Category Archives: World History

Asia, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Politics, US History, World History

Obey

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Fall                                                                                      Falling Leaves Moon

 

Students in Jefferson County, Colorado and Hong Kong reacted strongly against authoritarian regimes that would limit the teaching of history and studies focused on the homeland. This is no accident. Children and teens are acutely aware of the BS factor in adult pronouncements. They learn some of that at home no doubt, matching parents words with their deeds, but school authorities often say one thing and do another. Kids always notice. Sometimes, like reasonable human beings, they dismiss it, probably saying something like, adults will be adults, but sometimes they notice a danger to their future, perhaps even to the adult’s future.

Especially when governments, the schoolboard in the instance of Jefferson County and Beijing in the instance of Hong Kong, try to shape teaching to conform to their own ends. In Jefferson County the schoolboard wanted a more “patriotic” curriculum that emphasized the values of free enterprise and loyalty. They also wanted a curriculum that downplayed the role of protest and other civil disobedience in the shaping of American history. In Hong Kong the movement led by Joshua Wong wanted public decision making in who would be chief executive of Hong Kong. They also opposed a moral and national educational program* that had critics among Hong Kong teachers, just like Jefferson County.

Children know that their birthright is a world in which they have a voice, in which their decisions and choices matter, in which the information on which they make those choices is as unbiased as possible. In particular they oppose bias by so called “authorities.” Why? Because children instinctively know that authority shapes reality for its own purposes.

As we grow older, we become that authority. If we are wise and can remember our own youth, we will listen to the voice of the young when they say, “I’m calling bullshit on that.”

 

*”The “China Model National Conditions Teaching Manual”, published by the National Education Services Centre under government fundings, was found to be biased towards the Communist Party of China and the so-called “China model“. The teaching manual called the Communist Party an “advanced, selfless and united ruling group” (進步、無私與團結的執政集團), while denouncing Democratic and Republican Parties of the United States as a “fierce inter-party rivalry [that] makes the people suffer”” analysis by teachers, from Wikipedia

Colorado, Commentary on the news, Minnesota, The Move, Travel, World History

Vive la difference!

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Lughnasa                                                                  College Moon

How different we are from Europe. Scotland has a population of 5.3 million, Ireland about 4.6 million, England 53 million. California alone has 38.3 million people. Texas 26.5. New York, 19.6 with New York City 8.3 million. Of course, we’re all tiny compared to the behemoths of India and China, but I’m interested right now in Scotland’s vote, underway right now, for its own independence as a nation.

It’s as if Minnesota were a dependency of Caltex and wanted to break away, put up its own borders and start issuing passports. My point here, heightened by our upcoming move to Colorado, is that we move between states often equivalent in size to many of the storied nations of Europe: Netherlands-16M, Greece 10.6M, Sweden 9.5M, Denmark-5.6M. Iceland-324,000.

Think of the history of Greece. Greece! The wine-dark sea. Homer. Zeus. the 300. Or, the Netherlands, home of Spinoza, holding back the sea, pot-friendly, deeply anti-semitic. Or, Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen, Copenhagen. Places redolent with backstory, filled with the architecture and the palmprints of genius.

Minnesota and Colorado sit next to each other on the population chart: Minnesota at 5.4M and Colorado at 5.2M. We could be moving from Denmark 5.6M to Norway 5M.

Imagine crossing borders, having to register as a resident alien or the equivalent, learn a different language, be aware of a different deep history. And in that imaginary case only moving 375 miles. While we will go 966 miles, almost 3 times as far to arrive in another “nation”, where the natives speak our language, share our currency and most of our habits and customs. We are a big country and our relative unity is a wonder. It might even be a miracle, albeit a very human one and no less miraculous for that. Too, we’ll have remained roughly within the center of the nation, with hundred of miles to go to an ocean from either place.

We’re so young to be so strong. And yet the world looks to us, perhaps less so now, but still…é

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Humanities, Letters, Translating De Bello Gallico, Travel, World History

Scottish Independence? Yes.

