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Make Way for Wynn:Steel Goes Up on the Tower, Gas Station to Go
by Patriot-Bridge Staff • June 23, 2017 • 0 Comments
As the steel bones of the new Lower Broadway in Everett – just over the Charlestown line – begin to climb to the sky at the Wynn Boston Harbor, old stalwarts on the roadway are about to disappear.
Wynn Boston Harbor announced this week that it will begin the demolition of the former Mobil Gas Station on Lower Broadway – a stalwart stopping point on the way to and from Boston for decades.
The station will be acquired by the Wynn Boston Harbor resort and it will serve as the entrance to the property.
“That station is going to be demolished,” said Greg John of Wynn Boston Harbor. “It’s going to be happening very soon because that’s where our entrance will be.”
The Dunkin’ Donuts next door is likely to go, but John said it would be staying a little bit longer.
Already this month, fencing crews moved in to put a barrier around the station in preparation for its demolition.
There was no record of sale yet for the property, which is listed in City records as being owned by VMA Corporation. The property is likely under agreement with Wynn, however, as it was listed as the address in a large mortgage transaction two years ago from Deutsche Bank, according to property records from the Middlesex County Registry of Deeds.
Wynn has purchased a number of properties, with one of the largest acquisitions on the books being the LTI Limo property on Bow Street. LTI has been working on a plan to relocation to Chelsea, where its airport heavy business will now be headquartered. There was no timeline for when that property would be taken over by Wynn.
Already, the GT’s Lounge and an accompanying building have been demolished.
Last year, the McDonald’s was torn down and rebuilt next door. The brand new showpiece restaurant opened in March.
Additionally, 3 Charlton St. was acquired by Wynn and demolished as well, opening up in November 2016 as the central nervous system of the design, planning and construction coordination work.
A building directly in front of the site on One Horizon Way – a new office building that was built and never occupied – was acquired and demolished some time ago.
At the same time as the Mobil gets ready to become history, the future of the city is rising higher and higher with steel beams from the tower now being easily seen from the roadway.
The beams now visible – which are two large silo shapes are where the new garage entrance and bus drop-off location will be on the entry road.
John said there are 10,000 pieces of steel weighting 11,000 tons that are ready to go up vertically. When steel is topped off, it will rise to the same height, roughly, as the adjacent windmills topmost blade positioning.
As an interesting fact, John said that six Boeing 777 airplanes could fit within the basement footprint of the building.
On the waterfront, he also said that the old, abandoned barges on the shore will soon be removed as they begin work on the shoreline.
Wynn Boston Harbor has recently been hosting dignitaries from the State House to the site for tours of construction site. Earlier this month, they hosted Gov. Charlie Baker and a contingent of officials from the administration for a tour and update.
Then on Tuesday, June 13, they hosted several state legislators, including State. Rep. Dan Ryan and State Sen. Sal DiDomenico.
← USS Constitution to go Back Afloat
Impossible Dream Returns to Charlestown Marina, Spaulding for Sail Boston →
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One Day at a Time: It’s “Groundhog Day” For Everybody
Here’s one way to view the current situation in which we all find ourselves:
Prior to the pandemic sweeping the nation and the world, our lives were such that each day truly was a new day, filled with new challenges and the possibility of new excitement, albeit to varyingdegrees.
Today however, with most of us locked down in our homes, our daily routines have taken on a stunning sameness that is bereft of any sense of the usual moments of joy that form the essence of our humanity.
Similar to the classic Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day” from 1993 (wow, has it really been 27 years?), each day seems to be a repeat of the day before.
The daily news in particular has a feeling of being in “Groundhog Day” mode. The headlines, politicians, and talking heads basically tell us the same thing, day after day after day, to the point where most of us now are tuning it out.
And yet, unlike the movie, there is nothing humorous about the real-life Groundhog Day in which we find ourselves.
The COVID-19 pandemic by far is the most tragic, far-reaching, and life-changing event that every American has faced since the end of World War II 75 years ago.
The phrase, “One day at a time,” which is meant both as an inspiration and an admonition to those among us who struggle wth substance abuse and other issues, now applies to every person, in every corner of the globe, regardless of fame, wealth, power, or any other status that differentiates us from anyone else.
The news that public figures as disparate as the actor Tom Hanks, Boris Johnson (the Prime Minister of England), and James Dolan (the billionaire owner of the New York Knicks and Comcast) have contracted COVID-19 — on three different continents — makes it clear that the coronavirus does not discriminate and is world-wide in scope.
In short, there is no escape — no way out — for every human being on the planet.
Moreover, with public health authorities informing us that the ongoing lack of testing in the United States continues to leave our nation flying blind in the face of the pandemic, we truly will have reason to fear every interaction with another human being (even if we and they are fully-masked and we space ourselves six feet apart) for the foreseeable future.
Without any understanding of the trueextent of the spread of the disease in the United States, no one can predict when we will begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“One day at a time” will be our mantra for many days to come.
← Easter Sunday Ringing of the Bells
Baker and Walsh Announce Stricter Measures; New Funds for COVID-19 Relief →
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Nicki Minaj’s Brother Sentenced to 25 Years to Life in Prison for Predatory Sexual Assault
Nicki Minaj's brother has received his sentence for a heinous crime.
On Monday (Jan. 27), XXL confirmed with the Nassau County District Attorney’s office that Jelani Maraj has been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after being found guilty of predatory sexual assault against a child as well as endangering the welfare of a child. The sentence comes over two years after the verdict for the case was reached.
As previously reported, Maraj was accused of sexually abusing his then-stepdaughter when she was 11-years-old and repeatedly raping her between April and November 2015. Police said they found Maraj's semen in the child's pajamas, but his defense team claimed the girl's mother planted the evidence. Maintaining his innocence, Maraj and his lawyers argued that the allegations were fabricated in an attempt to extort $25 million from his famous sister.
Back in October, Maraj lost his bid to have the rape conviction set aside on the basis of "clear jury misconduct." Maraj's lawyer, David Schwartz, told Newsday that the verdict should be vacated because he believed that "outside influences," including social media posts and news articles, "affected the verdict."
Judge McDonald reportedly determined that "not every misstep by a juror rises to the inherent and prejudicial level at which reversal is required," and that Maraj's team failed to meet the burden of proving any such misconduct.
Nicki has yet to comment on this sentencing publicly. XXL has reached out to Maraj's attorney for comment.
Source: Nicki Minaj’s Brother Sentenced to 25 Years to Life in Prison for Predatory Sexual Assault
Filed Under: nicki minaj
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The Q-Wave: An Update on COVID-19 from Our Founder
By John BielinskiApril 28, 2020No Comments
As a physician assistant, as a nurse practitioner, as a physician, we have to have one source we get our content from. Most people refer to a site called UpToDate, which offers providers up to date medical knowledge. It’s updated all the time and I believe people feel it’s an authoritative reference, because whenever information is updated, it immediately goes to UpToDate. It’s really considered the gold standard for understanding disease processes.
I’ve summarized the information on COVID-19 from UpToDate as of Monday, March 30th. This is the best information I can give based on the data available. This is an informational newsletter, not just for clinicians, but also for laypeople. I’m going to describe what we know about the novel coronavirus, not just in medical language, but also so patients can understand it. In my experience, there’s some very confusing stuff on the news. You hear doom and gloom and then you hear the opposite; it’s hard to know what to believe.
I want to provide the most objective information possible from UpToDate on this problem we’re going through, this pandemic. COVID-19 is now deemed severe acute respiratory distress syndrome coronavirus two. They’re saying this is very similar to SARS. This beta coronavirus is in the same family as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or the SARS virus.
The virus has been shown to use the same receptor, the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), for cell entry. If you’re a layperson, that won’t mean much to you. If you’re a clinician, that makes you think, “Should we cease ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blocking?” The answer is no, but we’ll talk about that later.
In an analysis of 103 strains of COVID-19 from China, two different types were identified. The first is designated as type L, counting for 70% of the strains. The second is type S, which makes up about 30%. It’s unclear how this information is relevant; understand there have been 103 strains, with two different types designated as sinister.
The bottom line is that we don’t completely understand the route of transmission. Person-to-person is the main mode of transmission. It is thought to occur mainly via respiratory droplets, similar to influenza. Droplets typically do not travel more than six feet and do not linger in the air.
However, in one letter to the editor, it was stated that COVID-19 remains viable in aerosolized medium, at least under experimental conditions, for at least three hours. That’s why I’ve been told that in the emergency room they’re avoiding anything that may aerosolize pulmonary secretions, like nebulizers or someone with those puffers. The puffer, I don’t think, is as sinister as a nebulizer, where a patient is hooked up to oxygen and medication runs in. That does give more secretions.
How long is a person infected?
How long are you sick? We don’t know for sure. Anything you see or hear online is speculation. We know that the viral RNA levels appear to be higher soon after symptoms of onset, when compared to levels later in the illness. This suggests transmission is more likely in the earlier stages of infection, but we don’t know that for sure. Now remember, symptoms that we’re going to talk about later are primarily fever and pulmonary symptoms. We’re going to come back to that.
How long does the virus stay around? In one study of 21 patients with mild illness, meaning they weren’t short of breath, they weren’t hypoxic, 90% tested negative 10 days after the start of symptoms. So, with mild symptoms, 90% of the 21 patients, about 18 or 19, were retested at 10 days and the test didn’t find the virus. Tests were positive for longer in patients with more severe disease. In another study of 137 patients who lived, the duration was an average of 20 days, ranging from eight to 37 days. How long is the virus around? It appears anywhere from 10 to 37 days, depending on the severity of the illness.
How contagious is this virus?
If I’m on a bus and there’s someone else on the bus who’s got the virus, what are the chances I’m going to get it, especially if they’re within six feet? Transmission from someone who’s sick varies from person to person. The rate of transmission ranges from 1 to 5% among tens of thousands of close contacts of confirmed patients in China. Among crew members on a cruise ship, 2% developed a confirmed infection.
In the United States, the symptomatic secondary attack rate was about half a percent, 0.45%, among 445 close contacts in 10 confirmed patients. So the bottom line is that the contagious rate is anywhere from about half a percent to 5%.
What is the incubation period?
We believe that it’s about 14 days after exposure, with most cases occurring approximately four to five days after being exposed. Let me make this clear. If I’m in close contact with someone who has COVID-19, my chances of getting it are anywhere from half a percent to 5%. And I could develop symptoms for up to two weeks, even though it’s more likely that if I’m going to get sick, I’m going to get sick at about day five. Those are good general rules.
The good thing is that, based on the best information, about four out of five people who get this are going to have a mild disease. There will be either no pulmonary symptoms or mild pulmonary symptoms in 81% of patients. Severe cases, where your lungs are involved (dyspnea, hypoxia, greater than 50% of lung involvement on a CAT scan), make up about 14% of cases. Critically ill patients are 5% of patients.
Let me back up for a second. Ladies and gentlemen, the infection rate is anywhere from half a percent to 5%. If you’re going to get sick, you get sick at five days. And if you’re going to get sick, 81% of the time it’s going to be mild. This information is a little bit more reassuring to me. Clearly, a lot of bad stuff is going on, but to me, those are reassuring numbers.
The overall case fatality rate so far has been 2.3%. No deaths were reported among patients in noncritical cases.
What are the risk factors for severe disease?
I think this is relatively obvious. If you work in medicine, anytime someone is sick, like with pneumonia, you look at the patient and how sick they were when they presented. Do they have cardiovascular disease or risk factors like diabetes, hypertension, chronic lung disease, chronic kidney disease, or cancer? All of those are linked to worse outcomes.
Now, this is not as much for the layperson. This is more for clinicians. What are some of the signs of poor prognosis? Lymphopenia, low white counts, elevated liver function tests, elevated LDH, elevated inflammatory mediators, such as C-reactive protein and ferritin, elevated D-dimer, elevated prothrombin time.
There is also the impact of age. Adults of middle age and older are most commonly affected, relative to kids. Symptomatic infections in children appear to be uncommon. When it occurs, it’s usually mild, although severe cases have been reported.
Can you have the virus without symptoms?
Can you be an asymptomatic carrier? Yes. Asymptomatic carriers have been described, but we don’t know how often. We just don’t have good data on it. So, you could have no symptoms but carry it to other people. On a cruise ship, most passengers and staff were screened. About 17% tested positive. About half of the 619 confirmed cases had no symptoms at the time of the diagnosis. So absolutely, you can have the virus in you and be a carrier, but have no symptoms.
If the patient has no symptoms, can there still be evidence of disease? Yes. Someone asks me, “John, how do you feel?” I feel good. But then, if you do a CAT scan, the CAT scan might be positive. A study of 24 patients without symptoms who had a chest CT found that 50% had the typical ground-glass opacities or patchy shadowing, and another 20% had some degree of CAT scan abnormalities.
What are some of the clinical manifestations?
How do COVID-19 patients present? The initial presentation is typically pneumonia.
Even a low-grade temperature should be a flag. Let’s make sure we’re really digging into the data on fever. A fever might not be a universal finding. In one study, fever was reported in almost all patients, but about 20% had a very low-grade temp. That means less than 100.4. In another study of about 1100 patients from China, fever defined as an axillary temp above 99.5 was present in only about 44% on admission, but was ultimately noted 89% of the time during hospitalization.
My concern with this is that it was an axillary temp. It was in the armpit, which is notoriously poor. I don’t know how much I can rely on that if it’s not an oral temp, but I understand it. Why wouldn’t they use an oral temp? With an oral temp, you’re getting into secretions.
And then there are pulmonary symptoms. So about 60% of cases had pulmonary symptoms like a dry cough, about 30% had shortness of breath, about 30% coughed up some sputum, and about 30% were overtly short of breath.
Constitutional symptoms include anorexia, meaning they had no appetite, they weren’t hungry, about 40% of the time. You’ll also see muscle pain or myalgias 35% of the time. Overall fatigue is present 70% of the time. Less common symptoms of headache, sore throat, rhinorrhea (a runny nose), and GI symptoms, such as nausea, vomiting or diarrhea have also been reported in some patients, and that may be the presenting complaint.
Anosmia (no sense of smell) has been anecdotally reported. That’s hasn’t been supported in data. A colleague of mine who lives in New York, she said her phone blew up with people calling and saying, “I can’t smell anything.” It was because it just came out that people with COVID-19 could possibly lose their smell.
What about the course and complications?
What does UpToDate say? Well, dyspnea presents approximately five days after onset of symptoms and hospital admission occurs typically about seven days after symptoms appear. Acute respiratory distress syndrome is the major complication. That’s where your lungs just freak out and shut down. In a study of 138 patients described with acute respiratory distress syndrome, it developed in about 20% approximately eight days after the onset of symptoms. In another study, 41% of patients developed ARDS. What does the acute respiratory distress syndrome literature tell me? About 20% will get it. If you have risk factors, the chances go up. Age greater than 65, diabetes, and hypertension were each associated with ARDS.
Other complications include arrhythmia (abnormal heartbeat) and acute cardiac injury, which means your heart took a beating. Not necessarily that you’ve had a heart attack, but your heart got sick from an infection. Or there’s been overt shock, that’s where you lose your blood pressure and that doesn’t perfuse your body well.
In a series of 21 severely ill patients admitted to the ICU in the United States, about one-third of them developed cardiomyopathy. If you have cardiomyopathy that means that the heart gets sick, it can’t pump blood well, and the patient goes into a kind of congestive heart failure.
Recovery time appears to be around two weeks for mild infections and about three to six weeks for severe infections. In laboratory findings, the white blood cell count can vary, so it could be high or low, as well as a lymphocyte count. The lymphocytes typically fight viruses and that’s been shown to be low. Elevated lactate dehydrogenase, LDH, and ferritin levels are common, and elevated AST and ALTs are also common. CAT scans demonstrate this ground-glass opacification that’s consistent with viral pneumonia.
When should we test?
When should we even consider testing? Consider this diagnosis in patients with a new onset of pulmonary symptoms and/or fever. Increases rate relative to exposure: if you traveled within the prior 14 days to a risk location or had close contact with a confirmed or suspected case. And if you think you have COVID-19 and do not need emergency care, call prior to presenting to an emergency room.
A positive test generally confirms the diagnosis, although false-positive tests are possible. That’s the best UpToDate can say. If initial testing is negative, but the suspicion for COVID remains, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends re-sampling and testing from multiple respiratory tract sites. We just don’t know how accurate those tests are.
Let’s say you have mild disease and you’re going to stay at home. Stay at home and be smart. Try to separate yourself from other people and animals within the household. You should wear face masks when you’re in close contact with others. Disinfect frequently.
How long should we home isolate? When a patient has a positive test, and the patient may discontinue home isolation when there is:
A complete resolution of fever without using medication to lower your fever. And remember, right now we’re recommending only acetaminophen or Tylenol. We are not recommending ibuprofen, Motrin or Advil.
Improvement in your lung symptoms, so you don’t have the cough. All your lung symptoms go away.
Two negative specimens done 24 hours apart.
Now, testing is limited so that seems incredibly unrealistic. If you’re going to be at home, we’re really looking for decreasing of the fever and betterment of your pulmonary symptoms. You want to talk to your primary care provider about how you’re going to get testing done and if that’s even an option for you.
So what about if there’s no test done? If you have mild symptoms, they’re not recommending testing. So if you have no testing done, when could you discontinue home isolation? Patients may discontinue home isolation when the following criteria are met:
At least seven days have passed since the symptoms first appeared.
At least three days or 72 hours have passed since recovery from the symptoms.
Again, resolution of symptoms is defined as reduction of the fever without the use of fever-reducing medications, and improvement of the pulmonary symptoms, including cough or shortness of breath.
For example, a person came down with a fever and a cough on Monday and they felt like crap for another two days (Wednesday and Thursday) and felt better on Thursday. By Thursday there was no cough, no fever, no shortness of breath. Then, if they remain symptom-free Friday, Saturday and Sunday, they could go back in the public on Monday. That’s what I believe they’re saying.
The WHO suggests home isolation in patients with documented COVID-19 should continue at least two weeks after symptom resolution. These patients often need oxygen. If they need oxygen, we have to be very careful about aerosolizing secretions because we don’t know the risks.
How do we treat COVID-19 patients?
What about steroids, glucocorticoids, things like prednisone, dexamethasone or Solu-Medrol? The WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended glucocorticoids not be used on COVID-19 patients unless it’s needed for another indication, such as COPD or asthma. Glucocorticoids have been associated with an increased risk in some viral infected patients.
What about NSAIDs (ibuprofen, Motrin, Advil, Aleve, Naprosyn)? We’re uncertain. These concerns are based on anecdotal reports from a few young patients who received NSAIDs early in the course of infection and then experienced severe disease.
Just so you know, when they say anecdotal, it’s not evidence-based. It just means some people said, “Hey, these people got pretty sick when they used Motrin.” There could be no correlation, there could be a correlation. We don’t know for sure. In light of these concerns, some providers are using acetaminophen in place of NSAIDs for reduction of fever. However, there’s been no clinical or population-based data that directly addresses the risk of NSAIDs.
What do the European Medicines Agency and the WHO say about using Motrin? Well, the European Medical Agencies and the World Health Organization do not recommend that NSAIDs are avoided when clinically indicated. So it seems we’re holding back on it, but just know that around the world they’re saying, if you need them, go ahead and use them. If they’re indicated, don’t worry about it.
What about ACE inhibitors and ARBs? Patients receiving angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers should continue treatment with these agents. There’s been no recommendation to stop them.
Screening is a good thing. If someone has symptoms, they recommended possibly screening by phone or video conferencing. In the healthcare setting, the WHO and CDC recommendations for infection control for suspected or confirmed cases of infection differ only slightly. So basically, everybody’s pretty much saying the same thing. The World Health Organization recommends standard contact and droplet precautions: gloves, gown, mask, and eye protection or face protection. The addition of airborne precautions, such as respirators, is warranted during aerosolized-generating procedures.
The CDC recommends that patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 be placed in a single occupying room with a closed door and dedicated bathroom. The patient should wear a face mask if being transported out of the room. An airborne infection isolated room, i.e., a single-patient negative pressure room, should be reserved for patients undergoing aerosolized generating procedures. Any personnel entering the room of a patient with a suspected infection should wear the appropriate personal protective equipment: gloves, gown, eye protection, and a respirator – an N95 respirator, not just a mask.
We have limited resources, right? So if respirator supply is limited, the CDC acknowledges that face masks are an acceptable alternative, in addition to contact precautions and eye precautions; respirators should be worn during aerosolized-producing procedures. Aerosolized-generating procedures include tracheal intubation; noninvasive ventilation, so that’s BiPAP or CPAP; a tracheostomy; CPR; manual ventilation before intubation, so that’s Ambu bagging; upper endoscopy; and bronchoscopy.
The CDC does not consider nasal pharyngeal oropharyngeal specimen collection an aerosolized generating procedure that warrants an airborne isolation room, but it should be performed in a single occupied room with a closed door, and any personnel in the room should wear a respirator, or if unavailable, a face mask. In Washington State, suboptimal use of infection control procedures contributed to the spread of the infection. So there’s some evidence that this is clearly really important – it sounds intuitive, but there’s also some evidence behind it.
So, we have a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE). What’s recommended? We’re in a battle zone right now; we have to do what we have to do. Strategies include canceling non-urgent procedures or visits that would warrant the use of PPE, prioritizing the use of certain PPE for high-risk situations, and cautious extension or limited reuse of PPE.
What about decontamination with ultraviolet light for reuse, particularly of N95 respirators? It has been shown to be helpful with other viruses like H1N1, so it’s an option.
What about pregnant and breastfeeding women? In a review of 38 pregnant women with COVID-19, no cases of intrauterine transmission and no maternal deaths have been documented. The approach to prevention, evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of pregnant women with suspected COVID-19 should be similar to that of a non-pregnant individual. It is unknown whether the virus can be transmitted through breast milk. The only report of testing found no virus in the maternal milk of six patients. Hand hygiene and use of a face mask are recommended if breastfeeding.
Preventing Community Exposure
We need diligent hand washing, particularly after touching surfaces in public. The use of hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol is a reasonable alternative if hands are not visibly dirty. Respiratory hygiene, covering your cough or sneeze, is important. Avoiding touching your face and in particular your eyes, nose, and mouth – mucus membranes. Avoid crowds, particularly in poorly ventilated spaces. If possible, avoid close contact with ill individuals. Clean and disinfect objects and surfaces that are frequently touched.
If COVID-19 is prevalent in the community, residents should practice social distancing by staying at home as much as possible. Individuals who develop an acute respiratory illness, i.e., fever and/or respiratory symptoms, should be encouraged to stay home from school or work for the duration of the illness.
In situations involving asymptomatic individuals with potential exposure, it’s recommended that we practice social distancing and be monitored for the development of consistent signs and symptoms (cough, fever, dyspnea). In some cases, quarantine may be warranted. Clinical manifestations should prompt self-isolation at home and should be dictating medical evaluation. In the United States, the CDC currently recommends that individuals avoid all nonessential travel to high infection rates areas.
UpToDate says we should consider the diagnosis primarily in patients with fever and/or respiratory tract symptoms who reside in or have had traveled to areas with community transmission, or who have had recent close contact with a confirmed or suspected case. We’re looking at two factors: fever and pulmonary symptoms, and risk. Have you been exposed?
Limitations in testing capacity may preclude testing in all patients. We just don’t have enough tests for everybody. The CDC recommends a single occupying room for patients with gloves, gown, eye protection, and respirator (or face mask as an alternative) to healthcare practitioners.
Management consists of supportive care. And we must reduce the risk of transmission. So folks, wash your hands, practice respiratory hygiene, cover your cough, avoid crowds and close contact with individuals. Social distancing is advised.
A John-ism for You
This is a John-ism; it’s me just talking to you. This is not from UpToDate. Remember that viral bronchitis is still real. Allergies are still very real. You can still get pneumonia. You want to look at yourself and say, “Do I have a fever? Do I have pulmonary symptoms? Have I been exposed?” I’m here at a condo development in St. Petersburg, Florida. I have very little contact. I’m by myself all day and I go out on the boat. I’m not around people, so I’m a really low-risk guy. So if I got pulmonary symptoms, I’m not jumping to the conclusion that I have COVID-19.
If you have pulmonary symptoms and a fever and you have not been around people, that still puts you in a low-risk category. Be very hesitant just popping up in an emergency room, because you don’t want to get sick in the emergency room. And if you do have COVID-19 and you have mild symptoms, you don’t want to bring it into the ED.
We have to be smart about this, okay? We have to be reasonable about this; maybe that’s the best way to put it. Because I don’t even know what smart is anymore. I grossly under predicted this. Two or three weeks ago, I was going, “Oh, come on guys, this is nothing. We’re making a big deal out of nothing.” And clearly, I was grossly mistaken, so I say it with humility. I want to be reasonable. And that’s why I want to share the best information that clinicians have right now, based on UpToDate.
Colleagues, Daniel Kahneman wrote a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow. In it, he says something that was very powerful for me. He said that the cornerstone of rationality is an unbiased appreciation for uncertainty. The cornerstone of rationality is an unbiased appreciation for what’s going on right now.
All we can do is take the best data that we have, which is being updated all the time. I’m going to keep making these newsletters and putting them out. It’s the best that I feel I can do to help my colleagues and my friends out there, people who need information. If you are like me and you’re struggling with the information on the news, I believe UpToDate is very accurate and unbiased, and that’s what I’m going to keep presenting on.
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The Q-Wave: The 6 Most Important Mindsets of Urgent Care
The Q-Wave: You’ve Got to Play the Piano
The Q-Wave: Things vs Experiences in Social Isolation
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Extreme Rainfall Ramps Up
American Geophysical Union:
WASHINGTON—Across the continental United States, massive, often-devastating precipitation events—the kind that climate scientists have long called “hundred-year storms”—could become three times more likely and 20 percent more severe by 2079, a new study projects.
That is what would happen in a scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at a rapid rate—what researchers call a high-warming scenario. Extreme rainfall events, the so-called hundred-year storms, would then be likely to occur once every 33 years.
The new study finds warming has a more profound effect on both the severity and frequency of extreme precipitation events than it does on common precipitation events. The research was published in AGU’s journal Earth’s Future, which publishes interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of Earth and its inhabitants.
The findings have serious implications for how humans prepare for the future, according to the researchers.
“The five-year flood, the 10-year flood—those aren’t the ones that cause huge amounts of damage and societal disruption,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles and lead author of the new study. “That comes when you get 50- or 100-year floods, the low-probability but high-consequence kinds of events.”
For example, the occurrence of historic rainfall events such as the one that caused California’s Great Flood of 1862 or Houston’s flooding from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 is increasing much faster than that of lower-magnitude events that happen every decade or so.
Extreme rainfall becomes more extreme
The new study predicts extreme precipitation increases for the entire continental United States and delves into the consequences of those extreme rainfall events: the increases in the number of floods and the number of people who would be exposed to them.
Combining climate, water physics and population models, the authors project that, in a high-warming scenario, the increases in extreme precipitation alone would put up to 12 million additional people at risk of exposure to damage and destruction from catastrophic flooding — nearly 30 percent more people than face that risk today.
Surging Waters, a report produced by AGU in 2019, looks at flooding in the United States and demonstrates how science is supporting flood management, as well as furthering the solutions needed to mitigate flood impacts on people and property in the future.
The new study also made projections using other scenarios that combine the effects of warming and projected population growth. For example, high warming juxtaposed with high population growth would increase the number of people exposed to risk of so-called 100-year floods by around 50 million in the continental U.S.
And even in the absence of climate change—at least some of which is unavoidable over the next 30 years—medium or large population growth would expose an additional 20 million or 34 million, respectively, to such floods, highlighting the importance of demographic factors in driving the growing risk.
“There’s a huge difference between best- and worst-case scenarios,” Swain said. “People’s exposure to flooding in a warming climate is definitely going to increase. It could increase by a somewhat manageable amount or by a truly massive amount, and that depends both on the climate trajectory we take and on the demographics of the U.S.”
More frequent flooding
Previously, projections for extreme precipitation events relied on limited historical records that go back only 100 years. For the new study, the researchers used a modeling technique to create multiple plausible pasts and futures, essentially increasing the amount of available data by 40 times over what was available from history alone.
“We don’t just have one 100-year event we can pull from the historical record; we have lots of really severe, rare events we can pull out to give us a better sense of how they’re likely to change,” Swain said.
Importantly, the study found the risk of flooding in the U.S. will increase significantly over the next 30 years, even with moderate warming—meaning a temperature increase of 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) globally. That would expose more than 20 million additional people to a 100-year flood within the next 30 years, they projected.
Even the term “100-year flood” is probably already something of a misnomer, Swain said. With global temperatures already having increased by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (about 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past century, the term is fast becoming outdated.
2 Responses to “Extreme Rainfall Ramps Up”
Yes, the sooner we ditch the “100/500/whatever-year flood” terminology, the better.
“high warming juxtaposed with high population growth”
But we don’t have high population growth in the US. We have very low population growth, approaching zero, combined with immigration mostly caused by economic failures in developing countries. Those failures are largely caused by the actions of the US and its and Europe’s (and increasingly Chinese) multinational corporations destroying the bond between traditional farmers and the land, and forcing them into cities there and here, where race and class-based and nationalist unemployment and underemployment and the resulting conditions are plagues in their lives.
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The Ukrainian House
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I thought it might be useful, I hope it's useful for you if I make myself available to answer any questions you have on why we're here in Ukraine, and why the President is here and what our objectives are. And before I take your questions, let me just give you three reasons why we're here, and three objectives that the President has for this meeting.
First, Ukraine's a very important country for the United States. It's centrally located in the new Europe, it's a country the size of France geographically, with a population of roughly 52 million to 53 million, which is quite large, and by everyone's account, as we look to the next century, strategically important for the United States and for the rest of Europe. And the President is coming to express his interest in building a new and strong relationship with Ukraine.
Second, Ukraine, by all accounts, is the third largest possessor of nuclear weapons in the world, and Ukraine has committed itself to a non-nuclear future under the trilateral agreement negotiated by President Clinton with President Yeltsin and President Kravchuk a year and a half ago. Ukraine has committed itself to giving up its nuclear weapons. The trilateral agreement is well ahead of schedule. Over 350 nuclear warheads have been transported from Ukraine to Russia, and that process will be completed in 1996.
By the end of 1996, there will be no more nuclear weapons in Ukraine; it's quite an achievement for the Ukrainian people and that is something that the President talked with President Kuchma about at the Budapest Summit, when the START I Treaty was signed into force. Ukraine signed that treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state.
Third, the United States has supported Ukraine, President Kuchma in its effort to reform its economy. And in the last year President Kuchma has completely transformed the economic landscape. This was a centrally planned economy for a long time. Among the successor states of the former Soviet Union, it was the one country that held on to command economics for a long time until last summer when President Kravchuk decided that their future should be based on reformed economics, an open capitalist system.
President Clinton, at Naples last summer, led the G- 7 effort to dangle a $4-billion carrot in front of the Ukrainians, promising that if they did reform their economy, the G-7, the IMF and the World Bank would respond with up to $4 billion in assistance; and I believe more than $3 billion of that has already been pledged.
But since last summer there has been a fundamental economic transformation here towards a reformed economic future. The United States has responded with $700 million in economic assistance, and in Nunn-Lugar assistance for dismantling. That makes Ukraine the fourth largest recipient of American assistance anywhere in the world after Israel, Egypt and Russia.
So, in sum, I would say this is an exceedingly important relationship for the United States. It expresses our determination to build American relations in the region not only with Russia, but with this very large and important country situated outside of Russia.
If you think back over the last two years of the Clinton administration's policy in the region, I think it's fair to say that 1993 was the year in which the President and the Secretary focused on Russia; 1994, by contrast, was the year in which the administration focused on Ukraine.
The President was here on January 12th of '94, very briefly in an airport stop. He signed the trilateral statement in Moscow the next day with the Ukrainian and Russian leaderships. In November of this year, President Kuchma was in the White House for a state visit, the first state visit by a Ukrainian leader to the United States. The Secretary of State has been here on several occasions. Secretary Perry has been here most recently to witness the destruction of Bear bombers and nuclear weapons at an air base not far from here.
So we come here with a great deal of optimism about this relationship. We come here having worked very hard over the last two years to build one of the closest relationships the United States has with any country in Central and Eastern Europe.
And all that's by way of introduction, and I'll be glad to take any questions you have.
Q Are you on the record?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I'm ON BACKGROUND.
Q What issues will the two Presidents be discussing?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The two Presidents are going to discuss the following issues: Number one, economic reform. How can the United States and the West support the radical economic reforms that President Kuchma has instituted over the last seven to eight months, and we're doing that in a combination of ways. I refer you to the fact that we are extending $700 million in assistance to Ukraine, $350 million of that is for economic support. It is almost entirely grant funding. It's quite unusual for a Western country to have the majority of its aid in grants.
The United States, I think, is alone in the West in its assistance program to this region in basing almost all of it on grant. So what we're trying to do is support the process of privatization which is going on, the privatization of Ukrainian state firms. There is a U.S.-Ukraine Enterprise Fund that has been established, it was established last summer, and that fund capitalized, I think it's $75 million, supports the creation of small businesses in Ukraine and lends money to existing small businesses.
In addition to that, the United States has played without question the leading role in the West in trying to garner international economic support through the IMF, World Bank and the G-7. Ukraine was just recently granted a standby credit of $1.5 billion by the IMF. So it has received the same type of loan that Russia has also recently received.
That's a quite extraordinary accomplishment if you think about where Ukraine was a year ago today. I was here a year ago this week, and Ukraine had not made the decision to reform economically. It was well behind the Russians and the Balts, the Poles, the Hungarians. But in just the last eight to nine months, as Kuchma has taken office, has formed a new government, brought in a team of young economic reformers who have had a lot of exposure to the West, they've done quite well in moving forward and the international community has responded. I think it's quite significant that they received the IMF standby credit at the same time that Russia did.
So President Clinton has tried to lead within the G- 7 to form a consensus that the West should respond to these economic reforms with substantial assistance. As I say, he did that at the Naples Summit. The United States then called for a G-7 summit especially on Ukraine that was held last October 27th in Winnipeg, in Canada, and that was a conference to promote international assistance to Ukraine. So that's issue number one, economics.
The second issue is what we can do with the Ukrainians to continue the process of dismembering the nuclear arsenal here -- nuclear warheads that number in the thousands here that made Ukraine the third largest possessor of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world.
Our Nunn-Lugar program is the expression of our commitment to help them do that, and we have various programs underway here to help them store fissile material, to help them dismember both bombers and ICBMs, to ship the warheads, transport them in a safe manner by train to Russia where, through a process of reverse engineering, they are completely dismantled.
And as I said, when we signed the trilateral statement in January, 1994, it was our expectation that this would take several years to complete, and I'm pleased to say that we're well ahead of schedule, and that this process should be complete by next year.
If you remember back to '91 and '92 when the Soviet Union broke up and these countries emerged, there was deep concern in the West about the future of this country for two reasons. One, a lot of people in this country wanted to retain a nuclear arsenal and make Ukraine a nuclear power. And, certainly, the United States and our Western Allies did not want to see that happen.
Secondly, Ukraine had been the bread basket of the Soviet Union; it's an enormously rich country in terms of its agricultural and economic potential, but it was an economic basket case, because it was the last of these countries in the western part of the former Soviet Union to adopt economic reform.
And there was a lot of concern in the U.S. government, as well as outside, that Ukraine might not survive its infancy as a nation state because of its failure to reform economically. And we have been very pleased to see that, over the last -- as I said, since last July and August, President Kuchma has completely transformed the economic landscape through his new government and his new policies, and the West is now responding. So those are the two major issues.
Let me just add a third. The Russia-Ukraine relationship is an extremely important relationship for both countries and a very complicated one; fifty-two million people in this country, of whom 12 million are ethnic Russians. Russia was formerly a part of the Russian Empire for 300 years, and has been associated with Russia in one way or another for over 1,000 years. These two countries are linked ethnically, historically, linguistically and for a lot of other reasons economically and politically.
The Ukrainians have tried very hard to assert their sense of independence while retaining close economic and political ties with Russia. It's our opinion that President Kuchma has done that quite skillfully. There are two major outstanding Ukrainian-Russian issues beyond the nuclear weapons: The status of the Black Sea Fleet; this was the fourth largest fleet of the Soviet Union -- how will they apportion the assets of the fleet between the two countries. The second issue is Crimea. Crimea had been historically Russian, was given to the Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by Khrushchev, never expecting that Ukraine would become an independent country.
Crimea is a strategically important part of the former Soviet Union in the Black Sea area, and the Russians and Ukrainians are conducting negotiations on both issues. They have managed to avoid a crisis between their countries on both issues.
President Yeltsin has been supportive of President Kuchma, and vice-versa. They have a fairly good relationship, but the two countries have a lot of impediments in the way of a normal relationship. The United States has been the middleman on the issue of nuclear weapons. President Clinton stepped in, in late 1993 when the two countries could not decide how the process of denuclearization would be carried out, and he was the one who brokered this trilateral agreement that will lead to Ukraine becoming a non-nuclear state by next year. So that's the agenda for President Clinton and President Kuchma today.
Q What's your estimate of how many warheads remain?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The question is, how many warheads remain in this country. I can't give you an exact figure; I'm sorry. But I can tell you that over 350 have been transported out, and that I think roughly over 1,000 remain. But let me try to get all of you a better number on that when some of our experts who know the subject better than I arrive.
Let me just explain under this trilateral arrangement, it is a triangular process whereby Ukraine sends its nuclear warheads to Russia, they are dismantled in Russia, the nuclear fuel rods that are derived as a part of this process are then shipped back to Ukraine to power Ukrainian nuclear plants.
That process, that third leg is funded by the United States. We pay Russia for the fuel rods to be shipped to Ukraine; that's our economic piece of the relationship.
Q What is it that the United States would like this country to do now that it's not doing? From the description you've given, it sounds as if the President is here to -- (inaudible) -- anything else.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I do think that one of the prime objectives that the President has today is to express very clearly his support for what has happened here --for denuclearization, for economic reform, support for President Kuchma and his government, and support for the process of reform.
This is a divided country politically, like many others in the region. There are many in the Supreme Rada here, which is the Ukrainian Parliament who do not agree with the policies of economic reform.
There have been very heavy, strong political debates over the last couple of years about what this country should become. And the President is here to say that we support what the current government is doing in taking this government in a westward direction, trying to integrate it to become a member in the future of the OECD and the WTO and the IMF, integrate it westward. And I should also mention, Ukraine was the first country in this region to sign up fully to the Partnership For Peace. And as we think about the issue of NATO expansion in the future, we certainly want to make sure that Ukraine's interests are considered in that, and that the geostrategic position of Ukraine, which is quite critical in the process of NATO expansion and European unity is fully considered.
So I think you're right in saying that the primary purpose of this trip is to support a relationship that is working and that is going quite well.
Q Is Ukraine now clearly the leading candidate among the PFP nations for confirmation into NATO?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I wouldn't go that far. We've made no decisions on which of these countries is going to be -- which of these countries is the leading candidate to become a member of NATO. Ukraine itself has not decided if it's even interested in NATO membership, unlike a lot of its Central European members -- the Visegrad states.
Ukraine has a highly complex relationship, as you can understand, with Russia and has not yet asked or requested consideration for NATO membership. It has said that it wants to be part of the process of bringing NATO closer to these countries through the Partnership For Peace, so Ukraine has already participated in military exercises under the PFP.
Q with Ukraine's enforcement of sanctions on the Balkan States? Are you satisfied that their sanctions enforcement of the Danube --
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The question is, are we satisfied with Ukraine's enforcement of sanctions in the Balkans. Ukraine is part of -- has a contingent of troops that make up part of UNPROFOR. That has been an ongoing concern of ours. There are a number of problems with the sanctions regime in the Balkans, the sanctions regime against the Serbs, and there are a number of offenders. And on a couple of occasions, we've brought issues to the attention of the Ukrainian government pertaining to sanctions enforcement.
Q Is there any hangover here from President Bush's visit when he, as you know, discussed, made the speech that was widely seen as an effort to urge the Ukrainians not to go off independently on their own?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The question is, is there a hangover from the famous, or infamous "Chicken Kiev speech" of July, 31, 1991.
Q That's not what you called it then.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: (Laughter.) And the answer is, I think that was a long time ago in history. That was even before the attempted coup against Gorbachev. That came at a time when Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union. Ukraine's been independent for 3.5 years, and it's been a rocky road as an independent country. And we have had, the United States had, initially, a fairly rocky relationship with Ukraine. Throughout '92 and through most of '93, the United States and Ukraine had a number of differences over the status of the nuclear weapons. But in '93, the President decided to open up the economic relationship and to try to continue to convince the Ukrainians to denuclearize, and that policy was successful.
I think I can say with a certain degree of objectivity that the objectives that the President brought to this relationship in January, 1994 when he first visited here have been met. The economy is reforming with the assistance of the United States, and they have decided to become a non-nuclear country, which was our primary concern.
And so I think he arrives here today, I think with a certain sense of accomplishment about the way this relationship has been conducted and managed by the United States and Ukraine, and we think that our national security interests, which were to see a reduction in the number of nuclear powers in this region are being accomplished.
Kazakhstan gave up the last of its nuclear missiles two weeks ago. Belarus will give up the last of its nuclear missiles shortly in the next couple of months and Ukraine next year. That, I think, was one of the primary foreign policy objectives anywhere in the world in the Clinton administration back in 1993, and we are well on the way to accomplishing that objective.
Q So the answer is no?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The answer is no. Yes, thank you.
Q To what extent does the economic support here and the other efforts that we're making here serve as a model for what the United States may be able to do for Russia if they continue to proceed on their path?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I would say there is not really a great distinction in my own mind about how Ukraine has fared economically and how Russia has. For a long time, until about a year ago, even eight, nine months ago, Ukraine was the lagger in terms of economic reform, and Russia was the role model.
And when President Kuchma took office, I think he had a very sensible view: we need to reform economically, but we need to maintain close economic relations with Russia because of the historic trading patterns and the dependency that both --that they have on each other, and also because Russia has set a very good reformist course.
Russia, by and large, is the economic reform role model for almost all the states in the western part of the former Soviet Union -- Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, to name the three that are closest to Russia, and the United States has absolutely nothing against a close Russia-Ukraine economic relationship; in fact, we encourage it. As long as Russia remains reformist, there's certainly no reason why we should discourage close economic ties between Russia and Ukraine.
Q Can you talk a little bit about Chernobyl? The Ukrainians have been looking for large sums of money from the West -- America to help them close Chernobyl by the year 2002.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: That's right Chernobyl remains the West's outstanding issue with Ukraine. This is not so much a bilateral issue as it is a G-7 issue with Ukraine. You all know about the lingering after-effects, environmental after-effects of Chernobyl in Ukraine and Belarus; they're quite significant in health terms.
Chernobyl, itself, the reactor complex which comprises four reactors, is a highly unstable environment, and there's a lot of concern in the West and in Ukraine about the structure, the ability of the structure to even hold up over the next couple of years.
So the G-7, a year and a half ago, started a discussion with Ukraine on how we could work with Ukraine to shut down Chernobyl completely. Just a couple of weeks ago President Kuchma publicly committed himself to shutting down Chernobyl by the end of this decade. He needs financial support to do that, because Chernobyl is important as a source of energy for this region of Ukraine. And the G-7 came up with a financial support package last summer at Naples which the Ukrainians deemed inadequate. So there is a continuing discussion about this. We have contributed, I think, $38 million, the United States, to this multilateral effort to try to fund a close-down of Chernobyl and the development of alternative energy sources for Ukraine.
Q come up now with some more money?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I think it's fair to say this discussion is going to continue at Halifax before, during and after Halifax. It's one of the more important issues that's going to be raised at the Halifax Summit, and I don't think it's possible for Ukraine to take this step without substantial Western support in the form of grants and credits and loans, and that remains to be negotiated. But we are hopeful that, with this latest public statement from Kuchma, the Ukrainians now also share our sense of concern about the future environmental dangers of keeping at least two of the units at Chernobyl active, which is presently the case.
Q Would you describe the Kuchma-Clinton relationship? How well do they know each other?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: President Clinton has met President Kuchma once, and that was last November during the state visit to Washington, November 22nd and 23rd. When President Kuchma was candidate Kuchma for President he came to Washington in April, 1994 and met with Al Gore, met with Strobe Talbott and a number of others in the administration. So we know him quite well.
Vice President Gore visited here last August to show support for Kuchma three weeks after Kuchma took office, and Gore was the first Western leader to visit Ukraine, and that was intended to be a very strong signal of American support for Kuchma's agenda, which was non-nuclear and pro-economic reform. So they developed, the two Presidents, a good relationship, the President's been looking forward to coming here.
Q About Chernobyl, is it figuring in the talks today, and are they going to shut down completely, or just the two reactors?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Chernobyl will figure in the talks today. It's an agenda item, and the intention is to shut down all four of the rectors at the Chernobyl complex, not just the two of them; all four of them -- to shut it down completely because of its inherent instability.
Q You said they'll talk about Ukraine's --problem and whether we're upset about it.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Ukraine, like Russia, has expressed a concern about the CFE Treaty limits on the disposition of its conventional forces with -- inside its own country. And as we have with Russia, we have encouraged Ukraine to seek flexibility, to seek a resolution of its problems within the confines, the parameters of the CFE Treaty. And I would just take the opportunity to say that I'd just like to reaffirm that's our policy with Russia as well.
I know there is some confusion about that stemming from the press conference with Yeltsin yesterday. Our policy on CFE hasn't changed. We still believe that both Russia and Ukraine should seek adjustments within the parameters of the treaty. We do not favor either country seeking adjustments outside the treaty. What I mean by that is by breaking the treaty open and then attempting to renegotiate it.
Q Aren't the changes temporary? They cannot be permanent on the base of the treaty?
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The CFE changes? Well, both countries -- and there are also a number of other countries in this group -- want to adjust to what they feel are adjusting security concerns, changing security concerns. And we have sympathy with both Russia and Ukraine for their problems, but we do not believe the answer is to go outside the treaty. So that will be the gist of what we say to the Ukrainians today.
END1:30 P.M. (L)
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For Immediate Release November 20, 1998
DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL GENE SPERLING
AND SENIOR DIRECTOR FOR ASIAN AFFAIRS AT NSC KEN LIEBERTHAL
Akasaka Prince Hotel
MR. LEAVY: All right, now for the real news of the day, we have a briefing for you -- the Director of the National Economic Council, Gene Sperling, and Senior Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, Ken Lieberthal. Gene will talk about the economic piece, and then Ken will give a preview of the day, of the bilats with Prime Minister Obuchi. And then they will take your questions.
MR. SPERLING: The President clearly is speaking to the Japanese people and to Prime Minister Obuchi at a very critical time for Japan in terms of their economic choices. He, as you know, did the town hall meeting yesterday. He just spoke to the AmCham, and then has time with Prime Minister Obuchi both during lunch and then during the bilaterals.
Clearly, one of the opportunities that the President had in this trip was a chance to speak directly to the Japanese people in the speech today, but probably most directly through the town hall meeting. And the President, as he does in these situations, took very seriously how he wanted to communicate and what messages he wanted to deliver.
And I think those of you saw the town hall meeting yesterday, heard his speech, one issue, firstly, he's making clear, that the United States very much wants a strong Japanese economy. In both of our countries, there are people who -- in each of our countries -- who still believe that somehow this is a zero-sum game. If the Yankees are stronger, the Red Sox must be weaker.
But as opposed to a situation which has never been more clear, which is that the world economy needs a strong Japan and a strong United States, and that both countries, as well as Asia and the rest of the world, are benefited from our strength. And I think that is am important message for the President to directly make clear, that the United States wants a strong Japanese economy and believes it is in the interests of the region and the world, particularly at this sensitive time.
Secondly, the President spoke and is continuing to speak on the notion that structural change, that opening markets, that having a more market-based allocation of credit, that these decisions and movements, while difficult, pay off for a great people in terms of higher-paying jobs and a stronger future, and that in the United States we have gone through difficult political choices, but that they have paid off.
And the President referred to issues in the deregulation area like telecom and airlines, where the United States has gone through deregulation that has ended up being positive in terms of job creation. And, in fact, in telecommunications, the United States has had job growth by over 17 percent since deregulation, while Japan had only 3.3 percent increase during that time. That is to stress simply that deregulation and opening markets and having a more market-based system, however threatening change can at times seem, has been positive and can and should be positive.
The third point, which is very important, reflects the conflict or the balance between savings and growth for societies that are concerned about an aging population. Japan clearly has even a more serious situation than we do. At the moment, both of us have about 20 percent of people over 65, compared to those between 24 and 65, the working population. By 2050, Japan may have as many as 50 to 60 percent of their population over 65, compared to those between 20 and 64. Only Italy has as serious a situation.
But the message that the President was very much delivering, both in his AmCham speech and in the town hall meeting was that strong growth and strong productivity growth is also essential to having the resources for dealing with an aging society; and that while high savings rates is important, so is a strong and growing economy; and that Japan needs to have a stronger debate, the Japanese people, about what is the right balance -- even as we in the United States have had to have that debate in somewhat the other direction, increasing our savings rate at times to deal with an aging society.
Fourth, the President talked very directly about the fact that the United States has, itself, lessons that we have learned in terms of dealing with the banking crisis. It is estimated by people who studied the S&L crisis that the eventual cost to the United States in fixing the S&L system was five times greater than it would have been if we had acted more directly and quickly, that the cost went from $20 billion to over $125 billion because of the delay, and that the United States can say that we have erred in our dealing with banking in the past and that there are lessons one can learn from our mistakes.
And, certainly, here the President has been complimentary of Prime Minister Obuchi for the amount of funds that have been set aside for banking legislation, $60 trillion yen, $500 billion; but that the essential element of whether that legislation will work does go to the issues of how prompt the corrective action is, how much you're able to get assets back into the market, back being sold, back available for creative opportunities and that with strong injections of public capital must come the conditions that will make the banking system work in the future.
And, finally, the President spoke on the issue of trade and I think has spoken in three areas as to the critical role the U.S. and Japan play at trade right now -- that we right now face a critical time in the world economy where there will be temptations by countries to pull in that could lead to a cycle of protectionism and that it's critical for the world's leading economies to play a leadership role in furthering market liberalization. And the President has spoken about that in terms of Japan in three contexts.
One is our efforts in terms of multilateral trade liberalization. And there's no question that we were frustrated that Japan did not play a more constructive role in APEC Internet liberalization of the nine sectors in the EVSL. But the important thing we're stressing now is that Japan share with us a leadership role in getting resolution on those nine areas in the WTO next year and that we have leadership together in other efforts going forward.
Second, that we need to have progress in the areas where we have agreements, areas that range from flat glass to insurance where we do not feel the implementation of those agreements has been strong enough, that it is important at this time for the United States to show that there has been progress; and that, finally, where we have areas -- the President has mentioned steel, where they've had 114 percent increase in overall steel from Japan, 550 percent in hot-rolled steel -- that it's important if the United States is to keep its markets open and resist protectionism that the American people have confidence that there is fair trade dealings with us and that the notion of leadership on multilateral, on progress and implementing and ensuring in areas where there are surges that there has not been unfair trade practices are critical for all of us maintaining our confidence in open markets.
And the President mentioned specifically the impact that the combination of market opening and demand has on the region. And the statistic he used was that during this year the United States has taken in $5 billion more in imports from the key struggling Asian countries. But at the same time, there's been $13 billion less in exports from those countries to Japan. And so Japan's market opening and their stronger demand is critical in this very tangible way, as in others, to the strength of the region.
With that, let me turn to Ken Lieberthal, who will just make clear the events of the day and go through the national security side.
MR. LIEBERTHAL: Thank you, Gene. Let me begin with a brief overview of the schedule for the day. The President gave a speech at AmCham that wound up just about a half hour ago. He's now over at the U.S. Embassy, meeting and greeting embassy personnel.
From there, he'll have lunch at a restaurant. This is with the Prime Minister and several others, but it is characterized as a social occasion, not as a working lunch. I believe he'll take a short stroll after lunch and see something of street life in Japan.
Then they begin the bilateral meetings. There will be two of them, one right after the other. The first will focus on international security issues and the second will take up economic issues. Those together will run for a little bit shy of two hours. There will then be a brief meeting with the press. Each leader will make a short press statement and then there will be an opportunity for just a few questions afterwards. Then the President gets on the plane and departs for Seoul.
Let me give you an overview of some of the, I think, most important national security issues that are going to be discussed. On the global side, I think clearly the most important issue on the agenda concerns North Korea. There the President will want to explain our views about difficulties with North Korea. He's talking to a man who leads a country that had the indignity of watching the North Korean missile over-fly its territory without any advance notice on August 31. So there will be an attempt to get our thinking together about how best to deal with North Korea.
The issue here, let me stress, is not one of changing policy. The issue is one of how you take the agreed framework, the framework that we have for our policy toward North Korea, and strengthen it; create the incentives for North Korea actually to abide fully by its commitments; and that working in terms of their commitments is important for maintaining the necessary political support, I think in the United States and Japan, in order to keep North Korean policy on track.
So that part of what the President is doing here -- and let me say also when he goes to the ROK from here -- is to get a basic mutual understanding as to what the nature of the challenges in North Korea and how we can best handle that challenge over the coming years. It's an issue for our friends and allies in the region.
I would expect that several other international issues will come up, although more briefly -- among those would certainly be an update of Iraq, I think potentially Japanese support for the Middle East peace process. Prime Minister Obuchi just came from a visit to Russia; next week he'll host the first visit ever by a Chinese head of state to Japan. I'm sure the President will want to hear about his views on Russia and discuss with him a bit the upcoming visit from Jiang Zemin of China.
And then, finally, there are some bilateral security issues. These are well known. I won't take time, let me just mention them. The defense guidelines legislation and discussion of when they are likely to be submitted and adopted by the Diet; the implementation of what's called the Saco agreement, basically the agreement for changing the footprint of our armed forces in Okinawa. And then, finally, I think the two men will want to highlight the common democratic values that we share.
One of the points that the President made in his speech this morning to AmCham was the compatibility as he understands it between democratic systems of government and success in market economies in the information-based society that we all are facing in the 21st century. And I think that they'll have some remarks about that that they'll also want to make.
So that's a brief overview. Both of us are open to questions on any of these topics.
Q When you were talking about the increase in hot-rolled steel, are you talking about over a year or over some other period of time?
MR. SPERLING: The increase in hot-rolled steel looks at, I believe it's the first eight months of this year, and compares it to the first eight months of the previous year. And during that time I believe it -- I can check this for you -- but I believe it's gone from 200,000 metric tons to 1.3 million, during that same time period, which is a, obviously, more than fivefold increase.
Q Both in Kuala Lumpur, Vice President Gore, and here, President Clinton has indicated there is like some limit to the flood of Asian imports. Can you quantify sort of when you'll cry uncle?
MR. SPERLING: I don't -- there are many different reasons that you can have a change in imports or trade deficits. At times in the last few years we've taken in more simply because our economy was growing so much stronger and that reflected the strength of our economy.
I think what the President is saying is that this is a difficult time in the world economy and that it's important that countries like the United States -- the leaders, United States and Japan -- retain their commitment to open markets, recognizing that with change and flows that could come from falling currencies, it becomes that much more important for a leader such as the President to be able to assure the people in our country that we're operating by a rule-based system, where people are operating under the trade laws. And so what we're looking at is not so much a particular quantity, but when the President mentions and area like hot-rolled steel, we aren't going to make a judgment on that because there is currently an anti-dumping case going on against Japan, Russia and Brazil on hot-rolled steel right now.
But we do think it's fair to say to countries, Japan and others, that it's important right now that we both take efforts to open markets, but that we also ensure that we're operating by a rule-based system because it is a sensitive time. And if people believe that the excess in imports reflects unfair trade practices, that will, as the President said, likely lead to political pressures for retaliation which could lead to a cycle of protectionism, which is exactly what the world economy does not need at this time.
Q But doesn't the anti-dumping case indicate that you believe that they are not operating by a set of rule-based systems?
MR. SPERLING: Well, the private industry filed the anti-dumping case.
Q But do you agree with them?
MR. SPERLING: I think what the President suggests is that that dramatic of an increase is -- something has to be looked at closely. I do not think that we right now -- that it's right for us to prejudge something that is going through effectively a quasi-judicial process, but I think it's fair for us to tell countries that they need to make sure that they have their house in order in terms of trading relations with us, both in terms of opening markets and in terms of not allowing unfair trade practices or unfair dumping to occur. That's a general message that we would have.
Q For either gentlemen, why do you think the Japanese will change their policy on trade liberalization when it's moved to a WTO forum? What's the President going to say to the Prime Minister to encourage that, and doesn't that whole dispute undercut your argument that in a democratic system you can deal with all these issues because specifically those democratic pressures that are making it very difficult for the Japanese to deal with this --
MR. SPERLING: Well, in our conversations with Japanese officials prior to APEC many actually suggested that they wanted this to be dealt with more in a WTO context. We were disappointed that there was not more progress made at APEC. Nonetheless, 16 countries did put forward offers of some form; that is twice as many countries as was used to leverage an agreement -- an information technology agreement. We want to follow that same model. What we're suggesting is, we know that there are difficult pressures on all countries, but the important thing is that if we can move forward in this broader context, we feel very strongly that Japan should share with us a leadership role in doing that.
I won't start on -- we could have a lengthy discussion-debate on democracy and tough economic choices, but there is --but the point I'd make is every country has to deal with tough political pressures in doing the right things. Trade is one area, but as you know, deficit reduction for us was that type of area.
So the democratic system is one in which democratic leaders have to try to engage in positive long-term economic areas that look out for the long-term benefit of all of their people, and obviously have to make tradeoff between being politically realistic; you have to make tradeoffs between intense political pressures that you get from one area versus what you think is the long-term benefits for the working people of your country at large.
We believe that the working people of each country at large benefit from an open and ruled-based trade system. We understand each country has to put up with or try to deal with intense pressures at times in doing that, but we believe that the long-term benefit for the people -- the overall people of each country are benefitted by an open system. And the President mentioned particular areas where we have gone through more opening or deregulation, whereas actually in the long-term led to more job creation and high-wage job creation at that.
MR. LIEBERTHAL: Let me give you just a slightly different cut on the democracy issue because the way we've argued it, and we're quite serious about it, is that if you look at the attributes of a country that has good governance, good democratic governance, you have room for individual choice, you have a law-based system with good property rights, you have freedom of information flows, you have a government that is more accountable to its people and, therefore, more legitimate and also potentially more adaptable.
Those are qualities that in a fast-paced, information-based global economy are likely to enable you to perform better over the long run. That certainly is not to indicate that democracies don't have their own pressures and find certain things difficult at different times. Obviously, they do. So this is a more fundamental and long-range kind of argument.
Q The President said in his speech today that he was convinced the security partnership cannot be maintained unless our economies are strong. Does he mean to suggest in some way that the security partnership is not lasting or is in some way conditional?
MR. LIEBERTHAL: No, I don't think he was trying to indicate it was conditional. I think he's talking about an overall partnership between the American people and the Japanese people. Part of that is a security alliance; part of it is a high level of economic interdependence and a shared set of responsibilities for economic leadership; and part of it diplomatic.
And I think he was indicating that if you want to have that overall relationship work well, each part of it has to work well. And so no one should think that we would think in terms of a security alliance, but in fact want a weak Japanese economy. Quite the opposite. We want the Japanese economy to perform at the same time that we want them to be good alliance partners.
Q When heads of state visit the United States it would be rare or almost unheard of for them to give advice or lectures on U.S. fiscal policy. Aren't you worried the Japanese are going to resent this even if it is offered in the spirit of friendly advise?
MR. SPERLING: The President spent significant time preparing for this, thinking about exactly what is the right way and the best way to communicate with the Japanese people. And I think that if you look at the way he spoke at the town hall meeting, I think it was one of a leader of a country sharing the lessons that one economic superpower has had, speaking directly with the people of another economic superpower. And what he was, I believe, doing was praising the Japanese people as a people that have overcome as much significant challenges as any people over the last 50 years, and talking about the ability to overcome them in these situations.
And in the banking situation, the President does not come and preach; he comes and talks about problems and challenges that we had in our S&L crisis and what lessons might be learned.
On the stimulus and growth side, I think the President was very aware and respectful of the fact that Japan does have a significant aging problem and in fact one greater than ours by the middle of the next century, and that we as a country have needed to perhaps go in somewhat the other direction, to go better in higher national savings.
But what he suggested is that the Japanese people, like us, need to think of what the right balance is. And the balance of having strong growth, and the importance of that, for preparing for an aging society too.
So I think that the President -- I think if you look at the town hall meeting that he had, he certainly, I think, tried to speak in a way that was offering some of the lessons we have. But I also do think that there is no question that we are at a very sensitive time in the world economy, and I think in fairness, other countries were quite critical of the United States in 1993. And I think when we first came into office, when we went to forums, we were often harshly criticized that our deficit was a drag on the rest of the world.
So I do think it is fair for other countries to talk frankly and candidly about what the inter-relationships are to the world economy and the need for each country to do its part in creating economic growth. And I think that's a positive message and was put forward in a positive way.
Q -- the President said something like some people here think he might have gone further, there might have been more to it. What is he going to say to Obuchi about the specific package that was announced --
MR. SPERLING: I think the President recognized in the town hall meeting and today that the Prime Minister is trying to take a positive step forward in a stimulus plan. I think that it is also the case that most top economic analysts have not projected that that in itself would lead to meaningful growth next year. So I think that our view is simply reflecting what is, I believe, the widespread view of the top Japanese and international economists and forecasters.
And I think that the President's message would simply be one that Prime Minister Obuchi would share, that there should be an aspiration to higher economic growth and that there should be constant effort until that is achieved. So I think that they will obviously be able to talk more openly about that in private, but again, I do not believe that we have a view on this that is different than what most economic forecasters have been saying. In fact, we have met with several of them while we have been here.
MR. LOCKHART: Can we take one more for Gene, please.
Q So far the Japanese haven't been listening terribly hard about the idea of keeping markets open, the whole point of APEC. Their disagreement on these nine key sectors is one example. Do you have any indication that they're going to listen at this point, the message will sink in?
MR. SPERLING: Well, I think the message the President is bringing is that it's critical for the two countries to move forward and that more than ever right now there needs to be signs of increased opening and cooperation if we are going to be able to maintain the political support in the United States for the open market orientation that we think has been good for the United States and good for the world.
So you'll have to ask their leaders -- we think the important thing is that the President communicate that message and do so directly to the Japanese people as well as to Prime Minister Obuchi. There's no question that we were frustrated at APEC, and we have not hit that. We would like to also point to positive things we could do. For example, one of the goals that we will have is to have enough progress so that there can be a further announcement of progress on the enhanced deregulatory initiative by the next time the President and Prime Minister Obuchi meet.
Q Joe, just one more for Gene? Is there an administration reaction to this possible tax consumption cut that -- and Obuchi have talked about? And will they discuss it today, do you expect, the President and Obuchi?
MR. SPERLING: I don't think that we want to be in the position right now looking at any particular element in the sense offering kind of a micromanaging type of advice. I think the point that we have made is that we think it is extremely important for the region and for the Japanese people ultimately for growth to emerge, and that there should be a constant effort to go forward until it's clear that there will be sustainable economic growth.
So the President's message will not be to try -- both privately and publicly, will not be to try to pull or push in any direction on any specific micropolicy, but to encourage the Prime Minister to not be satisfied with anything less than all efforts that are necessary to achieve sustainable economic growth, and that his efforts, while positive and deserving of commendation for moving in the right direction, have so far, not from our view but from the market's view, not been seen as going as far as necessary.
END 11:35 A.M. (L)
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For Immediate Release August 27, 2000
Today, the Department of Justice released the 1999 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) which shows that last year, the nation's violent crime rate experienced the single largest one-year drop in the survey's history and is at its lowest level in over 25 years. This news is further proof that the Clinton-Gore Administration's anti-crime strategy of more police on our streets and fewer guns in the wrong hands has helped to create the safest America in a generation. Since the Vice President and I took office in 1993, every major category of violent and property crime has decreased significantly according to today's NCVS, with the overall violent crime rate down by one-third, and the rates for rape, and robberies and assaults with injuries down by more than one-third.
Despite our extraordinary progress, we can and must make America even safer. Every year, our nation loses nearly 30,000 Americans -- including 10 children every day -- to gun violence. That is why I call on Congress to continue our success by funding our Administration's proposals to put up to an additional 50,000 community police officers on the street, and hire 1,000 new federal, state and local gun prosecutors and 500 ATF firearms agents and inspectors to crack down on gun criminals. Congress also must make passage of the long-stalled common sense gun safety legislation a top priority as our children prepare to return to school. Together, we can continue to drive down the nation's crime rates and improve the quality of life for American families for generations to come.
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Home › It
The darling of the fashion world and co-host of the music TV show Fuse News shares her inspirations, musings, and her own very personal and eclectic styleWith influences that range from the sultry beauty of Jane Birkin to the rocker chic of Mick Jagger, it’s no wonder that everything worn by Alexa Chung instantly becomes the latest trend. Already a hugely popular television personality and a muse for Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld, Chung is now a co-anchor of the nightly music show Fuse News, covering today’s hottest acts and entertainment news. Chung’s first book, It, provides her legion of fans with a long-awaited inside look at her fascinating world.A wholly unique collection of Chung’s personal writings, drawings, and photographs, It covers everything from her candid thoughts on life, love, and music to her favorite ensembles and how to decide what to wear in the morning. With Chung’s characteristic wit, charm, and refreshingly down-to-earth attitude, this full-color compendium is a must-have for anyone who loves fashion, music, and just about everything Alexa Chung.
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How to Dress Like Cat in the Hat
The Cat in the Hat Male TV Shows
Cat in The Hat Costume See on Amazon
Black Face Paint See on Amazon
White Face Paint See on Amazon
Umbrella See on Amazon
Winter Slipper See on Amazon
Best Cat in the Hat Costume Guide
Nearly everyone is familiar with Dr. Suess books, having read them growing up. One of the most popular characters ever created by Dr. Suess would have to be The Cat in the Hat. The popularity of the book led to a movie about the character created in 2003. Get the complete look of the mischievous cat with this The Cat in the Hat costume guide.
The Cat in the Hat is an anthropomorphic cat that can be seen wearing a bright red bowtie along with his familiar red and white striped hat. He visits with two children, Sally and Sam, who are home alone. He wants to create a fun day for them and begins by showing them the fantastic magic tricks he can do. His trickery soon turns into a bit of a mess, but luckily The Cat in the Hat can quickly set things right again. Get dressed up in this iconic costume with a Cat in The Hat Costume, White Face Paint, Black Face Paint, Winter Slipper, and Umbrella.
Cat in the Hat Cosplay Costumes
The Cat in the Hat is arguably one of the most iconic characters created by children’s author Dr. Suess. He’s a fun and carefree character that anyone can dress up like! One of the best things about choosing to dress as The Cat in the Hat is the list of things you’ll need. Unlike some other characters who require a lot of intricate details and pieces to cosplay, The Cat in the Hat only needs a few, simple things. These items are simple to get your hands on, but the costume is still unique enough that you’ll stand out from the crowd.
The Cat in the Hat is a fantastic costume on its own, but why stop there? You should recruit a few of your friends to accompany you dressed up as Thing One and Thing Two from the story, or you could have cats A-Z follow close behind you. Whatever route you choose to go, make sure to submit a picture to our Halloween Costume Contest!
About Cat in the Hat
Most people have heard of the author Dr. Suess, and most people also know that a popular book he wrote was The Cat in the Hat. The story is about two siblings, Sally and Sam, who are left home alone on a rainy day wishing for something fun to do. At just that moment, The Cat in the Hat arrives. The character created by Dr. Seuss is a tall cat in a bow tie and a slightly floppy red and white-colored top hat. He says he knows a few tricks that will brighten the children’s mood and begins to show them off much to the disapproval of their pet fish.
However, the games get a little out of hand when Thing One and Thing Two show up. Soon the house is in shambles, and their mother’s new dress is completely ruined. When the fish spots their mother approaching the house, The Cat in the Hat quickly jumps into action and cleans it all up. With the help of a few friends, the children’s home is back to its usual state, and their mother is none the wiser.
Mr. Poopybutthole
Dress like Mr. Poopybutthole, the Rick and Morty character voiced by Justin Roiland.
Enter the ring dressed as Rowdy Roddy Piper, the wrestling Hall of Fame member and actor.
Ancient One
Transform into the Sorcerer Supreme dressed as The Ancient One, a powerful characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Legendary damsel in distress, Rapunzel, was artfully recreated by Disney, resulting in the blockbuster hit, Tangled.
Get the everyday look of Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard student that started Facebook from his dorm room in 2004.
Dress up like Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellín Cartel, portrayed by Wagner Moura in the Netflix series Narcos.
Get the look of Kazuma Kiryu, the main character in the massive hit video game series from Sega, Yakuza.
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Watch Alone Online
Watch Alone Full Series Online. Hardcore survivalists are put by themselves in the Vancouver Island wilderness, without camera crews, teams, or producers – on a single mission to stay alive for as long as possible.
Watch Partners Full Series Online. Allen Braddock and Marcus Jackson are two attorneys with very different views on the law. After getting fired from his father’s prestigious firm for employing…
Watch Black Mirror Full Series Online. A contemporary British re-working of The Twilight Zone with stories that tap into the collective unease about our modern world. Over the last ten…
Watch Dynasty Full Series Online. The reboot follows two of America’s wealthiest families, the Carringtons and the Colbys, as they feud for control over their fortune and their children focusing…
Watch The Righteous Gemstones Full Series Online. The story of a world-famous televangelist family with a history of deviance, greed and, yes, charitable work, all in the name of Jesus.
Watch The Plot Against America Full Series Online. An alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey, as they watch the political rise…
Bachelor in Paradise Australia
Watch Bachelor in Paradise Australia Full Series Online. Follow former Bachelor and Bachelorette contestants on their second chance quest to find true love. Drama will build until the last remaining…
Watch Flight of the Conchords Full Series Online. The trials and tribulations of a two man, digi-folk band who have moved from New Zealand to New York in the hope…
Watch Jane the Virgin Full Series Online. A comedy-drama following a chaste young woman who is accidentally impregnated via artificial insemination as she struggles to inform her devoutly religious family…
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Navroz: A New Start
in World — by Rene Wadlow — March 21, 2019
May the soul flourish;
May youth be as the new-grown grain
Navroz, usually celebrated on 21 March in Iran and Central Asia, is the “New Day”, the end of the old year with its hardships and deceptions and the start of the New Year to be filled with hope and optimism. With each periodical festival, the participants find the same sacred time – the same that had been manifested in the festival of the previous year or the festival of a century earlier. It is a day for spiritual renewal and physical rejuvenation and is usually a time for reciting devotional poetry, presenting food with symbolic meaning to guests, and visits among family and close friends.
Navroz, which coincides with the Spring Equinox, is related to myths focused on the sun and thus symbolizes the connections of humans to Nature. In some of the myths, Navroz is considered as symbolizing the first day of creation − thus a time when all can be newly created. It is a day between times − old time has died; new time will start the day after Navroz. In this one-day period without time, all is possible. The seeds are planted for a new birth. Among some who celebrate Navroz, real seeds are planted, usually in seven pots with symbolic meanings of virtues. Their growth is an indication of how these virtues will manifest themselves in the coming year. Among those influenced by Islam and Christianity, Navroz is the day when God will raise the dead for the final judgment and the start of eternal life.
Navroz has an ancient Persian origin, related to Abura Mazda, the high god who was symbolized by the sun and manifested by fire. Navroz is also related to the opposite of fire, that is, water. However water can also be considered not as opposite but as complementary, and thus fire-water can become symbols of harmony. Fire – as light, as an agent of purification, as a manifestation of the basic energy of life − played a large role in Zoroastrian thought and in the teachings of Zarathoustra. Thus we find fire as a central symbol and incorporated into rituals among the Parsis in India, originally of Iranian origin.
From what is today Iran, Zoroastrian beliefs and ritual spread along the “Silk Road” through Central Asia to China, and in the other direction to the Arab world. As much of this area later came under the influence of Islam, elements of Navroz were given Islamic meanings to the extent that some today consider Navroz an “Islamic holiday”. Navroz is also celebrated among the Alawits in Syria, the Baha’i, the Yezidis, and the Kurds, each group adapting Navroz to its spiritual framework.
In Turkey, for many years, Navroz was officially banned as being too related to the Kurds and thus to Kurdish demands for autonomy or an independent Kurdistan. I recall a number of years ago being invited to participate in a non-violent Kurdish protest in Turkey on Navroz to protest the ban. I declined as the idea of going from Geneva to be put in a Turkish jail was not on top of my list of priorities. Fortunately, for the last few years, the ban has been lifted.
Navroz was marked in 2018 in the Syrian Kurdish area of Afrim by the arrival of Turkish troops and their Syrian allies. One of the first acts of the Turkish troops was to pull down and destroy a statue of Kawa, a mythological founder of the Kurdish people. In the myth, Kawa is a blacksmith who melted iron to make swords and liberate the people from an evil ruler who had been helped by spirits.
2018 Navroz was also the end of a seven-year cycle begun in March 2011, the uprising and then war in Syria. Seven years in many traditions is a significant number. Thus Navroz as a day outside of time can be a moment of reflection on the armed conflict in Syria, and on our inability as peace makers to facilitate negotiations in good faith. Now, a new cycle of secular time has begun, made even more complex by the arrival of Turkish troops.
The armed conflict in Syria is complex with outside official players: Iran, Russia, USA, Turkey, the United Nations, the Arab League and more shadowy characters: the Islamic State, a host of intelligence agencies, money and fighters from a variety of sources. We find some of the same players in the war in Yemen. There is, however, agreement among all that killing those who disagree is the only realistic policy. It is a very old and wide-spread idea found in most cultures. The techniques of killing have become more sophisticated – drones and car bombs – but the idea has remained the same and is easily understood.
In contrast, ideas of conflict reduction through changes in structure are more complex: broadening the base of the Syrian government by bringing in individuals from groups largely excluded, creating con-federal forms of association among the Kurds without necessarily creating a separate State, creating a cosmopolitan, humanist society which meets the basic needs of all. Moreover, we on the outside can suggest approaches, but the effort will have to be made by local people.
Those who advocate (and carry out) killing have funds and staff which conflict resolution non-governmental organizations lack. Yet conflict resolution efforts must continue and grow stronger. A new, even more complex cycle of time has started. The old approach of killing those who disagree remains strong. Yet, I believe that there are possibilities of renewal and cooperative action for a more peaceful and just wider Middle East.
Rene Wadlow, President, Asdsociation of World Citizens
Pangea says:
Beautiful article, hope one day the whole world will share and sympathize with this celebration.
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It’s hard to believe that it’s been 25 years since an optimistic bunch of outdoor enthusiasts took to local rivers, streams, and forests to clean up their environment and create a special place for the people of the Kiski-Conemaugh River Valley to enjoy the rivers and lands they love.
It’s been no easy task, but the men and women of the Conemaugh Valley Conservancy have spent that time on many worthwhile ventures, including the construction of their signature West Penn Trail, a path leading from Saltsburg to just outside of Blairsville that covers the terrain of the historic Pennsylvania Mainline Canal and Pennsylvania Railroad. This scenic trail offers vistas of canal remnants and passes over once-forgotten stone arch bridges constructed in the early 1900’s.
This trail, and the Conemaugh River, have played host to the West Penn Trail Triathlon for six years now – an event that brings cyclists, runners, and kayakers together for a challenging, but exciting adventure in the wilderness. The seventh race is slated for Saturday, October 12th.
This year CVC is adding a new event, not only on the West Penn Trail, but including many of its neighboring regional trails. The Otter Trot 5k Run/Walk Race Series will invite people to the trails to get out, get fit, and to do a little fun exploration of what our regional trail system has to offer.
The series will consist of six races, each featuring unique sections of the West Penn, Ghost Town, James Mayer, and Westmoreland Heritage Trails in Saltsburg, Johnstown, Ebensburg, and Murrysville. CVC will track participants through a point system during each race, combining the totals of those that participate in four or more events. The top three racers from both the men’s and women’s divisions will be awarded prizes in each race, and overall series winners will be declared after the final race. Details can be found on the News and Events page.
All proceeds from the Otter Trot 5k Run/Walk Race Series will benefit Conemaugh Valley Conservancy and the work they’ll be doing in the upcoming year. Current initiatives span the entire river valley and include projects such as stream analysis and mine drainage monitoring to building new parks and boat accesses.
