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The New Yorker Scores Again

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A Great New Yorker Cover

I don’t always like The New Yorker, which I slavishly continue to read every week. There are far too many detailed biographies of boring national business figures and other thieves whom I would consign to the lower circles of Dante’s Inferno. (Witness, in particular, the October 8, 2012 issue, which on one hand kisses up to the top 0.001% and on the other attempts to maintain its Liberal editorial policy.)

The September 24 cover, however, which is shown above, is a classic take-off on an America which I no longer profess to understand. It’s not that I’m a Socialist or even necessarily a Liberal. But most certainly I am not a flag-waving motherhood and apple pie type. Whenever I meet some Tea Party type, I usually prefer to think of myself more as a Hungarian-American rather than an American—just to distance myself. (Though, God knows, there are as many if not more horror stories connected with my Magyar antecedents.)

It is always surprising to me to fight Right Wingers in other countries, yet they are there. In fact, they are everywhere.

Will I ever come to terms with them? Probably not. At best, I can co-exist with them, and not always peacefully. I am always amazed by the disconnect by these people, who usually profess to be such good Christians, yet are so hateful toward the unfortunate, in direct opposition to Christ’s teachings. Trying to reconcile one’s beliefs and make sense of them does not appear to be part of the American way.

 

Tories or Loyalists?

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Loyalist Reenactors at Kings Landing, New Brunswick

Back in the days before the Cretaceous Extinction, when I was in high school learning the history of the American Revolution, we heard a lot of nasty things about the so-called Tories. These were American colonists who would have no part of the Revolution and who wanted to remain loyal to King George III.

We did not treat these Americans particularly well. We destroyed their property, threatened their lives, and keyed their carriages. The result was that many, if not most, of them fled to Canada or back to Britain.

When one is in Canada, there is an entirely different point of view. The Tories here are called Loyalists. And the United States is seen, particularly from the point of view of the 18th and 19th centuries, as the enemy. After all, we sent Benedict Arnold to invade Canada during the Revolution; but he failed, as he himself was conflicted over his loyalties. Then, during the War of 1812, we invaded twice and were beaten back twice.

In New Brunswick, one of Canada’s Maritime Provinces, there is an open-air park near Fredericton called Kings Landing Historical Settlement, which honors the Loyalist settlers. When the Saint John River was dammed near Fredericton, many old 19th century buildings were moved to Kings Landing and re-assembled as an outstanding museum, complete with costumed reenactors in the houses and shops who were able to explain the details of farming, cooking, printing, milling grains, sawmills, furniture manufacture, and other typical activities of the time.

Martine and I spent a whole day here, from opening time to closing. We even had an excellent lunch at the King’s Head Inn. I don’t suppose we were disloyal Americans for sympathizing with these Tories who, after all, were for the most part decent people who contributed greatly to Canada’s growth in the early days after the English occupied the country after the French and Indian War (1754-1763).

In general, it was interesting during our vacation to see so many of the populations that make up Eastern Canada, from the Loyalists to the French Canadians of Quebec to the Acadians of the Maritime Provinces (who are very distinct from the Quebecers) to the so-called First Nations tribes.

We Americans joke about the Canadians lacking a national identity. We did not find that to be so. It’s just that most Americans don’t bother to see for themselves, or else they just won’t open their eyes.

 

 

Time and Tide

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Hopewell Rocks at High Tide, September 19, 2:45 pm

I had always wanted to see the famous high and low tides in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, though I doubted I could do this without some guidance. So Martine and I took the Hopewell Rocks and Bay of Fundy Coastal Tour offered by Roads to Sea of Moncton, New Brunswick. About ten of us crowded into a minibus with Anna-Marie Weir, our capable guide.

We started by going to Hopewell Rocks at low tide, around 8:45 am. We learned that we had by accident picked a day when the difference between high and low tide would be 45.3 feet (13.8 meters). Afterwards, we saw several other sites affected by the tides, including the Harvey Shipyard, the Alma Lookout, the boats in the harbor at Alma, and Cape Enrage. The first three of the above, we saw twice, at intervals that graphically illustrated the striking difference made by the tides.

Below is the same location as the above photo in the early morning at low tide:

Hopewell Rocks at Low Tide Earlier the Same Day

We were able to walk among the rocks and take pictures . One can see by the markings along the bottom of the rocks how high the tide normally comes.

That Wednesday we took the tour started with the threat of rain, which, by early afternoon, became a reality—as you can see in the first photo above. Irrespective of the weather, we enjoyed the tour to such an extent that it was one of the highlights of our recent vacation.