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Lughnasa                                                                               College Moon

The global market in television programs, which has increased its reach now that aggregators have entered the market, offers insights into other cultures. I’ve found a clue about the English/Celtic divide in one of them.

Kate and I have converted our television viewing to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime as I’ve mentioned before. A knock on effect (as the Brits would say) has been an increase in watching BBC shows: Waking the Dead, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Line of Duty and others whose names I can’t recall. We’re currently watching MI-5, a long running show that features Britain’s internal security service, a combination of the CIA & the FBI.

It’s interesting as drama. They have us on edge at least once during most shows. It’s equally interesting as a reveal of stereotypical British views, especially of other countries. The Americans are loud or devious or arrogant, or, often, all three. The French. Well, they’re French and can be dismissed pretty much.

The Celts have representation on the show mainly through the IRA which MI-5 portrays as ruthless, blood-thirsty and callous. Which mirrors exactly the Irish attitude toward the English, their long time occupiers. The Welsh show up occasionally and the Scots appear mostly through the Glaswegian accent which I’ve learned to recognize.

The other night Harry Pearce, head of MI-5, made a remark about the Celts. I’m paraphrasing: Oh, you know there’s no such thing as a Celtic race. Doesn’t exist. This is an ethnocentric point of view, one which posits English culture as the norm (not really a big surprise in that attitude) and uses it to dismiss the cultural roots of the Celts.

Culture does not equal race, never has. Race, in fact, is a nonsense phrase in terms of the homo sapiens gene pool. Yes, people discriminate on their folk understanding of race as discernible by skin color, but genetically? The differences that do exist (and they are minor) have no correlation to racist typologies.

One clear marker of culture has always been language. Find a different language from your own and you’ve usually found a different culture. All the Celtic lands have some form of the Celtic language as their historical tongue: Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic chief among them though there are variations on the Isle of Mann, Brittany (Briton) and Galicia (a Celtic province in Spain’s far northwest). Probably Cornwall, too, but I’m not sure about that.

Then, there is the matter of history. The Picts (Scots), Welsh, Irish, Manx and Cornish were the indigenous people of the British Isles. Yes, they were immigrants likely, too, sometime after the culture that built Stonehenge and before the Roman and Anglo/Saxon invasions, but the various tribes of the Celtae were in place long before the Anglo/Saxons, the direct ancestors of the English.

The English have a subdue, occupy and rule mentality that did not begin in the days of the British Empire writ global. No, it began, like most good empires do, close to home. The Scots held off the British (and the Romans, Hadrian’s Wall) the longest, succumbing only after a Scottish king, James Stuart, inherited the British throne, but Scotland has a long, long history of self-rule, the longest of all the Celtic lands.

Harry Pearce of the television show MI-5 had it partly right, there is no Celtic race (no black race or yellow race or white race or brown race either), but the bald attempt to dismiss the Celtic reality, its long and distinctive history and culture, is not, again as the British say, on.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, US History, Weather +Climate, World History

Cities built on Vesuvius

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

War is a terrible act. It marshals the forces and treasure and precious lives of foes into a bloody knuckle, don’t stop till the last soldier is down fog. Intentions, plans and often nations disappear in that fog and sometimes never re-emerge. Yet Barak Obama, the get-us-out of Iraq and Afghanistan president, is about to have his Woodrow Wilson moment.

My wife is a pacifist, my son a manager of war planes in battle. I’m an anti-Vietnam war era foreign policy realist who recognizes the anarchy existing at the level of nation-states. The always combustible atmosphere of geo-politics is even more flammable in the Middle East where oil and playing with matches has become the third millennial Great Game.

Add to that a world-defining struggle between Enlightenment rationalists and those who inhabit the caves which still project a dead God’s shadow (see post below) and we may be living during a world historical turning point. The irony, of course, is huge. We fight those inflamed by their commitment to a desert storm god not only because they harass us with bombings and public beheadings, but because their god’s realm includes the very fuel we need to continue poisoning the climate in which we all have to live.

This is a struggle between the god-drunk and those who live the dangerous life in which “knowledge (has) finally (stretched) out her hand for that which belongs to her: she means to rule and possess, and you with her!” We are out-numbered and out-flanked as the Chinese dragon grows stronger every day. What could possibly be more dangerous than this life? And, if we follow Nietzsche, “the most fruitful and enjoyable.”

