular coincedence of a particular type of brain state with a particular type of physical state could eventually be established (not just regular in one individual brain but across individuals’ brains in general) has largely been abandoned as impossible to achieve.
Leibniz made the same point as Wittgenstein when asking us to imagine somehow being able to wander about inside someone else’s (or it could be your own) brain. You can observe all sorts of things pulling and pushing, he says, but cannot observe the thoughts. Which is why spatial correlation of a brain state with a mental state sounds even more disorientatingly weird than temporal correlation, horribly like a category mistake. To claim, as Smart does, that sensations and thoughts are just processes in the brain makes sense in one way -- without brain movements consciousness wouldn’t happen; but what the consciousness is of, the content of consciousness (the beach on Formentera in 1983, some of your religious beliefs or disbeliefs, the difficulty of solving problems of consciousness) – is that in the brain exactly? And isn’t your pain felt in your tooth and your pleasure located in your breasts?
Just as you couldn’t pick out the precise area in a brain where a practising Jew’s disbelief in the resurrection of Jesus (or a physicalist’s disbelief in mind-body dualism, or an enamoured man’s feeling of love) is located, or that becomes activated when Jesus’s resurrection (or dualism, or the beloved) is mentioned, nor more could you get the practicing Jew to believe in the resurrection while preserving his other beliefs, or convert the physicalist into a dualist, or get the man to fall out of love, by tampering with or obliterating specific parts of her or his brain activity. A belief is part of a whole theory or system of beliefs, a feeling of love part of life history, memories, beliefs, etc. Given what is called the holism of the mental, a holism both of abstract belief systems, and of concrete, personal life histories, you couldn’t alter either just by tampering piecemeal. (obviously you could by damaging the brain so severely that the person became incapable of coherent thought or speech, actually wiping out wholesale the capacity to remember, believe, feel as others normally do, and the person specifically had done.) Another reason why at best you get correlation or causation, not identity.
It seems more feasible, perhaps, to seek to establish mental state/brain state correlations in the case of visceral, body-related mental states, like pain, than in the case of contentful (‘intentional’) mental states that overarch, and invoke, other parts of a person’s life and belief-systems. Apart from the obvious fact that there is no neat division here but overlap and further diversity, these two sorts of mental state have at least one thing in common – can either ‘a thought [or this particular thought] about the beach in Formentera’, for instance, or ‘pain [or this particular sensation of pain]’, be on a par with lightning, heat or water? How far is consciousness comparable to any physical phenomenon? Smart seems to have an uneasy inkling of their non-comparablity when he makes a point of seeking to ‘forestall irrelevant objections’ by pointing out that he is not talking about ‘the publicly observable physical object, lightning’ but about the sense datum or the brain state (which are, as he is of course arguing, one and the same) that are caused by lightning. Surely he is stressing this very obvious distinction because he has a worrying sense (anticipating Saul Kripke (see especially lecture 3) that there is not an equivalence between the equation: ‘lightning = an electrical discharge’ and the equation: ‘this particular (or this type of) mental state = this particular (or this type of) brain state.
‘Lightning’, ‘water’ and ‘heat’ are commonsense terms for phenomena that are, for scientific purposes, more accurately called ‘electrical discharge’, ‘H2O’ and ‘molecular motion’. The lightning and water equations only seem analogous to a mental state = brain state equation, because the common sense terms ‘lightning’ and ‘water’, unlike their respective scientific terms, somehow contain (and therefore smuggle in) the sense of what lightning and water look like. Therefore, to say that lightning is an electrical discharge, or that water is H2O, adds objective knowledge of what the phenomenon really is (lightning isn’t after all something hurled by angry gods). But how can ‘irritation at his assumption that this problem can be so easily solved’ or ‘remembering how we sat under the honeysuckle near Orford’ be more illuminatingly called ‘brain state 50,987 with x neurons doing y [and however complicated and precise you want to make this description]’? What exactly would be added to your feeling or memory by discovering (if you could) that it was a movement of atoms?
Is a conscious state really equivalent to lightning, heat or water? For, as Kripke pointed out, now, once it has been discovered that water is H2O, lightning is an electrical discharge, heat is molecular motion, we all know it to be the case that whenever you get water you get H2O etc. and anyone who doesn’t is ill-informed. Only ignorance prevents the perceiver of water, lightning or heat from knowing these respective identity statements to be true. Different meanings, same reference. But that surely doesn’t apply in the case of sensations, thoughts, memories, etc.
Water seems a certain way to us, and science, in its attempt to produce what Nagel calls ‘a view from nowhere’, ignores and extracts from the seeming, in order to get at what water really is, irrespective of the viewer's race, sex, age, or other subjective idiosyncracies, irrespective in fact of any viewer whatever. But we can't subtract the viewer when dealing with consciousness. Consciousness is unavoidably subjective and about how things seem, what things seem like to the conscious person. Of course another conscious person may deduce, or be informed about and thereby make deductions about the truth and quiddity of, another conscious person’s thoughts or feelings. And of course in some way consciousness may be caused by, or correlated with, the brain's microscopic properties. But (as Nagel hardly needed to remind us) what it feels like to be conscious of something, or to be in a particular state of pain or serenity, surely goes beyond those brain properties. A scientific description of what happens in the brain when someone has a certain thought or experience seems inevitably to leave out what the thought is about or the experience is like. Once again, there’s something left over, something which, if the person were observing their own brain states, they would be having in addition to seeing neurons fire and synapses wiggling.
What more would the person conscious of pain, of the memory of Formentera in 1983, of believing in physicalism, know about the pain, the memory or the belief, either as experienced or as described, if knowing that any of these ‘is’ brain state 3,9087? In what sense ‘is’ any of them a specific brain state or set of brain states?
As Kripke said, when God (obviously metaphoric here) created the world, all he needed to do to create heat was to create molecular motion (which is what heat is) but he needed to do something extra in order to create a sensation of heat. Ditto with creating water, it was just a matter of creating H2O, but the sight, sound, taste, feel, smell(?) of water were an additional labour, actually requiring the creation of sentient organisms. (In a way, heat is in a slightly different category from lightning and water. The latter two phenomena (especially water) can be more easily imagined as unperceived entities than heat can. With heat, the objective phenomenon is much more inextricably interwoven with the subjective effect of it, which is why Kripke’s use of heat as an example can be misleading.)
The most irritating (to us lay people) aspect of philosophical and scientific attempts to reduce the mental to the neural, and to squash down human beings into being on all fours with other physical things, is that their proponents nearly always say that actually they are just putting the truth about consciousness more clearly and taking nothing away from our experience. Like politicians deviously withdrawing privileges, they expect us to be quite happy about this. Some developments of identity theory, however, are more upfront. They force consciousness into equivalence with lightning and water by impugning the ignorance of us ordinary people. The way we talk about sensations, memories and beliefs is, say eliminative materialists, hopelessly antiquated, a form of ‘folk psychology’ as hidebound and superstition-laden as talk about witches, or about epileptics being possessed by devils. ‘Folk psychology’ is a theory about how humans function, they say, that is pathetically inadequate in both describing and predicting. In time, a more scientifically sophisticated vocabulary will replace it.
Really? So we were wrong all the time about our memories and our passions? What sort of a world, I wonder, do these eliminative materialists envisage with their revised vocabulary about mental (or rather neural states). What exactly would be doing? What would be the point of training ourselves, or being trained, to report on our brain states?
The eliminative materialists may base their argument on the perspicuous fact that some mental terms do trail theories behind them, and can therefore be replaced, extrapolating from this the notion that such terms can be wholesale eliminated. ‘Depression’, ‘grief’, ‘melancholia’, ‘black bile’, ‘accidie’ are, it is true, not synonymous, nor do they, probably, refer to precisely the same phenomena; but does that mean that there are no such dark phenomena? ‘Dark’ is not just purple passagey – these, like many mental states, arent exactly describable except by pictorial and other metaphors. But I wonder how eliminative materialists would replace Macbeth’s description, or expression, of depression, melancholy, black bile or whatever in the ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech, or George Eliot's apercu on the insincerity of spontaneous feeling.
Metaphor bridges the gap between secluded mental states by invoking physical things that are open to all (whatever the likelihood of their being differently experienced). If indeed ‘folk psychology’ could be eradicated, along with all the metaphor and poetry that has grown up around it, then surely, with the irrepressibility of weeds, metaphor and poetry would spring up again around brain state terminology. But how would we be induced to abandon ‘folk psychology’ in the first place. Eliminativism seems to share the worst aspect of Cartesian dualism – its hopeless seclusion. Our brain states, although in principle open to anyone’s inspection, are in practice hidden. Why would we go the trouble of talking about our inner states, sensibly say objectors to dualism, unless in the context of sharable, palpable experiences? Even more ridiculous, by the same token, is the idea that we could be taught about, and discuss, brain states. Why would we ever dream of doing so?
Worse than this, would be the loss to morality and self-creation. Suppose, in a juxtaposition of eliminativism and Freudianism, a woman’s amygdala lighted up in the anger zone even as she was professing not to be angry. She is duly given the expert’s better-informed diagnosis of her state of mind. But is that an advantage, particularly if she accepts the diagnosis and acts on it. Denial of anger may sometimes be dishonesty or self-deception, but may also, even while being both, be part of the suppression of anger that is so imperative in civilised life. What about if a man objecting to a situation of social injustice were subjected to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to obliterate his present feeling of dissatisfaction and induce a feeling of pleasure? Surely what actually matters to him is the cognitive aspect of the dissatisfaction – the reason he was feeling it.
The new neuro-social-sciences are the latest of many attempts to naturalise the human---to make every aspect of our lives and selves comprehensible merely as subjects of scientific explanation. The social consequences of the naturalistic program make it especially important to understand its philosophical limits. Not only do we become experimental subjects, but we very easily become subjected -- to the particular types of control that scientific understanding invites, especially the "medical model" of the expert which offers the 'patient' diagnosis, prophylaxis, prognosis and cure. This may produce wonderful results in the right context, but should be tightly confined within the world of atoms; in the world of meanings, its essentially metaphorical status needs to be always understood. A naturalised, rather than thoughtful and deliberative politics, is not only creepy, it is incoherent. Ironically, it substitutes a medical metaphor for meaningful argument.
Hard-line identity theorists, and eliminativists above all, don’t appreciate how much they would change things if indeed we could come to believe and implement their theories. Our world would increasingly be leeched of meaning, morality, dignity and freedom, and if we rejected folk psychology in favour of scientific terminology about brain states, not only would we know less, not more, about ourselves; we would also have less to know about, because we would be less.
30.5.09
The Sun Has Set
...........but the nostalgis lives on.
Sitting on a cruise ship deck, watching the flying fish skimming over the blue expanse of the Indian Ocean is a wonderful way to relax and think about – well nothing, really. Tiny and almost transparent, the fish shoot away from the side of the ship and speed like ethereal darts 20, 30 or even 40 yards across the surface of the sea, before they impale themselves on a wave top and disappear.
One day we caught the tail-end of a cyclone, the wind howling and the sea rough, and watched half-a-dozen petrels flying at breakneck speed only a few inches above the waves, twisting and turning through the maze of wave crests and troughs with a precision that any fighter pilot would envy. In spite of the MV Aurora doing 22 knots into the teeth of a half-gale, they easily kept pace with the ship. Feeding off plankton on the wing and visiting land only to breed, they are brilliant examples of Darwin’s law of the survival of the fittest.
The wildlife was spectacular, but the cruise from Durban to Singapore was really a sentimental journey for me. We stopped in Mauritius, where I reported my one and only royal tour for Reuters; in Penang, where I was born; and finally Singapore and its famous Raffles Hotel, at which my father always stayed on his way to and from Malaya, as it then was known, during his rubber-planting days.
Apart from the navel-gazing aspect of the journey, enhanced by the company of my journalist daughter, Carlotta, on a break from wintry, warring Kabul, we sailed across mainly balmy seas to the island of Réunion. A tiny speck of France, no bigger than Leicestershire, it rises steeply from the wastes of the Indian Ocean, 500 miles east of Madagascar.
Discovered, like so much in this part of the world, by Portuguese mariners in the early 1500s, Réunion was colonised in 1642 by French settlers who planted coffee and imported African slaves, from whom the mainly Creole population is descended.
Imran, our Creole taxi driver, dropped us in the attractive little resort of St-Gilles-les-Bains where we swam in a luxuriously warm sea and had lunch and a bottle of white Bordeaux in a pretty French restaurant overlooking the marina. Réunion is merely an appetiser for Mauritius, about 140 miles to the north-east and which it closely resembles.
Mark Twain quoted the locals as saying: “Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and heaven was copied after Mauritius.”
This was still almost true when in October 1956 Princess Margaret, young and beautiful, visited Mauritius at the start of her first solo royal tour. She stayed at Government House, in a secluded spot called Au bout du monde, “at the end of the world”. We, the press party, were put up at the equally exotically named Pamplemousses, “grapefruit”. We all swam in the turquoise sea at Blue Bay, although not at the same time as Princess Margaret. Those were pre-paparazzi days but her private secretary presumably did not want her swimsuited figure splashed all over the popular press.
Mauritius is best known, of course, as having been the home of dodos, those luckless, flightless giant pigeons which were so trusting that they walked straight up to the first Dutch sailors to arrive on the island and were repaid for their friendliness by having their necks wrung and their plump bodies consigned to the cooking pot. Within a few years, alas, they were indeed “as dead as a dodo”.
We now sailed north-east without seeing land for five days, arriving early one morning on the magical Thai island of Phuket, so brutally savaged by the tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004. In Patong, the resort which was one of the hardest hit, Carlotta booked a room in the beachfront Impiana, which bore the brunt of three tidal waves, suffering £1m worth of damage. And yet you would not think so today. The hotel is immaculate, the beach unscarred. I have never swum in more beautiful water, although the motorboats dragging the parasailers into the sky were irritatingly noisy, the only flaw in this particular paradise.