In addition, CVC will also be hosting their 20th Annual River Sojourn from June 6-9th. The sojourners will cover 44-miles by boat on the Stonycreek, Conemaugh, and Kiskiminetas Rivers from Johnstown to Apollo. Participants of all skill levels are welcome to join for one or more days and to camp with the group as they travel.
Details for all CVC events can be found on the News and Events page. Register today and get outdoors with CVC! CVC memberships are just $25 per household and includes discounts to CVC events.
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The 27 Most Expensive Hobbies in the World Money Can Buy
When asked about the hobby, people come up with things like reading books, swimming, surfing the internet, cycling, photography and many other common things.
A hobby is an activity which we do in our leisure time to de-stress ourselves. Being the source of happiness, we generally don’t hesitate to spend on our hobbies.
But now come out of the box and think big, the hobbies for which you have to spend lavishly amounting to thousands of dollars.
Would you still engage in those hobbies?
We would explore in this article the hobbies on which you would never spend, though you would yearn to be rich to have such majestic hobbies.
Expensive Hobbies:
1. Flying an RC Airplane:
How amazing would it be to build your own airplane which can be controlled by remote control? This hobby has all the segments which one looks to entertain oneself.
Firstly, it requires creativity and understanding to build a plane, which could actually fly. Then, when you successfully fly it, you feel just like the wright brothers when they first flew the plane, overwhelmed with happiness.
Hearing about this hobby if you feel excited and want to try your hands on it, you may spend around $100 to $200 and fly a ready-to-fly RC airplane. But for building your own plane the expenditure keeps on growing to start from $700 for a basic one.
As you become skilled in developing the advance RC airplane, the cost becomes relatively high. Famous actor Tyler Perry has a big and expensive collection of RC plane, which cost thousands of dollars.
2. Traveling around the world:
Though we hear many stories which tell how to travel around the world with a few bucks, it is practically less possible.
Also, if you travel as guided by some, you will end up staying at below-average rooms, restricted food options and commuting within the places via walking.
Was this the travel plan you wished? No. This is the reason that traveling around the world is a hobby which only the rich can follow.
As traveling is not only being at the place but it includes everything from wallowing in the luxuries of the hotel to eating the famous lip-smacking gastronomies of the destination and from doing the adventure activities to commuting in ease to all sightseeing places.
Additionally, for taking a tour around the world requires a long break, which is hardest to afford and very pricey.
If we give you a rough estimation for traveling around the world can be between $20,000 but the exact amount would depend on personal choices.
3. Car Racing:
Do not get influenced by the fast and furious movie series and take car racing as an easily bearable expense. Especially, if you are looking to make car racing as your hobby, be ready to part with a huge sum of money.
Apart from the various expenses done to accessorize your car with speeding options, you will also need to have the best safety equipment as car racing is a dangerous endeavor.
You can get your dream racing cars with the necessary equipment from $10,000 to $100,000.
This cost excludes the price of the life insurance under which an extreme car racer can be covered, that is, $566.34 per month. On the whole, this is the costly affair than it seems
4. Flying a Plane:
In our childhood days, the airplane has fanaticized most of us and listening to the very voice of a plane approaching we just ran to see it. But some of us carry that fantasy for life and love to fly like a free bird.
For flying a plane you have to take an aviation lesson which can cost around $7000 and can help you avail private pilot rating. After which you can take your family anywhere in the world in the single-engine plane.
But for covering longer distances you will need extra pilot rating and a faster flying option like a jet.
The most important element of this hobby, a plane, can be bought between $15000 and $200,000. Additionally $5000 needs to be paid for the license.
5. Collector:
While some of us love to collect stamps or coins or books or some miniature art pieces, the opulent lot may collect the following and make the collection an expensive hobby:
Paintings and other art pieces are quite expensive to collect, especially if some big name is associated with it like Pablo Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, and Vincent Van Gogh.
The art pieces of these artists are worth millions. The art collector has hunger of all kinds of arts, especially of the painters who were the heroes of their time.
Collecting art is a hobby for which even if you won millions in a lottery then too, you may be able to buy only a few of these atypical paintings.
For your record, the most expensive purchase list includes an art piece for $250 million by Paul Cezanne, an art piece for $179.4 million by Picasso and an art piece for $142 million by Francis Bacon.
Collecting cars as a hobby is also a million affair. People collect the rare pieces of the vintage car, muscle car or sports car.
Car collection is not only expensive to buy but to maintain and store. To give you a bird’s view of the expense incurred in collecting the car, the following is the cost of three rare cars
• 1937 Bugatti Type 57S – $4.4 million
• 1961 Ferrari California- $10.8 million
• 1954 Mercedes Formula 1 Racing Car- $29.6 million
6. Ballroom Dancing:
The TV shows and movies may make Ballroom dancing quite easy to approach, learn and complete. But the story most of the time is different than it looks.
It is not easy, especially on your pocket and engaging in Ballroom Dancing as a hobby means you must be all set to spend big bucks.
This intense dance performance is a blend of both physical movements and emotional storytelling. Though learning this art form is not exorbitant and you can learn it by spending $50-$200 on the private sessions.
The tricky part, however, is making it a hobby and engaging in a different competition to suffice your love for ballroom dancing.
Participating in a competition can tax your balance sheet with a cost ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 depending upon the theme and the accessories required for the dance.
For example, only the dress or a tuxedo can cost around $1000 and ballroom dancing shoes can cost $150.
7. Diving:
Sky Diving:
Skydiving is an experience which most of us dream to have at least once in life. Leaving oneself free in the air much above the world we know and flying like a bird is a magical experience.
The adrenaline rush felt in jumping from the plane is what makes some people intoxicated to feel it again and again. Thus many of the rich people make it a hobby and they don’t mind shelling out dollars for every second they engage in sky diving.
Comparing the time one gets to the cost incurred, it is highly expensive and cost approximately $2.5 for every second, which can accumulate to $150 to $250 per minute.
This means that even if you jump twice a week it will cost you approximately $24,000 every year. However, if you get yourself certified by incurring a cost of $1500, you may reduce the expense per year.
Scuba Diving:
Exploring the world beneath you has its charm. The aquatic life can captivate you with its colors and tranquility. You can easily engage in scuba diving when you go on a vacation.
Making it a hobby can cost you just 800 dollar, which includes $500 for equipment and $300 for certification, but this cost is only applicable if you live near a scuba diving site.
So, if have to travel or you want to get enthralled by the scuba diving experience from distant places as well then it may cost around $3000 per trip.
8. Exotic Pets:
Gone are the days when rich people had only dogs as pets. To raise the level of their status quo rich people now engage in having exotic pets as a hobby. By exotic pets, we intend to point on a white lion cub or a cheetah or an octopus.
Passion to have exotic pets is taking over many of the international celebrities and they are spending big on it. Nicolas Cage was in news for buying an octopus for $150,000 to develop an understanding of other forms of life and thereby become a better actor.
Apart from the celebs, the well-heeled people are spending huge on this hobby. If you wish to have a white lion cub, it can cost you about $140,000 and similarly a cheetah cub can cost around $314,500.
This is not the only expense you have to bear. For having many of the exotic animals as pets you also need to get a license.
Once you are done with all this, then comes the price which is to be paid to professionals for taking care of these animals that can range between $40,000-$50,000, along with the ongoing cost of upholding these pets.
Considering the danger to the owner and pet the cost seems even higher.
9. Yacht Racing:
So do you want to take over the water world? Well, this can be the feeling after winning a yacht race. The yacht is an expensive affair and when you have one then definitely have a pocket of gold.
A yacht can be bought from $ 2 million to $800 million depending on the luxuries it has. When you want to have a yacht race which is quite in rage as a hobby among the loaded people an additional cost of $8 to $10 million has to be incurred to make it race-ready. While the maintenance of a yacht for the purpose costs $100,000 every month.
Now just calculate the cost because Yacht does crash while racing. This hobby is not for the faint-hearted people who are rich but cannot sink their money like that.
10. Mountain Climbing:
This hobby is actually for both the worlds. While the ones who are not rich need to be experienced to engage in mountain climbing, rich can assess this as an adventure sport and even with less experience they can be guided to climb the top and experience the thrill and the scenery which is incomparable to any of the joys which city gives.
If you want to make mountain climbing as a hobby and calculate all the prerequisites including the guide, permits, clothing, equipment and other travel expenses, it is not a cheap hobby at all.
So, along with guides if you engage yourself in climbing the seven summits the total cost can touch the whopping $170,000. Plus, the time you give to it as this hobby will make you call off from work for many days together.
11. Polo:
The sport of the upper class, Polo, has been the hobby of wealthy people from a long time. The reason why it is called their sport is that playing polo doesn’t only involve the skill to play it but $8000 per year to be a member of the Polo Cub.
Then, buying a Polo horse costs around $20,000 and again keeping a Polo Horse amount to an extra expense of $1500 per month.
Totaling all this would make a grand figure and making the polo a hobby which cannot be everybody’s affair.
Most Entertaining But Expensive Hobbies:
Hobbies are a great way to spend your past time productively. A person’s hidden passion or talent can be identified with their respective hobbies.
As for a few people, their hobby is not an activity done in free time but their strong emotion which they feel toward it, be it related to art or sport.
An expensive hobby is mostly described as a waste of money, but some people do not mind it and are more than happy to spend on their hobby.
Some of the topmost expensive hobbies only the rich can afford are
12. Ice Sculpting:
Ice sculpting is nothing but crafting a sculpture out of ice. Though this is something not very usual it is one of the favorite hobbies of many people. Moreover, it is a bit expensive as the courses and tools it requires costs a lot.
13. Model Railroading:
Model Railroading without a doubt is a very expensive hobby. The pieces of things required for it alone can cost up to $300 per piece of the set. So imagine what would the whole set cost you.
14. Drag Racing:
Drag racing is a type of car racing which looks exciting but can burn your pockets completely. The cars used in drag racing can cost you in a range of $3k to $20k. Along with it comes the cost of maintenance, fuel and also car racing fees.
15. Collecting Cars:
Car collecting is an expensive hobby which few rich people have. Though it sounds strange surprisingly it is true. They not only collect the latest cars but also cover all type of car models.
16. Sailing:
Sailing truly is an enjoyable activity but can cost you more, as a sailboat alone can cost you around $2k
17. Blackjack:
Blackjack is one of the attractive game in casinos. Unfortunately, not all people can enjoy this game as the minimum wages required for this game to play is high. Truly an expensive hobby which only the rich can afford
18. Cigarette Boat Racing:
The cigarette boat gives you a flying experience over water as it moves at a speed of 100 miles per hour. This thrilling hobby is an expensive one, as the average price of such a boat is around $1.2 million
19. Hot Air Balloon:
If you are afraid of height then definitely this is not for you. But if you are ready to pay any amount for this wonderful experience then a single ballon can cost you $45,000.
Also, you need to attend a flight institute for about $3,500. Additionally, you also need to pay for the crew who help you enjoy your hobby safely.
20. High Stakes Poker:
Gambling is a fun game but your winning also depends on your luck. This can turn out to be an expensive hobby if you are playing in high amounts or without limits.
21. Traveling Around the World:
This is one of the biggest dreams of many people. But for some this a hobby which can cost a lot of money. Though you can make it possible with little adjustments, if you want to travel with better comfort then it turns out to be expensive.
22. Antique Collection:
Antique collection is a great hobby and is practiced by many. Also, the products they gather are not only antique but also rare that is the reason the price tag attached to them are very expensive.
23. RC Planes:
Rc planes are typically small planes. Though the average type plane can be easy on the pocket, if you go for a high-end one then this can turn out to be a very expensive hobby
24. Equestrianism:
Equestrianism or horseriding is a typical hobby which most rich people practice. An average horse can range from $5000 to $100000. Such a hobby can be maintained only by rich people.
25. Country Clubbing:
Though clubbing is a great way to destress and enjoy yourself but is an expensive affair. The membership charges of country clubbing come in a range of $5000 to $250000 per year. Not all can afford it.
26. Motor Gliding:
Motor gliding is a fun activity and hobby for many but owning an own glider can be quite expensive as the price of it can be around half a million dollars
27. Home Aquaria:
Many people love to have an aquarium at their home. Moreover, a decent-sized aquarium can set up easily at about $600. Now a few people desire for more and them their hobby is important no matter how much it costs.
If you go for the high end like rare fishes, Dinosaur Gold Aquarium then it can cost you around a whopping 4.8 Million dollars. Now, this is something very expensive which only rich people can afford.
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Why US Financial Regulators Are Unprepared for the Next Financial Crisis
The Great Recession from 2007-2009 represented a toxic mixture of failures by market participants and financial regulators. The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 patched some of the holes. but not nearly all of them. At least, that's the conclusion I reach from a three-paper "Symposium on Financial Stability Regulation" in the Winter 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. (Full disclosure: I have worked as Managing Editor of JEP since the first issue back in 1987, so I am perhaps predisposed to find its articles persuasive.) The papers are:
"Financial Regulation: Still Unsettled a Decade after the Crisis," by Daniel K. Tarullo
"Prone to Fail: The Pre-crisis Financial System," by Darrell Duffie
"Would Macroprudential Regulation Have Prevented the Last Crisis?" by David Aikman, Jonathan Bridges, Anil Kashyap, and Caspar Siegert
To understand the underlying perspective here, you need to think about recessions in two parts. All grown-ups know that bad things are going to happen to economies from time to time: oil price shocks, trade shocks, price bubbles in stock markets or housing markets, and so on. If an economy is reasonably resilient, any resulting recessions can be fairly mild and brief. On the other side, if an economy and its financial sector is fragile, with high levels of debt that often need to be rolled-over and refinanced on a short-term basis, then a recession that could otherwise have been fairly mild turns into a Great Recession.
From this perspective, the role of financial regulators goes beyond the traditional tasks of looking at individual financial institutions to make sure they are reasonably solvent and are providing timely and accurate information to investors. For some years now, financial regulators have been talking about "macroprudential" regulation (for example, here and here), which goes beyond looking at individual financial institutions to see whether the financial system as a whole is robust. The idea is to avoid the mistake of looking at individual trees, while missing risks that involve the entire forest. This view recognizes that recessions will continue to happen, but hopes that with robust financial system, they will not mushroom into another Great Recession.
In the context of the Great Recession, the team of Aikman, Bridges, Kashyap, and Siegert argue that if US financial regulators had the legal authority and the foresight to take steps to protect the overall robustness of the US financial system in the years before 2008, the Great Recession would have been only one-third or one-fourth as large. They write: "Our diagnosis centers on two overlapping but distinct vulnerabilities: the increase in leverage and short-term funding at financial intermediaries, and the build-up in indebtedness in the household sector. These factors, we argue, can account for around two-thirds to three-quarters of the fall in US GDP that followed the financial crisis."
They describe what macroprudential policy tools would have been needed to address these issues. For example, at least in theory a government regulator could have required that mortgage lenders impose certain loan-to-income rules, to hold down on the rise in household debt. Or at least in theory, a government regulator could have imposed rules to prevent investment banks from relying so heavily on extremely short-term borrowing that needed to be rolled over every day--which made them highly vulnerable when that borrowing was not rolled over. However, they point out that these changes were not part of the power given to regulatory authorities by the Dodd-Frank legislation They write:
We argue that the US Financial Stability Oversight Council would likely make little difference were we to experience a rerun of the factors that caused the last crisis. It has no macroprudential levers under its direct control, and not all of its members have mandates to protect financial stability. ... And given the role played by loosely regulated nonbank financial institutions prior to the last crisis—and the continuing evolution of the financial system—a successful macroprudential intervention would likely require political backing to be nimble in widening the perimeter of regulation to capture such institutions. More generally, such a regulator would have to be fairly aggressive in using its powers. Given the novelty of these powers, there is no clear evidence on whether such forceful interventions would be realistic were risks to escalate again. ...
As one example of the powers that US regulators do not have:
After the crisis, the Dodd–Frank Act did ban certain types of mortgages, such as interest-only mortgages or those with negative amortization. But it left the question of minimum down-payment restrictions to a group of six regulators involved in housing, which ultimately opted against introducing such a requirement. While risks in the housing market have significantly declined since the crisis, average loan-to-value ratios on mortgages are not lower than they were in the early 2000s. Furthermore, no US regulator has the ability to impose loan-to-income requirements, even if the Financial Stability Oversight Council wished to recommend this action. ... Moreover, the Fed lacks authority over many parts of the financial system and has no tools that can be used to tackle household debt vulnerabilities. A June 2015 “war game” exercise conducted by four Reserve Bank presidents concluded that the Fed had insufficient macroprudential powers to address a build-up in risks that resembled the earlier financial crisis. Also, Fed officials have cast doubt on whether its mandate permits it to use monetary policy to act against a build-up in financial stability risks.
Thus, Aikman, Bridges, Kashyap, and Siegert are pointing out that financial regulators are unprepared for a literal rerun of the financial crisis that already occurred. The regulators also remain unprepared for financial crises that arise form other sources or in other forms.
For example, Daniel Tarullo points out in his essay that most of the regulatory attention has focused on banks. but potential dangers remain in the rest of the financial system. Tarullo writes:
Within the perimeter of prudentially regulated banking organizations, post-crisis financial regulation has made considerable strides, though liquidity regulation needs more work and capital requirements for the biggest banks should probably be somewhat higher. ... While there is at least a chance for maintaining the progress toward more resiliency for the largest banks, it is considerably harder to conjure up a benign outcome with respect to financial activity that occurs outside the perimeter of banking organizations. Recycled or new forms of shadow banking will almost surely increase over time, whether from existing nonbank financial firms or from new fintech (financial technology) entrants. Some of these will present risks to financial stability.
For an example of one set of shadow banking issues, Amit Seru argues that 'Regulation of the Mortgage Market Must Consider Shadow Banks" in a Policy Brief written for the Stanford Instituted for Economic Policy Research (December 2018). As he notes: " Mortgage lending in this country is highly segmented and traditional banks represent only an increasingly small part of the story. For many decades, banks have competed with independent mortgage companies that don’t take deposits and typically don’t have brick-and-mortar branches, a group that can be called `shadow banks.'” This figure shows that the share of mortgage lending that doesn't come from banks is over half and rising.
The mortgages from these independent companies are then bundled together into financial securities, which are in turn sliced and diced into pieces and resold to investors (including banks, pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, money market funds, and others). Because the financial reforms have focused so heavily on banks, they do not delve into the potential system risks from the nonbanks.
For other examples, Darrell Duffie discusses in his JEP essay "the run-prone designs and weak regulation of the markets for securities financing and over-the-counter derivatives." For example, one rule change is that there is now strong encouragement for financial derivatives to be bought and sold through central clearinghouses--but there has been little attention to the risks that might be accumulated in these clearinghouses. If a clearinghouse seemed close to failing, and as a result it appeared that many derivatives contracts could fail or go into limbo for a time, the effects on fhe financial system could be nasty. Duffie writes:
A key change is the increased use of central clearing, which was directly mandated in post-crisis regulation and further encouraged by new regulatory capital requirements that, in effect, expressed a preference for central clearing. A central counterparty (CCP), also known as a clearinghouse, enters a derivatives trade as the buyer to the original seller, and as the seller to the original buyer. In this way, original counterparties become insulated from each other’s default risk—provided of course that the clearinghouse meets its own obligations. Central clearing also improves the transparency of derivatives positions and enforces uniform collateral practices that are more easily supervised by regulators. ...
There do remain, however, important concerns over the ability to resolve the failure of central counterparties, which have become enormous concentrations of risk under post-crisis regulations. If a clearinghouse has insufficient resources to manage the default of the derivatives obligations of a clearing member, the consequences could be catastrophic, now that hundreds of trillions of derivatives have been cleared by a small number of systemically important central counterparties. The default management resources of the central counterparty consist primarily of the margins provided by clearing members against their positions, and by a default fund to which all clearing members contribute. If the initial margin of a failed clearing member is not enough to cover the losses, the default fund is then applied. If the clearinghouse burns through both of these paid-in default management resources, and a small layer of its own capital, it then has the contractual right to stop paying clearing members the amounts otherwise due on their derivatives, even to the point of “tearing up” their derivatives positions. In the worst scenarios, the cessation of payments to clearing members and tear-ups would be catastrophic, and contagious. The largest clearing members are generally also large members of other central counterparties. This tail contagion risk is subject to regulatory stress tests and ultimately to regulations that could trigger a failure resolution process for central counterparties. However, actual implementable plans for the failure resolution of clearinghouses have still not been designed, at least in the United States...
In November 2018, the Federal Reserve started publishing a Financial Stability Report, with lots of information about various possible sources of financial risk in the economy, as well as a Supervision and Regulation Report about trends and patterns in these areas. My general sense is that there aren't any major systematic financial risks threatening the US economy right now. But one hopes that financial regulators can be proactive, rather than reactive, to risks that could easily emerge in the future.
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Rome’s big ticket attractions like the Colosseum, Pantheon, Vatican and Trevi Fountain, just to name a few, should definitely be on everyone’s ‘to do list’, but there are surprising sights that you may never have hear of, but will amaze you.
1. Capuchin Crypts
At first this can be quite a grotesque and confronting place. In about 1631, the Capuchin monks used the bones of over 4000 dead monks, plus a few others, to decorate the walls and ceilings of the crypts.
More than 4000 dead monks went into the creation of these crypts. Source: https://www.wantedinrome.com/yellowpage/crypt-of-the-capuchins-in-rome.html
However, if you look past the fact you are surrounded by death, you can see the messages the monks have incorporated into these series of small chapels. Each chapel has a different point to make to visitors, but all share the common theme that life is short, while death is for eternity. This is not meant to be morbid. The bones are arranged to create symbols, such as clocks to remind us to embrace life, to live life well and with meaning.
The story of how the order of Capuchin monks was established and how these crypts were created are fascinating. Capuchin means hoods in Italian and they are a branch off from the Franciscan order. Occasionally there are performances of sacred music in the crypts, usually at night which would be both powerful and slightly petrifying, despite the uplifting messages.
A tour is probably the best way to get the most out of this place as the untrained eye will miss a lot of the details and hidden metaphors. City Wonders is the original tour of this kind, reasonably priced and the tour guides really know their stuff, often university graduate students in the field.
2. Ostia Antica
This is Rome’s answer to Pompeii. It is close enough to Rome to visit in a day trip.
During ancient Roman times, this was a major seaport, a significant city to the Roman Empire (509BC – 27BC). However, other seaports sprang up and Ostia became neglected. When a malaria plague hit the city, people left in droves and it became forgotten for centuries. At its height 100,000 people called Ostia home and your can still walk down the main street and see the theatre, taverns, and public baths.
Ostia provides a window into ancient Roman life without having to go too far afield.
3. St Clements Basilica
Just up the road from the Colosseum, St Clements Basilica is an eye-opening experience. The current basilica, completed in the 12th century, was built on the ruins of Rome’s past. Rome is a city of layers as each era builds on top of the last. This is good for archaeology as it preserves the past, but not so good for building new metro lines. Construction has been held up for years because every time they dig, they find yet another historically significant site and have to down tools, but I digress. St Clements Basilica provides a first-hand experience of what lays beneath the surface of Rome. The Basilica itself holds and interesting story about St Clement, but narrow, damp stairs lead you down through history to a 4th century church. But it doesn’t end there. Further down is 1st century Rome including a store room for the Colosseum, a surprisingly intact pagan temple, alleyways, baths, homes and the river that connects to the Colosseum is still running down there. These all date back to Nero’s fire. Truly a journey through the hidden depths of Rome.
You feel a little Indiana Jones as your descend through the layers of history.
Note: A church (chiesa) is different from a basilica. A basilica in a church that contains a sacred relic and therefore hold more religious significance. This basilica allegedly holds the martyred remains of Saint Clement and Saint Ignatius, which leads me neatly to the next point.
4. St Ignatius Church
Like many churches in Rome, the exterior of St Ignatius looks quite bland and you’d be forgiven for walking past it without giving it a second thought. I did. Once I went inside and was amazed, I pledged never to judge an Italian church by it’s cover again.
The beauty and magnificence of the ceiling fresco is awesome. It depicts representations of the continents to symbolise the missionary work of the Jesuit order, a refreshing change from the usual sacred art subjects. For me it is better than the Sistine chapel. A big call I know, but the optical illusion created of people seemingly falling and infinite space in genius. Andrea Pozzo is the Jesuit painter and architect who you have probably never heard of who specialised in these illusions in the 17th century.
Pozzo also created a false dome win St Ignatius, another optical illusion of great magnitude.
St Ignatius Church is just around the corner from the Pantheon. Entry is free.
5. Bernini
While we’re on the subject of under rated artists: Bernini. So often he is overlooked, but without him Rome would be far less beautiful, or interesting. Rather than go one about it, here are some picture of his work. They speak for themselves.
Dawn is the best time to appreciate Bernini’s masterpieces and the eternal city itself. It’s also a great time to take memorable photos, without random tourists and hawkers getting in the way. At this time there’s a serenity to the eternal city that is lost when battling the hoards.
The dawn light is magnificent for photography. For more great pics, click here.
7. Appian Way
When you ask: What have the Romans ever done for us? One of the first answers is the roads. Goes without saying. The Appian way is one of the first and most important roads the ancient Romans built, and the original paved path is still intact.
But even if you’re not mad keen on soaking up the beauty of ancient roadways, the Appian Way is another site to enjoy some distance from the crowds. It also provides a host of interesting attractions as well as a deliciously sinister history. Since it was prohibited to bury people within the city walls, the early Christians and Jews buried their loved ones in catacombs beneath the Appian Way. More infamously, Spartacus and his legion of slave followers were crucified along the road sides following their unsuccessful uprising to serve as a warning to other would-be upstarts.
Can you just imagine the lines of crucified rebel slaves?
If you’ve got the time or inclination you may want to walk the entire 62KM length (originally it was more than 200 KM long), but you certainly don’t have to. Indeed, you don’t even have to walk. There are bike tours, and even Segway tours available.
8. Dark Heart Tour
I would rarely suggest a tour, but this one is different. It’s a 90-minute, small group night time walking tour that takes you to the sites of some dastardly happenings in the city. The cases selected for the tour tended to be more domestic nature, rather than political, so no Julius Caesar murder or incestuous Caligula. But there was one case involving a sinister pope. One doesn’t want to give too much away. The walk was easy, and the tour ends near a taxi rank. It’s also one of the cheapest tours on offer. Check out the tour and tickets here. Would recommend doing the tour before visiting the Castel St. Angelo.
9. Cat Sanctuary at Julius Caesar’s Murder Site
Julius Cesar was famously stabbed in the back by his senators, including his best mate. It all went down in Pompey’s Theatre – not to be confused with Pompeii of volcano infamy.
The cats live in the ruins of Julius Caesar’s murder place.
Pompey’s Theatre is in the city of Rome. It is currently the site of a cat sanctuary where the city’s stray cats are fed, de-sexed, given medical treatment and re-homed. The cats live among the ruins of the theatre. It’s a great place for cat lovers. Be quick though as there are plans to re-purpose the site as a tourist attraction with new toilets and gift shop.
10. A Taste of Opera
If you’re not a big fan of opera, but would like to experience some high Italian culture, then check out I Virtuosi Dell Opéra di Roma.
A collection of well-loved opera arias are performed in the Church of St. Paolo Entrole Le Mura and is far less formal than a full-blown operatic experience and at 22 Euro, much cheaper. The company has been around for a good 20 years. Musicians and singers are first rate and the acoustics in the church are phenomenal. But the company also offers other options of varying degrees of formality here.
Of course, there are far more fascinating and unusual things Rome has to offer. A city doesn’t get to be eternal without an eternity of captivating interest points. Just wandering about getting lost in the lanes and discovering hidden gems is a wonderful way to spend a few hours.
There are many tours available in Rome, but I recommend City Wonders because they are reasonably priced, the guides are experts in their fields and the content of the tours take you to next level, not just same-old tourism info.
I’d love to hear about your favourite unusual things to do in Rome.
Living in Thailand: Chiang Mai
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bronisław malinowski education
Bronisław Malinowski was the son of the Krakow linguist Lucjan Malinowski. WORKS BY MALINOWSKI. Malinowski, Bronislaw. A detailed critique of his theories is in Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (1968). Bronislaw Malinowski Like Durkheim, Malinowski (1954) uses data from small-scale non-literate societies to develop his thesis on religion. He later married Anna Valetta Hayman-Joyce. Malinowski returned to Europe in 1920, and resumed his post as a part … Bronisław Malinowski was the son of the Krakow linguist Lucjan Malinowski. He completed a doctorate in mathematics and physics in 1908. He worked and lived in France, then rejoined the University of London in 1924 where he researched and lectured on anthropology. Unlike Durkheim, Malinowski died in New Haven, Conn., on May 14, 1942. Malinowski came from a cultured, highly educated family and was mostly home-schooled before attending Jagiellonian University. Malinowski began reading James Frazer’s The Golden Bough whic… During the early 1940s, he spent time in the USA lecturing. Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was born in Krakow, Poland, at the time Austria-Hungry, on the 7 April 1894. Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski (1884–1942) was a Polish-born social anthropologist whose professional training and career, beginning in 1910, were based in England. While ill he read Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, which turned his interest to anthropology. Further Reading on Kaspar Bronislaw Malinowski. Nine "Malinowski's Contribution to Social Anthropology," and Chap. Bronisław Malinowski has 42 books on Goodreads with 9246 ratings. His command of languages included Polish, Russian, German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish, as well as the languages of tribal groups he studied. He encouraged beginning students but was often intentionally devastatingly critical as they became more advanced. In 1939, when World War II erupted, he was teaching at Yale University and was chairman of the board of exiled members of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He remarries, and the painter Valetta Swann becomes his second wife. Malinowski's ideas and methodologies came to be widely embraced by the Boasian influenced school of American Anthropology, making him one of the most influential anthropologists of the 20th century. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY. Malinowski is distinguished with an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and becomes a professor at Yale University. He subsequently obtained a doctorate of science from the University of London (1916) for his work based on his findings in New Guinea. Brief study at the University of Leipzig under Karl Bücher and Wilhelm Wundt was followed in 1910 by further study in anthropology at the London School of Economics under C. G. Seligman and Edward Westermarck. He completed a doctorate in mathematics and physics in 1908. When he was thirteen years old, his father died. In focusing on these and other cultural factors as functional parts of a nicely balanced system, he founded the so-called functional school of social anthropology and helped transform speculative anthropology into a modern science of man. WORKS BY MALINOWSKI. Joining the London School of Economics in 1910, Malinowski became involved in the study of anthropology, a new subject at the time. Malinowski between two worlds: the Polish roots of an anthropological tradition, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. His career is recounted in Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (1961). influential writings. SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY. He established the field of social anthropology and remained at the University of London. Bronisław Malinowski on the Trobriand Islands, 1918, photo: CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia. As a commanding figure in modern anthropology, Malinowski was famous because of his skillful lectures and Kaspar Bronislaw Malinowski founded the functional school of anthropology. He also lectured in Geneva, Vienna, Rome, and Oslo. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Elsie Malinowski died in 1935 after a long illness. Ten "Malinowski-Fieldworker and Theorist" Read preview Overview History and Theory in Anthropology By Alan Barnard Cambridge University Press, 2000 On April 7, 1884, Polish anthropologist Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was born. Bronisław Malinowski on the Trobriand Islands, 1918, photo: CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia. Like Durkheim, Malinowski sees religion as reinforcing social norms and values and promoting social solidarity. F. A. Montagu, "Bronisiaw Malinowski, 1884-1942," Isis, XXXIV, 1942, pp. Early Years. For instance, kinship cannot be explained separately from economics and economics from politics etc. 1 talking about this. 9Cf. April 7, He remarries, and the painter Valetta Swann becomes his second wife. He was doing fieldwork in México when he died of a heart attack on the 16 May 1942. Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski was born in Poland on April 7, 1884. Bronislaw’s main achievement was the founding of the science of social anthropology, particularly in relation to field studies he carried out in Oceania. She died in 1935, leaving three daughters. Malinowski is distinguished with an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and becomes a professor at Yale University. Malinowski is widely recognized as the founder of social anthropology and often considered one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists.. Bronislaw attended Cracow's King John Sobieski public school and the Jagellonian University, earning in 1908 the doctoral degree in physics and mathematics. In his youth he received strong influences from Ernst Mach,[6] a philosopher oriented towards natural science, and from linguistics.
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Pochettino living the dream at Spurs team punching above its weight
Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino says that he is living the dream at the London club as they prepare for a Champions League blockbuster against Ajax Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Mauricio Pochettino says that his Tottenham Hotspur team has exceeded all expectations with their achievements in the Premiership and Champions League.
Spurs have all but sealed their place in next season’s Champions League, despite a falling away of league form, and could yet make it into this season’s final something Pochettino said would have been thought a dream when he took over at the club in 2014.
“We are living a dream. Five years ago when we arrived it was to reduce the gap to the top four, and then to have the possibility to play in the Champions League,” Pochettino said at a press conference on Tuesday.
“I think nobody would believe we would be playing in the Champions League three seasons in a row and competing at this stage.”
Spurs are fourth in the Premier League heading into the final weekend with only Arsenal able to haul them in but their London rivals have an inferior goal difference and need a miracle to get back into Europe’s elite.
“You wouldn’t believe at the start of the season that Tottenham would be in the last week of the season with the possibility of being in the final of the Champions League and to be in the top four,” admitted Pochettino
Spurs are in Amsterdam for their semi-final return on Wednesday looking to overturn a 1-0 deficit after last week’s first leg in London, a side missing Harry Kane through injury and Heung-Min Son through suspension could not recover from Donny van de Beek’s goal in the opening exchanges. Spurs need to win the match, though a 1-0 win for the London club will trigger extra time.
A 2-2 away draw to PSV Eindhoven when they last visited to the Netherlands in October left Tottenham with just one point from three group games and staring at an early exit from the competition but they dug deep and progressed from the group stage. Spurs will need more of that spirit against a very good Ajax team.
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‘Bright Mansions’ concert celebrates Roland Carter, ‘Dean of Choirs’
Composer-conductor Roland M. Carter, known as “The Dean of Choirs,” and a member and supporter of the CSO’s African American Network, will be in Chicago for “In the Bright Mansions Above,” a celebration July 16 of his life, legacy and music. The free concert, which begins at 5 p.m. at the First Church of Deliverance, 4315 S. Wabash, features the Wooten Chorale Ensemble, which marks its 68th anniversary this year, and the Celebration Choir of Chicago, in works written and arranged by Carter.
Carter is known for his arrangement of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” widely regarded as the Black National Anthem. For the CSO’s community concert in October at the Apostolic Church of God, Riccardo Muti, CSO music director, and the orchestra performed Carter’s arrangement. In 1991, when Muti was music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, he also performed Carter’s arrangement of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” for a holiday concert honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Ahead of the concert, Muti sent a greeting, which will be read at the event: “Welcome to Chicago, Dr. Roland Carter. I am very happy to have had the honor of conducting your orchestral/choral arrangement of ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.’ Thank you for sharing your artistry.”
Several AAN members, who sing in the Wooten Chorale Ensemble and Celebration Choir of Chicago, will participate in the concert. Established in 2016, the CSO’s African American Network is dedicated to engaging the city’s culturally rich African American community through the sharing of musical experiences while building relationships for future generations.
The founder and CEO of MAR-VEL, a publisher specializing in music and traditions of African American composers, Carter is a professor emeritus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he was the Ruth S. Holmberg Professor of American Music in UTC’s department of music.
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It is not a crime to criticize Israel: Press release
April 4, 2018 April 16, 2015 by Cym Gomery
P.O. Box 40011, Ottawa, ON, K1V 0W8
President, Margaret Rao president@cusj.org
www.cusj.org
CIVIL SOCIETY REJECTS CRIMINALIZATION OF CRITICISM
OF STATE OF ISRAEL
CUSJ joins other civil society organizations in defending freedom of speech
Canadian Unitarians for Social Justice (CUSJ) has issued a joint statement with 75+ civil society organizations from across the country, including Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, and Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, condemning the Canadian government’s attempts to criminalize criticism of Israeli Government policies. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association has released its own statement on the issue, as has the Canadian Labour Congress and national union affiliates.“By deliberately conflating criticism of government action with racism, the Canadian government is making a bald-faced attempt to gag critics of Israel,” said Margaret Rao, President of CUSJ. “Attempts to re-classify any criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitic are dishonest and a step back from the open dialogue necessary to achieve peace in the region.”
“Unitarians and Universalists have long opposed racism, including anti-Semitism,” noted Rao. “We continue to condemn it today. But criticizing government policy is not racism. Advocating for basic human rights is not illegal. Peaceful actions – such as those the Boycott, Divestment & Sanction (BDS) movement employ to stop human rights abuses by the Israeli state – are not criminal. CUSJ is proud to stand on the side of justice along with the Palestinian human rights movement.
“We will continue to speak up for the rights of those persecuted by governments,” added Rao. “This is why, regardless of one’s stance on the issue of illegal Israeli settlements, Canadians should oppose this attempt to criminalize criticism of government policy.”
The joint statement, “Oppose the Canadian Government’s Threat to Criminalize Criticism of Israel” is below.
Canadian Unitarians for Social Justice (CUSJ) is a national faith-based organization founded to support Unitarian values through social action.
Margaret Rao president@cusj.org
Oppose the Canadian Government’s Threat to Criminalize Criticism of Israel
In 2009, the Canadian government gave major support to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA), a group of parliamentarians who accused those challenging Israel’s unjust treatment of Palestinians of being anti-Semitic. The goal of the CPCCA was to create a climate in which criticism of Israel could be criminalized in Canada. Fortunately, that initiative was unsuccessful, thanks to widespread opposition from members of the Canadian public.
In what appears to be another attempt to suppress criticism of Israel, the Canadian government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Israel which makes the claim that “the selective targeting of Israel is the new face of anti-Semitism” and declares that Canada will oppose those who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Shortly after the MOU was signed, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney announced to the UN General Assembly that the Canadian government would exercise “zero tolerance” toward “all forms of discrimination including rhetoric towards Israel, and attempts to delegitimize Israel such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.”
All this follows on the fact that in October 2014 the Canadian government passed changes to the criminal code in Bill C-13 which expanded the definition of identifiable groups to be protected against public incitement to hatred to include “nations”. This change to Canadian law parallels the situation in France, where alterations to the French penal code have led to the conviction of twenty French citizens who support the BDS movement, on charges of inciting racial hatred. It is not yet clear how the Canadian government intends to implement a policy of “zero tolerance” to those who exercise their freedom of speech by advocating and participating in boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns to pressure Israel to respect the rights of Palestinians. What is clear, however, is that the Canadian government is determined to target people who expose and oppose Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.
Such efforts by the government can only put a chill on Canadian democracy and may lead to the criminalization of such dissent down the road. We are unequivocal in our condemnation of all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. It must be stressed that it is not anti-Semitic to criticize the state of Israel. Those who equate such criticism with a hatred of Jewish people are simply attempting to silence Israel’s critics. In the face of these actions on the part of the Canadian government, we must defend the right of people in a democracy to criticize any government’s behaviour and to participate in boycotts designed to alter that behaviour if they choose to do so.
We, the undersigned organizations, oppose attempts by the Canadian government to criminalize criticism of or opposition to the actions of any country.
Categories Israel and Palestine Tags Anti-Semitism, BDS, Press releases Leave a comment Post navigation
Report on First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa Study Sessions
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Watching “Happiest Season” was the most unhappy time
Letter from the editor: logging off…for now
Petition for CSULB to offer alternative grading options “grows by the minute”
Sophomore guard Michael Carter III receives advice from head coach Dan Monson after the end of team practice. Ralston Dacanay/Daily Forty-Niner
Men's Basketball, Men's Sports, Sports
Long Beach State men’s basketball: Newcomers III
by Ralston Dacanay on October 21, 2019
Ralston Dacanay Author
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When thinking about what’s worked for the Long Beach State men’s basketball team in recent memory, it’s hard to overlook the success of its transfers.
With former transfers such as Gabe Levin and Deishuan Booker, players who move to the Beach—by way of junior college or other collegiate athletic conferences—have had good reason to like what they see in head coach Dan Monson’s player development track record.
Although the Beach has been ramping up efforts to prioritize freshmen recruitment and development, Monson and his staff appear to be sticking with how they approach integrating transfers this year.
“The first thing you’re always concerned about is why are they transferring,” Monson said. “Are they coming because they think it’s going to be easier at your place, or are they coming because they weren’t the star at the other place? Are they coming because they didn’t fit in or got in trouble at the other place?”
Monson said the biggest part of the vetting process with transfers is making sure they are comfortable and on the same page with the direction of the team.
“When we had problems with transfers is when we haven’t been on that same page,” Monson said, “and when we’ve had success with them is when they come in with the same vision and expectations with what their role is going to be as you do.”
The Daily Forty-Niner’s player spotlights for the 2019–20 Long Beach State men’s basketball roster continues with the program’s three incoming transfers.
Ralston Dacanay / Daily Forty-Niner
Chance Hunter, 6’6”, 190 lbs, Guard, Sophomore, Cerritos CC (Inglewood)
Something many CSULB students can relate to, Hunter’s journey to the Beach was a 10-mile drive on Interstate 605 from Cerritos College.
Whether it be cruising around campus together on skateboards or challenging each other on the virtual hardwood in “NBA 2K,” Hunter said the team’s chemistry clicked right away.
“I feel like with our group, everybody just messes with each other,” Hunter said. “Everything we do pretty much, we’re always together or somebody from the team is always close. We started staying as close as possible, and I feel like it stands out on the court.”
An Inglewood-native southpaw, Hunter has shown the versatility to play multiple positions on the wing and score on all three levels. Starting 27 of 29 games last season at Cerritos, Hunter led the Falcons to a 22-7 record as their leading scorer with 13.8 points and 7.5 rebounds per game.
Back in August during the Costa Rica trip, Hunter scored a game-high 23 points in his scrimmage debut for Long Beach against the Panama All-Stars and 19 points against San Ramon ARBA a couple of nights later.
“I feel very comfortable,” Hunter said. “I just feel like with the offense, I can find ways to score. coach [Monson] puts me in the right spots to where I can just score efficiently and get the right shots that I love to get.”
Although Hunter appears primed to have a big role for the Beach right out of the gate, Monson said it’s going to take some patience for himself and Hunter to adjust to the elevated level of play.
“Chance looks ready,” Monson said. “He’s very mature, he’s fit in well, he’s a good team guy and I’m excited about his progress and his future. He’s never made a basket in Division I and it’s going to be some growing pains, but I have great confidence that he’s going to have a lot of success for us.”
Trever Irish, 7’0″, 230 lbs, Center, Sophomore, Central Arizona CC (Lewiston, Maine)
After growing up in Maine and coming off a two-year junior college stint in Arizona, moving to California was nothing out of the norm for Irish.
“I was in foster care, so it’s not new for me to move around,” Irish said. “Not being home isn’t hard for me.”
The toughest part of the transition for the 7-footer—living in the dorms, which come furnished with a single 80” x 34” XL Twin bed and tend to stay on the warmer side in fall.
“I hit both head and footboard,” Irish said. “I have to sleep curled up a little bit, but the hardest part was not having air conditioning and I like it cold. In the winter I mean, I sleep with the window open, so it was rough [at first in Long Beach] because it was super hot.”
Irish brings LB Nation more of the size down low that they’ve been asking for. At the junior college level, Irish was a force in the post with his college-ready physique, averaging 14.3 points on 62.6% shooting, 8.8 rebounds and 2.37 blocks per game as a freshman.
Last year, however, Irish played three games before being shut down for the rest of the season due to back issues. Additionally, Irish was the lone player to miss the Costa Rica trip due to summer school, and is working his way back from a hamstring injury he sustained early into team practices.
“The last one that we could afford to get hurt got hurt, and that’s usually just how the preseason goes,” Monson said. “We think that [Trever Irish’s] size and his skill set is going to be vital to this team when we get him healthy and up to speed with everybody else.”
Heading into the season, Irish said his main goal is simply to contribute.
“I’m not coming here being like ‘I want to average 25 and 15,’” Irish said, “like obviously, that’d be good, but I want to contribute to a winning team because I haven’t been able to win before. My high school team got kind of close, but we didn’t win. I think this team has a big potential to win a championship and then go dance in March.”
Michael Carter III, 6’5″, 175 lbs, Guard, Sophomore, South Dakota St. (Seattle, Washington)
After an injury-riddled year at Washington and leaving early last year from South Dakota State, Carter III looks to help take the Beach back to its conference-winning ways.
“I’m just taking it one step at a time,” Carter III said, “but our ultimate goal is to win the Big West and that’s what I came here to do.”
After going head-to-head against NBA-level talent like Matisse Thybulle in practice and competing against other Pac-12 Conference foes, Carter III is battle-tested and will be asked to provide important scoring and perimeter defense for the Beach.
Although the game of basketball stays the same no matter the program, Carter III said he felt his NCAA-sanctioned movements helped him grow.
“When I was a freshman, I took a lot of things personally that I shouldn’t have and that’s something that I learned,” Carter III said. “Just growing up mentally and physically.”
Monson said Carter III needs to readjust to the level of play after missing valuable playing time over the last two seasons.
“[Michael Carter III is] older,” Monson said. “He’s very experienced and he’s got a great basketball IQ defensively and picks up plays. He’s playing three different positions for us, he’s very versatile. But like Trever [Irish], Mike for all intents and purposes hasn’t played in almost three years. … so even though he’s a veteran, you got to go back to high school since he’s had significant minutes.”
Big West Conference, Chance Hunter, Coach Dan Monson, csulb, Deishuan Booker, Long Beach State Athletics, men's basketball, Michael Carter III, NCAA, Trever Irish
Ralston Dacanay
Pingback: Long Beach State men’s basketball: Season preview
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Donald Trump Hires Scott Walker’s Former Campaign Manager
Alex Pappas Political Reporter
Donald Trump has hired Rick Wiley, the former campaign manager for Scott Walker’s short-lived presidential campaign, to serve as his national political director.
“Rick is a seasoned political expert with a very successful career in winning elections,” Trump said in a statement. “He brings decades of experience, and his deep ties to political leaders and activists across the country will be a tremendous asset as we enter the final phase of securing the nomination.”
Wiley said: “Voters are frustrated with the political status quo in our country and are hungry for an outsider to shake up Washington. Donald Trump has energized millions of hard working people across the country with his no-nonsense straight talk and will bring his record of success to tackle the real problems that face our nation.”
Wiley previously worked as the national political director of the Republican National Committee. His hiring comes as Trump and RNC chairman Reince Priebus have sparred and the campaign is ramping up its efforts to secure delegates ahead of the party’s July convention.
Tags : donald trump elections 2016 rick wiley scott walker
Alex Pappas
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The fault in our stars (Chapter 10)
We could only take one suitcase. I couldn’t carry one, and Mom insisted that she couldn’t carry two, so we had to jockey for space in this black suitcase my parents had gotten as a wedding present a million years ago, a suitcase that was supposed to spend its life in exotic locales but ended up mostly going back and forth to Dayton, where Morris Property, Inc., had a satellite office that Dad often visited.
I argued with Mom that I should have slightly more than half of the suitcase, since without me and my cancer, we’d never be going to Amsterdam in the first place. Mom countered that since she was twice as large as me and therefore required more physical fabric to preserve her modesty, she deserved at least two-thirds of the suitcase.
In the end, we both lost. So it goes.
Our flight didn’t leave until noon, but Mom woke me up at five thirty, turning on the light and shouting, “AMSTERDAM!” She ran around all morning making sure we had international plug adapters and quadruple-checking that we had the right number of oxygen tanks to get there and that they were all full, etc., while I just rolled out of bed, put on my Travel to Amsterdam Outfit (jeans, a pink tank top, and a black cardigan in case the plane was cold).
The car was packed by six fifteen, whereupon Mom insisted that we eat breakfast with Dad, although I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields. But anyway, I tried to stomach down some eggs while Mom and Dad enjoyed these homemade versions of Egg McMuffins they liked.
“Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?” I asked them. “Like, why don’t we have curry for breakfast?”
“Hazel, eat.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it’s a breakfast sandwich.”
Dad answered with his mouth full. “When you come back, we’ll have breakfast for dinner. Deal?”
“I don’t want to have ‘breakfast for dinner,’” I answered, crossing knife and fork over my mostly full plate. “I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg–inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinnertime.”
“You’ve gotta pick your battles in this world, Hazel,” my mom said. “But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you.”
“Quite a bit behind you,” my dad added, and Mom laughed.
Anyway, I knew it was stupid, but I felt kind of bad for scrambled eggs.
After they finished eating, Dad did the dishes and walked us to the car. Of course, he started crying, and he kissed my cheek with his wet stubbly face. He pressed his nose against my cheekbone and whispered, “I love you. I’m so proud of you.” (For what, I wondered.)
“I’ll see you in a few days, okay, sweetie? I love you so much.”
“I love you, too, Dad.” I smiled. “And it’s only three days.”
As we backed out of the driveway, I kept waving at him. He was waving back, and crying. It occurred to me that he was probably thinking he might never see me again, which he probably thought every single morning of his entire weekday life as he left for work, which probably sucked.
Mom and I drove over to Augustus’s house, and when we got there, she wanted me to stay in the car to rest, but I went to the door with her anyway. As we approached the house, I could hear someone crying inside. I didn’t think it was Gus at first, because it didn’t sound anything like the low rumble of his speaking, but then I heard a voice that was definitely a twisted version of his say, “BECAUSE IT IS MY LIFE, MOM. IT BELONGS TO ME.” And quickly my mom put her arm around my shoulders and spun me back toward the car, walking quickly, and I was like, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
And she said, “We can’t eavesdrop, Hazel.”
We got back into the car and I texted Augustus that we were outside whenever he was ready.
We stared at the house for a while. The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.
“Well,” Mom said after a while, “we are pretty early, I guess.”
“Almost as if I didn’t have to get up at five thirty,” I said. Mom reached down to the console between us, grabbed her coffee mug, and took a sip. My phone buzzed. A text from Augustus.
Just CAN’T decide what to wear. Do you like me better in a polo or a button-down?
Button-down.
Thirty seconds later, the front door opened, and a smiling Augustus appeared, a roller bag behind him. He wore a pressed sky-blue button-down tucked into his jeans. A Camel Light dangled from his lips. My mom got out to say hi to him. He took the cigarette out momentarily and spoke in the confident voice to which I was accustomed. “Always a pleasure to see you, ma’am.”
I watched them through the rearview mirror until Mom opened the trunk. Moments later, Augustus opened a door behind me and engaged in the complicated business of entering the backseat of a car with one leg.
“Do you want shotgun?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “And hello, Hazel Grace.”
“Hi,” I said. “Okay?” I asked.
My mom got in and closed the car door. “Next stop, Amsterdam,” she announced.
Which was not quite true. The next stop was the airport parking lot, and then a bus took us to the terminal, and then an open-air electric car took us to the security line. The TSA guy at the front of the line was shouting about how our bags had better not contain explosives or firearms or anything liquid over three ounces, and I said to Augustus, “Observation: Standing in line is a form of oppression,” and he said, “Seriously.”
Rather than be searched by hand, I chose to walk through the metal detector without my cart or my tank or even the plastic nubbins in my nose. Walking through the X-ray machine marked the first time I’d taken a step without oxygen in some months, and it felt pretty amazing to walk unencumbered like that, stepping across the Rubicon, the machine’s silence acknowledging that I was, however briefly, a nonmetallicized creature.
I felt a bodily sovereignty that I can’t really describe except to say that when I was a kid I used to have a really heavy backpack that I carried everywhere with all my books in it, and if I walked around with the backpack for long enough, when I took it off I felt like I was floating.
After about ten seconds, my lungs felt like they were folding in upon themselves like flowers at dusk. I sat down on a gray bench just past the machine and tried to catch my breath, my cough a rattling drizzle, and I felt pretty miserable until I got the cannula back into place.
Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention. Mom was looking at me, concerned. She’d just said something. What had she just said? Then I remembered. She’d asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Amsterdam!” she half shouted.
I smiled. “Amsterdam,” I answered. She reached her hand down to me and pulled me up.
We got to the gate an hour before our scheduled boarding time. “Mrs. Lancaster, you are an impressively punctual person,” Augustus said as he sat down next to me in the mostly empty gate area.
“Well, it helps that I am not technically very busy,” she said.
“You’re plenty busy,” I told her, although it occurred to me that Mom’s business was mostly me. There was also the business of being married to my dad—he was kind of clueless about, like, banking and hiring plumbers and cooking and doing things other than working for Morris Property, Inc.—but it was mostly me. Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.
As the seats around the gate started to fill, Augustus said, “I’m gonna get a hamburger before we leave. Can I get you anything?”
“No,” I said, “but I really appreciate your refusal to give in to breakfasty social conventions.”
He tilted his head at me, confused. “Hazel has developed an issue with the ghettoization of scrambled eggs,” Mom said.
“It’s embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that scrambled eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings.”
“I want to talk about this more,” Augustus said. “But I am starving. I’ll be right back.”
When Augustus hadn’t showed up after twenty minutes, I asked Mom if she thought something was wrong, and she looked up from her awful magazine only long enough to say, “He probably just went to the bathroom or something.”
A gate agent came over and switched my oxygen container out with one provided by the airline. I was embarrassed to have this lady kneeling in front of me while everyone watched, so I texted Augustus while she did it.
He didn’t reply. Mom seemed unconcerned, but I was imagining all kinds of Amsterdam trip–ruining fates (arrest, injury, mental breakdown) and I felt like there was something noncancery wrong with my chest as the minutes ticked away.
And just when the lady behind the ticket counter announced they were going to start preboarding people who might need a bit of extra time and every single person in the gate area turned squarely to me, I saw Augustus fast-limping toward us with a McDonald’s bag in one hand, his backpack slung over his shoulder.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Line got superlong, sorry,” he said, offering me a hand up. I took it, and we walked side by side to the gate to preboard.
I could feel everybody watching us, wondering what was wrong with us, and whether it would kill us, and how heroic my mom must be, and everything else. That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people. We were irreconcilably other, and never was it more obvious than when the three of us walked through the empty plane, the stewardess nodding sympathetically and gesturing us toward our row in the distant back. I sat in the middle of our three-person row with Augustus in the window seat and Mom in the aisle. I felt a little hemmed in by Mom, so of course I scooted over toward Augustus. We were right behind the plane’s wing. He opened up his bag and unwrapped his burger.
“The thing about eggs, though,” he said, “is that breakfastization gives the scrambled egg a certain sacrality, right? You can get yourself some bacon or Cheddar cheese anywhere anytime, from tacos to breakfast sandwiches to grilled cheese, but scrambled eggs—they’re important.”
“Ludicrous,” I said. The people were starting to file into the plane now. I didn’t want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.
“I’m just saying: Maybe scrambled eggs are ghettoized, but they’re also special. They have a place and a time, like church does.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” I said. “You are buying into the cross-stitched sentiments of your parents’ throw pillows. You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.”
“You’re a hard person to comfort,” Augustus said.
“Easy comfort isn’t comforting,” I said. “You were a rare and fragile flower once. You remember.”
For a moment, he said nothing. “You do know how to shut me up, Hazel Grace.”
“It’s my privilege and my responsibility,” I answered.
Before I broke eye contact with him, he said, “Listen, sorry I avoided the gate area. The McDonald’s line wasn’t really that long; I just… I just didn’t want to sit there with all those people looking at us or whatever.”
“At me, mostly,” I said. You could glance at Gus and never know he’d been sick, but I carried my disease with me on the outside, which is part of why I’d become a homebody in the first place. “Augustus Waters, noted charismatist, is embarrassed to sit next to a girl with an oxygen tank.”
“Not embarrassed,” he said. “They just piss me off sometimes. And I don’t want to be pissed off today.” After a minute, he dug into his pocket and flipped open his pack of smokes.
About nine seconds later, a blond stewardess rushed over to our row and said, “Sir, you can’t smoke on this plane. Or any plane.”
“I don’t smoke,” he explained, the cigarette dancing in his mouth as he spoke.
“It’s a metaphor,” I explained. “He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn’t give it the power to kill him.”
The stewardess was flummoxed for only a moment. “Well, that metaphor is prohibited on today’s flight,” she said. Gus nodded and rejoined the cigarette to its pack.
We finally taxied out to the runway and the pilot said, Flight attendants, prepare for departure, and then two tremendous jet engines roared to life and we began to accelerate. “This is what it feels like to drive in a car with you,” I said, and he smiled, but kept his jaw clenched tight and I said, “Okay?”
We were picking up speed and suddenly Gus’s hand grabbed the armrest, his eyes wide, and I put my hand on top of his and said, “Okay?” He didn’t say anything, just stared at me wide-eyed, and I said, “Are you scared of flying?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said. The nose of the plane rose up and we were aloft. Gus stared out the window, watching the planet shrink beneath us, and then I felt his hand relax beneath mine. He glanced at me and then back out the window. “We are flying,” he announced.
“You’ve never been on a plane before?”
He shook his head. “LOOK!” he half shouted, pointing at the window.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I see it. It looks like we’re in an airplane.”
“NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY,” he said. His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn’t resist leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.
“Just so you know, I’m right here,” Mom said. “Sitting next to you. Your mother. Who held your hand as you took your first infantile steps.”
“It’s friendly,” I reminded her, turning to kiss her on the cheek.
“Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear. When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.
It was a quick flight to Detroit, where the little electric car met us as we disembarked and drove us to the gate for Amsterdam. That plane had TVs in the back of each seat, and once we were above the clouds, Augustus and I timed it so that we started watching the same romantic comedy at the same time on our respective screens. But even though we were perfectly synchronized in our pressing of the play button, his movie started a couple seconds before mine, so at every funny moment, he’d laugh just as I started to hear whatever the joke was.
Mom had this big plan that we would sleep for the last several hours of the flight, so when we landed at eight A.M., we’d hit the city ready to suck the marrow out of life or whatever. So after the movie was over, Mom and Augustus and I all took sleeping pills. Mom conked out within seconds, but Augustus and I stayed up to look out the window for a while. It was a clear day, and although we couldn’t see the sun setting, we could see the sky’s response.
“God, that is beautiful,” I said mostly to myself.
“‘The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes,’” he said, a line from An Imperial Affliction.
“But it’s not rising,” I said.
“It’s rising somewhere,” he answered, and then after a moment said, “Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while.”
“Also I’d live longer.” He looked at me askew. “You know, because of relativity or whatever.” He still looked confused. “We age slower when we move quickly versus standing still. So right now time is passing slower for us than for people on the ground.”
“College chicks,” he said. “They’re so smart.”
I rolled my eyes. He hit his (real) knee with my knee and I hit his knee back with mine. “Are you sleepy?” I asked him.
“Not at all,” he answered.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.” Sleeping meds and narcotics didn’t do for me what they did for normal people.
“Want to watch another movie?” he asked. “They’ve got a Portman movie from her Hazel Era.”
“I want to watch something you haven’t seen.”
In the end we watched 300, a war movie about 300 Spartans who protect Sparta from an invading army of like a billion Persians. Augustus’s movie started before mine again, and after a few minutes of hearing him go, “Dang!” or “Fatality!” every time someone was killed in some badass way, I leaned over the armrest and put my head on his shoulder so I could see his screen and we could actually watch the movie together.
300 featured a sizable collection of shirtless and well-oiled strapping young lads, so it was not particularly difficult on the eyes, but it was mostly a lot of sword wielding to no real effect. The bodies of the Persians and the Spartans piled up, and I couldn’t quite figure out why the Persians were so evil or the Spartans so awesome. “Contemporaneity,” to quote AIA, “specializes in the kind of battles wherein no one loses anything of any value, except arguably their lives.” And so it was with these titans clashing.
Toward the end of the movie, almost everyone is dead, and there is this insane moment when the Spartans start stacking the bodies of the dead up to form a wall of corpses. The dead become this massive roadblock standing between the Persians and the road to Sparta. I found the gore a bit gratuitous, so I looked away for a second, asking Augustus, “How many dead people do you think there are?”
He dismissed me with a wave. “Shh. Shh. This is getting awesome.”
When the Persians attacked, they had to climb up the wall of death, and the Spartans were able to occupy the high ground atop the corpse mountain, and as the bodies piled up, the wall of martyrs only became higher and therefore harder to climb, and everybody swung swords/shot arrows, and the rivers of blood poured down Mount Death, etc.
I took my head off his shoulder for a moment to get a break from the gore and watched Augustus watch the movie. He couldn’t contain his goofy grin. I watched my own screen through squinted eyes as the mountain grew with the bodies of Persians and Spartans. When the Persians finally overran the Spartans, I looked over at Augustus again. Even though the good guys had just lost, Augustus seemed downright joyful. I nuzzled up to him again, but kept my eyes closed until the battle was finished.
As the credits rolled, he took off his headphones and said, “Sorry, I was awash in the nobility of sacrifice. What were you saying?”
“How many dead people do you think there are?”
“Like, how many fictional people died in that fictional movie? Not enough,” he joked.
“No, I mean, like, ever. Like, how many people do you think have ever died?”
“I happen to know the answer to that question,” he said. “There are seven billion living people, and about ninety-eight billion dead people.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d thought that maybe since population growth had been so fast, there were more people alive than all the dead combined.
“There are about fourteen dead people for every living person,” he said. The credits continued rolling. It took a long time to identify all those corpses, I guess. My head was still on his shoulder. “I did some research on this a couple years ago,” Augustus continued. “I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?”
“And are there?”
“Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we’re disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.”
It was quiet for a minute, and then he asked, “You want to read or something?” I said sure. I was reading this long poem called Howl by Allen Ginsberg for my poetry class, and Gus was rereading An Imperial Affliction.
After a while he said, “Is it any good?”
“The poem?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s great. The guys in this poem take even more drugs than I do. How’s AIA?”
“Still perfect,” he said. “Read to me.”
“This isn’t really a poem to read aloud when you are sitting next to your sleeping mother. It has, like, sodomy and angel dust in it,” I said.
“You just named two of my favorite pastimes,” he said. “Okay, read me something else then?”
“Um,” I said. “I don’t have anything else?”
“That’s too bad. I am so in the mood for poetry. Do you have anything memorized?”
“‘Let us go then, you and I,’” I started nervously, “‘When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.’”
“Slower,” he said.
I felt bashful, like I had when I’d first told him of An Imperial Affliction. “Um, okay. Okay. ‘Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question… / Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” / Let us go and make our visit.’”
“I’m in love with you,” he said quietly.
“Augustus,” I said.
“I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
“Augustus,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn’t say it back. I couldn’t say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.
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No CCC Congress this year but rC3 online
The virtual version of the annual CCC Congress is underway and feels like a huge playground. Things are bumpy but the participants are still having fun. Of course, we have IRC as a save heaven. That always works.
The virtual world (which is the only thing the sold out tickets are needed for) is really fun. It feels like debugging a DOS game in the 80/90s. Not much works but it is engaging enough to keep poking at things.
The data formats are 2020 though, the main "lobby map" is a 3 MB json file:
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People that hand-optimized RLEs to fit games on floppies cry a little.
The streams are free (as in public), so please check https://streaming.media.ccc.de/ and the schedule at https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/rc3/2020/Fahrplan/ for some great content to watch live or add to your play list.
Categories: Other | 0 Comments
Defined tags for this entry: conference, json, retro, video, web
No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report
Posted by Daniel Lange on Thursday, 3. December 2020
The Linux Foundation has published its annual report today. LWN calls it glossy and yeah, boy, it is shiny.
So shiny that people that work in the publishing industry immediately see this has been produced with the Adobe toolchain which - unfortunately - is one of the big suites of software not yet available for Linux.
Checking the PDF file metadata reveals the keywords "open source, open standards, open hardware, open data". That is what the Linux Foundation is about. Good stuff.
The PDF producer meta data for the annual report PDF has been set to "Linux kernel 0.12.1 for Workgroups" and the PDF creator meta data element to "Sharp Zaurus XR-5000 (Maemo5) Edition". Somebody thought to better hide the real data and had some tongue-in-cheek ideas. Kudos.
But nicer would have been to use Open Source software to produce the report, not?
Running strings 2020-Linux-Foundation-Annual-Report_113020.pdf | grep Adobe | wc -l gives us 1229 lines and confirms the suspicion of the toolchain.
A stale /Title (Annual Report 2020) /Producer (macOS Version 10.15.7 \(Build 19H15\) Quartz PDFContext) has been forgotten in the document to tell us about the platform.
So, ladies and gentlemen, the Linux Foundation 2020 annual report has been produced on a Mac.
Running Adobe Creative Cloud on MacOS Catalina 10.15.7.
Which is proprietary software. Its kernel (and some userland pieces) are based on BSD. Not Linux.
The image on the front page also struck me as a bit odd ... using a ballpoint pen on the laptop screen?
Unbranded laptop. Unbranded cup in the foreground.
Kid in the background not paying attention to his tablet.
All of that cries stock image so loud it hurts.
Google currently finds ~560 uses of the picture and any editorial use nicely tells us that it is © Dragana Gordic / Shutterstock.
The image is "Smiling mom working at home with her child on the sofa while writing an email. Young woman working from home, while in quarantine isolation during the Covid-19 health crisis".
See the Daily Mail for a wonderful example of the working mum in context. I hope, if her laptop had been powered on, it would have run Linux. I mean, what else would still run on an old white MacBook with an Intel "Core 2 Duo" processor from 2008?
Continue reading "No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report"
Categories: Strategy | 5 Comments
Defined tags for this entry: bsd, dogfood, dtp, linux, mac, macos
Show https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/b4061a10fc29010a610ff2b5b20160d7335e69bf/drivers/hid/hid-samsung.c#L113-L118 to a friend.
Oops 'eh? Yep, Linux has been backdoored.
Well, or not.
Konstantin Ryabitsev explains it nicely in a cgit mailing list email:
It is common for git hosting environments to configure all forks of the same repo to use an "object storage" repository. For example, this is what allows git.kernel.org's 600+ forks of linux.git to take up only 10GB on disk as opposed to 800GB. One of the side-effects of this setup is that any object in the shared repository can be accessed from any of the forks, which periodically confuses people into believing that something terrible has happened.
The hack was discussed on Github in Dec 2018 when it was discovered. I forgot about it again but Konstantin's mail brought the memory back and I think it deserves more attention.
I'm sure putting some illegal content into a fork and sending a made up "blob" URL to law enforcement would go quite far. Good luck explaining the issue. "Yes this is my repo" but "no, no that's not my data" ... "yes, it is my repo but not my data" ... "no we don't want that data either, really" ... "but, but there is nothing we can do, we host on github...1".
05.11.20 Nate Friedman (CEO of Github) promises
[..] we are going to make it much more obvious when you're viewing an orphaned commit.
For context: The source code of Github (the product) had been leaked as a commit to Github's own DMCA repository. The repository has turned into a playground since Github took down the hosting for youtube-dl as the result of a DMCA complaint.
14.11.20 Seems Github now adds a warning to commits that are not in a reachable branch
Actually there is something you can do. Making a repo private takes it out of the shared "object storage". You can make it public again afterwards. Seems to work at least for now. ↩
Defined tags for this entry: git, github, hacking, linux, updated
Posted by Daniel Lange on Friday, 13. March 2020
I have been late to adopt an on-premise cloud solution as the security of Owncloud a few years ago wasn't so stellar (cf. my comment from 2013 in Encryption files ... for synchronization across the Internet). But the follow-up product Nextcloud has matured quite nicely and we use it for collaboration both in the company and in FLOSS related work at multiple nonprofit organizations.
There is a very annoying "feature" in Nextcloud though that the designers think menu items for apps at the top need to be limited to eight or less to prevent information overload in the header. The whole item discussion is worth reading as it it an archetypical example of design prevalence vs. user choice.
And of course designers think they are right. That's a feature of the trade.
And because they know better there is no user configurable option to extend that 8 items to may be 12 or so which would prevent the annoying overflow menu we are seeing with 10 applications in use:
Luckily code can be changed and there are many comments floating around the Internet to change const minAppsDesktop = 8. In this case it is slightly complicated by the fact that the javascript code is distributed in compressed form (aka "minified") as core/js/dist/main.js and you probably don't want to build the whole beast locally to change one constant.
const breakpoint_mobile_width = 1024;
const resizeMenu = () => {
const appList = $('#appmenu li')
const rightHeaderWidth = $('.header-right').outerWidth()
const headerWidth = $('header').outerWidth()
const usePercentualAppMenuLimit = 0.33
const minAppsDesktop = 8
let availableWidth = headerWidth - $('#nextcloud').outerWidth() - (rightHeaderWidth > 210 ? rightHeaderWidth : 210)
const isMobile = $(window).width() < breakpoint_mobile_width
if (!isMobile) {
availableWidth = availableWidth * usePercentualAppMenuLimit
let appCount = Math.floor((availableWidth / $(appList).width()))
if (isMobile && appCount > minAppsDesktop) {
appCount = minAppsDesktop
if (!isMobile && appCount < minAppsDesktop) {
// show at least 2 apps in the popover
if (appList.length - 1 - appCount >= 1) {
appCount--
$('#more-apps a').removeClass('active')
let lastShownApp
for (let k = 0; k < appList.length - 1; k++) {
const name = $(appList[k]).data('id')
if (k < appCount) {
$(appList[k]).removeClass('hidden')
$('#apps li[data-id=' + name + ']').addClass('in-header')
lastShownApp = appList[k]
$(appList[k]).addClass('hidden')
$('#apps li[data-id=' + name + ']').removeClass('in-header')
// move active app to last position if it is active
if (appCount > 0 && $(appList[k]).children('a').hasClass('active')) {
$(lastShownApp).addClass('hidden')
$('#apps li[data-id=' + $(lastShownApp).data('id') + ']').removeClass('in-header')
// show/hide more apps icon
if ($('#apps li:not(.in-header)').length === 0) {
$('#more-apps').hide()
$('#navigation').hide()
$('#more-apps').show()
gets compressed during build time to become part of one 15,000+ character line. The relevant portion reads:
var f=function(){var e=s()("#appmenu li"),t=s()(".header-right").outerWidth(),n=s()("header").outerWidth()-s()("#nextcloud").outerWidth()-(t>210?t:210),i=s()(window).width()<1024;i||(n*=.33);var r,o=Math.floor(n/s()(e).width());i&&o>8&&(o=8),!i&&o<8&&(o=8),e.length-1-o>=1&&o--,s()("#more-apps a").removeClass("active");for(var a=0;a<e.length-1;a++){var l=s()(e[a]).data("id");a<o?(s()(e[a]).removeClass("hidden"),s()("#apps li[data-id="+l+"]").addClass("in-header"),r=e[a]):(s()(e[a]).addClass("hidden"),s()("#apps li[data-id="+l+"]").removeClass("in-header"),o>0&&s()(e[a]).children("a").hasClass("active")&&(s()(r).addClass("hidden"),s()("#apps li[data-id="+s()(r).data("id")+"]").removeClass("in-header"),s()(e[a]).removeClass("hidden"),s()("#apps li[data-id="+l+"]").addClass("in-header")))}0===s()("#apps li:not(.in-header)").length?(s()("#more-apps").hide(),s()("#navigation").hide()):s()("#more-apps").show()}
Well, we can still patch that, can we?
Continue reading "Fixing the Nextcloud menu to show more than eight application icons"
Categories: Internet | 5 Comments
Defined tags for this entry: badchoices, design, javascript, nextcloud, patch, updated
Posted by Daniel Lange on Monday, 7. January 2019
Netatalk 3.1.12 has been released which fixes an 18 year old RCE bug. The Medium write up on CVE-2018-1160 by Jacob Baines is quite an entertaining read.
The full release notes for 3.1.12 are unfortunately not even half as interesting.
Be sure to read the original blog post if you are new to Netatalk3 on Debian Jessie or Stretch!
You'll get nowhere if you install the .debs below and don't know about the upgrade path from 2.2.x which is still in the Debian archive. So RTFA.
For Debian Buster (Debian 10) we'll have Samba 4.9 which has learnt (from Samba 4.8.0 onwards) how to emulate a SMB time machine share. I'll make a write up how to install this once Buster stabilizes. This luckily means there will be no need to continue supporting Netatalk in normal production environments. So I guess bug #690227 won't see a proper fix anymore. Waiting out problems helps at times, too :/.
Update instructions and downloads:
Continue reading "Apple Time Machine backups on Debian 9 (Stretch)"
Categories: Debian | 1 Comment
Defined tags for this entry: apple, backup, debian, netatalk, stretch, timemachine, updated
Frustrating spammers
Posted by Daniel Lange on Friday, 16. November 2018
Sometimes tiny things make my day at 9am already.
That spammer got frustrated because none of his bots would get comments pasted to my blog:
Greetings to Cambodia.
BTW: Mikrotik RouterOS 6.41, CVE-2018-7445. RCE unpatched for 9+ months.
Categories: Internet | 1 Comment
Defined tags for this entry: antispam, automate, humans
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Full 2013-2014 TV Season Series Rankings
NBC has won the 2013-14 TV season — but you already knew that — with Sunday Night Football finishing the season as the No. 1 show in primetime in total viewers (21.528 million viewers) and among adults 18-49 (9.971 million viewers), based on Live+Same Day data from Nielsen. NBC’s The Blacklist and ABC’s Resurrection are the only freshman series to make the Demo Top 1o List for the season that officially wrapped last night. And Blacklist alone makes the Total Viewer Top 10 among newbies.
Historically, Fox’s American Idol fell off both lists, making room for adds. In its defense, Idol’s two nights landed in the Top 20 in the demo — and Top 25 in total viewers — which puts it ahead of most broadcast primetime programming. Meanwhile, CBS’ The Big Bang Theory, in its seventh season, maintained its No. 2 status in overall audience (19.960 million viewers) and the demo (7.88 million), and rose to No. 2 in the demo — behind only NBC’s football in both.
Related: NBC Poised To Win 2013-14 Demo For First Time In 10 Years
Sunday Night Football mopped up this season — the franchise not only finished No. 1 for the season, in 2+ and the demo, but also among adults 18-34 and 25-54 — which included season wins not only with men 18-49, 18-34 and 25-54 but also with women 18-34 and 18-49. NBC also notes that 12 SNF games averaged at least 20 million viewers, tying the network’s Sochi Winter Olympics for most primetime telecasts with an average of 20 million viewers tuned in (not including pre-/post-shows).
Related: ABC To Win May Sweep For First Time In 14 Years
As usual, the TV Season Rankers Lists are full of inequities. ABC’s Resurrection, for instance, makes the Demo Top 10 (and barely misses the Total Viewer Top 10 at No. 11), in part because it ran zero repeats in its time slot; other freshman dramas saw their season averages tugged downward by encore-episode ratings in their slots. I know — cry me a river. Yes, we did not include pre- and post-game shows — and yes, we went with actuals in the demo this year, eliminating all those pesky three- and four-way ties. And yes, the lists are a bit beauty-pageant, given that a series’ success tends not to be based on whether it finished the season as the country’s 33rd-most-watched series, but whether it improved the network’s ratings performance in its time slot, how much it costs to make, who owns it, ancillary market potential, etc.
Even so, we love our lists. Check them out:
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| 0.908022
| 0.908022
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For Injury-Plagued Liverpool, Fabinho Is Just What The Doctor Ordered
Jon Super - Pool/Getty Images
Here’s a wild stat: Before Wednesday’s top-of-the-table clash between Liverpool and Tottenham, the Pool Boys had not conceded in open play with Fabinho at center back for nearly 16 hours. That streak ended with Son Heung-min’s 33rd minute goal, but the point stands that, despite losing the best center back in the world to injury, Liverpool has not missed much of a beat on defense, thanks in large part to the Brazilian. Though Mohamed Salah is back to his high-scoring ways, and though the rest of Liverpool’s vaunted attack has kept pace, the play of Fabinho has been a key part in weathering a barrage of injuries that could have derailed the club’s title defense.
Fabinho was close to perfect in Wednesday’s 2–1 Liverpool win. He succeeded with all four of his attempted tackles, recovered the ball nine times (the most of any defender in the game), and played 92 of his 98 passes accurately. Liverpool’s one defensive lapse, on Son’s goal, wasn’t on his side of the field, either. The club’s No. 3 shut down the left side of defense, a much-needed respite given the presence of talented-but-raw 19-year-old Rhys Williams next to him. (Williams also had a pretty solid game, though he wasn’t even Liverpool’s best 19-year-old on the day; that would be Curtis Jones, who has a shout for being the best Liverpool midfielder on Wednesday.)
When Virgil van Dijk went down on October 17 with what will likely be a season-ending knee injury, Liverpool turned to Joe Gomez and Joel Matip at the back. Reasonable, given that they are both natural center backs, but once Gomez also went down with a long-term knee injury of his own, Jürgen Klopp’s options dwindled. He could either start Williams full-time, something the teenager likely isn’t ready for, or he could drop Fabinho from the midfield into the backline.
