Badasstan

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ISIS Exists for a Reason

ISIS Exists for a Reason

Bad Asses of the World, Unite! You now have your own country, so to speak. Even if you’re not a devout Muslim, or not a Muslim at all, you now have a place to go where mayhem is sanctioned. That’s why so many disaffected youths—male and female—are making their way to Syria and ISIS, where they can be as bad as they want, just so long as it is in tune with what the self-professed Caliph, Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, permits.

And that’s where many of the new recruits will go astray. In the end, organized international mayhem is not as much fun as the local criminal kind. Instead of the cops, you have the Caliph’s masked minions; and now you can be blown to bits by bombers or Kurdish Peshmerga or (unless they feel disinclined) Iraqi armed forces. It’ll take them a while to discover that, because, as we know, bad asses are not known for thinking things through. And you can’t be all that spontaneous in an organizational context.

Oh, things will be gravy for a while, as you get your own Yazidi or other heretic girl to play house with, but eventually the pall descends; and you will be interviewed by Western news media as to why you deserted the cause.

 

 

La Trochita

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One of the Two Remaining Stretches of Patagonia’s Classic Narrow-Gauge Railway

One of the Two Remaining Segments of Patagonia’s Classic Narrow-Gauge Railway

In the mid-1970s, Paul Theroux wrote the book that first got me interested in South America, The Old Patagonian Express. He traveled by rail starting in Boston and as far south as he could go in the Americas using more or less connected rail routes.That sort of fell apart in Central America, where there is no reliable way to cross Panama’s Darien Gap by rail—or road for that matter. But from Bolivia to Esquel in Argentina’s Northern Patagonia, the rails were still in use.

Now, some forty years later, Argentina has no train between the Bolivian border and Tucumán, between Bahia Blanca and Viedma, and between Ingeniero Jacobacci and Esquel. And the segment from Tucumán to Buenos Aires will probably close soon.

The stretch that interested me most was the one between Ingeniero Jacobacci and Esquel using a narrow-gauge route referred to today as La Trochita (“The Little Narrow Gauge”) or El Trencito (“The Little Train”). Shortly after Theroux wrote his most memorable chapter about the last leg of his trip, La Trochita was no more …

… except in the fond memories of Argentinians who decided to keep a couple of stretches of the steam train active for tourists. One is between El Maitén and Thomae and between Esquel and Nahuel Pan. Being an unregenerate railroad buff, I plan to take both segments. That is to say, if I can schedule it right.

Where Theroux in his typically snarky way wrote about Patagonia that “Nowhere is a place,” I, who am really from Nowhere (Cleveland, Ohio, which was destroyed by Maynard G. Krebs’s mythical The Monster That Devoured Cleveland), think that the eastern range of the Andes in Patagonia is truly beautiful. But then, Theroux was never an aficionado of fine scenery or especially of anything that threatened his comfort. (Hey, I still love his travel books!)

Probably about half or more of my next trip to Argentina will be exploring the town between Bariloche and Trevelin along the eastern slope of the Andes. I might even hop across to the border to Futaleufu in Chile, which is accessible only through Trevelin in Argentina.

The last time I saw a real steam locomotive in use was in 1977 when I was traveling by rail from Budapest to Košice in what was then Czechoslovakia. Near Miskolc in Hungary, the railroad yard was full of steam locomotives shuttling freight cars back and forth.

 

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Scotland

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The Isle of Skye in the Hebrides

The Isle of Skye in the Hebrides

All the blog posts in this series are based on Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him.

My own ABCs consist of places I have loved (Iceland, Patagonia, Quebec), things I feared (Earthquakes), writers I have admired (Chesterton, Balzac, Proust, and Borges); locales associated with my past life (Cleveland and Dartmouth College), people who have influenced me (John F. Kennedy), foods I love (Olives), and things I love to do (Automobiles and Books). This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the weeks to come, you will see a number of postings under the heading “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. To see my other entries under this category, hit the tag below marked “ABCs”. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. Today the letter is “S” for Scotland.