From Phuket it is only a night’s sail to Penang, where I was greeted by a young python slithering down the path towards me – for old time’s sake, perhaps, since I dimly remember an encounter with a cobra when riding my tricycle on our rubber estate, aged four. After the python was captured and I had been assured it would not be killed, I walked to the E&O, the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, where my parents often stayed, passing some fine old colonial buildings but not, alas, the hospital where I was born. It was burnt down years ago. Arriving hot and sweaty, I drank a disappointingly weak gin sling, thinking that previous guests such as Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward – and my father – would not have approved.
All my hopes were now pinned on Singapore and Jane, a local friend. First stop was Raffles Hotel, opened in 1887. Despite no longer fronting the sea, the foreshore having been reclaimed, the entrance is still impressive. The famous Long Bar with its portrait of Shanghai Lily was in full cry, the peanut shells littering the floor as of old, a relic of early planters’ louche manners.
The MV Aurora
Across the lofty hall we marched to the tiffin [lunch] room which, I discovered, serves only curry, adored by my father but too hot for me. Instead we chose the bar and billiard room buffet where oysters flown from Canada lay on ice beside local sweet crab, clams and sushi slices of salmon and tuna. A side of swordfish reposed under its croûte and pasta was cooked to order.
It was in this very billiard room, legend has it, that one night in the early 1900s a couple of guests were having a game when they heard strange scratching noises from down below. They sent a “boy” to investigate. He reported back that a tiger, thought to have escaped from a nearby circus, had taken sanctuary in the undergrowth beneath the hotel, then built on brick piers. After urgent consultations, a certain Mr Phillips, the headmaster of a nearby school and the owner of a rifle, was called in. After crawling into the bushes under the hotel he came face to face with the tiger and, sadly, shot it dead between the eyes.
This well-known tale reminded me of my father’s story of how, walking one day through his estate he came to a ravine bridged by a fallen tree.
At exactly the same moment as he stepped on one end, a large tiger stepped on the other. My father, who was not carrying a gun that day, stood stock still, staring at the tiger which stared back, paw raised. For what must have seemed a very, very long time, they eyed one another, both unsure of what to do until, silently, the tiger turned and slipped away into the jungle.
Just as well. Otherwise, who knows, I might not be writing this.
California
When Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared on The Tonight Show on Tuesday, he joked with Jay Leno about advice he had given in a recent address to students at the University of Southern California. “I told them to work like hell and marry a Kennedy,” he said, to laughter and applause.
The studio audience loved Mr Schwarzenegger, who is married to Maria Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s niece. Making his 25th appearance on the show, he was in his element sparring with Mr Leno, who poked fun at the California governor’s Austrian accent.
But he has had little to laugh about away from the television studio. In the past two weeks the former movie star has had to deal with the biggest crisis of his short political career after voters in a “special election” spurned revenue-raising measures he hoped would avert financial disaster.
Hailed as the state’s saviour when he replaced Gray Davis, who was ousted in 2003, Mr Schwarzenegger’s poll ratings have reached their lowest ever. Amid a 29 per cent fall in tax revenues since last September, the state faces a budget deficit this year of $24bn (£15bn, €17bn) and the Republican governor is threatening to take a Conan the Barbarian-style sword to spending on health, education and other vital public services. “The people have spoken,” he says in a Financial Times interview. “We have to live within our means.”
With its beaches and laid-back lifestyle, California epitomises the delights and rewards of the American dream. Yet that dream appears to have soured. The state would be the eighth largest economy in the world if it were a separate country, but for the more than 36m people who live there, fiscal meltdown is threatening its very fabric.
No area of public expenditure is being spared in the effort to cut the deficit. At least 200,000 public workers are being asked to take a 5 per cent pay cut and thousands of firefighters, nurses and teachers are expected to lose their jobs. CalWorks, the programme that provides help to the poor and out of work, is to be dismantled. Grants to poor and low-income students are likely to be axed and thousands of jobs will go in the prison system. The early release of some prisoners has been mooted to save money.
Most worryingly, large cuts in Medi-Cal, the state-funded health programme, are being proposed, which would leave an estimated 2m people without adequate health insurance. Money to treat people with Aids and other serious diseases is also at risk.
“Quite frankly, people are going to die,” says Bonnie Castillo of the California Nurses Association. “The vulnerable, the sick, children, the elderly, are all going to have the rug pulled out from under them.” This picture of the poor and dying being denied help is far from the usual one of the Golden State, where a waitress can become a film star and a technology entrepreneur can create a company worth billions of dollars from a garage or basement.
One cause of the problem is the state’s dysfunctional political system. California is one of only three in the US that requires a two-thirds majority in its legislature to approve a budget. With the state’s upper and lower houses evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, securing a two-thirds majority on all but mundane matters is practically impossible. A two-thirds majority is also required to raise taxes, which limits the ability of the governor to balance the books.
California’s system of direct democracy, while laudable in aim, is another headache. “Ballot initiatives” were introduced in 1911 by Hiram Johnson, then governor, who wanted to curtail the influence of the mighty Southern Pacific Railroad and return power to the people. Since then, any issue can be put to a state-wide vote, provided half a million or so signatures are gathered to support a change in the law.
Ballot initiatives were intended to give a voice to voters. “It was supposed to be about mom and pop talking about something around the dinner table and then getting all their friends to sign a petition,” says Dan Mitchell, professor emeritus at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the School of Public Affairs. “But most initiatives on the ballot don’t start that way.” Instead wealthy individuals and special interest groups “pay a couple of million dollars to employ people to collect signatures outside of supermarkets”.
Ballot initiatives have resulted in controversial laws being passed, such as the amendment to California’s constitution that outlawed gay marriage in California last November. The state’s constitution is bursting with such amendments, which can often impose huge constraints on financial planning, such as the 1998 proposition that committed the state to spending 40 per cent of its annual budget on education.
Mr Schwarzenegger admits the two-thirds majority rules and the ballot proposition process have been a hindrance. “It’s governing with your hands tied behind your back,” he says. The final link in California’s fiscal chain is its tax system. “It’s flawed,” he adds. “It has failed us over and over again when we have a downturn. We in California rely very heavily on rich people paying taxes – income taxes and capital gains.” This imbalance is partly because of legislation passed in 1978 – via a ballot initiative, naturally – that set strict limits on property taxes.
Though California is home to some of the richest people in America, the economic slump has decimated its tax base. To offset against the impact of future downturns, Mr Schwarzenegger tried in the recent vote to increase the size of the state’s rainy-day fund. “You go through these economic cycles,” he says. “There is a downturn and then [during periods of growth] you have a surge in revenues. But we don’t prepare for the downturn.”
Voters rejected that idea, however, and Mr Schwarzenegger is now looking at options to raise money to reduce the deficit. Near the top of the list is the sale of publicly owned buildings, such as the San Quentin prison and the Los Angeles Coliseum, which hosted the 1984 Olympics.
Cuts to health and social programmes, though, have sparked the biggest public response, which leads Prof Mitchell to conclude that the governor may have an ulterior goal.
“California is trying to do what North Korea is trying to do,” he says. “And that is to get Barack Obama’s attention. California doesn’t have a missile to shoot off like North Korea but if we have to put sick and dying children on the street ... ultimately, the Obama administration is not going to be able to run away from that.”
The state has already received federal stimulus money. It is seeking more help, although it has not made a direct request for cash. “We don’t want any more money [from the government] to bail us out,” says Mr Schwarzenegger. “You can get one-time money from the federal government and the next year you have the same problems. We have to make cuts so that next year we don’t have [these problems].”
Instead, the state is asking the government to guarantee its bond sales – to become, as Bill Lockyer, state treasurer, puts it, “a municipal market backstop”. It needs $15bn to meet short-term spending obligations, such as teachers’ and doctors’ salaries. But its fiscal troubles have left it with the country’s worst credit rating. With its deficit set to balloon past $24bn to more than $40bn within 12 months, the cost of issuing bonds will rise sharply.
“If [the US Treasury] backs us, we will get a lower interest rate,” says Mr Schwarzenegger. “That’s what we’re looking at.” Treasury assistance would cut the cost of borrowing but also set a precedent the White House might prefer to avoid as other states and municipalities struggle with the recession.
Critics say Mr Schwarzenegger’s plan to impose swingeing cuts runs counter to the aims of Mr Obama’s stimulus package. “The cuts are an anti-stimulus package by every measure,” says Art Pulaski, executive secretary of the California Labor Federation, which represents close to 2m workers in the state. “Every dollar that comes into California from Obama will be dismantled dollar for dollar by the Schwarzenegger cuts. The state should instead be looking at the billions of dollars in corporate tax giveaways that were in the budget.”
Mr Schwarzenegger, though, suggests California needs a reality check. “The state and its people have to make major sacrifices,” he says. “There are no two ways about it.”
With 18 months left before the end of his final term as governor, he is running out of time to turn California around. He continues to be popular outside the state, mainly thanks to his role as a leading advocate of action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But at home his approval ratings are likely to fall even further as California absorbs the impact of his budget cuts.
Mr Schwarzenegger says he is unconcerned. “You don’t go into this business to win a popularity contest. I have been sent to Sacramento to lead this state in good times and in bad. I’m just the person trying to lead and bring people together so we are all marching in the right direction.”
When campaigning for his first term, Mr Schwarzenegger said he would shake up the state – invoking the Terminator, the ruthless cyborg that is his best-known character. The worry now is that California may face its own version of Judgment Day.
The studio audience loved Mr Schwarzenegger, who is married to Maria Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s niece. Making his 25th appearance on the show, he was in his element sparring with Mr Leno, who poked fun at the California governor’s Austrian accent.
But he has had little to laugh about away from the television studio. In the past two weeks the former movie star has had to deal with the biggest crisis of his short political career after voters in a “special election” spurned revenue-raising measures he hoped would avert financial disaster.
Hailed as the state’s saviour when he replaced Gray Davis, who was ousted in 2003, Mr Schwarzenegger’s poll ratings have reached their lowest ever. Amid a 29 per cent fall in tax revenues since last September, the state faces a budget deficit this year of $24bn (£15bn, €17bn) and the Republican governor is threatening to take a Conan the Barbarian-style sword to spending on health, education and other vital public services. “The people have spoken,” he says in a Financial Times interview. “We have to live within our means.”
With its beaches and laid-back lifestyle, California epitomises the delights and rewards of the American dream. Yet that dream appears to have soured. The state would be the eighth largest economy in the world if it were a separate country, but for the more than 36m people who live there, fiscal meltdown is threatening its very fabric.
No area of public expenditure is being spared in the effort to cut the deficit. At least 200,000 public workers are being asked to take a 5 per cent pay cut and thousands of firefighters, nurses and teachers are expected to lose their jobs. CalWorks, the programme that provides help to the poor and out of work, is to be dismantled. Grants to poor and low-income students are likely to be axed and thousands of jobs will go in the prison system. The early release of some prisoners has been mooted to save money.
Most worryingly, large cuts in Medi-Cal, the state-funded health programme, are being proposed, which would leave an estimated 2m people without adequate health insurance. Money to treat people with Aids and other serious diseases is also at risk.
“Quite frankly, people are going to die,” says Bonnie Castillo of the California Nurses Association. “The vulnerable, the sick, children, the elderly, are all going to have the rug pulled out from under them.” This picture of the poor and dying being denied help is far from the usual one of the Golden State, where a waitress can become a film star and a technology entrepreneur can create a company worth billions of dollars from a garage or basement.
One cause of the problem is the state’s dysfunctional political system. California is one of only three in the US that requires a two-thirds majority in its legislature to approve a budget. With the state’s upper and lower houses evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, securing a two-thirds majority on all but mundane matters is practically impossible. A two-thirds majority is also required to raise taxes, which limits the ability of the governor to balance the books.
California’s system of direct democracy, while laudable in aim, is another headache. “Ballot initiatives” were introduced in 1911 by Hiram Johnson, then governor, who wanted to curtail the influence of the mighty Southern Pacific Railroad and return power to the people. Since then, any issue can be put to a state-wide vote, provided half a million or so signatures are gathered to support a change in the law.
Ballot initiatives were intended to give a voice to voters. “It was supposed to be about mom and pop talking about something around the dinner table and then getting all their friends to sign a petition,” says Dan Mitchell, professor emeritus at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the School of Public Affairs. “But most initiatives on the ballot don’t start that way.” Instead wealthy individuals and special interest groups “pay a couple of million dollars to employ people to collect signatures outside of supermarkets”.
Ballot initiatives have resulted in controversial laws being passed, such as the amendment to California’s constitution that outlawed gay marriage in California last November. The state’s constitution is bursting with such amendments, which can often impose huge constraints on financial planning, such as the 1998 proposition that committed the state to spending 40 per cent of its annual budget on education.
Mr Schwarzenegger admits the two-thirds majority rules and the ballot proposition process have been a hindrance. “It’s governing with your hands tied behind your back,” he says. The final link in California’s fiscal chain is its tax system. “It’s flawed,” he adds. “It has failed us over and over again when we have a downturn. We in California rely very heavily on rich people paying taxes – income taxes and capital gains.” This imbalance is partly because of legislation passed in 1978 – via a ballot initiative, naturally – that set strict limits on property taxes.
Though California is home to some of the richest people in America, the economic slump has decimated its tax base. To offset against the impact of future downturns, Mr Schwarzenegger tried in the recent vote to increase the size of the state’s rainy-day fund. “You go through these economic cycles,” he says. “There is a downturn and then [during periods of growth] you have a surge in revenues. But we don’t prepare for the downturn.”
Voters rejected that idea, however, and Mr Schwarzenegger is now looking at options to raise money to reduce the deficit. Near the top of the list is the sale of publicly owned buildings, such as the San Quentin prison and the Los Angeles Coliseum, which hosted the 1984 Olympics.
