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Caudillismo

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Juan Manuel de Rosas Ruled Argentina 1929 to 1952

Juan Manuel de Rosas Ruled Argentina 1929 to 1952

When we think of South America, we usually think of the military dictators, or caudillos, who seemed to rule most of the time. Why is it that the continent has had so much difficulty transitioning to a democratic form of government? I think the reason goes all the way back to the expulsion of Spain from her colonies. The Spanish forces were sent back, but the criollos were still very much in charge. They were mostly white, with rarely some Indian admixture, but they held the reins of power. Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and Bernardo O’Higgins were all criollos. All the big landowners, almost without exception, were criollos. Only rarely did an Indian come into power, and then usually only for a short time.

The armies of the South American countries were, until late in the Twentieth Century, pretty much in charge. They acted as a kind of Praetorian Guard to their favorites, who were usually the caudillos. God help them, however, when the favorites were no longer favored. Eric Lawlor in his excellent book In Bolivia enumerates the country’s heads of state who met violent ends:

The list of presidents and former presidents to die violently is extensive. Pedro Blanco was assassinated in 1829; Sucre in 1830; Jorge Córdova in 1861; Belzú in 1866; Melgarejo in 1871; Augustín Morales in 1872; Hilarión Daza in 1894; and José Manuel Pando in 1917. Nor did the tradition end in 1946: President René Barrientos died in a highly suspicious helicopter crash in 1969, and former President Torres was gunned down in Buenos Aires in 1972. Becoming chief of state in this country often amounts to signing one’s death warrant.

Actually, the most spectacular Bolivian President’s demise was that of Gualberto Villaroel, who was hanged by a mob on a lamp post across the street from the Presidential Palace in 1946. As Lawlor write, “A sobering sight for incumbent presidents, it [the lamp post, which still exists] may explain why so many Bolivian communities are still without streetlights.”

Bolivia might be the most spectacular bad example of misgovernment, but virtually every South American country has its own bad examples, from Juan Manuel de Rosas of Argentina, who set some type of caudillo longevity record; to General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte of Chile; to Ramón Castilla y Marquesado of Peru; to José Antonio Páez of Venezuela; to José Artigas of Uruguay. Of the independent countries, Chile and Brazil had the fewest; and probably Bolivia had the most.

There is a nice PDF file on “The Rise of the Caudillos,” which deals with the issue in outline format.

 

 

 

“Mildness and Complaisance”

Terence

Terence

However well a man may have calculated his scheme of life, still circumstances, years, experience, always introduce a new element and teach new lessons. You find that you don’t know what you thought you did know, and what you thought of primary importance that in practice you reject. That’s what has happened to me. The hard life, which up to now I have lived, now that my race is almost run I renounce. And why? Hard facts have taught me that a man can have no better qualities than mildness and complaisance.—Terence, Adelphoe

What the Democrats Don’t Get

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Do What’s Right First, THEN Ask for Money

Do What’s Right First, THEN Ask for Money

I am daily besieged by dozens of almost identical e-mails asking me for support. At first, they want me to just sign a petition. That’s fine with me. Then they hold out the tin cup, asking me for money so that the evil Koch Brothers, the Nazgul of our own time and place, do not hurl us all into a pit of unrelenting misery.

Look, I hate the Koch Brothers as much as they do—but I also hate television. All these Democratic-aligned organizations are doing is arranging for millions in political ad buys on a medium which I do not support, and for which I have active contempt. I am also getting a little bit suspicious: Just whom are these organizations supporting? Is it the issue named? Or is it the collective broadcast and cable television networks? And has anyone ever checked to see whether there are kickbacks taking place?

That reminds me of a snippet I read last night from Christopher Isherwood’s South American travel journal Condors and Cows: “In Bogotá, he says, the milk was always sold diluted with water. One day, a pure-milk dairy was started but soon went bankrupt. It had been deliberately ruined by the directors of the water-works, who feared a serious drop in water-consumption.” In other words, are the TV ad people involved in these movements as a way of drumming up business?

These are questions that need to be asked, because I, for one, am reluctant to respond to any of these ads—regardless of my political beliefs.

