Category Archives: World History

Cinema and Television, Dogs, News of the Strange, Politics, Travel, US History, World History

All in a Morning’s Jaunt

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Spring                                                      Bloodroot Moon

Today is the much nicer day of the next three.  Tomorrow the high will be 46 and windy, Monday 41 with ice and snow. Today it is 53 and sunny. I chose walking over museums today.

Before leaving I ate my first and last breakfast at the hotel.  Their main breakfast is a buffet, served for the  many students staying here.  The coffee was weak and served in tired blue plastic mugs.  Jack Reacher would have scored the coffee very low.  A group of 18 students from Germany didn’t seem to mind the coffee though.

Outside the wind was mild, though the temperature in the morning was in the high 30’s.  I saw people in shirt sleeves but I stuck with my hat, Chilean fjord special muffler and my Ecuadorian coat.  There were a number of people out enjoying the sunshine when I passed the Willard Hotel.

(apparently my Android takes self-portraits.  This one showed up in my pics today.)

Those of you who watched House of Cards would recognize the Willard from the scene where Clean Water held its fund-raiser on the steps, then crossed the streets with trays of food for the striking teachers.  Up close it looks like money and power compressed into architecture.

About a block from the Willard and right next to the Whitehouse–how did I not remember this?–is the department of the Treasury.  Keep the nation’s finances right close by the Oval Office, I guess.

Michelle’s garden is on the south lawn and visible from the fence where we all gathered, gobsmacked by the presence of this icon of politics and American might.  The Whitehouse has been the home of all U.S. presidents except for George Washington though Truman vacated for four years while it got a top to bottom rebuilding.

Onward to the Mall, entering the green west of the still not open Washington Monument.  It’s having repairs and rejiggering of its foundations due to a 2011 5.8 earthquake whose epicenter was in Virginia.

Walking along the reflecting pool on my way to the Lincoln Monument I saw a very large Irish Wolfhound, gray and stately, walking its people, unfortunately too far away to meet.

At the monument there were a lot of people though not the crush I’ve  experienced at other times.  This is a moving place as I’m sure you already know.  It is, as it says right over Lincoln’s head, a temple.  Immersed as I am right now in Greek and Roman mythology it’s easy to see the architect and sculptor’s reach back to those ancient worlds for adequate ceremonial features.  He was and is a giant in our history and this haunting building makes that place clear.

A brief thought passed through my head that this was a monument for the ages, then Ozymandias came in its wake and I realized I was a citizen of Rome at Rome’s peak.  London at the height of the British Empire.  Xi’an during the T’ang empire.  Edo during the Tokugawa era.  And the glory of those cities now lies in the past, a memory, not a present fact.  So it will be with Lincoln and Washington, D.C. itself.

After the Lincoln Monument I went by the additions to the Vietnam Memorial, two statuary groups, one three men, the other three women, and wandered on to come upon what must be the most jingoistic of all our monuments and one built under the reign of George II, George W. Bush.  Nothing against the vets of WWII, among them were both my parents and an uncle, but this monument reeks of American exceptionalism and the projection of US power.  With George W.’s name on it it will forever be linked, as I’m sure he intended, with his misguided efforts in Iraq.

This is an example of the unintended consequences of the use of power.  No one can or should compare the US WWII effort, the last ‘good’ war’, with the ill-advised and deceitfully sold war against the Iraqi people.  This monument will itself stand as stone and metal irony on just this point.

In case, though, all these monumental treatments of liberty and freedom seem ill-advised, I found this on the back of a truck parked on the corner of Constitution and 15th, just two blocks from the Whitehouse.  There is always someone who would take freedoms away.

By the time I trudged my way back–I figure 4 to 5 miles round trip–this guy had exhausted himself.  A lunch at the Elephant and Castle then a long nap.  Woke up refreshed and ready to go back to the PRB show tomorrow.

Art and Culture, Asia, World History

Better

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Samhain                                                             New (Winter Solstice) Moon

Well into my stride now with the Terra Cotta Warriors tours.  Very satisfying.  Great questions, interested and attentive participants.  Doesn’t get much better.  I’ve stuck with telling the story of the Qin state and the arc of violence from the Spring and Autumn Period to the time of Qin Shi Huang Di.

