Jefferson Bible reveals Founding Father's view of God, faith
Nation's third president compiled the four Gospels into a single text without miracles that ends with Jesus' burial rather than the resurrection.
By Louis Sahagun
Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.
In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."
He called the book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible. It remains perhaps the most comprehensive expression of what the nation's third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence found ethically interesting about the Gospels and their depiction of Jesus.
"I have performed the operation for my own use," he continued, "by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill."
The little leather-bound tome, several facsimiles of which are kept at the Huntington Library in San Marino, continues to fascinate scholars exploring the powerful and varied relationships between the Founding Fathers and the most sacred book of the Western World.
The big question now, said Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:
"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "
"He was a product of his age," said Ferrell, whose upcoming book, "The Bible and the People," includes a chapter on the Jefferson Bible. "Yet, he is the least likely person I'd want to pray with. He was more skeptical about religion than the other Founding Fathers."
In Jefferson's version of the Gospels, for example, Jesus is still wrapped in swaddling clothes after his birth in Bethlehem. But there's no angel telling shepherds watching their flocks by night that a savior has been born. Jefferson retains Jesus' crucifixion but ends the text with his burial, not with the resurrection.
Stripping miracles from the story of Jesus was among the ambitious projects of a man with a famously restless mind. At 71, he read Plato's "Republic" in the original Greek and found it lackluster.
Ever the scientist, he inoculated his wife, children and many of his slaves against smallpox with fresh pus drawn from infected domestic farm animals, according to Robert C. Ritchie, W.M. Keck Foundation director of research at the Huntington Library.
"For a lot of people, taking scissors to the Bible would be such an act of desecration they wouldn't do it," Ritchie said. "Yet, it gives a reading into Jefferson's take on the Bible, which was not as divine word put into print, but as a book that can be cut up."
Jefferson, a tall vigorous man who preferred Thucydides and Cicero to the newspapers of his day, was not the only 18th century leader who questioned traditional Christian teachings.
Like many other upper-class, educated citizens of the new republic, including George Washington, Jefferson was a deist.
Deists differed from traditional Christians by rejecting miraculous occurrences and prophecies and embracing the notion of a well-ordered universe created by a God who withdrew into detached transcendence.
Critics of the time regarded deism as an ill-conceived attempt to reconcile religion with scientific discoveries. For rationalists in the Age of Enlightenment, deism was one of many efforts to liberate humankind from what the deists viewed as superstitious beliefs.
Jefferson was a particular fan of Joseph Priestley, a scientist, ordained minister and one of Jefferson's friends. Priestley -- who discovered oxygen and invented carbonated water and the rubber eraser -- published books that infamously cast a critical eye upon biblical miracles. Jefferson was particularly fond of Preistley's comparison of the lives and teachings of Socrates and Jesus.
Discussions and letters between Jefferson and another friend, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, led Jefferson to compile his "wee little book." In a letter to Rush on April 21, 1803, Jefferson said his editing experiment aimed to see whether the ethical teachings of Jesus could be separated from elements he believed were attached to Christianity over the centuries.
"To the corruption of Christianity I am indeed opposed," he wrote to Rush, "but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself."
Therefore, Ritchie said, "for Jefferson, the Bible was a book that could be made and unmade."
The Jefferson Bible remained largely unknown beyond a close circle of relatives and friends until 1904, when its publication was ordered by Congress. About 9,000 copies were issued and distributed in the Senate and the House.
Today several editions of the Jefferson Bible are available through booksellers. A few online versions exist, including one on the website of the Jefferson Monticello, www.monticello.org/library/links/jefferson.html.
It is hard to say whether Jefferson would have objected to publication of the book.
"Say nothing of my religion," Jefferson once said. "It is known to myself and my God alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."
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)
5.7.08
Vegas/Food
We are hardly ever quiet’
By Nicholas Lander
Las Vegas hotels have been opening outposts run by some of the world’s top chefs at such a pace that I felt the time had come to sample them rather than just read about them.
“I’ve been here 13 years,” said the lugubrious waiter at Bartolotta, the excellent Italian seafood restaurant in the Wynn Hotel, as he delivered a particularly authentic Ligurian octopus salad. “Until five years ago Las Vegas could still have been called a ‘buffet town’. But now people definitely come here for the restaurants.”
Judging by the queue I saw outside the entrance to the buffet at the Bellagio Hotel, which must have been several hundred long one Sunday lunchtime, buffets seem no less popular than before. This only served to underline what had made Jean Philippe Teresi, born in St Tropez and formerly at the Louis XV in Monaco, leave the Mediterranean to become general manager of Bradley Ogden’s restaurant in Caesar’s Palace.
“There’s nowhere else in the restaurant world that has the same concentration of visitors in such a small area,” he said. “About 40 million come here every year and most of them spend their entire stay within two miles along the Strip where there are four hotels – here, the Bellagio, Wynn and the MGM Grand – each with annual revenues in excess of a billion dollars. No other city in the world can match that. Not New York, Paris nor even London, I would guess. And we are hardly ever quiet,” he said, with more than a touch of Gallic pride.
The new restaurants have added an extra competitive edge to the hotels, which are investing heavily to outdo one another with the more luxurious restaurants spending millions on construction and decoration.
I certainly could not say that the interiors of either Bartolotta’s restaurant or Joël Robuchon’s establishment in the MGM Grand excited me as much as the food but in both instances the hotel’s management have had the foresight to let each chef be distinctive. Bartolotta’s octopus salad, grilled squid, seafood risotto and lemon sorbet took me straight back to a table in one of those romantic coastal restaurants in southern Italy. At Chez Robuchon, you would hardly know you were on the Las Vegas Strip, the city’s concentrated area of hotels and casinos. There is the black and red interior that has become the leitmotif of his restaurants worldwide, and the approach to service is quintessentially French. Its general manager, Loic Launay, ensures the quality of the ingredients, the precision of the service and the artistry of the bread and desserts that emanate from Kamel Guechida’s pastry kitchen. While prices are high, the weak dollar softens the bill.
Two days on the sizzling Strip, in very high temperatures, prompted two short excursions. The first, a 15-minute taxi ride away, was on the recommendation of a wine merchant in San Francisco and confirmed a local’s description of Las Vegas as a “strip surrounded by strip malls”.
My destination was Saipin Chutima’s Lotus of Siam, located among a plethora of Asian restaurants in a most unassuming lot. But this small restaurant has been a beacon for more than a decade, for its fine Thai food and its fabulous wine list, which places a particular emphasis on German Rieslings. We joined the noon rush for a table and after a 15-minute wait sat down to spicy fishcakes, fried tofu, rice with sausage, peanuts, chilli and ginger and a deep red rice vermicelli curry from the north of Thailand. The latter dish, our Bangkok-born waiter explained, was so specific to that region that he had never eaten it until he came to work here. Lotus of Siam’s interior is basic but the cuisine and hospitality are exceptional.
On another occasion I set out for Summerlin, 2,200 acres owned by the Howard Hughes Corporation and a 25-minute drive from the Strip. Originally intended to be the site of an aircraft factory, it is now home to many of the city’s legal and commercial companies, numerous high-roller homes, golf courses and country clubs and, naturally, a casino or two.
Our destination was Agave Comida y Tequila, the first of two restaurants established by developer Michael Corrigan and his talented chef Matthew Silverman. We chose it because the opportunity to eat authentic Mexican food is still rare outside Mexico. Silverman’s approach, backed by a Mexican brigade only too keen to replicate their grandmothers’ recipes, is bold but authentic, exemplified in his refined mushroom tamales, tuna tostadas and lobster empanadas.
My last port of call was a windowless office in the basement of the MGM Grand belonging to David McIntyre, vice-president of food and beverage. McIntyre oversees the hotel’s $300m annual sales of food and beverage. On one large wall is a plan of the hotel’s vast ground floor, delineating several different cafés, bars and restaurants. A part of his role is to maximise the “revenue per seat per hour” for this entire area. He continues to scour the world for the best chefs to open in his hotel, but believes that Las Vegas may soon be entering a new and distinctive phase. “So many top chefs have come here and in setting up their own restaurants have brought on the skills and techniques of many young, local cooks. Soon they will want to go on and open their own restaurants and that will present some really exciting opportunities.”
By Nicholas Lander
Las Vegas hotels have been opening outposts run by some of the world’s top chefs at such a pace that I felt the time had come to sample them rather than just read about them.
“I’ve been here 13 years,” said the lugubrious waiter at Bartolotta, the excellent Italian seafood restaurant in the Wynn Hotel, as he delivered a particularly authentic Ligurian octopus salad. “Until five years ago Las Vegas could still have been called a ‘buffet town’. But now people definitely come here for the restaurants.”
Judging by the queue I saw outside the entrance to the buffet at the Bellagio Hotel, which must have been several hundred long one Sunday lunchtime, buffets seem no less popular than before. This only served to underline what had made Jean Philippe Teresi, born in St Tropez and formerly at the Louis XV in Monaco, leave the Mediterranean to become general manager of Bradley Ogden’s restaurant in Caesar’s Palace.
“There’s nowhere else in the restaurant world that has the same concentration of visitors in such a small area,” he said. “About 40 million come here every year and most of them spend their entire stay within two miles along the Strip where there are four hotels – here, the Bellagio, Wynn and the MGM Grand – each with annual revenues in excess of a billion dollars. No other city in the world can match that. Not New York, Paris nor even London, I would guess. And we are hardly ever quiet,” he said, with more than a touch of Gallic pride.
The new restaurants have added an extra competitive edge to the hotels, which are investing heavily to outdo one another with the more luxurious restaurants spending millions on construction and decoration.
I certainly could not say that the interiors of either Bartolotta’s restaurant or Joël Robuchon’s establishment in the MGM Grand excited me as much as the food but in both instances the hotel’s management have had the foresight to let each chef be distinctive. Bartolotta’s octopus salad, grilled squid, seafood risotto and lemon sorbet took me straight back to a table in one of those romantic coastal restaurants in southern Italy. At Chez Robuchon, you would hardly know you were on the Las Vegas Strip, the city’s concentrated area of hotels and casinos. There is the black and red interior that has become the leitmotif of his restaurants worldwide, and the approach to service is quintessentially French. Its general manager, Loic Launay, ensures the quality of the ingredients, the precision of the service and the artistry of the bread and desserts that emanate from Kamel Guechida’s pastry kitchen. While prices are high, the weak dollar softens the bill.
Two days on the sizzling Strip, in very high temperatures, prompted two short excursions. The first, a 15-minute taxi ride away, was on the recommendation of a wine merchant in San Francisco and confirmed a local’s description of Las Vegas as a “strip surrounded by strip malls”.
My destination was Saipin Chutima’s Lotus of Siam, located among a plethora of Asian restaurants in a most unassuming lot. But this small restaurant has been a beacon for more than a decade, for its fine Thai food and its fabulous wine list, which places a particular emphasis on German Rieslings. We joined the noon rush for a table and after a 15-minute wait sat down to spicy fishcakes, fried tofu, rice with sausage, peanuts, chilli and ginger and a deep red rice vermicelli curry from the north of Thailand. The latter dish, our Bangkok-born waiter explained, was so specific to that region that he had never eaten it until he came to work here. Lotus of Siam’s interior is basic but the cuisine and hospitality are exceptional.
On another occasion I set out for Summerlin, 2,200 acres owned by the Howard Hughes Corporation and a 25-minute drive from the Strip. Originally intended to be the site of an aircraft factory, it is now home to many of the city’s legal and commercial companies, numerous high-roller homes, golf courses and country clubs and, naturally, a casino or two.
Our destination was Agave Comida y Tequila, the first of two restaurants established by developer Michael Corrigan and his talented chef Matthew Silverman. We chose it because the opportunity to eat authentic Mexican food is still rare outside Mexico. Silverman’s approach, backed by a Mexican brigade only too keen to replicate their grandmothers’ recipes, is bold but authentic, exemplified in his refined mushroom tamales, tuna tostadas and lobster empanadas.
My last port of call was a windowless office in the basement of the MGM Grand belonging to David McIntyre, vice-president of food and beverage. McIntyre oversees the hotel’s $300m annual sales of food and beverage. On one large wall is a plan of the hotel’s vast ground floor, delineating several different cafés, bars and restaurants. A part of his role is to maximise the “revenue per seat per hour” for this entire area. He continues to scour the world for the best chefs to open in his hotel, but believes that Las Vegas may soon be entering a new and distinctive phase. “So many top chefs have come here and in setting up their own restaurants have brought on the skills and techniques of many young, local cooks. Soon they will want to go on and open their own restaurants and that will present some really exciting opportunities.”
3.7.08
Today is Independence Day. On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, and the United States officially broke from the rule of England. The colonists were trying to persuade other nations of Europe to be on their side, so they included a long list of complaints about the king. The document said of the king, in part, "HE is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with Circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation."
Twenty-four years later, in 1804, the explorers Lewis and Clark had the first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. They were traveling through a part of the Midwest that is now Kansas. They stopped at the mouth of a creek on July 4th, and named it Independence Creek in honor of the day. To celebrate, they fired their cannon at sunset and distributed an extra ration of whisky to the men.
There were unofficial celebrations of Independence Day from its first anniversary, but it really became a popular holiday after the War of 1812. On the frontier, it was the only time of the year when everyone in the countryside gathered together in one place. There would be parades and speeches, and the prettiest and most wholesome girl in the village would be named the Goddess of Liberty. Politicians would get up and call the king of England a skunk and challenge him to a fight. Drunk men in the streets would get into fights and call each other Englishmen. Soon, events like groundbreaking ceremonies for the Erie Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroads were scheduled to coincide with July 4th festivities.
By a strange coincidence, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third presidents of the United States, both died on this day in 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote the Declaration, and John Adams was its strongest supporter in the Continental Congress. They were political opponents after the Revolutionary War and ran against each other for president, but on the day that they died, John Adams's last words were, "Thomas Jefferson still survives." In fact, Jefferson had died a few hours before.
Economist on Global Institutions
CLUBS are all too often full of people prattling on about things they no longer know about. On July 7th the leaders of the group that allegedly runs the world—the G7 democracies plus Russia—gather in Japan to review the world economy. But what is the point of their discussing the oil price without Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest producer? Or waffling about the dollar without China, which holds so many American Treasury bills? Or slapping sanctions on Robert Mugabe, with no African present? Or talking about global warming, AIDS or inflation without anybody from the emerging world? Cigar smoke and ignorance are in the air.
The G8 is not the only global club that looks old and impotent (see article). The UN Security Council has told Iran to stop enriching uranium, without much effect. The nuclear non-proliferation regime is in tatters. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the fireman in previous financial crises, has been a bystander during the credit crunch. The World Trade Organisation’s Doha round is stuck. Of course, some bodies, such as the venerable Bank for International Settlements (see article), still do a fine job. But as global problems proliferate and information whips round the world ever faster, the organisational response looks ever shabbier, slower and feebler. The world’s governing bodies need to change.
Time for a cull?
There has always been an excuse for putting off reform. For a long time it was the cold war; more recently, “the unipolar moment” convinced neoconservatives that America could run things alone. But now calls for change are coming thick and fast. Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, and America’s treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, want to redesign global financial regulation. Others are looking at starting afresh: John McCain is promoting a League of Democracies, while Asian countries are setting up clubs of their own—there is even talk of an Asian Union to match the European one. And many critics, especially in America, want a cull. Surely economic progress in the emerging world argues for getting rid of the World Bank? Is a divided Security Council really any use?
The critics are right to argue that global organisations should be more focused than they are, but wrong to assume they can be dispensed with altogether. Get rid of the Security Council or the World Bank and the clamour to invent something similar would begin: you need somebody to boss around 100,000 peacekeepers and to lend to countries that find it hard to access capital markets. International talking-shops and standard-setters are here to stay; instead of trying to bin them, focus on making them work well.
That means recognising how economics has changed the world order. Emerging economies now account for more than half of global growth. The most powerful among them need to be given a bigger say in international institutions—unless of course you think India will always be happy outside the Security Council and China content to have a smaller voting share than the Benelux countries do at the IMF.
Any solution must accept three constraints. First, better institutions will not solve intractable problems. A larger G8 will not automatically lick inflation, a better World Food Programme would not stop hunger. Second, no matter how you reform the clubs’ membership rules, somebody somewhere will feel left out. Third, you cannot start again. In 1945 the UN’s founders had a clean slate to write upon, because everything had been destroyed. The modern age does not have that dubious luxury, so must build on what already exists.
Take for instance the G8. Some dream of reducing it to just the economic superpowers: the United States, the EU, China and Japan. An appealing idea, but Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin are unlikely to give up their seats at the top table. Better to enlarge the current body to include the world’s biggest dozen economies. A G12 would bring India, Brazil, China and Spain into the club, while allowing Canada (just) to stay in.
The politics of the Security Council are even more outdated. Nobody now would give France or Britain a permanent veto, but neither wants to give up that right. Meanwhile, the four obvious candidates are held back by regional jealousies: India by Pakistan; Brazil by Argentina; Germany by Italy; and Japan by China. The most sensible plan gives these four permanent but non-veto-wielding seats, with two other seats provided for Islamic countries and one for an African nation.