Below is a photo of the personable Anna-Maria Weir and the minibus we rode on the tour:

Anna-Marie Weir of Roads to Sea

Martine and I had been in other areas with substantial tidal variation, especially when we visited Normandie in France about fourteen years ago. The high tide at Mont St-Michel reputedly would come in so fast that author Victor Hugo compared it to the speed of a galloping horse. Alas, we never were able to time our visit to see the variation with our own eyes.

Later in the trip, we even crossed the Bay of Fundy in a roll-on roll-off ferry that runs between Digby, Nova Scotia, and St. John, New Brunswick. It was interesting that the ferry docked at both coasts by a steel bridge that moved up and down with the tide. Ours was a surprisingly smooth crossing over its three-hour length. We were even able to eat a delicious supper with the famous Digby scallops, which are particularly huge and succulent.

 

Is That How He Prefers Them?

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A New Romney Meme Is Born

From Debate #2 between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The circumstances, according to CNN:

When asked about what he’d do to improve income equality for women, Romney cited his efforts as governor of Massachusetts to include women on a state economic panel, efforts that apparently included poring through “binders full of women” in search of qualified candidates. And with that, a meme was born.

I wonder how the women felt….

Follow the Bouncing Ball

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Argentinean Author César Aira

Most traditional literature is somewhat like a series of nested matryoshka dolls: You come back out the way you go in. In the process, all unresolved issues are neatly resolved (one hopes), and one has experienced a real 19th century experience.

Well, that doesn’t seem to be happening any more, except perhaps in some whodunits. It certainly isn’t happening in the slim novels of César Aira, an Argentinean from Coronel Pringles who writes the way a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot cleans: He just moves in a straight line until he encounters a barrier that sends him off in another direction.

In Varamo, we are in the city of Colón in Panama some 20 years after the Panama Canal was built. Varamo is the name of a Chinese-Panamanian who works for one of the government ministries in Colón. The story begins when, as his pay, he is handed 200 counterfeit pesos which he at once recognizes and is afraid to cash. He walks to the cafe one evening and witnesses an accident in which one of the government ministers is severely injured. That makes him late to the cafe, where he runs into three pirate publishers who urge him to write a book, which Varamo gladly does. It turns out to become a Central American poetry classic: The Song of the Virgin Boy.

Along the way, he encounters other adventures, but this will do for now. In the last paragraph, Aira gives a kind of apologia for his own highly individualistic writing style:

The result was Varamo’s famous poem, except that it was less a result in itself than a way of transforming what had preceded it into a result. It produced a kind of automatism or mutual fatality, by which cause and effect changed places and became the same story. Far from diminishing the poem’s initial vigor, this circle intensifies it. Which is, in fact, what always happens. If a work is dazzlingly innovative and opens up unexplored paths, the merit is not to be found in the work itself, but in its transformative effect on the historical moment that engendered it. Novelty makes its causes new, giving birth to them retrospectively. If historical time makes us live in the new, a story that attempts to account for the origin of a work of art, that is, a work of innovation, ceases to be a story; it’s a new reality, and yet a part of reality as it has always been for everyone. Those who don’t believe me can go and see for themselves.

Now there’s a manifesto! Aira’s “new reality” has, with me, fallen on receptive ears. I have read every Aira book that I could get my hands on. They are all relatively short, but always succeed in defying any attempt at speed-reading. This Argentinean knows how to throw curve balls that bounce all over the place. Following their trajectory across space and time is not only great fun, but also profound, in a weird way.

Photo Credit: The above picture—a favorite of mine—comes from the Buenos Aires BAFICI website (dedicated to independent filmmakers).

Joe Will Clean Your Clock

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VP Joe Biden

I am beginning to think that we have a very good Vice President indeed! Joe Biden cleaned Paul Ryan’s clock so thoroughly that the Faux News network (the one run by Rupert Merde-Duck) is lining up fake experts to claim that, far from winning the debate, he has dementia, is drunk, or “on, like, 18 lines of cocaine.” That’s high praise from such an unscrupulous opponent.

Now I think that is quite a tribute from the Republican noise machine. If you are a Democrat and do your job particularly well, the Faux noise machine will emit a high-pitched wail of compressed and variegated slander. Joseph Goebbels would have been so proud of Roger Ailes.

At one time, I wished for a Democrat equivalent to Murdoch and Ailes’s Republican propaganda network, but now I think that would not be such a good idea. Democrats are not so united as the Republicans, because we Democrats have a wide range of opinions, such that we frequently resemble a circular firing squad. Always, the most effective propaganda comes from totalitarian sources. Over time, they will end of smearing themselves so badly that people will just turn away from them.

In the meantime, we will have more patently false news stories with blatantly slanderous accusations. How many people are there who actually think that Faux News is “fair and balanced”? Al Franken laid that old chestnut to bed with his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and the ensuing lawsuit which embarrassed the so-called news channel.