Art and Culture, Asia, Politics, World History

My Vote’s With Barack, But My Heart’s With Qin Shi Huang Di

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Samhain                                                                    Fallowturn Moon

As Mitt and Barack go into the ring for real tomorrow, my attention remains focused on an earlier political figure, Qin Shi Huang Di, and the Qin state.  Of course, I’ll break out of my ancient Chinese reverie to head down to the polling place tomorrow.  Can’t miss that.  Haven’t done since I was old enough to vote.  Which was, BTW, 21 for me.

I’ll be surprised if Obama loses, not sure I’ll be happy if he wins.  There are, of course, those Supreme Court justices and the execution of the Health Care act.  Still, he’s not made my lefty heart flutter and if Gus Hall were around I’d vote Communist again.

Meanwhile I’ve defined a tour route using the Bo Bell, the gold and iron dagger, the early tomb figures (small), the Hu vessel, the kneeling archer, a nod to all the various acts of standardization, the chariot horse and the various pits, the General and the water birds.  My focus remains the rise of the Qin, including the reforms of Shang Yeng and the broader and deeper reforms of Qin Shi Huang Di.  This is a wonderful moment to help people grasp a bit of Chinese history, and not just any history, but history that shaped and shapes the Chinese state.

The story, too, can be told using wonderful, beautiful objects.  A great honor.

Art and Culture, Asia, World History

Qin Shi Huang Di Extends Reign to Minnesota

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Fall                                                                      Fallowturn Moon

Qin Shi Huang Di.  Quite a guy.  As Kate pointed out, starting your tomb when you’re 13, the age Ying Zeng assumed the throne of Qin, is precocious.  He reigned 35 years and as his achievement grew, so did his ambition for his tomb and tomb complex.  All of this he did in spite of a life-long obsession with immortality, since he wanted to be not only the first Qin Shi Huang Di, that is the emperor of Qin, ruling as the sage kings of deep antiquity, but he also wanted to be the last Qin Shi Huang Di.  He wanted to rule forever.

He didn’t.

The last four days I’ve had a barrage of education about the state of Qin; its rise in the Spring and Autumn period; it’s emergence as a dominant state during the Warring States Period; and, its eventual absorption of the other 6 of the warring states to create the first unified Chinese state.

On Thursday Yang Liu gave the continuing education lecture for the exhibition.  On Friday I attended the morning 2 hour + walk through of the show in which Liu went with us from gallery to gallery explaining his intentions and giving us additional background on all the objects.  Yesterday and today was the Qin symposium with, what I learned from some sojourning Chinese students from Princeton, were the world’s authorities on all matters Qin and earlier.

I’m gonna let all that settle over the next couple of days while I work on Latin, my mythology course and revising Missing.  Oh, cooking leeks and using our carrots, too.

 

Art and Culture, Asia, World History

China Rising

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Fall                                                                    Fallowturn Moon

Walk through with Yang Liu today for the Terra Cotta warrior exhibition.  Using the terra cotta term to shorthand this exhibition does it a significant disservice.  Yang Liu visited many provincial museums as well as the museums associated with Qin Shi Huang Di’s tomb complex.  He chose objects from 16 different museums in all, the bulk of them intended to the story of the rise of the Qin.

That means including Spring and Autumn period bronze ritual vessels and bells, plus a sword (looks more like a dagger to me) made of iron!  This same sword has a pure gold hilt done in sinuous rectangular shapes, dragon motif, and inlaid with turquoise.  The Qin began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period, 770-476 BC, grew strong during the warring states period, 476-221 BC, then, for a brief but centrally important 15 years, unified China and invented many of the marks of empire that would follow:  standardization of weights, currency, script, chariot axle widths, a pyramidal style government with the emperor at the top and a bureaucracy to support it.

The story this exhibit tells is of a region at war with itself, splintering into multiple states, each vying with the other for land, resources, power.  It is a long period because it runs from 770 BC to 207 BC, but it is a critical, perhaps the critical period for understanding the rise of China, many of its concepts still intact even in today’s People’s Republic.