Cuts to health and social programmes, though, have sparked the biggest public response, which leads Prof Mitchell to conclude that the governor may have an ulterior goal.
“California is trying to do what North Korea is trying to do,” he says. “And that is to get Barack Obama’s attention. California doesn’t have a missile to shoot off like North Korea but if we have to put sick and dying children on the street ... ultimately, the Obama administration is not going to be able to run away from that.”
The state has already received federal stimulus money. It is seeking more help, although it has not made a direct request for cash. “We don’t want any more money [from the government] to bail us out,” says Mr Schwarzenegger. “You can get one-time money from the federal government and the next year you have the same problems. We have to make cuts so that next year we don’t have [these problems].”
Instead, the state is asking the government to guarantee its bond sales – to become, as Bill Lockyer, state treasurer, puts it, “a municipal market backstop”. It needs $15bn to meet short-term spending obligations, such as teachers’ and doctors’ salaries. But its fiscal troubles have left it with the country’s worst credit rating. With its deficit set to balloon past $24bn to more than $40bn within 12 months, the cost of issuing bonds will rise sharply.
“If [the US Treasury] backs us, we will get a lower interest rate,” says Mr Schwarzenegger. “That’s what we’re looking at.” Treasury assistance would cut the cost of borrowing but also set a precedent the White House might prefer to avoid as other states and municipalities struggle with the recession.
Critics say Mr Schwarzenegger’s plan to impose swingeing cuts runs counter to the aims of Mr Obama’s stimulus package. “The cuts are an anti-stimulus package by every measure,” says Art Pulaski, executive secretary of the California Labor Federation, which represents close to 2m workers in the state. “Every dollar that comes into California from Obama will be dismantled dollar for dollar by the Schwarzenegger cuts. The state should instead be looking at the billions of dollars in corporate tax giveaways that were in the budget.”
Mr Schwarzenegger, though, suggests California needs a reality check. “The state and its people have to make major sacrifices,” he says. “There are no two ways about it.”
With 18 months left before the end of his final term as governor, he is running out of time to turn California around. He continues to be popular outside the state, mainly thanks to his role as a leading advocate of action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But at home his approval ratings are likely to fall even further as California absorbs the impact of his budget cuts.
Mr Schwarzenegger says he is unconcerned. “You don’t go into this business to win a popularity contest. I have been sent to Sacramento to lead this state in good times and in bad. I’m just the person trying to lead and bring people together so we are all marching in the right direction.”
When campaigning for his first term, Mr Schwarzenegger said he would shake up the state – invoking the Terminator, the ruthless cyborg that is his best-known character. The worry now is that California may face its own version of Judgment Day.
ART TATUM
There's a remarkable photo in the booklet accompanying "Art Tatum," the new 10-CD boxed set of rare music by the legendary pianist now out on the Storyville Records label. We see the jazz icon at work, surrounded by three heavyweight keyboardists: Albert Ammons, the boogie-woogie pioneer; Teddy Wilson, a star of the swing era and master of the American songbook; and Hazel Scott, whose specialty was swinging the classics. All three of them are looking over Tatum's shoulder with a look in their eyes that seems to acknowledge that here is a musician who can do -- all by himself -- everything that the three of them can do collectively, who can play more piano than all of them put together, and a great many others besides.
Body and Soul Humoresque Sweet Lorraine Tatum is unchallenged as far as sheer musical density is concerned: He played so many notes in a given performance that just counting them would be difficult, and actually transcribing one of his solos would be next to impossible. Just listening to Tatum at full blast can be overwhelming. (As Loren Schoenberg suggests in the booklet notes, Tatum is often best appreciated in small doses. Playing all 10 of these volumes -- and the bonus DVD -- in one sitting is obviously not recommended.) Yet because Tatum cast such an enormous shadow over the entire history of the jazz piano, and because he died so young, at age 47 in 1956, an odd dichotomy emerges in his oeuvre: He may have played millions of notes, yet every one of them is precious -- the laws of supply and demand, not to mention physics, no longer seem to apply.
Commercial recordings, like Tatum's classic series of solo and group performances of the mid-'50s, tell only part of the story. The current set, issued in time for the pianist's centennial this October, encompasses a ragtag bag of mostly live performances from Tatum's 20-plus years in the major leagues, as collated over a lifetime of detective work by Tatum scholar Arnold Laubich. The package begins with a once-rare aircheck of the 24-year-old pianist in his native Ohio (playing the Busby Berkeley dance number "Young and Healthy" like Fats Waller on amphetamines).
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Regarded as a serious virtuoso, Art Tatum was studied by the great classical pianists.
The last volume is highlighted by a series of unique duets privately taped in a New York apartment in which Tatum is paired with guitarist Tal Farlow or with organist Joe Mooney. Farlow and Mooney play so pianistically that in both cases the results sound like four-handed keyboard duets -- or maybe six-handed duets, since Tatum always sounds like he's got at least 20 fingers himself. (There are also a couple of impromptu duets with a pair of singers so out of tune and atrocious that even Paula Abdul wouldn't spare their feelings.)
When today's pianists illustrate Tatum's style, they invariably concentrate on his signature arpeggiated runs -- when he waits for the end of a line in a popular standard before stuffing in a whole string of notes. The suspense he generates is inevitably amazing -- a veritable movie-serial cliffhanger, as you wait breathlessly for him to finish his improvised line before he reaches the point where he has to start the next line of the written melody.
Yet this is only the beginning of what Tatum does, drawing on the vocabularies of stride, boogie and Mozart all at the same time, all driven by an overwhelming flair for the dramatic -- you use words like "adventurous" and "daring" when talking about Tatum. He's known for his damn-the-torpedoes full-speed showpieces, such as "I Know That You Know" and the hell-for-leather second chorus of his operetta update "Song of the Vagabonds." But I actually enjoy him most on medium-fast treatments of familiar songs, where he keeps both the melody and his own variations going at the same time, as if he were spinning multiple plates on "The Ed Sullivan Show" -- or playing duets with himself.
Tatum's capacity for merging one tune into another adds yet another dimension to his music. And, further, his penchant for inserting the classics into pop songs could be said to speak for a belief that Gershwin deserves to be taken as seriously -- or as humorously -- as Bach. Tatum blends "To a Wild Rose" into "Memories of You," as if they were different parts of the same piece, and quotes "Narcissus" and "Stars and Stripes Forever" in the middle of "Sweet Lorraine," while "Vesti la Giubba" rears its Italian head in "Body and Soul." It's in these quotes that Tatum's sense of humor rises to the surface, yet it's also present in other facets of his playing: He injects "Begin the Beguine" with so much warmth and wit that he lays the groundwork for the later career of Erroll Garner. He plays "Danny Boy" with so much tenderness that Tony Bennett was moved to name his son Danny.
A true prize in the box is Tatum's only known recording of Chopin's "Waltz in C-Sharp Minor (Opus 64, No. 2)," which he subjects to pumping rhythm that makes it sound like it was written by stride piano giant James P. Johnson. These classical showpieces -- especially his oft-played rearrangement of "Humoresque" -- are important for another reason: They underscore Tatum's reputation as perhaps the first jazz musician to be regarded by the larger culture as a serious virtuoso, comparable to Vladimir Horowitz or Van Cliburn. He anticipated the modern jazz movement not just in his advanced harmonies and breathtaking rhythms (it's said that the young Charlie Parker took a job as a dishwasher in a joint where Tatum was working just so he could listen to him all night) but in the nature of his music itself. He wasn't an entertainer or singer, and he didn't play music for dancing.
On one 1956 radio show included in the collection, critic Milton Cross talks about how the great classical pianists like Arthur Rubinstein were already studying Tatum. No wonder. One chorus was enough to convince anyone that jazz was art and, further, that Art was jazz.
Body and Soul Humoresque Sweet Lorraine Tatum is unchallenged as far as sheer musical density is concerned: He played so many notes in a given performance that just counting them would be difficult, and actually transcribing one of his solos would be next to impossible. Just listening to Tatum at full blast can be overwhelming. (As Loren Schoenberg suggests in the booklet notes, Tatum is often best appreciated in small doses. Playing all 10 of these volumes -- and the bonus DVD -- in one sitting is obviously not recommended.) Yet because Tatum cast such an enormous shadow over the entire history of the jazz piano, and because he died so young, at age 47 in 1956, an odd dichotomy emerges in his oeuvre: He may have played millions of notes, yet every one of them is precious -- the laws of supply and demand, not to mention physics, no longer seem to apply.
Commercial recordings, like Tatum's classic series of solo and group performances of the mid-'50s, tell only part of the story. The current set, issued in time for the pianist's centennial this October, encompasses a ragtag bag of mostly live performances from Tatum's 20-plus years in the major leagues, as collated over a lifetime of detective work by Tatum scholar Arnold Laubich. The package begins with a once-rare aircheck of the 24-year-old pianist in his native Ohio (playing the Busby Berkeley dance number "Young and Healthy" like Fats Waller on amphetamines).
View Full Image
Getty Images
Regarded as a serious virtuoso, Art Tatum was studied by the great classical pianists.
The last volume is highlighted by a series of unique duets privately taped in a New York apartment in which Tatum is paired with guitarist Tal Farlow or with organist Joe Mooney. Farlow and Mooney play so pianistically that in both cases the results sound like four-handed keyboard duets -- or maybe six-handed duets, since Tatum always sounds like he's got at least 20 fingers himself. (There are also a couple of impromptu duets with a pair of singers so out of tune and atrocious that even Paula Abdul wouldn't spare their feelings.)
When today's pianists illustrate Tatum's style, they invariably concentrate on his signature arpeggiated runs -- when he waits for the end of a line in a popular standard before stuffing in a whole string of notes. The suspense he generates is inevitably amazing -- a veritable movie-serial cliffhanger, as you wait breathlessly for him to finish his improvised line before he reaches the point where he has to start the next line of the written melody.
Yet this is only the beginning of what Tatum does, drawing on the vocabularies of stride, boogie and Mozart all at the same time, all driven by an overwhelming flair for the dramatic -- you use words like "adventurous" and "daring" when talking about Tatum. He's known for his damn-the-torpedoes full-speed showpieces, such as "I Know That You Know" and the hell-for-leather second chorus of his operetta update "Song of the Vagabonds." But I actually enjoy him most on medium-fast treatments of familiar songs, where he keeps both the melody and his own variations going at the same time, as if he were spinning multiple plates on "The Ed Sullivan Show" -- or playing duets with himself.
Tatum's capacity for merging one tune into another adds yet another dimension to his music. And, further, his penchant for inserting the classics into pop songs could be said to speak for a belief that Gershwin deserves to be taken as seriously -- or as humorously -- as Bach. Tatum blends "To a Wild Rose" into "Memories of You," as if they were different parts of the same piece, and quotes "Narcissus" and "Stars and Stripes Forever" in the middle of "Sweet Lorraine," while "Vesti la Giubba" rears its Italian head in "Body and Soul." It's in these quotes that Tatum's sense of humor rises to the surface, yet it's also present in other facets of his playing: He injects "Begin the Beguine" with so much warmth and wit that he lays the groundwork for the later career of Erroll Garner. He plays "Danny Boy" with so much tenderness that Tony Bennett was moved to name his son Danny.
A true prize in the box is Tatum's only known recording of Chopin's "Waltz in C-Sharp Minor (Opus 64, No. 2)," which he subjects to pumping rhythm that makes it sound like it was written by stride piano giant James P. Johnson. These classical showpieces -- especially his oft-played rearrangement of "Humoresque" -- are important for another reason: They underscore Tatum's reputation as perhaps the first jazz musician to be regarded by the larger culture as a serious virtuoso, comparable to Vladimir Horowitz or Van Cliburn. He anticipated the modern jazz movement not just in his advanced harmonies and breathtaking rhythms (it's said that the young Charlie Parker took a job as a dishwasher in a joint where Tatum was working just so he could listen to him all night) but in the nature of his music itself. He wasn't an entertainer or singer, and he didn't play music for dancing.
On one 1956 radio show included in the collection, critic Milton Cross talks about how the great classical pianists like Arthur Rubinstein were already studying Tatum. No wonder. One chorus was enough to convince anyone that jazz was art and, further, that Art was jazz.
29.5.09
SILK ROAD
KASHGAR, China — A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s cramped streets. Chinese traders, their camels laden with silk and porcelain, did the same.
The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked, by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.
Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again.
Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City, “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road.”
Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.
In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.
Demolition is deemed an urgent necessity because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands. “The entire Kashgar area is in a special area in danger of earthquakes,” Mr. Xu said. “I ask you: What country’s government would not protect its citizens from the dangers of natural disaster?”
Critics fret about a different disaster.
“From a cultural and historical perspective, this plan of theirs is stupid,” said Wu Lili, the managing director of the Beijing Cultural Protection Center, a nongovernmental group devoted to historic preservation. “From the perspective of the locals, it’s cruel.”
Urban reconstruction during China’s long boom has razed many old city centers, including most of the ancient alleyways and courtyard homes of the capital, Beijing.
Kashgar, though, is not a typical Chinese city. Chinese security officials consider it a breeding ground for a small but resilient movement of Uighur separatists who Beijing claims have ties to international jihadis. So redevelopment of this ancient center of Islamic culture comes with a tinge of forced conformity.
Chinese officials have offered somewhat befuddling explanations for their plans. Mr. Xu calls Kashgar “a prime example of rich cultural history and at the same time a major tourism city in China.” Yet the demolition plan would reduce to rubble Kashgar’s principal tourist attraction, a magnet for many of the million-plus people who visit each year.
China supports an international plan to designate major Silk Road landmarks as United Nations World Heritage sites — a powerful draw for tourists, and a powerful incentive for governments to preserve historical areas.