America has yet to get behind these proposals, but a sharpened Security Council could mitigate the emerging world’s objections to UN reform. With a more representative high command, more jobs could be allocated on merit, the globocracy slimmed and bolder steps considered: for instance, the case for a small standing army, or earmarked forces, to nip Darfur-style catastrophes in the bud, would be easier to make.
The Bretton Woods duo are easier to change: all that is needed is Western will. Their problem is finding a useful purpose. The World Bank is still needed as a donor to the really poor and as a supporter of global public goods, such as climate-change projects. There is less obvious need for the IMF, which was originally set up to monitor exchange rates. It could become a committee of oversight, but the main financial regulation will stay at the national level.
League of Good Hope
Supporters of Mr McCain’s League of Democracies suggest it could be like NATO—a useful democratic subcommittee in the global club. But Mr McCain needs to define his democracies. (Will Malaysia count? How about Russia or Iran?) And, crucially, any league must not be seen as an alternative to reforming the UN. The whole point of global talking-shops is that they include everybody, not just your friends.
Faced with the need to reform international institutions, the rich world—and America in particular—has a choice. Cling to power, and China and India will form their own clubs, focused on their own interests and problems. Cede power and bind them in, and interests and problems are shared. Now that would be a decent way to run a world.
The G8 is not the only global club that looks old and impotent (see article). The UN Security Council has told Iran to stop enriching uranium, without much effect. The nuclear non-proliferation regime is in tatters. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the fireman in previous financial crises, has been a bystander during the credit crunch. The World Trade Organisation’s Doha round is stuck. Of course, some bodies, such as the venerable Bank for International Settlements (see article), still do a fine job. But as global problems proliferate and information whips round the world ever faster, the organisational response looks ever shabbier, slower and feebler. The world’s governing bodies need to change.
Time for a cull?
There has always been an excuse for putting off reform. For a long time it was the cold war; more recently, “the unipolar moment” convinced neoconservatives that America could run things alone. But now calls for change are coming thick and fast. Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, and America’s treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, want to redesign global financial regulation. Others are looking at starting afresh: John McCain is promoting a League of Democracies, while Asian countries are setting up clubs of their own—there is even talk of an Asian Union to match the European one. And many critics, especially in America, want a cull. Surely economic progress in the emerging world argues for getting rid of the World Bank? Is a divided Security Council really any use?
The critics are right to argue that global organisations should be more focused than they are, but wrong to assume they can be dispensed with altogether. Get rid of the Security Council or the World Bank and the clamour to invent something similar would begin: you need somebody to boss around 100,000 peacekeepers and to lend to countries that find it hard to access capital markets. International talking-shops and standard-setters are here to stay; instead of trying to bin them, focus on making them work well.
That means recognising how economics has changed the world order. Emerging economies now account for more than half of global growth. The most powerful among them need to be given a bigger say in international institutions—unless of course you think India will always be happy outside the Security Council and China content to have a smaller voting share than the Benelux countries do at the IMF.
Any solution must accept three constraints. First, better institutions will not solve intractable problems. A larger G8 will not automatically lick inflation, a better World Food Programme would not stop hunger. Second, no matter how you reform the clubs’ membership rules, somebody somewhere will feel left out. Third, you cannot start again. In 1945 the UN’s founders had a clean slate to write upon, because everything had been destroyed. The modern age does not have that dubious luxury, so must build on what already exists.
Take for instance the G8. Some dream of reducing it to just the economic superpowers: the United States, the EU, China and Japan. An appealing idea, but Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin are unlikely to give up their seats at the top table. Better to enlarge the current body to include the world’s biggest dozen economies. A G12 would bring India, Brazil, China and Spain into the club, while allowing Canada (just) to stay in.
The politics of the Security Council are even more outdated. Nobody now would give France or Britain a permanent veto, but neither wants to give up that right. Meanwhile, the four obvious candidates are held back by regional jealousies: India by Pakistan; Brazil by Argentina; Germany by Italy; and Japan by China. The most sensible plan gives these four permanent but non-veto-wielding seats, with two other seats provided for Islamic countries and one for an African nation.
America has yet to get behind these proposals, but a sharpened Security Council could mitigate the emerging world’s objections to UN reform. With a more representative high command, more jobs could be allocated on merit, the globocracy slimmed and bolder steps considered: for instance, the case for a small standing army, or earmarked forces, to nip Darfur-style catastrophes in the bud, would be easier to make.
The Bretton Woods duo are easier to change: all that is needed is Western will. Their problem is finding a useful purpose. The World Bank is still needed as a donor to the really poor and as a supporter of global public goods, such as climate-change projects. There is less obvious need for the IMF, which was originally set up to monitor exchange rates. It could become a committee of oversight, but the main financial regulation will stay at the national level.
League of Good Hope
Supporters of Mr McCain’s League of Democracies suggest it could be like NATO—a useful democratic subcommittee in the global club. But Mr McCain needs to define his democracies. (Will Malaysia count? How about Russia or Iran?) And, crucially, any league must not be seen as an alternative to reforming the UN. The whole point of global talking-shops is that they include everybody, not just your friends.
Faced with the need to reform international institutions, the rich world—and America in particular—has a choice. Cling to power, and China and India will form their own clubs, focused on their own interests and problems. Cede power and bind them in, and interests and problems are shared. Now that would be a decent way to run a world.
Two to Remember
the birthday of playwright Tom Stoppard,(books by this author) born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (1937). He's the author of many plays, including the trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2003) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), a comic retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point of view of Hamlet's two friends.
He once wrote, "Life is a gamble, at terrible odds — if it was a bet you wouldn't take it."
It's the birthday of food writer M.F.K. Fisher, (books by this author) born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Michigan (1908). She's the author of many books about food and eating, and best known for The Gastronomical Me (1943). During World War II, she published How to Cook a Wolf (1942), which suggested all kinds of ways people could eat well on food rations. She wrote, "When the wolf is at the door one should invite him in and have him for dinner."
He once wrote, "Life is a gamble, at terrible odds — if it was a bet you wouldn't take it."
It's the birthday of food writer M.F.K. Fisher, (books by this author) born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Michigan (1908). She's the author of many books about food and eating, and best known for The Gastronomical Me (1943). During World War II, she published How to Cook a Wolf (1942), which suggested all kinds of ways people could eat well on food rations. She wrote, "When the wolf is at the door one should invite him in and have him for dinner."
Independence Days
Independence Days
Self-Evident Truths, Whenever Declared
By George F. Will
The impatient patriots here had splendidly short fuses in 1775. Those who tilled the startlingly red clay or who lived in the town named for George III's wife, Charlotte, might have been bemused had they foreseen the annual hoopla that commemorates July 4, 1776.
What occurred that day in Philadelphia might have been a Declaration of Independence, but the first such was enacted here on May 20, 1775. Presbyterians, meaning most Mecklenburgers, were incensed by Anglican meddling from London, such as the Vestry and Marriage Acts of 1769, which imposed fines on Presbyterian ministers who conducted marriage ceremonies. Marriage as a political issue is not just a recent phenomenon.
On May 19, 1775, the day before the Mecklenburg convention met to act on such grievances, a rider arrived with news from Massachusetts about the April bloodshed at Lexington and Concord. The next day, Mecklenburg's convention declared:
"We the citizens of Mecklenburg County do hereby dissolve the political bands which have connected us to the mother country. . . . We do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people . . . to the maintenance of which independence, we solemnly pledge to each other our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor."
Thus did a settlement on the fringe of the British Empire declare war on that empire. It used language -- note, especially, the last nine words -- that is echoed in the 1776 declaration, for reasons explained in a new book, "The 4th of July and the Founding of America," by Peter de Bolla of King's College, Cambridge. He is fascinated by Americans' fascination with the fact, such as it is, that their country had, as few nations can claim, an "originative moment." But what, and when, was it?
The Declaration of Independence was not signed that day by the 56 persons whose signatures would eventually adorn it. Perhaps no one signed it that day; the evidence is murky. Still, uncountable millions believe otherwise because they have seen John Trumbull's painting, in the U.S. Capitol's rotunda, depicting Thomas Jefferson, at the center of six colleagues, holding "his" Declaration on July 4, as though for signing.
What Congress actually did that day was agree to print and publish the Declaration authorized two days earlier. So, was July 2 what de Bolla calls the "punctual moment"? John Adams thought that day "will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America."
What was voted on July 2 was, however, really decided on July 1. But on June 28, Congress considered Jefferson's draft of the Declaration, so was the die then cast? Or was it cast on June 10, when Congress voted that "a committee be appointed to prepare a declaration"? The Declaration was first actually declared -- read aloud to a crowd (at the State House, now Independence Hall) -- on July 8.
De Bolla says that unlike certain events, such as an earthquake or the beheading of a monarch, the birth of a nation has "a different kind of temporality," one constructed as a tradition. This is true even of the United States, which did not, like Germany and France, emerge over millennia from history's mists.
Fifty years later, less than two months before his (and John Adams's) death on July 4, 1826, Jefferson was determinedly protective of his reputation as "author" (he directed his tombstone to declare this) of the Declaration. Still, he candidly acknowledged that it "was intended to be an expression of the American mind," not "aiming at originality of principle or sentiment." Hence, "all its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day."
Certain politically charged rhetorical tropes were then society's common property. Writing shortly before his death, Jefferson affirmed his belief that "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." Those words were as stirring then as they had been when one of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers declared from the scaffold, "I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden."
What de Bolla calls "the intricate history of the nation's founding document" does not and should not inhibit Americans from asserting the truth that their nation originated on July 4, 1776. They hold that to be a self-evident truth, which means they have decided to believe it, thereby making it a self-validating tradition. So there.
Self-Evident Truths, Whenever Declared
By George F. Will
The impatient patriots here had splendidly short fuses in 1775. Those who tilled the startlingly red clay or who lived in the town named for George III's wife, Charlotte, might have been bemused had they foreseen the annual hoopla that commemorates July 4, 1776.
What occurred that day in Philadelphia might have been a Declaration of Independence, but the first such was enacted here on May 20, 1775. Presbyterians, meaning most Mecklenburgers, were incensed by Anglican meddling from London, such as the Vestry and Marriage Acts of 1769, which imposed fines on Presbyterian ministers who conducted marriage ceremonies. Marriage as a political issue is not just a recent phenomenon.
On May 19, 1775, the day before the Mecklenburg convention met to act on such grievances, a rider arrived with news from Massachusetts about the April bloodshed at Lexington and Concord. The next day, Mecklenburg's convention declared:
"We the citizens of Mecklenburg County do hereby dissolve the political bands which have connected us to the mother country. . . . We do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people . . . to the maintenance of which independence, we solemnly pledge to each other our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor."
Thus did a settlement on the fringe of the British Empire declare war on that empire. It used language -- note, especially, the last nine words -- that is echoed in the 1776 declaration, for reasons explained in a new book, "The 4th of July and the Founding of America," by Peter de Bolla of King's College, Cambridge. He is fascinated by Americans' fascination with the fact, such as it is, that their country had, as few nations can claim, an "originative moment." But what, and when, was it?
The Declaration of Independence was not signed that day by the 56 persons whose signatures would eventually adorn it. Perhaps no one signed it that day; the evidence is murky. Still, uncountable millions believe otherwise because they have seen John Trumbull's painting, in the U.S. Capitol's rotunda, depicting Thomas Jefferson, at the center of six colleagues, holding "his" Declaration on July 4, as though for signing.
What Congress actually did that day was agree to print and publish the Declaration authorized two days earlier. So, was July 2 what de Bolla calls the "punctual moment"? John Adams thought that day "will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America."
What was voted on July 2 was, however, really decided on July 1. But on June 28, Congress considered Jefferson's draft of the Declaration, so was the die then cast? Or was it cast on June 10, when Congress voted that "a committee be appointed to prepare a declaration"? The Declaration was first actually declared -- read aloud to a crowd (at the State House, now Independence Hall) -- on July 8.
De Bolla says that unlike certain events, such as an earthquake or the beheading of a monarch, the birth of a nation has "a different kind of temporality," one constructed as a tradition. This is true even of the United States, which did not, like Germany and France, emerge over millennia from history's mists.
Fifty years later, less than two months before his (and John Adams's) death on July 4, 1826, Jefferson was determinedly protective of his reputation as "author" (he directed his tombstone to declare this) of the Declaration. Still, he candidly acknowledged that it "was intended to be an expression of the American mind," not "aiming at originality of principle or sentiment." Hence, "all its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day."
Certain politically charged rhetorical tropes were then society's common property. Writing shortly before his death, Jefferson affirmed his belief that "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." Those words were as stirring then as they had been when one of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers declared from the scaffold, "I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden."
What de Bolla calls "the intricate history of the nation's founding document" does not and should not inhibit Americans from asserting the truth that their nation originated on July 4, 1776. They hold that to be a self-evident truth, which means they have decided to believe it, thereby making it a self-validating tradition. So there.
2.7.08
Vivaldi
Vivaldi and the Pietà
One of the famous tourist attractions in 18th century Venice was the Pietà, an orphanage for girls. The more talented orphans received a musical education, and public performances by the young ladies attracted large crowds. Travelers reported that the orphanage orchestra had developed into one of the best in Europe.
The Pietà orchestra was a source of much local pride, and so it's hardly surprising that on today's date in 1723, that institution's directors passed a motion to hire one of the most famous Italian composers of the day, Antonio Vivaldi, to write new works for their orchestra.
Actually, they were RE-hiring Vivaldi. Twenty years earlier, in 1703, the Pietà had given Vivaldi his first important musical post when they hired him as a young violin teacher. But a lot had happened since then. As his fame grew, Vivaldi spent less and less time in Venice. Vivaldi's new contract called for him to write two concertos a month for the Pietà orchestra, and rehearse each concerto in person if he happened to be in Venice -- which was not often the case.
In fact, the frugal directors of the Pietà were careful to stipulate they wouldn't be charged extra for postage if Vivaldi had to mail them their concertos each month from Dresden, Vienna, Prague, or Amsterdam!
It's a pity Vivaldi didn't live to see the era of overnight deliveries via FedEx or UPS, we suspect he would have given them a lot of business!
One of the famous tourist attractions in 18th century Venice was the Pietà, an orphanage for girls. The more talented orphans received a musical education, and public performances by the young ladies attracted large crowds. Travelers reported that the orphanage orchestra had developed into one of the best in Europe.
The Pietà orchestra was a source of much local pride, and so it's hardly surprising that on today's date in 1723, that institution's directors passed a motion to hire one of the most famous Italian composers of the day, Antonio Vivaldi, to write new works for their orchestra.
Actually, they were RE-hiring Vivaldi. Twenty years earlier, in 1703, the Pietà had given Vivaldi his first important musical post when they hired him as a young violin teacher. But a lot had happened since then. As his fame grew, Vivaldi spent less and less time in Venice. Vivaldi's new contract called for him to write two concertos a month for the Pietà orchestra, and rehearse each concerto in person if he happened to be in Venice -- which was not often the case.
In fact, the frugal directors of the Pietà were careful to stipulate they wouldn't be charged extra for postage if Vivaldi had to mail them their concertos each month from Dresden, Vienna, Prague, or Amsterdam!
It's a pity Vivaldi didn't live to see the era of overnight deliveries via FedEx or UPS, we suspect he would have given them a lot of business!
Keillor
A couple hours to kill on a humid afternoon in a small town in Massachusetts and rather than sit looking at hotel wallpaper I took a little walk. A pretty town, well-kept, especially in the historic district where we tourists congregate -- old shop fronts that once sold hardware, dry goods, groceries, now selling candles, collectibles and coffee, and old white frame houses that make you think of large happy families in a Norman Rockwell painting (he lived in Stockbridge, not far from here) with plump women in print dresses putting platters of food on a picnic table for the Glorious Fourth.
I liked a lot of Rockwell's stuff because he was a liberal and he painted faces with great devotion. The faces shine through, as they should in a liberal's art.
It didn't take me long to get out of the picturesque district to where ordinary people live, and there, walking down a sort of suburban street (no sidewalk), I heard yelling and saw straight ahead a couple kids in white uniforms tearing across a field -- Little League baseball -- and I went straight for it. It's July and I hadn't been to a ballgame yet this year, the sign of a misspent spring. I got there just as the runner pulled up at second and the next batter came to the plate, a girl, the only girl on the field, and I climbed into the bleachers, a meager crowd, and the moment I sat down I knew I was sitting next to the batter's father.
He was silent and yet bursting with feeling. Rays of fatherly devotion emanated from him.
She looked good at the plate, nice easy stance, hands cocked behind her right ear, bat high and straight up.
"How's she doing?" I said. He said she was doing great. He didn't take his eyes off her. She took two low pitches and the third was a fat one down the middle and she put the wood to it and the centerfielder, who had been playing her shallow, turned and ran helter-skelter toward the fence and got there as the ball caromed off it and the girl was steaming toward second with her mind on third.
We were both standing, clapping. I complimented him on her swing. "The thing is, I never worked with her," he said. "She just really wanted to play. Turned down a chance to play girls' softball and they let her play here."