Photo Credit: The above photo is from Rolling Stone’s website.

Happiness vs. Contentment

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Happiness is a lasting state which does not seem to be made for man in this world. Everything here on earth is in a continual flux which allows nothing to assume any constant form. All things change round about us, we ourselves change, and no one can be sure of loving tomorrow what he loves today. All our plans of happiness in this life are therefore empty dreams. Let us make the most of peace of mind when it comes to us, taking care to do nothing to drive it away, but not making plans to hold it fast, since such plans are sheer folly. I have seen few if any happy people, but I have seen many who were contented, and of all the sights that have come my way this is the one that has left me the most contented myself. I think this is a natural consequence of the influence of my sensations on my inward feelings. Happiness cannot be detected by any outward sign and to recognize it one would need to be able to read in the happy person’s heart, but contentment is visible in the eyes, the bearing, the voice and the walk, and it seems to communicate itself to the onlooker. Is there any satisfaction more sweet than to see a whole people devoting themselves to joy on some feast-day and all their hearts expanding in the supreme rays of pleasure which sign briefly but intensely through the clouds of life?—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “Ninth Walk”

On Hungarian Time

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Hungarian Cowboy, or Csikos, on the Hortobagy

This weekend was spent attending two Hungarian events: A Los Angeles Hungarian Meetup Group get-together at Mishi’s Strudel Shop in San Pedro and the Fall Bazaar of the First Hungarian Reformed Church in Hawthorne.

It was interesting to spend a weekend on Hungarian time. At the strudel shop, Martine and I were there on time (at 2 pm), but no one else was. At the church, the bazaar was to begin at 1 pm. We got there fifteen minutes early, and found the place was full because everything started much earlier than the posted time, perhaps by as much as an hour. (And it ended an hour and a quarter early, too.)

I am usually fanatical about being not only on time, but a little early, for everything. It was strange to be outdone in this regard by my fellow Magyars.

Fortunately, it didn’t matter. We just took our seats and enjoyed ourselves immensely through the dinner and musical program. There were two opera singers—Sándor László and Huba Marcsi—singing old Hungarian folk songs to be piano accompaniment. This was followed by a singalong led by Dr. Tai Chen of other old folk songs based on music passed out to everyone. (My Hungarian, being sub par, made it difficult for me to participate.)

There was also a number of rousing folk dances by the Kárpátok Hungarian Dance Ensemble, whose flawless execution of a series of stunning and complicated maneuvers is always a crowd pleaser. I see tthem at least twice a year and find their work to be exhilarating.

It was such a good weekend that I feel like manhandling a bunch of horses like the csikos in the above photo, which comes from Flickriver.

 

 

An Interview With Ayn Rand

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Ideologue for the Irreligious Right

I am, to say the least, no supporter of Ayn Rand. Thirty years after her death, she has has occupied an incongruous position with her rightist and libertarian supporters. On one hand, she was an avowed enemy of religion. On the other, her tenets have been adopted by a political party which has close ties to American Evangelical Christians. It was Jesus Christ in the Gospel of St. Luke (12:33) is quoted as saying, “Sell your possessions and give to charity; make yourselves purses which do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near, nor moth destroys.”

Contrast that with Ms. Rand, who stated in a famous 1964 Playboy interview with Alvin Toffler:

My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.

How Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, can square his religion (Roman Catholicism) with his adherence to the belief system of Ayn Rand’s so-called Objectivism is a mystery to me. I personally find much of her thinking to be abhorrent, such as her elevating productive work about family and friendship:

If they place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life, and human relationships are not primary in a man’s life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite; whereas, if he places his work first, there is no conflict between his work and his enjoyment of human relationships.

So, which is it to be, Mr. Ryan? Shall we adhere to the teachings of Christ or of Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, alias Ayn Rand?

The interview with Rand is worth reading in its entirety. Or one could just read one of her long and confused novels such as The Fountainhead (1943) or Atlas Shrugged (1957) to get to the same point after a several hundred turgid pages.

 

 

“I Did Not Want To Become Slight and Fantastic”

As I … meditated the direction of modern poetry, my discouragement blackened. It seemed to me that Mallarmé and his followers, renouncing intelligibility in order to concentrate on the music of poetry, had turned off the road into a narrowing lane…. Idea had gone, now meter had gone, imagery would have to go; perhaps at last words might have to go or give up their meaning, nothing be left but musical syllables…. I was standing there like a God-forsaken man-of-letters, making my final decision not to become a “modern.” I did not want to become slight and fantastic, abstract and unintelligible.—Robinson Jeffers, Preface to Roan Stallion