But Kashgar is missing from China’s list of proposed sites. One foreign official who refused to be identified for fear of damaging relations with Beijing said the Old City project had unusually strong backing high in the government.
The project, said to cost $440 million, began abruptly this year, soon after China’s central government said it would spend $584 billion on public works to combat the global financial crisis.
It would complete a piecemeal dismantling of old Kashgar that began decades ago. The city wall, a 25-foot-thick earthen berm nearly 35 feet high, has largely been torn down. In the 1980s, the city paved the surrounding moat to create a ring highway. Then it opened a main street through the old town center.
Still, much of the Old City remains as it was and has always been. From atop 40 vest-pocket mosques, muezzins still cast calls to prayer down the narrow lanes: no loudspeakers here. Hundreds of artisans still hammer copper pots, carve wood, hone scimitars and hawk everything from fresh-baked flatbread to dried toads to Islamic prayer hats.
And tens of thousands of Uighurs still live here behind hand-carved poplar doors, many in tumbledown rentals, others in two-story homes that vault over the alleys and open on courtyards filled with roses and cloth banners.
The city says the Uighur residents have been consulted at every step of planning. Residents mostly say they are summoned to meetings at which eviction timetables and compensation sums are announced.
Although the city offers the displaced residents the opportunity to build new homes on the sites of their old ones, some also complain that the proposed compensation does not pay for the cost of rebuilding.
“My family built this house 500 years ago,” said a beefy 56-year-old man with a white crew cut, who called himself Hajji, as his wife served tea inside their two-story Old City house. “It was made of mud. It’s been improved over the years, but there has been no change to the rooms.”
In Uighur style, the home has few furnishings. Tapestries hang from the walls, and carpets cover the floors and raised areas used for sleeping and entertaining. The winter room has a pot-bellied coal stove; the garage has been converted into a shop from which the family sells sweets and trinkets. Nine rooms downstairs, and seven up, the home has sprawled over the centuries into a mansion by Kashgar standards.
But Hajji and his wife lost their life’s savings caring for a sick child, and the city’s payment to demolish their home will not cover rebuilding it. Their option is to move to a distant apartment, which will force them to close their shop, their only source of income.
“The house belongs to us,” said Hajji’s wife, who refused to give her name. “In this kind of house, many, many generations can live, one by one. But if we move to an apartment, every 50 or 70 years, that apartment is torn down again.
“This is the biggest problem in our lives. How can our children inherit an apartment?”
Building inspectors have deemed most of the oldest homes unsafe, including all mud-and-straw structures, the earliest form of construction. They will be leveled and, in many cases, rebuilt in an earthquake-resistant Uighur style, the city promises.
But three of the Old City’s seven sectors are judged unfit for Uighur architecture and will be rebuilt with decidedly generic apartment buildings. Two thousand other homes will be razed to build public plazas and schools. Poor residents, who live in the smallest homes, already are being permanently moved to boxy, concrete public housing on Kashgar’s outskirts.
What will remain of old Kashgar is unclear. Mr. Xu said that “important buildings and areas of the Old City have already been included in the country’s special preservation list” and would not be disturbed.
No archaeologists monitor the razings, he said, because the government already knows everything about old Kashgar.
Kashgar officials do have good reason to worry about earthquakes. Last October, a 6.8 magnitude quake struck barely 100 miles away. In 1902, an 8.0-magnitude quake, one of the 20th century’s biggest, killed 667 residents.
Some residents say they also prefer a more modern environment. The thousand-year-old design that gives the Old City its charm often precludes basics like garbage pickup, sewers and fire hydrants.
In Mr. Xu’s view, demolition will give the Uighurs a better life and spare them from disaster in one fell swoop.
All that said, there is a certain aura of forcible eviction about the demolition, an urgency that fear of earthquakes does not completely explain. The city is offering cash bonuses to residents who move out early — about $30 for those who vacate within 20 days; $15 if they move in a month. Homes are razed as soon as they become empty, giving some alleys a gap-tooth look.
On Kashgar television, a nightly 15-minute infomercial hawks the project like ginsu knives, mixing dire statistics on seismic activity with scenes of happy Uighurs dancing in front of their new concrete apartments.
“Never has such a great event, such a major event happened to Kashgar,” the announcer intones. He boasts that the new buildings “will be difficult to match in the world” and that citizens will “completely experience the care and warmth of the party” toward the Uighur ethnic minority.
The infomercial also notes that Communist Party officials from Kashgar to Beijing are so edgy over the prospect of an earthquake “that it is disturbing their rest.”
Check out the slide show at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/world/asia/28kashgar.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print
The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked, by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.
Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again.
Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City, “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road.”
Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.
In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.
Demolition is deemed an urgent necessity because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands. “The entire Kashgar area is in a special area in danger of earthquakes,” Mr. Xu said. “I ask you: What country’s government would not protect its citizens from the dangers of natural disaster?”
Critics fret about a different disaster.
“From a cultural and historical perspective, this plan of theirs is stupid,” said Wu Lili, the managing director of the Beijing Cultural Protection Center, a nongovernmental group devoted to historic preservation. “From the perspective of the locals, it’s cruel.”
Urban reconstruction during China’s long boom has razed many old city centers, including most of the ancient alleyways and courtyard homes of the capital, Beijing.
Kashgar, though, is not a typical Chinese city. Chinese security officials consider it a breeding ground for a small but resilient movement of Uighur separatists who Beijing claims have ties to international jihadis. So redevelopment of this ancient center of Islamic culture comes with a tinge of forced conformity.
Chinese officials have offered somewhat befuddling explanations for their plans. Mr. Xu calls Kashgar “a prime example of rich cultural history and at the same time a major tourism city in China.” Yet the demolition plan would reduce to rubble Kashgar’s principal tourist attraction, a magnet for many of the million-plus people who visit each year.
China supports an international plan to designate major Silk Road landmarks as United Nations World Heritage sites — a powerful draw for tourists, and a powerful incentive for governments to preserve historical areas.
But Kashgar is missing from China’s list of proposed sites. One foreign official who refused to be identified for fear of damaging relations with Beijing said the Old City project had unusually strong backing high in the government.
The project, said to cost $440 million, began abruptly this year, soon after China’s central government said it would spend $584 billion on public works to combat the global financial crisis.
It would complete a piecemeal dismantling of old Kashgar that began decades ago. The city wall, a 25-foot-thick earthen berm nearly 35 feet high, has largely been torn down. In the 1980s, the city paved the surrounding moat to create a ring highway. Then it opened a main street through the old town center.
Still, much of the Old City remains as it was and has always been. From atop 40 vest-pocket mosques, muezzins still cast calls to prayer down the narrow lanes: no loudspeakers here. Hundreds of artisans still hammer copper pots, carve wood, hone scimitars and hawk everything from fresh-baked flatbread to dried toads to Islamic prayer hats.
And tens of thousands of Uighurs still live here behind hand-carved poplar doors, many in tumbledown rentals, others in two-story homes that vault over the alleys and open on courtyards filled with roses and cloth banners.
The city says the Uighur residents have been consulted at every step of planning. Residents mostly say they are summoned to meetings at which eviction timetables and compensation sums are announced.
Although the city offers the displaced residents the opportunity to build new homes on the sites of their old ones, some also complain that the proposed compensation does not pay for the cost of rebuilding.
“My family built this house 500 years ago,” said a beefy 56-year-old man with a white crew cut, who called himself Hajji, as his wife served tea inside their two-story Old City house. “It was made of mud. It’s been improved over the years, but there has been no change to the rooms.”
In Uighur style, the home has few furnishings. Tapestries hang from the walls, and carpets cover the floors and raised areas used for sleeping and entertaining. The winter room has a pot-bellied coal stove; the garage has been converted into a shop from which the family sells sweets and trinkets. Nine rooms downstairs, and seven up, the home has sprawled over the centuries into a mansion by Kashgar standards.
But Hajji and his wife lost their life’s savings caring for a sick child, and the city’s payment to demolish their home will not cover rebuilding it. Their option is to move to a distant apartment, which will force them to close their shop, their only source of income.
“The house belongs to us,” said Hajji’s wife, who refused to give her name. “In this kind of house, many, many generations can live, one by one. But if we move to an apartment, every 50 or 70 years, that apartment is torn down again.
“This is the biggest problem in our lives. How can our children inherit an apartment?”
Building inspectors have deemed most of the oldest homes unsafe, including all mud-and-straw structures, the earliest form of construction. They will be leveled and, in many cases, rebuilt in an earthquake-resistant Uighur style, the city promises.
But three of the Old City’s seven sectors are judged unfit for Uighur architecture and will be rebuilt with decidedly generic apartment buildings. Two thousand other homes will be razed to build public plazas and schools. Poor residents, who live in the smallest homes, already are being permanently moved to boxy, concrete public housing on Kashgar’s outskirts.
What will remain of old Kashgar is unclear. Mr. Xu said that “important buildings and areas of the Old City have already been included in the country’s special preservation list” and would not be disturbed.
No archaeologists monitor the razings, he said, because the government already knows everything about old Kashgar.
Kashgar officials do have good reason to worry about earthquakes. Last October, a 6.8 magnitude quake struck barely 100 miles away. In 1902, an 8.0-magnitude quake, one of the 20th century’s biggest, killed 667 residents.
Some residents say they also prefer a more modern environment. The thousand-year-old design that gives the Old City its charm often precludes basics like garbage pickup, sewers and fire hydrants.
In Mr. Xu’s view, demolition will give the Uighurs a better life and spare them from disaster in one fell swoop.
All that said, there is a certain aura of forcible eviction about the demolition, an urgency that fear of earthquakes does not completely explain. The city is offering cash bonuses to residents who move out early — about $30 for those who vacate within 20 days; $15 if they move in a month. Homes are razed as soon as they become empty, giving some alleys a gap-tooth look.
On Kashgar television, a nightly 15-minute infomercial hawks the project like ginsu knives, mixing dire statistics on seismic activity with scenes of happy Uighurs dancing in front of their new concrete apartments.
“Never has such a great event, such a major event happened to Kashgar,” the announcer intones. He boasts that the new buildings “will be difficult to match in the world” and that citizens will “completely experience the care and warmth of the party” toward the Uighur ethnic minority.
The infomercial also notes that Communist Party officials from Kashgar to Beijing are so edgy over the prospect of an earthquake “that it is disturbing their rest.”
Check out the slide show at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/world/asia/28kashgar.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print
RECESSION
The challenges we face in the Western industrialised world today are threefold. There isn’t just a single crisis; there are three substantive crises that we must address. These three crises interact with, and on occasion aggravate, one another.
To make a medical analogy: if the Western world is a patient, then this poor patient is suffering from three things. First, an acute illness: the current recession. Second, a chronic illness, which I would characterise as a crisis of production and the hollowing out of value-adding production of goods and services in most Western economies. This is happening at different paces across the West, but it is a fairly common feature. And third, to top it all, this patient has a doctor – the political class – who is making a hash of things and generally making the situation worse. On top of the acute and chronic economic problems, there is a crisis of political leadership.
Let us consider the acute crisis first, the recession. The symptoms are all the things we see around us: businesses closing, output contracting, more redundancies - such as the 15,000 at British Telecom in recent weeks. All of these are typical expressions or consequences of the recession.
However, many now recognise that this is not a typical, business-cycle recession. To stretch my medical analogy probably too far, as Star Trek’s Dr McCoy probably never said to Captain Kirk: ‘It’s a recession, Jim, but not as we know it.’
Various experts and observers have tried to put various epithets to the recession, in order to describe what kind of abnormal, atypical recession we face today. People talk about a ‘banking recession’, an ‘investment banking recession’, a ‘bubble recession’, a ‘financial recession’, or a ‘credit recession’. There may be some good reasons for using all of these epithets – but all of them have downsides, too, in that they tend to narrow down what is going on to the financial sector. The view seems to be that the main problem is in the banking sector, which may be to do with regulation, the over-expansion of credit, low interest rates, and so on; the problem is all in one part of the economy, apparently. I think this is a deceptive and unhelpful way of looking at things.
The epithet that I would use is that this is a ‘financialisation recession’. What I mean by financialisation is the trend over the past 20 years where it is not only the case that the financial sector has become bigger in many economies, in particular in Britain and America, but also that financial activities and financial engineering have infiltrated the whole of the economy. There has been a fusion of financial activity with the rest of the economy. Not only are the banks themselves more important these days, but virtually the entire economy has become dominated by financial-style activity. And it is this that has imploded in the recession of the past year-and-a-half.
This links to the chronic problem, which is the decay of productive activity in the West. The rise and rise of financialisation has been the other side of the atrophy, the wasting away, of productive activity in Western economies. Thirty or 40 years ago, there were large sectors in Western economies that were engaged in the production of goods and services. But that has diminished – and financialisation has risen to replace it. Financialisation has been both a consequence of the weakening of the productive sector, and a palliative to it.
Financialisation is a classic palliative, of course – in the sense that it is only partial; its offsetting impact is temporary in historical terms (perhaps 10 to 15 years for Western economies); and it hasn’t cured the deep-seated problem.
This leads me to the third problem: the crisis of political leadership, the doctor who has been making things worse. This is perhaps the most serious of the triple crises because it is about what we can do to resolve the first two crises, the recession and the hollowing out of production. The ‘doctor’ has been oscillating between effectively saying ‘I can’t see any symptoms’ – denial that there is anything serious taking place – and wishful thinking that time will cure any problematic symptoms and everything will be okay. This is epitomised by the ‘green shoots’ discussion. The ‘doctor’ also sometimes recognises that there are serious symptoms, but says ‘I’m going to be really tentative about it’ – so he restructures the banking sector on day one, but then on day two he pulls back because he’s not sure what to do with these troubled assets relief funds. Such tactical tinkering and dithering doesn’t help.