Versatility has always been one of the Brazilian’s strengths. He has played at center midfield, defensive midfield, right back, and center back for the Reds, and done all of them admirably. He even got to show off his midfield dribbling skills on Wednesday while playing at the back, taking the souls of Son and Lucas Moura with a pair of nifty dribbles.
Fabinho isn’t the perfect defender, at least not when compared to the man he’s subbing in for. Against Fulham over the weekend, he was lucky to not give up a penalty for what looked like a foul on Ivan Cavaleiro. But even that game demonstrates how important Fabinho has become. Despite its spot on the table, Fulham did not sit back and let the title holders dominate the game, choosing instead to come out swinging. Fabinho and Matip (before he was subbed off due to injury) held strong, only allowing a wonder goal from Bobby Decordova-Reid. That strong defending against a surprisingly game Cottagers side allowed Salah to convert a 79th minute penalty to salvage the point.
Salah, who is tied for the Premier League lead in goals with 11, has been Liverpool’s single best player, and is the main reason why the club currently sits atop the table. But Liverpool’s injury crisis during this coronavirus-afflicted schedule has been the team’s biggest obstacle, and Fabinho’s excellence no matter where he’s asked to line up has played a crucial role in Liverpool’s hurdling of said obstacle. The club is reportedly looking to upgrade Fabinho’s contract to the highest levels at the club, those reserved for the star attacking trio and van Dijk. Given how he’s played so far in an unnatural position, anything the club pays him will be money well spent.
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Forensic audit in Lebanon: Goodbye to accountability?
available languages: english Ноябрь 27, 2020
Извините, этот техт доступен только в “Американский Английский”. For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in the alternative language. You may click the link to switch the active language.
Sabine El Hayek, Legal Research Officer at DRI Lebanon examines the impact of consultancy firm Alvarez and Marsal’s (A&M) decision to withdraw from conducting a forensic audit on Lebanon’s central bank, citing a lack of cooperation from the Lebanese authorities. This comes at a time when Lebanese politicians are being accused of systematic corruption and malpractices.
The central bank initially had until 3 November 2020 to turn in the required information for A&M to proceed with the forensic audit over its accounts. Even though caretaker Finance Minister Ghazi Wazni ensured that A&M’s mission would be extended for three months to give the central bank another chance to comply with its contractual obligations, the company decided to withdraw nevertheless.
The central bank invoked the 1956 Banking Secrecy Law to justify its stance, claiming that Lebanese banks are subject to professional secrecy. It also resorted to Article 151 of the Code of Money and Credit which “prohibits any current or former central bank employee, in any capacity, from disclosing the secrecy established by the law of 1956. This obligation covers all information and facts concerning clients of the central bank, banks, and financial institutions.” However, if the central bank’s intention were to cooperate with the company, it would have lifted the secrecy from its accounts from the start for the purpose of the forensic audit. The forensic audit aimed to reveal embezzlement, money laundering, insider trading, and corruption operations.
According to the government’s contract with A&M, the Preliminary Forensic Audit Report would have cost Lebanon 2,100,000 USD, covering a 10-week period from the commencement decision up to the submission of the report. A&M is entitled to benefit from a fixed-break fee of 150,000 USD if the company is unable to start its work because it did not receive adequate information from the central bank. A&M received 40% of the fee upon signing the terms of the engagement, payable before beginning service delivery.
Based on a legal memorandum prepared by the Committee of Legislation and Consultations at the Ministry of Justice (No. 981 of 22/10/2020), caretaker Justice Minister Marie-Claude Najm stressed that banking secrecy does not apply to state accounts, nor to the central bank’s accounts, as this information was made public under the Access to Information Law (No. 28/2017). While secrecy is limited to private accounts, these may still be audited by using encryption codes and anonymity. Furthermore, banking secrecy cannot and should not be used against the public interest or to protect criminal wrongdoings.
What are the solutions to the banking secrecy issue?
A headway is still possible. According to Karim Daher, President of the Lebanese Association for Taxpayers’ Rights, “MPs should file a draft law made of one article stipulating that the forensic audit on the central bank’s accounts is mandatory and does not violate banking secrecy.” On 19 November, the parliamentary bloc “The Strong Republic” announced their intention to introduce such a draft law made for A&M to accomplish its mission, and for a one-year duration.
To exhort the MPs to adopt this law, “the President of Lebanon could send a letter to the Parliament, following Article 53 (§10) of the Constitution, and state the urgency of the forensic audit and its importance in curbing corruption,” he said in a recent interview on the Sawt El-Shaab radio channel. On 24 November, President Aoun addressed a letter to Parliament urging policymakers to cooperate and conduct the forensic audit because it is a key condition to achieve the needed reforms and implement the aid programmes.
The vote should be done by a show of hands and be live-streamed. Although this does not increase the chances of passing the law, it strengthens transparency in compliance with the Access to Information Law and allows decision-makers that are obstructing the forensic audit to be held publicly accountable.
What impedes the Special Investigation Commission from acting?
As per the “Curbing Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Law” (No. 44/2015), the Special Investigation Commission has a judicial status and is entitled to lift banking secrecy. It may request so to review suspicious transaction reports and conduct financial investigations in coordination with foreign and local competent authorities. The Commission is not subject to the central bank’s authority.
Nevertheless, the Commission could have been the competent authority to assist forensic auditors in conducting their mission, had its role not been undermined. The current head of this Commission is the governor of the central bank himself, which not only violates the Code of Money and Credit but also poses a major conflict of interest.
Given the urgency of the situation, DRI Lebanon recommends
Carrying out an impartial forensic audit on the central bank’s accounts to restore the solvency of public finances by providing the necessary tools for a credible outcome
Enforcing political and institutional reforms so that the recovery plan discussed with the International Monetary Fund to induce funds and assist Lebanon financially is implemented
Improving transparency and accountability to restore trust in Lebanese public administrations.
INDEX PUBLICATIONS FOR LEBANON
For an overview of our publications on Lebanon click here.
Publications for Lebanon
Lebanon’s forensic audit: The controversy continues
Restructuring subnational governance in Lebanon
Policy Briefing: Finding inclusive and sustainable local solutions to Lebanon’s garbage crisis
Lebanon’s Local Response to the Waste Crisis: Lessons for Decentralisation
How access to information can help tackle corruption in Lebanon
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Des Moines NewsChannel.com
Des MoinesNewsChannel.com
The recent protests for an increased minimum wage are part of a larger global protest. The purpose is the same for low wage earners all over the world; increase wages to match the cost of living, and allow workers to form unions if desired and needed. The global protest has gained media attention all over the world, but critics claim that is the only accomplishment the movement will have.
People working minimum wage jobs, especially in the fast food industry, started a movement a year and a half ago to educate people about fast food working conditions, how little they’re paid and how they can’t pay their living expenses for themselves and their families. The problem they claim is that too many people still believe that high school and college aged young people mostly hold fast food jobs. These jobs don’t need to be high paying because it’s just extra income for kids to buy things they want. The reality is quite different. The majority of people working in fast food are adults who often rely on that minimum wage job to pay for rent, utilities and to support families. Most families working low-paying jobs like those in fast food often supplement their income with food stamps, Medicaid and cash assistance. This shifts the burden of supporting these people onto the taxpayers.
The fast food industry is a $200 billion dollar per year business, yet CEOs and owners have no problem with American tax dollars subsidizing their workers’ income. Walmart is another multi-billion dollar business that pays its\' employees low wages. A single Walmart store costs taxpayers a million dollars through subsidizing workers pay with social benefits.
The effort to raise wages and the awareness that minimum wage fast food jobs aren’t enough to live on in the United States is part of a larger global effort. Strikes and demonstrations were held in many cities in 33 countries around the world, with plans to expand demonstrations in more cities through the summer. The purpose is to bring awareness and educate people who don’t understand how difficult it is to live and support a family earning low wages paid by fast food restaurants. The plan is to keep the demonstrations and protests going and growing into other cities until the CEO’s and owners of fast food and other low wage paying businesses have no other choice but to change their policies. The strikes also want to influence governments to change wage laws and raise the base pay.
In the United States a federal increase to the minimum wage has stalled in the House of Representatives. States and the City of Seattle are considering raising the minimum wage before the federal government does. In the case of Seattle, WA, the mayor has signed a petition to raise it to $15 an hour. In Australia, they held a teach-in to explain how bad the situation was. In The Philippines the demonstrations took the form of a flash mob. In Italy their protests coincided with convincing a factory to stay in Italy instead of moving to Poland, which has earned the title of the “China of Europe” for the proliferation of low paying jobs in that country.
So far, the fast food industry and retailers who rely on low wages and the government to subsidize their employees show no signs of changing wage policy. Governments drag their heels worldwide over fears that making employers raise wages will trigger job losses. A spokesperson for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce insists that the demonstrations being held worldwide are merely staged for the media, and there is very little support from fast food workers to do anything about the wages they earn. While in a few locations there were reports that individual restaurants did close for short periods of time during the protests, corporate headquarters for Yum brand and McDonalds insist no stores closed as a result of the strikes.
If the minimum wage were pegged to the cost of living, it would currently be around $22 per hour in the United States. This is around what fast food workers in Denmark make right now. Fast food workers are organizing globally to continue demonstrating and agitating the industry to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. The key may be if they can interrupt business with enough stores that the corporations will have to pay attention. For anyone who enjoys eating fast food, this is not a movement to take lightly or believe it will fizzle out.
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Google Person Finder for Boston Marathon Explosions, Plus Hotline and Tipline
April 15, 2013 By domani spero in Uncategorized Tags: Boston Marathon Explosions, Google Person Finder
Google’s people finder was tracking 4,000 records by the time I uploaded this. Click on image for larger view, includes hotline for families of victims and a tip line for possible witnesses.
Thank You For Your Help – Mustafa Akarsu Family Fund Hits $107,551
April 15, 2013 By domani spero in Diplomatic Attacks, Diplomatic Security, Foreign Service, FSOs, Locally Employed Staff, Terrorism, U.S. Missions Tags: Bureau of Diplomatic Security, David Root, FSNs Killed, Indiegogo, Mustafa Akarsu, Turkey, US Embassy Ankara 2 Comments
Two months ago I’ve blogged about the passing of Mustafa Akarsu, the local guard at the US Embassy in Ankara who was killed in the suicide attack on February 1 (see US Embassy Turkey: Suicide Bomber Kills Local Guard Mustafa Akarsu, Wounds One and also US Embassy Turkey: Mourning Mustafa Akarsu).
A week after he was killed, his supervisor at the US Embassy in Ankara David Root started a fund-raising drive for Mustafa’s wife and children. David, a Special Agent with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security and Assistant Regional Security Officer did it in his private capacity via Indiegogo. (see DS Agent David Root Starts Fund for Mustafa Akarsu’s Family, Guard Killed in Embassy Ankara Suicide Attack – You Can Help.
During the 60 day campaign, David posted photos and did 31 updates to supporters of the fund. The fund-raising effort generated 1,294 funders and 147 comments. Best of all, the final amount of $107,551 is more than 35 times over the original goal of $3,000.
For some who may not know it, local employees are in a non-US compensation system. They are not considered FS or CS and do not typically get U.S. Social Security (used to, but not in the last 30 years if I remember correctly). I don’t know if they are covered by the death gratuity rules that cover American employees or if they get one on a case by case basis subject to the decision of the Secretary of State. I was told that while local employees do get life insurance when they are hired, the plan that covers the employees in Turkey apparently states that it does not cover terrorist attacks, sabotage, etc.
I hope the next step is to get the family members SIV if they want it, a much more complicated step now that the employee is no longer here. If I can get an update on that, I’ll post it here.
If you are a reader of this blog and have donated to the Akarsu fund, thank you for your kindness and support.
Officially In: Matt Armstrong to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)
April 15, 2013 By domani spero in Functional Bureaus, Nominations, Officially In, Public Diplomacy Tags: BBG, Broadcasting Board of Governors, Matt Armstrong, Public diplomacy, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
On April 11, President Obama announced his intent to nominate Matthew C. Armstrong to serve on the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The WH released the following brief bio:
Matthew C. Armstrong is an author, speaker, and strategist on issues related to public diplomacy. In 2011, he served as Executive Director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Previously, Mr. Armstrong was an adjunct professor of public diplomacy at the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California. In 2010, he founded and served as President of the MountainRunner Institute and published a blog on public diplomacy and strategic communication. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Public Diplomacy Council and a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Mr. Armstrong received a B.A. and an M.P.D. from the University of Southern California.
Matthew Armstrong, Executive Director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy gives his remarks during a reception hosted in his honor by Deputy Ambassador James B. Cunningham on Monday, Oct 17, 2011. (Department of State)
BBG Watch, a website that covers the BBG and maintained by former and current BBG, VOA and RFE/RL employees and their supporters released the following statement:
“BBG Watch welcomes the nomination of Matt Armstrong to serve on the BBG board. His expertise in public diplomacy will strengthen this very important institution and will help other BBG members and any future CEO in their efforts to reform the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), the worst managed organization within the federal government. We hope that Mr. Armstrong will help to transform the IBB from a centralized bureaucracy bent on increasing its power into a lean support organization that serves rather than issues commands to individual media entities.”
I have blogged previously about Matt Armstrong and ACPD (see Matt Armstrong Joins the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, PD Commission KIA by Congress; Welcome Back, Matt Armstrong, U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy Re-Authorized – Where the Heck Is It?).
Sorry to see that he won’t be returning to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD). So now, we’ll have to wait and see how much work the re-authorized ACPD gets to do with “support” from the “R” bureau.
Sequestration Prompts Attempt to Silence U.S. Radio Broadcasting (heritage.org)
Matt Armstrong to the BBG! (toinformistoinfluence.com)
U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy Re-Authorized – Where the Heck Is It? (diplopundit.net)
Bruce Gregory’s Public Diplomacy Resources #64 (takefiveblog.org)
War Vet Alan Cutter on “the profound disquiet of the wounded soul”
April 15, 2013 By domani spero in Learning, War Tags: Alan Cutter, Guardian, Vietnam War 1 Comment
Alan Cutter is a Presbyterian reverend who served in the US Navy from 1969-1975. He also worked as teacher at the Naval Academy Preparatory School and is currently a member of the International Conference of War Veteran Ministers. He wrote Learning to come home from war: no one said ‘thank you’ to Vietnam vets for The Guardian.
What has not changed over the centuries is the profaneness of war; the frustration of returning to a society preoccupied with mindless vicarious thrill seeking, enthralled by “reality” shows; the loneliness one feels even in the midst of a crowd; the terror of the unexpected sight or sound or smell; the rage so easily triggered; and the profound disquiet of the wounded soul.
I am waiting for someone to say “Forgive me?” That question both admits complicity for what happened and initiates a conversation. I’d like to tell that person this: my friend, we share responsibility. I’m proud to have served my country, even if it meant going to Vietnam. I’m sinfully proud of having been both an enlisted man and an officer. I did my best in an untenable situation. But I wasn’t prepared for the haunted eyes in the refugee camp, or the cries of the wounded, or the angry, wary stares of the villagers. Forgive us, yes, if that will ease your mind. But if you will stay and listen to the story, then together we may find salve for our wounded souls.
Thus begins the risky pathway of healing. Will you, beloved and fortunate citizen, do that duty for some returning warrior who has served our nation?
Read in full here.
— DS
Vietnam vets finally have their day (wiscnews.com)
A Vietnam veteran reflects: How I found peace 40 years later | Andonios Neroulias (guardian.co.uk)
Learning to come home from war: no one said ‘thank you’ to Vietnam vets | Alan Cutter (guardian.co.uk)
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (francineinretirement.wordpress.com)
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Sri Lanka’s New President Puts Immediate Ban on Glyphosate Herbicides
Jun 2, 2015 | Featured, Reports
Sri Lanka’s newly elected President Maithripala Sirisena announced Friday that the import of the World’s most used herbicide glyphosate will be banned with immediate effect. The release of already imported stocks has also been stopped.
Source: Sustainable Pulse
Sirisena, a farmer and ex Health Minister, stated that glyphosate is responsible for the increasing number of chronic kidney disease (CKDu) patients in Sri Lanka and added that the move would protect the Sri Lankan farming community.
In Sri Lanka alone CKDu now afflicts 15% of people of working age in the Northern part of the country; a total of 400,000 patients with an estimated death toll of around 20,000.
Watch the videos “Mystery in the Fields” and “Cycle of Death” for 5 minute documentaries providing additional background information on afflicted areas around the world.
Sri Lanka’s ban comes after two scientific studies led by Dr. Jayasumana showed that drinking water from abandoned wells, where the concentrations of glyphosate and metals are higher, as well as spraying glyphosate, increased the risk of the deadly chronic kidney disease (CKDu) by up to 5-fold.
It also follows the recent World Health Organization announcement that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen.
Sri Lanka did ban the sale of glyphosate herbicides in March 2014 but this decision was overturned in May 2014 after a review. The decision by Sri Lanka’s new President however has huge significance following the latest WHO report on glyphosate.
Sri Lanka now becomes the second country to fully ban the sale of glyphosate herbicides following El Salvador’s decision in 2013, also taken due to the fatal CKDu disease. Bermuda has also put a temporary ban on glyphosate imports and is holding a review.
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Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood gets National Treasure status
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is to announce this morning that the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood on Detroit’s far east side has been designated a National Treasure.
This will be Michigan’s first National Treasure, and just one of 70 in the United States.
The Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood, with residential and commercial buildings built primarily in the 1920s, runs along East Jefferson Avenue from Alter Road to Conner Avenue.
The designation means the neighborhood will have the attention and resources of the national organization to preserve and improve its buildings, said Mary Lu Seidel, National Trust for Historic Preservation Chicago field director who also is project manager for the Jefferson-Chalmers project.
“Jefferson-Chalmers has good bones, a strong local partner (business development organization Jefferson East Inc.) and is on the tipping point of becoming better or worse. It has great assets and a strongly engaged community,” she said.
We’re looking to get involved in neighborhoods that suffered loss and disinvestment yet support rebuilding of the neighborhood in a way that benefits the community.
Seidel has been meeting with Detroit partners and stakeholders such as JEI, the city of Detroit,Detroit Future City, Michigan Historic Preservation Network and Preservation Detroit since February 2015 to determine the potential and impact of Jefferson-Chalmers and other Detroit neighborhoods being named a National Treasure.
Click here to read the full article in Crain’s Detroit Business.
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I am pleased to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint KRISTI PALMER, of Kronenwetter, as a Local Government Representative on the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, to serve for the term ending May 1, 2023.
hist111783Read and referred to the committee on Agriculture, Revenue and Financial Institutions.
I am pleased to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint ALYSSA KENNEY, of Madison, as a Public Representative on the Educational Communications Board, to serve for the term ending May 1, 2023.
hist111775Read and referred to the committee on Education.
I am pleased to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint DEANA M. ZENTNER, of Brooklyn, as a Public Member on the Auctioneer Board, to serve for the term ending May 1, 2023.
I am pleased to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint TAMMIE XIONG, of Cedarburg, as a Domestic Abuse Knowledge Representative on the Council on Domestic Abuse, to serve for the term ending July 1, 2022.
hist111778Read and referred to the committee on Health and Human Services.
I am pleased to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint SHERMAN BANKER, of Madison, as a Public Member on the Wisconsin Historical Society Board of Curators, to serve for the term ending July 1, 2022.
hist111774Read and referred to the committee on Local Government, Small Business, Tourism and Workforce Development.
I am pleased to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint CHARISMA TOWNSEND, of Milwaukee, as a Massage/Bodywork Therapist on the Massage Therapy and Bodywork Therapy Affiliated Credentialing Board, to serve for the term ending July 1, 2023.
I am pleased to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint YULONDA M. ANDERSON, of Milwaukee, as a Non-Lawyer Member on the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, to serve for the term ending August 1, 2021.
hist111779Read and referred to the committee on Insurance, Financial Services, Government Oversight and Courts.
I am pleased to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint KIM MAROTTA, of Milwaukee, as a Public Member on the Great Lakes Protection Fund, to serve for a two-year term, and thereafter at the pleasure of the Governor.
hist111782Read and referred to the committee on Natural Resources and Energy.
/2019/related/journals/senate/20191219 true journals /2019/related/journals/senate/20191219/_322 section true
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Biographical Sketch of Elizabeth Hewes Tilton
written by Daria Rose
Biographical Sketch of Elizabeth Hewes Tilton, written by Daria Rose. Included in Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, 1890-1920, .
Biography of Elizabeth Hewes Tilton, 1869-1950
By Daria Rose, undergraduate student
Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Elizabeth Hewes Tilton was born on March, 13, 1869 in Salem, Massachusetts. Her father and mother, James Tracey Hewes and Eleanor (Jewett) Hewes were originally from Maine. Shortly after their marriage on June 27, 1865 in Portland, Maine, they moved to Massachusetts, where James Tracey Hewes worked as a Unitarian minister. He worked as head minister at First Unitarian Church (316 Essex St Salem, MA) from 1868 to 1875. As a result, Elizabeth Tilton's upbringing was highly religious, which would later go on to influence her work as a temperance crusader and suffragist. Hewes had two brothers, Henry F. Hewes and James Tracy Hewes Jr. Hewes attended Radcliffe College between 1887 and 1888. She later married William Frederic Tilton (1867-1961) of Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 10, 1911. William F. Tilton graduated from Harvard in 1890, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1894. William worked as a social worker around the Massachusetts area and also encouraged Elizabeth during her temperance work. The couple lived on 11 Mason Street, Cambridge MA for most of their marriage, until Elizabeth Tilton's health began to fail in the late 1930's. It is not known definitively if they had any children. Elizabeth Tilton died on March 17, 1950 at her winter home in Winter Park, Florida. She is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Elizabeth Tilton was a dedicated advocate and champion of women's right, the temperance movement and passionately effective on issues regarding children like labor and education. Beginning in 1911, just after her marriage to William, she began working for Associated Charities of Boston -- much of the volunteer work involved disseminating pamphlets and smaller materials on the dangers of alcohol usage. Along the way, Tilton chronicles her experience in a series of correspondences and papers. She is inspired by her friend, Lucy M. Peabody to take a more active role in the organization. Tilton obliges and begins working with Dr. Charles Putnam and Dr. John W. Elliott to launch what newspapers would call, "a poster war on alcohol." Tilton used advertising and billboards to get the attention of the press and media, because she found that it was more effective than essays or statements. It was a new idea in the realm of political advertising, which had long been reserved for consumerism and the private sector. Tilton even received a direct letter from former president William Howard Taft in 1914 discussing her position on prohibition and his objections to it -- nonetheless recognizing her reach. After this campaign was well received, Tilton assumed the position of director of Unitarian Temperance Society (1913-1914).
As Elizabeth Hewes Tilton continued her fight for prohibition, she noticed the parallels between her cause and the Women's Suffrage movement. As an already well known activist and leader in the Boston community, Tilton took on her next major task as chairman of the Massachusetts Woman's Suffrage Association (1916-1918). Again, Tilton used propaganda as means of furthering the agenda of the women's vote. She was at the head of almost every meeting and engaged with high society figures around the Boston area promoting the 19th amendment. After it's passage, Tilton also led a campaign to ensure that women in the Massachusetts area were registered -- this was more a grassroots campaign that involved going door to door and issuing mail drops.
For the last segment of her activist career, before she became ill, Tilton turned her attention towards children and mothers. She served as chairman of the legislation committee of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers from 1921-1931. During this time Tilton penned hundreds of articles and appeals to the government and constituents regarding law reform on child labor, education, literacy, and maternity benefits. Many of those became the basis for bills like the Shepard-Towner Act that allowed for federal funding for maternity and child care due to high infancy morality rates and deaths of women in labor.
Elizabeth Hewes Tilton was a tireless defender of the rights' of women and children. Even in her later years, she continued to correspond with leaders and executives through letters and articles. She was committed to the betterment of American life and her legacy lives on in the change she enacted.
Elizabeth Hewes Tilton's papers are available at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library.
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How to Reach Your Target Audience With Mike Maynard
You might be thinking now that a lot of us are working from home how do we reach the right audience? Before COVID-19, you could meet people by doing lunch meetings and networking things where you might be able to find the right person interested in your product or service.
Now, everything is different, and we've got Mike Maynard here from NapierB2B to talk about some solutions to help us find the right audience and reach them from home.
Breaking Through the Virtual Barrier to Improve Your Business
We've got Mike Maynard here from NapierB2B, and he's going to go through some solutions and how you can find the right audience. So Mike, how would you go about making sure that you can reach an audience from home?
Mike: That's a great question to start off with Josh. It's hugely challenging to reach people at home. Our clients who we work with tend to sell to big business, and almost all of the people they wanted to reach sat in an office and they could send salespeople to meet them. Now obviously, COVID has completely changed that. Even if people are working in the office, you still can't get salespeople out there to meet them. So what you need to do is understand what sort of media and what sort of information people are consuming at home and how that's changed from when they're in the office.
There Are Multiple Channels Out There
So it comes down to being in their social feeds, being in their news feeds and creating a strategy to be able to track down the decision-maker in the business?
Mike: We're seeing clients have success with different tactics. I think one of the things that's really clear, is that different audiences, different sorts of people you want to reach with your marketing, are actually going to prefer different channels. So absolutely social, for sure, is bigger. You look at all the stats activity, and social media is way up. Now, people are working from home, but equally don't rule out things—for example, the good old email newsletter. Great newsletters can actually be very valuable today, particularly in some industries where perhaps people aren't receiving the trade magazines they might have been reading in the past.
Battling Against the Noise
With social media, do you think the amount of noise is becoming a problem, or the message getting washed out?
Mike: Whatever channel you choose, you've got to battle against noise. If you're trying to use email marketing, absolutely, you're still battling against noise and spam filters, trying to remove that noise. Unfortunately, sometimes that spam filter is going to think your messages are noise rather than signal. So absolutely, I think everybody's battling against noise.
We've seen a big move online, particularly from some of the companies who were perhaps a bit more focused on traditional media previously. All that's doing is adding to the noise. Now, of course, we have seen that some of the paid channels actually become slightly less competitive. So, for example, if you want to advertise travel destinations on Facebook, now's a pretty good time globally, because there's not much travel advertising going out on Facebook. However, whether it's good for your business is a very different question. So it's not the case that everything has got noisier and everything has got more difficult, but it's always the case that:
If you don't stand out and you don't add value, then people are not going to listen to you.
So I would forget about the competition and how much noise or not there isn't anyone channel and work out how you can create content and information that's actually going to be of interest to the people you want to influence.
Do you need help with business email solutions like spam filters?
Focus on Your Target Market
It comes down to making sure that you understand your target market, making sure that you've profiled your ideal client.
Mike: Absolutely. So we're all about focus. I think today, it's not just about having your ideal client, but it's also understanding the individuals within that client. For example, let's say you're looking to market an IT services company. You might want to talk to somebody who's the IT director, IT manager, but you also want to reach the CEO of the company, and potentially even the finance director or the guy in charge of the money. All three of those people will have very different thoughts about what they want from an IT services company. So what you need to do is not just tailor your message for your ideal company, but also tailor the messages for each of those three people within it to make sure that they hear information that addresses their concerns, their worries, and makes them feel you're the right business for them.
That information could also vary depending on who you're talking to. It could be analytical information; it could be emotional information. Once you found out that you've got that, then it just comes down to the channels that you need to be able to talk to or find people on. There are lots of different places out there that you could be throwing your content up. Your target will probably be on LinkedIn and might have an Instagram account too, but, do you want to spread the message too thin, or do you want to focus?
Mike: You absolutely want to focus. I think you need to find out what really works for you. One of the interesting things is you can't always predict that, and we have companies where one has fantastic results on social media, and the other will have email as their primary vehicle for reaching people. Both of them will be doing great, both clearly doing the right thing. Yet, it's different channels.
For me, there's a lot of different factors that affect what's going to be the most important channel. There's no point marketing in a place where your audience doesn't visit. If your audience is never on Instagram, don't go to Instagram, it’s a waste of time. But if you're where they are, then it's about:
Building a presence
Building an approach that works for you, and also works for your customer
It's about finding a platform or a channel, that's going to make a difference for you. That's going to reach your audience and a platform or channel where you can actually contribute.
Going back to marketing with Managed IT services, you know that there are some companies with awesome podcasts, there are other companies that are not doing podcasts because they're much more introverted.
I can say over the years, we've tried many different things. It comes down to working with what works. One of the things we do that we find can help connect you with the right person is we send out postcards to our ideal clients. We found no one gets a handwritten card in the post. So that's one way that we've made sure that we stand out a little bit.
Technology can help you grow your business! Do you want to find the right IT solutions for your business size and industry?
Current Trends in Online Marketing
With Facebook and any sort of online marketing, I've noticed a trend, and I just wanted to see what your thoughts were. Do you think right now businesses are pushing it more or pulling back? What do you see out there?
Mike: I think there's a mix of approaches. We did some research amongst the industries we work in. It was interesting to see that there was a group of people who were carrying on as they've always done, there was a group of people who were slashing marketing budgets and a group that was actually increasing. We saw the same with our clients. Some of that is due to how people approach marketing and where they see marketing as a cost or where they see it as an investment.
We have a Managed IT services client, who literally more than doubled their spend with us. When everyone's working from home, there are huge demands on I.T systems which I'm sure you know. Whereas we had other clients where they've cut back because their business has fallen.
Targeting Specific Accounts Can Work
If you are doing digital marketing and you are trying to be in people's newsfeeds, are you better off tracking down the decision-maker for the account as a marketing process?
Mike: I think the more focused you can be the better. So just sending out content and hoping it reaches the right person is clearly the wrong approach. What we're seeing is a lot of our clients moving to target specific accounts. So, LinkedIn is the primary platform for most people where you can target by industry, you can target by job role, and you can even target by company. You need a certain audience size, you can't literally target one person at one company when you do that. But you can build up really focused audience lists.
We're seeing people do the same thing on email, as well, I'm being very focused in my work on building their email list, and making sure they understand within that email list. Different industries might have different concerns, and the IT director wants to hear very different things from the CEO of a company. That's hard work and it takes time. This is one of the reasons why I do say that, that people shouldn't try and do everything. Just trying to spray stuff across almost all channels is the wrong thing. Doing one thing well is definitely the best approach.
You shouldn't try to do everything! Let dorks take care of your business IT needs.
If you don't have an email list and no digital leads, where do you start?
Mike: It's one of these great questions that really need to be answered with well; it depends. Where you start is your best guess as to what's going to give you the best return. Let's say you sell an engineering product. The big concern from all your customers is how to get prototypes of this mechanical engineering product. Perhaps you want to produce a lead magnet around 3D printing, for example. I would use that lead magnet across a number of different channels to see which one drives the most interest because that's going to start giving you an indication of where your customers are actually looking at information and looking for content.
There's all sorts of different ways you can do that. You can do that through SEO, you can do it through paid search, you can do it on social media, you can even do it through targeted ads. We're seeing clients using Google ads to target display ads on particular websites. The one thing I would say as well as if you don't have an email list, the one thing you probably do have is visitors to your website. So retargeting is like a poor man's version of an email list where you can actually target ads to people who visited your website. That certainly is a good approach if you know that people who you can sell a product to are actually visiting the website.
For anyone that's not sure what retargeting is, it’s where:
If someone comes to you, you can hide a little sneaky thing on their computer that lets you continue to market to them afterwards.
It's fantastic for some businesses, for example, if you're a florist and you want to send flowers out and remind everyone the week before Valentine's Day, “Hey, don't forget your partner”, it's great to know that you're in front of mind, even if they may have not have done something with you for 12 months. When it comes down to retargeting, the costs are significantly more cost-effective and efficient than virgin marketing when you are marketing to people based on long-tail keywords through AdWords. It's definitely a great way to go about it.
Want to automate? Ask business efficiency experts.
Understanding Your Sales Cycle
What would be an average timeline that you'd expect going from A to B to actually seeing some dollars trickle through for a business in the IT Professional Services industry?
Mike: That is so hard to say, but if we look at our clients, some of their sales cycles are pretty much immediate. They're eCommerce vendors, so they can pretty much immediately generate sales. But they've already got that email list. We have another client that makes baggage handling systems for airports and their sales cycle is 20 years. So 20 years from starting marketing all the way through.
I think the first thing you've got to understand is how long your sales cycle is in your particular business. In professional services, you can certainly generate leads very quickly using lead magnets and producing great content should generate leads pretty much straight away. Converting those leads that sales process is very difficult. It can depend on a lot of things. For example, in your business, Josh, where you're selling I.T services, if they've already got an incumbent company, then you probably don't really have an opportunity to get their business until the contract comes up for renewal. So there can be a sales cycle of anything from a month to a year, depending on how long is left on the contract.
Don’t Forget About Phone Calls
I think it's very hard to say how quickly you can get revenue because it's very dependent. But the reality is you can get leads. At the end of the day, marketing can do a lot of things, but you've just got to pick up the phone. even today, with people working from home, if someone's interested, you've got to pick up the phone and talk to them. That will ultimately start driving that sale.
Getting back on the phone is 100% something to be in front of mind, keep the personal touch. We use a lot of automation, we're always talking about automation, but I don't think you should ever automate the human connection. That's something that you should always just keep so you have that authenticity in your voice, keep the emotion, keep that connection with someone as opposed to just sending them just the newsletter.
Make sure your Internet and phone are set up properly. Do you want to explore your options!
Content Ideas That Work
A lot of people always use the term “I don't have enough time”. I think it's just that they probably don't want to spend their time doing certain things, such as content creation. A lot of people don't like that. But it is one of the cornerstone pieces of a good digital marketing campaign. How can you get people out of that rut?
Mike: Since my business is an agency I probably should be saying everyone employ agencies, they're a fantastic solution. But that is not always the case. Sometimes you've just got to bite the bullet and do things slightly differently if you're trying to generate some content. If you're really not the sort of person that wants to sit down in front of a computer and type out a white paper, an article, or an ebook, it's actually very easy. Just record yourself talking about it, and get it transcribed.
I think one of the biggest challenges people have is getting that first draft of something down. So any way you can do that, whether it's just scribbling, speaking into a microphone, or have someone just chat to you. You can transcribe it, and then turn that into an E-book or a white paper. All those sort of things make it easier to start. You can bring in an agency and they can make the quality of the text that much better and they can make the layout look beautiful, but the end of the day, if you don't start with something that's helpful to your audience, an agency is stuck, they can't do anything.
However pretty we make it look, it's not going to help that potential customer, it's not going to get them to pick the phone up to you. So, find the way that works for you to get that first draft. Then keep editing and editing as it is much easier than writing that first draft, I can assure you that once you've got that first bit of information down, it's so much easier.
I always think the first five minutes is the hardest when it comes to any task you don't want to do. It doesn't matter if it's public speaking and you're talking in front of an audience of 20 or 2000. The first five minutes is the hardest. I used to hate making content, but I've fallen in love with it. Everyone out there that is looking for a client, as long as you've got a business that's out there to make a difference you should have a story that goes with that as to how you're doing something differently. It shouldn't be driven by money. As soon as you start writing it down and you start talking about what it is and how your solution differs to other people, you'll start finding the people that resonate and become raving fans.
Mike: Just getting started is the key. I think people will find it much easier going forward; there are millions of tools on the market that are going to help you, whether it be creating emails, or whether it's creating E-books, there are tools to help you do that automatically. But the reality is, it's all about having a point of view. I can guarantee if you're in business, and your business is making money, you have a point of view. That point of view matters to somebody because you've got customers that value that point of view. We're seeing a lot of people struggle to get content created, because they feel that something written has got to be 20 times better than something verbal, and often that's not the case.
Make a difference with the help of technology. Do you want to learn more about small business IT solutions?
Avoid Buying Spun Content
I've seen a lot pop up more and more recently is people that are using spun content. They purchase subscription content and make a few newsletters for your industry that you send out to your clients. They are vaguely about your industry, and my personal thought is knowing how much work goes into developing content and making sure my brand and my message comes through is that I don’t like this option. What are your thoughts?
Mike: I think the answer is people are not looking for you to be a trade magazine. They've got trade magazines for that, they've got other newsletters, they've heard this information 100 times. So yes, if you've generated your own content, is the quality going to be as good? Maybe not, but is the value to your potential customer going to be higher? Absolutely. It's not about getting something that looks pretty. To me, the great thing about digital, perhaps the one thing I think the digital has done to completely change marketing is that marketing is no longer subjective. I can tell you; we run tests with ads. We'll have two ads, and almost unanimously, both within the agency within the client, everyone will go, “I love that ad” but I hate that second one and we will run the two ads as an A/B test. The one that everybody hates performs best.
So subjective opinions, particularly your own subjective opinion, is quite often wrong. If you keep doing something, whether it's an email newsletter, or a podcast or blogging, you will get better. I can tell you, we started our own podcast. Not only was I terrible in the first podcast interview, but actually I've managed to lose the recording as well. Every time you start, you know, you look back, and you think, my first attempt was awful. Maybe it is, but actually, there are still people who think it's great.
Stay efficient! Are you wondering which tasks can be automated?
Remember to Measure Your Engagement
I completely agree. Make sure you're measuring what you're putting out there so that you can see the results of your fruit. If you're going to the effort to make sure that you can see people are reading and clicking scrolling through and how long they're spending their session times on it. Whatever the content is, ask for reviews. This is something that people don't do, but ask your client. They may give you some feedback that you wouldn't have even thought about and give you information from a perspective of your client as opposed to what you think your client wants.
Mike: I totally agree. Also, the one thing I'd add to the measurement is measure something that matters. One of the worst things about digital is that it's given people any number of different metrics they can use to measure their marketing campaign. We work with a small engineering company, and they're doing some email marketing. If you look at the click-through rate, there's a group of people that have fantastic click-through rates; in fact, they click on every single link in every single email. So measuring the click-through rate is crazy, because it's not a human doing it, it's clearly a spam filter that's looking at the email and making sure that there are no links that you shouldn't visit. Ironically, we found out for sure that one of these was purely spam, because we found out the guy who we were sending to was on furlough, and didn't even have access to his email.
It comes down to how you can measure whether what you're doing is generating either quality leads or opportunities, or ultimately customers. At the end of the day, as a business owner, I don't make any more money, if my click-through rate goes up 10%. I make more money if I get more customers. I think people really need to think about that and not get dazzled by some of the sparkly bits on tools.
Do you want to find the best marketing tools and keep your processes efficient?
Mike’s Book Recommendation
The metrics have to matter. I like his story there on the spam filtering, because that happens quite a lot. I wanted to ask you one last question. What would you say is your favourite book that influenced the direction that you've got in your business?
Mike: I'm going to pick a book that is a little bit different. I read Lance Armstrong's autobiography, “It's Not About the Bike”, which is interesting. Lance, I mean, he is a very interesting character. He's got clearly a huge number of character flaws and is certainly very imperfect. He wrote the book before the emission of cheating with drugs, so he's still denying taking drugs in the book. But he talks a lot about his life and his cancer treatment. There's a bit in the book that kind of talks about the people who survive cancer and the people who die. He said, there are optimistic people who survive, they're optimistic people who die. People who really look after themselves and survive, some of them died.
He really brings home the fact that you can do a lot to get yourself in the best position, but sometimes there are things you can't control. We could do everything right as a business, as an agency, and COVID could still take the business down. It doesn't make us a worse business. That's really influenced my thinking; all you can do is really do the right thing and then hope the circumstances make you successful.
Anyone out there that's looking to get in contact with Mike, visit NapierB2B. You can find out a bit more information about the voodoo that he does and go from there. Stay good and stay healthy!
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The Utah Department of Public Safety (DPS) honored three local employees for their dedication to public safety at a ceremony in Richfield. The three women Kathy Quarnberg, Alicia Gleave, and Amie MacArt were promoted by Commissioner Keith Squires. A swearing in ceremony was held at the Sevier County Search and Rescue building where Utah Highway Patrol Colonel Michael Rapich led an oath of office.
“It is an honor to promote such talented individuals to these new positions of critical responsibility. I served in our Richfield Utah Highway Patrol office from 1998 to 2003 and saw firsthand the expert and caring way that Kathy and Alicia do their jobs,” said Commissioner Keith Squires of the Utah Department of Public Safety. “Amie has also distinguished herself with her hard work and support to our first responders and the public. Over the years, their dedication, leadership and service has been remarkable.”
Quarnberg was promoted to Deputy Bureau Chief with the DPS Communications Bureau. Quarnberg brings 34 years of experience in the communications profession. She has served as the Richfield Manager for the last 29 years.
Gleave was promoted to serve as the Richfield Communications Center Manager. She has 21 years of experience with the DPS Communications Bureau. She began her career as a dispatcher and was then promoted to a supervisor where she has dedicated her time the last 16 years.
MacArt will now serve as supervisor for the Richfield Communications Center. She has nine years of experience with the DPS Communications Bureau.
“We are fortunate to have such a great team in our DPS Richfield Communications Office serving all the public safety agencies and citizens of Central Utah and our entire state,” said Squires.
The DPS Richfield Communications Center provides local emergency communication services for Utah Highway Patrol, Millard, Juab, Sanpete, Sevier, Piute, Wayne and Garfield Counties. They receive an average of 81,000 calls for service each year.
Quarnberg, Gleave and MacArt bring a wealth of knowledge and skills that will prove invaluable in the community.
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The von Neumann architecture serves as the foundation for most modern computers. In this section, we briefly characterize the architecture’s major components.
The von Neumann Architecture (depicted in Figure 1 below) consists of five main components:
The processing unit executes program instructions.
The control unit drives program instruction execution on the processing unit. Together, the processing and control units make up the CPU.
The memory unit stores program data and instructions.
The input unit(s) load program data and instructions on the computer and initiate program execution.
The output unit(s) store or receive program results.
Buses connect the units, and are used by the units to send control and data information to each other. A bus is a communication channel that transfers binary values between communication endpoints (the senders and receivers of the values). For example, a data bus that connects the memory unit and the CPU could be implemented as 32 parallel wires that together transfer a 4 byte value, one bit transferred on each wire. Typically, architectures have separate buses for sending data, memory addresses, and control between units. The units use the control bus for sending control signals that request or notify other units of actions, use the address bus to send the memory address of a read or write request to the memory unit, and use the data bus to transfer data between units.
Figure 1. The von Neumann Architecture consists of the processing, control, memory, input, and output units. The control and processing units make up the CPU, which contains the ALU, the general-purpose CPU registers, and some special-purpose registers (IR and PC). The units are connected by buses used for data transfer and communication between the units.
5.2.1. The CPU
Together the control and processing units implement the CPU, which is the part of the computer that executes program instructions on program data.
5.2.2. The Processing Unit (1.)
The Processing Unit of the von Neumann machine consists of two parts. The first is the Arithmetic/Logic unit (ALU) that performs mathematical operations, such as addition, subtraction, and logical or, to name a few. Modern ALUs typically perform a large set of arithmetic operations. The second part of the processing unit is a set of registers. A register is a small, fast unit of storage used to hold the program data and instructions that are being executed by the ALU. Crucially, there is no distinction between instructions and data in the von Neumann architecture. For all intents and purposes, instructions are data. Each register therefore is capable of holding one data word.
5.2.3. The Control Unit (2.)
The Control Unit drives the execution of program instructions by loading them from memory and feeding instruction operands and operations through the processing unit. The control unit also includes some storage to keep track of execution state and to determine its next action to take: the Program Counter (PC) keeps the memory address of the next instruction to execute; and the Instruction Register (IR) stores the instruction, loaded from memory, that is currently being executed.
5.2.4. The Memory Unit (3.)
Internal memory is a key innovation of the von Neumann architecture. It provides program data storage that is close to the processing unit, significantly reducing the amount of time to perform calculations. The Memory Unit stores both program data and program instructions — storing program instructions is a key part of the stored program model of the von Neumann Architecture.
The size of memory varies from system to system. However, a system’s ISA limits the range of addresses that it can express. In modern systems, the smallest addressable unit of memory is one byte (8 bits), and thus each address corresponds to a unique memory location for one byte (8 bits) of storage. As a result, 32-bit architectures typically support a maximum address space size of 232, which corresponds to 4 gigabytes (GiB) of addressable memory.
The term Memory sometimes refers to an entire hierarchy of storage in the system. It can include registers in the processing unit, as well as secondary storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD) or solid state drives (SSD). In the Storage and Memory Hierarchy Chapter we discuss the memory hierarchy in detail. For now, we use the term "memory" interchangeably with internal Random Access Memory (RAM) — memory that can be accessed by the central processing unit. RAM storage is random access because all RAM storage locations (addresses) can be accessed directly. It is useful to think of RAM as a linear array of addresses, where each address corresponds to one byte of memory.
Word sizes through history
Word size, which is defined by an ISA, is the number of bits of the standard data size that a processor handles as a single unit. The standard word size has fluctuated over the years. For EDVAC, the word size was proposed at 30 bits. In the 1950s, 36-bit word sizes were common. With the innovation of the IBM 360 in the 1960s, word sizes became more or less standardized, and started to expand from 16-bits, to 32 bits, to today’s 64 bits. If you examine the Intel Architecture in more detail, you may notice the remnants of some of these old decisions, as 32-bit and 64-bit architectures were added as an extension of the original 16-bit architecture.
5.2.5. The Input and Output (I/O) units (4. and 5.)
While the control, processing, and memory units form the foundation of the computer, the input and output units enable it to interact with the outside world. In particular, they provide mechanisms for loading a program’s instructions and data into memory, storing its data outside of memory, and displaying its results to users.
The Input Unit consists of the set of devices that enable a user or program to get data from the outside world onto the computer. The most common forms of input devices today are the keyboard and mouse. Cameras and microphones are other examples.
The Output Unit consists of the set of devices that relay results of computation from the computer back to the outside world or that store results outside internal memory. For example, the monitor is a common output device. Other output devices include speakers and haptics.
Some modern devices, such as the touchscreen, act as both input and output, enabling users to both input and receive data from a single unified device.
Solid state and hard drives are another example of devices that act as both input and output devices. These storage devices act as input devices when they store program executable files that the operating system loads into computer memory to run, and they act as output devices when they store files to which program results are written.
5.2.6. The von Neumann Machine in action: executing a program
The five units that make up the von Neumann Architecture work together to implement a Fetch-Decode-Execute-Store cycle of actions that together execute program instructions. This cycle starts with a program’s first instruction, and is repeated until the program exits:
The control unit Fetches the next instruction from memory. The control unit has a special register, the Program Counter (PC), that contains the address of the next instruction to fetch. It places that address on the Address Bus and places a Read command on the Control Bus to the memory unit. The memory unit then reads the bytes stored at the specified address and sends them to the control unit on the Data Bus. The Instruction Register (IR) stores the bytes of the instruction received from the memory unit. The control unit also increments the PC’s value to store the address of the new next instruction to fetch.
The control unit Decodes the instruction stored in the IR. It decodes the instructions bits that encode which operation to perform and bits that encode where the operands are located. The instruction bits are decoded based on the ISA’s definition of the encoding of its instructions. The control unit also fetches the data operand values from their locations (from CPU registers, memory, or encoded in the instruction bits), as input to the processing unit.
The processing unit Executes the instruction. The ALU performs the instruction operation on instruction data operands.
The control unit Stores the result to memory. The result of the processing unit’s execution of the instruction is stored to memory. The control unit writes the result to memory by placing the result value on the Data Bus, placing the address of the storage location on the Address Bus, and placing a Write command on the Control Bus. When received, the memory unit writes the value to memory at the specified address.
The input and output units are not directly involved in the execution of program instructions. Instead, they participate in the program’s execution by loading a program’s instructions and data on the computer and by storing or displaying the results of the program’s computation.
Figure 2 and Figure 3 show the four phases of instruction execution by the von Neumann architecture to execute an example addition instruction whose operands are stored in CPU registers. In the fetch phase, the control unit reads the instruction at the memory address stored in the PC (1234). It sends the address on the address bus, and a READ command on the control bus. The memory unit receives the request and reads the value at address 1234 and sends it to the control unit on the data bus. The control unit places the instruction bytes in the IR register and updates the PC to the address of the next instruction (1238 in this example). In the decode phase the control unit feeds bits from the instruction that specify which operation to perform to the processing unit’s ALU, and uses instruction bits that specify which registers store operands to read operand values from the processing unit’s registers into the ALU (the operand values are 3 and 4 in this example). In the execute phase the ALU part of the processing unit executes the operation on the operands to produce the result (3+4 is 7). Finally, in the store phase the control unit writes the result from the processing unit (7) to the memory unit. The memory address (5678) is sent on the address bus, a WRITE command is sent on the control bus, and the data value to store (7) is set on the data bus. The memory unit receives this request and stores 7 at memory address 5678. In this example, we assume that the memory address to store the result is encoded in the instruction bits.
Figure 2. The Fetch and Decode stages of execution of the von Neumann Architecture of an example addition instruction. Operand, result, and memory addresses are shown as decimal values, memory contents are shown as binary values.
Figure 3. The Execute and Store stages of execution of the von Neumann Architecture of an example addition instruction. Operand, result, and memory addresses are shown as decimal values, memory contents are shown as binary values.
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Justia Dockets & Filings Ninth Circuit California Eastern District Sekona v. Custino, et al. Filing 28
Sekona v. Custino, et al.
ORDER signed by Magistrate Judge Craig M. Kellison on 2/3/2017 DENYING plaintiff's 9 , 25 motions for injunctive relief. (Yin, K)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 9 FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA 10 11 ETUATE SEKONA, 12 13 14 15 16 17 No. 2:16-CV-0517-CMK-P Plaintiff, vs. ORDER F. CUSTINO, et al., Defendants. / Plaintiff, a prisoner proceeding pro se, brings this civil rights action pursuant to 18 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Plaintiff has consented to Magistrate Judge jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 19 § 636(c) and no other party has been served or appeared in the action. Pending before the court 20 are plaintiff’s motions for injunctive relief (Docs. 9 and 25). 21 In both motions, plaintiff complains of prison conditions at Mule Creek State 22 Prison as well as California State Prison – Sacramento. A review of the record, however, reflects 23 that plaintiff has been transferred to Kern Valley State Prison. Where a prisoner is seeking 24 injunctive relief with respect to conditions of confinement, the prisoner’s transfer to another 25 prison renders the request for injunctive relief moot, unless there is some evidence of an 26 expectation of being transferred back. See Prieser v. Newkirk, 422 U.S. 395, 402-03 (1975); 1 1 2 Johnson v. Moore, 948 F.3d 517, 519 (9th Cir. 1991) (per curiam). Because plaintiff has not presented evidence of an expectation of being transferred 3 back to either Mule Creek State Prison or California State Prison – Sacramento, plaintiff’s 4 motions for injunctive relief with respect to conditions at those institutions are moot. 5 6 Accordingly, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that plaintiff’s motions for injunctive relief (Docs. 9 and 25) are denied. 7 8 9 10 DATED: February 3, 2017 ______________________________________ CRAIG M. KELLISON UNITED STATES MAGISTRATE JUDGE 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 2
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Kip Moore’s Sleep Date In Today’s Nashville Roundup
Ticket News claims Zac Brown Band is going to headline the Indy 500’s sixth annual Legends Day concert on May 25.
In Touch Weekly Magazine claims Keith Urban makes Nicole Kidman feel special on a daily basis. A source tells the magazine; “Nicole says that Keith makes her feel the most beautiful and sexy she ever has in her life. She feels young and confident and says she doesn’t feel like she is 51!”
Dustin Lynch tells Cosmopolitan Magazine that he doesn’t get tattoos because he’s scared of the commitment. “I’m kind of a fan of tattoos, but I’m scared of the lifetime commitment. I feel like I would wake up six months later and want something different. Like why is there a grasshopper on my arm? I mean, Blake Shelton has ladybugs. What was he thinking there? Now he has to put up with that the rest of his life.”
Kip Moore tells People Magazine that he once had a woman fall asleep on him during a date. “I had a girl one time, I got her to go out with me. She fell asleep on the ride home! A little bit of drool was coming out of her mouth as her head was up against the window. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. I thought ‘I’m such a loser that she’s fallen asleep on the ride home!’ ”
Scotty McCreery tells Rolling Stone Magazine that he once ate Denny’s with his idols, Rascal Flatts. “One night, we stopped at a truck stop rest area after a show with Rascal Flats. One of my buddies goes, ‘Hey, that’s Jay DeMarcus’s bus! I’m gonna go on it!’ I said, ‘No, don’t do that.’ He walked on without me. Jay recognized him from earlier and was like, ‘Let’s go get some Denny’s.’ So it was me, my friend, Jay DeMarcus and his whole crew. I grew up on Rascal Flatts. You wouldn’t expect to be chilling at Denny’s at 1 a.m., trading stories. We had the Grand Slam and we were good.”
Chris Stapleton tells The New York Times that he sometimes doesn’t know where he fits in musically. “I don’t know that my voice ever makes sense anywhere, necessarily. I would sing bluegrass music and I don’t fit in there; I would sing rock music and I’m probably a little too hillbilly for that. And the country, I’m too much rock ’n’ roll for there sometimes.”
Jake Owen tells Glamour Magazine that his mother gave him the best advice about marriage. “My mom and dad have been married for over 30 years, and my mom gave me a great piece of advice once that being married is not a 50/50 deal. Sometimes my dad gives 10 percent and she has to give 90 percent and vice versa. She said you’ll never be 50/50, it’s always one or the other. If someone is having a bad day, no matter if you want to or not, the other person needs you to lift them up, and I’ve learned that.”
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The Sumerians
Autor: Charles Leonard Woolley
Wydawnictwo: Reading Essentials
Professor Woolley, one of the world's foremost archaeologists, shows quite clearly that when Egyptian civilization began the civilization of the Sumerians had already flourished for at least 2000 years. The idea that Egypt was the earliest civilization has been entirely exploded. The Sumerians had reached a very high level of culture by 3500 BC, and may be said with some justice to be the forerunners of all the Old World civilizations of Egypt, Assyria, Asia Minor, Crete, and Greece. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the early history of man. C. Leonard Woolley, as leader of the joint expedition of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the British Museum, directed important excavations on the site of Ur of the Chaldees, a famous city long buried in the desert sand of Mesopotamia.
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Home » Ireland
Introducing the ICSF:
The Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) was founded in 2016 and is composed of Irish scientists, engineers and other professions.
The ICSF is committed to identifying and disseminating the latest climate science. Its members are characterized by an open and enquiring mind on climate science, driven by the imperative of objectivity without any vested interests.
The ICSF seeks a sustainable future for Ireland and its people. It aims to better inform national energy and climate-related policymaking in the best long-term national interest. It therefore arranges lectures and engages in relevant public consultations.
ICSF is modestly self-funded through member contributions only.
ICSF and Climate Science:
ICSF members are convinced that climate science is not yet settled and continues to evolve almost on a daily basis.
Most agree that recent research and observations indicate significantly lower climate sensitivity, that is, significantly less global temperature rise due to increasing GHG (Green-House Gas) levels than was predicted by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its Assessment Reports.
Many also agree that there are solar-related and other natural influences on earth’s climate, and suggest that the relative magnitudes of these influences may be comparable to or possibly even greater than those of GHG.
On balance, ICSF members consider that observed climate variability is caused by some combination of low-sensitivity GHG and solar/natural influences, where the relative contributions of these are still open to ongoing observation and research.
Under either scenario, ICSF members do not foresee a planetary climate emergency. They advocate progressive short/medium term climate/energy policies based on prudent energy efficiency and conservation, with continued economic growth, competitiveness and environmental sustainability as overarching objectives. Longer term policies should be based on evolving climate science and observations.
For more details, see our website www.ICSF.ie. You may contact us via [email protected]. An ICSF Overview of the Latest Climate Science for Policymakers may be downloaded here.
Jim O’Brien, Chair, ICSF.
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Pedro Martinez makes an appearance in Cambridge!
Pedro Martinez drew in hundreds of fans to St. Peter’s Field in Cambridge last week, as the former Red Sox legend pitched the first few innings at the 24th Abbot Financial Management Oldtime Baseball Game charity event. It was a one-two-three first inning for No. 45 during the game to benefit the ALS Therapy Development Institute and longtime NESN videographer John Martin who was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Hundreds of fans crowded around the fences as local high school players, past and present, were participating in the game as well. Cambridge players included Trevor Daniliuk, a current member of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School baseball team; Erick Ramirez, a former player (now at UMass-Dartmouth) and last year’s Oldtime Baseball Game Most Valuable Player; and Cameron Monagle, who plays Division 2 at Merrimack College.
Ramirez is a 2015 CRLS graduate from the Dominican Republic. He moved to Massachusetts in 2016 and Pedro Martinez was always one of his idols. Monagle graduated from Matignon, but has been a Cambridge supporter and resident his whole life. This was his fourth time participating in the event, although he has been the bat boy since the age of four. The charity event brought smiles, laughs and most importantly, awareness of ALS.
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jay.rosove@bellmedia.ca
Articles by Jay Rosove
Music store owner hopes video leads to recovery of $13K in stolen instruments
Edmonton home sales rose in 2020; what can we expect from 2021?
Ritchie Community League launches creative way to fundraise for new hall
AGLC temporarily lays off 265 workers
Edmonton's Muttart Conservatory upgrades complete, on time and on budget: city
U of A dark sky observatory to be a first in western Canada
Jay Rosove
Jay Rosove is an Edmonton-based videojournalist. Originally joining CTV as an ENG Photographer in 2007, his contributions have run the gamut. He’s done everything from operating the satellite truck to shooting and editing to writing and reporting.
Jay was born and raised in Ottawa, where he got his first taste of working in television at the local community cable station in high school. From there, he went on to Algonquin College’s Television Broadcasting program, which he graduated from in 2002.
He cut his teeth at CHRO in Ottawa right out of college, shooting and editing local and national stories of the day.
“This was such a beneficial experience for me. I learned a great deal about the industry, covering news in Ottawa.”
Jay gained valuable experience in both producing and reporting in the smaller markets of Fergus and Kitchener/Waterloo before moving out west to Edmonton.
“A dynamic city that has seemingly endless hidden beauty.”
At CTV Edmonton, Jay is a generalist and covers a plethora of topics. He’s had the opportunity to cover many memorable stories and events in Alberta. From the Ed Stelmach days of the late 2000s to the Fort McMurray wildfire in 2016, he’s witnessed many of the province’s historic moments.
“I feel extremely fortunate to come to work every day, never knowing what new memory will be created. Covering news in Edmonton never gets old.”
He speaks both English and French.
Jay was behind the camera in 2010, when former AHS head, Stephen Duckett, dodged reporters’ questions saying he was too busy eating a cookie. The 2 minute video went viral and led to Duckett’s termination.
Jay likes to spend his spare time skiing when it’s cold and playing golf and slo-pitch when it’s warm. He’s also grown fond of working in his yard, a job he admits will never be fully complete.
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Documents, Press Material
Countries Angola (9) Antigua and Barbuda (9) Bahamas (9) Barbados (9) Belize (9) Benin (9) Botswana (9) Burkina Faso (9) Burundi (9) Cabo Verde (9) Cameroon (9) Central African Republic (9) Comoros (9) Congo (Brazzaville) (9) DR Congo (Kinshasa) (9) Djibouti (9) Equatorial Guinea (9) Eritrea (9) Eswatini (9) Ethiopia (9) Gabon (9) Gambia (9) Ghana (9) Guinea-Bissau (9) Lesotho (9) Liberia (9) Madagascar (9) Malawi (9) Mali (9) Mauritania (9) Mauritius (9) Mozambique (9) Namibia (9) Niger (9) Nigeria (9) Rwanda (9) Sao Tome and Principe (9) Senegal (9) Seychelles (9) Sierra Leone (9) South Africa (9) South Sudan (9) Sudan (9) Tanzania (9) Tchad (9) Togo (9) Uganda (9) Zambia (9) Zimbabwe (9)
Topics Climate, Environment & Energy (4) Common Foreign & Security Policy (CFSP) (2) Counter-Terrorism (2) Countering disinformation (2) Crisis Response (2) Culture (2) Development Cooperation (4) EU Global Strategy (2) EU International Cyberspace Policy (2) Global Tech Panel (2) Human Rights & Democracy (7) Humanitarian & Emergency Response (4) Military and civilian missions and operations (2) Multilateral Relations (4) Refugee protection & Migration (2) Sanctions policy (1) Trade (2)
Organisations UN Geneva (2) UN New York (2) UN Rome (2) UNESCO (2) Vienna - international organisations (2)
Select... SGDS (1) sustainable development goals (1)
(-) Remove Council Conclusions filter Council Conclusions
Post date... 2012 (1) 2016 (2) 2017 (1) 2018 (4) 2019 (4) 2020 (3)
The Presidency of the Council issued presidency conclusions on the Gender Action Plan (GAP) III: "An ambitious agenda for gender equality and women's empowerment in EU external action". The text was supported by 24 delegations.
EU adopts a global human rights sanctions regime
The Council today adopted a decision and a regulation establishing a global human rights sanctions regime. For the first time, the EU is equipping itself with a framework that will allow it to target individuals, entities and bodies – including state and non-state actors – responsible for, involved
The Council today adopted conclusions on the EU's priorities at the 74th UN General Assembly(September 2019 – September 2020). These conclusions complements the Council conclusions on strengthening multilateralism which were adopted on 17 June 2019.
Supporting the Sustainable Development Goals across the world
The Council today adopted conclusions welcoming the publication of the first joint synthesis report of the EU and its member states on ''Supporting the Sustainable Development Goals across the world'' as an important contribution to EU reporting at the High Level Political Forum
Sustainable development: Council adopts conclusions
The Council today adopted a set of conclusions concerning the implementation by the EU of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development, which was established in 2015 and comprises a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Given the horizontal nature of the 2030 Agenda, its
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PGA Tour 2K21 review
The prospect of The Golf Club developer HB Studios teaming up with 2K Games is like an independent filmmaker with a very specific vision signing on to direct a big-budget Hollywood movie. That kind of situation can go either way. It can either be like Taika Waititi bringing his signature humor and energy to Thor: Ragnarok, or it can be Gavin Hood completely derailing an entire franchise with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Sometimes, it can really work out. Other times, it can destroy careers.
HB Studios taking the formula of The Golf Club, which was single-handedly keeping the golf sim genre alive, and putting it under the scrutiny of 2K’s business-driven lens could have been disastrous for the series. The upsides of getting the backing of a major publisher are obvious, but 2K Games has done a pretty good job over the years of completely squeezing the joy out of the NBA 2K franchise and replacing it with a need to spend. The risk was the publisher doing the same thing to The Golf Club.
Thankfully, that doesn’t seem to have happened—at least, not yet. PGA Tour 2K21, which a splash screen says is “powered by The Golf Club,” is an evolution of what HB Studios has done with its last three games, and it steers clear of the greedy trappings of 2K’s other series. In terms of how it plays and the content it offers, PGA 2K21 is one of the best golf sims ever. Unfortunately, the little bells and whistles you’d expect from a fully licensed sports game seem to be either missing completely or, at best, undercooked and underwhelming.
PGA Tour 2K21 doesn’t stray too far from the formula that has made The Golf Club the go-to series for fans of more serious golf games. More experienced players will find the same mechanics that made HB Studios’ flagship franchise so challenging and rewarding, but PGA Tour 2K21 makes a few key changes across the board that make it easier for new players to get started and develop their skills.
One of the biggest changes is the removal of backswing timing as a key aspect to the gameplay. Even on the higher difficulty levels, players don’t need to worry about the backswing impacting their results. Instead, downswing tempo and how straight you keep your swing are what determine whether you hook or slice the ball, while backswing determines the power of your shot. This might not sound like a big change for those who haven’t played HB Studios’ previous outings, but for those who found those games a little too technical and mechanically demanding, PGA Tour 2K21 eases up on the skill required to hit a decent shot.
This change brings a host of other difficulty options that let players meticulously set the right amount of challenge for them. Changing the base difficulty impacts your swing the most. On lower difficulties, the game’s pretty generous with what it considers a perfectly timed downswing, and the consequences for messing up the timing or going a little crooked on the swing are far less punishing than they are on higher difficulties.
User interface elements like the Distance Control Meter and Pro Vision visual aids (such as the specific arc your ball will make off a hit) can be toggled no matter what difficulty settings you’ve chosen, so if you want to keep the timing of Amateur difficulty but want to turn off all the visual aids to give yourself a bigger challenge, you can do that. When it comes to outside factors, you can adjust the difficulty level for AI opponents, which basically just determines how much under par you’ll have to shoot to beat them, as well as the conditions on a course such as wind speed and terrain firmness.
This design philosophy of micro adjustments extends to your golf bag as well. Instead of selecting an overall difficulty for your clubs, you can now select individual clubs. For example, drivers with a better distance rating are also more difficult to use and shrink your timing windows, giving your selection an element of risk-reward decision making. However, every club is well balanced, meaning you can get by just fine with even the beginning clubs.
All of this is filtered through 2K’s signature MyPlayer system, which means that you can purchase clubs with Virtual Currency. Thankfully, the aggressive microtransaction system in NBA 2K’s approach to the MyPlayer system is nowhere to be found in PGA Tour 2K21. Since your MyPlayer’s “attributes” are tied to what clubs you choose, you won’t start with an underpowered golfer. And while you can purchase clubs with VC, the game is fairly generous when it comes to doling out the stuff. Leveling up your player by completing events in the game’s PGA Tour career mode earns you 250 VC every time, and the most expensive club I’ve seen so far is only 800 VC.
On top of that, you can also earn additional experience and VC by completing in-game challenges, such as getting the ball on the green within regulation or completing a hole at Par or better without hitting any hazards. This makes progression fairly breezy early on, empowering players to start making adjustments to their golf bag right out of the gate. Given 2K’s history with exploitative microtransactions and how it can derail franchises, it’s great to see the publisher giving HB Studios a fighting chance to prove itself.
Speaking of your MyPlayer, HB Studios once again integrates your created character throughout the entire game, so my talented multisport athlete Jumbo Dirtbag acted as my avatar throughout the PGA Tour, as he will for online multiplayer. PGA Tour 2K21’s character creator is pretty much exactly as it was in The Golf Club 2019, meaning it’s got more options than EA Sports games but isn’t quite as robust as something like MLB The Show or WWE 2K. Unfortunately, there’s no option to give your character a nickname by which the announcer will refer to him or her, but the visual options are decent enough, and either unlocking cosmetics by leveling up or purchasing them with VC gives you plenty of opportunity to show off your personal style.
Unfortunately, this seemingly hands-off approach from 2K is a double-edged sword. Signing with a major publisher definitely has its benefits, such as a full licensing agreement with the PGA and even more brand partnerships. There are now seven additional real-world golf courses to play on, as well as the likenesses of about a dozen or so professional golfers. This might sound great to fans of The Golf Club who wanted more of the PGA in their game, but the results feel more like half-measures and proof-of-concepts than actual features.
Take, for example, the rivalry system, which pits you against a pro golfer and requires you to complete certain challenges to beat them. It’s a neat idea on paper, but the game never really delivers on any potential drama. There’s no real attempt at creating a story with cutscenes, and the tepid play-by-play commentary never really alludes to specific rivalries. There’s so little drama, in fact, that it’s easy to forget you even have a rival.
This lackluster attempt at creating drama extends to the overall presentation as well. The game has added the voices of Luke Elvy and Rich Beem, though unless you’re really into golf you probably won’t know or care who they are. As with The Golf Club 2019, the resulting commentary is painfully repetitive and shallow. Occasionally, you’ll get a sound bite you haven’t heard before, but it mostly feels like background noise. There are fun little cutaways during a round that will show replays and highlights from the other competitors on a course, but those also start to feel repetitive. Compared to how much effort other sports games with professional licenses put into their presentation, PGA Tour 2K21 doesn’t feel all that different from when HB Studios was making games independently.
Likewise, the multiplayer has only seen marginal updates, though at least these improvements are more noticeable. Online Societies have made a return, and their options are more robust, though they still function in mostly the same way they did in The Golf Club 2019. There are several more multiplayer modes, too, which will give you and your friends more options when facing off against one another, though I couldn’t seem to find an online match during my time pre-release time with the game, so it’s a little hard to say how much of an impact it has on the overall experience.
Finally, there’s HB Studios’ legendary course creator. Besides adding a ton of new assets, the creator remains largely unchanged from its The Golf Club 2019 counterpart. Since it’s based off the actual creative tools that HB Studios uses when building its courses, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise, though it does mean that the UI can be a little overwhelming, especially when it comes to fine-tuning certain aspects. It’s also a real pain in the butt to use with a controller, as even selecting a specific hole to work on was needlessly cumbersome.
Still, it’s a robust and fully featured experience that I expect will once again provide the kind of longevity to PGA Tour 2K21 that it did to The Golf Club 2019. You can even import courses from the previous title to PGA Tour 2K21, which means that there’s already a robust library of content that’s waiting to be uploaded. While I personally won’t be spending a lot of time making them, I sure as hell will spend a ton of time playing on other people’s courses, especially considering you can play on them no matter what platform they originated from.
PGA Tour 2K21 is probably one of the best-playing golf sims of all time, and yet I can’t get rid of this nagging feeling that it maybe doesn’t go far enough in establishing itself as a major sports title. While it’s a fully licensed game, it doesn’t feel all that different from HB Studios’ independent offerings, and I don’t know how that will pan out. On the one hand, it’s a fantastic game that should please longtime fans of the developers’ games while being accessible enough for new players to enjoy. On the other hand, it’s about the least flashiest sports game I’ve ever played, and golf is fighting an uphill battle in capturing an audience that doesn’t already care about the sport.
I want HB Studios to succeed because I love playing its games and I think it’s worked hard at establishing itself. It’s earned the right to be on the main stage. But I also don’t want the game to succeed so much to the point where 2K starts sinking its greedy little fangs into every aspect of it. The more players it has, the more likely 2K is to try to exploit them for every little penny. But there’s no real point in speculating, I suppose, other than to slap 2K’s grabby fingers away from the proverbial honey pot. These are questions for the future, a future that may never even arrive! Presently, what we have is a fantastic golf game, and that’s good enough for now.
PGA Tour 2K21 is hands down one of the best-playing golf games in the last decade. HB Studios has fine-tuned its formula while giving players enough options to find that sweet spot of challenge and accessibility. The overall presentation doesn’t really feel like a fully licensed sports game, and its career mode lacks in drama, but at least it’s a 2K Sports game that isn’t squeezing players for every cent. If you’ve taken a break from golf games, PGA Tour 2K21 is the best excuse to jump back into the genre.
PGA Tour 2K21 is available on Xbox One, PS4, Switch, and PC. Primary version played was for Xbox One. Code/hardware was provided by 2K Games for the benefit of this coverage. EGM reviews on a scale of one to five stars.
Post tagsreview2K GamesHB StudiosPGA Tour 2K21
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San José tours
9 Tours Activities and Experiences
All Experiences (9)
Quepos Cultural and Historical City Tour
Enjoy a city tour and get to know the history of the Quepoa Indians with transportation and refreshm...
Transportation with air conditioning
Tour package to tourguero from San Jose - 3 Days / 2 Nights
Tour package to Tortuguero from San Jose. Duration 3 days / 2 nights. Transportation, food and lodgi...
Shared ride. The type of car is based on the number of people of your booking.
Shared transportation between destinations (shuttle service): - San Jose to Pavona Dock - Pavona Dock to Arenal Volcano or Puerto Viejo Beach or San Jose.
3 breakfasts + 3 lunches + 2 dinners
Tourist Package to The Arenal Volcano and the Monteverde Cloud Forest (5 Days)
Enjoy the best of Costa Rica visiting the Arenal and Monteverde Volcano, ideal to enjoy with the fam...
in the mentioned departure places shared car
Shared car depending on the number of people.
4 breakfasts and 1 dinner
Doka Coffee Tour and La Paz Waterfalls Gardens from San José
An excursion focused on knowing and learning the agricultural culture around the cultivation of coff...
Hotel in San Jose
Modern transport with air conditioning roundtrip
Touristic Package to Pacuare River and Puerto Viejo Beach (4 days-3 nights)
Enjoy the best of Costa Rica, with a touristic package full of adrenaline along the Pacuare River an...
Shared car from your hotel in San Jose
4 breakfasts, 2 lunches and 1 dinner.
Tour to the Arenal Volcano and Tabacón Hot Springs from San José
The one day tour to the thermal waters of the Tabacon Resort; Spa and the Arenal Volcano, It is one ...
Hotel lobby in San Jose
Dinner and lunch with complimentary drink
Tourist Package for Arenal Volcano and Tambor Beach from San José (6 Days and 5 Nights)
Enjoy 6 days of Costa Rica, with the best places to visit with transportation and guide included....
Private transportation depending on the number of people
Daily breakfast + 2 lunches
Fullday to the National Park and Manuel Antonio Beach from San José
Enjoy the wonderful Fauna of Costa Rica with this tour through the Manuel Antonio National Park with...
Breakfast and lunch typical of the region
Canoe Tour through the Tortuguero National Park
Enjoy a canoe ride while you marvel at the marine and wild life of the national park from costa rica...
Downtown San Jose is the busiest part of the city. With a maze of streets and avenues, most of the city's museums can be found here, as well as a number of hotels, parks and plazas. A large number of tourism companies, restaurants and hotels can also be found in San Jose, with the Coca Cola bus terminal just north of Central Avenue. The center of the city is quite small and at the same time it is one of the most frequented places in the city, keep in mind that you will encounter traffic congestion accompanied by a lot of noise. But don't let this stop you, since this part of the city is downtown San José. The streets and avenues here are usually full of pedestrians and traffic, so the best way to explore this area is on foot.
Things to do in San José
Stroll through the Plaza de la Cultura: This square is one of the best known and busiest in San José. Partly because it is in the center of the capital. And also because apart from housing the National Theater, in its basement is the Pre-Columbian Gold Museum, one of the main attractions of the city.
Knowing the Central Park, something essential to do in San José: It is the oldest public space in San José. This park is known to be the nerve center of the capital, where all the Josefins pass by to take a taxi or the bus. It is also one of the main meeting points of the premises. A huge kiosk characterizes it, as does the Metropolitan Cathedral of San José, which is located at one of its ends.
Enter the Metropolitan Cathedral of San José: It is the largest and most important church in Costa Rica. In 1813 the Spanish Courts recognized San José as a city. Then, the current capital of Costa Rica needed a Christian temple where to implant the Catholic faith. However, it was not started to be built until 1825. After several earthquakes, the Cathedral, in neoclassical style and mud, has undergone many changes in its short history.
Get to know the Mail Building :, one of the main attractions to see in San José: Next to the National Theater of Costa Rica, the Post Office Building is one of the most emblematic of the Costa Rican capital. It was designed by a Catalan in 1917 and is neo-Renaissance. Knowing this architectural jewel is one of the essential things to do in San José.
Discover the Central Market: Visiting the Central Market is another of the activities to do in San José that you cannot miss in your itinerary. It has been open since 1880 and has been declared Cultural Heritage for its incredible tradition and identity.
Enjoy with your family at the Children's Museum: And another recommended activity to do in San José, especially if you are traveling with children, is to visit this Museum. The building itself is already an attraction. It is a different museum. If most are characterized by looking and not touching, this is the opposite. Children can play and learn.
Visit the Poás and its national park: El Poás is one of the most interesting volcanoes in Costa Rica. Its main crater, 300 meters deep and 1.32 km in diameter, is one of the largest in the world. However, its appeal is not limited to the volcano. The park offers incredible trails full of biodiversity that will take you to several viewpoints.
Go to La Paz Waterfall: It is a very advisable excursion to do in San José. It is approximately 1:30 a.m. from the capital. The entrance, which includes an animal conservatory and gardens with more than five waterfalls.
Discover the San Jose Chinatown: Yes, you read that right. San José also has its own Chinatown. In fact, it was the first Chinatown in a city in Central America. The area began to develop at the end of the 20th century when restaurants and supermarkets run by Orientals were created. Chinatown was recognized in 2012 and is now a tourist attraction in the city.
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Mosaic depicting Emperor Justinian in the basilica of Ravenna (Italy)
Justinian I (born 11 May 483 and died 13 November 565) was a Byzantine emperor who reigned from 527 to 565. He was one of the most important rulers of the late antiquity. He is above all known for originating a group of very important laws, the Code of Justinian, which regulated life in the Byzantine Empire for centuries, and strongly influenced Europe in Medieval times.
Justien also increased the territories of his Empire during his reign, for he tried to reconstruct the Roman Empire as it was in the second century. On the religious front, he has also played a great role, trying to unify the Christian beliefs but also to impose his views on the Pope.
2 His acts as Emperor
4 Laws
6 Culture under Justinian
7 Justinian the builder
Justinian (Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus in Latin) was born in Illyria on 11 May 483, in the city of Tauresium. He came from a fairly modest family of Roman culture. He was the nephew of a soldier, Justin, who had so much military success that he became an emperor in 518, under the name Justin I.