Dreams at High Altitude

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A City Surrounded by Mountains

A City Surrounded by Mountains

The other night I dreamed of Bolivia. I was in La Paz, one of the country’s two capitals—the other is Sucré in the South. I was trying to navigate between two locations within the city, but all I had was a two-dimensional street map that didn’t give me any idea whether I had to go uphill or downhill. The Lonely Planet guide to Bolivia lists the altitude of La Paz at 12,007 feet (3,660 meters), but isn’t that just an average? Even higher than La Paz is the erstwhile suburb of El Alto, which is, at 13, 620 feet, not only the highest major metropolis in the world with a million people, most of them Aymara, but also is home to the La Paz’s international airport,the world’s highest.

I am obsessing about La Paz: It is a city that pops up in my dreams because it is set in a huge bowl under several conical volcanoes, the most spectacular of which is Illimani at 16,350 feet. I keep thinking of traveling up and down the city by taxi and on foot, gasping all the while because of the high altitude.

Currently, I am thinking of starting my vacation in Lima and traveling through southern Peru to Lake Titicaca and then on to La Paz. From there, I plan to fly “open jaws” back to Los Angeles. That saves me time and money from having to deadhead back to Lima.

The big question is my susceptibility to Soroche, or altitude sickness. If, upon arriving in Cusco, I appear to have the beginnings of either HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema) or HACE (high altitude cerebral edema), I will turn around and return to Arequipa, going on to Tacna (in Peru) and Arica (in Chile), possibly as far as Antofagasta. In that case, I would deadhead back to Lima and fly home from there.

So if that alternate scenario takes place, I would have to have a flight from La Paz to Los Angeles that I can cancel if necessary. Is that possible? It remains to be seen.

Addendum: These two quotes from Christopher Isherwood’s South American diary, The Condor and the Cows, add an eyewitness’s observations to the city :

Sixty miles from the lake [Titicaca] the plain suddenly ends. You look over its edge into a deep horse-shoe valley and there is La Paz, fourteen hundred feet below. The view makes you gasp, for it is backed by the enormous snow-peak of Illimani, which fills the sky to the south. Illimani is rather higher than Mount Pelion would be if it were piled not on Ossa but upon Mont Blanc.

Believe it or not, I actually had the following scene in my dream:

Many of the side streets are so steep that you could scarcely hold your footing on the worn pavement. The Paceños have learned to slither down it in long strides, like skaters. What with the altitude, the gradients, the scarcity of elevators and the shortage of taxis, you spend most of the day painfully out of breath, and envy the Indians, whose enormous lungs enable them to trot uphill without the least sign of strain.

 

Anglo Saxon Attitudes

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Originally, the Phrase Comes from Through the Looking Glass

Originally, the Phrase Comes from Through the Looking Glass

The following scrap of dialogue appears in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. ‘I see somebody now!’ she exclaimed at last. ‘But he’s coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!’ (For the messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)

‘Not at all,’ said the King. ‘He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he’s happy. His name is Haigha.’ (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with ‘mayor.’)

Angus Wilson wrote a famous satirical novel by the name of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes back in 1956, but I am going to put a slightly different spin on the phrase. I am somewhat surprised that most Americans only read books originally written in English. My late friend Norman Witty was one such: The only exception was for some books written in French, and then he would only read them in French.

There is an Italian phrase—“traddutore, traditore”—whose meaning is that translators are all traitors. I don’t believe that. Some translators are notoriously inept, but they usually get hammered in the reviews. I remember one such translator of Proust’s Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of his In Search of Lost Time, which was translated by James Grieve into In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement suggested that one go back to C. K. Scott-Moncrieff’s somewhat prissy rendering which is nearing its centenary.

In my time, I have read many archaic translations, such as Constance Garnett’s of the novels of Dostoyevsky, Ellen Marriage’s of Balzac’s The Human Comedy, and even the dreadful Peter Anthony Motteux translation of Cervantes, which dates back to 1712. It didn’t matter that much. Even a bad translation will help one to appreciate the greatness of Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Cervantes—or anyone else for that matter. There are probably some old chestnuts around that are truly terrible, such as the Portuguese-English phrasebook that Mark Twain published because of its frequent howlers.

Now what I mean by Anglo Saxon Attitudes is a kind of linguistic provincialism, that eschews works from other countries because they were not written in English. I will grant you that English and American literature are remarkably wide, but so is that of other countries. My life would have been relatively impoverished if I had not read the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Euripides, the Icelandic sagas, Gyula Krúdy (a fellow Hungarian), Orhan Pamuk, Mo Yan, Kobo Abe, Stanislaw Lem, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Honoré de Balzac, Jorge Amado, or Fernando Pessoa. I suspect that approximately half the books I read were translated from other languages. So I didn’t get the same from them as a native speaker of the original languages, but I venture I got at least 75%, and that 75% has meant—literally—the world to me.