As this blog says in its tagline, Welcome to the journey.

 

Humanities, Translating De Bello Gallico, World History, Writing

A Celtic Neo-Renaissance?

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Lughnasa                                                                                           College Moon

Two matters Celtica in my life right now, causing my early writing interests in things Celtic and ancient to resurface. The first is Caesar and his commentary on the Gallic War. There is, in fact, a Roman gauze thrown over the lives of the Celts, first by Caesar and Tacitus, then by that other world dominating super power, the Roman Catholic church. After the Romans left around 400 or so A.D., the Roman church filled in behind them.

It was these two literate oppressors who recorded both the religion and folkways of the Celts. There is, as you can imagine, considerable disjunct between the likely reality of the Celts and their description by people looking down from positions from authority. Especially in the case of the Catholics who combined power with a demand to change the old ways.

The second is the upcoming vote, on September 18th, on Scottish independence. The English, in some ways the political and national extension of both the Romans and the Roman Catholics into the contemporary world of the British Isles, overthrew Celtic lands (Wales and Ireland) and later merged with Scotland.

They first took Wales, which never managed to govern itself as a nation, divided too much by its steep mountains. That was Edward I, Longshanks, in 1284. In 1536 Henry VIII took Ireland and, ironically, tried to supplant Catholicism by sending over Protestants. That is, members of the Church of England, a church created by his famous conflict with the Papacy over his failed attempt to find a wife who would give him a son. Then, in 1707, through a dynastic inheritance by the Scottish king, James Stuart, of the throne of England, Scotland joined England.

Over the course of the last century and this one those bonds have become loosened, first by the Irish struggles, not entirely over even today, and the independence movements in Wales and Scotland. The Welsh movement has not got much momentum, but the Scottish one seems to be gaining favor with the country. If Scotland shakes loose, we might see again a more recognizable Celtic culture with both Ireland and Scotland looking both back to their roots and forward to their own, independent futures.

 

Latin, Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

De Bello Gallico

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Lughnasa                                                                           College Moon

I asked Greg (Latin tutor) for something new, a different arrangement. He wrote back and suggested I start reading Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. That’s not quite what I had in mind, but I decided I’d try it before our time together next Friday. I’ve already translated 20 lines. It goes quicker than Ovid, prose rather than poetry explaining part of that I imagine. Translating made me feel like I’d made real progress. Probably Greg’s point in recommending it.

The commentary I’m using for Caesar suggests reading in the Latin word order first. That’s very hard with poetry because Latin poets move words around based on rhyme scheme and meter, as well as for dramatic effect. With Caesar however it gave me, for the first time, a feel for Latin as a foreign language rather than a puzzle created by unfamiliar words. Reading in the Latin word order means thinking the way a Latin writer and reader would.

There is a subtle irony involved in reading Caesar for me, two in fact. The first is that Caesar was the first real Latin text I ever began to read, way back in Miss Mitchell’s class in high school. (Yes, speaking of ancient times, that was 1964 and 1965.) The second and more profound one for me is that it is through Caesar and through De Bello Gallico, Of the Gallic Wars, that we have a great deal of our knowledge of the ancient Celts. Gaul = Celt. And, it was Caesar who invaded Briton. Between Caesar and Tacitus, a Roman historian, we have the bulk of the written accounts about the Celts, how they lived, fought, worshiped.

I’m going to keep translating both Ovid and Caesar, though I’ll finish Caesar long before I finish the Metamorphoses.

 

Humanities, Literature, Travel, World History

A Death in Brazil

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Lughnasa                                                                   College Moon

7th and 16th in GDP. 5th and 4th in population. 5th and 15th in geographic size. What are Brazil and Indonesia? I know little about either one. Trying to plug that gap at least a little I just finished a remarkable book called, A Death in Brazil, by Peter Robb.