Justin I took Justinian under his wing to involve him in his business. Justinian was then named patrician, and then consul. When his uncle died, in 527, Justinian became Emperor under the name Justinian I. In 523, Justinian married an actress, Theodora, who then became Empress. She had a large amount of influence over him.
Justinian has great qualities to be emperor: he has a sense of the state, it is capable of much work and lives fairly simply. He also had much artistic and religious knowledge. Justinian was also able to take men of quality as advisors to, which would allow him to have a very important reign.
Justinian died on 15 November 565, after naming his nephew, Justin II, his successor.
His acts as Emperor[edit | edit source]
Justinian's reign marked the transition of the Roman Empire to the Byzantine Empire east of the Mediterranean Sea. Justinian dreamed of recovering the greatness of the Roman Empire, but this had disappeared beginning in 476, in part because of the Germanic invasions. He will therefore, while expanding his empire, focusing on its eastern side, and make it stand on its own.
Wars[edit | edit source]
On this map, the red shows the Byzantine Empire at the beginning of Justinian's reign, and the orangish-yellow shows his own conquests
Justinian wanted to recreate the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean Sea. He thus began by making peace with Persia, in 532. This left him free to carry out conquests towards the West.
He attacked the Vandal Kingdom, in North Africa, and defeated it in September 533. In liberating the Mediterranean from Vandal ships, this allowed him to conquer Corsica, Sicily, and Sardinia. This conquest was often threatened by other kings, notably the Ostrogothic kings, but Justinian managed to maintain control of Italy throughout his reign. Taking advantage of the quarrels between the Visigoth leaders in Spain, he secured Baetica (modern-day Andalusia).
The war had resumed with the Sassanid Persians, but Justinian signed a new peace in 562 allowing him to expand his influence in Armenia and in the Caucasus.
Justinian was the last emperor to try to reunite the two parts of the former Roman Empire. But the wars had been very costly. Therefore, his successors, while not giving up the title of Roman Emperor will not seek any more to take military control of the whole Empire, which will gradually lose territories. Progressively, the empire shrunk back down to the Greek world.
Laws[edit | edit source]
The Byzantine Empire was already wealthy when Justinian became Emperor. He was thus able to begin reforming the laws. He asked his advisors to bring order to the laws, in particular the edicts that dated from the reigns of Emperors Hadrian and Diocletian. This reorganizations produced a set of laws, at the time called Corpus Juris Civilis (in Latin), which is known today as the Code of Justinian. This code was written in 529. It was written in Latin, the official language of the empire.
He also published a modernization of ancient Roman jurisprudence, called the Digest in 533, and a manual for teaching law, called the Institutes (at 533). The new laws that Justinian wanted were written in Greek, and are known as the Novels. They date from after 534.
In addition to this reorganization of the laws, Justinian wanted to change and modernize the way the empire functioned. He groups together some provinces, change the ways the Empire function, and often let the provinces be governed by the military to maintain order. His government was very authoritarian.
Religion[edit | edit source]
Justinian considered himself to be chosen by God. He wants to rule the Church in exchange for military protection it gives against the heresies. He was a true Christian. For him, Christianity was a state religion, meaning that all of the empire's inhabitants had to be Christian, and that he had the right to decide what was good for the Church.
He thus passed regulations on the role of priests and bishops.
Justinian tried to fight the pagans. He banned the worship of pagan gods in Anatolia.
He also tried to reconcile various Christian groups, who had separated from one another for theological reasons. He fights especially against monophysites Christians. He sometimes had a tendency to oppose popes.
Culture under Justinian[edit | edit source]
Justinian's empire was very wealthy, due to the destruction of the Vandal Kingdom, which decreased piracy in the Mediterranean Sea, and thanks to Justinian's conquests. Byzantine merchants were able to conduct trade throughout the Mediterranean world.
There was active trade between Gaul, Italy, the North African coasts, Egypt, and Syria. With the Kingdom of Ethiopia as an intermediary, Byzantium also traded with China via the Silk Road.
All of this wealth permitted the development of a significant cultural life. Justinian and his wife Theodora sought to recover the greatness of Ancient Rome. Hymns (a type of religious poem) were composed to glorify the Emperor and Christianity. Artists were invited to enrich and embellish Byzantium and other cities in the Empire.
Justinian and Theodora are depicted in their imperial adornments, with great figures from their court, by two famous mosaic panels in the basilica of Ravenna.
Justinian with his dignitaries, mosaic of Ravenna, 6th century
Justinian the builder[edit | edit source]
Justinian is known for having profoundly reorganized the city of Byzantium.
Justinian was first great builder. He ordered the construction of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Byzantium's other name) (dedicated to divine Wisdom, or "Sophia" in Greek) with the aid of 2 architects, 100 master builders, and 10,000 workmen. It was built between 532 and 537 by the architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. The first cupola having collapsed in 558, a second was rebuilt in 562.
Throughout the empire, Justinian financed the construction of cities, bridges, thermal baths, and roads.
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Evelyn Lorraine Rothman (1932–2007)
Evelyn Lorraine Rothman advocated for women’s reproductive rights and invented at-home kits for women’s health concerns in the late twentieth century in Los Angeles, California. Rothman provided women in the Los Angeles area with the means to perform self-examinations, pregnancy tests, and abortions on their own without assistance from a medical professional. Along with Carol Downer, Rothman cofounded the Federation of Feminist Health Centers in Los Angeles, California, and spent her career educating women on reproductive health.
Karl Landsteiner (1868-1943)
Karl Landsteiner studied blood types in Europe and in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Landsteiner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1930 for detailing immunological reactions in the ABO blood group system. The ABO blood group system divides human blood into one of four types based on the antibodies that are present on each cell. Landsteiner's work with blood types led physicians to safely perform blood transfusions and organ transplants.
Mary-Claire King (1946– )
Mary-Claire King studied genetics in the US in the twenty-first century. King identified two genes associated with the occurrence of breast cancer, breast cancer 1 (BRCA1) and breast cancer 2 (BRCA2). King showed that mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes cause two types of reproductive cancer, breast and ovarian cancer. Because of King’s discovery, doctors can screen women for the inheritance of mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes to evaluate their risks for breast and ovarian cancer.
Betty Friedan (1921–2006)
Betty Friedan advocated for the advancement of women's rights in the twentieth century in the United States. In 1963, Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, which historians consider a major contribution to the feminist movement. Friedan also helped establish two organizations that advocated for women's right, the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1963 and, in 1969 the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NAARL). Friedan argued for legalizing access to abortion and contraception, and her advocacy helped advance women's reproductive rights.
Annie Wood Besant (1847–1933)
Annie Wood Besant was a social activist who advocated for women’s access to birth control as well as marriage reform, labor reform, and Indian Nationalism in the nineteenth century in England and India. In her early career, Besant was involved in various social and political advocacy organizations including the National Secular Society, the Malthusian League, and the Fabian Society. Besant gave many public lectures and authored various articles in support of secularism, workers’ rights and unionization, and women’s rights.
Robert Guthrie (1916–1995)
Robert Guthrie developed a method to test infants for phenylketonuria (PKU) in the United States during the twentieth century. PKU is an inherited condition that causes an amino acid called phenylalanine to build to toxic levels in the blood. Untreated, PKU causes mental disabilities. Before Guthrie’s test, physicians rarely tested infants for PKU and struggled to diagnosis it. Guthrie’s test enabled newborns to be quickly and cheaply screened at birth and then treated for PKU if necessary, preventing irreversible neurological damage.
Richard Doll (1912–2005)
Richard Doll was an epidemiologist and public figure in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Working primarily at the University of Oxford, in Oxford, England, Doll established a definitive correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Furthermore, Doll’s work helped legitimize epidemiology as a scientific discipline. Doll’s research also helped establish modern guidelines for oncological studies, as well as for contemporary and future research on the effect of smoking on pregnancy and fetal development.
Annie Dodge Wauneka (1910-1997)
Annie Dodge Wauneka, a member of the Navajo Tribal Council in Window Rock, Arizona, from 1951 to 1978, advocated for improved lifestyle, disease prevention, and access to medical knowledge in the Navajo Indian Reservation, later renamed the Navajo Nation. Wauneka served as chair of the Health and Welfare Committee of the Navajo Tribal Council and as a member of the US Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Indian Health. Wauneka advocated for initiatives aimed at promoting education, preventing tuberculosis, and reducing the infant mortality rate.
Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910)
In the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Blackwell was a women’s healthcare reformer and the first woman to receive her medical degree in the United States. She practiced medicine as a primary care physician in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Blackwell graduated medical school from Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York, where she was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the US.
Simone Mary Campbell (1945–)
Simone Campbell is a Roman Catholic sister, attorney, and poet who advocated for social justice, especially equal access to healthcare in the US in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Campbell worked as a lawyer and served the working poor in California. As of 2018, she works for NETWORK, a lobbying group in Washington DC that focuses on broadening access to healthcare by lowering costs.
Leonard Hayflick (1928- )
Leonard Hayflick studied the processes by which cells age during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. In 1961 at the Wistar Institute in the US, Hayflick researched a phenomenon later called the Hayflick Limit, or the claim that normal human cells can only divide forty to sixty times before they cannot divide any further. Researchers later found that the cause of the Hayflick Limit is the shortening of telomeres, or portions of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that slowly degrade as cells replicate.
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Roma Spezia
Roma vs Spezia head 2 head
Roma Last Games
0 + + + + - + ? + 0 - 0 + + + 0 0 + + + + + - + 0 - + + - + + + 0 ?
Spezia Last Games
- - + + - 0 0 + - + + - + - + - 0 0 + - + 0 + 0 - - 0 - - - + + ?
Spezia 1
Roma Results
Spezia Results
Roma Goals
Spezia Goals
Roma Strength
Spezia Strength
Roma Goals (Last 30 games)
Spezia Goals (Last 30 games)
Roma Scorers (Last 15 games)
Henrikh Mkhitaryan 1 3 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 9
Borja Mayoral 2 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 6
Edin Dzeko 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 5
Jordan Veretout 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 4
Lorenzo Pellegrini 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 3
Gianluca Mancini 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 2
Roger 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Pedro Rodriguez 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Gabriel Debeljuh 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Riccardo Calafiori 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Tommaso Milanese 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Andrea Poli 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Spezia Scorers (Last 15 games)
Mbala Nzola 0 0 0 2 0 0 1 1 0 2 0 1 0 1 1 9
Tommaso Pobega 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 3
Roberto Piccoli 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 2
Diego Farias 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 2
Giulio Maggiore 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2
Julian Chabot 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Kevin Agudelo 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Daniele Verde 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Emmanuel Gyasi Quartsin 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
Claudio Terzi 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
Roma Bad Boy (Last 30 games)
Spezia Bad Boy (Last 30 games)
Roma 2.00 1.50 2.05 1.12 1.88
Spezia 1.33 1.17 1.67 1.56 1.50
Roma vs Spezia
Roma Stats
The team scored 24 points оn its own field in 10 last matches, with the following results 7 wins, 3 draws and zero losses. The difference between scored and conceded goals is 22-6. The average number of goals is 2.2. The average number of cards in 10 last matches is 2.5.
Leading players in the last 15 matches in all tournaments: Henrikh Mkhitaryan (9), Borja Mayoral (6), Edin Dzeko (5), Jordan Veretout (4), Lorenzo Pellegrini (3), Gianluca Mancini (2), Roger (1).
Spezia Stats
Leading players in the last 15 matches in all tournaments: Mbala Nzola (9), Tommaso Pobega (3), Roberto Piccoli (2), Diego Farias (2), Giulio Maggiore (2), Julian Chabot (1), Kevin Agudelo (1).
Claudio Ranieri 's inconsistent Sampdoria meet out-of-form Udinese on Saturday, after both sides suffered dispiriting defeats last time out.
Following two defeats in a matter of days, toiling Torino face Serie A surprise side Spezia on Saturday evening at Stadio Olimpico di Torino.
Gianluca Mancini's late header earned Roma a 2-2 draw as Inter Milan lost ground in the Serie A title race. Mancini glanced home a header from Gonzalo Villar 's cross with four minutes remaining to earn the hosts a draw and leave Inter three points adrift of city rivals AC Milan at the top of the table.
10 January 2021, 14:51 freesupertips.com
Spezia vs Sampdoria predictions for Monday's Serie A clash. Spezia hope to build on their stunning Serie A win last time out when they host Sampdoria.
Verona vs Crotone predictions ahead of this clash in Serie A on Sunday. Can Verona return to form at home against the league's bottom club?
Roma playmaker Henrikh Mkhitaryan has reportedly agreed to extend his stay with the Serie A powerhouses until the end of next season.
Following a catastrophic collapse in midweek, Napoli travel north to meet Udinese on Sunday, seeking to recover from a run of three defeats in five.
Scudetto rivals Roma and Inter Milan clash at Stadio Olimpico on Sunday, with just three points and two places separating them in the table.
Napoli vs Spezia predictions as Napoli look to stay in Serie A's top four. Can the hosts secure a victory over the relegation-threatened visitors?
Top-four contenders Napoli welcome lowly Spezia on Wednesday evening, fresh from a fine start to 2021 last weekend.
Spezia vs Verona predictions for Sunday's Serie A fixture at Stadio Alberto Picco. Verona will be confident that they can return to winning ways here against a Spezia side who have yet to register a home victory this season.
Former Roma manager Claudio Ranieri returns to his old stomping ground with Sampdoria in Serie A on Sunday. The 69-year-old had two spells in the Italian capital, with the most recent one lasting only two months in 2019, but has enjoyed a more productive spell in Liguria with his side 11th in the table.
Genoa manager Davide Ballardini will be hoping to make it two wins from two when his side host Lazio in Serie A on Sunday.
Spezia vs Genoa predictions ahead of this clash in Serie A on Wednesday. Can either of these two relegation-threatened sides secure a victory?
Rafael Leao scored the fastest goal in Serie A history as AC Milan maintained their lead at the top of the table with a 2-1 win at Sassuolo.
Following their second four-goal setback against a top four rival in a matter of weeks, Roma face former Giallorossi coach Eusebio Di Francesco 's faltering Cagliari at Stadio Olimpico on Wednesday.
Two sides struggling at the bottom of the table face each other on Wednesday night, as Genoa travel to Spezia in what could be viewed as an early-season six-pointer.
Inter Milan vs Spezia predictions ahead of this clash in Serie A on Sunday. Can Inter secure the points against the newcomers?
After their impressive comeback from Champions League heartbreak continued with a fortunate victory in midweek, Inter Milan welcome Serie A newcomers Spezia to San Siro on Sunday afternoon.
Crotone vs. Spezia (Saturday, 2.00pm) © Reuters Rock-bottom Crotone anticipate the visit of fellow promoted side Spezia on Saturday, trailing the Ligurian club by eight points in the Serie A table after a winless start to the campaign.
Spezia vs Bologna predictions for Wednesday's Serie A clash. Spezia hope to pull themselves away from the Serie A relegation zone when they face Bologna on Wednesday.
After a week in which they progressed in Europe and cruised to another Serie A victory, Roma now welcome troubled Torino to Stadio Olimpico on Thursday evening.
Spezia vs. Lazio (Saturday, 2.00pm) © Reuters Stadio Dino Manuzzi in Cesena - current home to Spezia 's first Serie A campaign - sees the Ligurian side welcome Lazio on Saturday as they continue to disprove the odds - and their doubters.
Udinese vs. Crotone (Tuesday, 5.30pm) © Reuters Udinese will be looking to make it four straight victories in Serie A when they continue their 2020-21 campaign at home to struggling Crotone on Tuesday night.
Udinese vs Crotone predictions for Tuesday's Serie A clash at the Dacia Arena. Udinese hope to extend their Serie A winning streak when they host Crotone.
Udinese will be looking to make it four straight victories in Serie A when they continue their 2020-21 campaign at home to struggling Crotone on Tuesday night.
Crotone vs Spezia predictions for Saturday's Serie A clash. Crotone hope to secure their first home win of the Serie A season when they face Spezia on Saturday.
Lazio vs. Udinese (Sunday, 11.30am) © Reuters Targeting their fourth win in five league games, resurgent Lazio take on struggling Udinese at Stadio Olimpico on Sunday.
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James C. Frisby and Leon G. Schumacher
The use of vegetable oil in compression-ignition engines is not new. Rudolph Diesel, who is credited with invention of the engine, first used peanut oil as fuel. However, the petroleum-based fuel we now call "diesel fuel" soon became the fuel of choice because of economic advantage. Until political unrest made availability questionable and air pollution became a concern, little consideration was given to alternative fuels.
In 1974, when unrest in the oil-rich Middle East threatened crude oil supplies, it became apparent that other countries dependent on imported oil could quickly be deprived of necessary fuel (at present, the U.S. has about 4.4 percent of the proven world petroleum reserves but consumes 25 percent of the world oil supply). As a result, research on alternate fuels was funded and old research information was retrieved.
Considerable research was then conducted on vegetable oils (such as soybean, safflower, rapeseed, sunflower and peanut oils) to fuel compression-ignition engines. An International Conference on Plant and Vegetable Oils as Fuels was sponsored by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers in August 1982. Yet research declined in the late 1980s as the price of petroleum-based fuels dropped.
The Persian Gulf war in 1991 reminded us that the U.S. cannot rely solely on foreign oil for fuel to produce, process and distribute food and feed products. The need to be self-sufficient and to have a reliable energy source now seems important enough to look beyond simple economic comparison.
The chemical structure of vegetable oil, an organic acid ester, is a glycerine molecule with up to three fatty acids linked to it with ester linkages. The comprehensive term triglyceride is used to describe this arrangement. The process of squeezing the seeds to remove oil and leave the meal, which usually has value as animal feed, is called expelling. Degumming is a process for removing gummy substances and impurities from the raw, or neat, oil. Transesterification, or esterification, is the chemical process of converting an organic acid ester to another ester of the same acid. As used in this guide, esterification removes the glycerine stem from the molecule and the resulting ester has a much smaller molecule, which improves characteristics such as viscosity that are desirable for use as an engine fuel.
Several states have conducted research on the feasibility of biodiesel fuel. Scientists in North Dakota have investigated expelling, degumming and esterifying oil from sunflower seed. Idaho scientists have investigated rapeseed oil, developing a relatively simple procedure for esterification. Rapeseed oil, which is used for industrial processes, contains a level of erucic acid that is detrimental to animal feed, so low erucic acid varieties, called canola, have been developed. In general, research information on rapeseed is applicable to canola.
Scientists in Illinois and Missouri have investigated the use of esterified soybean oil, called soy ester, and soy ester/diesel blends. In general, research findings indicate that it is feasible to use vegetable oil esters from a variety of sources as extender or replacement fuels for compression-ignition, internal-combustion engines. Table 1 compares characteristics of diesel fuel and some vegetable oils and their esters.
Comparison of fuel properties
Viscosity (cS)
Cloud point (degrees Fahrenheit)
Heat energy (Btu per pound)
Weight density (pounds per gallon)
Soybean 35 24 38 17,035 7.6
Soy ester 5 34 45 17,260 7.7
Sunflower 33 23 37 17,035 7.6
Sunflower ester 5 34 49 16,366 7.3
Canola 37 25 37 17,072 7.6
Canola ester 6 50 54 17,390 7.2
Crambe 54 50 44 17,404 7.5
#2 Diesel 3 5 47 19,494 7.1
At present, a pickup truck with a direct-injection, compression-ignition engine can be operated on esterified soybean oil. The truck is being used over-the-road and for typical farm activities to evaluate the effect of soy ester on engine wear when subjected to varying load/temperature conditions. Fuel is heated when temperature falls below the oil's cloud point (about 34 degrees Fahrenheit), the point when filter clogging can occur. Periodic samples of engine lubricating oil are analyzed for presence of metals that would indicate unusual engine wear. Exhaust emission levels are periodically analyzed for air pollutants. Exhaust is visually cleaner than diesel fuel exhaust, and the odor from vegetable oil is considerably less offensive than that of diesel fuel. Table 2 illustrates the non-visible emissions data by various diesel/soy oil blends. A 50/50 blend appears to have good characteristics.
Emissions data
Blend diesel percent
Oxygen percent
Hydrocarbons (ppm)
Carbon monoxide percent
Carbon dioxide percent
100 18.42 4.4 0.011 1.40
90 18.27 5.0 0.017 1.50
0 18.40 3.7 0.018 1.42
The esterified soybean oil used is presently being purchased from a supplier. The oil is already esterified. It is hoped that a portable esterification system, which could be used by individual farmers or a cooperative group of farmers, can be constructed for demonstration use. Additional work is needed to learn what processing steps are required to be sure no harm will be done to the engine or to the environment. This work is being funded in part by a grant from the Missouri Soybean Merchandising Council.
Economic comparison
Diesel fuel is sold on a per gallon basis, while soy oil sells by the pound. For comparison, some equivalent basis, such as volume or Btu content, is needed.
Consider a volume basis. Soy ester weighs about 7.7 pounds per gallon. Number 2 diesel fuel weighs about 7.1 pounds per gallon. If soy ester can be substituted on a one-to-one basis with diesel fuel, 7.7 times the price per pound for soy ester would equal the price per gallon for diesel fuel, or 0.13 times the price per gallon of diesel fuel would equal the price per pound for soy ester. For example, if soy ester costs 20 cents per pound, the equivalent cost for diesel fuel would be $1.54. Or, if diesel fuel costs $1 per gallon, the equivalent cost per pound for soy ester would be 13 cents per pound.
Since diesel fuel contains more heat energy per gallon than soy ester, a one-to-one comparison may not be fair. Using values from Table 1, number 2 diesel fuel contains about 138,400 Btu per gallon and soy ester about 132,900 Btu per gallon. About 1.04 gallons of soy ester would be required to perform the same work as one gallon of diesel fuel. On an energy basis, soy ester at 20 cents per pound would be equivalent to a diesel fuel cost of $1.60 per gallon.
Potential oil yield for soybeans is about 18 percent. That is, from a bushel of soybeans weighing 60 pounds, 10.8 pounds of oil can be removed. The remaining meal may be sold for about $185 per ton (or 9.25 cents per pound). Oil yield from canola and sunflower ranges from 40 to 45 percent.
Potential future use
The first commercial use of vegetable oil in the U.S. will likely be as a blend with diesel fuel. Several test vehicles are operating at present on blended fuel at Lambert Field airport in St. Louis.
Austria, Germany and Switzerland have removed all sales and road tax from biodiesel. If the total tax associated with the sale of diesel fuel in Missouri were about 30 cents per gallon and soy ester could be produced for $3 or less per gallon (if it were not taxed), then it would not cost the consumer any additional money to use a 10/90 soy ester/diesel fuel blend.
Emphasis on control of engine emissions is increasing. Using diesel fuel will require provisions for "cleaning" the exhaust. This eventually may make biofuel the fuel of choice, either alone or as a biofuel/diesel blend, because it naturally causes less air pollution.
Goering, C.E., A.W. Schwab, M.F. Daugherty, E.H. Pryde and A.J. Heakin. 1982. "Fuel Properties of Eleven Vegetable Oils." Transactions of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 1472-77; 1483.
Peterson, C.L., M.E. Casada, L.M. Safley, Jr., J.D. Broder, L. Perkins, D.L. Auld. 1990. Agriculturally Produced Fuels. ASAE Paper 905532. St. Joseph, Michigan.
Peterson, C.L., M. Feldman, R.A. Korus, D.L. Auld. 1991. "Batch Type Transesterification Process For Winter Rape Oil." Applied Engineering in Agriculture 7(6). Pages 711-716.
"Vegetable Oil Fuels." 1982. Proceedings of the International Conference on Plant and Vegetable Oils as Fuels. Publication 4-82, American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 2950 Niles Road, St. Joseph, Michigan 49085.
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Sometimes We Are Beautiful
Lay Waste The Poets
One of the most innovative and multi-faceted bands to have been a part of the scene, Inked In Blood left an indelible mark on metalcore. After self-releasing their EP “Awakening Vesuvius” in 2004, they recorded “Lay Waste the Poets”, their first full length, in 2005 for Facedown Records. The lead single from that album was picked up by Mtv’s Headbangers’ Ball and after touring extensively to promote “Poets”, Inked In Blood would seclude themselves within the confines of the Spectre Studios compound to work with Troy Glessner on a new album. The result was “Sometimes We Are Beautiful”, a 2007 record that was heavier and more melodic than any of their previous works. The hooks were founded on addictive melodies and singable choruses; in fact “Sometimes We Are Beautiful” was rooted firmly in the tradition of ‘evolving hardcore’ where the energy, intelligence and beauty of a band’s sound reflected the current state of the scene. In 2008 Inked In Blood disbanded saying “The good times were more than good. They were life-changing, and the most precious we’ve ever had.”
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Sweden faces weeks of uncertainty after close election
Breaking newsPolitics
By Insider Last updated Sep 10, 2018 366
STOCKHOLM — Sweden woke Monday to the prospect of weeks of political uncertainty after the country’s two rival blocs failed to secure a clear governing majority in elections that saw a boost for a far-right party amid growing discontent with large-scale immigration.
With most of the ballots counted, the governing center-left bloc had a razor-thin edge over the center-right opposition Alliance, with roughly 40 percent each.
Sunday’s election saw the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant party with roots in a neo-Nazi movement, win about 18 percent, up from the 13 percent it gained four years earlier.
The party, which has worked to moderate its image in past years, gained on a backlash against the challenges of integrating hundreds of thousands of immigrants that arrived in the Scandinavian nation over the past years.
Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, who brought the Social Democrats to power in 2014, said he intended to remain in the job. The center-left party emerged with the greatest share of the vote — 28.4 percent as the count neared completion — yet looking at holding fewer parliament seats than four years ago.
The leader of the Moderates party that came in second, Ulf Kristersson, has already called on Lofven to resign and claimed the right to form Sweden’s next government.
The center-right, four-party Alliance has said it would meet Monday to discuss how to move forward and demand that Lofven, head of the minority, two-party governing coalition, resign.
Final election returns were expected later in the week. The preliminary results made it unlikely any party would secure a majority of 175 seats in the 349-seat Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament.
With the prospect of weeks or months of coalition talks before the next government is formed, Swedish tabloid Expressen headlined its front page Monday: “Chaos.”
Both the left-leaning bloc led by the Social Democrats and the center-right bloc in which the Moderates is the largest of four parties have said they would refuse to consider the Sweden Democrats as a coalition partner.
Lofven told his supporters the election presented “a situation that all responsible parties must deal with,” adding that “a party with roots in Nazism” would “never ever offer anything responsible, but hatred.”
“We have a moral responsibility. We must gather all forces for good. We won’t mourn, we will organize ourselves,” he said.
Sweden — home to the Nobel prizes and militarily neutral for the better part of two centuries — has been known for its comparatively open doors to migrants and refugees. Sunday’s general election was the first since Sweden, which a population of 10 million, took in a record 163,000 refugees in 2015 — the highest per capita of any European country.
Turnout in the election was reported at 84.4 percent, up from 83 percent in 2014.
electionSweden
Cross-border ties remain strong after El Paso mass shooting
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Officials say defense consultant died from assault
A federal defense consultant whose body was found in a Delaware landfill was assaulted and died of blunt force trauma, the state medical examiner's office said Friday.
DOVER, Del. – A federal defense consultant whose body was found in a Delaware landfill was assaulted and died of blunt force trauma, the state medical examiner's office said Friday.
Officials offered no other details about the death of John Wheeler III of New Castle, whose body was found among a load of trash being dumped at the Wilmington landfill on the morning of Dec. 31.
Officials determined several weeks ago that Wheeler was a homicide victim, but they did not disclose any other details. Authorities had said they would not release the cause of death until toxicology tests were completed. They still refused to disclose the results of those tests on Friday.
Hal Brown, deputy director of the medical examiner's office, said specific results of toxicology tests are not released in homicide cases, but that if the presence of drugs or alcohol was deemed relevant, that fact would be included in the cause of death.
Brown said blunt force trauma involves "nonpenetrating" injuries such as concussions, contusions, lacerations, broken bones and abrasions, which are distinguished from penetrating wounds inflicted by stabbing or shooting.
"It's the result of an external object impacting your body," he said, adding that the object could be a hand, a foot or a weapon.
Wheeler, 66, was seen on video surveillance cameras wandering around downtown Wilmington in a disoriented manner in the two days before his body was found.
Officials with the Department of Health and Social Service, which oversees the medical examiner's office, referred calls seeking further details about the autopsy results to Newark police, who are leading the investigation, and to the state attorney general's office.
But Lt. Mark Farrall, a spokesman for Newark police, said he was unaware that the medical examiner's office had released the cause of death and he could not provide any details.
"We're still looking for anybody who might have information as to who may have been involved in the case," Farrall. said. "... No suspects have been identified at this time."
Jason Miller, a spokesman for Attorney General Beau Biden, said the Department of Justice would not provide any information on how Wheeler was assaulted, what injuries he suffered or what the results of the toxicology tests were.
Biden's office and police investigators have sought to keep information about the investigation from the public.
Biden's office filed a court motion to seal a search warrant for Wheeler's home, even though police had not originally requested that it be sealed. Three search warrants for searches of Wheeler's cell phone and his 1993 Oldsmobile also were sealed at the request of Newark police.
Police also have refused to release any of the video surveillance tapes investigators have looked at, including one of Wheeler in downtown Wilmington the night before his body was found.
The garbage truck that dumped Wheeler's body collected all of its trash from commercial disposal bins in Newark, several miles from both his home in New Castle and from downtown Wilmington.
"We still don't know how he got to Newark," Farrall said Friday.
Jim Jordan Is Defiant as Allegations Mount, and Supporters Point to ‘Deep State’
Father, suffering from dementia, shoots daughter
Not guilty plea made in expired boarding pass case
Worried about a radioactive ocean? A reality check
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Tag: EMQ’s with Vnter
EMQ’s with VNTER
Hi Everyone. Welcome to our new EMQ’s interview with. Swedish Rock band VNTER. Huge thanks to vocalist/guitarist Andy Aura for taking part!
My name is Andy, I play guitar and I’m the lead singer of VNTER. The idea of the band started when my former band called it quits and I felt that I wasn’t done playing huge arena rock. So I took what I thought was the greatest songs from that era, wrote some new songs and put together a bunch of great musicians and we formed VNTER in 2017.
We wanted a Swedish word as a band name and we got stuck on the word vinter that means winter in English. But if you google vinter you get over five million hits so I thought if we take away I from the word it will not only look awesome we will be the first thing that comes up when you google it and everyone can say it. I think it’s a pretty unique band name.
I’m from Sweden and man the metal scene here is fantastic. We got so many great bands that made it big in not only Sweden but also the world. Just take In Flames, Dark Tranquillity, Dead by April, Avatar, the list could go on forever and the city where I live in is known for its metal sound – the Gothenburg sound.
We released 2 singles and a video for one of them one year ago. Now we’re waiting to release the first song of 13 in June and it´s going to be fun to constantly keep up to date with new music for over one year straight.
Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro is a huge influence for me, Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters, Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age. But I also love people who do their own thing like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and even people who don’t play music.
I heard the album “Stay Hungry” from Twisted Sister when I was 6 years old and from that day I just loved music. I started to play the guitar a couple of years later but my guitar teacher kept hitting me on my fingers when I played the wrong notes so I quit and it wasn’t until maybe 10 years after that I started to play for real.
I would just love to do a collaboration with Biffy Clyro, which would be a dream come true.
I would like to play Lollapalooza in Argentina, the South American fans are crazy and I want to experience that.
Hmmmm, nothing really weird so far, I got a cook book because I worked as a chef for many years. That was really thoughtful I think.
Don’t stop supporting the bands you love. It means the world to us.
Easy, Freddie Mercury. I just love everything about that man but mostly his awesome voice and charisma.
Playing live, writing songs, being interviewed and recording an album. I don’t hate anything; some things can be less fun like taking promo pictures, mailing a lot and taking care of the economy.
There are a lot of places closing and festivals dying I would make sure that up and coming bands have somewhere to play their shows and help finance festivals. It’s the small bands today that you will see on the huge stage tomorrow.
“Appetite for Destruction” – Guns n Roses. Now that’s an album!
When I was a kid I recorded Brian May ´s solo from ‘We Will Rock You’ with Queen 15 times in a row on cassette and I just loved that format to consume music. So my answer is cassette, it’s something really genuine about it that I like.
We have an awesome venue here in Gothenburg called Sticky Fingers and it was back in 2014 I think. We opened up for the legendary man called Strings or Strängen in Swedish. He played in The Hellacopters back in the day and he tragically passed away in 2017. It was a huge crowd and the atmosphere was insane.
Probably something else creative. I do have a podcast where I talk to musicians, booking companies, record companies and so on, maybe more of that. But on the other hand if I hadn’t been a musician the podcast wouldn’t exist. I think I would go deeper into being a chef, work in a Michelin star restaurant, like really modern and cool food.
Daniel Ek – Founder of Spotify
Tommy Lee – Mötley Crue
Dave Grohl – Foo Fighters
We’re about to release the first of thirteen singles in June. Every month for thirteen months we are releasing a new song and after that the album comes out, but by then everyone already heard the songs. I’m really looking forward to that long process. We’re planning to go on tour as an opening act and to play festivals next year. So that’s what’s in sight for the near future.
We use Facebook and Instagram, just search for VNTER and you should see our page coming up. We also use Soundcloud to send our album as a secret link to record companies and booking agencies. And we’re on every major streaming platform.
Hahahaha, what is even a Jaffa cake? If they are called cake, they must be a cake so I totally say that they are biscuits. Just googled it and they look good!
Dont stop working on what you believe in. Who should believe in it if you don’t? Let the struggle be real and have fun doing it. Someday, someway if you work hard and long enough you will make it.
Thanks you so much, this was a lot of fun
Posted on May 13, 2019 Categories EMQ'sTags EMQ's, EMQ's with Vnter, Interview, sweden, Swedish Rock, VnterLeave a comment on EMQ’s with VNTER
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Tag: TripHop
AMERICAN BEAUTY: KELELA
Let’s see, this beauty Kelela Mizanekristos is a singer based in Los Angeles; Her heritage is Ethiopian, and as a teenager she was voted Most Likely to Be a Pop Star, Alternative R&B vocalist and songwriter. Kelela was born in Washington D.C., grew up in suburban Maryland and didn’t have aspirations as a singer until she started studying jazz. She moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and Kelela’s mixtape CUT 4 ME was released on October 1st, 2013. Her sound consist of R&B, Electronic, Experimental, and Trip-hop! In April, Paper Mag listed Kelela as one of the Most Beautiful people Class of 2015,
This music video “A Message” will be intriguing for all Anime lovers at the end. Kelela’s video is totally mesmerizing. It focuses hard on Kelela’s face, as she cuts off her waist-length dreads and turns into an anime hallucination.“A Message” speaks to the misery that Kelela was experiencing at the time. The song represents the “rejection and amputation” period of a relationship, in which the entire EP represents the turbulent lifespan of a relationship.
What’s Next for Kelela
Kelela is an artist who explores different elements of genres and Loves hard. Her upcoming EP should be different from her mixtape which definitely revealed post-heartache and post-breakup songs, songs that were surrounding a relationship, and then a few songs that point to the actual cusp of change. To fall in and out of Love and start all over again.
Kelela is currently touring and performing at festivals overseas in Europe and in France. She is still working on her first EP debut, which was supposed to drop early May but it was delayed until further notice. She only wants to release the best and really felt bad about the delay of it to her fans that she apologized via twitter. Kelela has a gang of other songs she has recorded, especially this one with recording artist Tink Kelela x Tink “Want it” .
For more information on Kelela and to keep track of what’s going on with her Follow her Below on all her social media pages ✌😜
Follow Kelela @ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud
Follow Ever Evolved @ Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
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In Syria “Withdrawal,” Less is Probably More
October 29, 2019 October 29, 2019 Thomas L. Knapp
When US president Donald Trump announced his plan to relocate a few dozen US soldiers in Syria — getting them out of the way of a pending Turkish invasion — the Washington establishment exploded in rage at what it mis-characterized as a US “withdrawal” from Syria.
Instead of fighting that mis-characterization, Trump embraced it, pretending that an actual withdrawal was in progress and announcing on October 9 that “we’re bringing our folks back home. ”
If he’s telling the truth, hooray! But so far as I can discern, no, he isn’t telling the truth.
Since taking office (after campaigning on getting the US out of military quagmires in the Middle East and Central Asia), Trump has boosted US troop levels in Syria from 500 or fewer under Barack Obama to at least 2,000 and possibly as many as 4,000.
Even at its most ambitious, the supposed US “withdrawal” from Syria consisted of moving a few hundred soldiers across the border into Iraq, from which they could launch operations in Syria at will.
The Iraqi government objected to hosting more US troops on its soil, so now the plan has changed to deploying elements of an armored brigade combat team (“less than a battalion,” so call it “less than a thousand troops” depending on what kind of battalion) to protect Syrian oil fields from the Islamic State (and from Syria’s own government).
Exactly how many US soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines were in Syria prior to the supposed withdrawal? How many are there now? How many will be there by the end of the year?
That’s hard to say with any exactitude. Over the last several years (and not just on Trump’s watch), the US government’s troop level claims have become less specific and more general, less matters of public record and more notional state secrets.
But so far, according to those claims, Trump has escalated US involvement in every conflict he inherited from Obama, even after promising to do the opposite and even while pretending to do the opposite.
If past performance is an indicator of future results, what’s going on in Syria isn’t a US withdrawal at all. Instead of US forces departing the country, more troops and heavier weapons seem to be flowing into the country (and the region, including B-1B bombers to Saudi Arabia).
Will Trump’s non-interventionist supporters finally notice or admit that, as usual, his rhetoric and his actions don’t match? Fat chance.
Libertarian Advocacy Journalismaction, change, conflict, future, government, history, intervention, libertarian, military, order, reading, trump
Written by Thomas L. Knapp
Tom has worked in journalism — sometimes as an amateur, sometimes professionally — for more than 35 years and has been a full-time libertarian writer, editor, and publisher since 2000. He’s the former managing editor of the Henry Hazlitt Foundation, the publisher of Rational Review News Digest (2003-present), former media coordinator and senior news analyst at the Center for a Stateless Society (2009-2015) and also works at Antiwar.com. He lives in north central Florida.
Guns and History
Evil Among Us
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Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments Program in Riley County, Kansas totaled $164,694 from 1995-2020‡.
Counties in Riley County, Kansas Receiving Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments Program payments, 1995-2020‡
1 Stanton County, Kansas $21,183,663 4.7% 4.7%
2 Scott County, Kansas $20,225,571 4.5% 9.2%
3 Stevens County, Kansas $19,263,148 4.3% 13.6%
4 Thomas County, Kansas $18,246,741 4.1% 17.6%
5 Greeley County, Kansas $17,630,228 3.9% 21.6%
6 Wichita County, Kansas $16,094,655 3.6% 25.2%
7 Sheridan County, Kansas $15,450,096 3.5% 28.6%
8 Gray County, Kansas $14,657,246 3.3% 31.9%
9 Hamilton County, Kansas $14,629,966 3.3% 35.2%
10 Sumner County, Kansas $13,570,829 3.0% 38.2%
11 Harper County, Kansas $11,845,324 2.6% 40.8%
12 Morton County, Kansas $11,826,111 2.6% 43.5%
13 Finney County, Kansas $11,628,842 2.6% 46.1%
14 Sherman County, Kansas $11,553,758 2.6% 48.6%
15 Haskell County, Kansas $11,526,062 2.6% 51.2%
16 Grant County, Kansas $10,691,960 2.4% 53.6%
17 Kearny County, Kansas $10,450,687 2.3% 55.9%
18 Lane County, Kansas $8,713,683 1.9% 57.9%
19 Ford County, Kansas $8,543,759 1.9% 59.8%
20 Logan County, Kansas $7,914,996 1.8% 61.6%
21 Wallace County, Kansas $6,186,200 1.4% 63.0%
22 Cheyenne County, Kansas $6,016,683 1.3% 64.3%
23 Rice County, Kansas $5,754,478 1.3% 65.6%
24 Gove County, Kansas $5,170,045 1.2% 66.7%
25 Seward County, Kansas $5,014,293 1.1% 67.9%
26 Reno County, Kansas $5,013,221 1.1% 69.0%
27 McPherson County, Kansas $4,999,518 1.1% 70.1%
28 Rawlins County, Kansas $4,977,479 1.1% 71.2%
29 Ness County, Kansas $4,545,841 1.0% 72.2%
30 Kingman County, Kansas $4,510,822 1.0% 73.2%
31 Harvey County, Kansas $4,495,759 1.0% 74.2%
32 Anderson County, Kansas $4,266,891 1.0% 75.2%
33 Norton County, Kansas $3,873,546 0.9% 76.0%
34 Hodgeman County, Kansas $3,750,700 0.8% 76.9%
35 Edwards County, Kansas $3,626,905 0.8% 77.7%
36 Cherokee County, Kansas $3,624,692 0.8% 78.5%
37 Sedgwick County, Kansas $3,541,473 0.8% 79.3%
38 Pawnee County, Kansas $3,402,261 0.8% 80.1%
39 Stafford County, Kansas $3,208,837 0.7% 80.8%
40 Pratt County, Kansas $3,158,864 0.7% 81.5%
41 Labette County, Kansas $3,153,793 0.7% 82.2%
42 Coffey County, Kansas $3,110,984 0.7% 82.9%
43 Crawford County, Kansas $3,090,130 0.7% 83.6%
44 Graham County, Kansas $3,014,564 0.7% 84.2%
45 Allen County, Kansas $2,993,527 0.7% 84.9%
46 Franklin County, Kansas $2,992,233 0.7% 85.6%
47 Cowley County, Kansas $2,982,261 0.7% 86.2%
48 Lyon County, Kansas $2,935,802 0.7% 86.9%
49 Trego County, Kansas $2,906,600 0.6% 87.5%
50 Meade County, Kansas $2,864,960 0.6% 88.2%
51 Barton County, Kansas $2,832,808 0.6% 88.8%
52 Montgomery County, Kansas $2,814,125 0.6% 89.5%
53 Osage County, Kansas $2,760,695 0.6% 90.1%
54 Butler County, Kansas $2,566,260 0.6% 90.6%
55 Ellsworth County, Kansas $2,218,159 0.5% 91.1%
56 Saline County, Kansas $2,127,114 0.5% 91.6%
57 Wilson County, Kansas $2,118,470 0.5% 92.1%
58 Linn County, Kansas $1,972,902 0.4% 92.5%
59 Marion County, Kansas $1,955,134 0.4% 93.0%
60 Rush County, Kansas $1,902,954 0.4% 93.4%
61 Nemaha County, Kansas $1,785,156 0.4% 93.8%
62 Douglas County, Kansas $1,691,399 0.4% 94.2%
63 Rooks County, Kansas $1,676,081 0.4% 94.5%
64 Miami County, Kansas $1,591,853 0.4% 94.9%
65 Clark County, Kansas $1,575,044 0.4% 95.2%
66 Wabaunsee County, Kansas $1,504,304 0.3% 95.6%
67 Neosho County, Kansas $1,495,349 0.3% 95.9%
68 Shawnee County, Kansas $1,413,011 0.3% 96.2%
69 Decatur County, Kansas $1,299,061 0.3% 96.5%
70 Ellis County, Kansas $1,053,945 0.2% 96.8%
71 Dickinson County, Kansas $1,042,628 0.2% 97.0%
72 Barber County, Kansas $961,431 0.2% 97.2%
73 Johnson County, Kansas $897,041 0.2% 97.4%
74 Doniphan County, Kansas $893,769 0.2% 97.6%
75 Morris County, Kansas $866,483 0.2% 97.8%
76 Bourbon County, Kansas $786,248 0.2% 98.0%
77 Mitchell County, Kansas $742,056 0.2% 98.1%
78 Chase County, Kansas $723,967 0.2% 98.3%
79 Kiowa County, Kansas $701,797 0.2% 98.5%
80 Jefferson County, Kansas $598,988 0.1% 98.6%
81 Jackson County, Kansas $587,495 0.1% 98.7%
82 Phillips County, Kansas $559,940 0.1% 98.8%
83 Woodson County, Kansas $558,476 0.1% 99.0%
84 Greenwood County, Kansas $528,203 0.1% 99.1%
85 Lincoln County, Kansas $435,579 0.1% 99.2%
86 Atchison County, Kansas $435,074 0.1% 99.3%
87 Smith County, Kansas $431,225 0.1% 99.4%
88 Pottawatomie County, Kansas $411,750 0.1% 99.5%
89 Marshall County, Kansas $397,372 0.1% 99.6%
90 Leavenworth County, Kansas $312,609 0.1% 99.6%
91 Russell County, Kansas $277,196 0.1% 99.7%
92 Clay County, Kansas $245,609 0.1% 99.7%
93 Riley County, Kansas $164,694 0.0% 99.8%
94 Ottawa County, Kansas $146,368 0.0% 99.8%
95 Wyandotte County, Kansas $137,640 0.0% 99.8%
96 Washington County, Kansas $134,633 0.0% 99.9%
97 Geary County, Kansas $132,615 0.0% 99.9%
98 Osborne County, Kansas $120,078 0.0% 99.9%
99 Brown County, Kansas $97,877 0.0% 100.0%
100 Cloud County, Kansas $70,441 0.0% 100.0%
101 Jewell County, Kansas $65,913 0.0% 100.0%
102 Elk County, Kansas $30,351 0.0% 100.0%
103 Chautauqua County, Kansas $18,193 0.0% 100.0%
104 Republic County, Kansas $9,584 0.0% 100.0%
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States share Medicaid fraud funding woes
Members of a congressional panel this month listened to repeated tales of inadequate funding and antiquated technology preventing numerous state Medicaid agencies from effectively combating fraud cases that result in billions of dollars lost nationally each year.
Some state Medicaid agencies are critically underfunded and rely on 20-year-old computers to detect and track fraud, forcing them to seek the help of the private sector in identifying and recovering money from fraudulent claims, Medicaid officials told members of the House Commerce Committee's Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. Medicaid may have lost $17 billion to fraud and abuse during fiscal 1998, according to General Accounting Office reports.
Subcommittee chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), called for aid from the federal level, specifically from the Health Care Financing Administration and the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services.
"As anyone who has recently purchased a personal computer can tell you, technology is changing so rapidly...a [computer] purchased five years ago is hopelessly antiquated," Upton said in his opening remarks. "How, then, can we expect Medicaid state agencies, some of which are still using 10- or 20-year-old computer systems to process and review Medicaid claims, to have any hope of uncovering these new, highly complex fraud schemes?"
Penny Thompson, program integrity director at HCFA, said in her testimony that the agency is modifying its National Fraud Investigation Database, which contains Medicare information, to include Medicaid cases. That should help the states' efforts in identifying and stopping corrupt providers nationwide.
The agency also recently established a national fraud and abuse electronic bulletin board, co-sponsored by the American Public Human Services Association, to enable states to share information on pertinent issues, she said.
However, Thompson was not convinced that technology alone could solve the problem. "Technology can play a great role, but it doesn't substitute for expertise, resources and commitment that are [essential] for fraud programs," she told FCW.
Last year, in an effort to fight Medicaid fraud and waste, HCFA hired Malcolm Sparrow, an expert on health care issues, to conduct a series of seminars nationwide at which state personnel could discuss their concerns.
Those seminars determined that many states have "inadequate technological infrastructures and a basic inability to interrogate databases efficiently to ferret out proper claims."
HCFA chief information officer Gary Christoph did not attend the subcommittee hearings but did offer his views on technology's role in the Medicaid fraud process. "As we get more sophisticated in analyzing information [and data], there are ways that technology can help us, [specifically] through data mining," he said.
"I'm very interested in exploring the new data mining techniques because it's a tool that can help, but it's very difficult...because you can't eliminate 100 percent of the risk. You need to put tools in place to try and help you because what you might find today, you won't find tomorrow," Christoph said, alluding to the highly sophisticated schemes and mobility of individuals attempting to commit Medicaid fraud.
Subcommittee vice chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said he was impressed with HCFA's technological efforts and plans to fight fraud that are under way.
But he noted that the overall structure of the system—including policies in which the federal government matches only 50 percent of money spent to combat fraud by states; the brief, 60-day time period for states to return overpayments made to recipients with federal money; and the lenient suspension rules meted out to individuals convicted of Medicaid fraud—need examination and legislation. He said the time for fact-finding missions is over.
"You don't need to [research] it—you need to deal with it and find a solution," Burr said. "[Frankly], HCFA doesn't hear the state folks." He said he anticipates legislative language that would institute some changes. "But I hope HCFA adopts them on their own" before that, he said.
A HCFA World Wide Web site located at fightfraud.hcfa.gov/mfs contains a listing of state statutes that target Medicaid fraud. It includes links to states' legislation on program integrity as well as contact information for the programs.
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New Esports BTEC a game-changer (sponsored)
Sat 17th Oct 2020, 12.40
The billion-dollar market for competitive video gaming is continuing to rise, with new jobs requiring fresh talent. And it’s not just about playing – like sports, the sector requires those with transferable skills in marketing, sales, coaching, commentary, editing and lots more. To facilitate this, new esports BTECs from Pearson and the British Esports Association aim to foster the workforce of the future, writes Pearson and the British Esports Association.
The worlds of education and esports are colliding.
Over the past few years, UK universities and colleges have begun offering courses in the space to help people get the skills to land a job in the burgeoning field.
Esports is a hugely popular recreational activity that offers many job and career opportunities around the world. It’s different from standard video gaming in that esports is competitive, it’s human vs human and usually has an engaging spectator element to it, like traditional sports. Viewers typically tune in to watch matches live streamed on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, as opposed to standard television channels.
Esports tournaments see amateur or professional gamers compete against one another for a cash prize. There are more than 40 esports games, including 5v5 battle arena game League of Legends, 1v1 sports game FIFA, 4v4 shooter Call of Duty and more. Some tournaments have prize pools of more than $1m, with the biggest reaching $30m and beyond.
Overall, it’s estimated that the global esports market will generate revenues of more than $1bn in 2020, with almost 500m viewers around the world.
Like sports, esports requires a host of talent across a range of disciplines, from commentary to coaching, marketing to management, broadcasting, production, PR, journalism and everything in-between. These skills are transferable, leading to a wide network of career pathways crossing into other sectors, for example sports, broadcasting, cybersecurity and the wider digital sphere and beyond.
Pearson and the British Esports Association recognise and welcome this, and are leading the way in esports education to create pathways for young people seeking careers in esports and other closely linked digital industries.
In April 2020, the pair linked up to develop the first esports BTEC qualifications of their kind in the world. Institutions in the UK and around the world now have the opportunity to offer these new level 2 and 3 qualifications to students as of September 2020, with funding confirmed in the UK from the Education and Skills Funding Agency.
Aside from this, British Esports has been developing a wealth of esports careers advice, and Pearson has been producing useful content for students, teacher resources and others to educate them, including this piece busting common myths around esports.
Today, there are a host of colleges and universities running esports courses in the UK, including Staffordshire University, The Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies, part of Nottingham Trent University, the University of Chichester and more. You can see a full list of colleges and universities involved in esports here.
The education sphere is also embracing esports’ competitive side as a recreational activity, too. More than 130 school, college and alternative provision teams take part in the British Esports Championships, a series of tournaments for students aged 12 and above. Matches usually take place in classrooms after school each Wednesday, but students are now also allowed to play from home in light of the covid-19 situation.
Teachers and students have reported a raft of benefits from the Championships, including increased attendance, behaviour and concentration levels. Other benefits of esports include the promotion of communication, leadership and social skills, greater reaction times, confidence, making new friends, having fun and more.
One such activity promoting the benefits of competitive gaming is World Esports Day. Taking place on October 24th, this will help increase awareness of the activity, with companies, teams, players and others getting involved with livestreams, gaming sessions, discussion panels and more, all whilst raising money for charity at the same time.
Kalam Neale, Curriculum Lead at Barnsley College, commented: “Esports education is providing a brand new, creative, digital learning environment where students are exceeding expectations, achieving high grades and developing personally, socially and holistically to become more confident individuals. They are employment-ready with the added opportunities for learners to progress onto Higher Education at university.
“The esports qualifications allow us as educators to continue to realise our vision for our learners, in order to transform lives, ensure learners have a great time, achieve their aims and progress onto their chosen destination in employment or Higher Education.”
For teachers and those in education who are looking for more information on how to get involved in esports, there’s the Esports in Education Summit, taking place online on November 10th, held by AoC Sport and British Esports and sponsored by Pearson. It’s free for teachers and leaders in education and registration is open now.
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Home / Special Features / Regular Features / Sustainable / Sustainable: A look at BOMA 360 certification for buildings
Advocates say the BOMA 360 Performance Program complements LEED and offers other useful information.
Sustainable: A look at BOMA 360 certification for buildings
By: Frank Jossi June 3, 2013 1:39 pm
Cushman & Wakefield/NorthMarq decided to seek BOMA 360 designation in 2011 for McGladrey Plaza, a 20-floor tower built in 1969 at 801 Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. (File photo: Bill Klotz)
The commercial real estate industry has come to embrace third-party organizations that use different formulas to determine how well buildings perform.
The best known of these is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program sponsored by the Washington, D.C.-based United States Green Building Council.
But the BOMA 360 Performance Program has emerged, and advocates say it complements LEED and offers other useful information. (BOMA is the acronym for Building Owners and Managers Association.)
“You’re comparing your performance to a broad base of industry practitioners,” said Brian Burg, vice president and general manager of Bloomington-based Cushman & Wakefield/NorthMarq. “LEED is focused more on energy consumption and sustainable operating practices. BOMA 360 requires that, too, but recognizes you’re operating a piece of commercial real estate and you have various other areas of performance you need to look at.”
As a result, Burg doesn’t see LEED and BOMA 360 as competitors.
The program remains much smaller than LEED, which has certified more than 200 buildings in Minnesota. Still, the 4-year-old BOMA program has attracted 16 building owners, said Kevin Lewis, executive director of the Greater Minneapolis BOMA.
He lauded the owners of BOMA 360 properties for their “commitment to have their buildings perform at the highest levels in all major areas of building operations and management” and to “have their buildings operate with the highest standards of excellence.”
Among the downtown Minneapolis buildings carrying the BOMA 360 designation: the IDS Center, the U.S. Bancorp Center, Campbell Mithun Tower, Capella Tower, Wells Fargo Center, McGladrey Plaza and the 333 South Seventh Street building (formerly known as Accenture Tower). A handful of other suburban office buildings, and the Warren E. Burger Federal Building and United States Courthouse in St. Paul, have BOMA 360 certification.
The Washington, D.C.-based BOMA International, which operates the program, reports that more than 462 buildings in 50 plus cities around the country have the BOMA 360 designation. Among the cities with more than 25 BOMA 360 buildings are Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
A study released last year by the organization showed that BOMA 360 buildings scored higher in 52 of 54 categories related to tenant satisfaction than buildings that do not have the designation. The study, conducted by Kingsley Associates of San Francisco, found that employers working in BOMA 360 properties say they are satisfied with the value they receive for the rent they paid, they rate the indoor air quality high and they are satisfied with security.
So, what is BOMA 360?
The program certifies buildings that meet the standards in several areas, among them sustainability. The “building operations and management” section, for example, evaluates floor measure standards, financial management, insurance and green purchasing.
An “energy” section evaluates purchases of Energy Star-rated products and the use of energy audits. The “sustainability” section seeks information from building owners on waste management and recycling, indoor air quality, water management, green cleaning and traffic reduction programs.
But what Burg likes is that the designation goes beyond sustainability. The “life safety/security/risk management” area covers everything from emergency preparedness to the presence of an emergency communications network.
The training and development part of the application looks at professional licenses, professional development plans and so forth. BOMA 360 also wants to see tenant relations’ activities and community involvement.
Cushman & Wakefield/NorthMarq decided to seek BOMA 360 designation in 2011 for McCladrey Plaza, a 20-floor skyscraper built in 1969 at 801 Nicollet Mall. Burg, the building’s general manager, recalled the process wasn’t lengthy. “We were able to complete the application by working on it several hours at a time over the course of a week or two,” he said.
Cushman & Wakefield/NorthMarq’s standardized operating procedures are divided into the same areas BOMA 360 covers in its application, he said. That made the paperwork chores required a bit easier and the application fee was light on the pocketbook, a mere $1,250.
For BOMA members, the certification costs from $750 for less than 100,000 square feet to $1,900 for more than 600,000 square feet. Non-BOMA members pay $300 more than BOMA members.
McCladrey Plaza was compared with other buildings like it in the BOMA portfolio by the organization’s national staff, he said. Outside of seeing how the building’s energy and water use stacked up with peer properties, his secondary goal was to see if the property could compete against others in terms of good management practices — something few other ratings programs provide.
BOMA 360 can also be employed to showcase energy and management practices, said Amy Wimmer, general manager of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis. The iconic tower is owned by Houston-based Hines.
BOMA 360 “was everything that is standard for us at Hines,” she said. “It was just a matter of me filling out the paperwork for the assigned sections. The reason I did it? We are already doing these things. Why not get credit for it?”
Burg compares BOMA in contrast to the other major tools. LEED looks at energy and water use and sustainable operating practices. Energy Star focuses mainly on energy consumption, he said. More than a few BOMA 360 buildings have been recognized by LEED certification and Energy Star, he said.
That’s not all that surprising, added Wimmer, because both of them require much of the same information. Once gathered, that data can be plugged into the BOMA 360 application.
Picking which programs to participate in depends on many factors, Burg said. The Ford Center in Minneapolis, which Cushman & Wakefield/NorthMarq serves as leasing agent, wanted and achieved a LEED certification after being renovated by Bloomington-based United Properties. For McGladrey Plaza, the desire was to see how its performance measured up.
“It is always good to self-audit against industry benchmarks,” Burg said. “It is a reminder of purpose, a clarification of priorities, and an opportunity to affirm that you and your team are all pulling on the same rope and in the right direction.
“We learned that we rank with the best in our business.”
The designation also helps sell the building in a small way. “It provides the consumer with some degree of confidence and awareness of the capabilities of the building operator,” he said. “BOMA 360 is another version of a seal of recognition and certification that a building is operated according to respected standards of the industry.”
333 South Seventh Accenture Tower Amy Wimmer Building Owners and Managers Association Campbell Mithun Tower Capella Tower Cushman & Wakefield/NorthMarq Energy Star Ford Center IDS Center Kevin Lewis Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design LEED McGladrey Plaza Nicollet Mall U.S. Bancorp Center United Properties United States Green Building Council Wells Fargo Center 1:39 pm Mon, June 3, 2013 Finance & Commerce
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Tag Archives: Muroc Air Base
Lambart Briefs Daedalians on U.S.’s new Joint Strike Fighter
A F-35 Lightning II test aircraft undergoes a flight check. (Photo courtesy of Lockheed Martin)
All below photos may be seen in higher resolution by simply clicking on them, and the videos all have sound and may be viewed at full screen, also.
The FASF’s Ric Lambart (at left) just briefed the El Paso, TX Daedalian Flight 24 on his 2018 visit to Edwards Air Force Base, CA Flight Test Center and about his introduction to the new Joint Strike Fighter, the Generation 5 new weapons system, the most costly ever purchased by the Pentagon. Here is a depiction of its relative costs:
The F-35 is not just the most expensive warplane ever, it’s the most expensive weapons program ever. But here is exactly how much a single F-35 costs.
A single Air Force F-35A costs a $148 million. One Marine Corps F-35B costs $251 million. A lone Navy F-35C costs a mind-boggling $337 million. Average the three models together, and a “generic” F-35 costs $178 million.
And, you might wonder how much it costs per hour of flight time:
$41,000 per hour.
The U.S. is the first nation to design, manufacture and fly a 5th Generation Jet Fighter. The new F-35, the second “Gen Five” machine, will be operated by thirteen of our closest Allies. It was designed and manufactured by Lockheed Martin, who coincidentally also made its WWII namesake, the P-38 Lightning. It is produced in three (3) models, or “Variants,” as shown above. Notwithstanding its official name, the Lightning II, many of its operational pilots have given it another nickname: The “PANTHER.”
L to R: Colonel Alan Fisher and USAF ROTC Cadet, Ammber Valverde of UTEP and NMSU, chat after the F-35 Power Point presentation. Both are FASF members.
The F-35A model, for the Air Force, the B model, for the Marines and the C Variant, for the USN.
The Marine Corps B Variant can actually take off vertically, just like a helicopter, and can also land vertically. The below short (1:40) video show how this is done:
Here is another short (1:35) video of this USMC F-35B operating off a small WWII type special aircraft carrier, which has neither a catapult nor a slant deck as do all new generations of USN Aircraft carriers. Those features simply are no longer needed for this new USMC F-35 Variant:
Unlike all previous fighters, the F-35 “Lightning II” (named after the high-speed prop-driven Lockheed P-38 Lightning of WWII fame) is unique, not only because of its advanced stealth features, but because it is a flying combat information center, with advanced electronics capabilities never before seen in a new fighter.
It can also fly at supersonic speed for over 170 miles without even engaging its afterburner, which is called flying at “Super Cruise.” The F-35 was designed to work together with the only other 5th Generation fighter, the F-22 “Raptor.” The two ships will work as a team in various combat scenarios, should their help ever be needed.
While the F-22 Raptor is more maneuverable, the F-35 is designed to engage and take out enemy aircraft long before the enemy has even detected the presence of the new flying weapons system. It can carry a wide array of different missiles internally, rather than attached to its fuselage and/or wings. This of course does a great deal to enhance its stealth capabilities.
The Lightning II is actually capable of shooting down enemy aircraft beyond the horizon. The pilots of this futuristic weapons system can actually see in all directions; wherever they look: including directly behind and directly below the fighter. It the pilot looks down between his or her knees, they can see right through the fuselage as though it were invisible.
A number of electronic “eyes” are built right into the ship’s fuselage, and what they “see” is projected right onto the inside of the pilot’s helmet visor – – – a first. These futuristic helmets alone are some $400,000 each! Here is a short (1:28) video about this unique helmet:
Additionally, Inputs from both ground intel and airborne recon craft are all displayed on the F-35’s integrated glass panel touch screen display, again, unlike any of its 4th or 3rd Generation predecessors.
Much like the mysterious Area 51, the existence of which was never even recognized by the Air Force until relatively recently, Edwards Flight Test Center also presents a similar air of mystery, since access to it is so highly restricted.
While on active duty with the Air Force, this reporter often flew in the vicinity of Edwards, but was always kept at a substantial distance, because the air space around the Base was so highly restricted. As a result, this recent visit to the facility was anticipated with no small amount of excitement.
The local Daedalian Flight 56, at Edwards, invited a number of fellow Daedalians from around the country to make this special visit, so that they might learn about the United State’s newest and most advanced airborne weapons system. The 461st Flight Test Squadron, under the command of Lt. Colonel Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton (at right), played official host to the visiting Daedalians. An AFROTC graduate, Col. Hamilton has flown 30 aircraft from a zeppelin to a MiG-15 to an A-10, and, and managed the entire $3 Billion Joint Strike Fighter Developmental Test program out of the Pentagon for all three services. Cinco started his Air Force career as an operational F-15C pilot.
LATE BREAKING USAF NEWS: An officer at Edwards Air Force Base in California last month became the first female test pilot to fly an F-35. See below:
(L-R) Maj. Rachael Winiecki, the first female F-35 test pilot, and Airman 1st Class Heather Rice, her crew chief.
Maj. Rachael Winiecki, a developmental test pilot for Colonel Hamilton’s 461st Flight Test Squadron, flew her first test flight in the Air Force’s most advanced fighter jet this past Dec. 14, according to the USAF.
L to R: Colonel Mario Campos, Flight 24’s Commander, who operated the Power Point Show, and our top Aviation News Scout, Virgil Hemphill. Both are FASF members.
And below, is a final video (2:00 long) showing the F-35 in a number of different combat scenarios and roles as it completed its final test program:
Lambart also gave the history of how Edwards Air Force Base was named, as seen immediately below:
USAAF Captain Glen Edwards.
L to R: Ric Lambart and Laura Kelly, both Daedalians, pose in front of one of Edward’s test F-35’s . Kelly was an Army Helicopter Pilot.
An old archived photo showing some of the Base’s famous Pilots, including Chuck Yeager at the center, with his wife, Glennis, after whom he named his rocket ship.. Yeager was the fist man to break the sound barrier – all at Edwards.
“Pancho” Barnes, (center below) who owned the famous bar and resort, “The Happy Bottom Riding Club,” was one of America’s most famous female aviators in her own right. Aside from being one of Hollywood’s best stunt pilots, she was actually the organizer of the Hollywood film industry’s first Stunt Pilot’s Union. It was at the “Riding Club” that her good friend, Chuck Yeager managed to break some of his ribs just before becoming the first human being to break the mythically impossible Sound Barrier in the Rocket Research Ship, the X-1, which bore his beloved wife’s name, “Glamorous Glennis.” Of course Yeager didn’t tell anyone about his broken ribs for fear of missing this extraordinary opportunity to make history. This particular incident is an episode in 1983 smash hit movie about the early astronauts: “The Right Stuff.” Yeager is played by actor Sam Shepard. Pancho’s Bar and Grill was the favorite hangout of all those heroic early aviators who daily risked life and limb test flying our country’s most advanced new aircraft. The below photograph was for sale at Iconic Auctions, in 2017, at the first offer of $1,000.
L to R: Pioneer Female Pilots: Debie Stanford, Pancho Barnes and Amelia Earhart.
Immediately below, is the 2009 award-winning documentary film’s trailer about the Barnes’ Riding Club and the famed aviatrix herself. It is 2:03 long:
This entry was posted in AVIATION NEWS, HOT NEWS!, NEW VIDEOS and tagged 1983 Movie "The Right Stuff", 3D Helmet, 461st Flight Test Squadron, A-10, A1C Heather Rice, Alan Fisher, Amelia Earhart, Ammber Valverde, Area 51, Aviatrix, Billie Flynn, Capt. Glen Edwards, Chuck and Glennis Yeager, Col. Mario Campos, Daedalian Flight 56, Daedalians, Debie Stanford, Edwards Air Force Base, F-15C, F-35 Lightning II, FASF Members, General Bob Cardenas, Happy Bottom Riding Club, Hollywood Stunt Pilot's Union, Laura Kelly, Lockheed-Martin, Lt. Col. Tucker "Cinco" Hamilton, Maj. Rachael Winiecki USAF, MIG-15, Muroc Air Base, P-38 Lightning, Pancho Barnes, Panther, Power Point Presentation, Short Field Takeoff and Landing, Stealth Fighter, USAF, USMC, USN, Variants, Vertical Takeoff and Landing, Virg Hemphill, Zepplin on January 16, 2019 by FASFRIC.
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Over the past 5 years, the world of MICE events has evolved so profoundly that it had to change its status to “Live Communications”.
Nowadays, the success of an event is directly proportional to the effectiveness of its communication; and communication can be effective only when it manages to involve its audience.
Among all audiences, the sports one, formed by people who become fan driven by passion, is therefore the most receptive and sensitive to the messages that are disseminated during the event in which they are participating.
Following this evolution, and to capture every nuance of this new way of communicating, FIVE came to life.
From the partnership between Casta Diva Live, Casta Diva Events, G2 Eventi and Hy Sport&Event Consulting, FIVE brings together their experiences in the world of MICE events, integrated communication and major sports events worldwide.
Like any ambitious and competitive team, FIVE is proud to deploy today a lineup in which every role is covered by one of the most recognized and appreciated professionality both inside and outside the events market, on a national and international level.
FIVE is committed in maintaining a work culture of inclusiveness and respect. We firmly believe that inclusive and thorough Welfare policies, as well as a strong sustainable approach in all our projects, are essential for any healthy and successful work environment. Therefore we firmly commit to our core values: Accessibility, Adaptability, Sustainability, Respect and a strong Corporate Social Responsibility.
FIVE will always deliver barrier-free projects and a thorough formation of its Teams in regards to accessible services. Inclusion and accessible facilities will be part of all our legacy programmes.
Our projects will include specific trainings to our staff and volunteers to emphasize not only the importance of having dedicated and accessible services, but also how correct words and expressions can make a difference in terms of quality, professional and social image and ethics.
Inclusion and accessible facilities will always be part of our Legacy.
We are specialized in building simple and flexible tools to support complex organizations. By a pragmatic approach, achieved by working within the most prestigious Organizing Committees, FIVE streamlines operations, promoting and developing innovation and readiness exercises. Consistent in strengthen communication, coordination, control and integration (C3I), we are capable to enter a multicultural environment and grow a great winning team.
CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) - Corporate Social Responsibility
FIVE pays attention to its territory and local communities, through a reduction of the environmental impact for energy expenditure and waste collection, together with growing consideration for employee engagement and support of corporate culture. We are willing to contribute to sustainable development, being responsible for future generations and improving relations with our local authorities. We aim at training our staff, being consistent, listening to our stakeholders, communicating and planning. In addition, through engagement, we are committing to lead our clients towards increasingly sustainable conduct, according to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
FIVE is committed in maintaining a work culture of inclusiveness and respect.
We consider diversity as a fundamental strength in our Team and we firmly believe that inclusive and thorough Welfare policies are essential for any work environment.
Sports events, sport federations and all the most important and successful committees worldwide fight against discrimination based on gender identity, sex, age, sexual orientation, physic characteristic, religion, disability, ethnicity or country of origin.
The implementation of a Sustainability Programme is one of our key elements. The IOC’s Agenda 2020 and the New International Norms have opened a path that FIVE wants to fully embrace. Sustainability is often seen as an abstract object, something that we must follow thanks to the common sense or our own rule. Are we sustainable? Are we capable to make the difference? Are we optimising resources to improve efficiency and reduce costs? Are we adapting and further strengthening the principles of good governance and ethics to changing demands? FIVE wants to change this way of approaching the subject, and for all our projects we will always design policies and procedures to ensure that all the national and international regulations have been implemented.
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Aboriginal peoplesadmin2019-01-26T22:48:13+00:00
Let’s look carefully at the word ‘aboriginal’. Ab – original. What does ‘original’ mean? It means ‘first’, right? So, aboriginal people were first people in Canada – British and French came later. Another interesting thing: it’s not ‘people’, it’s ‘peoples’. Why? Because there are many different groups of them.
There are 3 main groups of aboriginal people in Canada:
First Nations = Indians (65%)
Inuit = people of the North (4%)
Metis = mixed (30%)
First Nations/Indians
When Christopher Columbus came to America, he thought that he came to India. So he called people whom he saw ‘Indians’. This was a historical mistake. The name ‘Indians’ was incorrect. So, in 1970s, Canadian government said: ‘Let’s stop using the word ‘Indians’. Instead, we should call these people ‘First Nations’.’
Where do the First Nations people live? Half of them live on reserve land (about 600 communities), and the other half in big urban centres. If you live in Toronto, for example, you can see these people as you walk along the street.
The word ‘Inuit’ means “the people”. They speak English, French and Inuktitut language. They used to be nomadic, continuously travelling across the Arctic, but now they live in 600 small, scattered communities. They hunt and gather most of their food: seals, whale, duck, caribou, fish and berries. Their knowledge of the land, sea and wildlife enabled them to adapt to one of the harshest environments on earth.
The Métis
When British and French came to Canada 400 years ago, they were mostly men. Some of them married local First Nations women, and their children became the group called ‘Metis’. Most of them live in the Prairies. They speak English, French and their own dialect, Michif.
The ancestors of Aboriginal peoples are believed to have migrated from Asia many thousands of years ago. They were well established here long before explorers from Europe first came to North America. Diverse, vibrant First Nations cultures were rooted in religious beliefs about their relationship to the Creator, the natural environment and each other.
Aboriginal and treaty rights are in the Canadian Constitution. Territorial rights were first guaranteed through the Royal Proclamation of 1763 by King George III, and established the basis for negotiating treaties with the newcomers— treaties that were not always fully respected.
From the 1800s until the 1980s, the federal government placed many Aboriginal children in residential schools to educate and assimilate them into mainstream Canadian culture. The schools were poorly funded and inflicted hardship on the students; some were physically abused. Aboriginal languages and cultural practices were mostly prohibited. In 2008, Ottawa formally apologized to the former students. In today’s Canada, Aboriginal peoples enjoy renewed pride and confidence, and have made significant achievements in agriculture, the environment, business and the arts.
Arrival of Europeans
When Europeans explored Canada they found all regions occupied by native peoples they called Indians, because the first explorers thought they had reached the East Indies. The native people lived off the land, some by hunting and gathering, others by raising crops. The Huron-Wendat of the Great Lakes region, like the Iroquois, were farmers and hunters. The Cree and Dene of the Northwest were hunter-gatherers. The Sioux were nomadic, following the bison (buffalo) herd. The Inuit lived off Arctic wildlife. West Coast natives preserved fish by drying and smoking. Warfare was common among Aboriginal groups as they competed for land, resources and prestige. The arrival of European traders, missionaries, soldiers and colonists changed the native way of life forever. Large numbers of Aboriginals died of European diseases to which they lacked immunity. However, Aboriginals and Europeans formed strong economic, religious and military bonds in the first 200 years of coexistence which laid the foundations of Canada.
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Cormac McCarthy (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Bloom's Modern Critical Views African-American Poets: Volume I African-American Poets: Volume II Aldous Huxley Alfred, ...
Author: Harold Bloom
Bloom's Modern Critical Views African-American Poets: Volume I African-American Poets: Volume II Aldous Huxley Alfred, Lord Tennyson Alice Walker American Women Poets: 1650–1950 Amy Tan Arthur Miller Asian-American Writers August Wilson The Bible The Brontës Carson McCullers Charles Dickens Christopher Marlowe Cormac McCarthy C.S. Lewis Dante Alighieri David Mamet Derek Walcott Don DeLillo Doris Lessing Edgar Allan Poe Émile Zola Emily Dickinson Ernest Hemingway Eudora Welty Eugene O’Neill F. Scott Fitzgerald Flannery O’Connor Franz Kafka Gabriel García Márquez
Geoffrey Chaucer George Orwell G.K. Chesterton Gwendolyn Brooks Hans Christian Andersen Henry David Thoreau Herman Melville Hermann Hesse H.G. Wells Hispanic-American Writers Homer Honoré de Balzac Jamaica Kincaid James Joyce Jane Austen Jay Wright J.D. Salinger Jean-Paul Sartre John Irving John Keats John Milton John Steinbeck José Saramago J.R.R. Tolkien Julio Cortázar Kate Chopin Kurt Vonnegut Langston Hughes Leo Tolstoy Marcel Proust Margaret Atwood Mark Twain Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Maya Angelou
Miguel de Cervantes Milan Kundera Nathaniel Hawthorne Norman Mailer Octavio Paz Paul Auster Philip Roth Ralph Waldo Emerson Ray Bradbury Richard Wright Robert Browning Robert Frost Robert Hayden Robert Louis Stevenson Salman Rushdie Stephen Crane Stephen King Sylvia Plath Tennessee Williams Thomas Hardy Thomas Pynchon Tom Wolfe Toni Morrison Tony Kushner Truman Capote Walt Whitman W.E.B. Du Bois William Blake William Faulkner William Gaddis William Shakespeare William Wordsworth Zora Neale Hurston
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
Cormac M c carth y New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Cormac McCarthy, New Edition Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cormac McCarthy / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-395-0 (acid-free paper) 1. McCarthy, Cormac, 1933– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. Mexican-American Border Region—In literature. 3. Tennessee, East—In literature. 4. Southern States—In literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series. PS3563.C337Z624 2009 813’.54—dc22
Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi
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Contents Editor’s Note Introduction
vii 1
“The Very Life of the Darkness”: A Reading of Blood Meridian Steven Shaviro
Reeds and Hides: Cormac McCarthy’s Domestic Spaces Terri Witek “Wars and Rumors of Wars” in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy John Wegner Introduction: The Prototypical Suttree Georg Guillemin The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy Vince Brewton
Foundation of Empire: The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness in 85 Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian Sara L. Spurgeon
Discovering Fourthspace in Appalachia: Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Child of God James R. Giles Fetish and Collapse in No Country for Old Men Jay Ellis
Animals and Death in The Gardener’s Son, The Stonemason, “Bounty,” and “The Dark Waters” Wallis R. Sanborn III The Road John Cant Chronology
Acknowledgments Index
My introduction analyzes Blood Meridian as McCarthy’s permanent masterpiece and then proceeds to All the Pretty Horses as his best work since, a judgment I do not alter after reading both No Country for Old Men and The Road. Steven Shaviro’s reading exults in McCarthy’s soaring prose, while Terri Witek emphasizes McCarthy’s sense that on this earth we live in a place not at all our own. The Border Trilogy is seen by John Wegner as a map of war and violence, after which Georg Guillemin reads Suttree as an “ecopastoral.” Violence is traced in its many Cormacian varieties by Vince Brewton, while Sara L. Spurgeon meditates on the American Religion of Blood Meridian. Earlier novels are the focus of James R. Giles, after which Jay Ellis broods on the Jungian strain in No Country for Old Men. Visions of the wasteland are examined in early McCarthy by Wallis R. Sanborn, while John Cant confronts the ultimate wasteland of The Road.