A ballgame is a great place to get to know somebody. You talk sideways during the interludes of which baseball has many, and since the game itself is so orderly, you can converse in non sequiturs, and after I told him about my 10-year-old girl, who loves to swim, and we agreed on what a great age 10 is and what intense pleasure a kid is capable of, we got to the grim business of What Do You Do For A Living. He said he was a cop. I said I was unemployed. (You tell people you're a writer and they tend to clam up.)
"Tough times," he said. I nodded. We might've gotten onto politics then, but we got onto music and Ireland and so forth, but I thought, "Here is a guy the candidates have to talk to this summer." A cop is a realist and he knows where Rockwell leaves off and surrealism begins, and here is his girl taking a big lead off third base and he loves her so beautifully and unabashedly and wants the world to be there for her when it comes her time to fly.
I'm 65 and have a good life and can't claim that the Current Occupant has done me much harm at all. It's when I think about 10-year-old girls I start to get hot under the collar. This clueless man has dug a deep hole for them and doesn't seem vaguely aware of it. He has spent us deep in a hole, gotten us into a disastrous war, blithely ignored the long-term best interests of the country, and when you think of the 4,000 kids who now lie in cemeteries, and for what? -- you start to grind your teeth. For the sake of the girl with the beautiful swing, I hope we get a better president than the disgusting incompetent we've wasted eight years of our national life on. Think twice about who you put your arm around, Sen. McCain.
I liked a lot of Rockwell's stuff because he was a liberal and he painted faces with great devotion. The faces shine through, as they should in a liberal's art.
It didn't take me long to get out of the picturesque district to where ordinary people live, and there, walking down a sort of suburban street (no sidewalk), I heard yelling and saw straight ahead a couple kids in white uniforms tearing across a field -- Little League baseball -- and I went straight for it. It's July and I hadn't been to a ballgame yet this year, the sign of a misspent spring. I got there just as the runner pulled up at second and the next batter came to the plate, a girl, the only girl on the field, and I climbed into the bleachers, a meager crowd, and the moment I sat down I knew I was sitting next to the batter's father.
He was silent and yet bursting with feeling. Rays of fatherly devotion emanated from him.
She looked good at the plate, nice easy stance, hands cocked behind her right ear, bat high and straight up.
"How's she doing?" I said. He said she was doing great. He didn't take his eyes off her. She took two low pitches and the third was a fat one down the middle and she put the wood to it and the centerfielder, who had been playing her shallow, turned and ran helter-skelter toward the fence and got there as the ball caromed off it and the girl was steaming toward second with her mind on third.
We were both standing, clapping. I complimented him on her swing. "The thing is, I never worked with her," he said. "She just really wanted to play. Turned down a chance to play girls' softball and they let her play here."
A ballgame is a great place to get to know somebody. You talk sideways during the interludes of which baseball has many, and since the game itself is so orderly, you can converse in non sequiturs, and after I told him about my 10-year-old girl, who loves to swim, and we agreed on what a great age 10 is and what intense pleasure a kid is capable of, we got to the grim business of What Do You Do For A Living. He said he was a cop. I said I was unemployed. (You tell people you're a writer and they tend to clam up.)
"Tough times," he said. I nodded. We might've gotten onto politics then, but we got onto music and Ireland and so forth, but I thought, "Here is a guy the candidates have to talk to this summer." A cop is a realist and he knows where Rockwell leaves off and surrealism begins, and here is his girl taking a big lead off third base and he loves her so beautifully and unabashedly and wants the world to be there for her when it comes her time to fly.
I'm 65 and have a good life and can't claim that the Current Occupant has done me much harm at all. It's when I think about 10-year-old girls I start to get hot under the collar. This clueless man has dug a deep hole for them and doesn't seem vaguely aware of it. He has spent us deep in a hole, gotten us into a disastrous war, blithely ignored the long-term best interests of the country, and when you think of the 4,000 kids who now lie in cemeteries, and for what? -- you start to grind your teeth. For the sake of the girl with the beautiful swing, I hope we get a better president than the disgusting incompetent we've wasted eight years of our national life on. Think twice about who you put your arm around, Sen. McCain.
The Celestial Kingdom meets the Five Rings
The two million foreign guests who are expected to visit Beijing in August will encounter a largely familiar and exceedingly cosmopolitan environment. They will find clean air, smooth traffic, easy Internet access, and standardized restaurant menus, all intended to provide them with seventeen days of physical, mental, and moral ease. Beijing has trained 1,500 "civilized bus riding supervisors," appointed 5,000 anti-jaywalking monitors, held "queuing awareness days," and mounted campaigns against spitting and slurping. The planners have paved over old neighborhoods to make way for five-star hotels, malls, and theme restaurants. Migrant workers who built the Olympic venues will have been dispatched back to the countryside, beggars and petitioners shipped home to their villages, and dissidents and would-be demonstrators placed under temporary house arrest or jailed. Visitors will see an edited Beijing, the way its governors and many of its residents would like it to be seen, a world capital with its exotic side under control.
And yet these same visitors may detect a deep ambivalence in the city's welcome. The pride may seem leavened with insecurity, the greeting tinged with rejection, the celebration not quite drowning out the whispers of doubt. China has arrived at the modernity it has been seeking for over a century, but it is not quite the modernity that we--and many Chinese--have been expecting.
Visitors may be struck first by Beijing's monumentalism. Old Beijing's charm lay in the narrow alleyways known as hutongs, courtyard houses, streetside handicrafts, and slow savors of life--all built, to be sure, on a system of class and gender exploitation that could not survive. Mao Zedong's new government after 1949 tore down the city walls and built Tiananmen Square as a vast public space to celebrate communist rule. But thanks more to economic stagnation than to city planning, much of the old city was preserved. The first stage of urban revolution happened indoors and underground. Multiple families were crammed into old houses, street trades were eliminated, and tunnels were dug for civil defense. The peddlers and handicraftsmen disappeared, and street life turned drab. But the alleyways and the low buildings of the capital remained largely untouched, at least physically.
Deng Xiaoping's commercial revolution after 1979 created crowds, bustle, supermarkets, fast food outlets, high rises, bland sprawling residential districts, and wide congested roads. Several international athletic events, such as the Asian Games in 1990, contributed new construction. And this year's Olympics has finally completed the destruction of the historical city, with a huge new airport terminal, thirty-one competition venues, new roads, subway lines, hotels, bridges, neighborhoods, and parks. What remains of the old-style houses and streets, crafts, means of transportation, and ways of life is mere outdoor museum displays, according to Lillian M. Li and her co-authors in their narrative of the city's lost past. Visitors should carry this readable book with them as an aid to imagining what is no longer there, and to understanding the political sources--including hubris and corruption--of what they see.
The main Olympic site north of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square sits at the top of the city's cosmologically significant north-south axis, explains Susan Brownell in her book on the anthropology of Chinese sports. It thus expresses the unity of sports and politics that the Chinese authorities and the International Olympic Committee have been at such pains to deny. Brownell says that planners at one point wanted the main stadium, referred to as the "Bird's Nest" because of its lattice-like construction, which was contrived to accommodate 11,000 VIPs so that the whole hierarchy of power could display itself before the people on this most auspicious occasion. The stillsecret opening and closing ceremonies that have been designed for the arena will be global and glitzy, but they need to convey the same power, dignity, and order as did the old PRC aesthetic of massed gray suits, red ties, and primary-color potted flowers. After all, Hu Jintao's chief contribution to Chinese political thought in his six years in power has been the concept of the "harmonious society."
The Olympic buildings are diverse, and some of them are innovative. Yet in both the process of their construction and, I expect, in their use, they embody the dominance of the state. The public scale overwhelms the private scale, national power trumps personal comfort, and society's interests supersede individual rights. China's systems of land ownership, construction approvals, contracting, and labor discipline allowed quick and efficient displacement of residents (often through police and court collusion with developers, and the threat and use of violence), along with quick decisions on design, quick letting of contracts, and quick completion of projects. The buildings together announce that this is a society able and willing to consummate the Hegelian overcoming of its own past.
So, too, at the human level, China offers a political and social landscape in which those who are not part of the future make way for those who are. The individual fits in or gets out. Job ads for bank clerks and office workers specify sex, age, height, and good looks. A lawsuit a few years ago against height discrimination in job hiring was dismissed by a local court for lack of jurisdiction. A case on discrimination on account of looks was settled out of court with no precedential effect for other cases. The 380 hostesses guiding the athletes through the Olympic awards ceremonies will all be about the same age, height, and weight, and they have been trained to walk and gesture in standard ways.
By contrast, people who suffer from hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS are treated with widespread discrimination in college admission and employment. In search of something called "population security," couples are forbidden to bear more than one child, pregnancy screening has been upgraded to prevent "defective births," and mothers are taught how to raise children of "high quality." Despite the loosening of restrictions on migration for work, a legally entrenched caste system still grants rural residents political and social-welfare rights inferior to those of urban residents. Worsening income inequality shows its marks on the weathered faces of migrant workers who come to the cities from the villages to do the hardest labor, often going home cheated of their pay at the end of their term of employment.
The Olympics have been designed to showcase the upside of this dialectic: glass towers, modish people, prosperity, and health of every kind--economic, political, and physical. As Xu Guoqi points out, when China was the "sick man of Asia," many of its people were ill as well, and social thinkers of the time were obsessed with the connection between the two problems. They understood the relationship through the theory of social Darwinism, an idea then popular in the West, which held that human history was the story of competition for survival among the races. A Chinese elementary-school textbook of the 1920s explained that "Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and white races are relatively strong and intelligent. Since the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the white race. Only the yellow race competes with the white race. This is so-called evolution." Mao Zedong's first known published essay was on physical culture, and his theme (borrowed from contemporary thinkers such as Liang Qichao) was that a strong nation must have strong people.
What Susan Brownell calls Chinese "body culture"--ideas of health and how to get it--revolves around notions such as "seminal essence" and "vital breath." These concepts inform such Chinese disciplines as qigong (slow-movement exercises) and wushu (martial arts), both of which she says are more about shaping the subjective experience of the body than about training the body for competition. The Chinese state does not invest much in facilities for everyday fitness. Rural residents and migrant workers get their exercise doing manual labor. Most urbanites "cultivate their life force" (yangsheng) through traditional arts--tai chi, walking, keeping birds, and writing calligraphy in water on the pavement--that can be practiced for free in parks and other public spaces. The anthropologists Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang pointed out a few years ago that such gentle physical and spiritual exercises generate a calm, go-with-the-flow ambience that supports the regime's favored political quietism. Except for the new rich who belong to private golf or swim clubs, strenuous competitive sports belong to the arena of foreign policy, not everyday life.
Western sports were brought to China by the YMCA in the early twentieth century to help internationalize the country. Xu Guoqi tells this story in his book on China's involvement with international sports. In the 1950s, the new communist government set up a nationwide physical-education system modeled on that of its ally, the Soviet Union. The purpose, the Physical Culture and Sports Commission said at the time, was "to give participants a stronger physique and will power in order to better serve socialism and the defense of the fatherland." In those days China's sports diplomacy was limited to the Soviet bloc and what were called "the Games of the Newly Emerging Forces," because the mainland People's Republic of China had withdrawn from the Olympic movement in the mid-1950s to protest the participation of the rival regime located on Taiwan, called the Republic of China.
Both Xu's and Brownell's books contain withering accounts of decades of the International Olympic Committee's clumsiness in handling the two-Chinas problem. Xu's analysis is based on research in the IOC archives; Brownell's is informed by conversations with a senior Chinese Olympics statesman, He Zhenliang, whose biography she has translated (He Zhenliang and China's Olympic Dream, by Liang Lijuan, published by Foreign Languages Press last year). They tell how the fictions that Olympic committees do not represent nations and IOC members transcend their countries' interests clashed with the zero-sum struggle over legitimacy between the PRC and the ROC. Each side claimed to be the government of all China, and each took turns boycotting games when the other was allowed to participate.
The American Avery Brundage, who served as IOC chair from 1952 to 1972, oscillated between trying to get both Chinas in and keeping them both out. When he tried to get the ROC committee to change its name, he earned a verbal flogging in the anti-communist U.S. press. When the Canadian government refused visas for the ROC team to participate under its national flag in the Montreal Games in 1976, Canada was roasted by American politicians. But four years later, after the United States had switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, Washington copied the Canadian strategy and denied the ROC team the right to use its own name and flag in the Lake Placid Winter Games. It was not until 1984 in Los Angeles that both Chinas participated, having finally accepted a 1979 IOC proposal that Taiwan use the name "Chinese Taipei" and give up the right to display its national flag, anthem, and emblem. This so-called "Olympic formula" has subsequently been used to enable Taiwan's participation in a variety of official and unofficial settings, and is supposed to be used again in August when Taiwan's teams come to Beijing.
Under Mao, talented athletes went to special schools run by the military. That system was restored after the Cultural Revolution and confronted a series of doping scandals in international competitions in the 1990s. The system has been civilianized, but today as in the past, Xu Guoqi reports, recruitment and training for international competition remain major priorities under central state planning. Little seems to be known about training methods or the physical cost to the athletes, although Xu reports that in order to keep their focus on their sport, athletes are not allowed to fall in love or to marry until they reach the age of twenty-eight for men and twenty-six for women. Brownell, herself a top track-and-field athlete who participated in the 1986 Chinese National College Games when she was an exchange student, corrects misrepresentations about athlete-automatons, genetic engineering, and child abuse. But she acknowledges, as do other authors, that the Chinese government puts most of its sports funding into competitive sport rather than community sport. The reason is that sports in China is about the nation, not the public. Having come in second to the United States in Athens in 2004, China is aiming for the highest number of gold medals in 2008.
II.
Few foreign visitors to Beijing will see--but surely few can be unaware of--the state repression that is as integral to the contemporary Chinese model as urban monumentalism, social conformity, and state-managed sports. In July 2007, police in northeast China arrested a peasant land-rights activist named Yang Chunlin who had collected thousands of signatures for a petition titled "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics." He was held and tortured for eight months, then tried and sentenced to a five-year prison term on the vague charge of "inciting subversion of state power." Lu Gengsong, a Hangzhoubased activist who campaigned online against official corruption, was sentenced to four years in February 2008 for the same crime. Wu Lihong, a farmer activist who exposed environmental pollution in Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, was sentenced to three years in 2007 on fake charges of fraud and extortion.
The government has intensified repression in the past two years in order to ensure order during the Olympics. The San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation says that arrests for endangering state security rose in 2007 to their highest level in eight years. The small cadre of Chinese "rights protection" lawyers who have stepped forward to defend political activists in court have been subjected to escalating beatings, detentions, and threats, as chillingly detailed in a recent Human Rights Watch report.
The government seems to treat critics who have foreign audiences with special venom, as if to remind outsiders how little their disapproval matters. Two of the best-known cases are Hu Jia and Chen Guangcheng. Hu Jia, an AIDS activist and blogger, was sentenced to three and a half years in April 2008 by a Beijing court for--again--inciting subversion of state power because of his writings, including an open letter on "The Real China and the Olympics." For months before his arrest, Hu had been harassed. At one point he posted on YouTube an ominous yet comic video of buff young plainclothes security agents outside his apartment smoking, lunching, and picking their teeth. When Hu's wife went on an errand, they crowded and jostled her like bullies in a high school hallway.
This must be especially terrifying when the bullies run the country. I have asked activists why they take such risks. They usually say that they know how to maneuver within the limits allowed by Chinese law. But for many of them this gamble eventually goes wrong, and Hu Jia was such a case. After his arrest, Hu was tortured with stress positions and sleep deprivation. As Jerome A. Cohen and Eva Pils have observed, "It is part of the logic of political systems that treat opposition as a crime that they must not only punish the opposition, but also break its spirit."
The case of Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist for women's rights, is even more egregious. Chen is a soft-spoken man in his early thirties who got involved in helping draft appeals against forced abortion and sterilization in the rural area where he lived, which is part of Linyi city in Shandong province. (Chinese cities administer surrounding rural areas.) After a visit to Beijing, Chen was kidnapped and brought home by public security agents from Linyi, who placed him under illegal house arrest. When he persisted, he was roughed up by thugs, then arrested on charges--intentionally ludicrous, for a blind person--of destroying property and assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic. Defense lawyers who came from Beijing to see him were taken off a bus, beaten, and kept from attending his trial, which produced a sentence of four years and three months. On appeal a higher court did something that virtually never happens in China--it sent the case back for rehearing. But the local court reaffirmed the original sentence, which Chen is currently serving under harsh conditions.
How do cases like this happen in the up-to-date China of Hu Jintao? As James Mann pointed out in The China Fantasy, many American politicians and businessmen claim to believe that China's leaders are forging ahead against cultural and social obstacles to establish the rule of law and democracy. Yet here was a case that must have been well known to Hu Jintao and "Grandpa" Wen Jiabao (as the premier identified himself to children during the recent earthquake relief efforts), a case so troubling that even a Chinese court intervened, a case that Hu and Wen could have corrected if they had wanted to.