However, the problem of political leadership can be seen not simply in their tactical mistakes; more fundamentally political leaders have not recognised that there is a need for a more strategic approach to the recession. They have simply responded to the surface appearances of a financial crisis and tried to muddle through. They are evading a recognition of how severe things are, and evading responsibility for addressing the crisis. If their outlook remains myopic and short-termist, and sometimes in denial, they are never going to be able to identify what needs to be done – and this will prolong the crisis and ensure that it reoccurs in new forms later on.
We need to go much deeper than the current discussion of the recession, in order to realise that what is required is a fundamental fix at the level of the productive sector as well as a deeper understanding of the real reasons why all this financialisation is taking place. To return to the medical analogy, simply to treat the acute problem without recognising the chronic one will only cause the patient to relapse into the chronic illness in the future.
Phil Mullan is the author of The Imaginary Time Bomb: Why an Ageing Population Is Not a Social Problem. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)). This article is based on Phil Mullan’s speech at the Battle for the Economy summit held in London on 16 May.
To make a medical analogy: if the Western world is a patient, then this poor patient is suffering from three things. First, an acute illness: the current recession. Second, a chronic illness, which I would characterise as a crisis of production and the hollowing out of value-adding production of goods and services in most Western economies. This is happening at different paces across the West, but it is a fairly common feature. And third, to top it all, this patient has a doctor – the political class – who is making a hash of things and generally making the situation worse. On top of the acute and chronic economic problems, there is a crisis of political leadership.
Let us consider the acute crisis first, the recession. The symptoms are all the things we see around us: businesses closing, output contracting, more redundancies - such as the 15,000 at British Telecom in recent weeks. All of these are typical expressions or consequences of the recession.
However, many now recognise that this is not a typical, business-cycle recession. To stretch my medical analogy probably too far, as Star Trek’s Dr McCoy probably never said to Captain Kirk: ‘It’s a recession, Jim, but not as we know it.’
Various experts and observers have tried to put various epithets to the recession, in order to describe what kind of abnormal, atypical recession we face today. People talk about a ‘banking recession’, an ‘investment banking recession’, a ‘bubble recession’, a ‘financial recession’, or a ‘credit recession’. There may be some good reasons for using all of these epithets – but all of them have downsides, too, in that they tend to narrow down what is going on to the financial sector. The view seems to be that the main problem is in the banking sector, which may be to do with regulation, the over-expansion of credit, low interest rates, and so on; the problem is all in one part of the economy, apparently. I think this is a deceptive and unhelpful way of looking at things.
The epithet that I would use is that this is a ‘financialisation recession’. What I mean by financialisation is the trend over the past 20 years where it is not only the case that the financial sector has become bigger in many economies, in particular in Britain and America, but also that financial activities and financial engineering have infiltrated the whole of the economy. There has been a fusion of financial activity with the rest of the economy. Not only are the banks themselves more important these days, but virtually the entire economy has become dominated by financial-style activity. And it is this that has imploded in the recession of the past year-and-a-half.
This links to the chronic problem, which is the decay of productive activity in the West. The rise and rise of financialisation has been the other side of the atrophy, the wasting away, of productive activity in Western economies. Thirty or 40 years ago, there were large sectors in Western economies that were engaged in the production of goods and services. But that has diminished – and financialisation has risen to replace it. Financialisation has been both a consequence of the weakening of the productive sector, and a palliative to it.
Financialisation is a classic palliative, of course – in the sense that it is only partial; its offsetting impact is temporary in historical terms (perhaps 10 to 15 years for Western economies); and it hasn’t cured the deep-seated problem.
This leads me to the third problem: the crisis of political leadership, the doctor who has been making things worse. This is perhaps the most serious of the triple crises because it is about what we can do to resolve the first two crises, the recession and the hollowing out of production. The ‘doctor’ has been oscillating between effectively saying ‘I can’t see any symptoms’ – denial that there is anything serious taking place – and wishful thinking that time will cure any problematic symptoms and everything will be okay. This is epitomised by the ‘green shoots’ discussion. The ‘doctor’ also sometimes recognises that there are serious symptoms, but says ‘I’m going to be really tentative about it’ – so he restructures the banking sector on day one, but then on day two he pulls back because he’s not sure what to do with these troubled assets relief funds. Such tactical tinkering and dithering doesn’t help.
However, the problem of political leadership can be seen not simply in their tactical mistakes; more fundamentally political leaders have not recognised that there is a need for a more strategic approach to the recession. They have simply responded to the surface appearances of a financial crisis and tried to muddle through. They are evading a recognition of how severe things are, and evading responsibility for addressing the crisis. If their outlook remains myopic and short-termist, and sometimes in denial, they are never going to be able to identify what needs to be done – and this will prolong the crisis and ensure that it reoccurs in new forms later on.
We need to go much deeper than the current discussion of the recession, in order to realise that what is required is a fundamental fix at the level of the productive sector as well as a deeper understanding of the real reasons why all this financialisation is taking place. To return to the medical analogy, simply to treat the acute problem without recognising the chronic one will only cause the patient to relapse into the chronic illness in the future.
Phil Mullan is the author of The Imaginary Time Bomb: Why an Ageing Population Is Not a Social Problem. (Buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)). This article is based on Phil Mullan’s speech at the Battle for the Economy summit held in London on 16 May.
28.5.09
Painting Wars in Venice
Soothed by the waters lapping against the swaying gondolas, ravished by the mist-shrouded views of towers and domes, the visitor to Venice is soon ready to accept her nickname, La Serenissima. But the truth is that there is no place on earth whose fate and achievements owe more to fierce hostilities, to bitter competition, to ruthless struggles for survival and supremacy. Venice is the ultimate Darwinian city. Sharp elbows were second nature to its Renaissance patricians, and throughout the society animosities and feuds were endemic. Even a distinguished man of letters and a cardinal, Pietro Bembo, lost the use of a finger in a street fight over a lawsuit. Lower down the social scale, two factions regularly scheduled violent encounters on the city’s bridges. The dark vision of James Fenimore Cooper’s Bravo is no travesty of a quarrelsome, intrigue-ridden republic. And the competitive instinct served Venice well as she swept rivals aside to establish her wealth, dominance of the Aegean, rule of northern Italy, and presence throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
What about the arts? Here, surely, the nickname is earned as we contemplate the rich colours, calm figures, charming pets and sunny landscapes that fill Venetian canvases. Yet that, too, is an illusion. It is true that, for the practitioners of some kinds of art history, there are no exemplars of high achievement more worthy of close attention than the Bellinis, Giorgione, Titian or Veronese. Their work yields instructive insights into aesthetic standards, mastery of conception and technique, originality and the elements of creativity. That, however, is to respond to paintings, not to painters. As soon as one tries to understand personalities – how they went about their tasks, what they were aiming to do, how they earned their living, and why they behaved as they did – an entirely different set of questions arises, and the connections with the city’s other inhabitants become salient and vivid.
The purpose of the remarkable exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is to elucidate this context: the competitiveness that inspired the achievements of even the greatest artists. An adroitly positioned display of fifty-four canvases convinces us that, in this respect, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were unmistakably Venetian. What is astonishing is that this is the first exhibition to approach them in this way, despite Vasari and modern accounts such as Rona Goffen’s pioneering Renaissance Rivals (2002). We know about the protean Picasso, and his uneasy connections with Braque, Matisse and others. But the old masters?
The emblematic story in the relationship of these three artists, mentioned more than once in the exhibition catalogue, took place in early June 1564. One of the rich and powerful charities of Venice, the Scuola San Rocco, was determined to make a splash by commissioning the finest decorations for its magnificent headquarters. Accordingly, a competition was announced for the oval canvas at the centre of the ceiling of the albergo, the room where the Board met. As was customary, the finalists (Tintoretto, Salviati, Zuccaro and Veronese) were asked to come to the albergo with drawings of their proposed entries, which the assembled Board would judge. The four competitors appeared with their drawings, except for Tintoretto, who, when asked for his design, had the cardboard covering the ceiling removed to reveal his finished painting, “St Roch in Glory”, in situ. Thanks to an accomplice on the Board, he had been able to install it secretly a few days earlier. To complete his triumph, he offered the picture to the confraternity as a donation, which they were bound to accept (though twenty of fifty-one Board members still voted against it – another reflection of the factions that swirled through the city). The consequences of this episode dazzle us to this day: the vast array of Tintorettos throughout the Scuola, of which he became a member, and particularly the enormous “Crucifixion” in the albergo, which Ruskin and others have considered the finest painting ever made.
Where the exhibition is concerned, however, this is merely one of many dramatic instances of the aggressiveness of the city’s artistic community. One might have thought that Titian, by far the oldest of the trio on display in Boston, and famous throughout Europe by the time the others emerged in the late 1540s, would have been above such contrivances. But no. The Boston show begins with his training in the studio of Giovanni Bellini (two Bellinian panels are the only works not by the three protagonists), to show how, from the start, he added movement and emotion to his artistic inheritance. We then jump thirty years to the period of nearly four decades when he overlapped with Tintoretto and Veronese. By then, his competitive instincts were well honed. A perfect example is the altarpiece he painted for San Giovanni Elimosinario, a small church near the Rialto. This was newly built, and while Titian was out of the city in the 1530s, one of his contemporaries, Pordenone, began to decorate the interior, notably with a large portrait of three saints which survives to this day. Titian’s altarpiece was not just a pious gesture, but an attempt to outshine Pordenone. Decades later, he intruded into Veronese’s church, San Sebastiano, with a St Nicholas that is still the first painting the visitor sees.
Small wonder that Titian kept a sharp eye on Tintoretto and Veronese as they began to compete for commissions. Their talent was obvious, and in Tintoretto’s case married to a naked ambition and an ability to work at furious speed that clearly alarmed the older man. Veronese was a gentler figure, so it was not surprising that, when tenders went out for the decoration of the ceiling in the new Marciana Library, Titian made sure that Tintoretto was excluded and that Veronese won the prize for the best contribution. This story, too, appears more than once in the catalogue, and it is interesting to see how differently the contributors view Tintoretto’s aggression. For the show’s curator, Frederick Ilchman, an expert on Tintoretto, adjectives such as “assured”, “bold”, “defiant”, even “brazen”, reflect a profound admiration. Patricia Brown, by contrast, dryly notes that, after installing some paintings for the Duke of Mantua, Tintoretto “characteristically . . . sought (without success) to replace the court artist . . . with himself”. And Linda Borean refers to him as the “enfant terrible” of the trio. In other words, there was no escaping Tintoretto’s overabundant creative presence. Mark Twain spoke of being taken aback by the “acres of Tintorettos” in Venice, but recognition of his genius was, and is, unavoidable.
A major merit of the Boston exhibition is that it tames this hyperactivity in order to show its effects. Thus the installation of a ceiling canvas once owned by Aretino in the Museum’s own ceiling gives one a sense of Tintoretto’s range but serves also as a reminder of how the artist could rub people up the wrong way. Aretino bought the painting while Titian was away from Venice, but did not repeat the mistake after experiencing his friend’s fury on his return to the city. One can also imagine what Titian must have said when he saw how Tintoretto had refashioned one of his own most famous works, an expansive “Presentation of the Virgin”, now in the Accademia, which showed the little girl climbing a long stairway. The younger man’s version, in the church of Madonna dell’Orto, was tight, angled and dramatic, dominated by the staircase, and with an entirely different feel to it. Tintoretto may have been a difficult colleague, but the results of the rivalries he relished were paintings of grace, elegance, power and insight.
It seems invidious to pick out just a few of the juxtapositions that the show uses to illuminate its central themes, but one cannot do equal justice to some two dozen revelatory pairings. A few will have to do. Perhaps the most striking is what Frederick Ilchman calls the nude and the mirror. The Titian prototype, Washington’s “Venus with a Mirror”, provides the catalogue cover and the emblem of the entire show. Hung next to it is Veronese’s extraordinary response, also “Venus with a Mirror”, from Nebraska. Where Titian has the half-nude goddess seen from the front, Veronese has her in almost the same pose, but seen from the rear. The result is an awkwardness in the twist of her head that seems almost painful, yet it is clear that Veronese’s aim was to demonstrate his comparable mastery of lush flesh and crimson drapery. Tintoretto’s nude with a mirror is Susannah, and we do not see her reflection, but we do see the full body, drapery and a creamy, shadowed skin that proclaims itself the equal of anything Titian or Veronese could produce.
Nearby, alongside one another, are three versions of the Supper at Emmaus. Titian’s was famous for the exactitude of the objects on the table – almost Dutch in their precision – and for its shimmering tablecloth. For much of its history it was called “The Tablecloth”. When Tintoretto painted his version, he kept the column behind Christ’s head to emphasize his central position, but he realized he could not match Titian’s mastery of the objects on the table, and instead of a dog on the floor he put a cat. To make his mark, though, he set the figures in almost violent motion. Gone was the stunned surprise as Christ was recognized; instead there is movement, action and outflung arms. Veronese, gentler and more approachable, left the column in place, but now focused all attention on a heaven-gazing Christ. He makes more of an effort than Tintoretto did to render the tablecloth, but the stamp he puts on the subject is the figure of a little girl, looking out at the viewer and embracing the inevitable dog.
Similar competitive dialogues pervade the exhibition. There are three St Jeromes in the wilderness. Three women with just a touch of drapery face grave peril: two Lucretias and an Andromeda facing a remarkable Veronese monster who would do a horror movie proud. In every case there are echoes of predecessors’ compositions and conceptions. The same is true of depictions of children with large dogs, of portraits, of figures in armour, of floating saints and divinities, and of goddesses as symbols of love and fertility. The show has both Titian’s “Venus and Adonis” and Veronese’s “Venus and Mars”, embodiments of the female form clinging to a lover, but not the third in the trio, Tintoretto’s “Origins of the Milky Way”, in which a nude Juno arises from the same red drapery as Jupiter approaches with the baby Hercules.