When I write about the places I love most, Scotland ranks high on my list. I have been there four times, but have barely scratched the surface. Twice I went with Martine, who liked it as much as I did. To this day, she still wears the Cardigan sweater she bought at a woolen mill near Oban, and I still have two Scottish sweaters I bought almost forty years ago, which I still wear occasionally even though they are starting to pill a bit.

Nowhere else in the British Isles are you likely to get as tasty food as in Scotland. Scots are typically friendlier than the folk south of Hadrian’s Wall—probably because they know so many Americans have Scottish blood flowing in their veins as a result of the Highland Clearances that took place after Culloden.

What really distinguishes the Scots in my mind is their sense of history. There’s not only the rebellion of 1745, in which the Highlands wasted their manpower for the unworthy Bonnie Prince Charles, but going farther back, back to Somerled and the Lords of the Isles, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, the struggles of the House of Stewart to establish themselves, the great tragedy of Flodden Field, the death of Mary Queen of Scots, the cruelty of Butcher Cumberland, and that brave late 18th century renaissance that brought so many Scottish thinkers and inventors to the fore. As with Hungarians, the Scots live the entire spectrum of their history.

Edinburgh is probably one of my two or three favorite cities in the world, especially that long walk downhill along the Royal Mile from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and then the climb of Arthur’s Seat to see “Auld Reekie” in all its glory. But if you really want to see Scotland, go for the isles, for Mull, Iona, Islay, Skye, and the Orkneys. When you walk among the graves by the church at Iona, remember that Macbeth and a score of early Scottish kings are buried there in unmarked graves.

Martine and I have looked for the Loch Ness Monster at Drumnadrochit. (We didn’t see it.) We visited castles, Scotch whisky distilleries, ate haggis and neeps (at least, I did), and enjoyed a bowl of cullen skink.

Then were all those novels by Nigel Tranter and Sir Walter Scott, not to mention the poems of Robert Burns, whose museum I saw at Dumfries.

Och, it’s time to go back!

 

 

Gentleman, Vocative

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My Guide at the Archbishop’s Palace in Lima

My Guide at the Archbishop’s Palace in Lima

She was as cute as a button. On a whim, I had decided to take a tour of the Archbishop’s Palace at Lima’s Plaza de Armas, conveniently next door to the massive cathedral. Apparently, I was the only tourist who had wandered in at that hour (about eleven a.m.), and I had a guide all to myself. By this time during my trip, I had come to appreciate the beauty of Peruvian women; and my guide was, I felt, a real looker.

But wait, Jim! This young lady was probably a postulant—that is to say, a future nun. Her clothing had a definite clerical look to it. For all that, she might already have made her vows and belonged to one of the orders that didn’t wear more conservative garb.

She kept addressing me in the vocative case as “Gentleman” as in: “Gentleman, this statue dates back to the Sixteenth Century.”

She knew every feature of that vast archiepiscopal palace, and kept addressing me as Gentleman.

In that most Catholic of countries, I couldn’t be anything other than the Gentleman I was thought to be. I enjoyed every minute of that tour and hope I conveyed my appreciation to the young lady for a very pleasant visit.

 

Roadside Saints

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Argentinians Have Made Up Some of Their Own Saints

Argentinians Have Made Up Some of Their Own Saints

This comes from a post on Multiply.Com which I wrote on August 18, 2011. Some changes have been made:

Oh, oh! I’ve been thinking about Argentina again, and that means you’re going to hear about some more really obscure (but, IMHO fascinating) stuff.