Instead, the official who presided over the railroading of Chen Guangcheng was promoted. This official, named Li Qun, is a typical product of modern China's ladder of success, the Chinese Youth League system that produced Hu Jintao. Like many in today's techno-bureaucratic leadership, Li Qun is broadly experienced and lavishly credentialed. He studied physics at Shandong University, worked in the Chinese Youth League, served as mayor in a smaller Shandong city, took an executive training course in economics at the Shandong Party School, led a group of Shandong cadres to take a special M.P.A. course at New Haven University in Connecticut, and enrolled in an in-service Ph.D. course in "management engineering" at Northwest Industrial University in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province.
At the time of Chen Guangcheng's persecution, Li Qun was Party secretary of Linyi. In China the local Party secretary runs everything--the police, courts, media, the people's congress (a rubber-stamp representative body), the population-planning bureaucracy, the agriculture bureau, industry, commerce, and so on. Li Qun's joint appointments (besides his Party role) were as mayor, head of the people's congress, and head of the local Party school; he also chaired or assigned his deputies to chair coordinating committees that exist in every Chinese territorial unit on legal and political affairs, family planning, propaganda, and other key sectors.
This universal Chinese set-up--some scholars call it "de facto federalism"--has produced both China's remarkable economic surge and its environmental disasters and rights abuses. The regime gives local officials full powers, and holds them accountable to achieve a short list of priority tasks. The key benchmarks are high economic growth, close conformity with mandated annual birth rates, and low levels of what the regime calls social disorder, such as demonstrations and episodes of collective petitioning. Having too many local citizens visit Beijing to petition national authorities counts as a black mark. To keep their records clean, according to a 2005 Human Rights Watch report, local officials send "retrievers" to Beijing forcibly to repatriate their local citizens who have gone there to petition. These well-dressed young men wait across the street from the petition offices with their car doors open, waiting to kidnap local citizens and bundle them home, often for terms of forced labor. This was what happened to Chen when he petitioned for Linyi women in Beijing.
Chen Guangcheng's activities threatened to weaken Li Qun's record on two counts essential for Li's promotion: family planning and social disorder. When Chen didn't get the message from harassment and beatings, Li Qun either did--or like King Richard caused to be done--what needed to be done, and had Chen convicted. Apparently the Party's secretive internal personnel department, the Organization Department, approved: in 2007 Li Qun was promoted to the post of head of Propaganda Department of Shandong provincial party committee.
Another successful Youth League alumnus was in charge of Tibet during the recent disturbances. Before going to Tibet, Zhang Qingli--coincidentally a Shandong native like Li Qun--held county- and city-level posts in his home province, did a stint in the central CYL office in Beijing, and served in provincial-level posts in Gansu and Xinjiang, in China's far west. Like Li, Zhang garnered a variety of academic credentials along the way and worked some of the time in propaganda. In late 2005, he was posted as Party secretary to Tibet.
There Zhang pushed the third round of a multi-year "patriotic education campaign" under way since 1996, which requires Tibetan monks and nuns to thank the motherland (meaning China) for the gift of modernization and to denounce the Dalai Lama for "splittism." Mickey Spiegel explains in her essay in the collection China's Great Leap: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression that during such campaigns Party officials take over the monasteries, deciding who is promoted, what is published, and how daily rites are conducted. This time the Party tightened control even further by publishing a formal decree in July 2007 proclaiming that no incarnation of any lama would be valid in the future without government approval. This extended an existing practice. In 1995, the Party had named a Panchen Lama in violation of Tibetan religious procedures, taking custody of the incumbent recognized by most Tibetans and disappearing him from the public scene. And it had claimed the right to the final say in recognizing the future incarnation of the Dalai Lama. These are among the two highest lamas in Tibetan Buddhism. The "Measures on the Reincarnation of Living Buddhas," promulgated in 2007, extended this principle to the entire range of Tibetan religious leaders at even the lowest level.
During the patriotic education campaign, Zhang Qingli is said to have remarked that "the [Party] Central Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans." Such statements do not register as insulting among most Han Chinese, because they reflect the social Darwinist conviction that religions are superstitions and minority cultures are backward. Such faiths and cultures are expected naturally to dissolve as their adherents experience modernization.
Among Tibetans, on the other hand, the campaign against their religion generated dissatisfaction even more intense than that created by Han-dominated, environmentally insensitive economic development. For this reason--and to take advantage of the international attention generated by the upcoming Olympics--young monks carried out peaceful demonstrations in Lhasa starting on March 10, which was the anniversary of the uprising against Chinese occupation in 1959. When the demonstrations spread and turned violent, Zhang Qingli rushed home from a meeting in Beijing to convene a Party and government conference on restoring order. He told those assembled that "the Dalai [Chinese officials don't grant their enemies the honorific "lama"] is a wolf in a monk's robe, a monster with a human face but the heart of a beast; we are in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique, a life and death battle between us and the enemy." There followed a violent crackdown revealing, among other things, the failure of the designated civil order force, the People's Armed Police, to master the crowd-control techniques they were supposed to have been studying since the Tiananmen tragedy nearly two decades ago.
There is no reason to think that Zhang's career will suffer for exacerbating the split between Han and Tibetans. After all, China's top ruler, Hu Jintao, was promoted to the status of heir apparent in 1992 partly on the strength of his having declared martial law in Lhasa in 1989. The government publicly rewards leaders who show toughness because it wants to make sure people understand that it is determined to keep control.
In some political systems, Li Qun's promotion to the post of provincial propaganda chief might count as being kicked upstairs. Not in China: propaganda is one of the most important domains in the Chinese party-state. It is thanks to the success of China's propaganda work that public assent is procured not only by repression, and runs both wide and deep. As Anne-Marie Brady demonstrates in a superb study of this central and hidden part of the Chinese system, the surface diversity of the Chinese media hides the guiding hand of a high-level Party office in Beijing called the Central Propaganda Department, which works its will across the whole spectrum of activities in media, education, entertainment--and also in sports. Deliciously, Brady reveals that the department is funded partly by a 3 percent tax on enterprises ranging from bookstores to karaoke bars, golf courses, and bowling alleys, because all these units fall within its orbit of control; and it uses these funds partly to support Party and army publications, rural bookstores, literature prizes, and social science research. She does not say whether the Beijing Olympic Committee is also paying this tax, but it may well be doing so, since sports are under the partial control of the propaganda system.
Brady reveals that China's central propagandists have studied the theories of "manufacturing consent" by Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, and have learned from media critics such as Noam Chomsky, and--although she does not make quite this ultimate ironic point--emulate such Western visionaries of popular journalism as Rupert Murdoch. They know how diversity and contention within a permitted range of subjects render invisible the subjects forbidden by the regime and placed outside the perimeter; how naming and framing place inconvenient facts in a desired light. The department intervenes at all levels of the media hierarchy through a system of news guidance, post-publication review, and reward and punishment. Its most effective tool is a traditional Chinese invention rather than a Western import: a "you know what we mean" style of regulation that allows experimentation, tolerates ambiguity, and then punishes retroactively and arbitrarily.
The efflorescence of creativity that foreign visitors will see in Beijing in August is not a challenge to Party control. It enables that control. The lively art and music scenes, colorful newsstands, crowded bookstores, stylish clothing, experimental dance, innovative architecture, sexy advertising, rampant consumerism, luxurious housing, ebullient schlock, even the considerable scope for academic inquiry: this lightly patrolled free zone is not the antithesis but the twin of the permanent crackdown on the political frontier, where the few who insist on testing the regime are crowded to the cultural margin and generally ignored. In this sense the energetic new Chinese art that has caught the imagination of Western buyers, with its pictorial irony and cynicism, repudiation of history, detachment from the world, and love of stunts, is not the challenge to those in power it is sometimes construed to be. Rather, it is a secret joke that the regime shares with the artists and their audience--part of a new social contract that allows the children to have their sly fun so long as the grown-ups run the house.
Brady argues that the end result of this sophisticated cultural programming differs little from the mass media in the West, where just as in China nothing important is discussed. Like American TV viewers and tabloid readers transfixed by the photo shoot of the teenage star Miley Cyrus and the debate over whether to lift the federal gas tax for the summer driving season, Chinese readers feel they are living in an environment of freedom. The difference is that even those motivated to do so have no way to break into the monopoly circle that decides on the fundamental issues that confront their society.
III.
The Beijing Olympics have never been anything but a conscious part of this strategy--what Brady nicely calls a campaign of mass distraction. Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China is a grudgingly admiring analysis by communications specialists in the West of the Beijing organizers' strategies for "seizing the platform," shaping the space, and "controlling the narrative." A central theme is that the Olympics redefine citizenship--both Chinese and foreign--as consumership, abetting the depoliticization of public life that lies at the heart of China's post-Mao propaganda strategy.
Indeed, the Beijing Olympics mark the full mastery of marketing techniques by Chinese bureaucrats. According to Xu Guoqi, "The Beijing organizing committee hopes that through merchandising, sponsorships, and other commercial applications, China's logo will by and large pay for the Games." (This hope may have failed, given the escalating costs noted by domestic critics.) Authorized vendors have sold zillions of dolls, keychains, T-shirts, Swatch watches, papercuts, and telephones representing the five Olympic mascots--the saccharine, symbolically laden, and cutely named fuwa. The official game logo, a running stick figure against a red background, has been crammed with meanings: the running man is both winning a race and throwing his arms out in welcome; the shape of his body resembles the Chinese character for jing in Beijing; and the red background evokes a traditional Chinese chop by which people used to sign their names on documents and precious art works.
To be sure, the Olympics so far have not entirely worked out the way the planners intended. Beijing's bid in 1993 for the 2000 games was defeated at least partly on human rights grounds (although Frank Ching implies in China's Great Leap that bribery from the winning city of Sydney had more to do with it). It is not clear whether Beijing made explicit human rights commitments in its second bid. Sharon K. Hom notes, in China's Great Leap, that despite numerous requests, the host city contract has never been made public. Brady says foreign p.r. consultants advised Chinese officials to mention human rights in the bid document, and Brownell reveals that they debated at the very high vice-premier level whether to do so, deciding in the end to keep such mentions informal. This may explain a remark--often cited by critics--made around that time by Liu Jingmin, vice president of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, who said that allowing Beijing to host the Games would "help the development of human rights. " Whether or not human rights were explicitly included, Beijing certainly made pledges that it would not fulfill. China's Great Leap documents non-compliance with all four elements of the published 2002 Beijing Olympic Action Plan: Green Olympics, High-Tech Olympics, Free and Open Olympics, and People's Olympics. Even the logo has evoked ironic caricatures, including one in which the red running man is the bloody silhouette of a firing-squad victim.
The campaigns to embarrass China over the 2008 Olympics have been as long in the works as the Games themselves. From the moment the Games were awarded to Beijing in July 2001, human rights advocates, instead of calling for a boycott, began planning to use the event to ramp up pressure on the Chinese government. Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China set up special websites tracking the Beijing organizing committee's failure to make good its commitments. (I am on the Asia advisory committee of the former and am board co-chair of the latter.) The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a series of reports on violations of press freedom. Amnesty International's "Olympics Countdown" series has tracked violations over the two-year period leading to the games. Chinese Human Rights Defenders has issued an "Olympic Watch" series of press releases. The Save Darfur campaign and an offshoot, Olympic Dream for Darfur, pressed China to address the Darfur problem via the link between Beijing and Khartoum. Advocacy groups recently demonstrated along the route of the Olympic torch, clashing with blue- and-white-suited Chinese escorts who were drawn from the student body of the People's Armed Police academy.
All this is also propaganda, of course--human rights groups prefer the term "advocacy"; but precisely for that reason it is a mystery why the Chinese leaders and the IOC ever thought they could get away with throwing a party to celebrate China's accomplishments at which no one would mention China's shortcomings. Why did China put its face out to be slapped? And why did the IOC abet them in doing so? Evidently both parties were blinded by the charm of their own blarney, the line that sports is only sports.
But in the end this miscalculation has not mattered much. In the Chinese leaders' accurate realpolitik analysis, they had already stared down Western human rights pressure after Tiananmen, defeated Bill Clinton's "human rights conditionality" in 1994, rolled back post-Tiananmen sanctions, forged alliances with other rightsviolating states to pull out the teeth of the United Nations Human Rights Council, and pushed Western criticism into the confidential government-to-government "human rights dialogue" and "private diplomacy" channels where there is no fear of real action. The West's economic interdependence with China has become so intense that an Olympic boycott--or indeed any effective sanction against China--has become unthinkable.
At home, if the government cannot have Western approval, it can make stone soup out of disapproval by playing the criticisms as an attack on the pride of the nation. This official attitude was well expressed in a book that Chen Guangcheng's persecutor, Li Qun, published in 2004, well before the Olympic controversies had reached high pitch. During his studies at New Haven University in 2000, Li Qun did an internship in the office of Mayor John DeStefano Jr., and after his return he published a book unforgettably titled I Was a Mayor's Assistant in America. He described his studies in America as a "political test" that confirmed his confidence in the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics. "Most Americans," Li wrote, "are friendly to China, although they do not understand it very well. But a small group of politicians strike the banners of democracy and human rights to critique us constantly by their own standards, distort things, and interfere with our domestic affairs. Their real purpose is not to protect the so-called human rights but to use this pretext to influence and limit China's healthy economic growth and to prevent China's wealth and power from threatening their world hegemony."
There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of Li's sentiments, clichéd though they are, or the degree to which they represent the views of many Chinese inside China and out. Coming to the United States and seeing how things work here does not necessarily shake the faith of Chinese officials, or students, in their country's way of doing things. Quite remarkably, and in general for the better, tens of thousands of Chinese students have returned home from the West to play their willing roles in academia, the media, business, and other sectors, accepting subordination to the ruling party and its national project.
Thus it is not only China's growing military and economic power that renders it less and less vulnerable to human rights advocacy, which depends on international reputational costs. Perhaps even more importantly, the government is protected by its success in shaping its own public's reaction to the criticism. Indeed, the regime faces more risk in yielding to Western criticism than in being subjected to it. The audiences that matter are not in the United States and Europe, but in China and the Third World. Even the main Olympic sponsors--GE, Coca-Cola, Kodak, McDonald's, Visa, and seven other American and foreign companies, who are front and center in the eyes of international consumers--have decided to hunker down and absorb whatever hits cannot be avoided in order to protect their enormous long-range stakes in China. This is an almost unimaginably large market, and a market that remembers. Name and shame works with countries dependent on the West, but China is no longer such a country.
Xu Guoqi raises the possibility that the Olympics will lead to the transformation of the Chinese regime the way the Seoul Games in 1988 brought on Korean democratization. True, the regime this year has suffered a series of what some Chinese see as cosmological portents--a crippling snowstorm, Tibetan unrest, and the huge Sichuan earthquake. The leaders certainly react to any such challenge, and much smaller ones, as if their rule is fragile. Yet sophisticated crisis management and canny media spin have earned the government broad public support each time. Even if an unexpected event occurs in August--something security agencies have been gearing up to prevent--the likely consequence will be to strengthen the regime's already robust grip on power. Assertive and unapologetic, the new and future China now struts the stage. Its character dovetails with what is reported to be the forceful personality of the designated future leader, Xi Jinping, currently the vice president, who is slated to succeed Hu Jintao in 2012.
This is modern China. It is not what we imagined it would be when Richard Nixon wrote forty years ago that we should not leave China "forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors," and started us down the path of engagement. When we wondered all these years whether China would modernize or not, Westernize or not, become civilized or not, we were asking the wrong questions, making the wrong distinctions. What we got instead is a China that is both proud and resentful, open and closed, like us yet not at all like us. We used our three wishes and now we must live with what we got. The onetime sick man of Asia is in exuberant health--that is the intended message of the Beijing Olympics, and the unintended one.
Andrew J. Nathan teaches at Columbia University. He is a co-editor of How East Asians View Democracy (Columbia University Press).
And yet these same visitors may detect a deep ambivalence in the city's welcome. The pride may seem leavened with insecurity, the greeting tinged with rejection, the celebration not quite drowning out the whispers of doubt. China has arrived at the modernity it has been seeking for over a century, but it is not quite the modernity that we--and many Chinese--have been expecting.
Visitors may be struck first by Beijing's monumentalism. Old Beijing's charm lay in the narrow alleyways known as hutongs, courtyard houses, streetside handicrafts, and slow savors of life--all built, to be sure, on a system of class and gender exploitation that could not survive. Mao Zedong's new government after 1949 tore down the city walls and built Tiananmen Square as a vast public space to celebrate communist rule. But thanks more to economic stagnation than to city planning, much of the old city was preserved. The first stage of urban revolution happened indoors and underground. Multiple families were crammed into old houses, street trades were eliminated, and tunnels were dug for civil defense. The peddlers and handicraftsmen disappeared, and street life turned drab. But the alleyways and the low buildings of the capital remained largely untouched, at least physically.