The artists’ competitiveness did not end with their deaths. Alongside the catalogue essays by Ilchman and Brown on the rivalry and the forms of their patronage is an essay by Linda Borean on the collectors who bought the trio’s works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a story that shows how patrons’ preferences, crossconnections and reputation affected the fate of the paintings over the decades that followed. And it is, in essence, brought up to date by Nicholas Penny’s meticulous and comprehensive catalogue of the Venetian paintings of 1540–1600 in the National Gallery in London. The three artists and their imitators take up nearly 300 pages in a 440-page publication, a massive compilation – and a testimony to their continuing appeal.
There are, of course, other major figures at the National Gallery in London, notably the Bassanos, Paris Bordone and Palma Giovane. Yet Palma’s “Mars and Venus”, seen in the wake of the Boston exhibition, looks primarily like an extension of the themes laid out there. Nevertheless, on their own terms the National Gallery paintings offer a sumptuous window on to Venice’s Golden Age. Penny’s catalogue provides not only a complete understanding of the physical presence of each painting, but also of its content. The erudition is encyclopedic and the illustrations lavish; excellent reproductions of drawings, details, analogous works and sources add conviction to the arguments. If one were to single out an entry, it would have to be the thirty pages on Titian’s “Vendramin Family”, which are so rich in information about the identities of the subjects, their clothes, the different hands that worked on the canvas, the nature of the composition and its details, the meaning of the work in the family’s history, and the fate of the painting in subsequent centuries, that they transform one’s understanding of the picture.
Readers will find their own pleasures in this assemblage, but I was struck, in particular, by the discussions of provenance. Here, the history of reputations and collecting comes to life. The British aristocracy of course looms large, as does the twentieth-century erosion of their holdings, to the notable benefit of the gallery. But there are also glimpses of Philip II of Spain, Queen Christina of Sweden, and members of other royal families, not to mention the Bonapartes. In one journey, Bassano’s “Road to Calvary” entered the English royal collection and then departed when it served as a bribe. Such details crop up regularly, and make The Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings a treasure-house for browsing and understanding some of the gallery’s most memorable canvases.
At the end of this immersion in the art of Venice’s Golden Age, a pair of images remains in the mind. Both are in the Boston show, but their subject matter is unique: two self-portraits by Tintoretto. The first, done in his late twenties, shows the burning, piercing intensity that characterized the artist’s confrontations, triumphs and urge to outdo his contemporaries. Here was someone impervious to the dismay that his self-confidence might provoke. The second, which closes the show, is of the old man, around seventy, who had outlived both Titian and Veronese. There is only sadness in the eyes, a sadness that seems to suggest how impossible it was for an artist of such drive and ambition ever to achieve lasting personal satisfaction, or indeed serenity.
What about the arts? Here, surely, the nickname is earned as we contemplate the rich colours, calm figures, charming pets and sunny landscapes that fill Venetian canvases. Yet that, too, is an illusion. It is true that, for the practitioners of some kinds of art history, there are no exemplars of high achievement more worthy of close attention than the Bellinis, Giorgione, Titian or Veronese. Their work yields instructive insights into aesthetic standards, mastery of conception and technique, originality and the elements of creativity. That, however, is to respond to paintings, not to painters. As soon as one tries to understand personalities – how they went about their tasks, what they were aiming to do, how they earned their living, and why they behaved as they did – an entirely different set of questions arises, and the connections with the city’s other inhabitants become salient and vivid.
The purpose of the remarkable exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is to elucidate this context: the competitiveness that inspired the achievements of even the greatest artists. An adroitly positioned display of fifty-four canvases convinces us that, in this respect, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were unmistakably Venetian. What is astonishing is that this is the first exhibition to approach them in this way, despite Vasari and modern accounts such as Rona Goffen’s pioneering Renaissance Rivals (2002). We know about the protean Picasso, and his uneasy connections with Braque, Matisse and others. But the old masters?
The emblematic story in the relationship of these three artists, mentioned more than once in the exhibition catalogue, took place in early June 1564. One of the rich and powerful charities of Venice, the Scuola San Rocco, was determined to make a splash by commissioning the finest decorations for its magnificent headquarters. Accordingly, a competition was announced for the oval canvas at the centre of the ceiling of the albergo, the room where the Board met. As was customary, the finalists (Tintoretto, Salviati, Zuccaro and Veronese) were asked to come to the albergo with drawings of their proposed entries, which the assembled Board would judge. The four competitors appeared with their drawings, except for Tintoretto, who, when asked for his design, had the cardboard covering the ceiling removed to reveal his finished painting, “St Roch in Glory”, in situ. Thanks to an accomplice on the Board, he had been able to install it secretly a few days earlier. To complete his triumph, he offered the picture to the confraternity as a donation, which they were bound to accept (though twenty of fifty-one Board members still voted against it – another reflection of the factions that swirled through the city). The consequences of this episode dazzle us to this day: the vast array of Tintorettos throughout the Scuola, of which he became a member, and particularly the enormous “Crucifixion” in the albergo, which Ruskin and others have considered the finest painting ever made.
Where the exhibition is concerned, however, this is merely one of many dramatic instances of the aggressiveness of the city’s artistic community. One might have thought that Titian, by far the oldest of the trio on display in Boston, and famous throughout Europe by the time the others emerged in the late 1540s, would have been above such contrivances. But no. The Boston show begins with his training in the studio of Giovanni Bellini (two Bellinian panels are the only works not by the three protagonists), to show how, from the start, he added movement and emotion to his artistic inheritance. We then jump thirty years to the period of nearly four decades when he overlapped with Tintoretto and Veronese. By then, his competitive instincts were well honed. A perfect example is the altarpiece he painted for San Giovanni Elimosinario, a small church near the Rialto. This was newly built, and while Titian was out of the city in the 1530s, one of his contemporaries, Pordenone, began to decorate the interior, notably with a large portrait of three saints which survives to this day. Titian’s altarpiece was not just a pious gesture, but an attempt to outshine Pordenone. Decades later, he intruded into Veronese’s church, San Sebastiano, with a St Nicholas that is still the first painting the visitor sees.
Small wonder that Titian kept a sharp eye on Tintoretto and Veronese as they began to compete for commissions. Their talent was obvious, and in Tintoretto’s case married to a naked ambition and an ability to work at furious speed that clearly alarmed the older man. Veronese was a gentler figure, so it was not surprising that, when tenders went out for the decoration of the ceiling in the new Marciana Library, Titian made sure that Tintoretto was excluded and that Veronese won the prize for the best contribution. This story, too, appears more than once in the catalogue, and it is interesting to see how differently the contributors view Tintoretto’s aggression. For the show’s curator, Frederick Ilchman, an expert on Tintoretto, adjectives such as “assured”, “bold”, “defiant”, even “brazen”, reflect a profound admiration. Patricia Brown, by contrast, dryly notes that, after installing some paintings for the Duke of Mantua, Tintoretto “characteristically . . . sought (without success) to replace the court artist . . . with himself”. And Linda Borean refers to him as the “enfant terrible” of the trio. In other words, there was no escaping Tintoretto’s overabundant creative presence. Mark Twain spoke of being taken aback by the “acres of Tintorettos” in Venice, but recognition of his genius was, and is, unavoidable.
A major merit of the Boston exhibition is that it tames this hyperactivity in order to show its effects. Thus the installation of a ceiling canvas once owned by Aretino in the Museum’s own ceiling gives one a sense of Tintoretto’s range but serves also as a reminder of how the artist could rub people up the wrong way. Aretino bought the painting while Titian was away from Venice, but did not repeat the mistake after experiencing his friend’s fury on his return to the city. One can also imagine what Titian must have said when he saw how Tintoretto had refashioned one of his own most famous works, an expansive “Presentation of the Virgin”, now in the Accademia, which showed the little girl climbing a long stairway. The younger man’s version, in the church of Madonna dell’Orto, was tight, angled and dramatic, dominated by the staircase, and with an entirely different feel to it. Tintoretto may have been a difficult colleague, but the results of the rivalries he relished were paintings of grace, elegance, power and insight.
It seems invidious to pick out just a few of the juxtapositions that the show uses to illuminate its central themes, but one cannot do equal justice to some two dozen revelatory pairings. A few will have to do. Perhaps the most striking is what Frederick Ilchman calls the nude and the mirror. The Titian prototype, Washington’s “Venus with a Mirror”, provides the catalogue cover and the emblem of the entire show. Hung next to it is Veronese’s extraordinary response, also “Venus with a Mirror”, from Nebraska. Where Titian has the half-nude goddess seen from the front, Veronese has her in almost the same pose, but seen from the rear. The result is an awkwardness in the twist of her head that seems almost painful, yet it is clear that Veronese’s aim was to demonstrate his comparable mastery of lush flesh and crimson drapery. Tintoretto’s nude with a mirror is Susannah, and we do not see her reflection, but we do see the full body, drapery and a creamy, shadowed skin that proclaims itself the equal of anything Titian or Veronese could produce.
Nearby, alongside one another, are three versions of the Supper at Emmaus. Titian’s was famous for the exactitude of the objects on the table – almost Dutch in their precision – and for its shimmering tablecloth. For much of its history it was called “The Tablecloth”. When Tintoretto painted his version, he kept the column behind Christ’s head to emphasize his central position, but he realized he could not match Titian’s mastery of the objects on the table, and instead of a dog on the floor he put a cat. To make his mark, though, he set the figures in almost violent motion. Gone was the stunned surprise as Christ was recognized; instead there is movement, action and outflung arms. Veronese, gentler and more approachable, left the column in place, but now focused all attention on a heaven-gazing Christ. He makes more of an effort than Tintoretto did to render the tablecloth, but the stamp he puts on the subject is the figure of a little girl, looking out at the viewer and embracing the inevitable dog.
Similar competitive dialogues pervade the exhibition. There are three St Jeromes in the wilderness. Three women with just a touch of drapery face grave peril: two Lucretias and an Andromeda facing a remarkable Veronese monster who would do a horror movie proud. In every case there are echoes of predecessors’ compositions and conceptions. The same is true of depictions of children with large dogs, of portraits, of figures in armour, of floating saints and divinities, and of goddesses as symbols of love and fertility. The show has both Titian’s “Venus and Adonis” and Veronese’s “Venus and Mars”, embodiments of the female form clinging to a lover, but not the third in the trio, Tintoretto’s “Origins of the Milky Way”, in which a nude Juno arises from the same red drapery as Jupiter approaches with the baby Hercules.
The artists’ competitiveness did not end with their deaths. Alongside the catalogue essays by Ilchman and Brown on the rivalry and the forms of their patronage is an essay by Linda Borean on the collectors who bought the trio’s works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a story that shows how patrons’ preferences, crossconnections and reputation affected the fate of the paintings over the decades that followed. And it is, in essence, brought up to date by Nicholas Penny’s meticulous and comprehensive catalogue of the Venetian paintings of 1540–1600 in the National Gallery in London. The three artists and their imitators take up nearly 300 pages in a 440-page publication, a massive compilation – and a testimony to their continuing appeal.
There are, of course, other major figures at the National Gallery in London, notably the Bassanos, Paris Bordone and Palma Giovane. Yet Palma’s “Mars and Venus”, seen in the wake of the Boston exhibition, looks primarily like an extension of the themes laid out there. Nevertheless, on their own terms the National Gallery paintings offer a sumptuous window on to Venice’s Golden Age. Penny’s catalogue provides not only a complete understanding of the physical presence of each painting, but also of its content. The erudition is encyclopedic and the illustrations lavish; excellent reproductions of drawings, details, analogous works and sources add conviction to the arguments. If one were to single out an entry, it would have to be the thirty pages on Titian’s “Vendramin Family”, which are so rich in information about the identities of the subjects, their clothes, the different hands that worked on the canvas, the nature of the composition and its details, the meaning of the work in the family’s history, and the fate of the painting in subsequent centuries, that they transform one’s understanding of the picture.
Readers will find their own pleasures in this assemblage, but I was struck, in particular, by the discussions of provenance. Here, the history of reputations and collecting comes to life. The British aristocracy of course looms large, as does the twentieth-century erosion of their holdings, to the notable benefit of the gallery. But there are also glimpses of Philip II of Spain, Queen Christina of Sweden, and members of other royal families, not to mention the Bonapartes. In one journey, Bassano’s “Road to Calvary” entered the English royal collection and then departed when it served as a bribe. Such details crop up regularly, and make The Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings a treasure-house for browsing and understanding some of the gallery’s most memorable canvases.
At the end of this immersion in the art of Venice’s Golden Age, a pair of images remains in the mind. Both are in the Boston show, but their subject matter is unique: two self-portraits by Tintoretto. The first, done in his late twenties, shows the burning, piercing intensity that characterized the artist’s confrontations, triumphs and urge to outdo his contemporaries. Here was someone impervious to the dismay that his self-confidence might provoke. The second, which closes the show, is of the old man, around seventy, who had outlived both Titian and Veronese. There is only sadness in the eyes, a sadness that seems to suggest how impossible it was for an artist of such drive and ambition ever to achieve lasting personal satisfaction, or indeed serenity.
Lincoln
On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama, then a relatively unknown US senator, stood on the steps of the Illinois statehouse. A crowd numbering in the thousands braved the winter weather to hear him speak. Obama first warmed his audience with inspirational snippets drawn from his autobiography. Then, setting up the key passage of his address, he invoked one of the critical chapters in the nation’s political history: “In the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a house divided to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America”. As the crowd cheered and chanted his name, Obama repeatedly circled back to Lincoln’s memory: the sixteenth President’s rise from humble origins, his perseverance, and his unrelenting focus on reuniting a nation ripped apart by the scourges of slavery, sectionalism, and Southern secession. Obama concluded with one more homage to Lincoln – an allusion to his greatest speech, the Gettysburg Address – asking his supporters to help him “usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth”.