To begin with, Argentina is such a Catholic country that it had to create additional saints native to its own soil. Let’s begin with La Difunta Correa, which means, literally, the Dead Correa:

According to popular legend, Deolinda Correa was a woman whose husband was forcibly recruited around the year 1840, during the Argentine civil wars. Becoming sick, he was then abandoned by the Montoneros [partisans]. In an attempt to reach her sick husband, Deolinda took her baby child and followed the tracks of the Montoneros through the desert of San Juan Province. When her supplies ran out, she died. Her body was found days later by gauchos that were driving cattle through, and to their astonishment found the baby still alive, feeding from the deceased woman’s “miraculously” ever-full breast. The men buried the body in present-day Vallecito, and took the baby with them. [from Wikipedia]

All over the country, there are roadside shrines to La Difunta Correa, many surrounded by gifts left by truck drivers and travelers in a hope for a safe journey to their destination. Remember that Argentina is the eighth largest country on earth, and that distances can be farther than one imagines, especially on unpaved ripio roads.

There are two other popular saints with shrines all across the nation: Gauchito Gil (“Little Gaucho Gil”) and El Ángelito Milagroso (“The Little Miraculous Angel”), a.k.a. Miguel Ángel Gaitán.

Gauchito Gil hails from the state of La Rioja near the Bolivian border. A farmworker, Gil was seduced by a wealthy widow. When the police chief, who also had a thing for the widow, and her brothers came after Gil, he joined the army in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (perhaps the bloodiest war ever fought in the Americas, with the exception of our own Civil War). When he returned home, the Army came after him to join in one of Argentina’s many civil wars. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Gauchito deserted. He was discovered by the police, who wanted to execute him. Whereupon Gil prophesied to the head of the police detail that if he were merciful, the officer’s child, who was gravely ill, would get better. Instead of being shown mercy, Gil was executed.

When he returned home, the police officer found that his son was indeed very ill. So he prayed to Gauchito Gil, and his son got better. It was this police officer who returned to the scene of the execution, gave Gil a proper burial, and built a shrine in his memory. Today there are hundreds of such shrines scattered throughout the country.

By the way, the Gauchito is not the only deserter hero in Argentina’s past. Perhaps the national epic is Martin Fierro by José Hernández, about a gaucho who deserts from the so-called “Conquest of the Desert”—really a war of genocide against the native tribes of the Pampas—and is pursued by the police militia.

The Nineteenth Century in Argentina was unusually bloody, what with civil war, wars against the native peoples, and wars against other countries such as Paraguay and Brazil. So it is not unusual to find deserters as heroes, which is unthinkable in Europe and North America.

Finally, there is another La Rioja “saint” named Miguel Ángel Gaitán, El Ángelito Milagroso, who died at the tender age of one in 1967. When his body didn’t rot, the locals thought that meant it was supposed to be exposed for veneration—and so it was.

Land of Little Rain

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Is This Where We’re Headed?

Is This Where We’re Headed?

The title for this post is the same as a that of a classic book by Mary Austin about her life in the Owens Valley. While there is little doubt that deserts can be starkly beautiful—as for instance Death Valley or the National Parks of Southern Utah—it can be frustrating to have forecast rain turn into little more than a dirty drizzle.

I call it a dirty drizzle because there’s only enough rain to smear my windshield when I run my wipers. As my windshield wiper reservoir is leaking and its replacement costs a small fortune for my twenty-year-old Nissan Pathfinder, I spend a good part of .L.A.’s so-called rainy season driving around looking through a coating of dirt.

I have no faith in weather forecasters. Why? Because they are only intent on selling advertising. Therefore, they tend to wildly exaggerate any rain forecast. Even if there’s so much as a 10% chance of showers, newsmen will spend hours telling us to look for the forecast in the next fifteen minutes, er…, half hour, er… hour. What usually happens, the mountains to the north of us get the rain, or the deserts beyond the mountains. What we get, at most, is a pittance.

People in the Northeast must be looking at us with ill-suppressed envy, as they struggle with snow and cold and “polar vortexes,” whatever those are. In the meantime, we continue to dry out. Our state’s agriculture, once the envy of the nation, is looking at a potential dust bowl.

Putin’s Kleptocracy

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Something New from Mother Russia

Something New from Mother Russia

I know that some people think of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as the reincarnation of Stalin. Others on the right idolize him because, well, he persecutes gays. The truth is actually to be found elsewhere.