Deng Xiaoping's commercial revolution after 1979 created crowds, bustle, supermarkets, fast food outlets, high rises, bland sprawling residential districts, and wide congested roads. Several international athletic events, such as the Asian Games in 1990, contributed new construction. And this year's Olympics has finally completed the destruction of the historical city, with a huge new airport terminal, thirty-one competition venues, new roads, subway lines, hotels, bridges, neighborhoods, and parks. What remains of the old-style houses and streets, crafts, means of transportation, and ways of life is mere outdoor museum displays, according to Lillian M. Li and her co-authors in their narrative of the city's lost past. Visitors should carry this readable book with them as an aid to imagining what is no longer there, and to understanding the political sources--including hubris and corruption--of what they see.
The main Olympic site north of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square sits at the top of the city's cosmologically significant north-south axis, explains Susan Brownell in her book on the anthropology of Chinese sports. It thus expresses the unity of sports and politics that the Chinese authorities and the International Olympic Committee have been at such pains to deny. Brownell says that planners at one point wanted the main stadium, referred to as the "Bird's Nest" because of its lattice-like construction, which was contrived to accommodate 11,000 VIPs so that the whole hierarchy of power could display itself before the people on this most auspicious occasion. The stillsecret opening and closing ceremonies that have been designed for the arena will be global and glitzy, but they need to convey the same power, dignity, and order as did the old PRC aesthetic of massed gray suits, red ties, and primary-color potted flowers. After all, Hu Jintao's chief contribution to Chinese political thought in his six years in power has been the concept of the "harmonious society."
The Olympic buildings are diverse, and some of them are innovative. Yet in both the process of their construction and, I expect, in their use, they embody the dominance of the state. The public scale overwhelms the private scale, national power trumps personal comfort, and society's interests supersede individual rights. China's systems of land ownership, construction approvals, contracting, and labor discipline allowed quick and efficient displacement of residents (often through police and court collusion with developers, and the threat and use of violence), along with quick decisions on design, quick letting of contracts, and quick completion of projects. The buildings together announce that this is a society able and willing to consummate the Hegelian overcoming of its own past.
So, too, at the human level, China offers a political and social landscape in which those who are not part of the future make way for those who are. The individual fits in or gets out. Job ads for bank clerks and office workers specify sex, age, height, and good looks. A lawsuit a few years ago against height discrimination in job hiring was dismissed by a local court for lack of jurisdiction. A case on discrimination on account of looks was settled out of court with no precedential effect for other cases. The 380 hostesses guiding the athletes through the Olympic awards ceremonies will all be about the same age, height, and weight, and they have been trained to walk and gesture in standard ways.
By contrast, people who suffer from hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS are treated with widespread discrimination in college admission and employment. In search of something called "population security," couples are forbidden to bear more than one child, pregnancy screening has been upgraded to prevent "defective births," and mothers are taught how to raise children of "high quality." Despite the loosening of restrictions on migration for work, a legally entrenched caste system still grants rural residents political and social-welfare rights inferior to those of urban residents. Worsening income inequality shows its marks on the weathered faces of migrant workers who come to the cities from the villages to do the hardest labor, often going home cheated of their pay at the end of their term of employment.
The Olympics have been designed to showcase the upside of this dialectic: glass towers, modish people, prosperity, and health of every kind--economic, political, and physical. As Xu Guoqi points out, when China was the "sick man of Asia," many of its people were ill as well, and social thinkers of the time were obsessed with the connection between the two problems. They understood the relationship through the theory of social Darwinism, an idea then popular in the West, which held that human history was the story of competition for survival among the races. A Chinese elementary-school textbook of the 1920s explained that "Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and white races are relatively strong and intelligent. Since the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the white race. Only the yellow race competes with the white race. This is so-called evolution." Mao Zedong's first known published essay was on physical culture, and his theme (borrowed from contemporary thinkers such as Liang Qichao) was that a strong nation must have strong people.
What Susan Brownell calls Chinese "body culture"--ideas of health and how to get it--revolves around notions such as "seminal essence" and "vital breath." These concepts inform such Chinese disciplines as qigong (slow-movement exercises) and wushu (martial arts), both of which she says are more about shaping the subjective experience of the body than about training the body for competition. The Chinese state does not invest much in facilities for everyday fitness. Rural residents and migrant workers get their exercise doing manual labor. Most urbanites "cultivate their life force" (yangsheng) through traditional arts--tai chi, walking, keeping birds, and writing calligraphy in water on the pavement--that can be practiced for free in parks and other public spaces. The anthropologists Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang pointed out a few years ago that such gentle physical and spiritual exercises generate a calm, go-with-the-flow ambience that supports the regime's favored political quietism. Except for the new rich who belong to private golf or swim clubs, strenuous competitive sports belong to the arena of foreign policy, not everyday life.
Western sports were brought to China by the YMCA in the early twentieth century to help internationalize the country. Xu Guoqi tells this story in his book on China's involvement with international sports. In the 1950s, the new communist government set up a nationwide physical-education system modeled on that of its ally, the Soviet Union. The purpose, the Physical Culture and Sports Commission said at the time, was "to give participants a stronger physique and will power in order to better serve socialism and the defense of the fatherland." In those days China's sports diplomacy was limited to the Soviet bloc and what were called "the Games of the Newly Emerging Forces," because the mainland People's Republic of China had withdrawn from the Olympic movement in the mid-1950s to protest the participation of the rival regime located on Taiwan, called the Republic of China.
Both Xu's and Brownell's books contain withering accounts of decades of the International Olympic Committee's clumsiness in handling the two-Chinas problem. Xu's analysis is based on research in the IOC archives; Brownell's is informed by conversations with a senior Chinese Olympics statesman, He Zhenliang, whose biography she has translated (He Zhenliang and China's Olympic Dream, by Liang Lijuan, published by Foreign Languages Press last year). They tell how the fictions that Olympic committees do not represent nations and IOC members transcend their countries' interests clashed with the zero-sum struggle over legitimacy between the PRC and the ROC. Each side claimed to be the government of all China, and each took turns boycotting games when the other was allowed to participate.
The American Avery Brundage, who served as IOC chair from 1952 to 1972, oscillated between trying to get both Chinas in and keeping them both out. When he tried to get the ROC committee to change its name, he earned a verbal flogging in the anti-communist U.S. press. When the Canadian government refused visas for the ROC team to participate under its national flag in the Montreal Games in 1976, Canada was roasted by American politicians. But four years later, after the United States had switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, Washington copied the Canadian strategy and denied the ROC team the right to use its own name and flag in the Lake Placid Winter Games. It was not until 1984 in Los Angeles that both Chinas participated, having finally accepted a 1979 IOC proposal that Taiwan use the name "Chinese Taipei" and give up the right to display its national flag, anthem, and emblem. This so-called "Olympic formula" has subsequently been used to enable Taiwan's participation in a variety of official and unofficial settings, and is supposed to be used again in August when Taiwan's teams come to Beijing.
Under Mao, talented athletes went to special schools run by the military. That system was restored after the Cultural Revolution and confronted a series of doping scandals in international competitions in the 1990s. The system has been civilianized, but today as in the past, Xu Guoqi reports, recruitment and training for international competition remain major priorities under central state planning. Little seems to be known about training methods or the physical cost to the athletes, although Xu reports that in order to keep their focus on their sport, athletes are not allowed to fall in love or to marry until they reach the age of twenty-eight for men and twenty-six for women. Brownell, herself a top track-and-field athlete who participated in the 1986 Chinese National College Games when she was an exchange student, corrects misrepresentations about athlete-automatons, genetic engineering, and child abuse. But she acknowledges, as do other authors, that the Chinese government puts most of its sports funding into competitive sport rather than community sport. The reason is that sports in China is about the nation, not the public. Having come in second to the United States in Athens in 2004, China is aiming for the highest number of gold medals in 2008.
II.
Few foreign visitors to Beijing will see--but surely few can be unaware of--the state repression that is as integral to the contemporary Chinese model as urban monumentalism, social conformity, and state-managed sports. In July 2007, police in northeast China arrested a peasant land-rights activist named Yang Chunlin who had collected thousands of signatures for a petition titled "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics." He was held and tortured for eight months, then tried and sentenced to a five-year prison term on the vague charge of "inciting subversion of state power." Lu Gengsong, a Hangzhoubased activist who campaigned online against official corruption, was sentenced to four years in February 2008 for the same crime. Wu Lihong, a farmer activist who exposed environmental pollution in Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, was sentenced to three years in 2007 on fake charges of fraud and extortion.
The government has intensified repression in the past two years in order to ensure order during the Olympics. The San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation says that arrests for endangering state security rose in 2007 to their highest level in eight years. The small cadre of Chinese "rights protection" lawyers who have stepped forward to defend political activists in court have been subjected to escalating beatings, detentions, and threats, as chillingly detailed in a recent Human Rights Watch report.
The government seems to treat critics who have foreign audiences with special venom, as if to remind outsiders how little their disapproval matters. Two of the best-known cases are Hu Jia and Chen Guangcheng. Hu Jia, an AIDS activist and blogger, was sentenced to three and a half years in April 2008 by a Beijing court for--again--inciting subversion of state power because of his writings, including an open letter on "The Real China and the Olympics." For months before his arrest, Hu had been harassed. At one point he posted on YouTube an ominous yet comic video of buff young plainclothes security agents outside his apartment smoking, lunching, and picking their teeth. When Hu's wife went on an errand, they crowded and jostled her like bullies in a high school hallway.
This must be especially terrifying when the bullies run the country. I have asked activists why they take such risks. They usually say that they know how to maneuver within the limits allowed by Chinese law. But for many of them this gamble eventually goes wrong, and Hu Jia was such a case. After his arrest, Hu was tortured with stress positions and sleep deprivation. As Jerome A. Cohen and Eva Pils have observed, "It is part of the logic of political systems that treat opposition as a crime that they must not only punish the opposition, but also break its spirit."
The case of Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist for women's rights, is even more egregious. Chen is a soft-spoken man in his early thirties who got involved in helping draft appeals against forced abortion and sterilization in the rural area where he lived, which is part of Linyi city in Shandong province. (Chinese cities administer surrounding rural areas.) After a visit to Beijing, Chen was kidnapped and brought home by public security agents from Linyi, who placed him under illegal house arrest. When he persisted, he was roughed up by thugs, then arrested on charges--intentionally ludicrous, for a blind person--of destroying property and assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic. Defense lawyers who came from Beijing to see him were taken off a bus, beaten, and kept from attending his trial, which produced a sentence of four years and three months. On appeal a higher court did something that virtually never happens in China--it sent the case back for rehearing. But the local court reaffirmed the original sentence, which Chen is currently serving under harsh conditions.
How do cases like this happen in the up-to-date China of Hu Jintao? As James Mann pointed out in The China Fantasy, many American politicians and businessmen claim to believe that China's leaders are forging ahead against cultural and social obstacles to establish the rule of law and democracy. Yet here was a case that must have been well known to Hu Jintao and "Grandpa" Wen Jiabao (as the premier identified himself to children during the recent earthquake relief efforts), a case so troubling that even a Chinese court intervened, a case that Hu and Wen could have corrected if they had wanted to.
Instead, the official who presided over the railroading of Chen Guangcheng was promoted. This official, named Li Qun, is a typical product of modern China's ladder of success, the Chinese Youth League system that produced Hu Jintao. Like many in today's techno-bureaucratic leadership, Li Qun is broadly experienced and lavishly credentialed. He studied physics at Shandong University, worked in the Chinese Youth League, served as mayor in a smaller Shandong city, took an executive training course in economics at the Shandong Party School, led a group of Shandong cadres to take a special M.P.A. course at New Haven University in Connecticut, and enrolled in an in-service Ph.D. course in "management engineering" at Northwest Industrial University in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi province.
At the time of Chen Guangcheng's persecution, Li Qun was Party secretary of Linyi. In China the local Party secretary runs everything--the police, courts, media, the people's congress (a rubber-stamp representative body), the population-planning bureaucracy, the agriculture bureau, industry, commerce, and so on. Li Qun's joint appointments (besides his Party role) were as mayor, head of the people's congress, and head of the local Party school; he also chaired or assigned his deputies to chair coordinating committees that exist in every Chinese territorial unit on legal and political affairs, family planning, propaganda, and other key sectors.
This universal Chinese set-up--some scholars call it "de facto federalism"--has produced both China's remarkable economic surge and its environmental disasters and rights abuses. The regime gives local officials full powers, and holds them accountable to achieve a short list of priority tasks. The key benchmarks are high economic growth, close conformity with mandated annual birth rates, and low levels of what the regime calls social disorder, such as demonstrations and episodes of collective petitioning. Having too many local citizens visit Beijing to petition national authorities counts as a black mark. To keep their records clean, according to a 2005 Human Rights Watch report, local officials send "retrievers" to Beijing forcibly to repatriate their local citizens who have gone there to petition. These well-dressed young men wait across the street from the petition offices with their car doors open, waiting to kidnap local citizens and bundle them home, often for terms of forced labor. This was what happened to Chen when he petitioned for Linyi women in Beijing.
Chen Guangcheng's activities threatened to weaken Li Qun's record on two counts essential for Li's promotion: family planning and social disorder. When Chen didn't get the message from harassment and beatings, Li Qun either did--or like King Richard caused to be done--what needed to be done, and had Chen convicted. Apparently the Party's secretive internal personnel department, the Organization Department, approved: in 2007 Li Qun was promoted to the post of head of Propaganda Department of Shandong provincial party committee.
Another successful Youth League alumnus was in charge of Tibet during the recent disturbances. Before going to Tibet, Zhang Qingli--coincidentally a Shandong native like Li Qun--held county- and city-level posts in his home province, did a stint in the central CYL office in Beijing, and served in provincial-level posts in Gansu and Xinjiang, in China's far west. Like Li, Zhang garnered a variety of academic credentials along the way and worked some of the time in propaganda. In late 2005, he was posted as Party secretary to Tibet.
There Zhang pushed the third round of a multi-year "patriotic education campaign" under way since 1996, which requires Tibetan monks and nuns to thank the motherland (meaning China) for the gift of modernization and to denounce the Dalai Lama for "splittism." Mickey Spiegel explains in her essay in the collection China's Great Leap: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression that during such campaigns Party officials take over the monasteries, deciding who is promoted, what is published, and how daily rites are conducted. This time the Party tightened control even further by publishing a formal decree in July 2007 proclaiming that no incarnation of any lama would be valid in the future without government approval. This extended an existing practice. In 1995, the Party had named a Panchen Lama in violation of Tibetan religious procedures, taking custody of the incumbent recognized by most Tibetans and disappearing him from the public scene. And it had claimed the right to the final say in recognizing the future incarnation of the Dalai Lama. These are among the two highest lamas in Tibetan Buddhism. The "Measures on the Reincarnation of Living Buddhas," promulgated in 2007, extended this principle to the entire range of Tibetan religious leaders at even the lowest level.
During the patriotic education campaign, Zhang Qingli is said to have remarked that "the [Party] Central Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans." Such statements do not register as insulting among most Han Chinese, because they reflect the social Darwinist conviction that religions are superstitions and minority cultures are backward. Such faiths and cultures are expected naturally to dissolve as their adherents experience modernization.
Among Tibetans, on the other hand, the campaign against their religion generated dissatisfaction even more intense than that created by Han-dominated, environmentally insensitive economic development. For this reason--and to take advantage of the international attention generated by the upcoming Olympics--young monks carried out peaceful demonstrations in Lhasa starting on March 10, which was the anniversary of the uprising against Chinese occupation in 1959. When the demonstrations spread and turned violent, Zhang Qingli rushed home from a meeting in Beijing to convene a Party and government conference on restoring order. He told those assembled that "the Dalai [Chinese officials don't grant their enemies the honorific "lama"] is a wolf in a monk's robe, a monster with a human face but the heart of a beast; we are in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique, a life and death battle between us and the enemy." There followed a violent crackdown revealing, among other things, the failure of the designated civil order force, the People's Armed Police, to master the crowd-control techniques they were supposed to have been studying since the Tiananmen tragedy nearly two decades ago.
There is no reason to think that Zhang's career will suffer for exacerbating the split between Han and Tibetans. After all, China's top ruler, Hu Jintao, was promoted to the status of heir apparent in 1992 partly on the strength of his having declared martial law in Lhasa in 1989. The government publicly rewards leaders who show toughness because it wants to make sure people understand that it is determined to keep control.
In some political systems, Li Qun's promotion to the post of provincial propaganda chief might count as being kicked upstairs. Not in China: propaganda is one of the most important domains in the Chinese party-state. It is thanks to the success of China's propaganda work that public assent is procured not only by repression, and runs both wide and deep. As Anne-Marie Brady demonstrates in a superb study of this central and hidden part of the Chinese system, the surface diversity of the Chinese media hides the guiding hand of a high-level Party office in Beijing called the Central Propaganda Department, which works its will across the whole spectrum of activities in media, education, entertainment--and also in sports. Deliciously, Brady reveals that the department is funded partly by a 3 percent tax on enterprises ranging from bookstores to karaoke bars, golf courses, and bowling alleys, because all these units fall within its orbit of control; and it uses these funds partly to support Party and army publications, rural bookstores, literature prizes, and social science research. She does not say whether the Beijing Olympic Committee is also paying this tax, but it may well be doing so, since sports are under the partial control of the propaganda system.