H ar o ld B l o o m
Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant even in 2010 than it was twenty-five years ago. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian, much as I appreciate Don DeLillo’s Underworld; Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Bound, Sabbath’s Theater, and American Pastoral; and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. McCarthy himself, in his Border Trilogy, commencing with the superb All the Pretty Horses, has not matched Blood Meridian, but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed. My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays. The violence begins on the novel’s second page, when the fifteen-year-old Kid is shot in the back and just below the heart, and continues almost with no respite until the end, thirty years later, when Judge Holden, the most frightening figure in all of American literature, murders the Kid in an outhouse. So appalling are the continuous massacres and mutilations of Blood Meridian that one could be reading a United Nations report on the horrors of Kosovo in 1999. Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because Blood Meridian is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence—its
language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and convert goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s. When I teach the book, many of my students resist it initially (as I did, and as some of my friends continue to do). Television saturates us with actual as well as imagined violence, and I turn away, either in shock or in disgust. But I cannot turn away from Blood Meridian, now that I know how to read it, and why it has to be read. None of its carnage is gratuitous or redundant; it belonged to the Mexico–Texas borderlands in 1849–50, which is where and when most of the novel is set. I suppose one could call Blood Meridian a “historical novel,” since it chronicles the actual expedition of the Glanton gang, a murderous paramilitary force sent out both by Mexican and Texan authorities to murder and scalp as many Indians as possible. Yet it does not have the aura of historical fiction, since what it depicts seethes on, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else, well into the third millennium. Judge Holden, the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honor in our years to come. Even as you learn to endure the slaughter McCarthy describes, you become accustomed to the book’s high style, again as overtly Shakespearean as it is Faulknerian. There are passages of Melvillean-Faulknerian baroque richness and intensity in The Crying of Lot 49, and elsewhere in Pynchon, but we can never be sure that they are not parodistic. The prose of Blood Meridian soars, yet with its own economy, and its dialogue is always persuasive, particularly when the uncanny Judge Holden speaks (chapter 14): The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said. The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. Judge Holden is the spiritual leader of Glanton’s filibusters, and McCarthy persuasively gives the self-styled judge a mythic status, appropriate for a deep Machiavelli whose “thread of order” recalls Iago’s magic web, in
which Othello, Desdemona, and Cassio are caught. Though all of the more colorful and murderous raiders are vividly characterized for us, the killingmachine Glanton with the others, the novel turns always upon its two central figures, Judge Holden and the Kid. We first meet the Judge on page 6: an enormous man, bald as a stone, no trace of a beard, and eyes without either brows or lashes. A seven-foot-tall albino, he almost seems to have come from some other world, and we learn to wonder about the Judge, who never sleeps, dances and fiddles with extraordinary art and energy, rapes and murders little children of both sexes, and who says that he will never die. By the book’s close, I have come to believe that the Judge is immortal. And yet the Judge, while both more and less than human, is as individuated as Iago or Macbeth, and is quite at home in the Texan–Mexican borderlands where we watch him operate in 1849–50, and then find him again in 1878, not a day older after twenty-eight years, though the Kid, a sixteen-year-old at the start of Glanton’s foray, is forty-five when murdered by the Judge at the end. McCarthy subtly shows us the long, slow development of the Kid from another mindless scalper of Indians to the courageous confronter of the Judge in their final debate in a saloon. But though the Kid’s moral maturation is heartening, his personality remains largely a cipher, as anonymous as his lack of a name. The three glories of the book are the Judge, the landscape, and (dreadful to say this) the slaughters, which are aesthetically distanced by McCarthy in a number of complex ways. What is the reader to make of the Judge? He is immortal as principle, as War Everlasting, but is he a person, or something other? McCarthy will not tell us, which is all the better, since the ambiguity is most stimulating. Melville’s Captain Ahab, though a Promethean demigod, is necessarily mortal, and perishes with the Pequod and all its crew, except for Ishmael. After he has killed the Kid, Blood Meridian’s Ishmael, Judge Holden is the last survivor of Glanton’s scalping crusade. Destroying the Native American nations of the Southwest is hardly analogous to the hunt to slay Moby-Dick, and yet McCarthy gives us some curious parallels between the two quests. The most striking is between Melville’s chapter 19, where a ragged prophet, who calls himself Elijah, warns Ishmael and Queequeg against sailing on the Pequod, and McCarthy’s chapter 4, where “an old disordered Mennonite” warns the Kid and his comrades not to join Captain Worth’s filibuster, a disaster that preludes the greater catastrophe of Glanton’s campaign. McCarthy’s invocation of Moby-Dick, while impressive and suggestive, in itself does not do much to illuminate Judge Holden for us. Ahab has his preternatural aspects, including his harpooner Fedellah and Parsee whaleboat crew, and the captain’s conversion to their Zoroastrian faith. Elijah tells Ishmael touches of other Ahabian mysteries: a three-day trance off Cape
Horn, slaying a Spaniard in front of a presumably Catholic altar in Santa Ysabel, and a wholly enigmatic spitting into a “silver calabash.” Yet all these are transparencies compared to the enigmas of Judge Holden, who seems to judge the entire earth, and whose name suggests a holding, presumably of sway over all he encounters. And yet, the Judge, unlike Ahab, is not wholly fictive; like Glanton, he is a historic filibuster or freebooter. McCarthy tells us most in the Kid’s dream visions of Judge Holden, towards the close of the novel (chapter 22): In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. I think that McCarthy is warning his reader that the Judge is MobyDick rather than Ahab. As another white enigma, the albino Judge, like the albino whale, cannot be slain. Melville, a professed Gnostic, who believed that some “anarch hand or cosmic blunder” had divided us into two fallen sexes, gives us a Manichean quester in Ahab. McCarthy gives Judge Holden the powers and purposes of the bad angels or demiurges that the Gnostics called archons, but he tells us not to make such an identification (as the critic Leo Daugherty eloquently has). Any “system,” including the Gnostic one, will not divide the Judge back into his origins. The “ultimate atavistic egg” will not be found. What can the reader do with the haunting and terrifying Judge? Let us begin by saying that Judge Holden, though his gladsome prophecy of eternal war is authentically universal, is first and foremost a Western American, no matter how cosmopolitan his background (he speaks all languages, knows all arts and sciences, and can perform magical, shamanistic metamorphoses). The Texan–Mexican border is a superb place for a war-god like the Judge to be. He carries a rifle, mounted in silver, with its name inscribed under the checkpiece: Et In Arcadia Ego. In the American Arcadia, death is also always there, incarnated in the Judge’s weapon, which never misses. If the American pastoral tradition essentially is the Western
film, then the Judge incarnates that tradition, though he would require a director light-years beyond the late Sam Peckinpah, whose The Wild Bunch portrays mildness itself when compared to Glanton’s paramilitaries. I resort though, as before, to Iago, who transfers war from the camp and the field to every other locale, and is a pyromaniac setting everything and everyone ablaze with the flame of battle. The Judge might be Iago before Othello begins, when the war-god Othello was still worshipped by his “honest” color officer, his ancient or ensign. The Judge speaks with an authority that chills me even as Iago leaves me terrified: This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. If McCarthy does not want us to regard the Judge as a Gnostic archon or supernatural being, the reader may still feel that it hardly seems sufficient to designate Holden as a nineteenth-century Western American Iago. Since Blood Meridian, like the much longer Moby-Dick, is more prose epic than novel, the Glanton foray can seem a post-Homeric quest, where the various heroes (or thugs) have a disguised god among them, which appears to be the Judge’s Herculean role. The Glanton gang passes into a sinister aesthetic glory at the close of chapter 13, when they progress from murdering and scalping Indians to butchering the Mexicans who have hired them: They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. Within a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head. I break into this passage, partly to observe that from this point on the filibusters pursue the way down and out to an apocalyptic conclusion, but also to urge the reader to hear, and admire, the sublime sentence that follows directly, because we are at the visionary center of Blood Meridian.
They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun. Since Cormac McCarthy’s language, like Melville’s and Faulkner’s, frequently is deliberately archaic, the meridian of the title probably means the zenith or noon position of the sun in the sky. Glanton, the Judge, the Kid, and their fellows are not described as “tragic”—their long-suffering horses are— and they are “infatuate” and half-mad (“fond”) because they have broken away from any semblance of order. McCarthy knows, as does the reader, that an “order” urging the destruction of the entire Native American population of the Southwest is an obscene idea of order, but he wants the reader to know also that the Glanton gang is now aware that they are unsponsored and free to run totally amok. The sentence I have just quoted has a morally ambiguous greatness to it, but that is the greatness of Blood Meridian, and indeed of Homer and of Shakespeare. McCarthy so contextualizes the sentence that the amazing contrast between its high gestures and the murderous thugs who evoke the splendor is not ironic but tragic. The tragedy is ours, as readers, and not the Glanton gang’s, since we are not going to mourn their demise except for the Kid’s, and even there our reaction will be equivocal. My passion for Blood Meridian is so fierce that I want to go on expounding it, but the courageous reader should now be (I hope) pretty well into the main movement of the book. I will confine myself here to the final encounter between the preternatural Judge Holden and the Kid, who had broken with the insane crusade twenty-eight years before, and now at middle age must confront the ageless Judge. Their dialogue is the finest achievement in this book of augmenting wonders, and may move the reader as nothing else in Blood Meridian does. I reread it perpetually and cannot persuade myself that I have come to the end of it. The Judge and the Kid drink together, after the avenging Judge tells the Kid that this night his soul will be demanded of him. Knowing he is no match for the Judge, the Kid nevertheless defies Holden, with laconic replies playing against the Judge’s rolling grandiloquence. After demanding to know where their slain comrades are, the Judge asks: “And where is the fiddler and where the dance?” I guess you can tell me. I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s
Introduction
right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? You aint nothin. To have known Judge Holden, to have seen him in full operation, and to tell him that he is nothing, is heroic. “You speak truer than you know,” the Judge replies, and two pages later murders the Kid, most horribly. Blood Meridian, except for a one-paragraph epilogue, ends with the Judge triumphantly dancing and fiddling at once, and proclaiming that he never sleeps and he will never die. But McCarthy does not let Judge Holden have the last word. The strangest passage in Blood Meridian, the epilogue is set at dawn, where a nameless man progresses over a plain by means of holes that he makes in the rocky ground. Employing a two-handled implement, the man strikes “the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” Around the man are wanderers searching for bones, and he continues to strike fire in the holes, and then they move on. And that is all. The subtitle of Blood Meridian is The Evening Redness in the West, which belongs to the Judge, last survivor of the Glanton gang. Perhaps all that the reader can surmise with some certainty is that the man striking fire in the rock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in the West. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps will never die, but a new Prometheus may be rising to go up against him. All
P retty Horses
If there is a pragmatic tradition of the American Sublime, then Cormac McCarthy’s fictions are its culmination. Moby-Dick and Faulkner’s major, early novels are McCarthy’s prime precursors. Melville’s Ahab fuses together Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists—Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth—and crosses them with a quest both Promethean and American. Even as Montaigne’s Plato became Emerson’s, so Melville’s Shakespeare becomes Cormac McCarthy’s. Though critics will go on associating McCarthy with Faulkner, who certainly affected McCarthy’s style in Suttree (1979), the visionary of Blood Meridian (1985) and The Border Trilogy (1992, 1994, 1998) has much less in common with Faulkner, and shares more profoundly in Melville’s debt to Shakespeare. Melville, by giving us Ahab and Ishmael, took care to distance the reader from Ahab, if not from his quest. McCarthy’s protagonists tend to be apostles of the will-to-identity, except for the Iago-like Judge Holden of Blood Meridian, who is the Will Incarnate. John Grady Cole, who survives
in All the Pretty Horses only to be destroyed in Cities of the Plain, is replaced in The Crossing by Billy Parham, who is capable of learning what the heroic Grady Cole evades, the knowledge that Jehovah (Yahweh) holds in his very name: “Where that is I am not.” God will be present where and when he chooses to be present, and absent more often than present. The aesthetic achievement of All the Pretty Horses surpasses that of Cities of the Plain, if only because McCarthy is too deeply invested in John Grady Cole to let the young man (really still a boy) die with the proper distancing of authorial concern. No one will compose a rival to Blood Meridian, not even McCarthy, but All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are of the eminence of Suttree. If I had to choose a narrative by McCarthy that could stand on its own in relation to Blood Meridian, it probably would be All the Pretty Horses. John Grady Cole quests for freedom, and discovers what neither Suttree nor Billy Parham needs to discover, which is that freedom in an American context is another name for solitude. The self’s freedom, for Cormac McCarthy, has no social aspect whatsoever. I speak of McCarthy as visionary novelist, and not necessarily as a citizen of El Paso, Texas. Emerson identified freedom with power, only available at the crossing, in the shooting of a gulf, a darting to an aim. Since we care for Hamlet, even though he cares for none, we have to assume that Shakespeare also had a considerable investment in Hamlet. The richest aspect of All the Pretty Horses is that we learn to care strongly about the development of John Grady Cole, and perhaps we can surmise that Cormac McCarthy is also moved by this most sympathetic of his protagonists. All the Pretty Horses was published seven years after Blood Meridian, and is set almost a full century later in history. John Grady Cole is about the same age as McCarthy would have been in 1948. There is no more an identification between McCarthy and the young Cole, who evidently will not live to see twenty, than there is between Shakespeare and Prince Hamlet. And yet the reverberation of an heroic poignance is clearly heard throughout All the Pretty Horses. It may be that McCarthy’s hard-won authorial detachment toward the Kid in Blood Meridian had cost the novelist too much, in the emotional register. Whether my surmise is accurate or not, the reader shares with McCarthy an affectionate stance toward the heroic youth at the center of All the Pretty Horses.
S teven S haviro
“The Very Life of the Darkness”: A Reading of Blood Meridian
Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery. —Judge Holden (252)
He would look for spiders, and make them fight together, or throw flies into the spider web; and then he watched that battle with so much pleasure, that he would sometimes burst into laughter. —Colerus, Life of Spinoza
eath is a festival, a ceremony, a ritual; but it is not a mystery. Blood Meridian sings hymns of violence, its gorgeous language commemorating slaughter in all its sumptuousness and splendor: some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. . . . [O]ne of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans From Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 143–155. © 1993 by The Southern Quarterly.
on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives. . . . (156) Everywhere in this book, death leaves behind its memorials, its trophies and its fetishes: the scalps collected by Glanton and his men, the tree of dead babies (57), the crucified mummy (247), the circle of severed heads (220), the eviscerated bodies of bearded men with “strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man’s parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths” (153). Reading Blood Meridian produces a vertiginous, nauseous exhilaration. A strong compulsion draws us through this text, something beyond either fascination or horror. “What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It’s a great thing, the dance” (327). Bloody death is our monotonously predictable destiny; yet its baroque opulence is attended with a frighteningly complicitous joy. Cormac McCarthy, the solitary poet of this exultation, is our greatest living author: nomadic wanderer, lucid cartographer of an inescapable delirium. In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian. Both novels are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness. Both manifest a sublime visionary power that is matched only by a still more ferocious irony. Both savagely explode the American dream of manifest destiny, of racial domination and endless imperial expansion. But if anything, McCarthy writes with a yet more terrible clarity than does Melville. For he has none of Melville’s nostalgia for lost—primitive or uterine—origins. The “kid” who is McCarthy’s nameless protagonist knows nothing of his mother: she dies giving birth to him (3). And he scarcely knows his father any better; within the first two pages of the book he has already left home forever, “divested of all that he has been” (4). We encounter instead the monstrously charismatic figure of Judge Holden, ironic Ahab to the kid’s unselfconscious Ishmael. Orphanhood is taken for granted in Blood Meridian; the kid, unlike Ishmael, never feels any pathos in this condition. The judge notes at one point that “it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir,” so that the “father dead [before the son was born] has euchered the son out of his patrimony” (145). Such a double displacement—exile so extreme that we are exiled even from the possibility, the hope and despair, of exile—characterizes the life of these wanderers in the desert. The oedipal myth of paradise lost and regained, of patrimonial inheritance and promised land, has been abolished once and for all. These travelers will feel different cravings, experience different affects. The kid’s “origins are become remote as is his destiny” (4), and his only
point of reference in “that hallucinatory void” (113) is the unrepresentable extremity in which the judge embraces him “like a son” (306), enfolding him forever in his “immense and terrible flesh” (333). Blood Meridian is a book, then, not of heights and depths, nor of origins and endings, but of restless, incessant horizontal movements: nomadic wanderings, topographical displacements, variations of weather, skirmishes in the desert. There is only war, there is only the dance. Exile is not deprivation or loss, but our primordial and positive condition. For there can be no alienation when there is no originary state for us to be alienated from. Glanton’s riders climb into mountainous regions or descend through narrow canyons, but they always remain in intimate contact with the superficies of the earth, with the elemental forces of ground and sky, snow and hail and lightning, water and wind and barren rock. The journey is limitless, circumscribed only by the infinite vault of “naked and unrectified night” (106), and by the open wound of the horizon, “holocaust” (105) and “distant pandemonium” (185) of the declining sun. This horizon beckons onward to all the “itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague” (78). Or it emerges into violent and menacing clarity: “and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them” (44–45). In either case, the horizon is a circumference that looms ominously near, lures or threatens, and yet remains forever out of reach. As the judge warns us (thus also explaining the title of the book), “in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day” (146–47). Zenith and horizon continually exchange places, without mediation or delay; what is most dim, distant and uncertain abruptly appears as an inescapable fatality. Blood Meridian rejects organicist metaphors of growth and decay, in favor of an open topography (what Deleuze and Guattari call “smooth space”) in which the endless, unobstructed extension of the desert allows for the sudden, violent and fortuitous irruption of the most heterogeneous forces: “in the convergence of such vectors in such a waste wherein the hearts and enterprise of one small nation have been swallowed up and carried off by another the ex-priest asked if some might not see the hand of a cynical god conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a congruence” (153). Yet the entire book consists of nothing but such fatal encounters, lethal congruences of impossible but converging vectors. The riders trace a fractal path upon the surface of the earth; they define an intradimensional space in which the extremities of night and day intersect, a permeable membrane for the incessant transactions of life and death.
They follow the contours of an inverted circle whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is nowhere, “some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man’s transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny” (96). Indeed, we are consigned so utterly and irredeemably to this “third destiny,” this elemental desert, that fate and will alike fade into insignificance. We are called to no responsibility, and we may lay claim to no transcendence. Blood Meridian is not a salvation narrative; we can be rescued neither by faith nor by works nor by grace. It is useless to look for ulterior, redemptive meanings, useless even to posit the irredeemable gratuitousness of our abandonment in the form of some existential category such as Heideggerian “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). We have not fallen here or been “thrown” here, for we have always been here, and always will be. Only the judge seems descended from another world (125). We are never separate from the landscape or from those other voyagers with whom we so disastrously meet and clash, for the same nomadic forces impel us all: “If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts” (138). Nothing inhuman can be alien to me. The world is infinite in novelty and variety, “a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent,” and whose “ultimate destination . . . is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning” (245); and yet this world is devoid of final mystery or essential otherness, since all is composed of the one unique Spinozistic substance. We would like to believe that our destiny is lofty and singular—whether it be self-willed or decreed by a transcendent and inexorable fate—but we discover that we are merely “pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys” (121). There is finally no mystery, not even in death; if we remain puzzled as to who we are, whence we have come, and whither we are bound, this is only because, the judge explains, “[a]s the dance . . . contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well” (329). Our experience of the world’s limits consists precisely in this, that we can never encounter or encompass or transgress those limits. We remain bound in a dance of perpetual immanence. Western culture has dreamed for centuries of some act of heroic transgression and self-transformation: whether this take the Enlightenment
form of rational mastery, or the romantic and mystical one of apocalyptic transfiguration. McCarthy, like Nietzsche, exposes not just the futility of the dream, but—far more troublingly—its inherent piety, its ironic dependence upon the very (supposed) mysteries that it claims to violate. What is most disturbing about the orgies of violence that punctuate Blood Meridian is that they fail to constitute a pattern, to unveil a mystery or to serve any comprehensible purpose. Instead, the book suggests that “a taste for mindless violence” (3) is as ubiquitous—and as banal—as any other form of “common sense.” Scalping has been a common human practice for at least 300,000 years, as one of the epigraphs to the novel suggests. Acts of destruction are as casual, random and unreflective as acts of kindness and civility—which also occur at odd moments in the course of the narrative. The judge demonstrates this point with cynical clarity when he calmly scalps a young child after having rescued it and carried it about and played with it for three days; for all that he and his mates have just destroyed an entire defenseless village, Toadvine is scandalized (164). Toadvine is incapable even of imagining transgression; he robs and kills precisely to the extent that such acts seem to him within the normal order of things. The judge, on the other hand, transgresses only in an ironic mode: by his lights, the perversity of scalping the child after it has come to trust him is no greater than the initial perversity of rescuing it from an otherwise total holocaust. In both cases, actual transgression is impossible. Transgression is an endeavor to exhaust the world, to compel it to reveal itself: as the judge puts it, “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth” (198). Such is the self-transcending project of Enlightenment. And we might be tempted to say that whereas all the other characters kill casually and thoughtlessly, out of greed or blood lust or some other trivial cause, only the judge kills out of will and conviction and a deep commitment to the cause and the canons of Western rationality. But the judge also knows that it is impossible to transgress when there is no Law to violate, and when there is no final accumulation of goods or knowledge to be gathered together and no ultimate boundary to be attained. We cannot deplete the world, we cannot reach the sunset. Beyond the desert, there is only more empty space, the equally daunting infinitude of the ocean, “out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea” (304). The judge reminds us that “more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others” (245). Our order
is never the world’s order, not even in the Nietzschean sense of an order that we impose. We mark out paths in the desert or we read the tracks of others, but we cannot thereby master futurity or compel events to our liking. For subjectivity is not a perspective upon or projection into the world, nor even a transcendental condition for our perception of the world; it is just another empirical fact, an inherence within the world like any other. There is no interiority, no intentionality and no transcendence. The radical epistemology of Blood Meridian subverts all dualisms of subject and object, inside and outside, will and representation or being and interpretation. We are always exiles within the unlimited phenomenality of the world, for we cannot coincide with the (nonexistent) center of our being: “the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be” (329). And so, just as we can never possess the world (since we cannot even possess ourselves), by the same logic we can never transgress the order of the world or estrange ourselves from it—no matter how hard we try. In the pages of Blood Meridian, then, there is room neither for the demonic monomania of an Ahab nor for the self-reflective detachment of an Ishmael. Or better, these types flicker only for a moment, and before we know it they have “passed all into the problematical destruction of darkness” (105). Indeed, there is something of Ahab in Glanton: “He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so . . .” (243). Glanton resolves to be equal to his destiny; without the moralistic playacting usually present in such cases, he lays claim to the absurd existential nobility of the tragic hero. Yet there’s an enormous difference between what can be called Glanton’s stoicism and Ahab’s dualistic defiance. Glanton affirms his own agency through an identification with the whole of fate, so that it is as if he has willed even the event that destroys him. Whereas Ahab’s will continues to affirm itself against the universe, even at the mortal instant when that universe consumes it into nothingness. Glanton, unlike Ahab, confirms the judge’s claim that “war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence” (249). His very aggressiveness and egotism are finally nothing but a means of sacrificing himself to such unity. And his only compensation for this sacrifice is the dubious one of proclaiming his defeat as a higher victory. The judge has little respect for such consolations: “There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that
is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps” (331). The play will soon be over, and we fool ourselves if we think that we can derive from it any profits of catharsis or redemption. Glanton’s heroic resoluteness does not lend any grandeur to his death; still less does it lead to any tragic recognition or transfiguration: “Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple” (275). At the other extreme from Glanton’s tragic heroism, there is something of Ishmael in the kid. He drifts from place to place, never taking the initiative, sidestepping mortal engagements and warily refusing the judge’s continual seductions. The kid keeps his distance from the claims both of destiny and of agency; he offers to the world only a sort of passive resistance, a silent, obstinate rejection of all finalities and of all melodramatics. Even as he behaves as a good fellow to his comrades, and participates uncomplainingly in the most violent, barbaric actions, he seems to retain the detachment of an observer. His most typical moment is perhaps that when he watches from high in the mountains “the collision of armies remote and silent upon the plain below” (213). The kid’s skeptical reserve is analogous to Ishmael’s, although it arises from an utter unreflectiveness in the one case and from an exacerbated self-consciousness in the other. For we are never given any insight into the kid’s inner life; apart from that manifested in the stubbornness of his refusal to commit himself, he does not appear to have any. I think it is this eerie affectlessness, rather than some more determinate quality, that leads to the kid’s hesitation at certain crucial moments: such as when he does not kill Shelby (206–10), or later when he ignores Tobin’s advice to launch a preemptive strike against the judge. And this blankness is also what makes the kid into an object of desire for other characters in the book. They lust after him to the precise measure of his own indifference. I am thinking here of strange scenes like that of the old hermit’s advances to the kid (20), as well as the judge’s disturbing interest in him: “The judge watched him. Was it always your idea, he said, that if you did not speak you would not be recognized?” (328). In fact, it is the kid’s very silence and unresponsiveness that the judge singles out in him: “That feeling in the breast that evokes a child’s memory of loneliness such as when the others have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without opponent” (329). It is this indifference that irritates the will of the judge, and that he seeks to master and appropriate; this seductive child’s loneliness that he needs to baptize and give (re-)birth to, as he does in the parallel case of the idiot (259). The judge reproaches the kid’s refusal of tragic knowledge as much as he scorns the futility of Glanton’s accession to such knowledge: “You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body
of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay” (307). We are left in a no-win situation: the kid’s evasive blankness marks a deferral but not an exemption from the all-embracing game of war. He can refuse its communion, but not its claim to be “the truest form of divination” (249). For “[w]hat joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. . . . Our animosities were formed and waiting before ever we two met” (307). There is no retreat, no separation. The kid cannot refuse the judge’s election, any more than he can live up to it. This Ishmael will not be thrown free, and will not survive the wreck. Glanton and the kid may represent opposite poles of a dialectic, but it is a stalled dialectic, one that fails ever to advance. All these heroic or evasive stances only bring us back by circuitous routes to the immanence of the landscape and the imminence of death, that “wry and grinning tradesman good to follow every campaign or hound men from their holes in just those whited regions where they’ve gone to hide from God” (44). We cannot run and hide in the desert, for the desert’s vastness already enfolds the shape of our destiny. “You wouldn’t think that a man would run plumb out of country out here, would ye?” (285), Toadvine complains. Death stalks these vast expanses of space and time, as inevitable and unforeseen as the uncanny bolts of lightning flashing out in the darkness that repeatedly punctuate the book. There is no reserve of potentiality in Blood Meridian; everything is cruelly, splendidly actual. There is no transcendence, and no possibility of standing out from Being. There is no stance by which subjectivity might fold back upon itself, thereby affirming and preserving itself, or at least attenuating the shock of those multiple, fatal encounters that mark its inherence in the world: as the judge warns, “Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well” (330). This “third destiny,” exceeding both will and fate, is an immanent function of the landscape itself, which means that it is also a function of writing. McCarthy’s sublime prose style resonates with those of Faulkner, of Melville and of the King James Bible. And by any criterion, McCarthy’s writing is as great as any of these. But still more important, I think, is the way in which the language of Blood Meridian caresses the harsh desert landscape, slides amorously over its surfaces. The language of Blood Meridian is not primarily mimetic, as in classical models of the novel; but neither is it turned inward to thought or back upon itself, as is canonically the case with modernist texts. It is rather continually outside itself, in intimate contact
with the world in a powerfully nonrepresentational way. McCarthy’s writing is so closely intertwined with the surfaces of the earth and the depths of the cosmos that it cannot be disentangled from them. “Books lie,” says the judge, referring to the salvational fables of scripture; but the actual, material words of God—who “speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things”—these do not lie (116). The writing of Blood Meridian composes such an immanent, material language, a speaking inscribed in the rocks and in the sky, in the very physical body of the world: “In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships” (247). In a passage such as this one, the effect of the language is the same as the effect of the light. Minute details and impalpable qualities are registered with such precision that the prejudices of anthropocentric perceptions are disqualified. The eye no longer constitutes the axis of vision. We are given instead a kind of perception before or beyond the human. This is not a perspective upon the world, and not a vision that intends its objects: but an immanent perspective that already is the world, and a primordial visibility, a luminescence, that is indifferent to our acts of vision because it is always passively at work in whatever objects we may or may not happen to look at. McCarthy’s narrative follows the progress of the kid, and to a lesser extent of other of Glanton’s men; but it is never really written from their points of view. The prose enacts not a symbolization or a hermeneutics but an erotics of landscape, moving easily between the degree zero of “desert absolute” (295) and the specific articulations of water, mud, sand, sky and mountains. It leaps from the concrete to the abstract and back again, often in the space of a single sentence. It observes a fractal symmetry of scale, describing without hierarchical distinction and with the same attentive complexity the most minute phenomena and the most cosmic. And its observations cannot be attributed to any fixed center of enunciation, neither to an authorial presence nor to a narrating voice nor to the consciousness of any of the characters. There is only an incessant fluid displacement, a flux of words and of visions and palpations, indifferent to our usual distinctions between subjective and objective, between literal and figurative or between empirical description and speculative reflection. The book is written “[a]s if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality” (247).
Blood Meridian thus refuses to acknowledge any gap or opposition between words and things. It insists that there can be no fissure or discontinuity in the real. But if this be the case, then there can also be no separate order of signification, and questions about the adequacy or inadequacy of language to what it describes cannot even arise. Speaking of “representations and things” (136), the judge remarks, “What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all” (141). This is not to argue (like the philosophers decried in Plato’s Sophist) that it is impossible to lie or to speak what is not—though as far as I can tell, everything the judge says throughout the book is in some sense true, even if the pragmatic effect of his ironies and sarcastic insinuations is to deceive his listeners. Nor is it to say that the book fatally determines the course of what happens, or conversely that it faithfully reproduces that course. It is rather to insist, in the manner of Spinoza, that the order of words and images is literally the same as the order of actions and events. The judge affirms an ontological parallelism between thing and representation, between ‘being’ and ‘witness’: “Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world” (141). Language no less than the desert floor is a space which comprehends everything, but in which the complex intrication of heterogeneous forces fatally leads to unwelcome encounters and deadly confrontations. Words and images are inherently dangerous; they participate, just as do bodies, in the “ultimate game” of war, the “testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select” (249). Mimesis is not an imitation of the real so much as an aggressive and provocative solicitation of the real. The judge recalls that “he’d once drawn an old Hueco’s portrait and unwittingly chained the man to his own likeness. For he could not sleep for fear an enemy might take it and deface it . . .” (141). The making of images and words is not a tranquil process of recollection and perpetuation, but a continual movement of accretion that also implies the cruelty of triage or selection. The judge duplicates the world by obsessively copying all that he encounters into his notebooks; his simulations of various objects allow him to dispense with or even destroy the originals, “to expunge them from the memory of man” (140). He complains, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (198). But the more that is drawn or written and that hence becomes known, the more that is thereby subjected, not to human agency or adjudication, but to “war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification” (249). The writing of Blood Meridian is a catastrophic act of witness, embracing the real by tracing it in gore. McCarthy’s previous novel, Suttree (1979),
ends with the admonition to flee the cruel huntsman and his hounds, “slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world” (471). Blood Meridian ignores this advice, and instead conjures the presence of those hounds, tracks them as closely as possible. For McCarthy as for the judge, writing is inevitably an act of war: deracination, divinatory affirmation, the composition and conduction of dangerous forces, and the production of an active counter-memory. Writing, like war, is a ceremonial and sacrificial act; and Blood Meridian is a novel written in blood, awash in blood. Yet for all its lucidity in the face of horror, this is not a book that sets a high value upon selfconsciousness. And for all its exacerbated sense of fatality, its tenor is profoundly anticlimactic and anticathartic. Blood Meridian places the reader in the position of one “who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart . . .” (331). But there is no purgation or release in this recognition, no curative discharge of fear and pity. We are rather swamped by emotions which can find no outlet; we too are implicated in this savage spectacle. We perform acts of sacrifice—“the slaying of a large bear” (329), or of many men—not to propitiate alien gods and not to ward off distant calamities, but to confirm our own complicity with the forces that crush and annihilate us. “Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?” (329). The scariest thing about Blood Meridian is that it is a euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing one. Our pulses quicken as “considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right [are] rendered void and without warrant” (250), subsumed in the trials of war. Once we have started to dance, once we have been swept up in the game, there is no pulling back. The judge states categorically that “[a] ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals” (329). All the devastations chronicled in Blood Meridian occur in a ritual space and time, an Outside that helps to enforce, yet stands apart from, the social bond: “Here beyond men’s judgements all covenants were brittle” (106). Glanton and his men exist only to disrupt the orderly procedures of production, conservation and trade; they “carried no tantamount goods and the disposition to exchange was foreign to them” (121). They ravage the very order upon which they parasitically feed. Their actions all fall under the rubric of what Georges Bataille calls nonproductive expenditure: prodigality, play, waste, recklessness, empty display and unmotivated violence. Beneath the mask of a Darwinian struggle for survival, or a Hobbesian war of all against all, or even a lust for wealth and power and honor, they sumptuously, gratuitously squander their own lives—together,
of course, with those of many others—at every turn. They have no spirit of seriousness or of enterprise; they unwittingly pursue self-ruin rather than advantage. All these men—and not just the kid—are childlike in their unconsciousness, or indifference, as to motivations and consequences. According to the judge, “Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. . . . All games aspire to the condition of war” (249). Glanton and his men give themselves over to the game of war wholeheartedly, playing without taking care to preserve their stakes. Their lack of awareness is more than a match for the judge’s extreme lucidity, if it is a question of reaching the point where “that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all” (249). For the clash and testing of wills in which the judge exults must end, not in the victory of one, but in the sacrificial consumption of everyone and everything. And such is finally our inmost, most secret and most horrific desire. Blood Meridian performs the violent, sacrificial, self-consuming ritual upon which our civilization is founded. Or better, it traumatically re-enacts this ritual, for foundations are never set in place once and for all. More blood is always needed to seal and renew the pact. The American dream of manifest destiny must be repeated over and over again, ravaging the indifferent landscape in the course of its lemmings’ march to the sea. Our terrible progress is “less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle” (337), an obsessive reiteration without advancement, for we build only to destroy. There is no escaping this ritual, no avoiding the point at which we are compelled to assume the fate we have assigned to others, by putting up our own lives as the ultimate stake. But there is also no power or knowledge to which participation in the ritual gives us access, no occult secret unveiled before an elite of initiates. We sacrifice in vain, we sacrifice to nothing. There is nothing mysterious or transfiguring or even surprising about the ritual: “The evening’s progress will not appear strange or unusual even to those who question the rightness of the events so ordered. . . . We are not speaking in mysteries” (329). We all end up like the kid, violated and smothered in the shithouse; but how can we dare attach a unique significance even to this? For we are granted no marks of distinction, no special dispensation, but only the ever-renewed immanence of the dance, embodied in the grotesquely pirouetting figure of the judge, “huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant,” who “never sleeps” and who “says that he will never die” (335). In the “light and nimble” feet of this perpetually smiling, Zarathustrian child, we may perhaps see the reason for this book’s shocking cheerfulness. Everything in Blood Meridian is violence and blood, dying and destruction. But even darkness and death
have their own proper vitality. As the second of the book’s three epigraphs, taken from Jacob Boehme, reminds us: “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.” Wor ks Cit ed McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random, 1985. ———. Suttree. 1979. New York: Vintage, 1986.
T erri W itek
Reeds and Hides: Cormac McCarthy’s Domestic Spaces
early all the protagonists in Cormac McCarthy novels flee from or lose their homes. Kenneth Rattner lights out from the cabin he shares with Mildred and his young son (The Orchard Keeper), Lester Ballard’s family farm is sold out from under him (Child of God) as is John Grady’s ranch house (All the Pretty Horses), Culla and Rinthy Holme strike out from the perverse Eden of their incestual home (Outer Dark), Suttree trades in his family’s substantial housing for a houseboat (Suttree), and “the kid” leaves his alcoholic father’s cabin to wander the practically trackless Southwest (Blood Meridian). Such flight patterns, perhaps a cultural memory from restless immigrant ancestors, are central to our country’s literature. But if, as this literature suggests, Americans are committed to flight, they remain equally bound to an idea of home. The painful dilemma occasioned by these twin desires is explored without sentimentality in Cormac McCarthy’s six novels. No one would claim that Cormac McCarthy is a domestic writer: in a June 24, 1993 review of All the Pretty Horses published in The New York Review of Books, Denis Donoghue complains succinctly: “He is not good with village Romeos and Juliets or indeed with any lives that have entered upon communities, cultural interests, attended by customs, proprieties, and laws.” McCarthy’s imagination “refuses to give credence to the world as it has come to be in its personal, social, and political forms.” I think McCarthy’s quarrel From The Southern Review 30, no. 1 ( January 1994): 136–142. © 1994 by Louisiana State University.
is that the metaphors we construct about our existence don’t match up with the brutal realities they should rightfully represent and are therefore only a shared delusion. Bent on exposing the chimera by which communities live and lie to themselves, and himself a firm proponent of flight, McCarthy is therefore at his most fierce and convincing when taking on such conventional images of community life as the spaces we choose to call home. From the first, Americans have made metaphors of a collective identity, and dwelling places have always been fashioned as emblems of the family. Historically, these images have been powerfully ideological. In The American Family Home: 1800–1960, Clifford Edward Clark argues that by the end of the eighteenth century, for example, the rhetoric of family life was that families should work as a balanced combination of mutually independent parts, as hierarchical and as orderly as the Greek Revival architecture so beloved of early colonists, representing as it did the imagined reversal of that perceived chaos which greeted the first European immigrants. For the Victorians the house was a moral edifice, a cornerstone of society which combined the careful display of beauty with the sanctuary aspects of church, both presided over by the house’s guiding angel, Mother. For post–World War II suburbanites, the house was one of thousands which tried to express simultaneously both the individuality and the conformity of its family, a task as paradoxical as the balance of majority rule and individual freedom which has always been the core dilemma of democracy. No matter how ideas of the family change, the American dwelling place acts out its inhabitants’ deep beliefs about the way individuals go about living together. Cormac McCarthy’s first move in challenging such morally freighted metaphors as the American home is to present dwelling places, and therefore the communities they represent, as impermanent. From Suttree’s houseboats to the clapboard houses of the earlier books to the makeshift digs of Harrogate or Ballard (caves are an exception, and will be discussed later), most of the places people live in in McCarthy’s novels seem one step away from returning to the flotsam and jetsam from which they are, often enough, literally constructed. Houseboats, tenuously connected to the ground, are poised for flight. While Suttree is in Gatlinburg his moored one almost sinks, and Reese’s, like the Reese family itself, appears on the scene and then vanishes in the novel’s upriver. As homes which are also modes of transit, houseboats act out literally the impermanence of community life which is McCarthy’s continual subtext. Ground dwellings are not necessarily more lasting. Gene Harrogate’s below-bridge accommodations, which he regards as both luxurious and private, are so weakly constructed that nearly any community agency would classify him as homeless. The houses which claim more for themselves in McCarthy’s books are shown to be just as impermanent as Gene Harrogate’s rigged-up dwelling.
Like Knoxville’s aging apartment buildings, all are subject to McCarthy’s wrecking ball. If characters’ houses aren’t taken from them outright, they are liable to invasion—either by wild animals or by angry citizens whose rules about such things are different from the owners’. In The Orchard Keeper, for example, old Uncle Arthur’s house is disturbed by both the law and large cats, elements of civilization and its opposite, neither of whom have much regard for the individual within. This double force, a type of lawless law which decides against the permanence of buildings and the communities they house, is even more evident in Blood Meridian, in which the townspeople invite Glanton’s men into what they think of as their stable communities, only to have them virtually destroyed: the book’s moveable Indian encampments are wiped out without the accompanying illusions. Even the hacienda of All the Pretty Horses, perhaps McCarthy’s most enduring house, is endangered. The economic vigor of that beautiful home and its family depends on the bunkhouse, which is finally too close for comfort. When an inmate of the bunkhouse undertakes an affair with the daughter of the big house, he must be brutally expelled in an effort to save the house and family, which have been altered forever, as if by encroaching rot. McCarthy engineers this so that our sympathies are with the lowerclass outsider John Grady, and of course this is a standard romantic ploy. It is worth considering, however, that John Grady is a more sympathetic cousin to other, more fatal McCarthy outsiders. His effect on the established community of the hacienda is not so different from that of Glanton’s men, who ride into Blood Meridian’s towns to a warm welcome and then turn into community wreckers, wild animals in the living room. Even the grandest house is only an illusion or two ahead of shared community spaces like the wonderful inn in The Orchard Keeper which collapses and later burns, both times spilling its occupants into the night. All spaces in which people live together in McCarthy’s novels seem to be elaborations of the campfires which dot Blood Meridian. Perverse versions of Boy Scout wiener roasts, these shared sites demonstrate the fragile underpinnings of all community life: people disappear from them, reappear, and are occasionally disposed of on the spot. The campfires themselves are dismantled and remade nightly in different places, an emblem of the endlessly repeated patterns of impermanence which drive the characters’ lives. And yet McCarthy’s characters seem compelled toward imitations of domesticity: think of Lester Ballard’s underground home, complete with dead wives. But domesticity rarely works for them, a fact which is often enough demonstrated in gender terms so that we may see that domestic spaces are emblematic not only of family, but of a family’s women. When powerful women inhabit Cormac McCarthy’s texts, they often act as catalysts for destruction: ensconced at home, they become inadvertent homewreckers.
A dark reversal of the Victorian era’s Angel in the House, such a woman is often, as Suttree thinks of his former wife, a “mater dolorosa,” a sorrowing mother. Mildred Rattner is a sorrowing mother, as is Gene Harrogate’s sick, offstage one, her words carried out into the world by a daughter who is in the process of becoming the same thing. One of the reasons men so early and guiltily leave home in McCarthy books is because of these women’s power, derived from a pain so great that it becomes too much for the men who are implicated in their grief. The consequences of having such women at home expand to include the larger community. The successful butter farm in Outer Dark, for example, has as its center a fruitful woman whose children have all died; we are not surprised to find out in a later scene that even if the butter has been made, the farmer has failed to deliver it to the local store. One of the bleak jokes of Outer Dark is that the extension of this particular maternal grief across the landscape echoes the plight of Rinthy Holme, filled with milk that goes unused as she searches for her banished baby. Rinthy is Cormac McCarthy’s premier example of the mater dolorosa, but even the kinless Joyce, Suttree’s whore/girlfriend, shows how the Dark Angels of McCarthy’s households are implicated in their downfall. Suttree and Joyce seem to have a workable adult relationship until they begin to get specifically domestic: Suttree leaves his houseboat to move in with her, they get an apartment, eventually they even buy a car. What looks like social and domestic prosperity in American terms is their ruin. Soon Joyce doesn’t want to go whoring: when she becomes a drunken caricature of a bored housewife, Suttree leaves her. The better their dwelling, the more impermanent it gets, in other words, and the Knoxville apartment buildings which are torn open for our inspection merely reinforce the point. Joyce also goes to show that you don’t have to be a biological mother to become a sorrowing woman: all you need to do is attempt to resist the transience of all things by establishing yourself in a self-deluding version of home. For the women of McCarthy novels, the only alternative is to die, as Lester Ballard’s women do, as Wanda Reese does during a rainfall which reveals to her lover Suttree the matriarchal structure of her family. Only in this way can McCarthy’s women avoid the sorrow of their involvement with men who are bound to flee them. Yet neither type of woman really wins out in McCarthy’s books the way some of the male characters do, and if both types inhabit the same domestic space we eventually see them as versions of each other. All the Pretty Horses’ Alejandra starts as a tempestuous virgin like Wanda Reese and beds John Grady in the bunkhouse, or in the great outdoors they share with their horses in a tangle of downy fetlocks. But no matter what the setting, their brief domesticity is doomed. Alejandra ends up a sorrowing woman like her aunt; both finally select against John Grady in order to preserve their brother and father’s house (literally, his law-
abiding and patrician lineage). John Grady and Alejandra sleep together for the last time at a hotel near a train station in a town which is home to neither of them; the symbols of impermanence are ranged around them and they know it. Rinthy Holme’s grieving motherhood offers a twist on McCarthy’s usual scenario in that Rinthy leaves home before her brother Culla does. But this is a narrative sleight-of-hand, because the true catalyst for the action is that Rinthy’s brother disappears with their baby. Though Culla returns, the male child’s forced exodus has the same effect on their little family as any male’s flight: it breaks up the only home they know. When Rinthy leaves, she is trying to trade her brother’s house for her son’s. She doesn’t recognize what she finds, however; when she unknowingly beds down near a “little calcined ribcage,” the phrase suggests a birdcage, some dwelling for a small animal who has vanished. Rinthy cannot fit within such a space all that is left of her child; she is disqualified from living with either her brother or her son. McCarthy leaves Outer Dark’s mater dolorosa sleeping at a communal site where the major male characters have convened just shortly before. In typical McCarthy fashion, they have gathered, worked out the final consequences of their sins without her, and then vanished. As such stories illustrate, adult men and women do not inhabit the same dwelling places very easily in any of McCarthy’s books. What usually happens is that the domestic spaces, of which the prototypical examples are the campsites in Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, are composed of men without women. These men, as their all-male communal spaces suggest, are frontiersmen—whether they are living in the southwestern plains or in a southern city. And yet, unlike traditional frontiersmen, they are hardly preparing the way for more permanent dwellings. In Material Life in America 1600–1860, a group of scholars claims that homesteading was traditionally a stable pattern of the same three steps performed over and over: “one, two, three—hovel, house, home.” But this process is if anything reversed for McCarthy’s pioneering souls, who must resist building structures which would eventually house women whom they would most certainly grieve and then flee. McCarthy’s insistence on the impermanence of domestic spaces lets his protagonists do more than avoid their women, however. McCarthy characters seem to understand implicitly that with such things as cash crops and permanent buildings comes not freedom but alienation: think of our suburbs, each family locked into an individual but similar house, a cliché which is the furthest reach, in house terms, of the American dream. According to material culturists, impermanent dwellings have the advantage of enforcing a particular type of community, despite their appearance; such structures are so high-maintenance they actually force their inhabitants to
depend on each other, and to venture out into the larger world. Consider a freezing, racist Gene Harrogate warming himself over black Knoxvillians’ stoves and bottles, Lester Ballard negotiating for an ax-handle, Culla Holme trying to find cocoa for Rinthy. Despite the acknowledged impermanence of their ties, a frail community of need is established anyway. And the further question McCarthy asks us to consider is why, given the benefits of impermanence and the transience of all things, should we create anything that outlasts us anyway? The first dwellings of American settlers were earthfast, pegged to the ground as if to dramatize the mortal equation between them, and McCarthy demands that we should be equally precise in our definition of human communities. Tellingly, the most permanent dwelling places in McCarthy’s books lie within the earth itself. The judge in Blood Meridian makes the distinction between them as images of the human condition: For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us. By this definition, most of Cormac McCarthy’s characters are hideand-reed dwellers: the description is true of the human body as well as of constructed homes. But Lester Ballard (and Gene Harrogate makes a brief comic version of the attempt) decides at the last to live in stone, like those ancients the judge describes. Like many McCarthy protagonists, he operates first according to a backwards form of frontiersmanship, progressing from home to hovel. While his move into the caves can be thought of as a further undoing, at that point the process seems to be the reverse of itself as well, for in the caves Ballard is lord of a mansion far more permanent than any plantation house. He also has, perversely, figured out how to share domestic space with women, first by accruing dead paramours and then by becoming a macabre version of those he has killed. At the height of his powers he transforms himself into the Angel of the House who controls both its style and its display: he has truly become his home’s moral center. Of course, to have made this sort of domestic space beneath towns of reed and hide is to have attempted to alter the universe, and this is forbidden. Like Culla and Rinthy’s baby, who violated the oldest taboo with his birth, he must be exiled from the place that expresses his truest condition. It would be reassuring to think that, despite the impossibility of living in stone and despite the transience of those shelters of reeds and hides which matches the brevity of our lives, we might still call the earth our home. But
the world seems largely indifferent to its inhabitants in Cormac McCarthy’s books, whether they dwell in boats, lean-tos, caves, or two-story houses. We are reminded that these characters are without the benefit of those mythologies which describe the earth as a mother. If such myths held true in McCarthy novels, the earth would be the ultimate sorrowing mother her creatures both yearn toward and flee. But McCarthy won’t let us make the metaphor more comfortable when he expands it. In his books the earth is no grieving woman but merely itself, trackless and yet filled with signs that refuse to yield up their significance. And unlike the houses we build, the world is not a metaphor for us: we have not constructed it, it has constructed us. We are therefore its metaphor, its fragile dwellings whose patterns of impermanence finally display, despite the efforts of McCarthy’s characters, an endurance of their own. As the judge exhorts his listeners: “This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.” What last, then, are human patterns of impermanence written on the earth’s hard walls. The patterns themselves, McCarthy’s work argues, are the only dwelling place we have: they are quite literally the one home truth permitted. Cormac McCarthy does not deny that the spaces we inhabit are metaphors for our collective identity. On the contrary: they match precisely and mercilessly to teach us that no place in the world is home, that everywhere is a potential campsite, that every boy must be the frontiersman of what will turn out to be a grave-sized chunk of earth. Therein lies the ferocious power of McCarthy’s treatment of domestic space in his novels. Of course, unlike the doomed inhabitants of some sleepy Mexican town, we never expected him to bring good news. At his best and least comforting, the hard logic of Cormac McCarthy’s position and the beauty of his writing become the lawless law against which the usual metaphors of home will not prevail. That is when, homebodies all, we let him in.
J ohn W egner
“Wars and Rumors of Wars” in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy
Evenin Mr Johnson, he said. Evenin son. What’s the news? The old man shook his head. He leaned across the table to the windowsill where the radio sat and turned it off. It aint news no more, he said. Wars and rumors of wars. —Cities of the Plain The Modern Era has nurtured a dream in which mankind, divided into its separate civilizations, would someday come together in unity and everlasting peace. Today, the history of the planet has finally become one indivisible whole, but it is war, ambulant and everlasting war, that embodies and guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind. Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere. —Kundera, The Art of the Novel
ar is the central thesis to McCarthy’s southwestern works. The Crossing begins between World War I and World War II with America on the verge of the Depression, and Cities of the Plain essentially ends in 1952 as America’s presence in Korea grows. John Grady Cole’s father returns from a World War II POW camp sick and dying; The Crossing ends with Billy’s witness From Southern Quarterly 38, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 59–71. © 2000 by Southern Quarterly.
John Wegner
of the “strange false sunrise . . . of the Trinity Test” (Hunt 31); and Cities of the Plain begins with John Grady’s drinking with Troy, a war veteran. Even more pervasive are the accounts of the Mexican Revolution that become integral parts of the trilogy’s narrative: Dueña Alfonsa’s story to John Grady about Francisco I. Madero; Billy’s encounters with the blind revolutionary and the patriot in the bar late in The Crossing; and Travis’s story in Cities of the Plain of crossing the border after the fighting in Juárez. The two wars that form the backdrop of the trilogy represent opposite ends of the spectrum. The Mexican Revolution was fought on horseback and train track by peasants and ill-equipped soldiers. The war’s most popular figure was a barbaric, illiterate guerilla warrior, Pancho Villa. World War II, on the other hand, was the first great technological war, fought from the air and ended with arguably the twentieth century’s most significant and deadly discovery, the atomic bomb. In McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, these two wars act as historical frames for the novels, defining and mapping the world in which these characters must live and survive. The journey of Blood Meridian’s kid prefigures both the importance of war and the multiple international crossings of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham in the Border Trilogy.1 His movement from Tennessee to Texas begins directly after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), and he participates in various filibustering gangs whose goals are to rid the earth of the heathen tribes below the newly formed border and make a little money while doing it. The kid flits in and out of the lives of the famous and infamous, known and unknown figures of the West and other fictional characters based closely upon historical persons. In essence, the kid actively participates in American expansion West and South.2 Concomitantly, the epilogue to Blood Meridian seems to foreshadow All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain.3 While there are many philosophical implications of the man “progressing over the plain by means of holes” (BM 337), he is quite literally digging fence posts, fence posts John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins wish did not exist and fence posts Billy and Boyd Parham will burn for firewood on their first trip to Mexico. John Grady and Billy’s nostalgia for a time before the man digging post holes, the time of the kid’s youth, is a product of naïveté, Hollywood, picture books, and youthful exuberance—a romanticizing of pre–World War I America. McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, however, is not necessarily part one of a border tetralogy. Ostensibly (and perhaps paradoxically), his first southwestern novel offers a counter-argument to the trilogy’s almost wistful and romantic look at the pre-industrial Southwest. In a type of midrash on his own work, McCarthy offers a pre-revisionary comment on his own nostalgic western novels, revealing “the impossibility of separating ourselves from the events of our past that we now find to be morally objectionable”
and that “American history [is] a series of violent cultural transformations, a history of slaughtered selves and strange, incongruous births” (Parrish and Spiller 463). John Grady, in particular, would have done well to read Blood Meridian before setting out across the border searching for his Big Rock Candy Mountain. McCarthy’s novels are bound by their region, just as the Southwest remains bound to itself and its history. It is a region redefined from the Mexican North to the American Southwest by war, and it is a region where some areas still have more in common with Mexico City than New York City. The kid enters Texas and the Southwest shortly after the American defeat of Mexico and during the negotiations regarding the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. At this pivotal moment in history America creates the border that John Grady and Billy will later cross.4 The kid’s life of isolation and degradation spans both the American Civil War and Mexico’s war with Spain. When he meets Elrod on the plains and the judge in the jakes, Porfirio Díaz has recently gained the Presidency in Mexico, superseding Benito Juárez, who successfully defended Mexico against Maximilian and Spain’s attempts to reassert its colonial power in Mexico. During the war, Juárez’s “capital city” was El Paso del Norte, a city vital for supplying weapons and American money. Juárez’s victory was crucial to the United States’ and Mexico’s relations because his fierce Mexican pride created an anti-American sentiment that persists even today.5 When Díaz wrested control from Juárez (an Indian peasant who rose to power), he opened Mexico’s border to rich US investors who appropriated the land and resources, oppressing the Mexican population with foreign economic interests. The northern Mexico and southwestern United States in which McCarthy sets his four southwestern novels exist in the aftermath of 110 years of revolution and war. Mexico’s revolving door began with Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo’s cry for Mexican independence from Spain (1810) and continued for the next 100 years: Agustin de Iturbide (1821); Santa Anna (1823–1855); Benito Juárez and Melchor Ocamp Ignacio Comonfort (1855–1872); Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910). A hundred years after the Hidalgo-led revolution, Mexico was still in turmoil with a revolution led by Francisco I. Madero (1910), who was joined (at first) by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Madero gave way to Victoriano Huerta (1913), who quickly lost the presidency to Venustiano Carranza (1914). The next three years were marked by violent civil war and interim presidents. In 1917 under Carranza’s leadership, Mexico crafted its constitution (a constitution still in use today), but Carranza was assassinated in 1920 and Alvaro Obregón became President. Obregón’s election effectively marked the end of the revolution. Despite sporadic revolutionary violence in Mexico, Obregón was a strong leader who served a four-year presidency that helped stabilize the Mexican government after ten years of revolution.
In the midst of this bloodshed below the border, McCarthy’s characters live both in the historical moment and in its aftermath. Glanton’s gang lays the groundwork for men like William Randolph Hearst to enter into the Mexican economy and buy La Babícora, a purchase that occurred only six years after the kid meets the judge in the jakes. Unlike the kid, who rides with historical men, the boys from the Border Trilogy simply live in the historical aftermath of bloodshed in Mexico. The anti-American sentiment, Magdalena’s difficult (and fatal) attempt to cross the border, and Eduardo’s hatred for the leprous paradise north of the border in Cities of the Plain are all products of history, but they are not part of an archived historical moment in that history. They are, in other words, the stuff of fiction. From the exact dates and weather patterns of Blood Meridian to the vague location of the White Lake brothel, McCarthy’s southwestern works grow less historically and geographically specific. It is this distinction that separates the completed Border Trilogy from Blood Meridian. History, an important, viable character in Blood Meridian, becomes an influence—a secondary, subtle motivator—in the trilogy, where it is the human responses to that historical influence that take center stage. John Grady Cole may believe “in individualism, free will, volition . . . [and that] every man born on this planet is an Adam, free of memory and external constraint, able to shape his illimitable ‘self ’ in any way he chooses” (Pilkington 320). However, the history lesson John Grady learns from Dueña Alfonsa contradicts that American ideal. Instead, he learns, as Quijada tells Billy, that the “soul of Mexico is very old” (C 385); the past influences and controls the present. The scalping, filibustering gangs like Captain White’s and Glanton’s prefigured the economic filibustering gangs led by Hearst. This continual and oppressive American presence fueled the 1910 Mexican Revolution that tightened the border restrictions the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had created. John Grady and Billy travel to a Mexico controlled by the PRI, the Partido Revolucionario Institutional, a political party created in 1938. Creating a political party that institutionalizes the revolution, in effect, implies that the government represents the revolution and its ideas for reform. By the same token, the government eliminates the need for any new revolutions, implying that Mexico is in a constant state of controlled revolution and change. For Mexico, then, the revolution is continual and ongoing, hence the past is a significant part of the present. Whether history or myth, McCarthy’s trilogy seems to contend that “the past that was differs little from the past that was not” (BM 330). When Billy Parham talks to the traveler in the epilogue to Cities of the Plain, the narrator tells him that “This story like all stories has its beginnings in a question” (277). The traveler’s story, a story within a story “in what we must imagine to be some unknown infinitude of alternate being and likeness,” is
a retold narrative explaining why the Mexican narrator drew a map of his life (275). His tale of a dreamer and a group of men engaging in a “blood ceremony that was then and is now an affront to God” blurs boundaries between dreams and reality and contends that there is a common history among all men, hence a common history among cities, among nations (280). The narrator’s discussion of “common histories” and his story about his dreamt dreamer’s dream, with all of its inherent philosophical complexities, seem to deconstruct boundaries that separate men and generations: “Two worlds touch here” within the traveler’s story (276, 285). That point of contact mirrors the lives of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. Ostensibly, the question that begins the story of the two protagonists of the trilogy asks whether “His history is the same as yours or mine” (COP 285). This duality reflects the opening of the trilogy just as the “candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass” introduce us to John Grady (APH 3). If we treat these as one, then it is necessarily true that history is a shared experience and boundaries themselves do little to separate the effects of events where two worlds touch. The image and the reality (the myth and the history) are not two distinct objects; both become “twisted and righted” when the wind blows (APH 3). Much of what is twisted and righted historically is war. McCarthy’s southwestern fiction consistently provides historical reminders of the “wars and rumors of wars” (COP 61) that Mr. Johnson hears on the radio, and these rumors constantly remind us that history and all the events of history revolve around war and revolution. The constant of McCarthy’s southwestern fiction is the effect of war on men and women. The dominant historical event of the Southwest has been the revolutions in Mexico that created a new border between the wealthy United States and the poverty-stricken Mexican people. The battles south of the border influenced America’s readiness for World War I, and the United States returned to the Southwest to perfect its ability to end world wars by building and testing the atomic bomb. Yet, even that capability does not stop the military intrusion on the land and its people as the government plans to buy Mac McGovern’s ranch to extend the White Sands Missile Range.6 McCarthy’s southwestern fiction rejects the judge’s admonition that “If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay” (BM 307). Rather, these novels cry out against the meaninglessness of war and the repetitive historical patterns that create war, arguing that war will simply bury man in the clay that much faster. The Border Trilogy rejects the clichéd hope that to know history is to avoid repeating it. It argues that “The war changed everything” (COP 78), but McCarthy does not specify which war because they are all the same, caused by the same types of events. The change is constantly revolving, violently and inevitably, and “wars and rumors of war” dominate the discourse of the twentieth century.
The two wars that dominate the trilogy are the Mexican Revolution and World War II, and America’s involvements in both of these conflicts are defining moments in American history. Both Don Héctor and Dueña Alfonsa speak “of the revolution and of the history of Mexico . . . and of Francisco Madero” (APH 144).7 Madero’s revolution was intended to recreate Mexico and end the dictatorships that oppressed the worker and peasant. While it is true that the revolutionary party claimed victory after 1917, the poverty in Mexico that John Grady and Billy see subverts the rhetoric of change. The revolution offered hope to the masses that free elections could create equality. Even though Don Héctor correctly dismisses Madero and his revolution as quixotic (146), the revolution “was one of the last oldfashioned, pre-industrial wars, in which modern techniques and machinery had only an occasional role to play. It was a war of epic battles and mythical warrior-heroes, two of whom—Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata—have achieved fame throughout the world” (Rutherford 213). In McCarthy’s Border Trilogy the revolution comes to represent the peasant’s kindness in the face of continued oppression. The foreign ownership of places like La Babícora by men like William Randolph Hearst and the corruption of Captain Rául, who imprisons the old man Orlando at Encantada, are continually opposed by the basic human kindness of the workers, those very people the revolution should have freed from oppression. It is a country, Travis tells Billy and the other cowboys, where the goodness of the people contrasts with the reality of the historical moment: I was a cattlebuyer for Spurlocks. . . . I rode all over northern Mexico. Hell, there wasnt no cattle. Not to speak of. Mostly I just visited. . . . I liked the country and I liked the people in it. I rode all over Chihuahua and a good part of Coahuila and some of Sonora. I’d be gone weeks at a time and not have hardly so much as a peso in my pocket but it didnt make no difference. Those people would take you in and put you up and feed you and feed your horse and cry when you left. You could of stayed forever. They didnt have nothin. . . . You could see that the revolution hadnt done them no good. A lot of em had lost boys out of the family. Fathers or sons or both. Nearly all of em, I expect. They didnt have no reason to be hospitable to anybody. Least of all a gringo kid. That plateful of beans they set in front of you was hard come by. But I was never turned away. Not a time. (COP 90) As I have shown elsewhere, the Mexican Revolution is an overt presence in each book of the trilogy.8 It appears in All the Pretty Horses with
Luis’s story of Huerta, and Luis and Antonio’s continued subjection to Don Héctor reveals the failure of the revolution to effect social reform or increased independence for the peasants. The failure of Madero’s revolution is a prominent theme in both Dueña Alfonsa’s and Don Héctor’s conversation. The revolution is even more prominent in The Crossing, historically the earliest of the novels with its beginning in 1939 during Cardenas’s presidency. In his travels, Billy encounters such characters as the young female revolutionary and her mother-in-law and the blind revolutionary who tells him his story. The corrido about “El güerito” that Billy hears on his return from the US seems to cast Boyd as a hero for the oppressed, a revolutionary fighting against the “patrón’s men” (381). But, more importantly, as Dirk Raat has said, “corridos function as barometers of the Mexican’s attitudes towards events. The corrido is a kind of collective diary, an ethnohistorical document containing facts about society and history. Most corridos depict the Mexican as either victim or hero and often have themes of intercultural conflict. Many express frustration and anger over Anglo and North American dominance, and are, at times, a call to action” (48). Even Quijada admits the corrido “tells about him. . . . The corrido is the poor man’s history” (C 386). The corrido allows those not in power to lament their oppression and to rail against that oppression. In essence, then, the corrido offers hope. The Mexican people needed a hero because they lacked power.9 They may have gained certain agrarian reforms, but absentee landowners still dominated Mexico. The living circumstances of the Muñoz family and of the indian Quijada, who works for Hearst’s La Babícora, reiterate the failure of the revolution, land reform, and the continued presence of foreign ownership of Mexican resources. The revolution may have had little effect on the distribution of power and income in Mexico, but America’s reaction to it helped reshape fundamental aspects of the American military and attitudes about war. While the United States never officially entered the Mexican Revolution, America invaded Vera Cruz in 1914, and after Pancho Villa’s attack on Columbus, New Mexico, the government mobilized 40,000 National Guardsmen on the border near El Paso by 18 June 1916 (Vanderwood and Samponaro 10, 12). Even though America technically maintained its neutrality, the mobilization of so many troops gave the army a chance “to test new equipment and to train personnel, to hone its command structure and modernize its supply and support services. . . . Because of its Mexican venture, the U.S. Army finally became a twentieth-century fighting force, in large part due to Pancho Villa” (Vanderwood and Samponaro 186). Pershing’s foray into Mexico chasing Pancho Villa specifically helped the army develop tank warfare and redefine troop supply from mule and train dependencies to vehicular supply. In essence, America’s training along the border helped the troops’ preparedness for World War I.10
Perhaps most importantly, though, the army’s pre–World War I presence in the Southwest influenced its return to the Southwest to prepare for World War II. If the first World War showed America’s willingness to involve itself in Europe’s problems, the second World War created the American superpower mystique. The atomic bomb, a creation with its heart in the Southwest, fundamentally changed the face of war in the modern world. No longer would two opponents meet on the field and battle trench to trench. The technological wizardry that eliminated human contact with the enemy heightened the brutality of war. Glanton’s gang is animalistic, but they see the value of human life. Modern warfare removes the human(ity) from war, creating apathy and devaluing the warrior’s knowledge of his enemy’s life, hence his own. In essence, the atomic bomb made it easier to kill both from a technological standpoint and from a psychological standpoint. The effects extend beyond the battlefield. As Robert L. Holmes asserts in On War and Morality, the “paradox of contemporary civilization is that beyond a certain point the individual’s security begins to vary inversely with the power embodied in the systems meant to ensure that security” (3). Mr. Johnson’s “wars and rumors of wars” hold in them not just the history of civilization, a contention that would agree with Judge Holden’s theories on war; these wars he hears on the radio (probably Korea and possibly the Egyptian Revolution) carry with them the threat of total annihilation of all countries because of the destructive power of the atomic bomb. War is nothing new, as Mr. Johnson says,11 and that war dominates the discourse is nothing new to McCarthy readers. The epigraphs that open Blood Meridian point to the violence inherent in mankind. However, the Border Trilogy is not just about violence; it is about the inevitability of war, the inability to survive peacefully. At times, war seems god, or at least (as Kundera claims), war offers unity. Holmes argues that Since originating an estimated forty thousand years ago, war has consumed more wealth, demanded greater sacrifice, and caused more suffering than any other human activity. In shaping history it has eclipsed even religion, in whose service it has so often been enlisted. But although war has brought out the worst in man, it has also brought out the best. While it cannot be said to have done much for music, it has inspired literature and poetry and brought advances in science, medicine, and technology that otherwise might have been long in coming. Ruskin claims that it has been essential to art as well. It has sometimes been the cohesive force that has brought together divided peoples to form strong and durable societies. (12)12
This would seem to be the case in the Mexico of the Border Trilogy. Travis’s account of his trips to Mexico as a cattle buyer mirrors moments both John Grady and Billy experience in their trips to Mexico. John Grady, on his way back to the Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, gets a ride with some farmworkers “[a]nd after and for a long time to come he’d have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will” of the men in the truck (APH 219). Similarly, Billy and Boyd both receive assistance from the peasants and workers in The Crossing. The kindness of the Mexican people is contrasted and perhaps fostered by the oppressive world in which they live. The hombres del país who take the handcuffed captain are men of the country, not men of the government (APH 281). They instinctively know that John Grady is telling the truth about his horses and require no retribution for his actions in kidnapping a man of the government. Boyd’s immediate popularity after “kill[ing] the manco in a gunfight” and the worker’s shout that “hay justicia en el mundo” (C 317– 18; there’s justice in the world) also signal the underlying dissatisfaction of the Mexican populace. Billy’s later encounter with the drunk patriot further subverts the docility of the populace and points to the potentially violent anti-American sentiment in the country (C 356). McCarthy’s continual references to the Madero revolution accentuate the dichotomy between the revolution’s goals and its achievements. These are people who have no reason to offer kindness, especially to gringo kids, but who do so despite the false hope created by a revolution eventually institutionalized and adopted by the dominant political machine of the country. Much like the revolution in Mexico, World War II created false hopes in America. When Billy returns to America, he tries to enlist because “I dont have anyplace to go” (C 341), but the army will not take him because of his heart. Dianne C. Luce contends that “Billy’s attempts to enlist in the armed services come to stand for his only sustained effort to live among men in The Crossing, and this enterprise is doomed, too” (211–12).13 However, Billy’s desire to join the community by entering the army is ironic: the institution he tries to join is a primary cause of the increased alienation and isolation he and John Grady feel. These are boys “disinherited by war and war’s machinery” (COP 204). After trying to enlist multiple times, Billy works on a line camp, and, in a scene that mirrors his later encounter with the Mexican patriot, he goes to a bar in Winslow and orders a beer. In a second bar, where he meets a soldier and a bartender, his reticent stoicism causes problems. The bartender claims the “uniform dont mean nothin to him” (C 349). He follows this accusation with a bit of patriotic fear-mongering, telling the soldier that Billy would care if a uniform with “that risin sun on the collar . . . was comin down Second Street” (C 349). The patriotism is tempered by the location of the patriot: an empty bar in Winslow, Arizona, where a soldier drinks alone.
Billy later drifts across the Southwest where “[b]y the spring of the third year of the war there was hardly a ranch house in all of that country that did not have a gold star in the window” (C 350). The Southwest has “had it pretty rough. . . . Pretty rough,” Mr. Sanders tells Billy (C 351). There is little talk of the glory of war on Billy’s wanderings. Nevertheless, the war was a boon for the Southwest. Despite the gold stars and rough times for the families, war transformed the West economically.14 However, the economic benefits did not match the loss of life and hope that McCarthy infuses into his World War II veterans. Billy’s encounter with the American patriot takes place in an empty bar. John Grady’s father returns from war a broken, dying man. As John Grady and Billy are talking about their respective trips to Mexico, Billy tells John Grady “this country aint the same. Nor anything in it. The war changed everything. I dont think people even know it yet” (COP 78). World War II was a war that robbed America of joy in victory. Unlike in previous, imperialistic wars, America gained no land; and unlike World War I, this was not the war to end all wars. After World War I, Americans listened to network radio shows. . . . [S]educed by the imagery of advertising and the cinema, encouraged to ride out of familiar, stable locations in search of the unfamiliar or for the sheer experience of movement, Americans became a part of a distinctively modern, discontinuous and anonymous culture: a culture that was, and is, not specifically tied down to any individual locality, state, region—or, indeed, to any particular nation. (Gray 50) This seduction by technology became less pleasurable after World War II and Hiroshima. America suffered heavy losses and inflicted even greater losses by dropping the bomb, a move that stunned the world. More obvious, though, was the effect on servicemen returning to America. John Grady’s father, a former POW and survivor of the Bataan Death March, returns not “the same” despite his son’s assertion that he is the same “inside” (APH 12). On their last ride, he looks “over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he’d seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last” (APH 23). John Grady’s father may be wracked by pneumonia (many Bataan survivors returned with fatal pneumonia or other deadly infectious diseases), or he may have cancer or emphysema promoted by the cigarettes and lighters distributed to American soldiers. Much like John Grady’s father, Troy returns from the war isolated. After his discharge from the army, he “wandered all over this country” (COP 22), he tells Billy—right after telling him about a driving trip to Amarillo with
Gene Edmonds, when the “front of the car . . . was just packed completely full of jackrabbit heads . . . all lookin out, eyes all crazy lookin” (COP 22). Troy’s story highlights the post-war industrial world. While it is still possible to hit jackrabbits driving in West Texas at night, the likelihood has diminished somewhat as the rabbits have grown used to cars. Gene Edmonds’s “brand new Olds Eighty-eight” (21) roaring down the highway is America in the twentieth century. The trip from El Paso to Amarillo (around 418 miles) in ten hours is a modern miracle in 1949. (Compare Troy’s trip to that of John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, who ride from San Angelo to Eldorado, 43 miles, in one day, in All the Pretty Horses.) The speed of the trip, however, is countered by the hellish grill “covered with blood and rabbit guts” (22). The death and ghoulish appearance of these rabbits is classic McCarthy; it is also a classic confrontation between technology and nature. America’s newfound love affair with the American automobile, with dynamic movement, creates gothic images of morbidity. Shortly after John Grady and his father discuss the selling of the ranch, poker, and John Grady’s grandfather, his father sees a newspaper and wonders, “How can Shirley Temple be getting divorced?” (APH 13).15 Shirley Temple’s divorce signifies the passage of time and the loss of innocence. To John Grady’s father, the death of the grandfather and Shirley Temple’s divorce both represent the death of pre–World War II values and life; in some respects, the divorce symbolizes the failure of World War II to fulfill the promise of peace, prosperity, and worldwide democracy. The end of the war in 1945 brought both euphoria and a rush to fulfill the promise of the myth of return. . . . The nation that emerged from the war, and to which the veterans returned, was not the place they had left. . . . But the most profound gap between the expectation and the reality of victory was opened by the breakdown of the wartime alliance between the United States and the soviet [sic] Union. Whatever else victory was supposed to mean, the establishment of permanent peace and a rational world order was the irreducible minimum. (Slotkin 329, 332)16 Shirley Temple’s divorce, the grandfather’s death, and the loss of the ranch do not exactly offer order. Paradoxically, according to Alex Hunt, the splitting of the atom, a moment of supreme Cartesian physics, created disunity and “challenges our anthropocentric view of the relationship between humanity and the natural world” (31). As Hunt says, Billy’s tears at the end of The Crossing “mourn the violence of humanity and humanity’s ultimate alienation from nature through its appropriation of nature’s power” (37).
Isolation and alienation seem at the heart of McCarthy’s novels; however, the alienation of the individuals comes at a time when America has exponentially increased its worldwide involvement in other countries’ affairs. The very creation and use of the atomic bomb virtually forced America into a universal role as a Big Brother peacekeeper, making isolation impossible to maintain. Wars and rumors of wars will always intrude; the technology of the twentieth century delimits John Grady’s desire to live on “a little spread up in the hills” where he can kill his own meat and remove himself from the world below (COP 77). What John Grady and Billy learn is that “each of us has a secret frontier within him, and that is the most difficult frontier to cross because each of us hopes to find himself alone there, but finds only that he is more than ever in the company of others” (Fuentes 161). Essentially, isolation and alienation are never complete because technology subverts the ability to remain alone. World War II acts as a moment of aporia for these boys: the alienation and isolation of the individual is deconstructed by the ever-growing communal responsibility and intrusion. The governmental intrusion upon the lives of the ranchers in the Southwest signifies this communal growth. Lurking in the background of Cities of the Plain are the army surveyors sent to “find the sorriest land they could find” (11). This land will become part of the militarized Southwest that includes Ft. Bliss and the White Sands Missile Range. Increased military presence began during the Mexican Revolution and continued as America created its nuclear arsenal. The transition from privately owned land did not always go smoothly, though. While McGovern recognizes that “the army’s” goin to take this place,” the only way Mr. Prather will “leave [is] in a box” (264, 62). When John Grady interrupts Mr. Johnson as he listens to the radio, we get a short history of New Mexico. Mr. Johnson tells John Grady that “Oliver Lee always said he come out here because the country was so sorry nobody else would have it and he’d be left alone. Of course he was wrong. At least about bein left alone” (61). The army will “take the whole Tularosa basin. . . . Folks will piss and moan about it. But they dont have a choice. They ought to be glad to get shut of it” (62). Oliver Lee was wrong on both accounts, it seems. Not only would he not be left alone, something John Grady must also learn, but he has moved to land that people do want. The army’s takeover was just another in a long history of land wars that includes the Mexican Revolution, the Lincoln County Wars, and the expansion of White Sands Missile Range.17 Even before the military takeover of the land, Lee was involved in the Lincoln County wars in New Mexico. This battle over land and water rights “attracted desperados from all parts of New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and south of the Rio Grande” (“White Sands” sect. 3). The most famous participant was, of course, Billy the Kid.