Less than a year later, Ron Paul, a congressman from Texas, roasted beneath arc lights on the television programme Meet the Press. Opposing the war in Iraq while equating federal power with tyranny, Paul at the time commanded an army of supporters, millions of shock troops eager for radical change: the so-called Ron Paul Revolution. The congressman hoped to march with these libertarian followers to the Republican presidential nomination. Midway into the interview, the journalist Tim Russert said: “I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln”. Paul, it seemed, had remarked a year earlier that “Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war”. Here was Russert’s signature move, a personal quotation designed to shatter a guest's composure and political ambitions. As Russert waited for Paul to recant what passes for heresy in the church of American politics, the congressman stood by his words. Insisting that Lincoln had sought “to get rid of the original intent of the Republic, displaying the iron fist of Washington”, Paul called the Civil War “senseless”.
From uncommonly frank discussions of race and citizenship, to confrontations over the Confederate flag’s semiotics and the proper scope of federal authority, to Senator Obama’s ongoing efforts to wrap himself in Lincoln’s mantle, the 2008 election threatened to become a referendum on the sixteenth President’s legacy. With the bicentennial of his birth looming, the sesquicentennial of the war he waged following soon after, and a relatively inexperienced legislator from Illinois in the race, an African-American man with a background in law and a once-in-a-generation gift for oratory, perhaps this should have come as no surprise. Still, a spate of recent books, all timed to celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday, reminds us that beyond the coincidence of historical anniversaries and a historic candidate in 2008, ’twas ever thus in the United States. Americans have long fought over Lincoln’s meaning; they did so even while he was still alive. And Lincoln’s ghost has loomed over American culture and politics from the time of his death.
That’s the moment that the Kunhardts – Philip III, Peter, and Peter Jr – use to open their new book, Looking for Lincoln, a lovingly illustrated inquiry into the origins of enduring myths and memories of Abraham Lincoln. On the night of April 14, 1865, Good Friday, Lincoln sat in a private box at Ford’s Theater, Washington, watching the third act of Our American Cousin. John Wilkes Booth, an actor driven to violence by the President’s recent support for African American voting rights, sneaked into Lincoln’s box and fired a single bullet into the back of his skull. After leaping on to the stage and fracturing his leg, Booth shouted out Virginia’s state motto, “Sic semper tyrannis!”. He then escaped into the night. Three doctors on the scene rushed to the President’s aid, and they decided to bring him across the street to a boarding house, where a huge group of people kept vigil through the night. Lincoln died the following morning.
The story of Lincoln’s murder, though frequently retold, feels like a new wound here. The impact stems from a formula the Kunhardts employ throughout their book. They begin chapters by recounting, with only light analytical interventions, a representative event from the years after the assassination, moments in which key memories of Lincoln took root in the culture. They then include brief excerpts from eyewitnesses, including, in the book’s opening chapter, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s bloodless statement: “The pistol ball entered the back of the President’s head and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal”. So it was. In this way, the Kunhardts allow history’s actors, famous, infamous, anonymous, to speak for themselves. Finally, an extraordinary array of images – drawings, newspaper clippings, editorial cartoons, paintings, photographs – render what might otherwise have been an episodic history into something organic. A grainy photo of the room in which Lincoln died, for example, provides the first chapter’s motif. A bloodstained pillow, easy to miss at first glance, transforms an otherwise innocuous tableau of rumpled covers, a framed landscape print hanging over a spindle bed, and an empty chair, into one of history’s most notorious death scenes.
In the aftermath of the assassination, the Kunhardts travel on to Easter Sunday, 1865, when Northern preachers began comparing Lincoln to Christ; to New York City, that same year, when a young boy named Teddy Roosevelt, who later modelled his politics on Lincoln’s, watched the funeral train; to the studios of artists and sculptors, whose works etched Lincoln’s image – the deeply lined face, the rangy body with absurdly long limbs, and of course the iconic top hat – into the national imagination; to the Lincoln centennial in 1909, celebrated in both North and South, sections reunited by a common desire to get back to the business of doing business; to the parlours of authors who published Lincoln biographies that still inform our judgements; to the start of construction on both the Lincoln memorial in Washington, DC and the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota's Black Hills; and finally, in 1923, to the Library of Congress, where Robert Lincoln, who until then had jealously guarded his father’s reputation, turned his papers over to the American people for posterity.
With these cases and others, the Kunhardts demonstrate the futility of separating history and memory where Lincoln is concerned. They also underscore the prominent role which African Americans – especially Frederick Douglass, the renowned abolitionist author and orator – played in preserving Lincoln’s legacy. In his outstanding new book, The Radical and the Republican, James Oakes goes even further, arguing that Douglass and Lincoln enjoyed something like a symbiotic relationship while they lived, shaping each other’s politics and world views. After Lincoln’s death, Douglass became one of the most important stewards of the President’s memory. In Oakes’s account, Douglass and Lincoln also shared key attributes: they were self-made men whose success hinged on oratory. But they were divided for most of their lives by disparate goals: Lincoln was a committed politician, focused on building winning coalitions, while Douglas was a radical reformer, a firebrand unafraid to alienate others in the service of ideological purity. Over time, though, Lincoln became progressively more radical, particularly on racial issues, while Douglass embraced politics. The two men ultimately “converged at the most dramatic moment in American history”.
Douglass first took note of Lincoln when the latter gave his “House Divided” speech in 1858. In that address, Lincoln insisted that freedom and slavery were inherently incompatible, that they could not exist together in perpetuity within the borders of the United States. “This government”, he said, “cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free . . . . It will become all one thing or all the other.” Lincoln then predicted that the forces of liberty “shall not fail”. Evincing the classically Whiggish perspective that typified his views of the nation’s history and future, Lincoln insisted that, “If we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come”. Progress would inevitably carry the day, sweeping away the institution of slavery. Reading these remarks, Douglass suspected that he had found a kindred spirit. And yet, two issues prevented him from embracing Lincoln at the time. First, Douglass still thought that politics necessarily sullied reform. And second, Lincoln didn’t then believe that African Americans should enjoy full rights of citizenship in the eyes of the law.
Oakes deserves high praise for making sense of Lincoln’s ideas about race and slavery by suggesting an evolution that tracked historical developments. As early as 1837, Lincoln condemned the peculiar institution while serving in the Illinois legislature. He believed slavery was immoral and dangerous, a cancer in the body politic. Then, after the US defeated Mexico in 1848, acquiring vast new territory in the West, Lincoln insisted that slavery should not be allowed to spread. At the same time, he argued that the federal government had no authority to regulate slavery where it already existed. By the late 1850s, though, Lincoln began worrying that an increasingly militant class of slaveholders posed an existential threat to the nation. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court’s noxious Dred Scott decision serving as a backdrop, Lincoln gave his “House Divided” speech. Even so, he embraced colonization schemes, suggesting that, following the abolition of slavery, freed people should return to Africa. As Oakes suggests, “He accepted racial discrimination because that was what most whites wanted”. As late as 1858, then, although Lincoln may not personally have deemed African Americans inferior to whites, he remained a democratic racist. The will of the people demanded that black people occupy the bottom rung on the nation’s racial ladder. Lincoln campaigned for the Senate that year as a white supremacist.
The Civil War changed both Lincoln and Douglass. Lincoln quickly realized that his primary goal, preserving the Union, could only be accomplished by destroying slavery. And when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, he also authorized African Americans to enlist in the army, a policy that had more immediate consequences. African American troops served heroically, challenging racial assumptions, and Lincoln moved haltingly towards calling for civil rights for all Americans. Douglass, meanwhile, embraced politics. In the summer of 1863, he met Lincoln for the first time. The President impressed him. But so long as Lincoln lived, the reformer’s doubts lingered. After Lincoln’s assassination, however, Douglass cherished his memory. On April 14, 1876, he delivered a speech at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, DC. The memorial, an emancipated slave kneeling at Lincoln’s feet, irked Douglass. Still, after calling Lincoln “preeminently the white man’s President”, Douglass elaborated: “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” The reformer could finally appreciate the politician’s work.
Oakes takes up similar themes in his essay on “Natural Rights, Citizenship Rights, States’ Rights, and Black Rights: Another look at Lincoln and race”, which appears in Our Lincoln, a collection of essays edited by Eric Foner. This volume is a one-stop shop for readers wishing to know the latest Lincoln scholarship. In addition to Oakes and Foner, who writes about Lincoln’s enduring romance with colonization, contributors include James McPherson on Lincoln as a wartime President; Mark Neely on Lincoln and civil liberties; Sean Wilentz on Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy; Harold Holzer on Lincoln and the arts; Manisha Sinha on Lincoln and African American abolitionists; Andrew Delbanco on Lincoln’s use of sacramental language; Richard Carwadine on Lincoln’s religiosity; Catherine Clinton on Lincoln’s family life; and David Blight on Lincoln and collective memory.
Like most edited collections, Our Lincoln is uneven. Two of its best chapters, Oakes’s and Foner’s, focus on Lincoln’s limitations. Oakes suggests that readers can only understand Lincoln’s troubling racial views by considering them on three levels: Lincoln believed that whites and blacks shared the same natural rights; near the end of his life he concluded that African Americans had earned citizenship rights; and he insisted that some issues – marriage and voting rights, for example – fell under the rubric of states’ rights. Reiterating a point he makes at greater length in The Radical and the Republican, Oakes concludes that, “Lincoln’s democratic deference to popular opinion explains his perplexing inconsistencies at least as much as his own racial prejudices”. But what of Lincoln’s persistent contention that freed African Americans must return to Africa? Foner suggests that colonization should be placed in the context of other nineteenthcentury racial engineering schemes, like Native American removal and Chinese Exclusion. Deep-rooted racial anxieties, then, shaped Lincoln’s views on the subject. He feared that whites and blacks could never live peacefully in an integrated society. And so, though they had been brought to the US in chains, African Americans would have to go – for the greater good. Only after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect did Lincoln stop speaking publicly about the virtues of colonization.
Alan Guelzo’s Lincoln: A very short introduction (160pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £6.99, US $11.95. 978 0 19 536780 5) tells the story of the President’s life in approximately 35,000 words. What stayed and what went is the story here. Guelzo opts to stint on Lincoln’s relationships, not just with his family but also with colleagues and subordinates, and goes long (relatively speaking) on intellectual context. This is a “biography of ideas”, especially liberal perspectives on equality, that forged Lincoln’s politics. Guelzo writes little about Lincoln’s upbringing, preferring to focus on his time as an attorney and a member of the Illinois legislature, experiences that taught him to distrust appeals to virtue and instead rely on the rule of law as a check to tyranny. From there, Guelzo hits the usual notes: the Compromise of 1850 and the KansasNebraska Act, which reopened the question of slavery’s fate in the West; the “House Divided” speech and Lincoln’s debates with Douglass, which vaulted him on to the national stage; the 1860 address at the Cooper Union, which helped Lincoln secure the Republican Party’s presidential nomination; then war, emancipation and martyrdom.
All the talk about race and slavery may be dragging Lincoln down. This is what Barry Schwartz argues in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era. Schwartz writes that Lincoln’s reputation reached its height during the Progressive Era. Americans at the time focused on Lincoln as a man of the people and the nation’s saviour. Even as they engaged in “egalitarian reform”, Schwartz suggests, common people still embraced their leaders. Lincoln served as “a subject of reverence and a symbol of union, equality, and justice”. Later, though, in the wake of the modern civil rights movement and as the conditions of postmodernity began transforming the culture, Lincoln became “a reminder of the nation’s continuing racial discrimination”. As Americans grew more cynical, they viewed their leaders through jaundiced eyes. At the same time, Schwartz notes, multicultural ideologies encouraged “racial and ethnic groups to cultivate their historical uniqueness”, rather than focusing on narratives of a shared past. Lincoln, in this context, became best known for emancipation rather than for having preserved the Union. As a result, he reminded many Americans of chapters of history they preferred to forget.
Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era is a contradictory book. On the one hand, Schwartz acknowledges that the cultural preconditions necessary for the kind of adulation Lincoln enjoyed at the start of the twentieth century are undesirable. “If Lincoln is to be revered as deeply as he was six or seven decades ago,” Schwartz writes, “then we must restore a social order of more authoritarian institutions, less negotiable loyalties, and sharper social discriminations.” He concludes that “such a restoration is not on the horizon, and few would look forward to the racial, religious, and ethnic tribalism accompanying it”. On the other hand, he sometimes regrets that “the result of these intertwined currents of postmodernity and multiculturalism is the shrinking of American history’s triumphs and heroes”. In these moments, as when he turns to right-wing activists such as David Horowitz for quotations about the nation’s moral decay, Schwartz transforms himself from a scholar of memory into a culture warrior. His book then becomes a narrative of declension, a lament for a bygone era. And when he writes without humour about contemporary parodies of Lincoln on the internet or in The Simpsons, Schwartz risks sounding like a grumpy old man, yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
Even after winning the presidency, Barack Obama continues to channel Abraham Lincoln. Obama arrived in Washington via the same train route that Lincoln did in 1861. He swore the oath of office on Lincoln’s bible. He chose the same lunch that Lincoln ate on his inauguration day. And with the nation mired in a dizzying array of crises, Obama says that he looks to Lincoln for inspiration. Ron Paul, meanwhile, did not secure the Republican nomination, despite the passion of his supporters. Nevertheless, he, too, continues to use Lincoln for political purposes. On April 15, Paul and hundreds of thousands of limited-government activists took to the streets to rail about the long reach of federal authority. In addition to claiming that income tax is unconstitutional, leaders of these so-called Tea Parties raised the spectre of secession. Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas, warned that if pushed, the Lone Star state might decide to leave the Union. And when political commentators heaped scorn on Perry, Paul defended him, noting that, “it is very American to talk about secession”. Perhaps, but Lincoln deserves a more generous 200th birthday present.