Brady reveals that China's central propagandists have studied the theories of "manufacturing consent" by Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, and have learned from media critics such as Noam Chomsky, and--although she does not make quite this ultimate ironic point--emulate such Western visionaries of popular journalism as Rupert Murdoch. They know how diversity and contention within a permitted range of subjects render invisible the subjects forbidden by the regime and placed outside the perimeter; how naming and framing place inconvenient facts in a desired light. The department intervenes at all levels of the media hierarchy through a system of news guidance, post-publication review, and reward and punishment. Its most effective tool is a traditional Chinese invention rather than a Western import: a "you know what we mean" style of regulation that allows experimentation, tolerates ambiguity, and then punishes retroactively and arbitrarily.
The efflorescence of creativity that foreign visitors will see in Beijing in August is not a challenge to Party control. It enables that control. The lively art and music scenes, colorful newsstands, crowded bookstores, stylish clothing, experimental dance, innovative architecture, sexy advertising, rampant consumerism, luxurious housing, ebullient schlock, even the considerable scope for academic inquiry: this lightly patrolled free zone is not the antithesis but the twin of the permanent crackdown on the political frontier, where the few who insist on testing the regime are crowded to the cultural margin and generally ignored. In this sense the energetic new Chinese art that has caught the imagination of Western buyers, with its pictorial irony and cynicism, repudiation of history, detachment from the world, and love of stunts, is not the challenge to those in power it is sometimes construed to be. Rather, it is a secret joke that the regime shares with the artists and their audience--part of a new social contract that allows the children to have their sly fun so long as the grown-ups run the house.
Brady argues that the end result of this sophisticated cultural programming differs little from the mass media in the West, where just as in China nothing important is discussed. Like American TV viewers and tabloid readers transfixed by the photo shoot of the teenage star Miley Cyrus and the debate over whether to lift the federal gas tax for the summer driving season, Chinese readers feel they are living in an environment of freedom. The difference is that even those motivated to do so have no way to break into the monopoly circle that decides on the fundamental issues that confront their society.
III.
The Beijing Olympics have never been anything but a conscious part of this strategy--what Brady nicely calls a campaign of mass distraction. Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China is a grudgingly admiring analysis by communications specialists in the West of the Beijing organizers' strategies for "seizing the platform," shaping the space, and "controlling the narrative." A central theme is that the Olympics redefine citizenship--both Chinese and foreign--as consumership, abetting the depoliticization of public life that lies at the heart of China's post-Mao propaganda strategy.
Indeed, the Beijing Olympics mark the full mastery of marketing techniques by Chinese bureaucrats. According to Xu Guoqi, "The Beijing organizing committee hopes that through merchandising, sponsorships, and other commercial applications, China's logo will by and large pay for the Games." (This hope may have failed, given the escalating costs noted by domestic critics.) Authorized vendors have sold zillions of dolls, keychains, T-shirts, Swatch watches, papercuts, and telephones representing the five Olympic mascots--the saccharine, symbolically laden, and cutely named fuwa. The official game logo, a running stick figure against a red background, has been crammed with meanings: the running man is both winning a race and throwing his arms out in welcome; the shape of his body resembles the Chinese character for jing in Beijing; and the red background evokes a traditional Chinese chop by which people used to sign their names on documents and precious art works.
To be sure, the Olympics so far have not entirely worked out the way the planners intended. Beijing's bid in 1993 for the 2000 games was defeated at least partly on human rights grounds (although Frank Ching implies in China's Great Leap that bribery from the winning city of Sydney had more to do with it). It is not clear whether Beijing made explicit human rights commitments in its second bid. Sharon K. Hom notes, in China's Great Leap, that despite numerous requests, the host city contract has never been made public. Brady says foreign p.r. consultants advised Chinese officials to mention human rights in the bid document, and Brownell reveals that they debated at the very high vice-premier level whether to do so, deciding in the end to keep such mentions informal. This may explain a remark--often cited by critics--made around that time by Liu Jingmin, vice president of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, who said that allowing Beijing to host the Games would "help the development of human rights. " Whether or not human rights were explicitly included, Beijing certainly made pledges that it would not fulfill. China's Great Leap documents non-compliance with all four elements of the published 2002 Beijing Olympic Action Plan: Green Olympics, High-Tech Olympics, Free and Open Olympics, and People's Olympics. Even the logo has evoked ironic caricatures, including one in which the red running man is the bloody silhouette of a firing-squad victim.
The campaigns to embarrass China over the 2008 Olympics have been as long in the works as the Games themselves. From the moment the Games were awarded to Beijing in July 2001, human rights advocates, instead of calling for a boycott, began planning to use the event to ramp up pressure on the Chinese government. Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China set up special websites tracking the Beijing organizing committee's failure to make good its commitments. (I am on the Asia advisory committee of the former and am board co-chair of the latter.) The Committee to Protect Journalists issued a series of reports on violations of press freedom. Amnesty International's "Olympics Countdown" series has tracked violations over the two-year period leading to the games. Chinese Human Rights Defenders has issued an "Olympic Watch" series of press releases. The Save Darfur campaign and an offshoot, Olympic Dream for Darfur, pressed China to address the Darfur problem via the link between Beijing and Khartoum. Advocacy groups recently demonstrated along the route of the Olympic torch, clashing with blue- and-white-suited Chinese escorts who were drawn from the student body of the People's Armed Police academy.
All this is also propaganda, of course--human rights groups prefer the term "advocacy"; but precisely for that reason it is a mystery why the Chinese leaders and the IOC ever thought they could get away with throwing a party to celebrate China's accomplishments at which no one would mention China's shortcomings. Why did China put its face out to be slapped? And why did the IOC abet them in doing so? Evidently both parties were blinded by the charm of their own blarney, the line that sports is only sports.
But in the end this miscalculation has not mattered much. In the Chinese leaders' accurate realpolitik analysis, they had already stared down Western human rights pressure after Tiananmen, defeated Bill Clinton's "human rights conditionality" in 1994, rolled back post-Tiananmen sanctions, forged alliances with other rightsviolating states to pull out the teeth of the United Nations Human Rights Council, and pushed Western criticism into the confidential government-to-government "human rights dialogue" and "private diplomacy" channels where there is no fear of real action. The West's economic interdependence with China has become so intense that an Olympic boycott--or indeed any effective sanction against China--has become unthinkable.
At home, if the government cannot have Western approval, it can make stone soup out of disapproval by playing the criticisms as an attack on the pride of the nation. This official attitude was well expressed in a book that Chen Guangcheng's persecutor, Li Qun, published in 2004, well before the Olympic controversies had reached high pitch. During his studies at New Haven University in 2000, Li Qun did an internship in the office of Mayor John DeStefano Jr., and after his return he published a book unforgettably titled I Was a Mayor's Assistant in America. He described his studies in America as a "political test" that confirmed his confidence in the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics. "Most Americans," Li wrote, "are friendly to China, although they do not understand it very well. But a small group of politicians strike the banners of democracy and human rights to critique us constantly by their own standards, distort things, and interfere with our domestic affairs. Their real purpose is not to protect the so-called human rights but to use this pretext to influence and limit China's healthy economic growth and to prevent China's wealth and power from threatening their world hegemony."
There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of Li's sentiments, clichéd though they are, or the degree to which they represent the views of many Chinese inside China and out. Coming to the United States and seeing how things work here does not necessarily shake the faith of Chinese officials, or students, in their country's way of doing things. Quite remarkably, and in general for the better, tens of thousands of Chinese students have returned home from the West to play their willing roles in academia, the media, business, and other sectors, accepting subordination to the ruling party and its national project.
Thus it is not only China's growing military and economic power that renders it less and less vulnerable to human rights advocacy, which depends on international reputational costs. Perhaps even more importantly, the government is protected by its success in shaping its own public's reaction to the criticism. Indeed, the regime faces more risk in yielding to Western criticism than in being subjected to it. The audiences that matter are not in the United States and Europe, but in China and the Third World. Even the main Olympic sponsors--GE, Coca-Cola, Kodak, McDonald's, Visa, and seven other American and foreign companies, who are front and center in the eyes of international consumers--have decided to hunker down and absorb whatever hits cannot be avoided in order to protect their enormous long-range stakes in China. This is an almost unimaginably large market, and a market that remembers. Name and shame works with countries dependent on the West, but China is no longer such a country.
Xu Guoqi raises the possibility that the Olympics will lead to the transformation of the Chinese regime the way the Seoul Games in 1988 brought on Korean democratization. True, the regime this year has suffered a series of what some Chinese see as cosmological portents--a crippling snowstorm, Tibetan unrest, and the huge Sichuan earthquake. The leaders certainly react to any such challenge, and much smaller ones, as if their rule is fragile. Yet sophisticated crisis management and canny media spin have earned the government broad public support each time. Even if an unexpected event occurs in August--something security agencies have been gearing up to prevent--the likely consequence will be to strengthen the regime's already robust grip on power. Assertive and unapologetic, the new and future China now struts the stage. Its character dovetails with what is reported to be the forceful personality of the designated future leader, Xi Jinping, currently the vice president, who is slated to succeed Hu Jintao in 2012.
This is modern China. It is not what we imagined it would be when Richard Nixon wrote forty years ago that we should not leave China "forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors," and started us down the path of engagement. When we wondered all these years whether China would modernize or not, Westernize or not, become civilized or not, we were asking the wrong questions, making the wrong distinctions. What we got instead is a China that is both proud and resentful, open and closed, like us yet not at all like us. We used our three wishes and now we must live with what we got. The onetime sick man of Asia is in exuberant health--that is the intended message of the Beijing Olympics, and the unintended one.
Andrew J. Nathan teaches at Columbia University. He is a co-editor of How East Asians View Democracy (Columbia University Press).
1.7.08
BIOGRAPHY R.I.P.
The death of life writing
Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes
Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. "Sclerosis" might be nearer.
Sales, it's true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it's worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling's Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.
However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch's Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials. Since becoming a biographer 15 years ago - most recently of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot - I have read widely within the genre and with professional attention. I also teach on the MA in life writing at UEA, which aims to give would-be biographers a solid grounding in their chosen art. And I get hundreds of titles sent to me every year for review. I have to say I am struck by their recent falling-off. Of course there are always stand-outs, even in a thin year such as 2007 (Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton and Rosemary Hill's Pugin), and 2008 is shaping up to be better, with new work from Richard Holmes and Michael Holroyd in the autumn. But the general standard, the mean, the middling, seems to have sunk to a listless low.
Let me give you a taste of what I am sent each week. There are endless lives of saucy 18th-century society ladies, even though it is a full 10 years since the surprise hit Georgiana by Amanda Foreman opened up that particular realm. (The worst moment was receiving a biography of Georgiana's sister, Harriet.) There are plenty of royal mistresses, to the extent that one wonders if there is a boudoir somewhere where they sit all day doing their hair, waiting to be called forward for active biographical duty. Lives on the edge of empire are popular too, probably in response to the academy's continuing interest in all things postcolonial. So each week you can be guaranteed stories about people who ran little kingdoms in clammy parts of the globe and/or were worshipped as gods by confused locals.
While there is a respectable rationale for doing these minor lives, grounded in the argument that hidden or forgotten subjects deserve their restorative moment in the sun, the real reason is more pragmatic. The fact is that anyone really important has already been done, probably several times. The 19th and 20th centuries have long been harvested for any royal, writer, actor, painter or soldier whose life and work could conceivably yield 350 pages of serviceable prose. (That's another problem: the misguided belief that writing a biography requires nothing more than journeyman skill when it comes to putting one word in front of another.) For a while, the 18th century appeared fertile, with its combination of ebullient consumerism and unbuttoned sexuality seeming to offer an easy parallel to our own. Now, though, it is all fished out. Go back any further than 1700 and you run into the problem not just of finding the sources, but of making sense of them. People in the early modern period had such different ideas about what it meant to be a self, especially in relation to others, that trying to corral them into the kind of unfolding psychodrama expected by the modern biography reader becomes tricky, unless you're prepared to gloss like crazy.
The least imaginative response to this lack of good new subjects is simply to go back to the big lives and do them over - and over - again. You can justify this by an appeal to the idea that each decade (actually, every four years might be nearer) needs its own Dickens or Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to this convenient way of thinking, dressing up old subjects in new clothes becomes playful and postmodern, rather than just desperate. Yet Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary, London University, whose The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection reached the Samuel Johnson shortlist two years ago, warns against being taken in by this sleight of hand. "What often happens is that a perfectly solid biography from 1978 gets rewritten with an eye to the intellectual moment, without the addition of a single bit of new information." The result: a George Eliot for the New Labour age (I plead guilty), or a queer Queen Victoria for the noughties, or the six wives of Henry VIII refashioned as the post-feminist heroines from Sex and the City.
Why doesn't anyone say or do something about these acts of biographical cannibalism? According to literary agent Andrew Lownie, who runs the Biographers' Club (a networking organisation for practitioners), it's because the power in publishing companies has decisively passed from the commissioning editors to the sales people. "Their thinking is, if something was once a hit, then let's try it again, even though clearly there's a law of diminishing returns. Anything new or different is looked on with suspicion." Lownie's theory is confirmed by the recent experience of one writer I spoke to. Having produced a first biography that punched well above its weight, he has been looking forward to writing his second, this time on a playwright whose work he knows well. His publishers, though, are having none of it and have suggested instead that he try a life of ... Graham Greene. That Norman Sherry's authorised multi-decker Life has sucked every last shred of marrow from Greene's tired old bones seems scarcely to matter.
What makes it doubly strange is that biography as a genre has a tradition of lively experimentation. Consider John Aubrey's Brief Lives, written in the lee of the civil war. If published today, its zany mix of biography and autobiography, gossip and scholarship would be hailed as wonderfully postmodern. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians of 1918 is a fine example of the short, pithy group biographies that are making something of a comeback. These are the fresh, wayward models that I ask my students to consider when they begin their own biographical projects. (Anyone who suggests embarking on a cradle-to-grave narrative of a royal mistress goes to the back of the class.)
In the interests of balance, I should report that it is not only Hamilton who remains bullish about the state of biography. When I asked Claire Tomalin, the biographer of Austen, Pepys and Hardy among others, she could see no reason to worry. Michael Holroyd agrees that "something has definitely changed", though stops short of calling it a crisis. His reading is that popular history and misery memoirs have temporarily knocked biography off its top spot in the non-fiction hierarchy, and that it's probably a question of waiting out the cycle. Michael Prodger, literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph, agrees that the golden age of biography, in which the publication of fat lives of important people by leading writers were automatically given the hushed attention due to a major minor cultural event, has probably passed. But he warns against uncritical nostalgia: "The fact is that there has always been a second division of biography, good enough without being distinguished. These nearly-books are always with us."
The responses of publishers were more upbeat. This could be because they are obliged to sound perky in public, or it may be that being on the receiving end of hundreds of proposals every year gives them a helpfully elevated view. Thus Jenny Uglow, editorial director of Chatto & Windus, herself a distinguished biographer, reports that "interesting ideas are still coming in, although perhaps we're having to look harder for them than we used to". Arabella Pike, meanwhile, who heads up a distinguished biography list at HarperPress, is justly proud of Linda Colley's Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which came out last year. An intellectually bold book, Elizabeth Marsh sets itself the task of plotting "the world in the life" of a humble British woman in the 18th century whose own history happened to collide with that of Britain's emerging empire. It is a fascinating book, which speaks straight to the current preoccupation with globalisation, written by one of our leading academic historians.
It has not, however, so far made it on to any of the shortlists for the major literary prizes. The reluctance of prize juries to get to grips with books that do not yield up their charms as easily as a royal mistress in an over-scented boudoir is not something that surprises Holroyd, who believes that scholarly and innovative biographies are increasingly overlooked in favour of texts that, although fluent and timely, are closer to journalism. "One used to award literary prizes to the 'tortoise' book, the one that had taken years of archive work but was never going to be a popular hit," he recalls. These days, by contrast, juries seem keener to make sure that a crowd-pleasing title wins on their watch. Stories slipping out from judging rooms over the past couple of years suggest a growing wariness of books that appear too long, complex, or perhaps simply good-mannered to beg for easy love.
Whenever two or three biographers are gathered together, it isn't long before the names "Amanda Foreman" and "Georgiana" come up. The fact is that much of the devaluing of the biographer's skill can be dated to 10 years ago when Foreman's first book, a biography of the 18th-century Duchess of Devonshire, became a publishing phenomenon. By choosing to be photographed nude behind a pile of books, and by allowing her own life story (starry father, tricky adolescence) to become as important as the person she was writing about, Foreman did an accidental disservice to biography in general, and to young women biographers in particular. Her success with a book written while still in her 20s created unrealistic expectations about the quality of work that young historians are regularly able to produce. Thirty years ago, no one would seriously think that many writers under 30, with or without a PhD, could publish books that would do anything other than slip shyly on to the market, acting as calling cards for the better work that was surely still to come.