When Mr. Johnson tells John Grady he is listening to “wars and rumors of wars,” he echoes our experience reading McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. These three novels are replete with allusions and direct references to the wars that dominate the American Southwest and northern Mexico’s past. Even those who fail to participate directly in the wars are affected, and the wars themselves are products of earlier wars. This constant revolution of war and violence sits at the heart of the trilogy. More importantly, though, that history affects everyone, without distinction. John Grady and Billy cannot reverse the world by running to Mexico or returning the wolf to her natural habitat. Instead, these conflicts hold within them the sense that what “is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change” (APH 239). John Grady and Billy are left “disinherited by war and war’s machinery” (COP 204); yet “[t]he world of our fathers resides within us” (COP 281). The paradoxical country whose technology both alienates and unifies becomes a world within which John Grady Cole cannot survive. His knife fight with Eduardo, the challenge made by honking a car horn, is emblematic of the dichotomy of the modern world after World War II. The kindness Billy encounters as the trilogy ends is subverted by the circular nature of the novel. Billy’s room off Betty’s kitchen returns us to the opening of The Crossing. In a sort of postmodern looping, we are returned to the time of Billy’s childhood before he leaves to return the wolf to Mexico. In essence, we return to the Parham family’s move out of Grant County (named for Ulysses S. Grant) to Hidalgo County (named for Guadalupe Hidalgo, the father of Mexican independence). It is this looping back to war and war’s referents that defines McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. The history of the region and those who live there is shrouded in war. John Grady and Billy become men unified by war and violence, and this war creates a map of existence for each person, a map both distinct and overlapped with the maps of others. Not e s 1. Leo Daugherty sees in Blood Meridian (1985) the “warrior judge’s work to achieve dominion—to be the realized . . . archon of this Anaretic planet” (164), and Rick Wallach makes an apt comparison between the martial codes of Beowulf and Blood Meridian, contending that the “structured social systems that justify and promulgate conflict, represent violence as craft, and conventionalize destructive activity in a craftsmanly way” (113). Robert L. Jarrett, in his Cormac McCarthy, argues that the judge “articulates an ideology of conquest that defends unlimited war as the supreme arbiter of the conflict between . . . wills (81), and that Blood Meridian “forces its readers . . . to confront the history of violence and the unicultural rhetoric of the antebellum period of Manifest Destiny” (93). War and Blood Meridian seem to go hand in hand (or perhaps hand to hand), and while we cannot necessarily call Judge Holden the novel’s spokesman, he does do the most speaking about war:
John Wegner This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. (249)
2. For discussions of history in Blood Meridian, see John Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian (Louisville: Bellarmine College P, 1993); and Dana Phillips, “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” American Literature 68.2 (1996): 433–60. 3. Edwin T. Arnold, in “The Mosaic of McCarthy’s Fiction,” contends that “the ending of Blood Meridian looks forward, the beginning of Pretty Horses looks backward, and they meet at a point where text joins text” (19). 4. See Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and its Hero. Paredes contends, “It was the Treaty of Guadalupe that added the final element to Rio Grande society, a border. The river, which had been a focal point, became a dividing line. Men were expected to consider their relatives and closest neighbors, the people just across the river, as foreigners in a foreign land” (15). 5. Juárez’s victory represented “a triumph of anti-colonialism in an age of dominant empires. As such, it anticipated the struggles of the mid-twentieth century in an exemplary manner” (Hamnett xii). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo separated El Paso del Norte between the two countries. Named after Benito Juárez in 1888, Juárez gained its notoriety during the Revolution of 1910–1920. The city was crucial to Francisco Madero’s early volley to overthrow Díaz, providing access to American arms and other goods. See my forthcoming article, “Mexico’s Revolutionary History and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” in Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000) for a more complete discussion of Juárez and the Border Trilogy. See Hamnett’s Juárez for biographical information on Benito Juárez and his fight for Mexican autonomy from France. 6. There is, of course, historical precedent for the army’s purchase of McGovern’s ranch. In 1941–42, when the government began the Los Alamos project (the atomic bomb), they intended to lease the land from ranchers. After testing the bombs, fearing radiation fallout, the government offered to buy the ranches or extend the leases. If ranchers did not agree to either of those terms, the army would file a “condemnation suit” (“White Sands” sect. 4). As late as 1982, the Dave McDonald family was still protesting the army’s rancher payment program. McDonald contended that the army did not follow the lease agreement. For more information about land issues, see “White Sands Missile Range—A Regional History,” and Ferenc M. Szasz, The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1984). 7. Gail Moore Morrison argued in 1999 (before the completion of the trilogy) that the revolutionary tales put John Grady’s disappointments in perspective and transform him into a man of action (191). I would agree that the tales are important, but John Grady seems already a man of action in All the Pretty Horses. In fact, he would do well to be less action oriented and more thoughtful. These tales also do not, it is revealed in Cities of the Plain, teach John Grady much about Mexico. Even after his trip to Mexico in All the Pretty Horses, he still asks Billy, “Dont you think if there’s anything left of this life it’s down there?” (COP 218). Unlike Billy, who seems to understand that Mexico does not provide an answer (“I concluded my business down there a long time ago”), John Grady still sees Mexico as a panacea for the dying ranch life.
8. For extended discussion of the historical Madero and his presence in the trilogy, see my “Whose Story Is It? History and Fiction in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses,” Southern Quarterly 36.2 (1998) 103–10. For more comprehensive historical explication of the trilogy’s many references to the Mexican Revolution, see my forthcoming article, “Mexico’s Revolutionary History and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” 9. See Américo Paredes, With a Pistol in His Hand for the best discussion of corridos. See also Merle E. Simmons, The Mexican Corrido as a Source for Interpretive Study of Modern Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1957), for an impressive collection of corridos arranged by subject. 10. Michael D. Carman writes that “[t]he Army’s chief of staff and inspector general reported that the entire Army had benefited from the mobilization” (48). See also Clarence C. Clendenen, Blood on the Border: The United States Army and the Mexican Irregulars (London: Macmillan, 1969), for a discussion of Pershing’s pursuit of Villa and American preparation for World War I. Vanderwood and Samponaro also contend that the US Army was ranked behind Germany and Japan at the turn of the century. The American Air Force was in worse shape. Because the government moved the training ground to the Southwest border and trained pilots in Mexico (188), the plane the gypsies move in The Crossing (401–02) could be an American Air Force plane used during training. 11. Two of John Grady Cole’s uncles “were killed in Puerto Rico in eighteen ninetyeight” (APH 7). Most likely, they were killed in the Spanish-American War. 12. I should point out that Holmes’s work focuses on the inherent immorality of any war, arguing against philosophers like Augustine who contend that war can be just (morally correct). Holmes quotes those who support war as useful to art and science, including an interesting passage from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle . . . and only in eternal peace does it perish” (qtd. in Holmes 13). Hitler’s claim sounds similar to something Judge Holden would say. 13. Luce writes that Billy’s damaged heart suggests “his shortcoming is more in courage than in the capacity for understanding” (212). I would add a secondary reading of the scene as a commentary on the absurdity of the army and war. Billy’s own logical observation “If I’m goin to die anyways why not use me” (C 341) shows both the subtle humor in McCarthy and the silliness of an army that recognizes “You aint got noplace else to go” (C 337) but refuses to allow him to enlist. 14. See Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), for a discussion of World War II’s impact on the American economy. Obviously, World War I changed the American economy as well: “from a debtor nation [the United States] had been transformed into a creditor nation, with loans to Europe worth $13,000,000,000” (Gray 50). 15. Temple’s divorce was reported on page one of the San Angelo Daily Standard on 5 December 1949. 16. Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation is an excellent look at the myth of the West and its development in film and politics. The passages quoted above discuss John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), a film in which an adult Shirley Temple appears. Interestingly enough, Slotkin points out that between 1947 and 1949 Hollywood produced approximately 150 Westerns, many of them either propaganda/patriotic films or anti-war films detailing transgressions by American armed forces. 17. While Mr. Johnson’s story of Oliver Lee and Colonel Fountain seems odd intermixed with army intrusion, his story reinforces the violence of the Southwest, representing “one of the last old-West killings” in the region (“White Sands” sect. 3). Lee, along with William NcNew, was accused of “defacing” a brand on a steer belonging to W. A. Irwin of El Paso.
Albert J. Fountain served as a Special Prosecutor for the case. On 31 January 1896, Fountain and his eight-year-old son disappeared while returning home from Las Cruces. The bodies were never recovered. See William Keleher, The Fabulous Frontier: Twelve New Mexico Items (Sante Fe, NM: Rydal P, 1945), for a more comprehensive discussion of Lee and Fountain. Interestingly, Fountain fought with Benito Juárez at one time.
Wor ks Cit ed Arnold, Edwin T. “The Mosaic of McCarthy’s Fiction.” Hall and Wallach 17–23. Arnold, Edwin T., and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. Bingham, Arthur. “Syntactic Complexity and Iconicity in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Language and Literature 20 (1995): 19–33. Carman, Michael Dennis. United States Customs and the Madero Revolution. El Paso: Texas Western P, 1976. Daugherty, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.” Arnold and Luce 159–74. Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden and Carlos Fuentes. New York: Farrar, 1985. Gray, Richard. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Longman Literature in English Series. Ed. David Carroll and Michael Wheeler. New York: Longman, 1990. Hall, Wade, and Rick Wallach. Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. El Paso: Texas Western P, 1995. Hamnett, Brian. Juárez. New York: Longman, 1994. Holmes, Robert L. On War and Morality. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. Hunt, Alex. “Right and False Suns: Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, and the Advent of the Atomic Age.” Southwestern American Literature 23.2 (1998): 31–37. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997. Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Grove, 1987. Luce, Dianne C. “The Road and the Matrix: The World as Tale in The Crossing.” Arnold and Luce 195–219. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, 1993. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1992. McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain. New York: Vintage, 1999. McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Vintage, 1995. Morrison, Gail Moore. “All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise.” Arnold and Luce 175–94. Paredes, Américo. “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and its Hero. Austin: U of Texas P, 1958. Parrish, Tim, and Elizabeth A. Spiller. “A Flute Made of Human Bone: Blood Meridian and the Survivors of American History.” Prospects 23 (1998): 461–81. Pilkington, Tom. “Fate and Free Will on the American Frontier: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Fiction.” Western American Literature 27.4 (1993): 311–22. “Porfirio Díaz, Remarkable President of Mexican Republic.” San Angelo Daily Standard 7 Mar. 1911: A2. Raat, W. Dirk. “The Mexican Pet and Other Stories: Folklore and History.” TwentiethCentury Mexico. Ed. W. Dirk Raat and William H. Beezley. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. 44–54.
Rutherford, John. “The Novel of the Mexican Revolution.” The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 2. The Twentieth Century. Ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 213–25. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Vanderwood, Paul J., and Frank N. Samponaro. Border Fury: A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico’s Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910–1917. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1988. Wallach, Rick. “From Beowulf to Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy’s Demystification of the Martial Code.” Southern Quarterly 36.4 (1998): 113–20. “White Sands Missile Range—Regional History.” Public Affairs Office White Sands Missile Range. 8 May 1998. .
G eorg G uillemin
Introduction: The Prototypical Suttree
The more we learn about nature, the more its reiterative meaninglessness will appall us. Ultimate horror lies not in the heart of darkness but in the heart of enlightened understanding of nature. —Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism
he most intriguing literary aspect of McCarthy’s fiction is that his narrative voice is increasingly at odds with his narrative vision. McCarthy pitches a highly stylized, wholly man-made literary practice against his evolving ecopastoral universe, until a stalemate between humanist discourse and post-humanist idea invests his fiction with a narrative melancholia that is actually very common in pastoral fiction. Out of the dialectic tension between narrative voice and narrative vision, however, evolves a version of pastoral without equal in the American literature of the latter half of the twentieth century. The subject of this comprehensive study will be the evolution of McCarthy’s work: the shift from traditional pastoralism in The Orchard Keeper (1965) to the wilderness turn in Child of God (1973), and from the anti-pastoralism of Outer Dark (1968) to the negative biocentrism of Blood Meridian (1985) and finally to the ecopastoralism of the Border Trilogy.1 The study is based on the assumption that a compositional triangle is at play throughout McCarthy’s work. One side of the triangle is formed by a pervasive spirit of melancholia, used—in keeping with a tradition going back From The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy, 3–17. © 2004 by Georg Guillemin.
Georg Guillemin
to baroque times (or even biblical times)—as a literary device for creating narrative distance. In a way, melancholia itself seems to narrate the novels. Another side of the triangle is allegoresis, the encryption of narrative contents in parabolic images and story lines in the manner of fables. On the third side of the triangle we find the pastoral theme, understood as the principal quest for harmony in a better world. All the novels mentioned above are defined by the interaction of melancholy mood, allegorical style, and pastoral theme. The one novel not mentioned, Suttree (1979), does not invite inclusion into a pastoral review of McCarthy’s work. It stands out because of its urban setting, and therefore contains few nature scenes that would validate a pastoral reading. It may, however, be used as the perfect introduction to McCarthy’s style, being, as it were, McCarthy’s longest novel and the most complex. Suttree marks a halfway point in McCarthy’s fiction, not just because it was the fourth novel published but also because it concludes the cycle of Southern novels. In some respects Suttree might count as his most Southern work (due to the tall tales, banter, and local color), while in other respects it seems barely American (due to its use of stream of consciousness and its Old World iconography). Actually, Suttree is less a pivotal than a prototypical work. McCarthy began to work on the novel in the early 1960s (before he wrote The Orchard Keeper), and it reads like a debut novel: Dense description alternates with the lean prose of the plot action; loquacious monologues with idiomatic dialogue; isolated episodes with a vaguely linear story line; autobiographical hints with intertextual links. Then again, the book draws on the writing experience of the three foregoing novels. Like these it uses expository tableaux, scenes of violence, and episodic tangents to describe the protagonist’s psyche. In the context of discussing McCarthy’s pastoralism, the singularity of Suttree constitutes not so much a challenge as a windfall. As a prototypical work, the novel contains all the compositional elements that will be essential for the individual interpretations of the novels. A selective discussion of these elements will introduce the intended critical approach without preempting the discussion of the larger context. This critical sleight of hand—involving Suttree in precisely the kind of reading it does not accommodate—will serve to define three compositional mainstays in McCarthy’s writings: the abovementioned elements of pastoral genre, allegorical style, and melancholy perspective. In each of McCarthy’s novels these elements interact to form a tripartite structure that showcases the author’s aesthetic order. The combination makes sense, for melancholy subject matter generally favors allegorical parables either of self-deprecation or self-empowerment, while pastoral narratives generally favor utopian parables of escape into a better, simpler world. And as he acknowledges the futility of his escapism, the pastoral narrator tends to succumb to melancholia.
Suttree is set in the Knoxville of the early 1950s, or, more precisely, in the urban wasteland of McAnally Flats, a depressed neighborhood adjacent to the Tennessee River and part of downtown Knoxville. The novel’s wealth of authentic detail reflects the fact that McCarthy grew up and went to college in that town.2 The text introduces the district as “a world within the world” (4), a microcosm of speakeasies, black shantytowns, and houseboats (one of which the protagonist Cornelius Suttree inhabits). The stark representation of this “terra damnata” (306) from Suttree’s point of view recalls the literary tradition of the gentleman observer mingling with the poorest of the poor. Coming from a bourgeois family background, this “reprobate scion of doomed Saxon clans” (136) has renounced his Catholic faith, social status, and career prospects to become a fisherman. Among Suttree’s pariah friends is young Gene Harrogate, one of McCarthy’s likable but never-do-well picaro figures. At their first encounter in the workhouse, Harrogate is incarcerated for sexually abusing watermelons. All his schemes reveal similar maturity and resourcefulness, such as his plan to dynamite his way into a bank vault that results in his breaching a sewer main instead. Along with the idiomatic banter, roughhousing, and tall tales, the humor of this picaresque story line constitutes a counter-discourse to the existential gloom of the novel’s bulk. After two abortive romances, a pilgrimage into the Appalachians, and the discovery of a dead man in his own bed (suggesting he had survived his own death) Suttree eventually leaves the city and takes to the road. The novel ends with an image reminiscent of Dante’s “The Wood of the Suicides,” in which black hounds terrorize the souls.3 The narrator addresses the reader directly in seeming abdication of both urban civilization and agrarian pastoralism: An enormous lank hound had come out of the meadow by the river like a hound from the depths and was sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood. Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of the cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. (471) This conclusion connects directly to a passage in the prologue in which, analogously, death is said to besiege the city; the references here are again to Dante, to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” and to Melville’s weaver god in Moby Dick (446): “The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but to the thing’s inside and can you guess his shape? Where he’s kept and what’s the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a timewarp, a carder of souls from the world’s nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his deadcart through the streets and does he call his
trade to each?” (Suttree 4–5) The liberal use of intertextuality here suggests not so much a postmodern pastiche with indeterminate meaning but rather, creates a passage that reads like the back-reference typical of allegorical writing, the implied threat being death. In short, Suttree combines a picaresque quest for survival with a modernist quest for truth, a baroque style with existentialist despair. The novel sustains comparisons to Eliot’s “Waste Land” and Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus (1942), to Joyce’s Ulysses (1918) and Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), and to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Dante’s The Divine Comedy.4 It invites a close reading of its iconography as much as it invites psychoanalysis. But in spite of its complexity, the novel manifests a unified composition. In discussing McCarthy’s aesthetic, it is essential to note that the melancholia underlying the narrative process does not originate in pastoral nostalgia. On the contrary, the pastoral theme of loss seems chosen as a suitable articulation of melancholia as such. Melancholia appears in McCarthy’s writings in the form of an obsession with death or mortality, as well as in a consistent maintenance of narrative distance. Such melancholy distancing, understood as a time-honored literary device, originates in the biblical image of the agonized prophet on the hill who watches the world from afar on its course toward ruin. In the novel at hand, this conceit is used, for instance, when Suttree associates the rubble of a riverside lot with the emblem used by the Puritans to invoke the divine sanction of their mission: “[A]ll this detritus slid from the city on the hill” (411). Here, the narrative melancholia is translated into the protagonist’s despondency as well as into his inability or unwillingness to assume any form of civic responsibility. Suttree’s self-chosen outcast status is never fully explained beyond a deep-seated resentment of the bourgeois pattern of domesticity, prosperity, and morality. He has abandoned his wife but continues to be traumatized by losing first her and later his child, “choked with a sorrow he had never known” (153). Yet his primitive life revolves around nothing at all, and its meaninglessness horrifies him just as much. In a scene reminiscent of mad King Lear on the heath, his quest for meaning takes a suicidal turn: “Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain” (366). In the sense that plot and exposition are organized around the search for the meaning of life and death, Suttree parallels the part of Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Both characters have an academic background; both are haunted by their families’ past. Here, as there, suicidal neuroses articulate themselves in obsessions with time and
the chiaroscuro of light.5 Among the relevant passages counts a childhood memory of a horse race in which Suttree’s grandfather offers that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man’s flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, nightsoil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which? (136) On a personal level, then, the novel reads like a psychological profile of its main character. From among the sermons of evangelists Suttree picks the jeremiads, a family photo album resembles a “picturebook of the afflicted” (130), a snake under a rock is hailed as “little brother death” (284), and his hard-drinking uncle has a “smell of death at the edges” (16). Suttree’s sensory spectrum is fine-tuned to aspects of mortality. He provokes lifethreatening experiences as if to seek death, involving himself in brawls, contracting typhoid, sustaining severe injury, and starving himself during his hike into the Gatlinburg wilderness. With the reclusive rag-picker he converses about God and dying. The ragman admits, “I always figured they was a God” but “I just never did like him” (147), and Suttree feels the same way. His skepticism and a longing for death inform his idea that “Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it” (153). Upon closer scrutiny, the melancholia apparent in Suttree and in the narrator of Suttree loses some of its mournful aspect and is in fact drained of any emotion whatsoever. Its intrinsic nature is the catatonic state described in William James’s lecture on the “sick soul.”6 What James says about Tolstoy could be applied to Suttree, namely that the perceived meaninglessness of life “was like those first discomforts of a sick man, to which he pays but little attention till they run into one continuous suffering, and then he realizes that what he took for a passing disorder means the most momentous thing in the world for him, means his death” (153). James suggests that sentiments of such emotionally deadened melancholia do not originate in the subject’s physical or social reality, but “have their source in another sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the subject’s being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your
world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness” (150). The state of mind James describes essentially captures not only the meaninglessness that perturbs Suttree, but, moreover, the narrative perspective governing McCarthy’s writings in general. It is precisely this melancholy equanimity that conditions the pastoral vision of McCarthy. If optimistically interpreted, its pessimistic indifference bestows an egalitarian existential status on all terrestrial phenomena alike. James’s words support this line of argument as he arrives at the following conclusion: “No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective” (150). What is most important, then, about the death-centeredness of Suttree is that death assumes a leveling function. The narrative form transporting the egalitarian aspect of death in effect simulates the folkloric emblem of Death personified, which comes for each and every person regardless of status. Relevant images include dreams of the dead: “In a dream I walked with my grandfather by a dark lake and the old man’s talk was filled with incertitude. I saw how all things false fall from the dead. We spoke easily and I was humbly honored to walk with him deep in that world where he was a man like all men” (14). Toward the end of Suttree, after “[t]he wilderness has treated him with a sublime indifference” (Longley 87) and after the typhoid fever has failed to carry him off, melancholia gives way to the affirmative insight “I know all souls are one and all souls lonely” (459). Elsewhere, this notion is rephrased in a way that calls to mind transcendentalist writing or Whitman’s7 poetry: “It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul” (414). In the course of the same soliloquy, Suttree comes to renounce his modernist quest for a stable sense of self, though no post-humanist implication reveals itself yet: “I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all” (414).8 On the plot level of the text, this moment of epiphany provides the novel’s theme of suicide with “a resolution to the very problem central to ‘The Myth of Sisyphus,’ and one presented with elements strikingly in common with that work. While many readers of Suttree have felt that the novel simply stops, it does resolve itself and does so in the same way as Camus’s work: in an act of will rather than an act of rational thought” (Shelton 72). On the meta-narrative level, however, the cause and resolution of Suttree’s crisis matter less than the fact that his fixation on death creates a protagonist with a melancholy point of view. Among McCarthy’s novels,
Suttree is the only one with an intellectually active protagonist, while in all his novels the narrative perspective coincides with the protagonists’ points of view. In a prototypical manner, Suttree shows how the protagonist’s melancholia is indistinguishable from that of the narrative consciousness. In other words, although character and narrator are distinct entities, they virtually share a point of view. Since he channels the narrative perspective, Suttree’s focus on death creates the cognitive condition for subjecting all that is seen and all that is told to the death-centered vision of the melancholy narrator. Analogously, the protagonists of all the other novels function as vessels for the narrative gaze even as the narrators remain amorphous, and even if most of McCarthy’s figures come across as curiously lifeless. In book after book, these unreflective nomads represent a melancholia that they do not contain within themselves. The uneasy reception with which McCarthy’s writings have occasionally been met may be due not so much to the author’s penchant for violent action, but to his rhetoric and iconography. McCarthy is a storyteller in a parabolic sense. The secret of his symbolism is that it works not symbolically but allegorically at a time when allegoresis has just begun to regain respect as a literary mode. Its semantic single-mindedness renders allegory alien to the romantic, realist, or modernist schools of literature. Some postmodern writing has rehabilitated allegoresis through its use of parable, and typological structure through its use of intertextuality. But McCarthy can hardly be considered a postmodern writer. Any de-centering intention he may share with postmodernism owes less to the influence of fashionable theory than to the subversive energy of the grotesque. His allegorical iconography partakes of the realism Mikhail Bakhtin has defined as carnivalesque. A case in point, Suttree’s hallucination during his wilderness quest calls to mind Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Goethe’s Faust II, or the tableaux of Hieronymous Bosch. The use of the grotesque is as typical of McCarthy’s style as the mannerism of the run-on sentences: “And along the little ways in the rain and lightning came a troupe of squalid merrymakers bearing a caged wivern on shoulderpoles and other alchemical game, chimeras and cacodemons skewered up on boarspears and a pharmacopoeia of hellish condiments adorning a trestle and toted by trolls with an eldern gnome for guidon who shouted foul oaths from his mouth-hole and a piper who piped a pipe of cloverbone and wore on his hip a glass flasket of some foul smoking fuel that yawed within viscid as quicksilver” (287–88). The problem of allegorical discourse is that it retards its own interpretation. It fails to signify anything beyond the finite meaning it confers through parable or type. The following emblem easily translates into the Ophelia motif, but what to make of it? “In an old grandfather time a ballad transpired here, some love gone wrong and a sabletressed girl drowned in an icegreen pool where she was
found with her hair spreading like ink on the cold and cobbled river floor” (283). No context is given; the image presents itself without preparation and comment and is dropped again. Emblems like this one abound in Suttree and in McCarthy’s novels generally. The insertion of these emblems must seem arbitrary if the text is approached with realistic criteria, and critics who have so approached it tend to write themselves into a rage.9 Actually, McCarthy’s craftsmanship does not suggest that anything is left to chance or escapes narrative control even if his novels are not laid out to foreground plot progression, denouement, or character development. The plots progress, and the characters develop, to the degree that they serve to accumulate, rather than order, installments of a certain story as if to complete a mosaic of stills rather than to scroll a film in linear sequence. McCarthy’s texts may therefore repeat intratextual stories or emblems and connect to stories told elsewhere by McCarthy or by other writers. They often affect a retold quality that is indigenous to oral storytelling and overrides the concerns of dramatic structure and mimetic exposition. In order not to end in a diagnosis of structural paucity, critical studies of McCarthy would do well to focus on the allegorical composition that gathers the emblems, banter, tall tales, and monotonous syntax into a unified aesthetic. The effects of allegoresis in Suttree are impossible to overlook. The novel’s prologue is all parable, explicitly establishing the textual setting as a stage. The baroque idea that the world represents a stage fronting for a higher form of being, and, inversely, that text and stage represent the world in microcosm, is the very presupposition of McCarthy’s aesthetic. The rest indeed is silence. It has begun to rain. Light summer rain, you can see it falling slant in the town lights. The river lies in a grail of quietude. Here from the bridge the world below seems a gift of simplicity. Curious, no more. [. . .] A curtain is rising on the western world. A fine rain of soot, dead beetles, anonymous small bones. The audience sits webbed in dust. Within the gutted sockets of the interlocutor’s skull a spider sleeps and the jointed ruins of the hanged fool dangle from the flies, bone pendulum in motley. Fourfooted shapes go to and fro over the boards. Ruder forms survive. (5) Apart from its allegorical quality, the excerpt contains emblematic allusions to melancholia (the skull, the dust-covered audience, the watcher on the bridge) and the hope of survival. The narrative tension between the prologue’s descriptions of urban squalor and the concluding emblem does not seem intended to qualify a Dickensian scenery with a sense of irony. Rather, it places in typological sequence two images of the world, one describing it
as a pest house and the other describing it as a stage. The latter represents the very image underlying the passage from Macbeth from which Faulkner also took his title The Sound and the Fury.10 What is added to the familiar image is that the theater seems decommissioned, bypassed by time, while “ruder forms” than audience, actors, and interlocutor—that is, creatures less refined—“survive.” The survivalist notion, while originating in the retrospective melancholia of the text, implies a narrative indifference toward these cultural artifacts. At the same time, it invests life forms with existential privileges that do not share in the high drama of life. Thus, a sense of rivalry between a tragic view of life and a comic one surfaces, and this aspect ushers in the essence of McCarthy’s pastoral vision. What few pastoral aspects are found in Suttree manage to run the whole gamut of American pastoralism. For one thing, Suttree describes a ruined mansion, “which might have been lifted from the pages of any southern pastoral lament,” while the novel remains free of pastoral nostalgia. The reader will look “in vain for the great theme of ‘the past in the present,’ for the burden of southern history, for . . . the conflict between tradition and modernity” (Grammer 30). A daydream occurring as Suttree walks the crumbling halls of the mansion and “through the ruined garden” contains the words “something more than time has passed here” (136). The scene obviously refers to Southern pastoralism in the emblem of the ruined mansion and ruined garden as something so anachronistic that it has ceased to be an object even of nostalgia. In this sense the scene reduces literary back-references, such as to Sutpen’s mansion in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), to the function of stage props and discourages any elegiac or tragic reading of the novel. To read it in an anti-pastoral sense would equally miss the point, because pastoral escapism as a lifestyle choice is clearly still available to Suttree, as his wilderness trip demonstrates. The mansion, then, functions like a prop representing an anachronistic pastoral nostalgia and helps create a setting against which a new pastoralism defines itself. The same narrative function is inscribed in the following reflection on the Westward-Ho! version of pastoral escapism: “[T]he country rolls away to the south and the mountains. Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease” (4). The passage alludes to the ideas of the Puritan errand into the wilderness, of Manifest Destiny, and of white supremacy. This legacy is identified not just as obsolete but also as pathogenic.
What presents itself in answer to traditional versions of pastoral and in contrast to the gnostic materialism of the city is not a unified ecopastoral alternative. One of several alternative approaches is suggested by Suttree’s immersion in nature, and this approach takes its cue from transcendentalism, even in regard to Suttree’s failure to become one with the cosmos: Rather than the sublime, he experiences the trivial and the grotesque. Another approach is personified in the Native American Michael who, like Suttree, is a fisherman, and who shares advice, food, secret bait, and a talisman. “As it turns out, Suttree—however he may aspire to it—proves incapable of the kind of oneness with the river which Michael has attained” (Young 105). In a sense, Suttree’s mystification over Michael’s teachings reflects the role of the Native American worldview as an ecological utopia. A third alternative to traditional pastoral vision is suggested in the treatment of wilderness, and it is the ecopastoral vision that subsumes the other two. McCarthy’s pastoralism is ecopastoral not just because it respects the ecological equality of all creatures and favors undomesticated nature over agricultural land, but, moreover, because it equates the external wilderness of nature with the social wilderness of the city and the internal wilderness of the human mind. As they ignore the distinction that is commonly made between these realms, McCarthy’s texts themselves come to function as a narrative wilderness of images and scenes and reflections. In this sense, the interaction of the several modes of wilderness also makes it possible to discuss Suttree as if it were in fact a pastoral novel. Moreover, the equivalence of the several modes of wilderness in the text integrates the picaresque into the pastoral. Without exception, McCarthy’s novels contain picaro figures, that is, deracinated protagonists preoccupied with survival more than with lofty quests, and gifted with a comic resourcefulness. Harrogate evidently reveals the trickster-like attributes of the picaro and, in a less comic way, so does Suttree. What matters here is less their identification with this generic role model than the fact that the type of the picaro is allegorically conceived (unlike a realistic character); that the picaresque genre is comic (as opposed to tragic); and that Suttree’s quest for survival in an alien cityscape parallels his quest for survival in the Appalachians. Both environments are wild; in neither environment does he care to dominate; and survival in either is equally hard. As if Suttree were in part a “Doomed Huck” (Charyn 14), in part as grandiloquent as Whitman, the novel’s ecopastoralism and its picaresque aspects subscribe to the same wilderness ethos. The egalitarian treatment of society and nature in Suttree is two-sided insofar as everything that initially seems meaningless and alien to Suttree later becomes meaningful and inclusive. As if to evoke the proverbial glass of water looking no longer half empty but half full, an angelic boy offers
Suttree a drink of water in the final scene. The moment contrasts favorably with Suttree’s earlier, grotesque vision of his Saxon forebears who “wait for the water-bearer to come but he does not come, and does not come” (136). Suttree affirms his kinship with the land when he “was struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited and he bore it a sudden love” (354).11 The positive sense of self and place he regains is obviously an extension of his integration into the human environment of his friends, qualifying the trauma of individualized death with the prospect of collective survival. As Vereen Bell argues in regard to the “common cause against the rule of death” in Suttree, “This commonality within, which may and should arise from the universality of suffering, is the quid pro quo in human life, brought into life, ironically by death” (Achievement 110). In a way, the survivalist reversal of Suttree’s view of life at the novel’s end suggests a need to reinterpret the novel’s grotesque imagery. For the grotesque, too, is of an egalitarian quality insofar as it is designed to level hierarchies and join incompatible aspects together and to be, above all, infinite, depersonalized, and dynamic. Suttree’s dictum “Nothing ever stops moving” (461) captures the anarchic flux at the heart of the grotesque. The grotesque imagery in Suttree becomes emblematic of the kind of survivalism that Bakhtin identifies in the grotesque realism of the Renaissance: “The last thing one can say of the real grotesque is that it is static; on the contrary it seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the eternal incomplete unfinished nature of being. Its images present simultaneously the two poles of becoming: that which is receding and dying, and that which is being born; they show two bodies in one, the budding and the division of the living cell. At the summit of grotesque and folklore realism, as in the death of one-cell organisms, no dead body remains” (Rabelais 52). McCarthy’s ecopastoralism bespeaks a worldview whose egalitarian underpinnings logically transcend the preference of the pastoral imagination for natural landscape settings. It embraces various modes of narrative discourse, from the loftiest abstraction to the most proletarian idiom. It places philosophical meditations side by side with the most mundane detail. If man is a relative to all living things and is on an existential par with them then civilization represents but one ecosystem among many, and literary discourse yet another. In this sense, every episode and every description in Suttree assumes its carefully calculated part in the novel’s cosmology. Once McCarthy’s aesthetic order is understood, all other aspects begin to fall into place. On this view, all of McCarthy’s novels, including Suttree, are intrinsically ecopastoral and call for ecocritical readings. McCarthy’s pastoralism defies traditional pastoral approaches because these tend to reduce the pastoral theme to a surface function against which other concerns are played out. McCarthy’s pastoralism, however,
is inclusive and holistic. The subsequent passage in Suttree, for instance, contains the machine-in-the-garden motif, but in a manner that subjects the symbol of intruding industrialism itself to destruction, as if to suggest a shared tendency to entropy while integrating it into the dominant theme of natural beauty. “Wasn’t two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue lookin and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I’m going to tell you you’ll think peculiar but it’s the god’s truth. That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I don’t think I’ll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night” (182). The slight shifts in focus (from boxcar to door to moonlit snow to pines and back to the receding train), which are effected not through differentiation but through concatenation, result in a nonhierarchical structure that highlights nothing so much as the fact that nothing is highlighted. Man, machine, and nature seem to be in perfect harmony in an aesthetic that is based on the relatedness of things, and not on the incongruity of the machine in the garden. Nowhere in this scene does the train signify industrial intrusion or even contrast with the setting. Instead, the whole scene becomes an emblem of the paradoxical harmony of destruction that informs the savage tableaux of Outer Dark and Blood Meridian as much as Lester’s dream of his last ride in Child of God (170–71) or the “miracles of destruction” that the Mormon seeks in The Crossing (142). The parable of the train suggests a pastoral truth that goes beyond the realm of nature to include mankind in shared mortality. Taking the place of the romantic sublime, this vision introduces a metaphysical component in McCarthy’s ecopastoralism. The chapters to come will use the term “nature mysticism” to describe this sense of a deeper truth in nature and the integrative function of this mysticism for the texts’ sense of pastoral. Whatever is mystical about McCarthy’s ecopastoralism ought to be understood as a reference to the experience of the egalitarian essence of the universe, such as described by Whitman in Specimen Days as “an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness—this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leash’d dog in the hand of the hunter” (894). Whitman’s dog-and-hunter simile hints at the need for figurative language to describe an essentially ineffable observation. The meaning of the term animism in this study—wherever it is applied to
describe the ecopastoral ethos in McCarthy’s novels—is attendant on this reductive concept of mystical perception, and is in turn to be understood as the conviction that all things animate and inanimate share in existential equality. In short, it is arrived at by way of nature mysticism more than by ecological argument. The inclusion of an ecocritical angle has become established procedure in McCarthy criticism. The chapters to follow will go a step further and undertake close readings designed to show that McCarthy’s work as a whole is crafted according to a unified ecopastoral aesthetic. McCarthy’s novels themselves, in their emphasis on multifaceted structure and semantic interrelationships, affect the complexity of ecosystems. Each textual aspect interrelates with any number of other aspects, and so the analysis of their egalitarianism becomes the most pressing and rewarding task of the McCarthy critic. Not e s 1. Not discussed, then, are McCarthy’s two short stories, “A Wake for Susan” (1957) and “A Drowning Incident” (1958); the TV drama The Gardener’s Son (1977); and the drama The Stonemason (1998). 2. Arnold writes that Suttree contains more than 150 named characters, many of whom are based on historic personae (“Naming” 57). Incidentally, McAnally is already mentioned in The Orchard Keeper as the destination of Sylder’s whiskey runs (29). McCarthy’s father, a lawyer, served on the legal board of the Tennessee Valley Authority, so the novel’s rebellious undertones suggest autobiographical motives. Also, the fact that, like McCarthy, Suttree spent time at the local university explains the protagonist’s prolixity. 3. The Divine Comedy, Canto XIII. The parallel is pointed out by Arnold (“Naming” 68, n. 21). 4. For the parallels between Suttree and works by Camus and Eliot, see Shelton’s essay; for the parallels to Dante, see Arnold’s essay “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness.” 5. The intertextuality is made explicit when Suttree dreams of stopping in front of a watchmaker’s shop and watching the timepieces arrest themselves in his presence (453–54). The fact that Quentin drowns himself finds a meaningful analogy in Suttree’s fear of drowning and his mortification when a suicide is pulled from the river and he perceives that “the dead man’s watch was still running” (10). 6. McCarthy’s knowledge of James is mentioned in Garry Wallace’s problematic but nonetheless useful article “Meeting McCarthy” (138). This information suggests that McCarthy carefully calculates the narrative effect of his narrators’ melancholia, rather than drawing on any personal sense of disenchantment. 7. Suttree’s realizations that “there is one Suttree and one Suttree only” (461) and “[a] man is all men” (422) are compared by Bell to “Walt Whitman speaking in a new idiom and time” (Achievement 110). 8. The quote reconnects to “The Waste Land” in which Eliot speaks of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” (504). The intertextuality confirms that Suttree’s quest for meaning and self is informed more by a modernist crisis of meaning than by the postmodernist contestation of all hegemonic structures of meaning.
9. Sullivan’s critique of Suttree is a case in point: “The shape of the novel is amorphous, even for McCarthy, whose long suit has never been dramatic structure. One gets the impression that McCarthy walks through the world cramming his brain with experience both actual and vicarious and then goes to work and gives everything back, scene upon scene, the devil take the hindmost” (“Citizens” 341). 10. Macbeth’s words are these: “Life’s but walking shadow; a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more: it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (act 5, scene 5). The lines are so familiar that McCarthy could hardly have created the image without having intended the reader’s inference of the intertextuality and the attendant melancholia. 11. The context is Suttree’s love affair with Wanda; his feeling of cosmic harmony recalls Leaves of Grass in which Whitman writes: “And I know [. . .] that all the men ever born are also my brothers . . . and the women my sisters and lovers, / And that a kelson of the creation is love” (31).
V ince B rewton
The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy
ormac McCarthy’s appearance on the national literary radar with the successful publication of All the Pretty Horses, after years of largely “academic” interest in his work, also inaugurated on a substantive level a clearly defined second phase in his career as a writer. Chronology alone would mark McCarthy’s first phase as a novelist as the two decades between 1965 and 1985 that saw the publication of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian, while the Border Trilogy spans the 90s, including All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and his latest, Cities of the Plain (1998). A historicist approach to McCarthy’s fiction, however, corroborates the chronological separation in that it reveals the correlations between the work of McCarthy’s two major periods on the one hand and the cultural moments, popular and otherwise, with which their conception and composition coincided. A clear and discernible correlation exists between the novels of McCarthy’s first period and the era of American history defined by the military involvement in Vietnam, while the novels of the Border Trilogy exhibit a similar imaginative and thematic debt to the changing political and cultural landscape of America beginning in the 1980s, a landscape best evoked by the Reagan presidency and the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. The correspondences between McCarthy’s work and his times are part of a From Southern Literary Journal 37, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 121–43. © 2004 by University of North Carolina Press.
Vince Brewton
larger cultural equation whereby contemporary historical events influenced prevailing cultural attitudes on the one hand, and cultural production on the other, a form of influence manifested in film and literature generally, but felt with equal force in the arena of national media culture, in the campaigns for president in 1980 and 1984, and in the political discourse of the 1980s. Perhaps all cultural artifacts are a product of their times, but the novels of McCarthy’s first phase are recognizably so in ways worth exploring, as is the case with the Border Trilogy. To understand how the works display this influence, in some cases a covert influence, requires situating McCarthy’s novels afresh in their historical contexts. The two separate cases of correspondence between McCarthy’s work and his cultural milieu are united primarily by the representation of violence and issues closely related to violence in the novels, a circumstance not surprising given that two wars have had a major impact on the cultural terrain of McCarthy’s career. Between the novels of the early phase and the work of the Trilogy, a major shift occurs in McCarthy’s storytelling and that shift is directly a product of a changing aesthetic of violence in his work. The transformation of McCarthy’s aesthetic of violence takes shape as a movement from the serial event to the symbolic drama: the former representing conflicts always contingent and soon to be superseded by fresh eruptions of violence; in the latter, a central act of violence is the single event itself toward which the narrative proceeds and which regularly contains the work’s larger thematic conflicts if not in every case their resolution. McCarthy’s transition between the serial and the symbolic returns him to the tradition of southern literary violence that relies on violence as the site where divergent interests converge for dramatic effect. While all literary violence can be viewed as formal in the sense that it has achieved literary form, normally we make a distinction between formal violence on the one hand—violence governed by rules, agreements, and cultural assumptions, typified by the formal duel—and informal violence on the other hand—violence that is fragmentary, unconsidered, “random,” or “senseless,” as public discourse of our time denotes it. Southern literature— from which Cormac McCarthy emerges in terms of our understanding of his work, especially in his early, Tennessee-centered vision—favors a narrative strategy in which violence represents a climax of tensions and stress with the literary text. For McCarthy, the conflict between an older order and the newer one replacing it persists from The Orchard Keeper to Cities of the Plain, a novel in which the closing of the western range ultimately brings about the displacement and final alienation of his surviving hero. Thus McCarthy’s return in the Border Trilogy to the symbolic violence familiar to southern literary genealogy marks a repetition worthy of our attention, for it is a return that reinforces our sense of his participation in the southern literary tradition
The Changing Landscape of Violence
he had seemingly relinquished in his turn to a new subject and place, the American Southwest. The Vietnam experience, while never appearing directly in McCarthy’s novels, has nevertheless left a deep imprint on his early work. Three novels in particular, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian, show the influence of imagery and ideas issuing from the military-political experience of Vietnam. While Child of God and Suttree contain repressed traces of the Vietnam experience, Blood Meridian comes close to being a novel whose true subject is Vietnam, a kind of allegory of American involvement in Southeast Asia and of the reverberations of that history in the American psyche. Although the date of publication puts Blood Meridian forward into the second cultural moment that in turn left its mark on the Border Trilogy, the novel of 1985 is significantly an artifact of McCarthy’s two-decade working through of the war and the mediation of that war by American popular culture. Critical thought on McCarthy has certainly hinted at such a connection. John Emil Sepich, in a footnote to his essay on the historical sources of Blood Meridian, writes, “The literature of ‘atrocities’ in Vietnam seems consistent, in its language, with that of Glanton’s ‘atrocities’ ” (138). Sepich, however, does not draw any inferences from the similarity (138). Andrew Nelson refers to Blood Meridian as “a book which finally dislocates the reader from the adventure of Manifest Destiny,” an interesting observation when we consider that Michael Herr made a similar point in his classic Dispatches (1977) about our involvement in Vietnam. In a work whose influence on Blood Meridian seems significant, Herr surmises that we “might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter” (49). Herr uses the familiar imagery of Native American dispossession to suggest that the disastrous American involvement in Vietnam was the logical conclusion of the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Along these same lines, Richard Slotkin has pointed out that Sam Peckinpah’s famous western The Wild Bunch mirrors contemporary history in its depiction of a struggle between democracy and tyranny that miscarries and becomes instead an orgy of bloodshed directly suggestive of the carnage in Vietnam (880). Similarly, reviewers of Blood Meridian have compared it to Peckinpah’s films (Tatum 479). But the full significance of the link between the historical event of Vietnam and the artistic vision of McCarthy’s first phase as a novelist remains to be explored. One persistent theme in McCarthy’s early work is the loss of the American myth of innocence. American mythology has long woven together John Winthrop’s imagery of the “city on the hill” with the older notion of the New World as an earthly paradise that generated a national self-conception of righteousness. The literary myth of the new American Adam similarly depends on the framing metaphor of America as a relocated garden, while
the Puritan vision of a sanctified national mission in an Edenic paradise added a crucial component of virtue/innocence to the national identity, even if that innocence is no more than a disassociation from the dubious legacy of Old World social arrangements. Innocence so conceived is the tangible quantity expunged from the American self-definition as a direct result of the military intervention in Vietnam and the soiled spectacle of our support for corrupt regimes, the pervasive loss of faith in authority, and the appalling images and stories of that war. In Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone sums up this loss of innocence, or ignorance, in Vietnam: “You can’t blame us too much. We didn’t know who we were till we got here. We thought we were something else.” (57) National mythology thus has linked purpose (mission) with place (paradise metaphors), a process that associates innocence with possession —McCarthy’s work charts the dissolution of both. Child of God chronicles the sad and sordid history of Lester Ballard’s dispossession and alienation in rural Sevier County, Tennessee. Lester’s mythic exile takes the narrative form of his eviction from the family farm in the novel’s opening scene. From this point on in the novel, Lester occupies a series of downwardly mobile dwellings, from rented shacks, to jail cells, to caves in the bowels of the earth, and at last an asylum for the criminally insane. His crimes conversely rise to a crescendo of horror, from voyeurism and petty theft, to arson, attempted rape, murder, mutilation, and necrophilia. Lester’s dispossession obliquely represents the national loss of innocence while also allegorizing the expulsion of the American psyche from the sheltering myth of “city on the hill” virtue, an expulsion that exposed the national consciousness to a two-decade ordeal of bad conscience. Although Ballard’s existence may be confined to the margins of the social order, storytelling reinserts him, or his legend, into the heart of the community. His cross-dressing presence on the outskirts of the civilization corresponds directly with his behavior: where law and taboo are remote, everything is permitted. The falling away of social restraint also reveals itself in the dumpkeeper, Ballard’s confrere of the margins, who slides from outraged parent to incestuous father in the heat of a wrestling match in the weeds. The space of the margins is like the traditional space of war, located on the periphery, but one nevertheless generated by the cultural center. Ballard’s dispossession places him on the civic limits, just as the organized apparatus of the state creates the scene of war where frequently, despite the well-intentioned rules of warfare, nothing is forbidden. The two sites are comparable in another way familiar to postmodern thought: as marginal spaces, both the scene of Ballard’s depravity and the scene of war have the uncanny ability to become central. In this respect, our national stock of lore concerning Vietnam mirrors the legend of Lester in the hollows. Part of
our narrative compulsion concerning Vietnam involves its function as a sign of the expansion of our capacity as a nation to misstep, the furthest point down the road of civic dishonor we have traveled in the twentieth century. Whether American ideals and conduct were at their worst between 1959 and 1973 has become in some ways beside the point. What matters is that public discourse on Vietnam acts as a nether limit for American civilization and serves as a boundary for American behavior within the bigger story of our history in the last century. The ballad of Lester Ballard plays a comparable role in Sevier County to the national obsession with Vietnam. Ballard’s catalogue of misdeeds transacted on the margins yields for the community a reinforced conviction of the existence of those margins that their own lesser meannesses and misdemeanors approach but never transgress. Lester’s ghoulish crusade transforms him over time into the hobgoblin of Sevier County mythmaking while his narrative provides the county’s inhabitants with a representative means for containing the story of communal deviance within the larger narrative of the community as a whole. Lester establishes the necessary boundary marker—like the cultural sign of Vietnam—and in this he has a function similar to a taboo, which, as Bataille reminds us in Erotism, directs us away from the prohibited action while in the same movement fixating our interest. The gruesome quality of Lester’s practices has heretofore been considered within the theoretical framework of the grotesque in southern literature. While the theory of the grotesque opens up Child of God in interesting ways, Ballard’s obsession with corpses (bodies) and his purloining of trophies from the dead transcend the ordinary pilfering of a criminal. Having been symbolically expelled from the community, Lester feeds on the edges of communal space. Out on the margins, Ballard recreates the world from which he has been estranged, and the corpses, clothes, and ultimately the “fright-wig” itself have the talismanic quality of the souvenired trophy. Ballard’s trophies allow him to incorporate the community that has unincorporated him, thus providing him with potent totems to shelter him existentially from what Vereen M. Bell describes as “more abasement than most humans could imagine” (Achievement 55). Every emblem Lester strips from the dead performs the function of the war trophy for the soldier still in combat, for whom the sliced-ear or thumb marks an overcoming of death dread through a symbolic overcoming of the foe. Like the soldier, Lester’s metaphorical consumption of objects and human remains confirms the Bakhtinian idea that to consume the world is to tame our fear of it (296). The retrieval of Lester Ballard’s collection of corpses at novel’s end bears an eerie resemblance to the return of dead servicemen from Vietnam, a cultural sign deeply intertwined with the consciousness of the period
in which Child of God was composed. McCarthy seems to be invoking the pathos of a sign already present in the psyche of his readers to charge this scene in his novel with the emotional freight of the dead soldier and the corresponding national trauma of that image. Sevier County’s dead, wrapped in “muslin shrouds on which was stenciled Property of the State of Tennessee,” are repatriated in a movement that mimics the return of servicemen during the war years in official body bags (196). Lester Ballard’s victims now share in the cultural mourning experienced by a nation for the casualties of war, deaths that seemed to many then and now as lives “wasted,” to use the soldier’s slang, in an expenditure of life not sufficiently sustained by a meaningful purpose as in previous wars. For Sevier County’s collective memory, the murdered victims occupy a place of unassigned meaning: the myth-making surrounding their murderer is unable to establish that they were killed for any sensible reason—not even as a product of the powerful but inchoate “meanness” with which they identify their own history of violence. Lester’s enigmatic career of murder and necrophilia can offer no closure or final understanding, a fact signaled by the mute narration of the gruesome homecoming. While Child of God has an obvious political subtext, Suttree, a Joycean epic of the days and nights of Cornelius Suttree, down and out in Knoxville, Tennessee, would appear to bear less resemblance to a clandestine novel of Vietnam. Yet, the narrative of Suttree’s daily life resonates with both the experience of war generally and Vietnam in particular. Ballard’s serial enactment of murder, by comparison, moves forward without a readily apparent object: even vengeance is absorbed into the series, for Greer’s death is only one more murder, neither the first nor the last. Violence in the life of Cornelius Suttree follows a similar sequence in which encounters have neither a cumulative effect nor contribute to a narrative movement toward one central or conclusive moment of violence. Rather, the bar fights of Suttree and his cronies and the titanic struggle of Ab Jones against the police, to cite the main arteries of violence in the sprawling novel, are inherently provisional. Partly for this reason, Suttree and Child of God have struck some critics as bereft of plot, or as Bell puts it, “innocent of theme and of ethical reference and plot” (“Nihilism” 31). The episodic quality of these novels, however, is neither an artistic failing nor lack of a sustained vision on McCarthy’s part, but on the contrary marks an importation of an aesthetic of violence from the heavily televised and reported war in Southeast Asia. Bell’s commentary on Suttree unintentionally reinforces the idea that the novel contains disguised references to Vietnam. Of the reckless quality to Suttree’s life, Bell writes: “The consequence of Suttree’s removing himself from normal society is that it removes him from ordinary amenities of the modern world and thus in a sense displaces him in time. He is therefore in
the presence of death daily in the way a citizen of an earlier century would be” (Achievement 92). One need not look to an earlier century as a source for Suttree’s daily experience. Bell’s assertion rings particularly true for the soldier who is removed from “ordinary amenities” and lives in “in the presence of death daily.” McCarthy inscribes the experiential reality of war into the novel not, I think, to tell elliptically the ongoing story of Vietnam but to impart to his narrative the wholly contingent and provisional nature of the daily life of an individual outside the normally sustaining entities of family, work, and religion. In the unsheltering existential sky of McCarthy’s early work, human beings face reality in unrelentingly gritty episodes of pain and pleasure, a kind of life Bell characterizes as where “the world itself is always insisting upon its own reality; it is then to be dealt with as itself and not at the subordinated service of ideas” (Achievement 77). Ideas, particularly those pertaining to the conventionally ordered life bounded by family, conventional politics, and commerce, cannot resist the reality of Suttree’s world that always “insists” more powerfully than any attempts to organize it. These attempts to frame and arrange the uncontainable truth of our being find expression in the reproach of Suttree’s father, who argues to his son that “The world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life you feel that you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government” (13–14). Cornelius Suttree’s difficulties hardly stem from missing out on life. Quite the contrary, McCarthy demonstrates that for the son life is really quite like war and has an awesome and unsettling immediacy the law courts, business, and government cannot match. Bell describes Suttree’s companions as “an odd little band of ragtag existential heroes” (81). A primary convention of the war genre in literature and film is the handful of soldiers who constitute a microcosm of the conflict, or of humanity in general. Crane, Remarque, O’Brien, James Jones, Hasford, Kubrick, and Oliver Stone all make use of the organizing principle of smallunit soldiery in their works. Suttree’s companions—“By nine oclock that night they were twelve or more, all good hearts from McAnally”—carouse with the kind of intensity and abandon of those who live entirely for the moment—“Who the fuck are we fighting? said Suttree. Who the fuck cares, if he aint from McAnally bust him” (184–186). McCarthy’s dubious heroes serve as a chorus for the conflict at the core of the novel, that between Suttree and his world. Arnold and Luce remind us that McCarthy labored over this voluminous novel during a twenty-year period that almost perfectly coincides with the Vietnam years. Like the television series M*A*S*H, McCarthy situates the novel’s action entirely in the 50s, so that although direct representation of Vietnam is formally denied, many of the text’s associations and other points of reference with Vietnam work in service of the novel’s primary conflicts (8).
Bell concludes his assessment of the Suttrean odyssey with this perceptive remark: “Suttree’s hard lessons harden him and eventually free him from sentimental regret, leaving him with perspective, which is at least like transcendence” (101). Bell’s insight could be inserted seamlessly into a discussion of the hero of war literature, whose ordeal in the crucible of war transforms him from the naive recruit and does confer something like transcendence, or at least an unsentimental perspective, as a result. When Bell contends that McCarthy never allows us a “readerly station” above the action of Suttree, that “we are solidly in it,” we recognize that McCarthy wants us to experience the vertiginous and visceral quality of Suttree’s daily struggle for survival, for redemption, a struggle comparable to the soldier’s day to day combat with fear, deprivation, and suffering. The narration of Suttree’s nearly fatal illness and subsequent recovery calls to mind Frederick Henry’s wounding and recuperation in A Farewell to Arms. For Suttree, the experience forms the final act in the drama of his transformation. The novel had begun with a simile of war: “The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea?” (4). His health restored, McCarthy’s hero stands beside the road with new clothes and suitcase, like “someone just out of the army or jail” (470). Suttree’s hard-won perspective invokes finally a farewell to arms that seems more permanent than any before. In the end, Suttree appears to bid farewell to some of his relentlessly uncompromising resistance to the organizing principles of his world, a stance he had long maintained out of some authentic alienation that refuses spurious consolation—the distinctive apartness common to McCarthy’s characters as the price of maintaining their original humanity. Blood Meridian takes us further historically from our time than any of McCarthy’s other novels while ironically carrying us closest to the heart of darkness that was the American experience in Vietnam. McCarthy tips his hand as to his intentions in the Captain’s recruiting speech that has as its direct referent the war with Mexico over Texas in 1846 and the ill-conceived military expedition that initiates the kid’s bloody sojourn in Mexico. The subject of the speech doubles as a muted commentary, at times cryptic, at times direct, on various aspects of the Vietnam conflict: We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by god if we didnt give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in Gods earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican government. . . . Did you know that when Colonel Doniphan took Chihuahua City he inflicted over a thousand
casualties on the enemy and lost only one man and him all but a suicide? . . . We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land. . . . Unless Americans act, people like you and me who take their country seriously while those mollycoddles in Washington sit on their hindsides, unless we act, Mexico—and I mean the whole of the country—will one day fly a European flag. Monroe Doctrine or no. (33–35) Replace the European flag with the banner of Communism to complete the analogy. The irony of the Captain’s rhetoric—“Colonel Carrasco is asking for American intervention”—when viewed in light of his expedition’s imminent slaughter, links this intervention with our own in Southeast Asia. The Captain’s military disingenuousness matches that of American policy makers and Pentagon planners who seriously miscalculated the potential for American casualties in the war. The Captain’s worldview has the almost selfparodying mixture of idealism and self-interest of American rhetoric of the war era. Explicit in the Captain’s appeal to the kid is the understanding that their mission will be conducted on behalf of civilization—and just as explicitly he appeals to the kid’s baser nature: “we will be the ones to divide the spoils” (34). Innocence mingles with a denial of greed here, anticipating the loss of the one and the wholesale embrace of the other. What begins as an appeal to join a crusade, however bungled in its execution and morally dubious, degenerates further still with the kid’s second recruitment into Glanton’s band of scalphunters, a collection of rogues about whom Herr might have been writing when he described the “common pool” of soldiers on leave in Saigon: “redundant mutilators, heavy rapers, eye-shooters, widow-makers, nametakers, classic essential American types; point men, isolatos and outriders like they were programmed in their genes to do it” (35). Glanton’s band of outriders was initially welcomed by the citizenry of Chihuahua City and officially commissioned by the governor and a private society to end Apache depredations on the populace. This relationship dissolves in chaos when the band begins to prey on the populace itself, a souring comparable to what became of the relationship between the Vietnamese people and their would-be protectors. Motivated ostensibly by greed and a bounty on Apache scalps, Glanton’s band soon abandons the troublesome distinction between Apaches and other Indians, collecting those scalps most easily culled. In this collapse of the separation between friend and foe, the novel illustrates a parallel with one of the common myths of Vietnam, that soldiers were at times unable, or perhaps unwilling, to discriminate between friendly villager and Viet Cong, further eroding the American relationship with the South Vietnamese.
The connection between the band’s scalphunting and the military policy of the “body count” in Vietnam was first made by Sepich, who does so only to propose a comparison in kind of atrocities. Glanton and his men lay claim to nominal success in the reckoning of scalps, but their conflict, as in Vietnam, is endless, the dogs of war not to be appeased with the offering of a few hundred scalps. For many Americans, Vietnam was a nightmare that seemed to have no end. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy expands this idea into one of the work’s most powerful themes, and Judge Holden figures as the living embodiment and oracle of an ontology of war: “War endures. . . . War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him” (248). The war waged by Holden and his associates is by its nature endless and in its essence less the pursuit of an object than the practice of a trade, “the ultimate trade,” as Holden calls it (248). Steven Shaviro describes Blood Meridian as a book of “restless, incessant horizontal movements: nomadic wanderings, topographical displacements, variations of weather, skirmishes in the desert” (145). While McCarthy supplies particulars of geography, the reader experiences a collapse of time and space so that only the ceaseless repetition of violence remains foregrounded, enacted in a kind of no-place of desolation. The novel depicts the scalphunters as the ultimate practitioners of their trade, warriors for whom war is no longer waged as an instrument of policy or even for gain, but for its own sake, and generative of its own radical state of being: “wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order” (172). If Blood Meridian serves as McCarthy’s epic treatment of war in Vietnam, the reactions of one commentator on the novel are interesting when juxtaposed with the observations of a commentator on the war itself. About the ambiguous experience of reading Blood Meridian, Shaviro writes “Bloody death is our monotonously predictable destiny; yet its baroque opulence is attended with a frighteningly complicitous joy,” and he goes on to contend that The scariest thing about Blood Meridian is that it is a euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing one. Our pulses quicken as “considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right [are] rendered void and without warrant” (250), subsumed in the trials of war. Once we have started to dance, once we have been swept up in the game, there is no pulling back. (154) Michael Herr’s observations on his own relationship to the soldiers and experience of war are remarkably similar to Shaviro’s: But of course we were intimate, I’ll tell you how intimate. . . . We covered each other, an exchange of services that worked all
right until one night when I slid over to the wrong end of the story, propped up behind some sandbags at an airstrip in Can Tho with a .30-caliber automatic in my hands, firing for a fourman reaction team trying to get back . . . until the whole night had passed and I was looking at the empty clips around my feet behind the berm, telling myself that there would never be any way to know for sure. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so tired, so changed, so happy. (67–68) The likeness revealed here goes beyond the critical hypothesis that McCarthy’s chronicle of nineteenth-century border history was influenced by his conscious or unconscious immersion in the cultural discourses of Vietnam. Certainly the subject matter is the same. One can argue with justice for the existence of a parallel between the trade of war as practiced by the scalphunters and the conflict in Vietnam—by eschewing territorial conquest as its goal, the United States doomed itself to a war of attrition that came to resemble, finally, the dark night of war primordial against an enemy of seemingly infinite numbers and boundless will. But one can and should go further to say that Blood Meridian insists upon a meditation on the darkness of our violent natures and the full range of scarcely imaginable, scarcely representable consequences that follow when human nature gives free play to the death drive. While McCarthy’s initial series of novels owes an unacknowledged debt to the Vietnam experience, the Trilogy shares significant associations and images with the Gulf War of 1991. The desert landscape had not been a prominent part of the American imagination since the Second World War, but the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the American military build-up in Saudi Arabia, and most importantly, the around-the-clock media coverage of events in the Gulf thrust the sensibility of the desert back into the American consciousness. The western landscape, including the desert, is ground commonly associated with the literary and film genre of the western. Richard Slotkin has argued that the revival of the western in the 1980s was “motivated in part by nostalgia for old movie forms and styles,” and that it “owed something to the popular mood of the Reagan presidency” (881). The influence of the popular mood in some form is visible in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy that, though spanning the 90s in terms of publication, shows significant traces of both popular cultural discourse in the 1980s as well as the imaginative legacy of the 1991 Gulf War. In McCarthy’s hands, however, the cultural discourse of the 1980s—with everything that that implies for us politically and socially—remains undeniably McCarthean, which is to say that it is fundamentally characterized by ambiguity rather than certitude.
The Trilogy marks a sea-change in McCarthy’s fiction in his treatment of the hero. In contrast to Lester Ballard, or the kid, or even Suttree, the protagonists of the Trilogy are unambiguously heroic. In this connection we should recall that the reconstitution of the hero was a central part of the cultural rhetoric of the 1980s. Gail Moore Morrison points out that one reviewer of All the Pretty Horses finds John Grady Cole “simply too good at everything” (190). A similar charge could be leveled against the sixteen-year-old Billy Parham in The Crossing, who adeptly captures and transports a wolf on horseback to Mexico, and with his younger brother Boyd vanquishes would-be rapists and a posse of agents working for “Senor [Randolph?] Hearst.” Despite an untimely death, Boyd also falls into this class of larger-than-life teenagers, about whom Billy remembers: “There aint but one life worth livin and I was born to it. That’s worth all the rest. My bud was better at it than me. He was a born natural. He was smarter than me too. Not just about horses. About everything. Daddy knew it too. He knew it and he knew I knew it and that’s all there was to say about it” (The Crossing 420). The heroic is not a part of McCathy’s vision before All the Pretty Horses, and to cite commercial ambition as the cause of this shift would be a disservice to the seriousness of his work, and in any case is unfounded given the noncommercial, metafictional structuring of the narrative in The Crossing. In the Border Trilogy, McCarthy has undertaken to tell authentic westerns using the basic formulas of the genre while avoiding the false sentimentality, uncritical nostalgia, and unearned happy endings that often characterize the genre in its popular forms. Slotkin identifies seven oppositions or conflicts that serve as hallmarks of the western, all of which in some form can be found in the Trilogy: Between white civilization and redskin savagery; between a corrupt metropolitan “East” and a rough but virtuous “West;” between tyrannical old proprietors (big ranchers) and new, progressive entrepreneur (homesteaders); between the engorged wealth of industrial monopolies (railroads) and the hardearned property of citizens (farmers); between old technologies (stagecoaches) and new (railroads); between the undisciplined rapacity of frontier criminals and the lawman’s determination to establish order . . . between the violent culture of men and the Christian culture associated with women. (874) It may be that some or all of these conflicts find their way inevitably into narrative when the genre of the western is employed. It seems more likely that the presence of all seven in McCarthy’s Trilogy indicates a
self-conscious effort by a postmodern writer interested in telling a western and interested in a genre that lends itself to storytelling about storytelling. Much in the same way that the genre of the western was employed by John Ford in The Searchers, and later Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, to tell morally sophisticated stories using the “simple”—and thus familiar— vocabulary of the western, so too McCarthy uses the western to explore the most permanent concerns of literature: the profound relationships between being and witness, between truth and desire, and the persistent proximity of violence to narrative. Each of the novels of the Border Trilogy relies on a version of the traditional western’s conflict between right and wrong. As heroes, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham both are deeply moral in a conventional sense and are guided by a code of principled conduct, though still susceptible to internal conflict concerning their own actions and motives. When we see Cole and Parham a decade or so older in the final volume, in fact, though Billy’s ardor for the austerities of cowboy life has waned, their core values remain unchanged. At critical moments in the narratives, the heroes find themselves pitted against clear injustice, or what seems the deliberate presentation of evil, and McCarthy’s eschatology mirrors the rhetoric of good and evil that underscored the U.S.-led war of public opinion that made the Gulf War possible. While it would be unwarranted to posit a direct connection between these novels and any series of contemporary events, a significant cultural yearning to be able to distinguish clearly between good and evil made itself felt in the early 90s, and McCarthy’s work seems to reflect that desire. To have arrived at this moral destination from the “ambiguous nihilism”—to use Bell’s phrase—of McCarthy’s first phase is a remarkable development. Both The Crossing and Cities of the Plain make use of a familiar Hollywood motif from the post-Vietnam era of the 1980s—the rescue mission. Film and television rescue dramas involving Vietnam POWs have continued to meet our psychic and entertainment needs well into the mid-90s, and, while McCarthy foregrounds this motif in the Trilogy, the effect on the narrative as a whole is far more complex than the use to which it is put in films like Uncommon Valor, or the Rambo saga, in which the Vietnam conflict is restaged in order to be won “this time.” The rescue plot of All the Pretty Horses is a function of McCarthy’s emergent interest in the love story during his second phase, and for the rescue plot to succeed, Alejandra must be “rescued” from her world in order to live with John Grady in his. The preamble to this rescue involves yet another plot standard from the 1970s—the unjustly accused hero—in which the ringing phrase “for a crime he did not commit” gives credentials to the central character as an anti-establishment hero. John Grady’s love for Alejandra being inadmissible in caste-bound Mexico, her father arranges Cole’s false arrest and imprisonment. As in classical tragedy,
the false accusation and its tragic outcome flow ultimately out of the best, most essential elements of John Grady’s character. Against Rawlins’s will and John Grady’s own better judgment he had helped Blevins recover (steal) his horse, and thus stands wrongly accused of the very serious crime of horse theft. This act among others emphasizes the “mixed” quality necessary to the hero of the western, the capacity to cross the line in pursuit of good. As Slotkin puts it: “the action of the narrative requires that borders be crossed by a hero whose character is so mixed that he can operate effectively on both sides of the line” (874). Blevins’s horse is a magnificent example of its breed, and this fact in itself tunes up Cole’s sense of justice, as if conscience makes a stronger than usual demand in the case of so fine an animal. In this juncture, McCarthy links Cole’s passion for horses, a passion that lies at the very heart of his character, with the narrative circumstances that separate him from Alejandra and place him in prison. The main action of All the Pretty Horses functions as a variation on one of Slotkin’s basic conflicts, that “between tyrannical old proprietors (big ranchers) and new, progressive entrepreneurs (homesteaders)” (xxx). Cole is an entrepreneur in the most basic sense of the word, and what he undertakes is the impossibility of love with Alejandra: “He told her that he could make a living and that they could go to live in his country and make their life there and no harm would come to them” (252). The failure of this romance in All the Pretty Horses reinscribes John Grady Cole in the myth of the stoic American of the frontier: “He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe it would ever leave” (254). Cole accepts this psychologically withering condition, however, without surrendering his fundamental will to live. Christina Bold’s definition of the protagonist of the traditional western—“a heroic man, poised and ultimately isolated on the frontier between ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’ ”—reminds us that isolation is the condition of possibility for the hero of the western (875). In each volume of the Trilogy, McCarthy leaves the hero’s quests either unresolved or settled in failure. Good and evil may be clearly distinct in the Trilogy, but good does not clearly triumph. Although John Grady is not wholly at odds with his world, it is fair to say that he has not found his place in it, nor can he, for his fate in the Trilogy is indissolubly tied to the old order of the range that is inexorably passing away. John Grady seeks expiation from the judge, in part, because he had been forced to kill the “cuchillero” in the scene that marks McCarthy’s return to symbolic violence in the Trilogy. The duel with the cuchillero in the prison mess marks the turning point in the novel and a shift in the hero’s condition, from victim of the hacendado’s revenge and Mexican
injustice to avenging angel and redresser of wrongs. Though nearly killed in the knife-fight—a foreshadowing of his eventual demise in Cities of the Plain—Cole recovers and becomes the embodiment of retributive justice, recapturing his own horses, delivering the captain to the summary justice of the vigilantes, and bringing Blevins’s horse back across the border. Present in the fight with the cuchillero are the novel’s primary conflicts, and the action of the novel since John Grady’s arrest on the hacienda Nuestra Senora de la Purisma Concepcion culminates in this moment. Cole and Rawlins encounter Blevins before they cross the border into Mexico, and from that moment the chain of events in the novel leads step by step to the scene of violence in the prison. By killing the cuchillero, John Grady initiates the reversal whereby Blevins’s murder is avenged. Cole’s opponent is a paid assassin, a coolly impersonal signifier of the forces he is pitted against—the hacendado’s influence and the sweaty caricature of Mexican injustice. In their other fights in the prison, Cole and Rawlins had fought back-to-back, reminiscent of heroic stands in narratives of the “buddy” genre. But in this symbolic contest Rawlins has been removed, too badly wounded to figure in the hero’s defining moment, and the mess hall clears out to reveal a stark tableau of violence, a narrow gate through which the narrative must pass. The opponents are equal in age and arms, their fight to the death a contest between both John Grady’s values and his ignorance on the one hand, and a tattooed killer who represents the world’s implacable and remorseless unconcern for the values John Grady represents. Cast in these terms, Cole’s triumph over his ordeal is at best a temporary victory, for in the context of McCarthy’s trademark pessimism (call it realism), the individual cannot truly win against the world. Nevertheless, in the context of the plot of All the Pretty Horses, the death of the cuchillero begins the hero’s ascent out of darkness, out of prison, out of the tentacles of injustice, and toward a resolution of the novel that completes the quest structure, though that completion provides little solace for the hero. McCarthy fittingly organizes the second volume of the Trilogy, The Crossing, around three border crossings into Mexico, by Billy Parham alone with the wolf, by Billy and his brother Boyd to recover horses stolen by their parents’ murderers, and by Billy alone again to search for his brother. Having exhumed his brother’s body from a Mexican cemetery for reburial at home, Billy laconically notes in the manner of the heroes of the Trilogy: “This is my third trip. It’s the only time I was ever down here that I got what I come after. But it sure as hell wasnt what I wanted.” (416). What Billy wanted was to find his brother alive and well, similar to the popular rescue fantasies of the 1980s where American POWs from Vietnam are snatched from work camps by selfless and patriotic (but antiestablishment) commandos. Instead, Parham is forced to settle for the repatriation of his brother’s bones, and
in the process his fraternal quest intersects with his brother’s reinvention as the “hombre de la gente” in the mythology of the Mexican folk (317). All of the novels of the Trilogy feature sage figures that provide a metacommentary on the narrative itself, or on other narratives told within the frame story. There are several in The Crossing—Senor Gillian, the ex-priest, the blinded revolutionary, the gypsy, the gerente Quijada—and it is Quijada who explains the significance of Boyd’s fate for his brother, once again telling the McCarthean story of storytelling itself: What does the corrido say? Quijada shook his head. The corrido tells all and it tells nothing. I heard the tale of the guerito years ago. Before your brother was even born. You dont think it tells about him? Yes, it tells about him. It tells what it wishes to tell. It tells what makes the story run. The corrido is the poor man’s history. It does not owe its allegiance to the truths of history but to the truths of men. It tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men. (387) What Billy knows with certainty is that his brother was seriously wounded by the henchmen of La Babicora and later disappeared with “the girl.” Whatever his actual fate, the circumstances of Boyd’s life and death are absorbed and transformed into the “corrido,” the ballad of the countryside that mythologizes the deep economic divide and political struggle between rich and poor in Mexico. The workers who save Boyd’s life immediately christen him the “guerito,” though they know nothing about who shot him or why. Boyd’s wounds and his youth are all that is required to transform him into the guerito of their song, and the myth-making apparatus of the Mexican folk absorbs whatever material it finds into the story that sustains their struggle. Billy Parham’s quest to find his brother and bring him home is thus linked with the larger narrative of class struggle and national identity in Mexico. Film and media discourse in the 1980s frequently foregrounded the issue of surviving MIAs in Vietnam. The repatriation of remains of soldiers killed in action and the issue of surviving MIAs became an important political and cultural subject for nearly a decade. Hollywood cinema did its share in fueling speculation that American servicemen had been betrayed, mostly by weak and cowardly civilians and generals. The effect of “rescue discourse” on American public consciousness was to partially merge the narrative of repatriation with the politically conservative narrative of American renewal. Bringing the POWs home became a part of a new national narrative, culturally significant if election results are an indicator, whereby rescuing brave Americans from the netherworld of POW camps marked a symbolic
movement analogous to rescuing national identity from the miasma of defeat in Southeast Asia and self-division at home. The narrative of the guerito and the narrative of American MIAs are similar in their role in the continuous reproduction of national identity, and both incorporate “real” events into a self-serving myth necessary for their respective communities. Each of the Parham crossings into Mexico has at least one corresponding scene of symbolic violence: Billy and the young don face off in the fighting pit over wolf; Billy and Boyd contend with the agents of La Babicora; and last, Billy experiences a kind of “Mexican stand-off ” in the bar with the drunken veteran of the revolution. In this last scene, bloodshed is averted only when Billy, himself intoxicated, backs down from a barroom dispute that seems to originate in simple ill temper. The confrontation is a scene rich in irony, however, for both men have reached a boiling point of frustration directly the result of their struggles against the same ruling powers in Mexico. The former soldier of the revolution refuses the American whiskey Billy proffers, signifying as it does to him the collusion of the American government with the despotic Mexican regime. Parham responds to the insult with belligerence of his own, fueled by the two adventures in Mexico that have proven so devastating for him personally. The violence in the moment remains latent, unrealized, and Billy achieves a moment of drunken clarity in “the sallow light of the cantina,” one in which he recognizes that two narratives of futile struggle against the McCarthean “world” of indifferent force, so well represented by the rich and powerful in Mexico, have spiraled into violent contact with one another. When the veteran displays his bullet wounds from the revolution, Billy reflects “that the only manifest artifact of the history of this negligible republic where he now seemed about to die that had the least authority or meaning or claim to substance was seated before him” (363). This epiphany holds true to the McCarthean vision presented in the Trilogy: the uncertain validity of all that Billy has been a part of in Mexico haunts his consciousness and calls to mind the suspect quality of all narrative, while on the other hand the veteran’s scars seem to tell an authentic story that ironically threatens the end of the road and his death. Another rescue plot appears as the main action of Cities of the Plain, and the novel’s resolution hinges on the rescue of John Grady’s beloved from a Juarez whorehouse. While the closing of the range provides Cities of the Plain with a historical backdrop, the primary ground of the novel is ontological rather than social or political. The book’s theme might be deciphered from an aphorism delivered by the nameless philosopher-transient to the aged Billy Parham: “You call forth the world that God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it” (285). There is certainly an air of authorial sanction to the words of the various sage figures in the Trilogy, and the mysterious
tramp’s observation concedes that while we do create reality in the act of perception, nevertheless because we are a part of that world we cannot falsify it, we cannot call it forth other than it is. This is McCarthy’s trump, an acceptance of the postmodern condition while refusing the nihilism inherent in such a position. So it must be with the life and death of John Grady Cole, a character in a work of art that has the same status as the figure in the dream told by the philosopher-transient. Cole’s entire romantic quest, beginning in All the Pretty Horses and concluding disastrously in his love for Magdalena, stands in the same relationship to the reader as the dream-figure for the philosopher-transient. McCarthy thus implies that John Grady’s life in a work of art (or Billy’s, or Boyd’s) and the life of the man in the dream have the same ontological standing, as the philosopher-transient explains: My belief is this, and I say it again: His history [the man in the dream] is the same as yours or mine. That is the stuff he is made of. What stuff other? Had I created him as God makes men how then would I not know what he would say before he ever spoke? Or how he’d move before he did so? In a dream we dont know what’s coming. We are surprised. All right. So where is it coming from? I dont know. Two worlds touch here. You think men have power to call forth what they will? (285) The point is, clearly, that we do not. Like Absalom, Absalom!, the volumes of the Trilogy ultimately provide their own theory, and Cities of the Plain can hardly be equaled for artistic bravado in that it contains the formal justification of its own narrative as truth. As the final installment of McCarthy’s turn from serial to symbolic violence, the contest between Cole and Eduardo marks the culmination of the primary action that begins the moment John Grady sees Magdalena at La Venada. Having premised the novel on the redemption of a teenaged, epileptic prostitute sold into sexual slavery as a child, it is difficult to imagine, even given McCarthy’s transformation as a storyteller, how such a tale could end happily and remain McCarthean. Cities of the Plain is a novel rich in narrative irony, and Cole’s fatal duel with the pimp and the failure of his quest are predicated from the very beginning—in retrospect, no other outcome seems possible. The entirety of the novel is present in the single moment that a teenaged cowboy and a child prostitute recognize their destiny in a Mexican bar, their love sufficiently improbable within the vision embraced by McCarthy’s work that we may without hazard foresee the outcome.