(farofa fried cassava (manioc) flour)

It’s a strange book structurally and in terms of genre, impressionistic in its use of anecdotes sprinkled through research on Brazilian colonization, slavery, key literary figures and recent political ethos (through 2003).  It is a Conradian evoking of the steamy foreign with strange, slightly distant figures acting and reacting in ways both understandable and despicable, and repetitive.

Yet, it is also a travel book, apparently recounting the author’s journey’s in Brazil, particularly in the northeastern coastal city of Recife. These passages go into detail about native Brazilian foods like farofa and moqueca de camarão (left).

Robb’s through line is about the first democratically elected president of Brazil, Fernando Collor and his money man, PC Farias. He recounts Collor rise to power in the small, poor state of Alagoas and PC’s role as his money man. Lula, the union organizer and presidential hopeful for the Worker’s Union Party, is the contrast to Collor, a man of the people rather than a man of the monied elite.

The book weaves in the work of Machado de Assis, Gilberto Freyre, and Euclides da Cunha, using these literary figures as lenses for viewing Brazilian society. It’s a clever deployment of literature because it illuminates the socio-political landscape of Brazil while focusing on Brazilian literary classics.

When finished, I had at least an outline of Brazilian history from the time of Portuguese colonization through 2003, an introduction to the slave trade and its unusually cruel instance in Brazil (the largest total number of slaves ever in the Western hemisphere and Brazil did not end slavery until 1888.), the political dynamic between the huge rural regions and the populous cities like Rio and Sao Paulo and an update of Brazilian political processes in the first decade of the new millennium.

Well worth reading.

Anybody know a similar book about Indonesia?

 

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., World History

Aurora

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

Well. The dogs have encouraged me to see another dawn. No, this is not some heroic clawback from the edge of terminal illness attained by the promise of canine companionship, rather it’s occasioned by canine demand for outside and food. So, here I am posting an Aurora just after a Nocturne. This might not be unusual for many, but for me, it’s downright odd.

The front page of the three papers I read consistently all feature the Malaysian Airlines disaster. The New York Times follows it with a long story about preparation by Israel for a ground assault on the Gaza Strip. Grim news from a part of the world that has been and continues to be a flashpoint for international conflicts.

Crimea, a major part of the Ukrainian/Russian violence, has featured in many wars and as part of the Great Game, the struggle between Great Britain and Russia for control in Central Asia. The Middle East, not far away, and its oil resources has become more prominent of late, particularly since the partition of Israel and Palestine. No one covers themselves with glory in any of these disputes and the politics are intractable, the product of ancient grudges coupled with the very modern demand for oil.

The ancient grudges often have their roots in this region’s other primary export, monotheistic religions. Though there were many polytheistic faiths in cultures there-from Babylonia to Assyria to Persepolis-it was with the Abrahamic covenant and the Egyptian diaspora of his descendants that monotheism began its ascendancy. In sequence came Christianity, then Islam both variants of that original turn toward one god.

The bitter soup concocted from petroleum and theological certainty, endemic to all three faiths, has bloodied nations and peoples over the whole globe. Where will it end? Oddly enough climate change might bring a peace of sorts in both central Asia and the Middle East. As the world backs away from its dependence on carbon based fuels, the relative importance of the oil rich regions and their conduits to markets (much of Central Asia, with pipelines headed toward China and toward the West) will decline.

Could be.

Great Work, Letters, Poetry, World History

They Say It’s Your Birthday

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Summer                                                                                     Most Heat Moon

“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.” 
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

A good while back I sat down and wrote a list of my saints. These are writers, political activists, artists, naturalists, poets, film-makers, scientists, philosophers and others who have influenced my thinking, moved me toward various arenas of action. They are my mentors.

A bit later I sat down and began entering their birthdays onto my Google calendar so I could acknowledge them at least once a year. That’s why my calendar for today, July 12th, has three names on it: Julius Caesar, Henry David Thoreau and Pablo Neruda. What an odd threesome, a Roman general and the first emperor, a New England Renaissance naturalist and writer, a socialist Chilean poet.

Someday I plan a post that will feature most of my saints, a blog version of the Book of Saints, only these will be mine, an idiosyncratic list with very few outright religious folks on it.