But since Foreman's unprecedented hit, photogenic young women are routinely commissioned to produce biographies of equally camera-ready subjects, regardless of whether they are equipped to do so. The results are often intellectually slight and stylistically poor. (Although this isn't always so - in which case, some rather good young women biographers are probably missing out on the critical attention they deserve.) The press releases accompanying these books are always the same, breathlessly referencing what are seen to be the author's key qualifications for the job: she went to Oxford, has done some part-time modelling and has a hobby such as grape-treading or motor-car racing. Whether she knows anything at all about her subject (and, let's be clear, a PhD is not the same as a decade of immersion in the relevant archives) is neither here nor there.
If this seems a peculiar way for publishers to pick their authors, not to mention their subjects, then Lownie can explain. "If a writer is untried, then they are, paradoxically, more attractive than one who already has form. The moment you publish your first book, you leave a paper trail. People can look up your sales figures and make a judgment about whether you are worth giving another chance. A new author, by contrast, is an unknown quantity."
Even older and not especially winsome biographers routinely feel the effect of this "anyone can do anything" culture. I have lost count of the number of times a publishing professional has suggested that I might like to try my hand at a subject from the Tudor or Stuart period (on the unspoken assumption, presumably, that my usual patch, the Victorians, is all used up). If I reply that, while it sounds fascinating, I have absolutely no expertise in the politics or economics (let alone the handwriting, and theology) of the 16th and 17th centuries, I am regarded as a spoilsport and, quite possibly, missing the point.
Still, better to seem like a dreary pedant than a rank amateur. That's what happened six weeks ago to Veronica Buckley when it emerged that, during her writing of a biography about Mme de Maintenon (yet another royal mistress), she had mistaken a fictional diary of Louis XIV for the real thing. For Brotton, Buckley's mistake is the predictable outcome of a systematic deskilling over the past 30 years. "Today's biographers simply aren't immersing themselves in the manuscript sources, but are working instead with more accessible printed versions. As a result, they fail to develop the deep familiarity with their material which would prevent such basic errors."
This reluctance to consult the primary sources is not because biographers have suddenly become lazy or stupid - in general, they are a hunched and harried crew who have to be prized away from their desks - but because they are increasingly given unrealistic deadlines to complete work. It is not uncommon these days for a publisher to allow two years for the writing of a major life. In which case, there is really no time to do anything other than get the relevant books out of the London Library, skim read, and embark on a hectic round of cut and paste (see Raj Persaud, the time-pressed media-friendly psychiatrist who was last week suspended for three months as a result of his over-enthusiastic adoption of this method of "research"). The kind of professional start that Holroyd enjoyed as a young writer in the early 1960s, working for years on the Strachey archive before publishing his first major biography, would be unthinkable now. Chances are that his publishers would lose patience, cancel the contract, and find someone else who could promise to deliver in 18 months.
Yet, despite this gloomy picture of careless publishers lashing on inexperienced writers, there are signs that something important is about to happen in biography. Jonathan Bate of Warwick University, who wrote a prizewinning life of John Clare, declares that "we are on the edge of a paradigm shift". In fact, he believes that he has already seen the future, in the shape of books such as Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street and Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which come at familiar subjects from odd angles. "Instead of old-style literary biography, which tells the story from cradle to grave, these books focus in on just one episode in a life and, in the process, unfold a far richer story." Bate is also justly excited about Holroyd's upcoming A Strange Eventful History, which, rather than concentrating on a single subject, braids together the lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families in order to tell a broader story about theatre culture on the eve of the modern age.
Pike is also enthusiastic about the mutation of biography into new, hybrid forms. She points to the work of Robert Macfarlane, who recently blended ecological reportage with auto/biography so memorably in Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. She also admires Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, published this year, which cleverly melds family history and crime writing with social and literary history.
To this list I would add, from two years ago, Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards - winner of the Guardian first book award - which, like work by Macfarlane and Summerscale, managed to become both a critical and a popular success. The book is about Stuart Shorter, an alcoholic, homeless man whose life story seemed to demand that it be written backwards in order to catch a proper sense of chaos. Masters, a young first-timer now working on his second book, happily admits to being turned off by the idea of writing what most people understand as biography: "It would never cross my mind to do the life of someone dead or great - it would be completely beyond me." (If that sounds admirably modest, Masters also added, "Anyway, who on earth needs another biography of George Eliot - it's so boring!") Instead, he urges biographers to "get out and write about the people under their noses - the people whose stories may seem mundane, but whose daily existences are actually filled with Homeric struggles".
I'm guessing that Stuart was written with a small advance. In order for biographers to make these kinds of breakthroughs in form, it may mean taking less money than they might like. Certainly Uglow urges writers to stick up for the projects they want to pursue, even if they don't initially seem like money-spinners. Her own recent book, Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, is a masterclass in how these risks can pay off. A biographer with a firmer eye on the market might have passed up the opportunity to write about the artist whose visual renderings of country life went so far towards defining the way the early 19th century saw the natural world. Nonetheless, Bewick ended up as one of the big successes of 2006, mentioned in "book of the year" slots more than any other title.
None of these aforementioned books on its own represents Bate's "paradigm shift", but taken together they do suggest that something significant is astir. Nor should we be complacent that, when the biographical future does arrive, we will necessarily like or even recognise it. The first time I heard about Stuart from Masters's publicist, I thought it sounded glum and dull - a view shared by Masters's then agent, who refused even to take the manuscript out of the Jiffy bag (he was soon replaced). All one can hope, really, is that a small but growing band of writers are financially and intellectually brave enough to strip biography back to its first principle - the recording of lived experience - and consider that brief in the widest possible terms. And even if we don't at first enjoy their efforts, perhaps finding them tricky or strange, at least it means that we will be spared too many more visits from those royal mistresses with their come-hither smiles.
Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes
Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strongly, not least because it suggests a certain convulsive energy. "Sclerosis" might be nearer.
Sales, it's true, are still good, though showing signs of softening. According to Nielsen BookScan, literary biography reached an all-time high in 2005, but has since started to fall. General arts biographies are also down. However, to give an idea of how the non-fiction market as a whole has recently been bent out of shape, it's worth noting the exponential leap in celebrity memoir. Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling's Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.
However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch's Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials. Since becoming a biographer 15 years ago - most recently of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot - I have read widely within the genre and with professional attention. I also teach on the MA in life writing at UEA, which aims to give would-be biographers a solid grounding in their chosen art. And I get hundreds of titles sent to me every year for review. I have to say I am struck by their recent falling-off. Of course there are always stand-outs, even in a thin year such as 2007 (Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton and Rosemary Hill's Pugin), and 2008 is shaping up to be better, with new work from Richard Holmes and Michael Holroyd in the autumn. But the general standard, the mean, the middling, seems to have sunk to a listless low.
Let me give you a taste of what I am sent each week. There are endless lives of saucy 18th-century society ladies, even though it is a full 10 years since the surprise hit Georgiana by Amanda Foreman opened up that particular realm. (The worst moment was receiving a biography of Georgiana's sister, Harriet.) There are plenty of royal mistresses, to the extent that one wonders if there is a boudoir somewhere where they sit all day doing their hair, waiting to be called forward for active biographical duty. Lives on the edge of empire are popular too, probably in response to the academy's continuing interest in all things postcolonial. So each week you can be guaranteed stories about people who ran little kingdoms in clammy parts of the globe and/or were worshipped as gods by confused locals.
While there is a respectable rationale for doing these minor lives, grounded in the argument that hidden or forgotten subjects deserve their restorative moment in the sun, the real reason is more pragmatic. The fact is that anyone really important has already been done, probably several times. The 19th and 20th centuries have long been harvested for any royal, writer, actor, painter or soldier whose life and work could conceivably yield 350 pages of serviceable prose. (That's another problem: the misguided belief that writing a biography requires nothing more than journeyman skill when it comes to putting one word in front of another.) For a while, the 18th century appeared fertile, with its combination of ebullient consumerism and unbuttoned sexuality seeming to offer an easy parallel to our own. Now, though, it is all fished out. Go back any further than 1700 and you run into the problem not just of finding the sources, but of making sense of them. People in the early modern period had such different ideas about what it meant to be a self, especially in relation to others, that trying to corral them into the kind of unfolding psychodrama expected by the modern biography reader becomes tricky, unless you're prepared to gloss like crazy.
The least imaginative response to this lack of good new subjects is simply to go back to the big lives and do them over - and over - again. You can justify this by an appeal to the idea that each decade (actually, every four years might be nearer) needs its own Dickens or Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to this convenient way of thinking, dressing up old subjects in new clothes becomes playful and postmodern, rather than just desperate. Yet Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary, London University, whose The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection reached the Samuel Johnson shortlist two years ago, warns against being taken in by this sleight of hand. "What often happens is that a perfectly solid biography from 1978 gets rewritten with an eye to the intellectual moment, without the addition of a single bit of new information." The result: a George Eliot for the New Labour age (I plead guilty), or a queer Queen Victoria for the noughties, or the six wives of Henry VIII refashioned as the post-feminist heroines from Sex and the City.
Why doesn't anyone say or do something about these acts of biographical cannibalism? According to literary agent Andrew Lownie, who runs the Biographers' Club (a networking organisation for practitioners), it's because the power in publishing companies has decisively passed from the commissioning editors to the sales people. "Their thinking is, if something was once a hit, then let's try it again, even though clearly there's a law of diminishing returns. Anything new or different is looked on with suspicion." Lownie's theory is confirmed by the recent experience of one writer I spoke to. Having produced a first biography that punched well above its weight, he has been looking forward to writing his second, this time on a playwright whose work he knows well. His publishers, though, are having none of it and have suggested instead that he try a life of ... Graham Greene. That Norman Sherry's authorised multi-decker Life has sucked every last shred of marrow from Greene's tired old bones seems scarcely to matter.
What makes it doubly strange is that biography as a genre has a tradition of lively experimentation. Consider John Aubrey's Brief Lives, written in the lee of the civil war. If published today, its zany mix of biography and autobiography, gossip and scholarship would be hailed as wonderfully postmodern. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians of 1918 is a fine example of the short, pithy group biographies that are making something of a comeback. These are the fresh, wayward models that I ask my students to consider when they begin their own biographical projects. (Anyone who suggests embarking on a cradle-to-grave narrative of a royal mistress goes to the back of the class.)
In the interests of balance, I should report that it is not only Hamilton who remains bullish about the state of biography. When I asked Claire Tomalin, the biographer of Austen, Pepys and Hardy among others, she could see no reason to worry. Michael Holroyd agrees that "something has definitely changed", though stops short of calling it a crisis. His reading is that popular history and misery memoirs have temporarily knocked biography off its top spot in the non-fiction hierarchy, and that it's probably a question of waiting out the cycle. Michael Prodger, literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph, agrees that the golden age of biography, in which the publication of fat lives of important people by leading writers were automatically given the hushed attention due to a major minor cultural event, has probably passed. But he warns against uncritical nostalgia: "The fact is that there has always been a second division of biography, good enough without being distinguished. These nearly-books are always with us."
The responses of publishers were more upbeat. This could be because they are obliged to sound perky in public, or it may be that being on the receiving end of hundreds of proposals every year gives them a helpfully elevated view. Thus Jenny Uglow, editorial director of Chatto & Windus, herself a distinguished biographer, reports that "interesting ideas are still coming in, although perhaps we're having to look harder for them than we used to". Arabella Pike, meanwhile, who heads up a distinguished biography list at HarperPress, is justly proud of Linda Colley's Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, which came out last year. An intellectually bold book, Elizabeth Marsh sets itself the task of plotting "the world in the life" of a humble British woman in the 18th century whose own history happened to collide with that of Britain's emerging empire. It is a fascinating book, which speaks straight to the current preoccupation with globalisation, written by one of our leading academic historians.
It has not, however, so far made it on to any of the shortlists for the major literary prizes. The reluctance of prize juries to get to grips with books that do not yield up their charms as easily as a royal mistress in an over-scented boudoir is not something that surprises Holroyd, who believes that scholarly and innovative biographies are increasingly overlooked in favour of texts that, although fluent and timely, are closer to journalism. "One used to award literary prizes to the 'tortoise' book, the one that had taken years of archive work but was never going to be a popular hit," he recalls. These days, by contrast, juries seem keener to make sure that a crowd-pleasing title wins on their watch. Stories slipping out from judging rooms over the past couple of years suggest a growing wariness of books that appear too long, complex, or perhaps simply good-mannered to beg for easy love.
Whenever two or three biographers are gathered together, it isn't long before the names "Amanda Foreman" and "Georgiana" come up. The fact is that much of the devaluing of the biographer's skill can be dated to 10 years ago when Foreman's first book, a biography of the 18th-century Duchess of Devonshire, became a publishing phenomenon. By choosing to be photographed nude behind a pile of books, and by allowing her own life story (starry father, tricky adolescence) to become as important as the person she was writing about, Foreman did an accidental disservice to biography in general, and to young women biographers in particular. Her success with a book written while still in her 20s created unrealistic expectations about the quality of work that young historians are regularly able to produce. Thirty years ago, no one would seriously think that many writers under 30, with or without a PhD, could publish books that would do anything other than slip shyly on to the market, acting as calling cards for the better work that was surely still to come.
But since Foreman's unprecedented hit, photogenic young women are routinely commissioned to produce biographies of equally camera-ready subjects, regardless of whether they are equipped to do so. The results are often intellectually slight and stylistically poor. (Although this isn't always so - in which case, some rather good young women biographers are probably missing out on the critical attention they deserve.) The press releases accompanying these books are always the same, breathlessly referencing what are seen to be the author's key qualifications for the job: she went to Oxford, has done some part-time modelling and has a hobby such as grape-treading or motor-car racing. Whether she knows anything at all about her subject (and, let's be clear, a PhD is not the same as a decade of immersion in the relevant archives) is neither here nor there.
If this seems a peculiar way for publishers to pick their authors, not to mention their subjects, then Lownie can explain. "If a writer is untried, then they are, paradoxically, more attractive than one who already has form. The moment you publish your first book, you leave a paper trail. People can look up your sales figures and make a judgment about whether you are worth giving another chance. A new author, by contrast, is an unknown quantity."
Even older and not especially winsome biographers routinely feel the effect of this "anyone can do anything" culture. I have lost count of the number of times a publishing professional has suggested that I might like to try my hand at a subject from the Tudor or Stuart period (on the unspoken assumption, presumably, that my usual patch, the Victorians, is all used up). If I reply that, while it sounds fascinating, I have absolutely no expertise in the politics or economics (let alone the handwriting, and theology) of the 16th and 17th centuries, I am regarded as a spoilsport and, quite possibly, missing the point.
Still, better to seem like a dreary pedant than a rank amateur. That's what happened six weeks ago to Veronica Buckley when it emerged that, during her writing of a biography about Mme de Maintenon (yet another royal mistress), she had mistaken a fictional diary of Louis XIV for the real thing. For Brotton, Buckley's mistake is the predictable outcome of a systematic deskilling over the past 30 years. "Today's biographers simply aren't immersing themselves in the manuscript sources, but are working instead with more accessible printed versions. As a result, they fail to develop the deep familiarity with their material which would prevent such basic errors."
This reluctance to consult the primary sources is not because biographers have suddenly become lazy or stupid - in general, they are a hunched and harried crew who have to be prized away from their desks - but because they are increasingly given unrealistic deadlines to complete work. It is not uncommon these days for a publisher to allow two years for the writing of a major life. In which case, there is really no time to do anything other than get the relevant books out of the London Library, skim read, and embark on a hectic round of cut and paste (see Raj Persaud, the time-pressed media-friendly psychiatrist who was last week suspended for three months as a result of his over-enthusiastic adoption of this method of "research"). The kind of professional start that Holroyd enjoyed as a young writer in the early 1960s, working for years on the Strachey archive before publishing his first major biography, would be unthinkable now. Chances are that his publishers would lose patience, cancel the contract, and find someone else who could promise to deliver in 18 months.
Yet, despite this gloomy picture of careless publishers lashing on inexperienced writers, there are signs that something important is about to happen in biography. Jonathan Bate of Warwick University, who wrote a prizewinning life of John Clare, declares that "we are on the edge of a paradigm shift". In fact, he believes that he has already seen the future, in the shape of books such as Charles Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street and Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which come at familiar subjects from odd angles. "Instead of old-style literary biography, which tells the story from cradle to grave, these books focus in on just one episode in a life and, in the process, unfold a far richer story." Bate is also justly excited about Holroyd's upcoming A Strange Eventful History, which, rather than concentrating on a single subject, braids together the lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families in order to tell a broader story about theatre culture on the eve of the modern age.
Pike is also enthusiastic about the mutation of biography into new, hybrid forms. She points to the work of Robert Macfarlane, who recently blended ecological reportage with auto/biography so memorably in Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. She also admires Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, published this year, which cleverly melds family history and crime writing with social and literary history.
To this list I would add, from two years ago, Alexander Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards - winner of the Guardian first book award - which, like work by Macfarlane and Summerscale, managed to become both a critical and a popular success. The book is about Stuart Shorter, an alcoholic, homeless man whose life story seemed to demand that it be written backwards in order to catch a proper sense of chaos. Masters, a young first-timer now working on his second book, happily admits to being turned off by the idea of writing what most people understand as biography: "It would never cross my mind to do the life of someone dead or great - it would be completely beyond me." (If that sounds admirably modest, Masters also added, "Anyway, who on earth needs another biography of George Eliot - it's so boring!") Instead, he urges biographers to "get out and write about the people under their noses - the people whose stories may seem mundane, but whose daily existences are actually filled with Homeric struggles".