It’s Greek To Me

Oedipus & Sphinx

Oedipus & Sphinx

Nothing grows clearer to me year by year than that the nature of the Greeks and of antiquity, however simple and universally familiar it may seem to lie before us, is very hard to understand, indeed is hardly accessible at all, and that the facility with which the ancients are usually spoken of is either a piece of frivolity or an inherited arrogance born of thoughtlessness. We are deceived by a similarity of words and concepts: but behind them there always lies concealed a sensation which has to be foreign, incomprehensible or painful to modern sensibility.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, Book III

I Run Into Charles Keating

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S & L Fraud Meister Charles Keating (1923-2014)

S & L Fraud Meister Charles Keating (1923-2014)

When Charles Keating died in Phoenix last week, I thought of my meeting with him in Iceland (of all places) in August 2001. I was staying at the Foss Hotel Skaftafell in Svinafell (see photograph below), about two kilometers south of what was then the Skaftafell National Park, and is now merely part of the giant Vatnajökull National Park that occupies most of the country’s southwestern quadrant. Since I was traveling alone and without camping gear, it was the only place I could stay in walking distance of the park without roughing it.

I was sitting in the hotel dining room, close to a large center table where there was a large, noisy group who were swilling large amounts of imported wine. (What other kind is there in Iceland?) The oldest member of the group excused himself for a rest room visit, while his friends talked about him behind his back. It was then I learned the man was the infamous Charles Keating, whose leadership of the American Continental Corporation and the Lincoln Savings & Loan Association led him afoul of the law, more so because he had tried to suborn five legislators (the so-called “Keating Five”) into letting him off scot free. It didn’t work, as in December 1991, he was convicted on seventeen counts of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy and given the maximum sentence of ten years by Judge Lance Ito. At the time, Ito is said to have remarked, “More people have suffered from the point of a fountain pen than from a gun.”

When Keating returned to the table, he noticed my sour looks (I don’t much cotton to strangers, especially when they’re drunk ratbags) and invited me over to his table. I politely refused and finished up my meal to return to my room and read Viking sagas about even more thoroughgoing ratbags.

The Foss Hotel Skaftafell

The Foss Hotel Skaftafell

The next morning, as I was hiking to the national park headquarters, I saw the Keating party leave in a small chartered tour bus and sighed with relief. I knew two people who had invested in his S&L and nothing good to say for or to the man. It was rather pitiful that he found it necessary to travel with a bunch of yes-men who had nothing particularly good to say about him while he was out of earshot.

So it goes.

 

 

 

 

 

As Likely As Any Other Theory

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A Painting of Neptune by an Indian Artist

A Painting of Neptune by an Indian Artist

Since most of the news about Malaysian Flight 370—or just about anything else—is so preposterous of late, I have decided to float some of my own theories. My theory is that Neptune (a.k.a. Poseidon), the Roman God of the Sea has hijacked Flight 370 and taken the Boeing down to his undersea palace a thousand miles west of Perth, Australia, where the passengers will be fêted on tea and cakes until he allows them to take off again.

As for Vladimir Putin’s recent takeover of Crimea, it is my firm belief that my friend Bill Korn has it right on his blog. Mr. Putin is trying to put together a new Greater Teabagistan now that the old Soviet Empire has run out of steam. And who better to rule as the new Czar of Teabagistan than Putin himself. I understand he is even thinking of taking Transdniester away from the Republic of Moldova because he feels they are not pronouncing it right. (Our Vladi is a stickler for correct pronunciation.)

In the United States, with the McCutcheon vs. FEH (not FEC as reported) decision, the U.S. Supreme Court is on the point of granting full freedom of speech and all other First Amendment rights to corporations, and then embarking upon the next step: Declaring human beings to be a carbon unit infestation that has arrogated too many rights to itself.

The real reason for David Letterman’s upcoming retirement from CBS is that he wants to become the new Stephen Colbert, while Colbert takes over his helm at CBS. Talk about a Chinese fire drill!

Perhaps I should apply to the news stations to come up with theories for their breaking news stories. If anyone can break the news, look no further than yours truly.

By the way, the above illustration of Neptune is by Indian artist Shakti Prasad Srichandan.