Less than a year later, Ron Paul, a congressman from Texas, roasted beneath arc lights on the television programme Meet the Press. Opposing the war in Iraq while equating federal power with tyranny, Paul at the time commanded an army of supporters, millions of shock troops eager for radical change: the so-called Ron Paul Revolution. The congressman hoped to march with these libertarian followers to the Republican presidential nomination. Midway into the interview, the journalist Tim Russert said: “I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln”. Paul, it seemed, had remarked a year earlier that “Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war”. Here was Russert’s signature move, a personal quotation designed to shatter a guest's composure and political ambitions. As Russert waited for Paul to recant what passes for heresy in the church of American politics, the congressman stood by his words. Insisting that Lincoln had sought “to get rid of the original intent of the Republic, displaying the iron fist of Washington”, Paul called the Civil War “senseless”.
From uncommonly frank discussions of race and citizenship, to confrontations over the Confederate flag’s semiotics and the proper scope of federal authority, to Senator Obama’s ongoing efforts to wrap himself in Lincoln’s mantle, the 2008 election threatened to become a referendum on the sixteenth President’s legacy. With the bicentennial of his birth looming, the sesquicentennial of the war he waged following soon after, and a relatively inexperienced legislator from Illinois in the race, an African-American man with a background in law and a once-in-a-generation gift for oratory, perhaps this should have come as no surprise. Still, a spate of recent books, all timed to celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday, reminds us that beyond the coincidence of historical anniversaries and a historic candidate in 2008, ’twas ever thus in the United States. Americans have long fought over Lincoln’s meaning; they did so even while he was still alive. And Lincoln’s ghost has loomed over American culture and politics from the time of his death.
That’s the moment that the Kunhardts – Philip III, Peter, and Peter Jr – use to open their new book, Looking for Lincoln, a lovingly illustrated inquiry into the origins of enduring myths and memories of Abraham Lincoln. On the night of April 14, 1865, Good Friday, Lincoln sat in a private box at Ford’s Theater, Washington, watching the third act of Our American Cousin. John Wilkes Booth, an actor driven to violence by the President’s recent support for African American voting rights, sneaked into Lincoln’s box and fired a single bullet into the back of his skull. After leaping on to the stage and fracturing his leg, Booth shouted out Virginia’s state motto, “Sic semper tyrannis!”. He then escaped into the night. Three doctors on the scene rushed to the President’s aid, and they decided to bring him across the street to a boarding house, where a huge group of people kept vigil through the night. Lincoln died the following morning.
The story of Lincoln’s murder, though frequently retold, feels like a new wound here. The impact stems from a formula the Kunhardts employ throughout their book. They begin chapters by recounting, with only light analytical interventions, a representative event from the years after the assassination, moments in which key memories of Lincoln took root in the culture. They then include brief excerpts from eyewitnesses, including, in the book’s opening chapter, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s bloodless statement: “The pistol ball entered the back of the President’s head and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal”. So it was. In this way, the Kunhardts allow history’s actors, famous, infamous, anonymous, to speak for themselves. Finally, an extraordinary array of images – drawings, newspaper clippings, editorial cartoons, paintings, photographs – render what might otherwise have been an episodic history into something organic. A grainy photo of the room in which Lincoln died, for example, provides the first chapter’s motif. A bloodstained pillow, easy to miss at first glance, transforms an otherwise innocuous tableau of rumpled covers, a framed landscape print hanging over a spindle bed, and an empty chair, into one of history’s most notorious death scenes.
In the aftermath of the assassination, the Kunhardts travel on to Easter Sunday, 1865, when Northern preachers began comparing Lincoln to Christ; to New York City, that same year, when a young boy named Teddy Roosevelt, who later modelled his politics on Lincoln’s, watched the funeral train; to the studios of artists and sculptors, whose works etched Lincoln’s image – the deeply lined face, the rangy body with absurdly long limbs, and of course the iconic top hat – into the national imagination; to the Lincoln centennial in 1909, celebrated in both North and South, sections reunited by a common desire to get back to the business of doing business; to the parlours of authors who published Lincoln biographies that still inform our judgements; to the start of construction on both the Lincoln memorial in Washington, DC and the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota's Black Hills; and finally, in 1923, to the Library of Congress, where Robert Lincoln, who until then had jealously guarded his father’s reputation, turned his papers over to the American people for posterity.
With these cases and others, the Kunhardts demonstrate the futility of separating history and memory where Lincoln is concerned. They also underscore the prominent role which African Americans – especially Frederick Douglass, the renowned abolitionist author and orator – played in preserving Lincoln’s legacy. In his outstanding new book, The Radical and the Republican, James Oakes goes even further, arguing that Douglass and Lincoln enjoyed something like a symbiotic relationship while they lived, shaping each other’s politics and world views. After Lincoln’s death, Douglass became one of the most important stewards of the President’s memory. In Oakes’s account, Douglass and Lincoln also shared key attributes: they were self-made men whose success hinged on oratory. But they were divided for most of their lives by disparate goals: Lincoln was a committed politician, focused on building winning coalitions, while Douglas was a radical reformer, a firebrand unafraid to alienate others in the service of ideological purity. Over time, though, Lincoln became progressively more radical, particularly on racial issues, while Douglass embraced politics. The two men ultimately “converged at the most dramatic moment in American history”.
Douglass first took note of Lincoln when the latter gave his “House Divided” speech in 1858. In that address, Lincoln insisted that freedom and slavery were inherently incompatible, that they could not exist together in perpetuity within the borders of the United States. “This government”, he said, “cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free . . . . It will become all one thing or all the other.” Lincoln then predicted that the forces of liberty “shall not fail”. Evincing the classically Whiggish perspective that typified his views of the nation’s history and future, Lincoln insisted that, “If we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come”. Progress would inevitably carry the day, sweeping away the institution of slavery. Reading these remarks, Douglass suspected that he had found a kindred spirit. And yet, two issues prevented him from embracing Lincoln at the time. First, Douglass still thought that politics necessarily sullied reform. And second, Lincoln didn’t then believe that African Americans should enjoy full rights of citizenship in the eyes of the law.
Oakes deserves high praise for making sense of Lincoln’s ideas about race and slavery by suggesting an evolution that tracked historical developments. As early as 1837, Lincoln condemned the peculiar institution while serving in the Illinois legislature. He believed slavery was immoral and dangerous, a cancer in the body politic. Then, after the US defeated Mexico in 1848, acquiring vast new territory in the West, Lincoln insisted that slavery should not be allowed to spread. At the same time, he argued that the federal government had no authority to regulate slavery where it already existed. By the late 1850s, though, Lincoln began worrying that an increasingly militant class of slaveholders posed an existential threat to the nation. With the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court’s noxious Dred Scott decision serving as a backdrop, Lincoln gave his “House Divided” speech. Even so, he embraced colonization schemes, suggesting that, following the abolition of slavery, freed people should return to Africa. As Oakes suggests, “He accepted racial discrimination because that was what most whites wanted”. As late as 1858, then, although Lincoln may not personally have deemed African Americans inferior to whites, he remained a democratic racist. The will of the people demanded that black people occupy the bottom rung on the nation’s racial ladder. Lincoln campaigned for the Senate that year as a white supremacist.
The Civil War changed both Lincoln and Douglass. Lincoln quickly realized that his primary goal, preserving the Union, could only be accomplished by destroying slavery. And when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, he also authorized African Americans to enlist in the army, a policy that had more immediate consequences. African American troops served heroically, challenging racial assumptions, and Lincoln moved haltingly towards calling for civil rights for all Americans. Douglass, meanwhile, embraced politics. In the summer of 1863, he met Lincoln for the first time. The President impressed him. But so long as Lincoln lived, the reformer’s doubts lingered. After Lincoln’s assassination, however, Douglass cherished his memory. On April 14, 1876, he delivered a speech at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, DC. The memorial, an emancipated slave kneeling at Lincoln’s feet, irked Douglass. Still, after calling Lincoln “preeminently the white man’s President”, Douglass elaborated: “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” The reformer could finally appreciate the politician’s work.
Oakes takes up similar themes in his essay on “Natural Rights, Citizenship Rights, States’ Rights, and Black Rights: Another look at Lincoln and race”, which appears in Our Lincoln, a collection of essays edited by Eric Foner. This volume is a one-stop shop for readers wishing to know the latest Lincoln scholarship. In addition to Oakes and Foner, who writes about Lincoln’s enduring romance with colonization, contributors include James McPherson on Lincoln as a wartime President; Mark Neely on Lincoln and civil liberties; Sean Wilentz on Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy; Harold Holzer on Lincoln and the arts; Manisha Sinha on Lincoln and African American abolitionists; Andrew Delbanco on Lincoln’s use of sacramental language; Richard Carwadine on Lincoln’s religiosity; Catherine Clinton on Lincoln’s family life; and David Blight on Lincoln and collective memory.
Like most edited collections, Our Lincoln is uneven. Two of its best chapters, Oakes’s and Foner’s, focus on Lincoln’s limitations. Oakes suggests that readers can only understand Lincoln’s troubling racial views by considering them on three levels: Lincoln believed that whites and blacks shared the same natural rights; near the end of his life he concluded that African Americans had earned citizenship rights; and he insisted that some issues – marriage and voting rights, for example – fell under the rubric of states’ rights. Reiterating a point he makes at greater length in The Radical and the Republican, Oakes concludes that, “Lincoln’s democratic deference to popular opinion explains his perplexing inconsistencies at least as much as his own racial prejudices”. But what of Lincoln’s persistent contention that freed African Americans must return to Africa? Foner suggests that colonization should be placed in the context of other nineteenthcentury racial engineering schemes, like Native American removal and Chinese Exclusion. Deep-rooted racial anxieties, then, shaped Lincoln’s views on the subject. He feared that whites and blacks could never live peacefully in an integrated society. And so, though they had been brought to the US in chains, African Americans would have to go – for the greater good. Only after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect did Lincoln stop speaking publicly about the virtues of colonization.
Alan Guelzo’s Lincoln: A very short introduction (160pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £6.99, US $11.95. 978 0 19 536780 5) tells the story of the President’s life in approximately 35,000 words. What stayed and what went is the story here. Guelzo opts to stint on Lincoln’s relationships, not just with his family but also with colleagues and subordinates, and goes long (relatively speaking) on intellectual context. This is a “biography of ideas”, especially liberal perspectives on equality, that forged Lincoln’s politics. Guelzo writes little about Lincoln’s upbringing, preferring to focus on his time as an attorney and a member of the Illinois legislature, experiences that taught him to distrust appeals to virtue and instead rely on the rule of law as a check to tyranny. From there, Guelzo hits the usual notes: the Compromise of 1850 and the KansasNebraska Act, which reopened the question of slavery’s fate in the West; the “House Divided” speech and Lincoln’s debates with Douglass, which vaulted him on to the national stage; the 1860 address at the Cooper Union, which helped Lincoln secure the Republican Party’s presidential nomination; then war, emancipation and martyrdom.
All the talk about race and slavery may be dragging Lincoln down. This is what Barry Schwartz argues in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era. Schwartz writes that Lincoln’s reputation reached its height during the Progressive Era. Americans at the time focused on Lincoln as a man of the people and the nation’s saviour. Even as they engaged in “egalitarian reform”, Schwartz suggests, common people still embraced their leaders. Lincoln served as “a subject of reverence and a symbol of union, equality, and justice”. Later, though, in the wake of the modern civil rights movement and as the conditions of postmodernity began transforming the culture, Lincoln became “a reminder of the nation’s continuing racial discrimination”. As Americans grew more cynical, they viewed their leaders through jaundiced eyes. At the same time, Schwartz notes, multicultural ideologies encouraged “racial and ethnic groups to cultivate their historical uniqueness”, rather than focusing on narratives of a shared past. Lincoln, in this context, became best known for emancipation rather than for having preserved the Union. As a result, he reminded many Americans of chapters of history they preferred to forget.
Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era is a contradictory book. On the one hand, Schwartz acknowledges that the cultural preconditions necessary for the kind of adulation Lincoln enjoyed at the start of the twentieth century are undesirable. “If Lincoln is to be revered as deeply as he was six or seven decades ago,” Schwartz writes, “then we must restore a social order of more authoritarian institutions, less negotiable loyalties, and sharper social discriminations.” He concludes that “such a restoration is not on the horizon, and few would look forward to the racial, religious, and ethnic tribalism accompanying it”. On the other hand, he sometimes regrets that “the result of these intertwined currents of postmodernity and multiculturalism is the shrinking of American history’s triumphs and heroes”. In these moments, as when he turns to right-wing activists such as David Horowitz for quotations about the nation’s moral decay, Schwartz transforms himself from a scholar of memory into a culture warrior. His book then becomes a narrative of declension, a lament for a bygone era. And when he writes without humour about contemporary parodies of Lincoln on the internet or in The Simpsons, Schwartz risks sounding like a grumpy old man, yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
Even after winning the presidency, Barack Obama continues to channel Abraham Lincoln. Obama arrived in Washington via the same train route that Lincoln did in 1861. He swore the oath of office on Lincoln’s bible. He chose the same lunch that Lincoln ate on his inauguration day. And with the nation mired in a dizzying array of crises, Obama says that he looks to Lincoln for inspiration. Ron Paul, meanwhile, did not secure the Republican nomination, despite the passion of his supporters. Nevertheless, he, too, continues to use Lincoln for political purposes. On April 15, Paul and hundreds of thousands of limited-government activists took to the streets to rail about the long reach of federal authority. In addition to claiming that income tax is unconstitutional, leaders of these so-called Tea Parties raised the spectre of secession. Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas, warned that if pushed, the Lone Star state might decide to leave the Union. And when political commentators heaped scorn on Perry, Paul defended him, noting that, “it is very American to talk about secession”. Perhaps, but Lincoln deserves a more generous 200th birthday present.
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