I'm guessing that Stuart was written with a small advance. In order for biographers to make these kinds of breakthroughs in form, it may mean taking less money than they might like. Certainly Uglow urges writers to stick up for the projects they want to pursue, even if they don't initially seem like money-spinners. Her own recent book, Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, is a masterclass in how these risks can pay off. A biographer with a firmer eye on the market might have passed up the opportunity to write about the artist whose visual renderings of country life went so far towards defining the way the early 19th century saw the natural world. Nonetheless, Bewick ended up as one of the big successes of 2006, mentioned in "book of the year" slots more than any other title.
None of these aforementioned books on its own represents Bate's "paradigm shift", but taken together they do suggest that something significant is astir. Nor should we be complacent that, when the biographical future does arrive, we will necessarily like or even recognise it. The first time I heard about Stuart from Masters's publicist, I thought it sounded glum and dull - a view shared by Masters's then agent, who refused even to take the manuscript out of the Jiffy bag (he was soon replaced). All one can hope, really, is that a small but growing band of writers are financially and intellectually brave enough to strip biography back to its first principle - the recording of lived experience - and consider that brief in the widest possible terms. And even if we don't at first enjoy their efforts, perhaps finding them tricky or strange, at least it means that we will be spared too many more visits from those royal mistresses with their come-hither smiles.
Prices? Fall????????????
Receding Prices: Could Oil Be Next?
By ROBERT SAMUELSON
Tired of high gasoline prices and rising foods costs? Well, here's a solution. Let's shoot the speculators. A chorus of politicians, including John McCain and Barack Obama, blames these financial slimeballs for piling into commodities markets and pushing prices to artificial and unconscionable levels.
Gosh, if only it were that simple.
Speculator-bashing is another exercise in scapegoating and grandstanding. Leading politicians either don't understand what's happening or don't want to acknowledge their own complicity.
Granted, raw material prices have exploded across the board. Between 2002 and 2007, oil rose 177%, corn 70%, copper 360%, and aluminum 95%. But that's just the point. Did "speculators" really cause all those increases? If so, why did some prices go up more than others? And what about steel? It rose 117% — and has increased further in 2008 — even though it isn't traded on commodities futures markets.
A better explanation is basic supply and demand. Despite America's slowdown, the world economy has boomed. Since 2002, annual growth has averaged 4.6%, the highest sustained rate since the 1960s, economist Michael Mussa of the Peterson Institute says.
By their nature, raw materials like food, energy, and minerals sustain the broader economy. They're not just frills. When unexpectedly high demand strains existing production, prices rise sharply as buyers scramble for scarce supplies.
That's what happened.
No one foresaw that China would grow at a 10% annual rate for more than a decade.
"Commodity producers just didn't invest enough," an analyst of Deutsche Bank, Joel Crane, says. In industry after industry, global buying has bumped up against production limits.
In 1999, surplus world oil capacity totaled 5 million barrels a day on global consumption of 76 mbd, reckons the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Now, the surplus is about 2 mbd — and much of that is high-sulfur oil not prized by refiners — on consumption of 86 mbd.
Or take non-ferrous metals, such as copper and aluminum. "You had a long period of underinvestment in these industries," an economist of Global Insight, John Mothersole, says. For some metals, the collapse of the Soviet Union threw added production — previously destined for tanks, planes, and ships — onto world markets. Prices plunged as surpluses grew. But Mr. Mothersole says, "the accelerating growth in India and China eliminated the overhang." China now accounts for up to 80% of the world's annual increased use of some metals.
Commodity price increases vary, because markets vary. Rice isn't zinc. No surprise. But "speculators" played little role in these price run-ups. Who are these offensive souls? Well, they often don't fit the stereotype of sleazy high rollers: Many manage pension funds or university and foundation endowments.
Their trading might drive up prices if they were investing in stocks or real estate.
But commodity investing is different.
Investors generally don't buy the physical goods, whether oil or corn. Instead, they trade "futures contracts," which are bets on future prices in, say, six months.
For every trader betting on higher prices, another is betting on lower prices.
These trades are matched. In the stock market, all investors — buyers and sellers — can profit in a rising market, and all can lose in a falling market. In futures markets, one trader's gain is another's loss.
Futures contracts enable commercial consumers and producers of commodities to hedge. Airlines can lock in fuel prices by buying oil futures; farmers can lock in selling prices for their grain by selling grain futures. The markets work because numerous financial players — "speculators" in it for the money — can take the other side of hedgers' trades. But the frantic trading doesn't directly affect the physical supplies of raw materials. In theory, high futures prices might reduce physical supplies by inspiring hoarding.
But that's not happening now.
Inventories are modest. World wheat stocks, compared with consumption, are near historic lows.
Recently, the giant mining company Rio Tinto disclosed an average 85% price increase in iron ore for its Chinese customers.
That affirmed that physical supply and demand — not financial shenanigans — is setting prices: Iron ore isn't traded on futures markets.
The crucial question is whether these price increases will continue or ease as demand abates and investments in new capacity expand supply. Prices for some commodities — such as lead and nickel — have receded. Could oil be next?
Politicians promise to tighten regulation of futures markets, but futures markets aren't the main problem. Scarcities are. Government subsidies for corn-based ethanol have increased food prices by diverting more grain into biofuels. A third of this year's American corn crop could go to ethanol. Restrictions on oil drilling in America have reduced global production and put upward pressure on prices. If politicians wish to point fingers of blame, they should start with themselves.
By ROBERT SAMUELSON
Tired of high gasoline prices and rising foods costs? Well, here's a solution. Let's shoot the speculators. A chorus of politicians, including John McCain and Barack Obama, blames these financial slimeballs for piling into commodities markets and pushing prices to artificial and unconscionable levels.
Gosh, if only it were that simple.
Speculator-bashing is another exercise in scapegoating and grandstanding. Leading politicians either don't understand what's happening or don't want to acknowledge their own complicity.
Granted, raw material prices have exploded across the board. Between 2002 and 2007, oil rose 177%, corn 70%, copper 360%, and aluminum 95%. But that's just the point. Did "speculators" really cause all those increases? If so, why did some prices go up more than others? And what about steel? It rose 117% — and has increased further in 2008 — even though it isn't traded on commodities futures markets.
A better explanation is basic supply and demand. Despite America's slowdown, the world economy has boomed. Since 2002, annual growth has averaged 4.6%, the highest sustained rate since the 1960s, economist Michael Mussa of the Peterson Institute says.
By their nature, raw materials like food, energy, and minerals sustain the broader economy. They're not just frills. When unexpectedly high demand strains existing production, prices rise sharply as buyers scramble for scarce supplies.
That's what happened.
No one foresaw that China would grow at a 10% annual rate for more than a decade.
"Commodity producers just didn't invest enough," an analyst of Deutsche Bank, Joel Crane, says. In industry after industry, global buying has bumped up against production limits.
In 1999, surplus world oil capacity totaled 5 million barrels a day on global consumption of 76 mbd, reckons the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Now, the surplus is about 2 mbd — and much of that is high-sulfur oil not prized by refiners — on consumption of 86 mbd.
Or take non-ferrous metals, such as copper and aluminum. "You had a long period of underinvestment in these industries," an economist of Global Insight, John Mothersole, says. For some metals, the collapse of the Soviet Union threw added production — previously destined for tanks, planes, and ships — onto world markets. Prices plunged as surpluses grew. But Mr. Mothersole says, "the accelerating growth in India and China eliminated the overhang." China now accounts for up to 80% of the world's annual increased use of some metals.
Commodity price increases vary, because markets vary. Rice isn't zinc. No surprise. But "speculators" played little role in these price run-ups. Who are these offensive souls? Well, they often don't fit the stereotype of sleazy high rollers: Many manage pension funds or university and foundation endowments.
Their trading might drive up prices if they were investing in stocks or real estate.
But commodity investing is different.
Investors generally don't buy the physical goods, whether oil or corn. Instead, they trade "futures contracts," which are bets on future prices in, say, six months.
For every trader betting on higher prices, another is betting on lower prices.
These trades are matched. In the stock market, all investors — buyers and sellers — can profit in a rising market, and all can lose in a falling market. In futures markets, one trader's gain is another's loss.
Futures contracts enable commercial consumers and producers of commodities to hedge. Airlines can lock in fuel prices by buying oil futures; farmers can lock in selling prices for their grain by selling grain futures. The markets work because numerous financial players — "speculators" in it for the money — can take the other side of hedgers' trades. But the frantic trading doesn't directly affect the physical supplies of raw materials. In theory, high futures prices might reduce physical supplies by inspiring hoarding.
But that's not happening now.
Inventories are modest. World wheat stocks, compared with consumption, are near historic lows.
Recently, the giant mining company Rio Tinto disclosed an average 85% price increase in iron ore for its Chinese customers.
That affirmed that physical supply and demand — not financial shenanigans — is setting prices: Iron ore isn't traded on futures markets.
The crucial question is whether these price increases will continue or ease as demand abates and investments in new capacity expand supply. Prices for some commodities — such as lead and nickel — have receded. Could oil be next?
Politicians promise to tighten regulation of futures markets, but futures markets aren't the main problem. Scarcities are. Government subsidies for corn-based ethanol have increased food prices by diverting more grain into biofuels. A third of this year's American corn crop could go to ethanol. Restrictions on oil drilling in America have reduced global production and put upward pressure on prices. If politicians wish to point fingers of blame, they should start with themselves.
Obama & Bush
Can Obama rescue Bush?
If the Democrat wins the White House and does his job right, he just might make his predecessor look good.
Jonah Goldberg
Breaking news! The ultimate White House insider plans a tell-all book about the Bush years. Boasting unprecedented access to the president's thinking, it will run counter to almost everything we've been told about Bush's radical presidency.
Who will be the latest to break the code of silence after former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan? George W. Bush.
At least that's what went through my mind listening to the president during a meeting with a small group of journalists in the Oval Office on Monday. The session, maddeningly and often foolishly punctuated by long, off-the-record musings and soliloquies, mostly dealt with foreign policy.
That's hardly surprising. At the end of their run, presidents usually become preoccupied with world affairs -- an area in which they have a much freer hand. On Capitol Hill these days, the only way a Bush proposal will see the light of day is if it arrives concealed in a pizza delivery box.
Dressed in a pale blue suit with a crisp blue tie, the president seemed to be in high spirits as he discussed developments in North Korea and other diplomatic initiatives, crushing my hopes for a poignant "Bush in winter" column. "When I write my book," the president teased, people will understand how much behind-the-scenes diplomacy went on during this administration.
I'm sure he's right. In fact, if only a fraction of what he had to say was remotely accurate, then the conventional bleats about unilateralism, war lust and cowboyishness will go down in history as the excessive caterwauling of an imaginative and hyper-partisan opposition.
Indeed, President Bush's reputation is not as solidified as his detractors and fans think.
If Iraq becomes a stable and democratizing nation, his presidency will look much better than it does today. But if Iraq Balkanizes or Lebanon-izes, then Democratic rhetoric about the "worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history" will gain descriptive heft. Only time will tell.
But whether it is ultimately deemed a failure or a success, there is one inconvenient fact of the Bush presidency that should prove dismaying to those who've invested so much in demonizing it: It isn't that special.
Many of its supposedly radical features fit neatly in the mainstream of American presidential history. Extraordinary rendition? That practice (in which we send terrorists to foreign countries to be interrogated under laxer rules) began under President Clinton. Aggressive interrogations, for good or ill, surely predate 2001. Holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo without benefit of a trial? As terrorism expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes in National Review, we were doing that under the first President Bush and under Clinton to innocent Haitian refugees, who got even less due process than we give captured enemy combatants.
Even the invasion of Iraq will probably seem to historians, in part, as a continuation of trends begun in the Persian Gulf War and extended by Clinton's (and Britain's) attacks in 1998.
On the domestic front, Bush broadly expanded federal spending on education, signed campaign finance reform and orchestrated a huge expansion of healthcare entitlements with his prescription drug benefit. Whatever the merits of those policies, it's unlikely that historians will see them as a radical, right-wing break from the Clinton years.
The more interesting question is how radical a break with the Bush years the next president will represent.
If John McCain wins the election, the continuity will be more obvious. McCain would inch leftward on most domestic issues, and rightward on a few. He doubtless would continue the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, though his methods might vary.
The larger question is about Barack Obama, who at times promises revolutionary, if not messianic, change. With a potentially huge Democratic majority in Congress, Obama might indeed produce a radical change from the Bush (and Clinton and Bush and Reagan) years on domestic issues.
But what about Iraq? A growing chorus of foreign policy experts, including Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh (coauthors of "After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy") and the New Yorker's George Packer, are starting to argue -- much as Obama's own foreign policy advisors have for a while -- that his foreign policy promises will not survive contact with post-election reality.
Already, Obama is changing his tune from his old, and irresponsibly heated, rhetoric about "immediate" withdrawal to talking about the need for policies that would adapt to the improving conditions in Iraq. Given Obama's ideological leanings and inexperience, there's clearly plenty of room for him to make costly mistakes. But odds are he too would come to realize that America needs to win the war on terror and succeed in Iraq. Hence the greatest irony. A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush's memoir a success story.
If the Democrat wins the White House and does his job right, he just might make his predecessor look good.
Jonah Goldberg
Breaking news! The ultimate White House insider plans a tell-all book about the Bush years. Boasting unprecedented access to the president's thinking, it will run counter to almost everything we've been told about Bush's radical presidency.
Who will be the latest to break the code of silence after former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan? George W. Bush.
At least that's what went through my mind listening to the president during a meeting with a small group of journalists in the Oval Office on Monday. The session, maddeningly and often foolishly punctuated by long, off-the-record musings and soliloquies, mostly dealt with foreign policy.
That's hardly surprising. At the end of their run, presidents usually become preoccupied with world affairs -- an area in which they have a much freer hand. On Capitol Hill these days, the only way a Bush proposal will see the light of day is if it arrives concealed in a pizza delivery box.
Dressed in a pale blue suit with a crisp blue tie, the president seemed to be in high spirits as he discussed developments in North Korea and other diplomatic initiatives, crushing my hopes for a poignant "Bush in winter" column. "When I write my book," the president teased, people will understand how much behind-the-scenes diplomacy went on during this administration.
I'm sure he's right. In fact, if only a fraction of what he had to say was remotely accurate, then the conventional bleats about unilateralism, war lust and cowboyishness will go down in history as the excessive caterwauling of an imaginative and hyper-partisan opposition.
Indeed, President Bush's reputation is not as solidified as his detractors and fans think.
If Iraq becomes a stable and democratizing nation, his presidency will look much better than it does today. But if Iraq Balkanizes or Lebanon-izes, then Democratic rhetoric about the "worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history" will gain descriptive heft. Only time will tell.
But whether it is ultimately deemed a failure or a success, there is one inconvenient fact of the Bush presidency that should prove dismaying to those who've invested so much in demonizing it: It isn't that special.
Many of its supposedly radical features fit neatly in the mainstream of American presidential history. Extraordinary rendition? That practice (in which we send terrorists to foreign countries to be interrogated under laxer rules) began under President Clinton. Aggressive interrogations, for good or ill, surely predate 2001. Holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo without benefit of a trial? As terrorism expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes in National Review, we were doing that under the first President Bush and under Clinton to innocent Haitian refugees, who got even less due process than we give captured enemy combatants.
Even the invasion of Iraq will probably seem to historians, in part, as a continuation of trends begun in the Persian Gulf War and extended by Clinton's (and Britain's) attacks in 1998.
On the domestic front, Bush broadly expanded federal spending on education, signed campaign finance reform and orchestrated a huge expansion of healthcare entitlements with his prescription drug benefit. Whatever the merits of those policies, it's unlikely that historians will see them as a radical, right-wing break from the Clinton years.
The more interesting question is how radical a break with the Bush years the next president will represent.
If John McCain wins the election, the continuity will be more obvious. McCain would inch leftward on most domestic issues, and rightward on a few. He doubtless would continue the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, though his methods might vary.
The larger question is about Barack Obama, who at times promises revolutionary, if not messianic, change. With a potentially huge Democratic majority in Congress, Obama might indeed produce a radical change from the Bush (and Clinton and Bush and Reagan) years on domestic issues.
But what about Iraq? A growing chorus of foreign policy experts, including Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh (coauthors of "After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy") and the New Yorker's George Packer, are starting to argue -- much as Obama's own foreign policy advisors have for a while -- that his foreign policy promises will not survive contact with post-election reality.
Already, Obama is changing his tune from his old, and irresponsibly heated, rhetoric about "immediate" withdrawal to talking about the need for policies that would adapt to the improving conditions in Iraq. Given Obama's ideological leanings and inexperience, there's clearly plenty of room for him to make costly mistakes. But odds are he too would come to realize that America needs to win the war on terror and succeed in Iraq. Hence the greatest irony. A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush's memoir a success story.
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