Art and Culture, Asia, Humanities, World History

Warring States

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Fall                                                                         Fallowturn Moon

Today begins the journey to Shaanxi, the province of the Qin state as it emerged during the Eastern Zhou dynasty, a peripheral state on the frontier.  In the lecture today I learned that there is some debate on the origin of the Qin state.  Did it emerge from the barbarians to the west?  Or, did it have, at least in its ruling family, linkage with the east coast?

Yang Liu, Curator of Chinese Art and Head of Asian Art Department, acknowledged this debate, then said, “Why is it important?”  The problem is this.  The Qin unified China and Qin Shi Huang Di is a national hero.  Dynastic China as we come to know it after the Qin has its roots in many of the reforms of Qin Shi Huang Di.  What would it mean if that founding state was not, after all, Chinese?

This show is going to be a big deal, a very big deal.  Schools have already booked nearly all the available slots between now and the show’s end.  The museum has asked docents to sign up for additional tours.

What Yang Liu wants to do is place the tomb, its guardians and other wonderful burial objects like life size water birds and half-size bronze chariots, in the context of the rise of the Qin state during the Eastern Zhou in the Spring and Autumn period, then its emergence as a powerful state during the Warring States Period.  Only then can this massive tomb complex, of which the warriors are, after all, only a small part, be understood in its full historical significance.

Over the next few days I’ll post research I’ve located and things I learn at the Qin dynasty symposium over the weekend.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, US History, World History

These Strange Times

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Lugnasa                                                   Hiroshima Moon

Pope’s butler accused of theft.  Wait.  The pope has a butler?  Shootings yesterday at Texas A&M.  The Sikh Temple in Wisconsin last week.  Aurora the 20th of July.  Can anyone else hear a tear in the moral fabric of the universe?

Not to mention that yesterday the stock market was down because of news from Asia.  Asia?  What happened to the euro?  It’s true that bad news always happens and good news is not, usually, news at all.  Still.

Let’s throw in the news from  Europe’s Cryosat that the polar ice has begun to retreat

(at) a loss of 900 cubic kilometers of ice in the last year. That’s 50 percent more than computer models predicted would melt.

A lack of ice is good news for shipping, and oil and gas exploration, but dark ocean water warms the air above more than reflective ice, a “positive feedback” that accelerates warming. Research suggests the Arctic is warming 2-4 times faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. So what? This warming is nudging the jet stream north, to the tune of 1 mile a year, 18 feet/day.   (paul douglas weatherblog)

Predictions of the end times have a 100% failure rating (so far), so I’m not going there, but bizarre times?  Yes.

Of all of these, the news I understand least are the three shootings.  Like the man here who killed his three daughters, there may be a psychological explanation.  Certainly there is a psychological explanation.  Has to be.  But explanation does not serve.  Tracing the inner path to these crimes leaves us with the crime in the end.

I’d like to know, if anybody does know, the incidence of these or similar crimes in other cultures.  Are we truly aberrant or is it a statistical phenomenon, a law of large numbers reality?

Of all these, the news that worries me the most comes from the cryosat satellite.  This summer was miserable for us and horrific for much of the country.  In this case I understand the cause.  I drive one.  So do you.  I use electricity.  So do you.  We have treated global warming as a topic for next year.  For the next generation.  Guess what?

It is next year.  And we’re the next generation.

World History

Hiroshima

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Summer                                                     New (Hiroshima) Moon

Concentrating on Hiroshima for this month’s moon.  August 6th is a day we should all remember, not as an outlier event, but, as an example, perhaps the example, of our consistently destructive nature.  Our, by the way, means humanity, not the United States.

The U.S. is not unique in its tendency to mete out violence; in fact, historically speaking, we appear restrained, especially since we have not had imperial ambitions.  (Yes, I know the arguments about Amerika and the overseas colonies created by capitalism and military bases.  Doesn’t hold a candle to England, Rome, USSR, even China as it swallows Tibet and aims for the Spratly Islands.)