The knife fight between Cole and Eduardo serves as a contest of violence in which self-preservation is put aside for principle and the resuturing of the fabric of self-respect calls for blood. There is an unspoken agreement between the two men that their quarrel involve no other, not Tiburcio or Billy Parham, and that it be fought with weapons, knives, not only equal on both sides but also fiercely expressive of the desire for the retribution that each man in his own way seeks. During their deadly struggle over a prostitute, Eduardo supplements the practiced play of his switchblade with a running commentary on an old story in which John Grady is a player: “They [Americans] drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now extinct among them. A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a name. Being farmboys of course the first place they think to look is in a whorehouse” (249). What Eduardo means by the nameless “thing” is of course the McCarthean mystery of existence, and the search for an answer to this mystery forms a thread that runs throughout his entire work. At an earlier stage in McCarthy’s career, Judge Holden offers one answer: “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery,” he observes to the assembled band of scalphunters, and in Blood Meridian the answer seems to be that “The mystery is that there is no mystery” (252). The novels of the Trilogy propose an alternative to the Judge’s nihilism. When John Grady descends on Eduardo at the White Lake—“to kill you or be killed”—he embodies the bitter failure of his romantic quest, the aborted Pygmalion south of the border (248). At the moment of truth, Cole kills Eduardo by jamming his knife through his jaws and into his skull, thus symbolically shutting the pimp’s mouth, but not before the pimp has made a home thrust, not only with his blade, but with an ontological sally: “They cannot seem to see that the most elementary fact concerning whores . . . is that they are whores” (249). On a symbolic level, John Grady’s success in silencing the pimp would seem to indicate that Eduardo is, as Cole claims, “a liar,” that Magdalena is no whore “to the bone,” but rather an unfortunate victim of horrific circumstances. The elementary fact that escapes Cole, however, as it escapes all romantics, is that the reality of the world seldom if ever coincides with the reality of our desires, that Magdalena is indeed a whore, if not morally, then by a more insidious and unalterable definition: she is a whore because she is a whore, and for that reason the world opposes their love with a finality explained by the blind man: “Let me tell you only this. Your love has no friends. You think that it does but it does not. None. Perhaps not even God” (199). Their worlds cannot touch; their quest for a life together has no future. Through the return to symbolic violence in the Trilogy, McCarthy reestablishes the connections to his predecessors Faulkner and, to a lesser degree, Warren that he had seemingly severed in his radical devotion to
serial violence in the early work. McCarthy turns to the genre of the western for a mythic landscape suitable to conflicts stark and simple, and on that spare terrain the true subject of the novels becomes not so much the story he is telling but storytelling itself. That he does so without resorting to the elaborate narrative hijinks of his peers among postmodern novelists we may attribute to what is pre-modern in his artistic sensibility, viz., that storytelling is a historically transcendent means of knowing—stories reveal being because they are a part of being itself. McCarthy’s novels of the Border Trilogy share equally with Faulkner and Warren a concern for the consequences of the crossing of the ways, of the passing away of one world and the emergence of another. Since this transcendent conflict oversees much of the work of these three writers, it is understandable that they find useful the organizing principle of symbolic violence as a means by which two antagonists can embody the contending forces within the narrative. Whatever McCarthy’s other artistic motives for taking up the genre of the western, the centrality of symbolic violence in the Trilogy testifies to his meditation on the continuous quest for identity in the space created by violence. Wor ks Cit ed Arnold, Edwin T. “The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 221–247. Arnold, Edwin T. and Dianne C. Luce. “Introduction.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 1– 16. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968. Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Bell, Vereen M. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. ———. “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy.” Southern Literary Journal 15.2 (1983): 31–41. Bold, Christine. “The Popular West.” Updating the Literary West. Ed. Thomas Lyon. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1997. 874–881. Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Vintage, 1991. Luce, Dianne C. “The Road and the Matrix: The World as Tale in The Crossing.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 195-219. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, 1992. ———. Blood Meridian. New York: Vintage, 1992. ———. Child of God. New York: Vintage, 1993. ———. Cities of the Plain. New York: Vintage, 1998. ———. The Crossing. New York: Vintage, 1994.
———. The Orchard Keeper. New York: Vintage, 1993. ———. Suttree. New York: Vintage, 1992. Morrison, Gail Moore. “All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 175–194. Nelson, Andrew. “Metaphysic or Metafiction: The Western Novels of Cormac McCarthy.” The Image of the American West in Literature, the Media, and Society; Selected Papers from the 1996 Conference of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. 263–266. Sepich, John Emil. “What kind of indians was them?: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 123–143. Shaviro, Steven. “’The Very Life of Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Eds. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 145–158. Slotkin, Richard. “The Movie Western.” Updating the Literary West. Ed. Christina Bold. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1997. 874–881. Stone, Robert. Dog Soldiers. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1997.
S ara L . S purgeon
Foundation of Empire: The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
The Foundation of Empire is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is No more. Empire follows Art and not vice verse. —William Blake
ormac McCarthy’s Southwestern works, and Blood Meridian in particular, have been seen as both archetypal Westerns and as anti-Westerns, as myth and counter-myth, as glorifications of American imperialism and as damning indictments of it. I will argue here that McCarthy does indeed evoke archetypal myths and mythic heroes that have traditionally been used to serve the cause of American westward expansion and imperialism. That is, in part, the function of myth—to legitimate current social structures through a stylized vision of the past, to offer blueprints for behaviors and attitudes, and to justify future actions. I will also argue, however, that by uncovering the most ancient bones underlying these myths and using them to construct a new mythic vision of history, McCarthy is deliberately deconstructing the imperialist aims and justifications of the old myths while disrupting assumptions about the ideas and identities they were intended to uphold. The result is indeed an indictment, bloody and accusatory, of an American national(ist) identity based on the violent conquest of both racialized Others and feminized nature. The new mythic vision presented in Blood Meridian From Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier, pp. 19–40. © 2005 by Sara L. Spurgeon.
Sara L. Spurgeon
offers a postmodern challenge to notions of essentialized ethnic and national identities and borders. One of the many complex relationships McCarthy explores in Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West is between humans, especially Anglo Americans, and the natural world. He does so in part through the manipulation of several archetypal myths closely identified with the European experience in the New World, tracing their collapse and rebirth in the border regions of the American Southwest. McCarthy moves Blood Meridian through the dark and disordered spaces of what Lauren Berlant terms the National Symbolic, but unlike the familiar icons of mythic frontier tales, McCarthy’s characters seek no closure, nor do they render order out of the chaos of history. Rather, they reveal the chaos at the heart of history and the myths we make from it. The novel functions on the level of mythmaking and National Fantasy as an American origin story, a reimaging, upon the palimpsest of the Western frontier the birth of one of our most pervasive National Fantasies—the winning of the West and the building of the American character through frontier experiences.1 Both of these related themes demand a wilderness to be conquered, either literally via ax and plow or metaphorically by defeating the Indians rhetorically tied to the wild landscape. Annette Kolodny has defined the American obsession with land, especially land-as-woman, as an American Pastoral, drawing some images from the European version, yet unique from it. The literary hero within this landscape, she says, is “the lone male in the wilderness” (The Lay of the Land, 147) struggling to define a relationship with the female landscape in its troubling metaphorical appearance as both fruitful mother and untouched virgin, one image offering nurturing fertility while the other demands penetration and conquest. Blood Meridian chronicles the origin of this figure, sometimes called the American Adam, though not the benignly patriarchal John Wayne version. McCarthy’s project is not simply to retell the familiar myths or dress up the icons of cowboys and Indians in modern, politically correct costumes. Rather he is using the trope of the historic frontier and the landscape of the Southwest within the genre of the Western to interrogate the consequences of our acceptance of archetypal Western hero myths. Blood Meridian rewrites and reorders those myths in such a way as to bridge the discontinuity Patricia Limerick identifies as being perceived by the public to exist between the mythic past of the American West and its modern realities.2 This gap, marked by the feeling of discontinuity and limned by continued popular obsession with traditional Western and frontier icons that have thus far failed to cover it, is filled in Blood Meridian with a newly structured version of National Fantasy, though not one that imposes any kind of hoped-for order or control.
Foundation of Empire
Instead McCarthy presents a counter-memory, a sort of anti-myth of the West, illuminating especially the roots of the modern American relationships between Anglos and non-Anglos and between humans and the natural world. In many ways McCarthy has produced a counter-history, in contradiction to the meaning generated from most official histories of the period. It is within the accuracy of the historical detail of Blood Meridian that McCarthy finds his mythic history, lurking within the liminal spaces of the familiar rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, the taming of the wilderness, John Wayne’s famous swagger, and other pillars of the National Symbolic. Kolodny argues that the American Pastoral was structured around the yeoman farmer responding to the female landscape and discusses this figure as he appears in Jefferson, Crevecoeur, Freneau, and others. However, as Henry Nash Smith notes, the image of the yeoman farmer was simply not romantic enough to sustain popular interest for long. What emerged instead was an American version of a far older figure—the hunter—that existed in both European and Native American myths. The myth of the sacred hunter, as Richard Slotkin explains it, is one of regeneration through violence enacted upon the body of the earth. The hunter must leave the safety of his community, track his game (usually a representation of the spirit of the wilderness or an avatar of a nature deity), and slay it. In many versions, both Native American and European, the prey allows itself to be hunted and killed, willingly sacrificing its life to sustain the life of the hunter and his community, who must in turn give honor and thanks to the prey and to whichever nature spirit it represents. Following the hunt, he and/or his community either literally or symbolically consume the prey in a eucharist of the wilderness, thus renewing the hunter and providing life for those he serves. The eucharist, Slotkin says, is itself a sublimation of the myth of the sacred marriage that enacts a sexual union between the hunter and the body of nature. The game the hunter tracks in many versions of this myth is revealed at the end of the chase to be some female representative of the wilderness whom the hunter marries, instead of slaying, in a parallel renewal of self and community through sexual union with nature.3 Slotkin writes that, in the Anglo American version, “The hunter myth provided a fictive justification for the process by which the wilderness was to be expropriated and exploited” (554). It did so by seeing that process in terms of heroic male adventure commodified by visual and symbolic proofs of the hunter’s heroic stature and, therefore, his rightful and proper triumph over his prey. The famous image of Davy Crockett standing proudly next to his stack of 150 bearskins, the legend of Paul Bunyon clearing miles of virgin forest with a single stroke of his ax, and the often-photographed mountains of buffalo skulls towering over the Great Plains embody this version of the myth.
The vision of a feminine landscape within the patriarchal bounds of Anglo American culture and the long-standing tradition of associating Native Americans with what appeared to early Anglo colonists as a “howling wilderness” both encouraged and justified this exploitation. In Blood Meridian these images are echoed in the scalphunters’ collections of scalps, ears, teeth, and various other trophies, as well as described in detail on the plain of the bone pickers. What is echoed and amplified as well is the subtle shift evident in the modern Anglo version of the myth, from the imaging of the prey as symbol of divine nature sacrificed so that man may live, to simply that which deserves to fall before him. The gigantic figure of Judge Holden, who is both a fictional version of an historical personage and an amalgamation of numerous archetypes from the mythic West, acts throughout the book as the author of the new version of the hunter myth. McCarthy consistently presents the judge as a priest, a mediator between man and nature, shepherding, or more accurately manipulating, the scalphunters’ souls even as Glanton guides their physical bodies. The image of the judge as priest is consistent with the dominant mood and tone of Blood Meridian as origin myth—a sacred tale recounting how the world came to be. Bernard Schopen calls the entire novel “profoundly religious” and claims it takes place “in a physical and thematic landscape charged with religious nuance, allusion, and language” (191). That is not to say that Blood Meridian is a Christian book or particularly interested in presenting any kind of Christian worldview. At its deepest structural and rhetorical levels, Blood Meridian utilizes mythic and religious imagery both Christian and non-Christian in order to strip away the layers of blind belief myths compel. The judge, a mythic figure in his own right, is the terrifying guide to the disintegration of the last vestiges of the old sacred hunter myth and its rebirth as the modern myth of the American frontier. The first time we see the judge is at the revival meeting tent where the primary charge he levels against the apparently innocent Reverend Green foreshadows the betrayal and perversion he will commit as the novel progresses. The minister, the judge claims, is wanted “On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years—I said eleven—who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God” (7). This violation of a child and the profaning of a sacred office by the figure entrusted with upholding and protecting it will be enacted again and again throughout the novel with the judge playing the leading role. The judge deliberately cultivates a feel for myth, ritual, and religion and directs it toward his own ends. His goal is to harness the unconscious response to mythic heroes, invoke it with the rituals of the sacred hunter
and the eucharist of the wilderness, and reorder, or perhaps disorder, it on a deep and essential level. The result is a new myth that restructures American attitudes and beliefs about what it means to be an American and how Americans must relate to the landscape they inhabit. Throughout Blood Meridian the judge both exalts the natural world and strives to contain and destroy it, to usurp its power for his own ends. He is priest here, not only of men’s souls, but of their minds as well, and he often appears as the spokesman of what is presented as a sort of new religion— science. As the novel progresses the figure of the judge becomes more and more godlike, while that of nature is debased. The judge manipulates the power and mystery of the natural world and its association with the sacred through his scientific knowledge, which gives him the ability to penetrate that mystery and therefore disrupt the assumptions of the other characters about the place of humans within the world. As the scalphunters are camped at an abandoned mine, the judge collects ore samples in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth’s origins. . . . A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled. Books lie, he said. God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. The squatters in their rags nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct . . . and this the judge encouraged until they were right proselytes of the new order whereupon he laughed at them for fools. (116) The acceptance of traditional Christian dogma regarding the world and the place of man in the natural order of existence is deconstructed by the judge, built anew through the acceptance and belief of his listeners, then destroyed again. His audience now doubts their own understanding of nature as well as Christian doctrine, but the one figure whose personal power has increased in the eyes of his followers is Judge Holden. The judge is laying groundwork, gathering “proselytes,” participants in the ritualistic myth he is enacting. That nature plays the part of the sacred does not imply the sort of patriarchal relationship imagined by Christianity in which a merciful, allpowerful God cares for and watches over his children. As many have noted, in McCarthy’s work nature is often brutal and almost always without mercy for humans, and yet the shadow of the sacred and the profane permeates
Blood Meridian and is constantly evoked by the judge through man’s relationship to the natural world. That this destructive version of the myth he is bringing to fruition demands material evidence of its fulfillment does not lessen its ritualistic power. The judge, having symbolically dethroned the priest of the Christian rituals and myths at the revival tent, will make proselytes of the scalphunters and lead them in a cannibalistic perversion of the old myth made new in this place where “not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation maybe shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay” (5). Whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will, I would argue, is one of the central questions of the novel, implicating American attitudes regarding man’s conquest of nature, the relationship of Anglo America to any non-Anglo peoples, and America’s imperial mission especially as it was imagined in relation to the West. Dana Phillips claims that what McCarthy is questioning is “whether human beings have any privileged position in relation to the rest of the world” (443). His answer is that, according to McCarthy, they do not. Humans and nature are simply part of the same continuum, mutually ignoring each other throughout the novel. At first glance it would seem that indeed creation cannot be shaped to man’s will, or, as Phillips says, “at least not for very long. Man’s will does not seem a very relevant or potent force in this novel” (439). However, a closer examination suggests that in fact man’s will is the most potent of forces as well as the central concern in the terrifying relationship between Holden and the kid. It is man’s will that ultimately shapes myth, and, McCarthy implies, it is our myths that also ultimately shape the world. The agent of this shaping is not nature but Judge Holden who, as the only character who truly understands the immense power of will, acts almost as collective human will made flesh in order to shape the stuff of creation through the shaping of the myth that constructs it. Phillips would likely disagree with this interpretation. He argues that there is no inherent meaning in the actions of the characters or of the natural world in Blood Meridian, that darkness is just darkness, death just death. McCarthy has even “dispensed with the concept of character” (441) in the traditional sense, Phillips says, in order to erase any hint of possible moral redemption for his band of scalphunters and their victims. I would argue, however, that the lack of traditional character development by McCarthy is more than a response to the “furious troping” (441) of Melville’s Ishmael or an avoidance of Flannery O’Connor-style moralizing. McCarthy is interested in myths, not morals. It is true, as Phillips notes, that there are no real surprises in the plot of Blood Meridian, that “all the novel’s complexities are fully present from the first page. . . . The novel does not seek to resolve
‘conflicts’ which trouble its characters” (443). This is so, not because there is no meaning or symbolism in the world of Blood Meridian, but because, like any mythic story, we already know the outcome. The characters are not explored in the Lukacsian sense because, as actors in a myth, their individualities are less important than the roles they are playing. The face of the hero is infinitely changeable; therefore the kid does not need a proper name, Judge Holden can be endowed with faculties that border on the superhuman, and Tobin can be referred to as simply “ex-priest” as often as he is called by name. Meaning resides solely in the actions the characters take and the power of their story to shape the world of those who hear it. It is true that the Christian god and the moral structures he represents are absent in the natural world of Blood Meridian, at least as a cipherable entity to the travelers. The judge alone among the scalphunters claims the power to solve the mysteries of the natural world, and he does so through science and a skewed rationality cloaked with the rhetoric of religion. The myth of science, with the judge as its sacred high priest, is opposed to the earlier myth of nature served by the sacred hunter. Within the space of the National Symbolic and in the tradition of the earliest Puritan writings about the New World, the judge’s figuring of wilderness as that which must be conquered by man lest it conquer him is a familiar trope, common to virtually every Western written after the mid-nineteenth century. Kolodny argues this is part of the defining structure of the American Pastoral, born in conjunction with the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, that “implicit in the metaphor of the land-as-woman was both the regressive pull of maternal containment and the seductive invitation to sexual assertion” (67). Henry Nash Smith notes that by the late 1850s, as the myth of the garden and the land as fruitful mother began to fray, the archetypal frontier hero in the American wilderness had lost Leatherstocking’s “power to commune with nature. . . . He no longer looks to God through nature, for nature is no longer benign: its symbols are the wolves and the prairie fire. . . . The landscape within which the Western hero operates has become . . . ‘a dreary waste’ . . . He is . . . alone in a hostile, or at best a neutral, universe” (89). And yet the relationship McCarthy explores is considerably more complex than the simple nihilism of “Nature does not care for man.” Dana Phillips refutes Vereen Bell’s claim that human beings and nature compete in the novel by arguing that “this competition has been decided in favor of . . . the natural world even before Blood Meridian begins” (446). Humans and the natural world are not antagonists, Phillips claims, but are instead “parts of the same continuum” (446). That is indeed the case at the outset of the novel, and the balance of power between the various parts of the continuum appears fairly equal, but it is the fundamental change in this relationship, enacted on the level of the mythic and sacred, that McCarthy
is interested in uncovering. That the nature of that relationship exists on a level significantly deeper than mutual indifference or antagonism is clear. Again and again, McCarthy invokes archetypal myths and references to the sacred when portraying humans in the natural world. Travelers of all sorts in the wilderness are commonly referred to as “pilgrims” and “proselytes.” As the scalphunters cross a dry lakebed, the narrator claims that the earth itself notes their passing, “As if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sentience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality” (247). The narrator continues with the often-quoted passage regarding the quality of light in the desert that “bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence . . . and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships” (247). These passages have often been interpreted as “a critique of our culture’s anthropocentrism,”4 and, as Phillips notes, “the human does not stand out among the other beings and objects that make up the world” (443). However, that relationship of indifferent equanimity is neither stable nor unchanging. It is the laying bare of the cataclysmic evolution taking place in the mythic formations that have created this structure that McCarthy seeks to document through the actions of his characters and their mythic roles. If we view the relationship between man and nature in Blood Meridian in terms of the sacred hunter myth, a clear set of images appears. This myth implies the necessity of a certain kind of relationship between man and nature—a bloody and violent one to be sure and one that does not necessarily hold any moral overtones in the Christian sense of right or wrong or good or evil, but simply a set of rules governing what is, how reality and the natural world work, and a sense of order and balance in the roles of each. That, of course, is the most basic function of myth, to organize and impose order upon man and his world, though in Blood Meridian the revelation of the profound disorder at the heart of our myths seems to be the ultimate goal. The scalphunters as a group can be read as playing the part of the sacred hunter, dark versions of classic Western heroes from the Deerslayer and Daniel Boone to Buffalo Bill, leaving their communities to enter the wilderness for renewal and regeneration through the act of hunting and killing. Although the scalphunters seek a human prey, it is a prey nonetheless rhetorically tied to the wilderness, and the goal of its killing is ostensibly the protection and renewal of the scalphunters’ foster community—the Mexicans living in Sonora. And yet the fact that their prey is human begins the degeneration of the myth, tilts it off its axis. Of course the epigraph from the Yuma Daily Sun that opens the novel (detailing a 300,000-year-old skull found in the Afar region of Ethiopia that showed evidence of having been
scalped) implies that such a perversion is equally as old as the myth itself. This idea is furthered by the name of the judge’s gun, “Et in Arcadia Ego” (Even in Arcadia am I [Death]) implying as Leo Daugherty notes that “the point of the gun’s name is not that because of its appearance in the landscape, or by synecdoche the judge’s appearance, death has been introduced into an idyllic Arcadia: the entire novel makes clear (primarily through the judge, who continuously emphasizes the point in his preachments) that the human world is, and has always been, a world of killing” (126–27). The figure of the judge within this space is a Conradian expression of white American civilization, or perhaps the brutal force of its will. Like Kurtz, the judge engages in a savage war that is both sanctioned and denied by various authorities; like Kurtz he carries his war forward from both sides, existing at once as the ultimate expression of Euro-American manhood (poet/scholar/warrior) and as the primitive savage he seeks to destroy and emulate, donning native clothing and defeating native peoples on their own ground. And more importantly, like Kurtz, the judge is the agent of the revelation of the savagery at the heart of the myth and the civilization that produces it. Once the prey of the sacred hunter becomes human, imperialism itself becomes a sacred act, mythically justified by the very narrative on which it depends. Through the course of the novel, the judge will turn the old myth on its head, pervert it and cannibalize it. He leads the scalphunters in acts that violate the relationship contained within the sacred hunter myth while still seeming to follow its internal rules, in the same way the Black Mass was seen as an inversion of a sacred ritual and indeed depended on the sacred nature of the original for its own symbolic power. This degeneration of the myth from within sounds a striking note of prophecy, for it marks a change not only in the outer form of the hero and his universe (to be expected as cultures change with the passage of time), but also in the most basic narrative structure of the myth. A change on this level, Slotkin claims, “reflect(s) a fundamental alteration of the culture’s conception of the relationship of man to the universe, a revolution in world view, cosmology, historical and moral theory, and self-concept. Hence such changes may be seen as marking the point at which a new epoch of cultural history or perhaps even a new culture can be said to begin” (Regeneration through Violence, 9). The neobiblical rhetoric of the novel and its blood-washed, apocalyptic images support this vision of revolution, of violent death and rebirth, of some enormous and profound change in the fabric of things imagined by McCarthy through the perversion of the sacred hunter and his position in the natural world. In fact the first description in the novel of Glanton and his gang mark them equally as actors within the myth and as deviants from it, as both hunters and cannibals:
a pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies . . . bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description . . . the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears . . . the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs . . . the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh. Foremost among them . . . rode the judge. (78) The natural order of the original myth governing the relationship between humans and nature has been upset so profoundly that even the horses are seen as feral, feeding on flesh instead of grass, and the hunters themselves a visitation of the profane rather than the sacred. Although Glanton is their nominal leader, it is the judge who is “foremost among them.” Their sacred nature as hunter heroes is evidenced by the “scapulars” they wear and yet their pollution is obvious as well. The scapulars are formed of scores of human ears collected as trophies in the same skewed capitalistic spirit as Davy Crockett’s bearskins or Paul Bunyan’s logs, and indeed the native people to whom those ears belonged are viewed by the scalphunters more as natural resources than human beings, just another part of an infinitely exploitable landscape. Inevitably, however, the cannibalization at the heart of the new myth will become reified. The first instance of the judge’s symbolic cannibalization of those whom he is engaged to serve occurs when the scalphunters spend the night with the doomed miners at the ruined mines. As the gang prepares to retire for the night, “Someone had reported the judge naked atop the walls, immense and pale in the revelations of lightning, striding the perimeter up there and declaiming in the old epic mode” (118). The next morning the body of the boy is discovered, lying naked and face down, while the judge is seen “standing in the gently steaming quiet picking his teeth with a thorn as if he had just eaten” (118). The sacred marriage and the sacred eucharist in this scene are at once conflated and perverted, the whole echoing and reimagining the sacred hunter myth as well as the Christian crucifixion and eucharist.5 The naked body of the innocent child “whose head hung straight down” (119) when the miners grabbed his arms and lifted him, mimics the image of the body of the innocent and sinless Christ on the cross, drooping head ringed by a crown of thorns. As the judge watches these procedures, he employs a thorn with which to pick his teeth clean of the cannibalized flesh of the child.
The connotations of rape in the explicit nakedness of the judge and the murdered boy mock the fertility rite of the sacred marriage with a union that produces only violence and death in much the same way as the cannibalism implied by the judge picking his teeth “as if he had just eaten” mocks the intention of renewal and life in the ritual of the eucharist. The judge both literally and symbolically consumes that which is forbidden, the child as a living representation of the community the sacred hunter is bound to serve and protect. The boy is neither proper prey for the hunter nor a proper bride, and yet as the myth is inverted and turned in upon itself he becomes both. His childlike state—weak, helpless, and lost in the wilderness—at once feminizes him and marks him as prey for the foremost hunter in the gang. In the proper fulfillment of this emerging version of the myth, the judge rapes and cannibalizes him, absorbs his essence and emerges renewed. Indeed the entire gang appears rejuvenated, associated here with the symbols of life and rebirth as the narrator tells us: upon discovery of the boy’s body they “mounted up and turned their horses to the gates that now stood open to the east to welcome in the light and to invite their journey” (119). This sequence of actions, enacting the ritual of the hunt culminating in a perversion of the sacred marriage and sacred eucharist and the regeneration of the hunters ends chapter 9. The next major action within the narrative begins in chapter 10 with the ex-priest Tobin relating to the kid the story of how he first met Judge Holden, a story that again involves the judge as priest leading a group of men in the perversion of the ritual of the sacred marriage. This narrative establishes the ritualistic heart of the judge’s new myth, for Tobin’s story shows the gang’s initiation into their roles as sacred, or perhaps profane, hunters. It is important, therefore, that McCarthy have this tale originate from one labeled “ex-priest,” fallen from the symbolic orders, both Christian and non-Christian, of the past, and ripe therefore to be baptized into the order (or disorder) to come. Tobin relates the much-talked-about scene in which the judge appears, alone in the middle of the desert, acting as savior for Glanton and his riders who are without gunpowder and in a desperate flight from nearly a hundred Apaches. The judge uses an uncanny knowledge of the natural landscape to lead them on a new course to a distant mountain range that holds both a bat cave full of nitre and a sulfur-ringed volcano. Tobin recalls that the judge, before commencing his bloody ritual, tells the men “that our mother the earth . . . was round like an egg and contained all good things within her. Then he turned and led the horse he had been riding across that terrain . . . and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith” (130). And like all converts, the men are required to unite in a group ritual pledging themselves to this “new faith,” legitimizing the degeneration of the
myth they have been enacting all along. The judge combines charcoal, the nitre from the bat cave, and sulphur scraped from the mouth of the volcano as Tobin continues, “I didn’t know but what we’d be required to bleed into it” (131). The scalphunters do pour forth their own bodies, in the form of urine instead of blood, into the hole in the earth the judge has made for the preparation of his eucharist. He worked it up dry with his hands and all the while the savages down there on the plain drawin nigh to us and when I turned back the judge was standin, the great hairless oaf, and he’d took out his pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture, pissin with a great vengeance and one hand aloft and he cried out for us to do likewise. . . . We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughin the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil’s batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself. (132) Here again the sacred marriage and the eucharist of the wilderness contained within both the hunter myth and Christianity are conflated and perverted. Rather than the flesh of a deer or the sacred host, the judge kneads “a foul black mass, a devil’s batter” made of elements of the natural world turned black and stinking by symbolic and ritualistic violence, with the men gang-raping the great vaginal hole in “our mother the earth,” spewing piss instead of semen. The ritual reaches its violent climax with Glanton firing his rifle, primed with the foul mixture, straight down the open mouth of the volcano. The flesh of men and the flesh of nature are united here by science to birth gunpowder used to slaughter every last Apache, with the judge as a midwife and anti-priest. As the final ceremonial step cementing the men to the judge as their spiritual leader within this version of the myth, the judge “called us all about to fill our horns and flasks, and we did, one by one, circlin past him like communicants” (134). And indeed communicants are precisely what the scalphunters are, participants in a ritual of renewal dependent upon acts of violence and the perversion of the very myth (and mother) that gave them birth. This scene, with its savage rape of the earth and resultant “butchery” (134) of the Indians, is a brilliant condensation of McCarthy’s violent counter-memory of the winning of the West, his anti-myth of the frontier, deconstructing the forms of National Fantasy so often and so fondly used in building the space of the National Symbolic and shaping the attitudes that
would come to justify American devastation of the natural world, genocide of native peoples, and imperial adventures from South America to Southeast Asia. Here we see that indeed “the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will” (5). The results of the shaping, of the wholesale acceptance of this version of the sacred hunter as the governing myth of the new nation, are played out through the last half of the novel. Immediately following this narrative, in revenge or perhaps fulfillment of the perversion of the sacred marriage/eucharist, a bear, a powerful symbol of the natural world for McCarthy, steals a Delaware. Like many chapters, this one begins with a detailed description of the natural world through which the scalphunters ride, this time the aspen and pine forests of a high mountain. The bear rises up unexpectedly beside the trail and is shot by Glanton. “The ball struck the bear in the chest and the bear leaned with a strange moan and seized the Delaware and lifted him from the horse . . . the man dangling from the bear’s jaws looked down at them cheek and jowl with the brute and one arm about its neck like some crazed defector in a gesture of defiant camaraderie” (137). Acting as an avatar of the natural world, perhaps as nature’s own sacred hunter, the bear escapes with his “hostage” (137). The relationship between them is something more than simply an unlucky rider falling prey to a random wild beast or indifferent nature. The Delaware has been consumed by the myth, as the narrator states, “The bear had carried off their kinsman like some fabled storybook beast and the land had swallowed them up beyond all ransom or reprieve” (138). By this time all the scalphunters have been swallowed up beyond ransom or reprieve by the anti-myth they are enacting, their disconnection from the wilderness through which they ride so complete that even their shadows on the stones appear “like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god” (139). The balance of power, which may be perceived as resting on the side of nature at the start of the novel, has by the final scenes shifted to the side of man. The original covenant has been violated, the sacred myths structuring the relationship of man to the natural world now perverted to an extent that McCarthy suggests cannot be redeemed, reprieved, or corrected. The first powerful vision we receive of the results of this reordered myth is on the plain of the bone pickers, fifteen years after the main action of the novel. The kid, now a man, camps on the prairie where he meets an old hunter who tells him of the slaughter of the buffalo herds in which he had participated, an event Tom Pilkington calls “an ecological calamity so stunning as to be almost inconceivable” (317). Initially the old hunter paints pictures that, while bloody and full of gore, reflect the sheer abundance of life that once existed on the now empty and silent plains:
“animals by the thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground . . . and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in the carrion. . . . On this ground alone there was eight million carcasses” (317). In contrast to this, the hunter then recalls the “last hunt” in which he and the other hunters searched the empty plains for six weeks for a sign of buffalo. “Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They’re gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they’d never been at all” (317). Here is the new covenant, this hunter and those like him proselytes of the new order the judge has helped bring into being in which man’s relationship to the wilderness is one of butchery on a scale scarcely imaginable. The outcome is not regeneration, since no animals remain alive to carry on the relationship. This new version of the ancient hunter myth represents degeneration signified by the images of the enormous mountains of bones, miles long, stretching across the prairies in which the mythic figure of the sacred hunter has been reduced to that of the bone pickers, ragged children gathering dead evidence of the now-vanished herds. It is the logical culmination of the task the judge has set for himself early on, when Toadvine questions his taxidermy of one of every species of bird they have encountered. The judge replies, “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. . . . The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos” (198). While the judge may be clothing it in the sacred rhetoric of the religion of science, we see that the will of man, far from being insignificant, is the most powerful force in the novel. If only nature can enslave man, conversely only man can enslave nature, even if by doing so he leaves a sky as empty of birds as the plains now are of buffalo. Through his will man can make himself suzerain of the earth, though in so doing he must destroy that which he would rule. Kolodny has identified this as “the pastoral paradox” and argues it is at the heart of the modern American relationship to the natural world. Within this paradox, she writes, “man might, indeed, win mastery over the landscape, but only at the cost of emotional and psychological separation from it” (The Lady of the Land, 28). And driven by the inexorable force of myth, man is incapable of stopping, his actions governed, directed, and justified by the myth his own deeds have reified. This situation has been foreshadowed by the judge through the allegory he relates at the Anasazi ruins: “The father dead has euchred the son out of his patrimony” (145). In destroying the sacred power of nature and the myth that tied man to it, the father has robbed those sons to come
of their right to take part in that myth and of the regeneration and rebirth to be had from it. Instead, ironically, by making himself suzerain, the hunter-father engenders his own demise, and thus has ensured that for the son, “The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way” (145). Like the son in the story, these sons will grow to be “killers of men” (145) rather than sacred hunters, resulting in generations of those “not yet born who shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s soul” (327). And in fulfillment of the judge’s desired containment of birds, the great patrimony of nature has been reduced to the level of a zoo or circus by the final chapter of the novel. The gigantic figure of the bear, formerly the magnificent and terrible avatar of the wilderness able to pluck a Delaware from the midst of the scalphunters, is now dressed in a tutu and dances on a saloon stage to the music of a little girl’s crank organ. As the kid watches, a drunk from the judge’s table shoots the bear, but there is nothing sacred or holy in this hunt. The prey is killed without even the intention of power or ritual and its death is a meaningless spectacle: “The bear had been shot through the midsection. He let out a low moan and he began to dance faster, dancing in silence save for the slap of his great footpads on the planks. . . . The man with the pistol fired again . . . and the bear groaned and began to reel drunkenly. He was holding his chest . . . and he began to totter and to cry like a child and he took a few last steps, dancing, and crashed to the boards” (326). This scene is the antithesis of the one that occurred in the mountains. The bear, like the last few buffalo and the defeated remnants of the native tribes, is now the hostage. In the place of the Delaware with his arm around the neck of the mighty beast who will carry him off crouches the sobbing child with her arms around the neck of the dead bear that “in its crinoline lay like some monster slain in the commission of unnatural acts” (327). This scene is capped with perhaps the most unnatural act of all: the judge’s subsequent murder of the little girl, who, like most of the other children in the novel, is betrayed by the sacred hunter who should be her protector and is taken by him as prey. The destruction and reordering of the original myth is now complete. This point for McCarthy is a meridian and a nadir, the final mastery of man over the wilderness and the prophetic embarkation of his descent. The judge tells the scalphunters, “in the affairs of man there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of his achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day” (147). There is the implication here of something inevitable and preordained, more than the random tragedy of history. As the quote regarding the 300,000-year-old skull from Africa suggests, neither scalping nor any other vicious perversion is new or unique. The scalphunters and the Indians, the dancers in the saloon, the lone buffalo hunter on the
empty prairie, and the long-dead scalper of the unfortunate Ethiopian whose skull now speaks to modern anthropologists are all tabernacled in the others’ books (141), “each pass[ing] back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys” (121) in an “endless complexity of being and witness” (141). The suggestion is that the myth has always contained within itself the anti-myth, the dark shadow double awaiting a Kurtz or a Holden to strip bare the original and turn it inside out. McCarthy’s earth in Blood Meridian and many other works is hollow, full of empty caves and echoing caverns, at once womb and tomb, signifying the hollowness at the heart of all myths. There is no center to the sacred hunter myth, any more than there is to its antithesis. And yet the power of myth to move and shape us remains, and through Blood Meridian, McCarthy has done more than simply invert the sacred hunter and the eucharist of the wilderness; he has altered their form in several significant ways. The most basic relationship enshrined in that myth, between man and nature, is ultimately replaced with a new ordering based upon the relationship between man and man in the form of sacred war. The death of a bear or deer, the sacrificial shedding of the blood of some symbol of divine nature, once an essential part of the ritual upon which the sacred hunter myth rested, is no longer sufficient for regeneration. Regeneration depends upon ritual, but as the judge explains, “A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals” (329). The myth of science, therefore, is not enough. It must be enacted through the more ancient ritual of war. Because all generations following this one have been euchred of the patrimony of nature, invalidating the blood of bears or deer as sources of regeneration, the prey must now become humanity itself. The new version of the myth demands human blood, for now no other will suffice, and, therefore, as the judge suggests, the holiest of all acts is war. And again the suggestion is that of inevitable procession toward this end. “War was always here,” the judge says. “Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner” (248). War, in fact, is god, according to the judge, because, as myth or game enhanced “to its ultimate state” (249), it is the perfect embodiment of human will, the force of will made divine, driven to test itself against the very stuff of creation, “a forcing of the unity of existence” (249), beyond what the judge considers the petty concerns of moral judgments. In engaging in the act of war, in forcing the hand of existence to choose who shall live and who shall die, the sacred hunter becomes one with the prey, and man assumes the cloak of divine power himself. Moral law, good and evil, are simply trivialities enshrined by one church or another. Questions of right and wrong are subsumed by the force of human will made manifest in this
mythic vision of war. To prove this notion the judge challenges Tobin, the de facto representative of religion and moral order: The judge searched out the circle for disputants. But what says the priest? he said. Tobin looked up. The priest does not say. The priest does not say, said the judge. . . . But the priest has said. For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor. The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself. . . . I’ll not secondsay you in your notions, said Tobin. Dont ask it. Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you’ve not already given? (250–51) The judge’s new myth has long ago swallowed up Tobin and the religion and morality he symbolizes, the impotent state of those institutions marked by Tobin’s status as “ex” priest. The churches are empty shells, like the Anasazi village, crumbling ruins of an order dead and vanished, now “wondered at by tribes of savages” doomed to erect new churches, new edifices of stone in their attempts to “alter the structure of the universe” (146). But all such attempts, the judge insinuates, will ultimately fail. “This you see here, these ruins . . . do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons” (147). The judge has proven that the only thing that can truly alter creation is the brute force of human will, sharpened and focused through the lens of a mythic structure unconcerned with morality and bent to the task of godlike war. The eucharist of the wilderness has now become a eucharist of humanity. Everyone now is a participant in the dance of war, either as hunter or as prey. All in the gang have been baptized into the new myth, have partaken in its ceremonies of cannibalism and rape. Only the kid finally attempts to renounce the dance and to assert a will independent of the judge and his anti-myth. By giving up his position as a hunter of men within this new myth, he makes himself prey. At the ruins, the judge supplied the blueprint for raising hunters, explaining that at a young age children should be put into pits with wild dogs, forced to fight lions and run naked through the desert. Only those with the most perfect and powerful wills would survive such tests (mercy, we are to assume, would produce weakness instead of strength), and, ironically of course, only those adults with the most potent of wills could administer the trials without succumbing to the urge to help the children. The kid faces several such trials throughout the narrative and fails them. He alone of the gang answers David Brown’s call for aid in removing
an arrow from his leg (162). By the rules of the anti-myth, Brown should have been left on his own, like the child in the pit of wild dogs, to triumph by the force of his will alone or to fail and die in the desert. Tobin warns the kid of the danger of his actions: “Fool, he said. God will not love ye forever. . . . Dont you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you boy. Like a bride to the altar” (162–63). The “he” here refers to the judge, who has earlier refused to help Brown and who tests the kid later by calling for help himself in the killing of a horse (219). None of the other members of the gang answers him, and Tobin again warns the kid not to respond. In doing so, the kid violates the internal order of the myth, though the prospect of being taken “like a bride to the altar” by the judge is perhaps not such an appealing one. While the phrase echoes the rhetoric of the sacred marriage common to both Christianity and the sacred hunter myth and perverted by the act of rape in this new order, in this instance we can understand Tobin to intend a positive meaning. While the relationship between the judge and the kid might be more properly characterized as that between father and son rather than husband and bride, the implication at least is of renewal and rebirth, the promise of regeneration that the kid betrays. As Tobin and the kid crouch in the desert after the slaughter at the ferry crossing, the kid receives his final chance to seize his place as hunter within the new myth and fails once again when he refuses to shoot the unarmed judge. To do so would only have been right and proper within the relationship of hunter and prey, human will against human will in sacred war, as well as within the relationship of father and son, since as the judge has said at the Anasazi ruins, it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled. When the kid will neither shoot him nor join him, the judge charges, “There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. . . . You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency” (299). The kid ignores the judge’s warning and over the final section of the book covering the last decades of his life, attempts to return to the previous mythic order, to reestablish the relationship of the sacred hunter as guardian and protector of his community. He becomes a guide for other travelers passing through the wilderness, protecting them from the forces of nature, from Indians, and from those like his old companions who have become hunters of men. Most significantly, he begins to carry a Bible, a book already made defunct by the judge as a false book and symbol of the empty moral laws thrown down before the force of human wills in war. Like the church it represents, the Bible is a kind of ruin here, silent and without reference in the world shaped by the new myth. Especially for the illiterate kid, the Bible is a mute emblem of a fallen system, “no word of which he could read” (312).
Its futility as a symbol within the world shaped by the new order is reified by the kid’s encounter with the penitents he finds butchered in a canyon and his attempts to speak with one of them: The kid rose and looked about at this desolate scene and then he saw alone and upright in a small niche in the rocks an old woman kneeling in a faded rebozo with her eyes cast down. He made his way among the corpses and stood before her. . . . She did not look up. . . . He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place, some party of her country-people who would welcome her and that she should join them for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die. He knelt on one knee, resting the rifle before him like a staff. Abuelita, he said. No puedes escucharme? He reached into the alcove and touched her arm. . . . She weighed nothing. She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years. (315) The kid attempts here to perform the act of confession, a ritual based upon the acknowledgement of a moral order the speaker has in some way violated, but the kid has himself been a participant, as his confession makes clear, in the destruction of that moral order that has rendered this ceremony empty and meaningless, the authority of the church now “just a dried shell.” The kid has turned his back on the new myth he helped bring into being, but it is too late to revive the old ones. He prostrates himself before a dead body that cannot hear his confession and can therefore offer no absolution or forgiveness, cannot even move to accept his proffered aide, and is as mute as the Bible he carries but cannot read. He even clasps his rifle, not like a weapon of divine war, worthy of the name the judge has bestowed on his gun, the tool of death in the garden, but like a staff, symbol of the doomed priest, administrator of an empty office, and a figure the kid is said to have come to resemble. The kid has in fact betrayed the sacred office he once occupied as a hunter of men in this new myth, and it is this betrayal for which the judge castigates him in the prison. “You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgment on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgments of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part” (307). And it
is for this betrayal that the judge, described as immense and bearlike (having subsumed the figures of the old myths within himself ), finally kills the kid in a horrible embrace, a corrupted hug, a perversion of the act of reproduction performed in the midst of human excrement (333), and yet despite all this, an act that is holy and proper within the structure of the new myth, for after the killing the judge emerges renewed and rejuvenated to join the dance in the saloon. If we accept Slotkin’s claim that any fundamental alteration of the narrative structure of the myth signals some profound shift in the culture that produces it, then the sense of momentous change is inescapable. Here is the bloody tie binding America’s mythic past to its troubled present, here in this mythic dance is the violent birth of a National Symbolic that has made heroes out of scalphunters and Indian killers and constructed the nearextinction of the buffalo and massive deforestation as symbols of triumph and mastery, the proud heritage of the modern American citizen. This is one possible interpretation of the novel’s rather obscure epilogue. The man progressing over the silent plain digging postholes is striking out of the rock with his steel, the fire, and symbolically the life, “which God has put there” (337), the first step before stringing barbed wire along that “track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground” (337). The barbed wire fence is a potent and deeply paradoxical symbol in the American West. On one hand, it is the triumphant emblem of Anglo America’s conquest of the land once referred to as the Great American Desert, of the sheer force of human will necessary to empty it of those animals like the buffalo that do not serve Anglo America’s needs and to fill it instead with cattle—nature tamed and controlled by the sharp-edged product of Eastern factories. It is also, for many Westerners, the sign of some final closure, usually expressed nostalgically as the loss of the wandering horseman’s right to travel freely and without restriction across the landscape. That wandering horseman, the lone cowboy with his bedroll and his rifle, is the most commonly recognized modern American expression of the sacred hunter, the lone male in the wilderness, here digging the postholes that mark his own demise and performing the final fencing-in of the natural world. The plain in the epilogue is empty of life, no buffalo, no bears, wolves, or antelope, the patrimony of nature gone, only “bones and the gatherers of bones” (337), following behind the diminished hunter striking out hole after hole. The act of the posthole digger “seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality” (337), the consequence of our national acceptance of the judge’s perverted anti-myth, of the disruption of the continuum identified by Dana Phillips in which some balance or relationship between man and nature has been destroyed and replaced with a mythic structure few besides McCarthy
have dared to gaze at unflinchingly. American identity, as constructed through the national(ist) narrative of frontier myth, cannot be seen as innocent, either of intent or deed. Nor can national identity as the product of myth be viewed as essential in any way. Rather, identity must be seen as fragile, tenuous, and unfixed, as McCarthy suggests all empires of man are. In the first of his Western works, McCarthy has recast the lens of myth through which American history and identity is viewed, thus challenging the mythic language by which the American nation understands itself, its beliefs, and its role in the world. Not e s 1. I use the term “palimpsest” here as Daniel Cooper Alarcón has employed it in The Aztec Palimpsest: “a site where texts have been superimposed onto others in an attempt to displace earlier or competing histories. Significantly, such displacement is never total; the suppressed material often remains legible, however faintly, challenging the dominant text with an alternate version of events” (xiv). 2. In The Legacy of Conquest, Limerick argues that the association of the Western landscape with “a potent and persistent variety of nationalistic myth” (30) coupled with the government’s official declaration of the end of the frontier in 1891 resulted in a public perception of “a great discontinuity between the frontier past and the Western present” (31). The perception has persisted, she claims, in part because of the romanticization of the frontier experience and in part because such a discontinuity allows the grim realities of conquest and colonization to be viewed from a safe remove, as associated with the distant past and unrelated to the present day. 3. Slotkin argues, for example, that the common and extremely popular folktale regarding Daniel Boone’s first meeting with his future wife Rebecca Boone is a version of this myth. The story claims Boone was hunting deer by torchlight one night when he saw two eyes shining among the trees. He raised his rifle to shoot but at the last moment stayed his hand. What he had believed to be a deer was actually Rebecca, walking at night through the woods. This portion of the story, though widely repeated, may or may not be true. Neither Boone nor Rebecca denied it, though their children, feeling it to be primitive and pagan and thus reflecting badly on their father, who was already well on the way to achieving mythic status, did so vehemently. We do know that Boone married Rebecca soon after their first meeting. Within the bounds of the myth working at the level of popular culture, this act would have been the proper fulfillment of the rules of the sacred marriage, which culminated the hunt and which decreed that woman or deer, married or slain, the hunter must love and honor that which he hunts for its sacred nature in order to receive union, and communion, with it. For a further discussion of the Boone myth as the first truly American (i.e., combination of European and Indian) version of the sacred hunter story, see Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence, pp. 152–56. 4. Bell, p.124. 5. The connection of the symbolic cannibalism of the Christian eucharist and the figure of Christ with both Old and New world versions of the sacred hunter myth in which the hunter himself must die in a symbolic mirroring of the hunter as stag and prey has been noted by many; see Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence, especially chapter 2, “Cannibals and Christians.”
J ames R . G iles
Discovering Fourthspace in Appalachia: Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Child of God
ew American novelists have so thoroughly explored the various and complex ramifications of violence as Cormac McCarthy. Sustained critical attention was late in coming to McCarthy, and, especially in recent years, it has focused on his western novels: the anti-Western Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985) and the Border trilogy, All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). Certainly this attention is deserved. No text so thoroughly deconstructs the myth of a heroic American West as Blood Meridian, with its constantly accelerating body count; it demonstrates that Anglo domination of the North American continent was made possible by illiterate and violent men acting outside any established legal system. Thus the subtitle with its implication of a frontier that, even while vanishing, leaves behind its blood-soaked legacy. The Border trilogy—especially the first two volumes, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing—represents a much more lyrical and forgiving modernist evocation of the frontier myth. All the Pretty Horses first brought McCarthy significant popular recognition and thereby inspired the re-publication of his neglected earlier novels. In these texts, all set in Tennessee or in some less identifiable realm of Appalachia, McCarthy had been exploring the phenomenon of violence for two decades. The ambitious Suttree (1979) is set in a relatively contemporary From The Spaces of Violence, pp. 16–41. © 2006 by the University of Alabama Press.
James R. Giles
Knoxville and is largely realistic in narrative approach. In contrast, Outer Dark (1968), while unmistakably set in rural Appalachia, seems to transcend precise definitions of space or time. While the setting of Child of God (1973) is identified as Sevier County, Tennessee, sometime around the midtwentieth century, the text evokes a comparable sense of unreality. What Vereen M. Bell says about Outer Dark is, to some degree, true of both novels: “The topography is vague, dreamlike, and surreal in a way that imposes an unwholesome, deranged aspect upon the entire scene” (33). In both texts, physical and social space are, at times, obliterated. While both short novels explore a desperation born of degrading poverty and stultifying ignorance, and can thus be seen as exposés of the disabling effects of systemic oppression, this is nevertheless only one of the levels on which the two texts are intended to function. The elusive nature of space in the two texts is witnessed in three perceptive but contrasting critical discussions. In Cormac McCarthy, Robert L. Jarrett discusses the problems in attempting to approach the fictional landscape in McCarthy’s Appalachian novels from familiar historical and literary sources. He notes that, in sharp contrast to the fiction of William Faulkner, a writer with whom McCarthy is often compared, McCarthy’s novels, and especially Outer Dark, seem almost untouched by nineteenth-century southern history, specifically by “the antebellum South, the Confederacy, and Reconstruction.” If there were a single identifiable county in McCarthy’s Appalachia, it would defy the talents of any mapmaker. While McCarthy does not completely ignore race, it is far from being the overwhelming issue that it is in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County (Jarrett 24–25). In part, Jarrett attributes the seeming absence of history in McCarthy’s fictional landscape to Appalachia’s geographical and cultural isolation from the rest of the South; because slavery was never profitable in eastern Tennessee, he points out, the plantation system never flourished there. In addition, Appalachia has historically existed in political isolation from the rest of the South (24–27). Brian Evenson and Gary M. Ciuba approach McCarthy’s world from considerably more abstract critical perspectives. Evenson discusses the central characters in both the Appalachian and the western novels in a poststructuralist context defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their analysis of “nomadology in A Thousand Plateaus” (Evenson 42). Dividing McCarthy’s protagonists into two categories, “wanderers” and “nomads,” Evenson places the three dark, murderous outlaws from Outer Dark and Lester Ballard from Child of God in the second category. Citing Deleuze and Guattari, Evenson writes that the defining characteristic of the nomad is a search for “smooth spaces,” that is, open spaces free from limiting, regulating forces: “Such a topography can be actual or it can be the metaphorical equivalent: a moral or ethical open ground. The nomad’s existence is a series
Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Child of God
of movements which explore the limitless, open possibilities of the smooth space” (42). McCarthy’s complex aesthetic in Outer Dark and Child of God projects landscapes or spaces that fuse the “actual,” the “metaphorical,” and the “psychological” to create something that is simultaneously all of these and none of them. This imagined landscape can perhaps be described as a kind of fourthspace, existing in a dimension somewhat similar to, but ultimately extremely unlike, Edward W. Soja’s thirdspace. The fourthspace that distinguishes the world of Outer Dark and Child of God merges the material, the metaphoric or linguistic, and the psychological or subconscious, and only the darkest forms of freedom, the most horrific possibilities, result from the merger. Ultimately, nothing is transcended in McCarthy; no one is given the opportunity to explore spiritually affirming “borders” of existence. The three grim outlaws of Outer Dark and the necrophilic murderer Lester Ballard act in a perverted realm of “smooth space.” They perform acts of evil characterized by sheer excess, and McCarthy’s two novels are, in part, explorations of such excess. On this level, they can usefully be read in the context of comments by Georges Bataille on work, reason, excess, and violence. Bataille posits an inherent duality in human beings that he defines through the binaries of work, a realm dominated by reason and secured through taboos, and excess, a realm of violent transgression of taboo: “One cannot fail to observe mankind’s double nature throughout its career. There are two extremes. At one end, existence is basically orderly and decent. Work, concern for the children, kindness and honesty rule men’s [the gender-specific language is in this case appropriate] dealings with their fellows. At the other, violence rages pitilessly. In certain circumstances the same men practise pillage and arson, murder, violence and torture. Excess contrasts with reason” (186). McCarthy’s fiction has always been focused on the second half of this duality; the excessive violence that dominates his fiction is thus an essential element in his aesthetic. The characters who inhabit the worlds of Outer Dark and Child of God are either exiles from the realm of work and reason or nomadic wanderers who have never even known it. The kind of “smooth space” they explore exists on several levels, all distinguished by the kind of extreme freedom that Bataille associates with excess; the violence in McCarthy’s fiction must be senseless, is often unmotivated, and above all is supremely irrational. McCarthy’s art is thus intended to disturb by revealing a world from which the protective taboos that characterize what Bataille identifies as the realm of work have been torn away. For Bataille, this kind of intentionally disturbing art is essential for revealing the full dimension of human beings, for probing into a level of the natural so extreme that it may become unnatural:
“Man has built up the rational world by his own efforts, but there remains within him an undercurrent of violence. Nature herself is violent, and however reasonable we may grow we may be mastered anew by a violence no longer that of nature but of a rational being who tries to obey but who succumbs to stirrings within himself that he cannot bring to heel” (40). In this context excess is an essential human characteristic, and one with which artists have long been fascinated. At times McCarthy’s nomads seem almost bloodless embodiments of such excess, and as Evenson points out, they are inevitably at war with “civilized” human spaces. When they encounter a settled space, violence inevitably results; the nomad’s quest for smooth space can only be pursued outside the boundaries of settlements. Evenson argues that McCarthy’s ability to dramatize the violent confrontations of nomads with settled spaces is “precisely the appeal of McCarthy’s greatest fictions” (43). In an essay that should be read in conjunction with Evenson’s (both are included in a collection of McCarthy criticism entitled Sacred Violence), Ciuba interprets Child of God through René Girard’s theories concerning violence and sacrifice. In this context, he provides an interpretation of the relationship between the title of the novel and its protagonist, the murderous Lester Ballard: Lester Ballard is the child of an ancient tradition of sacred violence. René Girard contends that the sacred of primitive religion rose out of the salutary transcendence of violence by violence. At the founding moment of culture, humankind overcame internecine strife by focusing its mutual hostilities on slaying one of its own. The violence that once threatened to destroy the community became the violence that graciously delivered it. . . . Since the sacrifice transformed an accursed outcast into the redeemer of a fractious community, the godhead assumed both the maleficent and beneficent aspects of violence. The transgressor became the savior; the most heinous was also the Child of God. (77–78) Thus, Lester Ballard becomes both sacrifice and sacrificer in an Appalachian community historically defined by violent injustice and oppression. It is as if a plague has been let loose upon the land, and Lester redeems it through the excess of his own transgressions. “Like some violent voluptuary in the religion of Georges Bataille,” writes Ciuba, “he makes transgression the very sign of its transcendence” (78). Girard offers a further gloss on this paradoxical concept: “From the purely religious point of view, the surrogate victim . . . inevitably appears as a being who submits to violence without provoking a reprisal; a supernatural being who sows violence to reap peace; a
mysterious savior who visits affliction on mankind in order subsequently to restore it to good health” (86). Lester does not perfectly fit Girard’s description. He submits to his initial displacement from the community only after he is knocked unconscious and forcibly removed from what was first his father’s and then his own farm while it and the things on it are being auctioned off. Thus Lester’s victimization is, to some degree, systemic; he is the product of decades of poverty and ignorance. Moreover, he exists in a world in which religious faith, to the degree that it exists at all, has been debased to a malevolent doctrine offering no genuine redemptive promise. While his crimes are certainly excessive in nature and execution, no one in the communal world of the novel would view him as a supernatural being. The sheer savagery of his acts serves to reinforce his undeniable humanness. He embodies the violent side of Bataille’s concept of human duality; certainly work is as foreign to his being as excess is natural to it. After he is forced off his farm, Lester gradually evolves into a representative of Evenson’s nomad, living on the edge of cultivated space. In the course of the novel he is transformed from a communal outcast to a mysterious nomadic presence that periodically assaults the settlement. In an early scene, he is falsely accused of rape and, while being interrogated in the sheriff ’s office, pronounces what amounts to his judgment on the community: “you sons of bitches. . . . Goddamn all of ye” (52). Periodically the novel shifts into a communal narrative voice, which at one point summarizes the disgraceful history of the Ballard family, concluding on a note of perverse pride: “I’ll say one thing about Lester though. You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he don’t outstrip em all” (81). It is significant that this judgment ties Lester’s origins firmly to the first human sinner rather than seeking a supernatural explanation for his actions. In distinct contrast, the “grim triune” from Outer Dark, while always appearing in human form, seems something other than human. Even more than Child of God—in fact, more than any other McCarthy novels—Outer Dark seems to take place in some ambiguous physical-social space devoid of history.1 In part, this almost surreal setting can be understood as exemplifying Jarrett’s description of Appalachia as a space on the periphery of the South and its history and traditions. In the opening of the novel, its two central characters, Culla and Rinthy Holme, brother and sister, are so isolated as to barely know that any larger community exists. This isolation is, moreover, not strictly spatial; Culla and Rinthy are victimized by a profound ignorance that is not simply a matter of literacy. It is as if they have somehow been untouched by any sustaining cultural values or accepted social customs. At one point Rinthy says, “They ain’t a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me” (29). The brother and sister appear parentless and, except for each other, cut off
from any family; the only reference to their background comes when Rinthy tells a family that takes her in and feeds her, “I bet I ain’t eat two pones of lightbread in my life. I was raised hard” (60). Certainly, she seems never to have known anything approximating kindness or gentleness. On one metaphoric level, Culla and Rinthy are re-creations of Adam and Eve, doomed to commit anew the unpardonable sin that threatens to exile them from human or divine mercy, to make them wanderers through a grotesquely fallen world. Thus their last name is cruelly ironic—they have never really known anything approximating “home” or even a safe space. Isolated from virtually everyone else, they almost doom each other. Before the novel opens, they have committed incest; the reader is introduced to them as the baby is about to be born. Culla delivers the baby himself after refusing to go in search of a midwife, since he wants to keep their sin secret. After delivering the child, he makes an ominous prophecy: “I don’t look for it to live” (15). Culla does not kill the child, though. Instead, he takes the infant and leaves it to die in some neighboring woods. McCarthy’s description of Culla’s misfortunes while carrying out his secret and desperate mission is, one assumes, deliberately excessive. After Culla stumbles and falls to the ground, he “lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare” (17). While this kind of McCarthy prose has been condemned as excessive and imitative of Faulkner, in this case it serves a legitimate purpose. The quick shift to the “fissured vision” of the “embryonic bird” evokes a timeless, primal space underlying the mimetic Appalachian setting. Incest (however it is defined) is, of course, one of the oldest of human taboos, Girard believes, because, like murder, it assaults communal order in the most profound of ways. By destroying culturally accepted distinctions, it bequeaths chaos: “Incestuous propagation leads to formless duplications, sinister repetitions, a dark mixture of unnamable things” (Girard 75). Carrying his child, the result of “incestuous propagation,” Culla has ventured into this “dark mixture of unnamable things” as much as, if not more than, he has entered forested material space. McCarthy seems to have emphasized Culla and Rinthy’s cultural and social isolation partly in order to emphasize the extreme and primal nature of their resultant guilt. Culla compounds his guilt by telling Rinthy that the baby is dead. When she demands to see where it is buried, he takes her into the woods where he has left the infant. Once there, they discover that the infant has
been taken, either alive or dead, by a tinker who had intruded upon their isolation and tried to sell Culla a book of amateurish pornographic drawings. One remembers folkloric associations of tinkers with Satan, and this tinker seems to possess supernatural insight into the lives of the isolated brother and sister. The tinker is, in fact, the first of several prophet figures, usually demented to some degree, in the novel. The tinker’s theft of the child forces Culla and Rinthy out of their isolated worlds as they separately seek to find the lost child, and McCarthy’s linguistic excess merges with the psychological guilt of Culla and the maternal need of Rinthy to produce the debased fourthspace in which the novel takes place. In their quests, both discover grotesquely fallen worlds, haunted by poverty, ignorance, and sheer malice. Bell describes Outer Dark as being “as brutally nihilistic as any serious novel written in this century in this nihilistic country” (34). Refuting Bell, Edwin T. Arnold asserts that a redemptive moral center underlies Outer Dark and all of McCarthy’s fiction, including Blood Meridian, with its unrelenting evocations of social, rather than strictly individual, acts of violence: “While I recognize and appreciate the postmodern celebration of McCarthy’s exuberant violence, his astonishing approximation of chaos, his grand evocation of the mystery of the world, there is also evident in his work a profound belief in the need for moral order, a conviction that is essentially religious. There is, in addition, always the possibility of grace and redemption even in the darkest of his tales, although that redemption may require more of his characters than they are ultimately willing to give” (46). Nihilism and something like religious affirmation are at war throughout McCarthy’s novel. In this context, it is significant that the space through which Rinthy travels is more conventionally mimetic and more accepting than the dark and deadly landscape Culla encounters. Arnold perceptively analyzes Culla’s descent into something that seems a great deal like both Christian and Sartrean imaginings of hell as resulting from a failure of courage, an attempt to flee from sin. That Culla’s journey is at least as much a psychological and a spiritual experience as an actual exploration of mimetic space is foreshadowed by a horrific nightmare that opens the novel and haunts him for the remainder of the text: There was a prophet standing in the square with arms upheld in exhortation to the beggared multitude gathered there. A delegation of human ruin who attended him with blind eyes upturned and puckered stumps and leprous sores. . . . It grew cold and more black and silent and some began to cry out and some despaired but the sun did not return. Now the dreamer grew fearful. Voices were being raised against him. He was caught up
in the crowd and the stink of their rags filled his nostrils. They grew seething and more mutinous and he tried to hide among them but they knew him even in that pit of hopeless dark and fell upon him with howls of outrage. (6) Now Culla has been transformed into something closer to a Cain than an Adam figure. He has been banished and set apart from the rest of humanity. This introductory nightmare functions as a metaphoric introduction of the remainder of the novel. The pornography-selling tinker was merely the first of the ominous prophets Culla will encounter as he travels among “the beggared multitude.” To some degree, the emphasis on the stinking “rags” of “the human ruin” evokes the more real or mimetic landscape of soulkilling poverty through which he will travel. It also alludes to the sinfulness and viciousness in which Culla finds human beings clothed and to his own sin, already that of incest and soon to be of child abandonment as well. Like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, Culla undertakes a journey in which physical space, psychological guilt, and spiritual despair merge so completely as to become indistinguishable. Shortly after the scenes of birth and abandonment, the novel depicts an incident that reoccurs in different forms throughout McCarthy’s fiction. On a Sunday, Culla goes to the nearest store to buy some food for the weakened Rinthy. Inevitably he finds the store closed and hears a voice calling down at him “from an upper window”: “We still christians here” (26). As indicated by the deliberate withholding of the uppercase C from “christians,” the scene constitutes, on one level, condemnation of a southern Christian fundamentalism that denies support to those who exist outside it. Such “faith,” McCarthy seems to imply, is divorced from any meaningful association with Christ; it merely looks down on and condemns those in physical or spiritual need. In this and comparable McCarthy scenes, God seems not so much absent as harsh and vindictive, as if looking down from an elevated space upon a desperately flawed humanity. Still, the most severe judgment on Culla comes from within; he believes that he has so violated established rules of human behavior as to stand in judgment outside the possibility of forgiveness. Most of all, it is Culla who withholds forgiveness from Culla.2 Once Culla undertakes his search for the stolen child, comparable judgments meet him at every turn.3 Sometimes they seem innocent enough on the surface, as when a “squire” for whom he briefly works lectures him that “I hope you’ve not got a family. It’s a sacred thing, a family. A sacred obligation” (47). Inevitably, Culla hears this pronouncement in the context of his sins of incest and child abandonment and cannot deny that he has, in fact, violated “a sacred obligation.” Here as elsewhere in the text, outsiders—
some of whom, like the squire, look down upon him from perspectives of social class or legal power—are, in some mysterious way, aware of his transgressions. Such judges exist on two levels, that of mimesis and psychological projection. The squire is a representative of class and economic superiority, of what Henri Lefebvre describes as the “power” of vertical space and the “submission” of horizontal space, as is made manifest in the squire’s initial meeting with Culla in which the squire looks at the desperate young man “as he would anything for sale” (42). The squire’s dominant position in the socioeconomic hierarchy is based on the power to objectify others, to treat them as commodities that can be used and then discarded. His power is transitory, however, as he ultimately runs into the three nomadic killers who coldly and senselessly murder him. But he is also an emblematic figure who embodies Culla’s self-condemnation. After the doomed squire, the next “judge” Culla encounters is an old man from whom he begs a drink of water. Twice, the old man tells Culla that he “wouldn’t turn Satan away for a drink” (117). Like the squire, the old man appears to possess some mysterious knowledge of the primal nature of Culla’s sins. Moreover, he turns out to be a snake hunter given to telling grotesque stories about victims of snakebite, and inside his cabin he has the skin of a monstrous rattlesnake tacked above his fireplace: “He was eight foot seven inches and had seventeen rattles. Big in the middle to where ye couldn’t get your hands around him” (122). The scene recalls traditional associations of serpents with death and evil ranging from Genesis to Satan’s magical staff in “Young Goodman Brown”; on a Freudian level, the phallic overtones of the monstrous snake recall Culla’s intercourse with Rinthy. Later a man who has lost his entire family to cholera charges Culla with being a plague carrier, to which Culla responds not at all honestly, “Ain’t nobody plagued” (138). Like that of Oedipus, Culla’s incest seems to have let loose a plague on the countryside. One also recalls Camus’s division in The Plague of human beings into the categories of plague carriers and plague fighters. Near the end of the novel, Culla comes close to being executed in a black comic “(mis)reading” of an incident recounted in the New Testament book of Mark. He abruptly finds himself in the midst of a herd of hogs driven by men “gaunt and fever-eyed with incredible rag costumes and wild hair” (213). After some wildly absurd discussion between Culla and one of the drovers about “unclean” hogs, split hooves, and Jews (“What’s a jew? That’s one of them old-timey people from in the bible”), the drover concludes: “A hog is a hog. Pure and simple. And that’s about all ye can say about him. And smart, don’t think they ain’t. Smart as the devil. And don’t be fooled by one that ain’t got nairy clove foot cause he’s devilish too.” Culla can only concur with such immaculate logic: “I guess hogs is hogs” (216). This exchange is a reminder of what the bleak central vision of Outer Dark can lead the reader
to forget—there is wonderful black comedy in the novel, most of which has roots in southern and old southwestern folklore. The mood of the scene quickly takes a more serious turn when the hogs inexplicably begin stampeding off the edge of a cliff into a river and the desperate drovers are transformed into beings barely recognizable as human: “[The swineherds] had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were . . . disciples of darkness got among these charges to herd them to their doom” (218). In the stampede, the younger brother of the drover with whom Culla had been talking is driven over the cliff to his death in the river below. Nevertheless, the scene undergoes another daring mood shift when Culla resumes conversation with the surviving drovers: [One of the drovers]: That beats everything I ever seen. [Culla]: That’s pitiful about your brother. [The drover]: I don’t know what all I’m goin to tell mama. Herded off a bluff with a parcel of hogs. I don’t know how I’m going to tell her that. [Culla]: You could tell her he was drunk. [The drover]: Tell her he got shot or somethin. [Culla]: You wouldn’t need to tell her he went to his reward with a herd of hogs. (219) Given the brutish behavior of most of the characters in the landscape through which Culla travels, McCarthy seems to be saying that, should anyone somehow manage to receive “his reward,” he will do so in the company of a herd of hoggish human beings. It is not insignificant that Culla and the drovers both assume that their mother would find lies about the deceased man dying drunk or as a result of human violence more acceptable than the truth. In the biblical text that McCarthy is intentionally “(mis)reading” (Mark 5:1–17), a man with an “unclean spirit” whose “name is Legion; for we are many” asks Christ to save him. In response, Christ sends the legion of “demons” out of the man and into a herd of two thousand swine, who then rush off “a steep place into the sea” and drown. Frightened by such power, those who have witnessed the miracle promptly beg Christ to leave the region. The savior is immediately rejected and symbolically banished. In this context, it is not surprising that, with no evidence whatsoever, the surviving drovers decide that Culla mysteriously caused the hogs to stampede, and another of Culla’s “judges,” fittingly in this context the most deranged of all, abruptly enters the text: “A parson or what looked like one was laboring over the crest of the hill and coming toward them with one hand raised in blessing, greeting, fending flies. He was dressed in a dusty
frockcoat and carried a walking stick and he wore a pair of octagonal glasses on the one pane of which the late sun shone while a watery eye peered from the naked wire aperture of the other” (221). McCarthy’s absurdist humor continues to be in evidence as the “parson” almost condemns Culla first to being lynched and then to being thrown off the cliff into the river with the hogs by asserting that such acts of retribution would be wrong: “Boys I believe he’s plumb eat up with the devil in him. But don’t hang him. . . . Don’t flang him off the bluff, boys, the preacher said. I believe ye’d be better to hang him as that” (223). After some deliberation, the drovers decide that hanging Culla would be the best course, and the preacher offers to baptize him first. When the outraged Culla refuses such a mode of salvation, the minister comments: “I guess a feller mires up so deep in sin after a while he don’t want to hear nothin about grace and salvation. Not even a feller about to be hanged.” To this speculation, one of the drovers adds this gloss: “It ain’t no use, Reverend. He’s too mean to be saved” (225). Of course, in this particular instance Culla is innocent, and not surprisingly, the reverend is later revealed to be a charlatan. Like the early scene at the store, this episode parodies a judgmental religious fundamentalism. Culla is, however, still in flight from the sins that drove him out into the world, and until he acknowledges them he is unworthy of salvation, not because he is “too mean” but because, as Arnold points out, he is too cowardly. Yet such judges as these, as potentially deadly as they are, pale in comparison with the grim triune whom Culla encounters twice in the novel. The first occasion occurs after Culla has almost been drowned on a ferryboat; in this scene, the rampaging river that swallows up everyone on the ferry but Culla is no bad substitute for the river Styx. It is not then surprising that Culla, after crossing the river of death, encounters the three outlaws. It is in McCarthy’s evocation of these three nightmarish figures, who exist on both mimetic and metaphoric levels, that the text’s fourthspace is most overtly dramatized. At one point they are described as emerging upon the landscape out of nowhere, “armed with crude agrarian weapons, spade and brush-hook . . . parodic figures transposed live and intact and violent out of a proletarian mural and set mobile upon the empty fields, advancing against the twilight” (35). They are grotesque parodies of the naturalistic figures created by Thomas Hart Benton in his American murals. Now as re-created by McCarthy, they threaten violent assault on an agrarian economic system that exploits and objectifies the small farmers of Appalachia, and thus their cold murder of the squire constitutes, on one level, retaliation against an exploitative social order. Described as coming across a field “attended by a constant circus of grasshoppers” (51) in the scene in which they murder the squire, they seem personifications of some delayed and apocalyptic judgment, this time
recalling the plagues unleashed on Egypt in the Old Testament story of the clash between Moses and the pharaoh. On another level, they can also be understood as “psychic avengers,” projections of Culla’s guilt over his sins of incest and child abandonment.4 In this context, they demonstrate the degree to which the fourthspace of Outer Dark, in contrast to Soja’s concept of a liberating thirdspace resulting from a merger of material space and cerebral recognition of the material, is frightening and restrictive. When Culla stumbles upon their camp, they, like several of the other “judges” in the text, appear to know about his past and recent experiences. Their unnamed leader, for instance, insists three times that Culla is the now drowned ferryman, thereby forcing the young man to deny three times that he is metaphorically the ferryman to hell.5 While Culla may not correspond to Charon, he did set the progress of his secular damnation in motion through his sinful actions involving the lost child and thus transports himself into an earthly hell. Culla, feeling that he is in the presence of some not-quite-human force, tries to look into the eyes of the leader with unsettling results: “In the upslant of light [the leader’s] beard shone and his mouth was red, and his eyes were shadowed lunettes with nothing there at all” (171). In a preview of the novel’s denouement, the satanic presence then insists that Culla partake of some almost inedible and never identified meat that the trio is cooking. Subsequently an ominous discussion of names ensues. Indicating one of the other two men, the leader and spokesman of the deadly trio says: “That’n ain’t got a name. . . . He wanted me to give him one but I wouldn’t do it. He don’t need nary. You ever seen a man with no name afore?” (174).6 The leader is identifying himself as the namegiver who possesses the power to withhold or bestow identity upon others and has thus assumed Culla’s role as an Adam figure. He then proceeds to tease Culla with the mystery of his own name: “I expect they’s lots would like to know that” (173–74). In part, the leader is playing a role derived from such popular-culture genres as the Western of the unnamed and thus doubly terrifying villain. More significantly, he is identifying himself with some force too powerful to be named, an Old Testament god of vengeance.7 With Culla and his transgressions clearly in mind, the leader next observes that “some things is best not named.” Because it so threatens the social order, incest has traditionally been a sin too fundamentally unsettling to be acknowledged. The reference to things best left unnamed seems intended as a reminder to Culla of the infant he has abandoned and thereby caused to be abducted by the peddler. In this context, he later mocks Culla in a speech that appears to refer to his nameless companion but actually seems intended to evoke the child: “I wouldn’t name him because if you cain’t name somethin you cain’t claim it. You cain’t talk about it even. You cain’t say