He definitely is a bad dude. Instead of killing people by the millions in Siberian gulags, he uses very targeted assassinations to eliminate some of his more outspoken enemies. In November 1998, soon after he took over the KGB, he had opposition Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova murdered for her pro-democracy advocacy. As soon as Yeltsin named him Prime Minister a year later, he initiated a bombing campaign in Chechnya which led to hundreds of civilian deaths.

One outspoken critic of the Chechen war was Anna Politkovskaya, whose dispatches on the conflict I have read (and recommend: they are published under the name of A Small Corner of Hell). She paid dearly for her upstanding journalism: She was shot by KGB operatives at the door of her apartment in October 2006.

For a considerably longer list of his targets, click here.

What makes Putin radically different from his Communist forebears is that he is an oligarch in personal control of billions of rubles worth of assets, alone or with a small number of co-conspirators with whom he feels comfortable. There is an excellent review by Anne Applebaum in the December 18, 2014 issue of The New York Review of Books which is a review of Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?

No fool, Putin knew that Communism was on the skids while he was still a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany, and he prepared for the demise of the Soviet empire by beginning to gather people whom he could trust. In St. Petersburg in 1991, he entered in numerous “legally flawed contracts” in which he exported millions of dollars worth of commodities in return for food that never seems to have been delivered. He was in on the rise to power of Bank Rossiya, which he used for his financial and criminal deals. Putin-controlled entities include Ozero Dacha Consumer Cooperative; St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company (SPAG), which was involved in Russian and Colombian drug money laundering; the construction company Twentieth Trust; and probably biggest of all—Gazprom.

It is as if an American president controlled Morgan Stanley, Exxon, Cargill, and numerous other massive corporations which combined to do whatever legal or illegal he or she wished to accomplish.

And yet Putin’s popularity is still high among Russian voters at this time. He pays careful attention to cultural and foreign policy choices that are in tune with the Russian man in the street. This includes his support of the Russian Orthodox Church and its hierarchy, and his ham-fisted attempts to support the Russian population of industrialized East Ukraine.

 

Time to Climb Off the Carousel

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Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative—Just Going Round in Circles

Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative—Just Going Round in Circles

You’ve probably learned by now that political labels in American politics are primarily for assigning blame, whether due or not. That’s why I decided to not to write any more outrage pieces on my blog site. It was too easy to react to stupid things the other side was saying.

Oh, I’m still a Democrat, but as my hero Will Rogers once said: “I am not a member of any organized party—I am a Democrat.” But I do not accept phone calls from any political party. And I’ve contacted the Democratic fund raisers who were bombarding my e-mail to stop it. Of course, Republicans and Libertarians know better than to try to contact me for any reason. I have my doubts about Democrats (a.k.a. The Circular Firing Squad), but I like the other guys even less. I figure that if Faux News has something good to say about anybody, they’re probably a serial child molester and would-be tyrant.

Do I consider myself a Liberal? Not really. Fiscally, I’m a bit on the Conservative side. My goal is not to see the Federal, State, and Local governments all spend themselves into bankruptcy; but I think that we can’t neglect the poor, the way that many troglodyte Conservatives advocate.

All the political labels have resulted only in a lot of Americans hating one another solely for their stated political affiliation. I’d prefer to judge people on the way they act.

 

Tati

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Monsieur Hulot and His Brother-in-Law

Monsieur Hulot and His Brother-in-Law in Mon Oncle

Because of tax season stress, I am repeating this post from March 2006:

It is difficult to say which Jacques Tati film I love the most. In the end, it is a tie between Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958), with Jour de Fete (1949) and Playtime (1967) close on their heels.  In the end, I chose Mon Oncle because I thought its humor has almost attained the status of myth. In the inter-generational rapport between M. Hulot and the young son of his social-climbing sister, we see how new Hulots are created. By the end of the film, even the insufferable CEO brother-in-law (shown in background above) has become Hulot-ized as he complicitly clasps the hand of his son.