Point is, we like to break things and kill each other as a species.  As a species, you could say we’re at the late toddler stage only with really powerful toys.  This tendency to self-murder is, for the most part, species specific.  Only chimps, as far as I now, kill each other for reasons other than dominance or in the heat of feeding.

Steven Pinker has a hopeful book out which I have not read, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that claims to show that violence, especially in the West, has been in decline in the short and long term perspectives.  I hope he’s right, but even if he is, it doesn’t change any of my observations.

A conservative take on this data is to be fatalistic about it, to shrug and let it go, “It’s just who we are.”  Personally, I take a piece of that-it is who we are-but we are also responsible for our choices.  We can choose to push ourselves away from violent solutions.  Will we ever become a peaceful species?  I doubt it, especially with nationalism still informing political decision making at the global level.

At the global level might makes right still rules the day and that makes peace a tough place to get to.

So, for this next full moon, let’s think about Hiroshima.  What it means.  Why we should say  Never again.

GeekWorld, Literature, Myth and Story, World History

Audacity

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Beltane                                                Garlic Moon

Here there be giants.  Fin de siecle Europe.  We’ve not recovered yet from the explosion of ideas that erupted there:  quantum mechanics, relativity, Marxism, symbolists, dada, surrealism, the airplane, electricity, lights, antibiotics, cubism, expressionism, fauvism, psychoanalysis, world war.

Just finished watching A Dangerous Method with Vigo Mortennsen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein.  To my taste Cronenberg’s focus on Jung’s mistress tilted the film away from the revolutionary work Freud and Jung had created.  But, perhaps my approach would lead more to documentary.

Still, what I got was a clear sense of the frisson between them and the astonishing, breath-taking really, courage it took to think the thoughts and engage in the work they did.  That’s what led me back to the fin de siecle.

There were radicals alive.  It must have been in the water.  Seeing visions.  Looking inside the mind.  Down inside the atom.  How to lift humankind into the air.  How to cure disease.

The audacity and daring inspires me, makes me want to tread as far out on the pier as I can go, to risk falling into the void, the abyss.  To see.  To feel.  To embrace.

Family, Humanities, Politics, Travel, World History

The Sunnier Side

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Beltane                                         Garlic Moon

OK. I may have tilted toward the darker side in the post below.  It’s here, all right, and dominant in much of what I’ve personally experienced of Romania this week.

However.  If this were a movie, the weather would have started rainy and cool, which it did.  We might say, the Romania I reported on in the post below.  Then, as the week went on, the rain would lift until a pleasant, sunny, mild day ended the visit.

The Romania which I saw, for example, as I took a walk around the hotel’s block.  There apartment buildings of modest heights, 3-6 stories, hide behind vine covered fences, a small pocket park has a shady place for children from the Mikos child care center.  Two backyards (all the backyards) have well-tended plantings and fountains.

A couple sat on their balcony four floors up, smoking, drinking morning coffee.  And, of course, there are homeless people on the streets and under the bridges of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

There is, too, the land, a beautiful land with mountains, picturesque villages, good train service and a friendly population.  And Bucharest has many, many trees and beautiful parks, wide streets and a safe feel so often not present in US cities.

This is a country, I believe, that awaits its vision of itself as a free people.  I can imagine one though.  It roots in millennia of settled history, linking this land to the greatest of early Western civilizations, Greek and Roman and makes the remains of those two a vital aspect of a new future.

The difficult period after the fall of Rome adds great texture to current Romania as Mongols, Magyars, Russian and Turks fought back and forth over this rich land at the nexus of so many ambitions. Those eras, though painful, also enliven a sense of Romania as a place desired by many; many who contributed cultural legacy to the present, like the Saxons around Brasov, the Slavs on the coastal regions of the Black Seas and the Hungarians in northwestern Romania.

The 19th and early 20th century had some stirrings of a free Romania, then world war II came and after that the fall of the iron curtain.

Now there is a country just waking up in its own home, a home with a past, and now one with a future.  I hope this is just the first visit for me.  Nicoleta’s brother and his wife have a baby on the way, naming ceremony in October.