 

American Noir

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One of the Greatest U.S. Noir Pictures

One of the Greatest Noir Pictures

Today, I came back from working on a Saturday to see the end of Warner Brothers’ High Sierra (1941) with Martine. There was Roy “Mad Dog” Earle, trapped on an Eastern Sierra cliff face and surrounded by police and reporters waiting to put an end to his career of crime. I had seen the film so many times that it was now in my blood. It was one of a handful of U.S. films that defined for me the whole American experience between the 1930s and the 1950s. I thought I would put together a list of the films in the genre that were my favorites.

Here are thirteen of them, arranged in alphabetic order:

  • The Big Heat (1953), directed by Fritz Lang, with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame
  • The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
  • Criss Cross (1949), directed by Robert Siodmak, with Burt Lancaster, Dan Duryea, and Yvonne De Carlo
  • Detour (1946), directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, with Tom Neal and Ann Savage
  • Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder, with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray
  • Gun Crazy (1949), directed by Joseph H. Lewis, starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall
  • High Sierra (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh, with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino
  • The Maltese Falcon (1941), directed by John Huston, with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet
  • Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur, with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas
  • The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), directed by Tay Garnett, with Lana Turner and John Garfield
  • They Live by Night (1949), directed by Nicholas Ray, with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell
  • Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), directed by Otto Preminger, with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney
  • White Heat (1949), directed by Raoul Walsh, with James Cagney and Virginia Mayo

If this seems like a long list, please note that I could have stretched it to fifty or a hundred without too much difficulty. There were a lot of noir films made in Hollywood over a long period.

What are noir films? According to Alain Silver, James Ursini, and Elizabeth Ward’s Film Noir: The Encyclopedia (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2010):

Film noir is grounded neither in personal creation nor in translation of another tradition into cinematic terms. Rather it is a self-contained reflection of American cultural preoccupations in film form. In short, it is the unique example of a wholly American film style. “Film noir” is literally “black film,” not just in the sense of reflecting a dark mood in American society, but equally, almost empirically, as a black slate on which the culture could inscribe its ills and in the process produce a catharsis to help relieve them.

There is a whole galaxy of elements which, together or in unison, make up a film noir plot. They include crime, police, private detectives, “bad girls,” urban environments with “mean streets,” and both inner and outer darkness.

 

Asking the Pilot

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Patrick Smith, a Commercial Pilot, Writes a Great Blog

Patrick Smith, an Experienced Commercial Pilot, Writes a Great Blog

Since people have been flying in heavier-than-air machines for over a century, it is amazing how little accurate information one can find in the news whenever there is a fatal crash or—heaven forbid—a missing aircraft. For many years, I had been reading Patrick Smith’s excellent “Ask the Pilot” column in Salon.Com, before that website decided to cut him loose in favor of more celebrity-conscious material. Patrick is the author of a book entitled Cockpit Confidential, which I am adding to my TBR (To Be Read) pile of books. On his excellent website, called Ask the Pilot, he writes:

More than ever, air travel is a focus of curiosity, intrigue, anxiety and anger. In these pages I do my best to inform and entertain. I  provide answers for the curious, reassurance for the anxious, and unexpected facts for the deceived.

I begin with a simple premise: everything you think you know about flying is wrong. That’s an exaggeration, I hope, but not an outrageous starting point in light of what I’m up against. Commercial aviation is a breeding ground of bad information, and the extent to which different myths, fallacies, wives’ tales and conspiracy theories have become embedded in the prevailing wisdom is startling. Even the savviest frequent flyers are prone to misconstruing much of what actually goes on.

Which isn’t surprising. Air travel is a complicated, inconvenient, and often scary affair for millions of people, while at the same time cloaked in secrecy. Its mysteries are concealed behind a wall of specialized jargon, corporate reticence and an irresponsible media. Airlines, it hardly needs saying, aren’t the most forthcoming of entities, while journalists and broadcasters like to keep it simple and sensational. It’s hard knowing who to trust or what to believe.

In the current edition of his website, he launches a broad-based attack on the Huffington Post, which did an article entitled “16 Alarming Secrets That Will Change How You Will Feel About Flying.” I recommend you read the Huffpost article, and then look at what Smith has to say about it entitled “Nonsense from the Huffington Post.”

Not only is Ask the Pilot a great resource for information on flying, but it contains some fascinating travel articles written by a guy who’s been just about everywhere. I like it so much that I am planning to link to it on my own site.