We don’t usually think of the French as being funny. Yet there was a tradition of film comedy in France going back to Max Linder in the silent era, followed by the early talkie musical comedies of René Clair. It is in Jacques Tati (real name: Tatischeff), however, that it reaches its pinnacle.  During his film career, which extended from 1934 to 1974, he directed only nine films and acted in fifteen, including shorts. Some of these are minor, but the four films named above are gems that will stand the test of time.

To illustrate how natural Tati’s comedy is, I will mention one scene. Hulot’s nephew plays with a bunch of lower-class kids who like practical jokes. They hide on a hillside overlooking a street corner where there is a lamppost. When they see a likely victim coming, one of the boys runs down with a broom and starts vigorously sweeping the sidewalk in front of the oncoming pedestrian, in effect directing him to walk toward the post. As he nears the post, another boy gives a loud whistle, which causes the pedestrian to look around and walk face first into the lamppost.  They run several variations on this until they are caught.

Hulot’s Paris is a layered city in which eccentric ne’er-do-wells laze around picturesque streets and social climbers dine at horribly pretentious restaurants like Kington’s (which looks ahead to the destruction of a similar restaurant/nightclub in Playtime).

For more information about Tati, click on Tativille, the “official” site of this great comedian. If you have never seen any of his films and need some cheering up, I urge you to get one of the recently released DVDs of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday or Mon Oncle and have yourself a ball.

 

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Russian Novels

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What Country Produces the Best Literature?

What Country Produces the Best Literature?

All the blog posts in this series are based on Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him.

My own ABCs consist of places I have loved (Iceland, Patagonia, Quebec), things I feared (Earthquakes), writers I have admired (Chesterton, Balzac, Proust, and Borges); locales associated with my past life (Cleveland and Dartmouth College), people who have influenced me (John F. Kennedy), foods I love (Olives), and things I love to do (Automobiles and Books). This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the weeks to come, you will see a number of postings under the heading “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. To see my other entries under this category, hit the tag below marked “ABCs”. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. Today the letter is “R” for Russian Novels.

I’ll come right out and say that, over the last two hundred years, Russia has produced the world’s best prose fiction. (They might well also have produced the greatest poetry, but I cannot judge as I do not know the language.) In addition to the 19th century titans—Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy—there are other greats whose work continues to amaze me. I am thinking of Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Nikolai Leskov, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov, and Mikhail Lermontov,

Despite the travails of the Communist Century, Russian novels continued to be the best in the world, what with authors like Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Rybakov, Victor Serge (even though he wrote in French), Vladimir Nabokov, Vassily Grossman, Victor Zamyatin, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Andrey Gelasimov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, Andrey Platonov, Ivan Bunin, Varlam Shalamov, and Sergei Lukyanenko.

And these are just the ones I’ve read! KI suspect I could find another dozen if only I lived long enough.

The most difficult thing most people find about Russian novels is the names of the characters. Let’s take for example the name of one of the major characters in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov is he youngest son of Fyodor Karamazov and bears his father’s first name in his patronymic (Fyodorovich). In addition to being called Alexei Fyodorovich, you are likely to see him called by one of his nicknames, which include Alyosha, Alyoshka, Alyoshenka, Alyoshechka, Alexeichik, Lyosha, and Lyoshenka—all depending on who is speaking. After a few decades, you get used to the nicknames. No longer do I ask myself, “Is Dostoyevsky introducing another character here?”

Also, Russian novels are likely to be l-o-n-g. That’s all right with me, because I usually get so wrapped up in the stories that I almost don’t notice it.

If you want to get started, I suggest you pick something more nearly contemporary, such as Sergeyyi Lukyanenko’s eerie Night Watch, with its vampires and witches. (The Russian movie based on it is also worth seeing.)

So, enjoy yourselves, and give my regards to Nevsky Prospekt!