what it is” (177). The words are apparently a reminder to Culla that he has forfeited any right to the child, and they also reveal an awareness that the young man’s concern for the lost infant is pretended. Certainly in contrast to Rinthy’s, Culla’s search is, at best, halfhearted. Reinforcing his satanic role, the leader comments, “I like to keep the fire up. . . . They might be somebody coming” (175). He is thus identifying himself as the guardian of the fires of hell, as the enforcer of eternal punishment, perpetually on the lookout for sinners like Culla. The multileveled nature of the trio’s identity becomes manifest in this scene. On a strictly mimetic level, they are a savage gang of roving outlaws who assault the community out of sheer malevolence. But the several metaphoric levels on which they exist are more important. They are simultaneously “proletarian” warriors and agents of a vengeful god. In this context, it is significant that they execute the peddler after taking the infant from him. Their chosen mode of execution is lynching, an act that evokes the history of southern violence and injustice as well as the fate that Culla almost experiences at the hands of the charlatan minister and the simpleminded drovers. Moreover, they are projections of Culla’s subconscious guilt, representatives of his sin and self-condemnation, a self-judgment that, as Arnold observes, he is too cowardly to acknowledge publicly. But they also embody a capacity for excessive evil that places them outside human comprehension. It is as if they are committed to violating all behavioral taboos, as if they are engaged in a prolonged assault on the order that is essential to preserving human community. Besides the several horrendous murders of which they are guilty, they unearth the dead, stealing the clothes of corpses and leaving them in positions that mock homosexual embrace. Girard points out that social taboos emerge out of a need to maintain order and that the ultimate threat to such order is death. Through their graverobbing, the grim triune make this threat overt. It is hardly irrelevant that Culla is accused of the violation of the corpses, since in the course of the novel he is accused of virtually everything else. He has, in fact, violated those taboos that the three outlaws, existing outside any communal structure that includes women, have no opportunity to violate. The full metaphoric role of the trio is not revealed until their last, climactic encounter with Culla. When he comes upon them this time, the child, now hideously disfigured, is with them: “It had a healed burn all down one side of it and the skin was papery and wrinkled like an old man’s. It was naked and half coated with dust so that it seemed lightly furred and when it turned to look up at him [Culla] . . . saw one eyeless and angry red socket like a stokehole to a brain in flames” (231). Perhaps not fully human themselves, the three have dehumanized the child, transforming it into something monstrous. Moreover, the leader
continues the harsh questioning of Culla that he began in the earlier scene, again seeming possessed of some kind of supernatural insight. He knows, for instance, that the tinker stole a child from Culla and asserts that the child was Culla’s as the result of an incestuous act. Twice, in what Arnold sees as the young man’s culminating moment of cowardice, Culla denies the accusation and any responsibility for the child: “He ain’t nothin to me” (235). Subsequently, in an action that echoes Girard’s description of the ritual sacrifice of the scapegoat in Violence and the Sacred, the leader holds the mutilated child over a burning fire and slits its throat with a knife. In committing incest, Culla violated one of the most basic of cultural taboos and thus instigated a sacrificial crisis that profoundly threatens the social order. As Girard explains, the sacrifice of an innocent is necessary to restore the order that Culla’s acts of incest and child abandonment have endangered. Girard further specifies that, in order to prevent a destructive cycle of retributive violence, the victim should be powerless, with no ties to the individual whose violations of taboo have brought on the crisis. Above all, such cyclical violence is to be avoided: Vengeance professes to be an act of reprisal, and every reprisal calls for another reprisal. The crime to which the vengeance addresses itself is never an unprecedented offense; in almost every case it has been committed in revenge for some prior crime. Vengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction whose consequences will quickly prove fatal to any society of modest size. The multiplication of reprisals instantaneously puts the very existence of society in jeopardy, and that is why it is universally proscribed. (14–15) The leader’s sacrifice of the unnamed child both clarifies and complicates the role of the grim triune as agents of retribution. Obviously, the infant, the very product of Culla’s sin, is not an arbitrarily chosen victim with no connection to the original violation of taboo. It could, though, hardly be more powerless, since it has been abandoned and remains nameless. The leader slits its throat only after Culla again denies responsibility for it. In the several brutal murders they commit, the triune seem to be agents of retributive vengeance, punishers of unnamed crimes, devoted above all to putting the communal order at risk. An example of McCarthy’s calculated narrative excess is evident in the remainder of this grim scene: “The child
made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. [The leader] handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witness eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat” (236). The mute one is the one from whom the leader has withheld a name, just as Culla has left his own child nameless. Now as punishment he is forced to witness its bloody sacrifice. The child, however monstrous it has become in the hands of the three, remains an innocent, and the mute’s act of drinking its blood is a parody of Christian communion. Any doubt the reader might have that the strange meat which Culla was forced to eat in his earlier encounter with the trio was human flesh is now removed. Unwilling to confront his guilt, he has nevertheless been forced to partake of “the body” and, fully unrepentant, he can hardly chew it. All of this is not, of course, an endorsement of cannibalism. It represents McCarthy’s vision that human beings are god, and god is human beings. The excess in this scene seems intended as testimony that any human action one can imagine, however diabolical, has almost certainly been already committed. In this context, it is perhaps worthwhile to see McCarthy as a post-Holocaust writer, since the Nazis exceeded any previously known boundaries of evil and thus threatened to make the word itself meaningless. Nevertheless, as the largely benevolent experiences of Rinthy, who is searching for her lost child and trying to negate Culla’s sin, indicate, god’s grace has not vanished from the world. In one scene, the denuded and grotesquely arranged corpses that the triune has unearthed are brought into a town on the back of a wagon. Seeing them, an unidentified man says to Culla: “I hate known they is such people, don’t you?” (88). One assumes that he does not mean the grotesquely displayed corpses but rather people who could do such things to the dead. One aspect of McCarthy’s aesthetic is a determination to force upon the reader the awareness that, in fact, such people exist in the world. But in the context of the novel’s fourthspace, actions like the triune’s murders take on added dimensions. In part, they personify Culla’s willingness to commit incest, abandon his child, and then repeatedly deny that the child is his, as well as embodying Culla’s self-condemnation for such actions. Excess in style and details of plot are essential parts of the linguistic dimension of the text’s fourthspace. They contribute to its merger of a grotesquely detailed mimesis, its metaphoric and sociological implications, and its surrealistic feeling as a projection of Culla’s subconscious. The space Culla enters is more complex and thus ultimately more inescapable than the forest into which Goodman Brown ventures. Because they exist completely outside the community
(unless they are in fact projections of communal sin and guilt), the grim triune is only privileged to move freely in an extended smooth space. Child of God is a more clearly mimetic novel. Its geographical setting is identified as mid-twentieth-century Sevier County, Tennessee, and its fourthspace is thus less complex and—somewhat paradoxically, given the content of the novel—less intimidating. Culla and the grim triune of Outer Dark coalesce in the figure of Lester Ballard, who, hideous though his actions are, remains recognizably human throughout the novel. Thus one dimension of the fourthspace of Outer Dark is inevitably absent: Lester as recognizable human being cannot be a projection of Lester’s own subconscious guilt. Psychology, especially abnormal psychology, is a concern of Child of God, though in a subtle manner. As several critics point out, the narration rarely intrudes on Lester’s consciousness; he is seen almost exclusively from a narrative distance, from outside. It is then difficult to know what, if any, degree of guilt Lester feels as a result of his horrific actions. A severely curtailed psychological dimension is part of the fourthspace of the novel. Mimetic and metaphoric dimensions are extensively developed in the novel. Evenson sees Lester Ballard as being “a nearly unadulterated nomad” (43). This definition is appropriate, but it is important not to overlook the factors that underlie the qualification. Evenson correctly observes that throughout most of the novel, “Ballard lives absolutely on the fringe, his dependence on society reduced to a minimum. Like the movie Badlands, Child of God portrays directionless violence, an amorality which refuses to apologize for itself, which denies judgment” (44). Lester is forced onto “the fringe” by the suicide of his father and the resulting auction of his home and the false charge of rape; he makes attempts, however halfhearted and doomed they may be, to rejoin the community before his final descent into mad and senseless violence; and at the end he voluntarily submits himself to society’s judgment. Edwin Arnold points out that “what Lester wants is permanence, even (or especially) the permanence of death, but what he experiences in his life is change in the form of desertion and denial and loss. He expects to be abandoned” (56). Lester is forced to retreat to society’s fringe after the auction because he has literally nowhere else to go; after existing in virtual isolation since his father’s suicide, he no longer knows, if he ever did, how to function in human society. He is then almost fated to occupy the kind of smooth space Evenson describes. Imprisoned because of the false charge of rape, Lester meets a black prisoner whose past and future foreshadow Lester’s own. The African American’s crime, in its sheer excess of brutality, previews the extremes of perversion that Lester will soon explore: he has beheaded a man with a pocketknife. Moreover, he feels no remorse for what he did
(“all the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught” [53]), and his self-definition is appropriate for Lester as well: “I’m a fugitive from the ways of the world. I’d be a fugitive from my mind if I had me some snow” (53). Still a kind of innocent at this point, Lester doesn’t know anything about “snow” or any other narcotics. But he will soon become a fugitive from his own mind; he will evolve into the very prototype of excess that constitutes the binary opposite of reason in Bataille’s paradigm. McCarthy sometimes employs a kind of after-the-fact communal narration to describe Lester, and one early such passage describes a propensity for sudden and frightening acts of violence. Still, before committing acts that make his exile from the human community complete and irrevocable, Lester makes failed attempts to rejoin at least its outer limits. In fact, he once makes an overture for something approaching mainstream acceptance by abruptly entering a country church, but his presence merely serves to shock the preacher and the congregation, which he inadvertently further outrages: “Ballard had a cold and snuffled loudly through the service but nobody expected he would stop if God himself looked askance so no one looked” (32). Lester is condemned partly because of his family’s history of poverty and lawlessness, and in this context he ironically attains a kind of stature in the community by entering its folklore. He is defined as being the most sinful member of two sinful families, the Ballards and the human race; the communal voice concludes a summary of the Ballard family with this: “I’ll say one thing about Lester though. You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he didn’t outstrip them all” (81). This pronouncement is crucial to the judgment the text is making concerning the human capacity for evil—as shocked and disgusted as they are by his actions, the community feels a degree of genuine pride in having produced the sinner of sinners. In Hawthorne’s dark forest, Satan tells Young Goodman Brown that “evil is the nature of mankind” and then welcomes the once innocent Puritan to the witches’ sabbath, the “communion of your race.” The community’s pride in Lester’s violent assault on the communal order indicates at least that evil is a strong part of human nature. Not surprisingly, Lester is rejected by women throughout the novel. He attempts a grotesque courtship with a young woman who has a mentally retarded child. Having captured a live robin, he brings it to the child as a present, telling the woman that he has something for her, to which she replies: “You ain’t got nothin I want” (77). When the child chews the legs off the living bird, Lester offers an explanation for the disgusting act: “He wanted it to where it couldn’t run off ” (79). McCarthy may well be venturing too obviously into the territory of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor in this scene, yet the episode of the young woman, the ghoulish child, and the robin is relevant to the rest of the text. Beginning with his
father’s suicide, people have been running away from Lester for some time. Moreover, the rejection by the young woman, as understandable as it is, effectively summarizes the communal response to Lester, who truly has nothing that anyone wants. Comparable in its evocation of the deliberately repulsive is McCarthy’s description of a deranged “dumpkeeper” and his family of nine daughters, each of which is “named out of an old medical dictionary gleaned from the rubbish he picked”: “These gangling progeny with black hair hanging from their armpits now sat idle and wide-eyed day after day in chairs and crates about the little yard cleared out of the tips while their harried dam called them one by one to help with chores and one by one they shrugged or blinked with sluggard lids. Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue” (26). Almost inevitably, the dumpkeeper discovers one of the daughters having sex in the woods and, after chasing the unknown young man away, tries to force himself on her. While such Erskine Caldwell-like misogyny and stereotyping of “poor white trash” is objectionable, the scene is thematically relevant to McCarthy’s narrative strategy. Child of God is devoted to exploring the boundary between the human and the animal, the spiritual and the material, the rational and the excessive. McCarthy is deliberately assaulting the reader; his aesthetic is inherently transgressive in nature. Moreover, the “community” of the dumpkeeper’s family, which exists outside any moral or ethical values, is the only one in which Lester is truly welcome; the family represents a transitional stage in Lester’s descent into a horrific and multileveled smooth space. The misogynistic overtones of the textual moments involving the woman, her monstrous child, and the robin and the dumpkeeper and his daughters pale in comparison to what is still to come. From an exile with some yearning still to be a part of the social order, Lester degenerates into a ghoulish figure so consumed by madness as to be scarcely recognizable as human. He becomes a murderer of women who collects the corpses of his victims in order to have sex with them. Moreover, he begins to dress in the clothing of the dead women and wears a literal fright wig “fashioned whole” from the scalp of one of his victims. Nevertheless, as Edwin Arnold, John Lang, and Dianne C. Luce have argued, McCarthy goes to considerable lengths to prevent readers from misunderstanding Lester as an inhuman monster. Arnold points out that the first third of McCarthy’s text is devoted to the stages of Lester’s exile from society, and Lang analyzes the ways in which the condemning communal voice ironically creates compassion for Lester. Lang further comments that “ultimately, Child of God testifies not to the anomalous outrages committed by Lester Ballard but to the potential of violence inherent in all human beings. Lester’s actions are often shocking, but they are not, unfortunately,
unique” (94). In describing Lester before he begins his murderous rampage, Luce offers the most perceptive analysis of the role of sexuality in the novel: “Ballard’s predicament is dramatized in terms of his human needs not only for a home and shelter but also for sexual contact. Considered peculiar, he finds it nearly impossible to approach the women he knows. They rebuff him not because they are chaste, nor because they are less crude than he, but because he is in some way marked as a pariah. As his parents and the law have dispossessed him of what he considers his by right, so the women he approaches deny him both sexual outlet and intimacy” (125). Of course, dead women cannot reject Lester; nor can they resist whatever he does to them. As Evenson points out, Lester “does not ask, as most of us would, what is the proper thing that should be done with a dead body, but rather what can be done with a dead body. For Ballard, a woman’s dead body is a smooth space, open to myriad possibilities” (44). None of this, of course, really resolves the issue of the novel’s misogyny. In Child of God, McCarthy is intent upon exploring the extremes to which male appropriation and objectification of the female can be taken. If there is a more profound way to objectify a woman (or, for that matter, anyone) than killing her, it would be by sexually desecrating her corpse. It is important to remember that Child of God is an exercise in excess, in the outer limits of violation of the body and the spirit, and that it is set in a rural southern culture in which women have traditionally been objectified. Evenson is correct in seeing the dead bodies of women as representing a cumulative smooth space for Lester, but they are only one such space for McCarthy’s “part-time ghoul” (174). The ultimate smooth space for Lester is madness, an insane discarding of any restrictions on or limitations to his murderous needs. Perhaps the defining aspect of his kind of madness is its seeming unawareness of all boundaries, not only those separating him from other people and even from nature itself but also those that separate the living from the dead. In his madness, McCarthy’s protagonist is free to explore fully Bataille’s dimension of excess, of the total renunciation of reason and order. His dressing in the clothes of his female victims and even constructing a wig out of the scalp of one of them can be understood in the context of a smooth space originating in his insane need to appropriate the bodies of his victims even more completely than by sexually violating them. Lester, in fact, wants to merge his body with theirs until what is left is a pure physicality from which all boundaries have been removed. It is in this context that McCarthy’s title is intended to be provocative, potentially even offensive, but ultimately inclusive of all forms of human behavior. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Michel Foucault valorizes the madness that underlies some of the most memorable products of Western art:
For Sade as for Goya, unreason continues to watch by night; but in this vigil it joins with fresh powers. The non-being it once was now becomes the power to annihilate. Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence, and of recovering tragic experience beyond the promises of dialectic. After Sade and Goya, and since them, unreason has belonged to whatever is decisive, for the modern world, in any work of art; that is, whatever any work of art contains that is both murderous and constraining. (136) Foucault believes that an essential element of the aesthetic power of the art of unreason comes from the fact that society attempts to deny and repress the vision that sustains it. McCarthy can certainly be placed in this tradition; his work is rooted in a dimension of murderous unreason that is nevertheless undeniably human. In the fourthspace of Child of God, this dimension becomes increasingly dominant as the text progresses, often submerging the mimetic to such an extent that Appalachia as a place is almost forgotten. Truly, Lester and all he represents might emerge anywhere. Lester exists initially on the boundary between reason and unreason, but for a time he finds his own kind of liberation in crossing over into madness. Lang writes that “Lester’s crimes would not place him beyond a human continuum on which we find John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer” (93), and indeed an underlying concern of McCarthy’s aesthetic is to show that human beings are capable of any act that one can imagine, however violent it may be. Thus McCarthy is careful not to make Lester seem as abstract and metaphoric as he does the grim triune of Outer Dark, even though Lester’s crimes differ from theirs only in being more clearly rooted in sexuality. Bell emphasizes the complex implications inherent in McCarthy’s insistence that such crimes do not place Lester beyond the possibility of grace and redemption: “This is at once strange and not strange, for if Lester is in a state of grace—if such grace were in fact possible—this seems to be precisely and incomprehensibly what true grace would be like” (68). In part, grace is possible for Lester because, despite the horrific nature of his crimes, he exists as a naturalistic victim and a sacrificial scapegoat. From the beginning of the novel, when his life is auctioned away and he is knocked unconscious, Lester is depicted as being controlled by external forces, some of them systemic and others fundamental and permanent. As one of Evenson’s nomads, however reluctantly he joins their ranks, Lester necessarily exists outside the protection of the social order. In this context, it is not surprising that the loyal sheriff, significantly named Fate, declares himself Lester’s merciless judge early in the novel. It is as if Fate knows that his antagonist will inevitably assault the social order he is charged
with protecting, prophesying early in the novel that Lester will become a murderer. Moreover, like Culla and Rinthy Holme, Lester is also the victim of long-standing economic oppression and profound cultural ignorance. At one point, McCarthy even goes to elaborate lengths during which he initially appears to shift the narrative perspective away from Lester to establish a historical context for his protagonist. A flood threatens to submerge the town and in fact most of Sevier County, after which Sheriff Fate joins some communal volunteers in rescue boats.8 They begin to reminisce about local history and especially rival vigilante groups known as the White Caps and the Bluebills, both prototypes of the Ku Klux Klan. About the White Caps, one old man says: “They was a bunch of lowlife thieves and cowards and murderers. The only thing they ever done was to whip women and rob old people. And murder people in their beds at night” (165).9 This discussion soon evokes memories of a legendary sheriff named Tom Davis who managed to subdue the White Caps. Paradoxically, but in the world of Cormac McCarthy inevitably, Davis eradicated violence only to celebrate it. The old man remembers a communal lynching of two White Caps that took on all the aspects of a carnival: “People had started in to town the evenin before. Slept in their wagons, a lot of em. Rolled out blankets on the courthouse lawn. . . . Women sellin sandwiches in the street. . . . [Davis] brung em from the jail, had two preachers with em and had their wives on their arms and all. Just like they was goin to church. All of em got up there on the scaffold and they sung and everybody fell in singin with em” (167). One remembers that the auction of Lester’s farm also turned into a carnival. In Sevier County, violence has always been as close as the courthouse lawn, and the boundary between reason and the excess of unreason has always been an illusion. Thus Lester is merely the historic culmination of the communal legacy of violence. He is the naturalistic victim of historic, as well as economic, forces. But Lester’s victimization goes even deeper. Nature itself seems to have willed his destruction, a fact that Lester vaguely comprehends. Early in the novel he sees a pack of hunting dogs catch and destroy a wild boar and is fascinated by the bloody, choreographed violence unfolding before him: “Ballard watched this ballet tilt and swirl and churn mud up through the snow and watched the lovely blood welter there in its holograph of battle, spray burst from a ruptured lung, the dark heart’s blood, pinwheel and pirouette, until shots rang and all was done” (69). Lester will become both boar and hound, the hunted and the merciless hunter fascinated with “the dark heart’s blood” of his female victims. What is most significant here is that the hunters (the godlike producers of the ballet) remain out of sight, as such controlling powers must in literary naturalism. The text directly challenges the reader on the second page, describing Lester as “a child of God much like yourself perhaps” (4). McCarthy’s narrative
strategy here is clear: the reader, at this point not really knowing Lester and certainly not having encountered him as murderer and necrophiliac, is not likely to resist such identification. Child of God demands that McCarthy’s implied reader, at the novel’s end, still accepts Lester as a human being different from other human beings only in the extremity of an isolation brought on by his descent into the realm of madness, by his insistence upon the discovery of the ultimate smooth space, by his assault on the boundaries between his own need for gratification and the bodies of others. The early reference to Lester as “a child of god much like yourself perhaps” is superseded in the novel by a later and more confrontational passage, which is interestingly one of the few places in Child of God where McCarthy indulges in the kind of stylistic excess that characterizes Outer Dark. In it, Lester attempts to cross a flooded river by riding a crate filled with an “odd miscellany” consisting of “men’s and ladies’ clothes, [and] the three enormous stuffed toys” (155). When the crate is swept out from under him, he is near drowning until he is able to grab a log that has come close to smashing into him. The external narrative perspective then isolates him in the midst of the raging river: “Ballard was lost in a pandemonium of noises, the rifle aloft in one arm now like some demented hero or bedraggled parody of a patriotic poster come aswamp” (156).10 Having isolated Lester in a cinematic manner,11 the text now adopts a dialogical mode from which to issue its strongest challenge for the reader to view Lester as a “child of god”: “He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. . . . How is he then borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?” (156). “Fellow men like you” belong to a human race that gives birth “to the maimed and the crazed”; the legacy of such beings is both monstrous and definitively human. Through this dialogical approach, McCarthy is insisting that the reader acknowledge a shared humanness with “the maimed and the crazed.” Whether or not the reader is willing to drown Lester, the human community of the text understandably demands that his prolonged assault of taboos central to the social order must be stopped. It also needs to sacrifice him as an embodiment of sacred violence gone mad; in the words of Ciuba: “Ballard eliminates the difference between the pious regard for sacred violence and the desire to arrogate such heavenly fury for his own power. . . . Like some violent voluptuary in the religion of Georges Bataille, he makes transgression the very sign of his transcendence. . . . The savage Lester is godlike precisely because he seems most ungodly” (78). Lester’s rampage is
the result of the sacrificial crisis evoked by the legacy of the White Caps and other such agents of Appalachian violence, and he must be stopped in order to avoid another cycle of reciprocal violence. Having abandoned himself completely to smooth space, Lester has issued the most fundamental of challenges to the striated space of the community. His madness, which removes all boundaries from his insatiable demands, simultaneously liberates him and sets in motion his inevitable destruction. Lester becomes so much a part of the open space outside the community that he can almost merge himself with the landscape at will. Still, his narrow escape brings home to him the communal hatred, and this epiphany dismays him. He has a chance unspoken encounter with a young boy on a school bus that evokes a recognition in Lester of the sheer madness of his actions and of a time when he was not the communal outcast that he has become. It is as if he confronts suddenly the image of his own human innocence, of the same need for belonging that inspired his visit to the carnival. Now his smooth space has been compromised, and his insane assault on taboos and boundaries must end. He thus presents himself at the county hospital, telling a startled night nurse that he belongs there. Ironically, he is never indicted for his crimes but is sent instead to the state hospital at Knoxville, where he is “placed in a cage next door but one to a demented gentleman who used to open folk’s skulls and eat the brains inside with a spoon” (193).12 It is as if the community’s frenzied need for a scapegoat has simply played itself out, as if the moment for retributive sacrifice has passed. Finally, in 1965, Lester dies of pneumonia, after which his body is shipped to the medical school at Memphis, where an autopsy inevitably yields no insights into his behavior. Child of God is a less complex novel than Outer Dark, eschewing the stylistic excess that characterizes the earlier novel, substituting for it excess of violent incidents. By denying himself narrative access to Lester’s consciousness, McCarthy forces the reader to impose his or her own understanding of abnormal psychology on the text. Unlike the grim triune of Outer Dark, Lester Ballard cannot be understood on a purely mythic level. During the rescue trip in the boat, a sheriff ’s deputy asks the old man, who assumes something close to an authorial voice in the scene, if people were “meaner” during the days of the White Caps than they are at present. The old man’s answer is crucial to an understanding of Child of God as well as Outer Dark: “No. . . . I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one” (168). Incest, child abandonment, murder, and necrophilia have been human actions since the beginning. Thus, society is always faced with the potential of a sacramental crisis. Still, in McCarthy’s world, human beings are children of god and thus never completely beyond the possibility of salvation unless, like Culla Holme, they flee from it through cowardice or,
like Lester Ballard, descend so deeply into madness that they exile themselves from redemption. And even then, Lester can experience a sudden awareness of his humanness that will bring him back into the arms of the community. Only the grim triune of Outer Dark, who exist in a largely metaphorical dimension and are thus not truly human at all, are beyond redemption. Not e s 1. For a good summary of the biblical sources of McCarthy’s title see Arnold 46. 2. One especially memorable such scene occurs when the “innocent” Gene Harrogate, violator of melons and planner of inept criminal schemes, passes beneath the window of a “viperous” evangelist who calls down a curse upon him (Suttree 106). 3. Arnold relates the circular structure of Outer Dark to Culla’s doomed flight from judgment: “His sin still unspoken, his guilt yet unnamed . . . Culla, wandering in his state of nothingness, seems fated to return again and again to the site of his sin” (54). 4. I am borrowing this term from Richard Wertime’s discussion of the symbolic significance of the street gang that serves as the central unifying structure in Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. 5. The most important application of the number three is obviously to the three outlaws, the “grim triune,” and they are indeed a dark parody of the Trinity, bringing violence and death instead of hope and salvation. Culla’s thrice-repeated denial that he is Charon may well be intended to echo Peter’s denial of Christ. 6. Especially in view of McCarthy’s later revisionist novels about the American West, it is possible that “the man with no name” is a veiled reference to the protagonist played by Clint Eastwood in the 1964 Sergio Leone “spaghetti Western,” A Fistful of Dollars. The Eastwood character also appears out of nowhere with a mission to punish evil. Since Eastwood, though of unknown origins, is a heroic figure in the film, such an allusion would be in keeping with the parodic subtext of McCarthy’s novel. 7. William C. Spencer applies an allegorical reading to the three outlaws. Picking up on the Old Testament feel of the novel, he argues that “the three marauders of Outer Dark comprise a triple allegory of evil, with the bearded leader symbolizing lawless authority and destruction, Harmon [the only one of the three named in the novel] representing violence, and the idiot corresponding to ignorance” (76). He adds that “like the God of the Old Testament, the bearded one of the three is an authoritarian. He gives all the orders; he clearly is in charge at all times. Furthermore, like the Father of the Holy Trinity, he acts as judge and as a dispenser of ‘justice’ ” (74). 8. The text makes overt the biblical overtones of this scene through dialogue that recalls early floods and fires that have threatened the community. 9. By the exclusion of African Americans from this list of victims, one is again reminded of Jarrett’s discussion of the strong differences between McCarthy’s Appalachia and the race-dominated and history-plagued South of Faulkner and other writers. 10. The scene inevitably recalls the aborted river crossing in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Again, Bloom’s ideas about the ephebe’s need to “appropriate the precursor’s landscape for himself [sic]” (105) through creative “(mis)reading” are relevant to any discussion of the relationship between the fiction of Faulkner and McCarthy. 11. In a perceptive discussion of the shifting levels of narrative perspective in Child of God, Bartlett discusses the cinematic aspects of the text, pointing out that Lester is sometimes viewed as in a cinematic “freeze frame.”
12. The kind of difficulty that confronts a writer like McCarthy, for whom shock effect is a central element in his chosen aesthetic, can be seen in the fact that a realistically staged act comparable to those performed by the “demented gentleman” can be seen in the most recent Hannibal Lecter film, Hannibal. Even though the movie was made almost three decades after McCarthy wrote his novel, one could argue that his appropriation of cinematic narrative techniques constitutes McCarthy’s recognition of film’s advantage over fiction in evoking purely visceral reactions. It has, after all, been a long time since Buñuel imaged the slicing open of an eyeball.
J a y E llis
Fetish and Collapse in No Country for Old Men
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. (Deuteronomy 24:16) The other thing is that I have not said much about my father and I know I have not done him justice. (Sheriff Bell; NCFOM 308)
Col l apse
e may see many more novels yet from Cormac McCarthy. But on first reading No Country for Old Men, it is hard to believe so. Everything in this novel seems to have collapsed, or seems headed that way. The book’s structure seems to collapse, starting with a bang into what seems to be one genre that only slides down into another. The villain, an avatar of Judge Holden, even kills people by collapsing their frontal lobe with a cattle gun, which at first seems simply to dispatch them through the same damage as a bullet, except that the closeness of the killer—“He placed his hand on the man’s head like a faith healer” (NCFOM 7)—might make us look for more than madness in this method. From No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy, pp. 225–261. © 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group.
The apparent protagonist is killed three quarters of the way through the novel. The true protagonist grumbles along in monologues that begin each chapter. For all his West Texas stoicism, these soliloquies begin to run on, well beyond the framing device we thought they were, into an increasingly tangled mix of memories and stoic Western conservative positions on past and present. Sheriff Bell, this true protagonist, is trapped in time. So haunted by the past that he can only see the present as a dark and confusing mourning over the dead, Bell follows his grumbles about how much worse things are with fearful prognostications about how worse will be what days may come. Structurally, his italicized monologues begin to rush in sooner after each dwindling parcel of the apparent story (which hardly resolves). Bell’s confessions take longer—and again longer—until the book collapses into one of his dreams. Given this book’s screenplay antecedent, one wonders at the possibilities of shifting light: the bright sunlit desert over Moss, the antelope, and the drug deal gone bad might imperceptibly fade into the darkness of that dream. Thus No Country for Old Men gradually reveals itself to have begun as one book, under one reading of its title in a bright light, only to slip away into another book, eventually fulfilling the depth and darkness of the title’s reference to a poem by Yeats. It begins as a (relatively) young man’s book, and ends in the voice of a middle-aged man who nonetheless seems to be quite old—as old as “Sailing to Byzantium” demands. I must confess that in one reading, this novel simply seemed a failure, a tossed-off screenplay barely redacted into a novel in a genre that does not hold much interest for me. It seemed even to fail at that, as if the author’s heart was not secure in the pot he might have meant to boil. No Country for Old Men starts hot, but then cools, and finally mists over. I ought to know better, and yet the novel’s apparent conservatism seemed so insistent that against all better judgment I began to suspect (as many reviewers have) that this indeed indicated the frightened political views of an author now twenty years older than Bell and yet speaking through him. The structure collapsed so obviously as to raise the question of waning aesthetic powers; why not (the critic in hubris wonders) a waning political sensibility as well? (As if to disagree with a few readers is to have lost marbles.) But then I reread it. In short, everything about this book seems one way, but then does not—thus my repetition of “seems” fits a first impression. On subsequent readings, it becomes clearer that all these apparent collapses derive from the reality that this story is told with an awareness that many things have already collapsed in the previous novels. The title works in its reference to a retreat: after we are meant to begin in one country, with one book, we are meant to end in another space and another book, the true No Country for Old Men.
And whatever the author’s politics, Bell eventually voices the fearful feelings and positions of many Americans.1 For this chapter, I will refer to those aspects that stand out most in the book’s beginning, that do not immediately (in a first reading) likely reveal themselves as parodic, and that create those aspects of genre fiction that have led to the labels applied to it as a “crime novel,” etc., as the Young Man book. This is Moss’s book. The Old Man book, however, is that simultaneous novel, buried early on (at least before rereading) and apparently set up as a generically typical narrative foil for the Young Man book. This is Bell’s book, initially only italicized, and it is the book that ultimately sounds deeper resonances with the title, No Country for Old Men. This novel simply does not work as a direct delivery of the Young Man book, nor should it. This is one of those works whose apparent failures create unexpected difficulties which can only resolve in rereading, where the novel then resonates in quiet success. I will attempt to offer a reading that, rather than pretending to have interpreted the book in that second way (the way I read it now), will instead parallel what the novel itself accomplishes: the appearance of one book with merely two voices, until those two views compete, and finally one overtakes the other. This is the only way I can answer several questions that first struck me about No Country for Old Men. Why would McCarthy deliver a taut, if thin, crime novel that only collapses into jeremiad? Who, really, is the main character of this novel? And why does this novel’s structure so obviously collapse? Among the reviews of the book so far, those reviewers obviously predisposed toward the strengths of this author (such as Joyce Carol Oates) find in No Country for Old Men a winnowed-down version of what they liked, but also what they did not like, in previous McCarthy books. Others simply praise whatever seems likely to satisfy, and disparage what surprises, a reader acquainted only with The Border Trilogy. Still others give the book its due but only (as I was tempted to do) by praising the power of its initial genre, writing off apparent weaknesses either as aspects of the genre or failures to fit that genre of fiction in which McCarthy seemed suddenly to be indulging. The quickest description of that genre well fits the limited space of the synopsis for the book among the New York Times Book Review’s “100 Notable Books of the Year” for 2005: “Women grieve, men fight in this hard-boiled Texas noir crime novel” (33). This genre label underestimates No Country for Old Men because it proves accurate only for the reader’s first acquaintance with the book. The ease, however, with which we might agree with that label reminds me of Glanton underestimating Caballo en Pello. Whether the book proves to be that powerful or not will depend on whether continued rereading rewards the reader. This is not Blood Meridian in its initial effects. But it is not supposed
to be. Neither is it ultimately a “hard-boiled Texas noir crime novel” at all. It merely starts out that way. It ends up as a coda to All the Pretty Horses. And in that way, No Country for Old Men not only extends but also begins to resolve the son and father anxiety found in McCarthy, even if doing so means a step backward into a nostalgic evocation of mythic archetype. The image closing the book can only be arrived at, without thoroughgoing sentimentality all along the way, by opening the book in a different genre—a different country, as it were. This movement creates the structural shift I referred to already as a collapse. While No Country for Old Men reinforces the loss of space to place that we have already explored, it does so by answering many remaining questions about the father and son tension developed through the previous eight novels. Granted, McCarthy is known to hold onto manuscripts (as most writers do). No Country for Old Men began as a screenplay and may have sat around in a drawer for some time before McCarthy turned it into a novel. But the book’s ending can hardly be imagined on film, or at least cannot be imagined in anything approaching the “hard-boiled Texas noir crime” film that McCarthy may have originally envisioned. As it refuses those genre labels, the book collapses under the weight of the son and father anxiety that is only forestalled by the fetishism and violence preoccupying its opening. Fe t ish What makes readers call No Country for Old Men a crime novel is not the commitment of any number of crimes, nor the violence in its depiction of those crimes. Nor has this label stuck to the book because of its comparatively terse style, or rather, not for that reason alone. After all, Blood Meridian certainly details more crimes. And a terse prose style characterizes much work that we would never think to call “noir” or “hard-boiled” for that reason alone. The salient characteristics of the cheaper forms of the genre fiction with which McCarthy seems to be working have more to do with technological fetish. This begins with Anton Chigurh’s cattle gun. At first, the cattle gun seems merely a small hook for the screenplay that preceded this material’s present form as a novel. “The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing” (NCFOM 7). This attention to sound, and the fact that Chigurh wears this apparatus in a nearly cyborg fashion, recalls Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. It feels like a gimmick. Although the cattle gun might provide a manner of killing someone with less noise than a conventional gun, so would a knife. Given the difficulty that law enforcement has in getting across the wide spaces between this book’s crime scenes, and given Chigurh’s ready use of guns for close-range as well as long-range killing, its purpose is not practical.
Thus, the detail becomes truly important. By killing people with a cattle gun, Chigurh is turning them into livestock, denying their humanity. Moreover, by shooting them in the forehead with it, Chigurh simultaneously deprives them of their living sight while imprinting in them a symbolic third eye—a visual representation of the enlightenment on matters of chance and destiny that he sometimes provides in a brief pre-murder Socratic dialogue. But we must also note that Chigurh’s requirement of this tool to accomplish what Holden does with his hands (BM 179), points to his mortality (as do his wounds from combat and the car crash). Chigurh can extend his thin line of philosophical argument regarding free will so as to extend Holden’s (and McCarthy’s) larger arguments on this. On first reading, these feel like comparatively weaker forms of philosophical additions to a narrative that would otherwise rest more perilously on the voice of Bell. And ultimately, Chigurh’s dependence on technology (not only weaponry, but on medicines, for instance, or on a telephone bill to track his victims) increases the distance between him and Holden. Chigurh needs gadgets, technology, to get around; he could never carry his own rock to sit on in the open desert. What seemed a weakness in the novel here, however, proves necessary to the way it works. Chigurh cannot be Holden because we no longer see devils or angels in our time, and Anton Chigurh is a villain of our time, and of the places created by the Blood Meridian Epilogue I discussed in Chapter Five. Although he kills everyone he sets out to kill, we last see him limping away, looking relatively mortal: “They watched him set off up the sidewalk, holding the twist of the bandanna against his head, limping slightly” (NCFOM 262). He has even had to buy this bandage from one of the boys who caused the wreck. Why doesn’t he just shoot these boys and take it? So they can see him. After all, apart from his secondary function in providing the novel with some philosophical content alternative to Bell’s jeremiads and confessions and dream vision, Anton Chigurh’s visual possibilities as a striking movie villain fit perfectly his primary role in this novel’s opening. He is himself a fetish of a villain, boiled down to a few villainish characteristics. Moss notices only these: “Blue eyes. Serene. Dark hair. Something about him faintly exotic” (NCFOM 112). Beyond this politically safe “faintly exotic” and the mix of dark hair but blue eyes, Chigurh lacks any striking physical characteristics for us to remember him by (again, unlike Holden), except for the contrast between relatively sensitive features (blue eyes, a serene countenance) and his lethality. His name even serves first to suggest the geographically indeterminate origins favorable for a post–cold war movie villain, and then second to point us on to his philosophy. In this way, Chigurh is the villain whose character resides only in what he does and says. This, too, is not only characteristic of
many film villains, but also of the crime novel genre. By “crime novel” I do not mean to refer to Chandler or Himes or other deft authors, but rather to the interchangeable serial novels that rely on formula and fetish in order to satisfy the desires of young male readers. Weaponry fetish nearly overcomes the novel’s first chapters. Even before the cattle gun, Chigurh satisfies that fetishistic need of crime novels not only to describe killing, but also to describe killing and other crucial activities of the hero and villains through the use of some surprising stratagem or technological apparatus. The characters must do things that the reader might not think of, such as blow the cylinder out of a lock “with the cobalt steel plunger of the cattlegun” (NCFOM 80). Note the specificity of the metal: “cobalt.” To pre-adolescent (and increasingly, adolescent and older) male readers still uncertain about their vulnerability and power in the world, their sexuality and its possibilities, and (compared with women at the same age, on average) their intelligence, the minutiae surrounding objects that seem to afford their user power in that world become all-important. The phallic thrust of the cattle gun is so obvious as to deserve no further comment. Anything that can be added on to an already desirable object that will afford greater lethality, greater speed, greater vision, or more information, fills in for what young men fear they lack. True intimacy with a young woman, friendship with someone they can completely trust and confide in fully, respect (or even time—let alone emotional intimacy) with a parent, acknowledgement from teachers—whatever is possible at any age among most of these things cannot be secured until after adolescence. But within the pages of a science fiction novel, or a crime novel, or as members of a car club, etc., young men can find ready substitutes for feelings of innate power, and honest emotional connection. The details provided in descriptions of the fetish objects in No Country for Old Men call on the very generic terminology that the novel ultimately shrugs off. The string of qualifiers in the phrase, “hard-boiled Texas noir crime novel” narrows and specifies whatever aesthetic space might still be granted any “novel.” The definitions of “hard-boiled” as a trope are “2. Callous; unfeeling” and “3. Unsentimental and practical; tough.” The stereotypes regarding the location, “Texas,” are too numerous to go into, but suffice to say this aspect of No Country for Old Men will seem to continue in the line of stoic cowboy existentialism that made All the Pretty Horses so popular, but which it, and particularly Cities of the Plain, also called into question, even to the point of parody.2 But it will nonetheless allow Moss to go shopping for more fetish items. Lest we assume that this “crime novel” might work in an optimistic mode where justice prevails and the hero lives, the word “noir” signals the disappointed male idealism that would complete the shield against
vulnerability that this genre requires. No Country for Old Men so thoroughly exploits the fetishes of its apparent genre that by the third chapter I kept expecting one of the characters to slap around an obviously effeminate gunsel. But this book would not even allow such a vulnerable man on the side of the villains. Any sign of weakness at the surface level of characters marks them for dead. Thus, Moss never even seems to consider the loss of his wife when dealing with Chigurh. And when he knows he must run from the drug dealers—on foot—“he realize[s] that he would never see his truck again. Well, he said. There’s lots of things you aint goin to see again” (NCFOM 29). Such as his wife, which is not the first thing to occur to him as lost. Moss’s character is first seen burdened not only by gear and descriptions of gear, but by the stereotypical situation in which we find him and the body language he assumes there. To be fair, anyone hunting in that part of the country might want that gear, and sitting on volcanic rock requires—even of someone accustomed to the back country—a slightly careful pose; a volcanic ridge is not, after all, a desk chair and does not feel like one. But the attention paid to all these aspects of the scene keep the reader safely distant from any deep identification of Moss’s character: Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power german binoculars. His hat pushed back on his head. Elbows propped on his knees. The rifle strapped over his shoulder with a harness-leather sling was a heavybarrelled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut. It carried a Unertl telescopic sight of the same power as the binoculars. (NCFOM 8) Even if we need to think about whether the .270 could hit the antelope at nearly a mile’s distance (one supposes in order for readers up on their gun knowledge to infer something about Moss’s willingness to take chances that could result in harm to other creatures), why do we care about the material of the stock? That is not a complaint. Rather, this brief look at a passage that precedes many more fetish descriptions makes it clear to whom the book seems to be aimed: a Young Man enamored of these details.3 We soon see “a Canjar trigger set to nine ounces” let loose a “150 grain bullet” fall short enough to ricochet “off the pan” to hit one of the antelope in the leg (NCFOM 9, 10). So much for all that gear and knowledge. Even the ground has been turned into something one might possess—a “pan”—in its flatness. Nonetheless, in this scene just before Moss’s world collapses around him, turning him into the prey, he simply was too far away from these antelope for even the
“twelve power german binoculars” and the “Unertl telescopic sight of the same power” to make it clear to him that he was too far away. And that his impressive gun could not shoot far enough. Here is where, on rereading, the genre fetish gives itself away as selfconscious, and either parodic, or momentarily indulged in to set up the Old Man part of the novel. Having succeeded in seeing the antelope but failing to see the impossible distance between those desired objects and the power of his gear, Llewelyn will soon have to put his knowledge to use in recognizing the gear of others. Note that these items are recognized by Moss in detail, as the narrative remains close to him. (We do not get nearly so many of these details when the narrative follows Chigurh, let alone Bell.) Moss’s knowledge of their particularity and appreciation of their value stands in for the dreams and details of deep character provided John Grady, for instance. Those levels of deep character—provided not only in dreams, but also in descriptions of setting and character movement involving John Grady, and even Lester Ballard—in No Country for Old Men have dried up into volcanic ridges and hardpan desert. By contrast, the vulnerability of John Grady and Ballard is revealed, while Moss’s is concealed by fetish. I cannot find a dream, a gesture, or a pose in an environment from which to infer anything about Moss’s character except that he is tough. Moss’s discovery of the rip-off focuses on the men only after, and even then among, their gear. He notices first that their “vehicles were four wheel drive trucks or Broncos with big all-terrain tires and winches and racks of rooflights” (NCFOM 11). When, on his return to the rip-off site, the truck pursues him, he hears its “slow lope of the cam. Big block engine” (NCFOM 28). Moss, a welder, might note that this truck—as indeed any truck that could clear rocks and other variations in the “pan” of a real desert without losing its oil pan or getting stuck would have to be—has been improved on. It can go farther, and (with that cam) faster from a dead stop, and this matters if it will be chasing you. Yet, it is highly doubtful that even Moss would be thinking about these things when he has every reason instead to be concentrating on, perhaps, the particular guns they might have and how they will use them on him. But realism is not the point here (if it ever is). The point is to add the next group of items to our list of Moss’s knowledge of fetish presumably important to the Young Man reader. The guns will soon regain their importance, of course. Moss has already found “a shortbarrelled H&K machinepistol with a black nylon shoulderstrap” lying in the lap of the dying drug dealer (NCFOM 12–13). As in a video game, where the player picks up one after another weapon, weighing the relative accuracy and lethality of each weapon for different situations, Moss’s tour of the rip-off site leads him through a small arsenal, including a shotgun modified to delight David Brown, “fitted with a pistol stock and a twenty
round drum magazine” (NCFOM 12). The “nickel-plated government .45 automatic lying cocked in the grass” that Moss finds “between [the] legs” of the man with the money—now dead—(NCFOM 17), reveals the obvious connection between guns as fetish objects and male sexual power. This “cocked” pistol (of a high caliber, we might note) has done the dead man no more good than did the .270 Moss used against the antelope. We might also note that this weapon is “government” issue, and therefore use our knowledge of that to suspect that some arm of law enforcement—whether acting undercover, or illegally—was involved in this drug deal gone wrong. But this proves to be a red herring, as nothing significant along those lines ever turns up in the plot. Characters in this genre must also do things in a particular way, either in a manner that is immediately recognizable and manneristic, such as in the Dragnet dialogue to come, or through some surprising novelty of detail that fills in for the lack of more standard character development. Thus, instead of writing that Moss merely looked through his binoculars, the noun for the fetish object is turned into a powerful (and new) verb: “He glassed the terrain slowly” and finds the scene of the rip-off, and then later “glassed the country to the south” to find the man with the money (NCFOM 10–11, 15).4 Any strong writer knows to find strong verbs. But this one highlights the object used to enhance Moss’s vision more than it does what he is looking at. Scopophilic power depends on the differential of seeing and not being seen, as we are reminded when Moss is the one on the run, emasculated in the desert sand, worrying in a suddenly not-so-macho fashion about the very realistic dangers of spiders and snakes he might be inviting up the legs of his jeans (NCFOM 30). Furthermore, Moss “glass[ing]” the desert floor seems to possess enough heat along with light to melt the sand that comes into his view, to turn it into glass. His trick of hiding the money in ventilation shafts similarly provides the particularity that promises to distinguish what would otherwise be a runof-the-mill scene of, well, hiding the money. We need to believe that the man who seems to be our troubled hero is intelligent and powerful; even when he is outnumbered and outgunned, his sheer toughness (inexplicable as a distinction when guns are involved), his disciplined refusal to become attached to women, let alone anyone else, and his cleverness are all stand-ins for those qualities desired (and therefore felt lacking) by the insecure reader of genre fiction. But the neat verb given to Moss to use with his binoculars does not help him hit his target. And hiding the money in the ventilation shaft only fools everyone but the one man he hopes to fool, Anton Chigurh. Compare the descriptions of the two men involving ventilation ducts serving Moss as a cache. Moss goes first, having cleverly bought a shotgun (and again, recalling David Brown’s
visit to the farrier), “a hacksaw and a millfile,” tent poles, sidecutters, and that most useful of items for ingenious men: duct tape (NCFOM 87). He untied the little nylon bag and slid the poles out. They were lightweight aluminum tubes three feet long and he assembled three of them and taped the joints with duct tape so that they wouldnt pull apart. He went to the closet and came back with three wire hangers and sat on the bed and cut the hooks off with the sidecutters and wrapped them into one hook with the tape. Then he taped them to the end of the pole and stood up and slid the pole down the ductwork. (NCFOM 101) All this careful detail only stiffens the symbolism. Moss goes to much trouble first to shove the money down one vent, only to pay for a second motel room that he luckily is correct in assuming contains a vent connecting to the same trunk line of a central air conditioning system.5 Then he must construct this single “pole” from the tent poles to create yet another extension of himself so that he can reach the money. Not only is all this activity conspicuous, but it is also time-consuming and liable to failure—in a Hitchcockian moment the hook on his pole nearly fails him in reaching the goodies. But at least it can be said that Moss, no sentimental fellow, refuses to be loyal to one air duct. Here is Chigurh retrieving the bag after Moss has been killed by one of the many gang members looking for him: He pulled the little bedside table over to the wall and stood and took a screwdriver from his rear pocket and began to back the screws out of the louvered steel cover of the airduct. He set it on the table and reached in and pulled out the bag and stepped down and walked over to the window and looked out at the parking lot. (NCFOM 243) By comparison, Chigurh retrieves the bag without all the improvised phallic extensions and cleverness of Moss, who in any case seems to have become less consummate in his ductwork insertions by this point. So, we note both that Moss’s knowledge of and care with fetishistic objects always fails him. And we note that he is the only one so deeply caught up in all these details of the crime novel genre. Moss’s character is indeed a parody of the hard-boiled hero for a Young Man genre novel. Moss reveals this to a comic degree in two of his later scenes. In the first, he goes shopping again. Granted, Moss needs clothes, as he is in the quintessential tough-guy position of walking out of a hospital
wearing nothing but the backwards gown. Earlier, he has bought clothes at a Wal-Mart, but in this shopping trip, he is preparing for imminent combat and must look the part. Moss has already noted the “expensive pair of Lucchese crocodile boots” worn by Wells (NCFOM 154). Now in a clothing store after hours, Moss receives the kind of service that might make Bell rethink his cynicism about the loss of manners. The details here prove that Moss is no dime store cowboy: he buys the least expensive boots and is only particular about his jeans. When the owner asks him if “white socks” suit him, he replies, “White socks is all I wear.” In this shopping scene so typical of Hollywood films of the last twenty years, we are forced to wait until Moss gets everything he needs—and we even get his underwear size (NCFOM 190–191). The attention to details continues to boil down his character until he seems dangerously malleable in fitting the requirements of genre fetish. In the second scene, Moss picks up a hitchhiker. The dialogue then finishes out the stereotypes, with lines like “I dont know where you’re at because I dont know who you are” (NCFOM 225), and the hitchhiker’s question, “So are you sorry you become a outlaw?” and Moss’s answer: “Sorry I didnt start sooner” (NCFOM 228). The easiest interpretation of all this is that McCarthy simply meant to boil the pot (or rather, in this case to boil his new novel in it to a hard-boiled consistency), and deftly managed these details to create the taught noir hard boiled crime novel that readers seem to be recognizing in No Country for Old Men. But if so, why do all these gadgets so miserably fail their users? Usually, when loving detail is lavished on something possessed by the hero of genre fiction, it will save his neck. Here, the details prove meaningless as Moss is failed by his binoculars, his scope, his rifle, his airduct stratagem, and essentially by his clothes and his dialogue. Why? The first sentence of No Country for Old Men reads, “I sent one boy to the gas chamber at Huntsville” (NCFOM 3). Many readers noticed that Texas had never executed anyone in a gas chamber. Complaints from enough of those who somehow enjoy McCarthy’s work and yet are sticklers for accuracy in the correspondence between novels and life, grew loud enough that McCarthy actually released a statement through his publisher: “I put it in there to see if readers were on their toes” (Garner). Perhaps. But only if we do not make the foolish assumption that this author—who almost never comments directly on his work—means by “on their toes” that a reader should be attuned to meaningless correspondences between the details of fiction and the details of life. What difference is there, really, between a gas chamber and an electric chair, a needle and a firing squad, except in absurd quibbles over the process chosen by the state putting a man to death? These differences are either analogous to those between a “Canjar” trigger and some other type, or they are differences of symbolic
import. By “on their toes,” the author of Blood Meridian might more likely mean that a reader ought to be alert to the foolishness of falling for literal truths in a book, of falling for the fetish instead of reading for the symbol. As an intentional “error,” the gas chamber reference strengthens the first sentence for a novel that seems to be aimed at a Young Man readership, but that proves to be something else. As with the fetish details that also mislead a first reader, this first sentence makes it clear that in No Country for Old Men there can be no simple recognition of just what the book is about. Not with any particularity in one answer. In general, it is about movement, and thus, about space. First Moss, and then Bell, flee the spaces in which we first find them, even as the world-narrowing power of Anton Chigurh threatens to collapse that space into a coffin. When Moss is finally killed at that three-quarter mark, the collapse of the Young Man book forces readers to acknowledge the true protagonist, and to recognize an altogether different genre at work. As Bell’s voice takes over, so does the new genre—even as the chapters begin to fall inward and dwindle down. In the meantime, the spaces of No Country for Old Men have become differently unstable for both Moss and Bell. Smug g l ing Spac e s First, No Country for Old Men merely echoes the collapse of space already occurring in Cities of the Plain and begun with the Epilogue to Blood Meridian. Allowing for numerous exceptions, we can see that throughout the novels, the general run allowed characters in flight first extends, and then contracts. With John Wesley and then Cornelius Suttree both leaving the terrain of the Southern novels, we actually find the greatest latitude of movement when Blood Meridian takes us back a hundred years earlier. After its meridian, we have seen the journey narratives of The Border Trilogy were doomed to collapse into a smaller and smaller space, like a lasso tightening around the necks of those characters. In “The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain,” Edwin Arnold commented on what many readers saw with some surprise in that novel: “adjustment to a diminished existence, illustrated by the growing number of confined spaces found throughout this novel: barn stalls, hotel and bordello rooms, long dark corridors and back alleys, hospitals and morgue labs, all leading to the packing crate in which John Grady, the all-american man of the west, meets his death” (235). Not only the Epilogue of Blood Meridian, but also the kid, meeting his death in the jakes, should have prepared us for this. As David Holloway and others have observed, McCarthy’s understanding of the twentieth century includes the story of increasingly unavoidable commodification: not only every activity, and every place, but every person becomes subject to
the strictures of economic activity. As I have put it, space becomes places. No, John Grady and Lacey, “they” do not “expect”—or really allow—“a man to ride a horse in this country” any more (ATPH 31). Not, at least, across the separately owned parcels of land demarcated by those barbed wire fences these boys have to cut and mend in order to make their way across West Texas. Space, therefore, has collapsed into smaller places well before No Country for Old Men begins. That Llewelyn Moss takes an ill-advised shot at too great a distance and probably fatally wounds an antelope, and that it takes him so long to walk toward it (as if he would get close enough to shoot it again), fools even this native of the area into thinking that out there in the desert, he can pick up what does not belong to him and get away with it.6 A visit to this area confirms the ease with which Moss might feel he has all the space in the world. Indeed, despite his modern equipment, Moss fails to get close enough to the antelope for a successful shot. But this does not erase the border observed at the Rio Grande River that Moss ends up splashing into and crossing back and forth. As soon as Moss picks up the wrong prize in this frontera space, he is in smuggling country. There, the movement of the man with the contraband, or the money, is constrained more than he might know, while the sense of place of those, such as Bell, who are not directly involved in smuggling feels suddenly unstable. Smuggling spaces confound the usual laws of physics regarding spaces collapsing into place. Moss’s hope to disappear nonetheless proves foolish. As it happens, another disappearing act in the book involves the drugs. We might reasonably expect that a plot retailing the found-drug-money conceit in any novel might have a bit more to do with the drugs. Money has not been a direct concern in McCarthy novels. But smuggling has, in a variety of ways. And given the noir aspect of the book, we might even expect someone to use drugs: at least a secondary picaró similar to a Blevins or Harrogate might get high. But the drugs here only briefly serve the direct purpose of providing evidence (among much other evidence cited by Bell) that civilization is falling apart. Beyond that, they prove merely to be the kind of contraband that we have seen before in McCarthy, even if the black tar heroin Moss finds in the back of the dying man’s truck is, compared with previous contraband, an inherently dangerous substance of no legitimate value to Moss. Nobody does the dope in No Country for Old Men, although we do get head-shaking Dragnet dialogue about frying brains without a cattle gun. “What am I supposed to do with this?” asks the sheriff of Eagle Pass, referring not to the drugs but to the nifty transponder. Bell’s Joe Friday says log it for evidence and then begins the hard-boiled editorial duet taking us back to the drugs:
Dope. They sell that shit to schoolkids, [the other sheriff ] said. It’s worse than that. How’s that? Schoolkids buy it. (NCFOM 194) For Bell, drugs merely represent a larger post-sixties slide in American moral values. He won’t disagree with Moss Senior, who won’t blame Vietnam but says, “Vietnam was just the icin on the cake. We didn’t have nothin to give to em to take over there.” That last explanation recalls the regularity with which these novels surprisingly revolve around exchange goods.7 The elder Moss goes on, “You cant go to war like that. You cant go to war without God” (NCFOM 294–295). Here “God” seems to have been the missing thing to “give em to take” to Vietnam. Drugs are the substitute for God, then, in the fallen world according to Bell. By contrast, the transponder receives more attention in this novel. It tells you the location of a man who thinks he can disappear. It collapses space into place with a beep. Drugs turn out not to be the point. The heroin here is more symbolic than realistic. In No Country for Old Men, the reduction of space includes one constraint doomed to failure: the control of a border and the eradication of smuggling—truly an unfulfillable dream. In the most circumscribed space of Knoxville in The Orchard Keeper and Suttree—its government buildings and their controlling reach beyond their walls—what is regarded as contraband is that which otherwise might move around uncontrolled on its own, spreading disease or preying on livestock. The government there seeks regulation of movement; where it cannot hope for that, it demands the eradication of what moves. The government therefore attempts to tax the movement of alcohol, and eradicate raptors and bats. But in the case of the bounties, this reversal of the usual transaction little matters. The results are the same as with all commodified goods, whether organic or synthetic, alive or dead: they transport more easily when reduced to their essence—or at least the essence visible in the market that, because of some disparity or surfeit, offers a bounty for them, dead or alive. This reduction of the commodity becomes easier, though, if what the economy desires is its erasure. To erase wolves or bison, a bounty on just their hides should suffice—though perhaps also their bones, as we see before the kid reaches Fort Griffin in Blood Meridian. Bats and birds are small enough to move whole. If it is the erasure of a people that is desired, then for the purposes of transportation those people can be reduced even further, given their size—to nothing but their scalps, as we see in Blood Meridian. Holloway examines the many objects exchanged in McCarthy:
In a fictive realm where scalps, children, buffalo bones, ferry crossings, ornate weaponry, whisky, landscape, and life itself are all merely “things” to be bought and sold according to the laws of the marketplace, the heterogeneous diversity of the object world is reduced to a single identity, a homogenous mass of matter, a collection of things linked together by their common exchangevalue, their shared status as commodities in a commodity world. (104–105) I would argue only that Blood Meridian includes some uncommodified terrain, spaces not yet rendered into places. At least not until the book’s Epilogue. But it, too, depends on a type of proto-smuggling. The border fiction renders smuggling in more obvious terms. After the reinscription of any a border’s power by Blood Meridian’s Epilogue, the illegal transport of commodified objects amounts to literal smuggling, if not to those doing the carrying. Billy Parham believes he is repatriating the she wolf. And John Grady is, in more than just the legal sense, recovering the horses in a reenactment of older border struggles. Mr. Johnson tells of a 1917 raid “to cross some stolen horses we’d recovered” (COTP 63). But the phrase “stolen horses” comes before “recovered” in such a way as to remind us that there can be disagreements about horse ownership. To “cross” your own horses amounts to “recover[y],” but to “cross” someone else’s amounts to smuggling. In No Country for Old Men, we hardly see any border crossing at all. And yet, the fact of smuggling hovers over the destroyed men and trucks found by Moss. Bell professes some knowledge of the bloody history of the area. “That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I’ve read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one” (NCFOM 307). Nonetheless, that history seems lost on him. Or, as would be more typical not only of someone professing Bell’s views, but also of most people professing political views that seem opposite them, he has likely read selectively; he has read only one side of a many-sided subject. In his arguments notably all of which are appeals to emotion written by an author who, in Holden’s case, has proven himself quite capable of working the corners of ethos and logos as well—Bell refers only to the “settler” side of that history. When he argues that for “the early settlers,” watching their wives “and children killed and scalped and gutted like fish has a tendency to make some people irritable” (NCFOM 195, my emphasis), Bell reveals that he has forgotten about, or is ignorant of, the peoples already living in that area for centuries before those “early settlers,” receiving the same treatment from the very real Glanton gang and their ilk. This seems so obvious to me, and that it ought to be obvious to anyone reading this book, that No Country for Old Men has begun to assume an
important position for me in our time of divisive, even polarized lack of genuine civic rhetoric. Bell’s use of the word “early” echoes the empty repetition of the word “aboriginal” or “native” on the other side of this history, reducing an understanding of our collective bloody past to a sibling argument over who had dibs on a territory, or on who started the violence over it. As if either putatively white “settlers” or idealized “native americans” knew of no violence until they encountered one another and began the scalping. Bell’s fearful and therefore selective history leaves him ironically more, not less, vulnerable to the realities of the continual and inevitable violence of smuggling spaces. The seemingly sudden killing in his county (with a law enforcement response that, ineffectual as it is, leads Bell to compare the ripoff to a historic flood twenty years earlier) feels like an invasion of lawlessness previously unknown to those parts. Even if we ignore the illegal crossing of humans and horses in Bell’s younger years, his willful ignorance that things were not, indeed, better in the old days in toto weakens his legs for standing strong wherever he finds himself.8 Bell’s sense of place falls away from under his feet, like the desert and mountains in that area when, after an inland sea dried up, heaved itself into a landscape that is more often than not sideways or upside down. We see Bell driving, more and more, across larger swaths of West Texas—but always a bit slow (unhurried enough to stop for coffee and pie) so that once he arrives, the most recent history has not only missed hurting him, but has also rendered the horror at his destination—of a drug shoot-out, a burned car, a motel shooting, a grieving father—distant to him. When these places become a single frighteningly open space to Bell—a borderland where the border keeps nothing back—he retreats. Smuggling spaces therefore reverse the otherwise inexorable human trend toward reinforcement of boundaries and commodification of goods under cross-boundary agreements, such as NAFTA. They resist the recognition of borders agreed on in treaties, of taxes levied by governments they hardly recognize, or refuse to recognize at all. Most of the traffic on the international highways in the epilogue of Cities of the Plain may be sanctioned by NAFTA, but a significant proportion of it is sanctioned by underground economies trafficking in illegal narcotics and illegal aliens, both supplied on the cheap to the U.S. The world cannot be wide enough, however, to run from Anton Chigurh. Despite the reversal of place into frightening space for Bell, Moss’s actions put him under the power of the same constraints as those limiting the movements of John Grady and Billy in Cities of the Plain. All are endangered by the determination of space by a more powerful other. This is another reason why McCarthy chose the gas chamber for the execution visit that opens the book: the gas chamber is the only modern means of executing a man or woman that already creates a controlled space around the condemned,
separating him or her from the rest of the world before death makes that separation irrevocable. (In lethal-injection—the method used at Texas’s Huntsville prison—the use of intravenous tubes, rather than syringes directly injected into the condemned, along with the removal of those administering lethal injection to a separate space from the room containing the man or woman strapped to the cross-like table, are all attempts to translate this spatial distinction into our drug-obsessed and medicalized culture.) The gas chamber recalls the “hiss and click of the plunger” from Chigurh’s cattle gun, sounding as it does “like a door closing” (NCFOM 7). As such, the closing door of the gas chamber collapses space. Fl ig ht to Jerusal em Although it begins in italicized remembrance, the subject matter of that opening (Bell’s visit to an execution) seems on first reading to be of a piece with the action that follows it. With all the violence in the roman type, it seems that this typographical remove for a relatively contemplative voice will serve merely to offset the violence, even to comment on it in ironic detachment—as if Bell is standing outside action that is occurring within a space safely sealed off from him. These monologues raise at least three questions. First, how do Bell’s monologues compare with previous italicized prologues for McCarthy chapters? After all, McCarthy has often used this technique. Here, contemplation alternates with the action. But not on anything like the level of the fireside chats of Holden, where philosophy asserts itself over history, between each massacre in Blood Meridian. Neither does the typographic switching provide the social voice of an oral history outside the action of the main character, as in Child of God. Whatever distance there is between Sheriff Bell’s regular italicized reflections (actual thinking, or so it seems) and the action on the ground—following Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh and even Carson Wells—we realize that rather than functioning within the generic expectations of the crime novel genre, these monologues begin to overwhelm that action. Second, then, how do Bell’s monologues fit the genre shift in No Country for Old Men? Initially by presenting that spatial separation for comment on the Young Man book, but eventually, by accomplishing the genre shift begun by that book’s structural collapse. Particularly when the Young Man book later refuses to provide standard (or even cleverly modified) plot points that would have satisfied a crime novel structure, something has to fill the void. Bell’s voice is there to fill in the relatively lengthening silences between gunfire. Indeed, the structure of the Young Man’s book within this novel runs backwards, in comparison with the usual escalation of violence to a
climactic shoot-out. Here, mayhem explodes along the border one third of the way into the book, opposite the end of a second act in a conventional three-act screenplay. We never actually see Moss die but are rather told the story third-hand, from the point of view of a deputy who got his version from a witness. Moss and his hitchhiker have simply disappeared from us, like Ophelia, with only their bodies making a reappearance to occasion a few words from the true protagonist. Bell’s monologues pick up the pieces after the characters starring in the Young Man book within No Country for Old Men have run out of luck, time, and space. By providing us with a character that is not so hard-boiled as is Moss to comment on the action, the narrative includes a moral center that Bell, laconic in his speech during that action, could not otherwise provide outside the tight-fitting constraints of Dragnet quips. In a work of film noir such as Double Indemnity, Leonard Neff ’s voice-over narration accomplishes both an ongoing confession and an ironic distance from the action that will conclude with his death. In that film, the voice-over performs Neff ’s confession to Barton Keyes, the “bulldog” who remains forever watchful, and yet who proves to be one step behind helping Neff by catching him. By the end of No Country for Old Men, Bell has similarly failed to help Moss by catching him. But as here the genre shift moves the weight of the novel onto those monologues, we have our last question about them. Third, what is the deeper nature of Bell’s italicized monologues? Bell has begun a very different confession from that of the central figure in a noir narrative. The book ends with Bell so defeated that he can only retreat into an image of a past that never existed, into a mythology that seems more of a defense than a viable dream. Instead of a vision of how a man might live outside the space of his dreams, Bell’s dream only throws into sharper relief the losses in his life. In this sense, Bell’s monologues serve as evidence that his conscious control of life has become overwhelmed by unconscious fears more than those myriad worries he cites in his earlier grumbling over the state of society. The narrative including his combat confession points to guilt over his behavior during combat. But that, too, proves to be another red herring (the circumstances of his position with the machine gun prove that his guilt over leaving that post is notably inflated). Bell’s real fears lie deeper, and thus his monologues employ the comparatively dreamlike quality of italicized type to take us into those fears, in the darker space of the unconscious. As I had first read into the new country of the Old Man book, however, the force of the genre fiction that preceded it—despite its failures, ultimately, to conform to that genre—kept me from recognizing the new genre as a total replacement of the earlier book. The new genre turns out to be, on rereading, evenly and fully realized throughout most of Bell’s monologues. Until this
new genre itself collapses into the unconscious, it repeats the laments of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. In the King James Version of that book, Jeremiah’s first worry is that he is insufficient to his god’s purpose. God has to inform him that he is his son in a special way, that he has already “ordained” him to be “a prophet unto the nations” before his birth (1:5). Jeremiah nonetheless exclaims, “Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child” (1:6). God solves this problem of insecurity in two ways. First, he tells Jeremiah simply not to say that he is a child (in other words, to grow up by pretending to be grown up). Second, God assures him that he will put his words into Jeremiah’s mouth. It is a father’s reassurance to a son that the son will become a man, but nevertheless that the son will always keep within him the power and truth of the father’s word—that he will always be a son. The “evil” that God is worried about first comes from another space, “out of the north” (1:15). At first, God’s purpose is to empower Jeremiah to guard against this by building “a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land” to protect what seems to be a remarkably small space within which God is not offended and his new prophet cannot be harmed. But immediately, the evil appears to be within that space, as well. This is the jealous and vindictive God displeased with the failures of his chosen people: “And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof, but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination” (2:7). A bit more will suffice: Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the LORD. For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. (2:11–13) Bell’s complaints recapitulate these concerns of his God. First, he sees the evil as having arrived from outside his place in the form of somehow invading Indians that “scalped and gutted like fish” the women and children of those “early settlers” (NCFOM 195). Here, Bell’s patriarchal assumption that the actual “early settlers” were the men, and not so directly “their” women and children, fits perfectly the typology of the Old Testament, as well as the archetypal unconscious idealization of masculinity for which we are headed. Second, the evil arrives from the outside in the form of drugs, run and dealt by “Mexicans.” As Bell seems to assume that all of these are Mexican nationals
(indeed, it is unclear if Bell regards Mexican-Americans as part of his flock), these dealers are outsiders. But here is where the problem collapses one spatial degree, from xenophobia to the mistrust of one’s own tribe, matching perfectly the collapse of God’s fears in the book of Jeremiah: the second threat is that the children inside the walls of the space protected by God’s prophet have not heard God, or have forgotten him, and that they will therefore adopt foreign gods and customs. Bell’s Dragnet dialogue now assumes a biblical tone, echoing God’s shift from xenophobia to a frustrated wrath against the children who have forgotten him: “It’s worse than that,” he tells the Sheriff who has commented on the outside threat (the drug dealers who sell to “schoolkids”). “Schoolkids buy it” (NCFOM 194). In other words, no one makes them use drugs; they choose them. The most heart-felt expressions of jeremiad fears in Bell’s monologues concern children, whether unborn, of school age, or grown up and gone to war. He worries about Moss, and the other inhabitants of his county, with a patriarchal feeling for them as his figurative children. Bell is a model for the god in McCarthy’s philosophy: a slightly doddering figure old before his time, worried first about the evil from without the space he keeps for his people, but then secondly worried about the evil taken into that space, and ultimately worried that, quite apart from whatever evil might exist outside that space, his people have lost their way—they have forgotten to listen to him. But it is also the case that he may have forgotten how to speak to them. Thus the third, inmost worry of God and Bell is that their children have given up their acknowledgement of what is good and righteous because of some failure on the part of God or Bell; the parent ultimately owns all failures of the child. Asked about the (apparently sudden) high crime rate in his county, Bell looks within that place: “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight” (NCFOM 304). Here again Bell’s worry is centered in the children (the ones buying the drugs, rather than the ones selling them), whom he sees as having lost their sense of place, in the sense that they no longer automatically show verbal respect for people who have gone before them. The first identification of the problem, however, points to parents. Bell doesn’t point right back at himself, but at the reporter with that “you.” By no longer exercising sufficient authoritative control, however, the patriarch is really the origin of the sin. The trope embedded in “overlook” suggests not only a hierarchical differential of power, but also distance. McCarthy shows us this the first time we see Bell as a character in the narrative: “Bell climbed the rear steps of the courthouse and went down the hall to his office. He swiveled his chair around and sat and looked at the telephone. Go ahead, he said. I’m here.” After this grumbling—like a father
who knows he is about to be bothered again with something trivial to him and yet important to his child—Bell picks up the phone and we infer the other side of the conversation from his. “Mrs Downie I believe he’ll come down directly. Why dont you call me back here in a little bit. Yes mam” (NCFOM 41). This cornball moment almost dropped the book from my hands. Worse than a formulaic film, this seems closer to something from a long-running television series whose best writers have all wandered off to better gigs. It introduces Bell in the perfect manner, of course, for the Young Man’s book as it so perfectly fits the cliché of the beleaguered and bored country lawman about to be overwhelmed by the excitement of the plot that will engulf him. And yet, it also introduces how Bell sees himself. Surprisingly, long after one endures this scene, it echoes through the collapse of Bell’s jeremiad into his dream. First in this telephone scene, note Bell’s good manners: at age fiftyseven, he uses both the honorific “Mrs” and “mam” for a woman who is probably older. The cat stuck up a tree emergency is so clichéd as to bring on the severest pain in the reader: yes, our sheriff character’s office is normally a slow place. My, how Anton Chigurh will, by comparison, shake things up. Bell first resents this call. “It’s money, he said. You have enough money you dont have to talk to people about cats in trees.” On second thought, however, he remembers his role as the protector of people whose concerns may seem trivial to them, but for whom those concerns are important. “Well.” The period suggests another pause. “Maybe you do” (NCFOM 41). Maybe. But we notice Bell’s ambivalence here, his understandable feeling of being put out to little purpose, and even the uncertainty permeating his reminder to himself that indeed, as sheriff in a largely empty county with a few frightened people scattered across the desert, his job does include reassuring old women about their cats. His errands quickly involve chasing after Moss (or might have involved chasing after Chigurh, which he seems assiduously to avoid). Nevertheless, his stops at the house, the pace of his dialogue, his pauses for coffee and pie, reveal that his favorite part of the job really is not in having to listen to his children, but rather in an enjoyment of the places of his office. Moving between his desk, his car, a booth in a cafe, and across somewhat frightening wide open spaces to various towns in which he is always known and recognized, give him the feeling that his children recognize in him the patriarchal figure who deserves recognition, verbal respect, freedom of movement, and pie. But this does not mean he has been speaking to his children with regularity, much less with success. And even if he has, on what authority can he speak? His ethos seems limited to that of a reluctant counselor for the tremulous owners of wayward cats. It might also be his job to actually
protect them. But he knows he is ineffectual at this (as indeed was the God of Jeremiah worried about those people to the north): he is so outgunned and outnumbered as to make it ridiculous for him to take a stand against the drug dealers. And they know it. “I think for me the worst of it is knowin that probably the only reason I’m even still alive is that they have no respect for me. And that’s very painful” (NCFOM 215). Bell’s only hope, as God’s in the book of Jeremiah, is that his children will again recognize righteousness, show respect for his authority, and refuse to take up the evil customs (drugs, another religion) from outside the place of safety within the larger wilderness. Why would Bell’s children listen to him? Bell, like many a real sheriff in West Texas counties, and like the god regularly discussed by many McCarthy characters, is powerless to do anything about evil. Or—and this provides evidence of a more troubled theology, and one that must retain some of the resentment of the distant father so hated by Cornelius Suttree—God is merely preoccupied. In Suttree, he busies himself with floods and dams and collapsing slate walls, oblivious to the carnage beneath his play. Like a giant child himself, he moves things around from time to time, sometimes curious about the progress of an individual ant—perhaps even an ant-on-sugar—but he does not preside over a simple top-down universe in which he regularly mediates the activity on lower levels of existence.9 This is why I argued at the end of Chapter Four that Holden’s claims should not be too readily discounted as inaccurate. Morality may be something conjured up, like a trick, by human beings living in a nonmoral universe. Morality may be inevitably medial, with no connection up or down. Our feelings of connection below, to animals and the natural world, proves to be no more than our inability to evolve out of anthropocentric habits of epistemology. So, too, our feelings of connection above, to the larger universe: these may only be an unkillable figment of the empathic systems our brains have evolved for our life as social creatures. Just as we are good (and terrible) at imagining what someone else is thinking and feeling, we might simply have the habit of projecting a god onto a universe that has none. Bell’s final dream makes it difficult to tell whether Freud, or Jung, should be our guide on this last question. Freud, of course, derided “oceanic” feeling as a delusion resulting from the failure to recognize “the reality principle” (11–12). Jung, on the other hand, believed that such feelings evidenced the truth of a collective unconscious. This isn’t the space to settle between these two, but I remain curious as to how McCarthy’s visions, dreams, and descriptions of feelings of a deep connection with the universe ultimately come out: true, or delusional? I cannot see this resolved within the books. But either way, we are headed down to myth and the unconscious with Bell, as his role speaking the worries of Jeremiah wears down under the terrible weight of God’s absence,
and as his role as a symbolic god proves that he, too, remains too far from people to really help them. The possibility that any god might intervene on the behalf of Bell and his people seems ruled out by Bell’s uncle when he asks him, Do you think God knows what’s happenin? I expect he does. You think he can stop it? No. I dont. (NCFOM 269) Riding f r om Jerusal em Thus, even the jeremiad, the genre that so takes over No Country for Old Men, itself wears out, collapsing into confession and dream. The key to Bell’s inability to meaningfully intervene on the behalf of his citizens goes all the way back to his departure from an absurd situation where he most certainly would have been killed and probably would not have accomplished anything but killing a few more German soldiers. And yet, this memory seems to ruin his ability to think of himself as effective in any way. Bell’s war experience seems to have damaged him irrevocably; he has already fought, even bravely, and yet the hopelessness of continuing that fight emasculates him. But this obsession with a particular guilt proves to be an unreliable inflation. As such, it leads inevitably to a projection of that inflated archetype that remains outside Bell’s ability to integrate the god-like power of his position into a whole personality. Bell’s concluding dream, as well as his jeremiad worries, echoes another father in McCarthy. As with the god of The Old Testament, we have only a general name for him, his family name alone: “Cole.” As with so many other names in McCarthy, this one resonates with meaning. One step down the alphabet from “Cold” (and thus more remote), the name sounds the same as “Coal,” that last cinder that carries within its heart the fire that must not be allowed to burn out in movements through the endless space of darkness. Perhaps only now does the insistence of the narrator about John Grady’s name ring true: “The boy’s name was Cole. John Grady Cole” (ATPH 7). Even seeing his mother with another man does not flush him from the San Antonio hotel where he spies on her. He must be sure that she is sleeping with someone other than his father before he can leave San Angelo, or at least that she has indeed renounced his father’s name. By checking to see if she has used that name to register for her own room, he finds out: “No,” the clerk tells him. “No Cole” (ATPH 22). Like Bell, John Grady’s father first appears to us as an already defeated, emasculated, and sorrowful man. He tells John Grady that “[w]hat you
won was gravy but what you lost was hard come by” (COTP 214). This pronouncement comes as a posthumous recollection two novels after the father’s admission that in one poker game he “won twenty-six thousand dollars in twenty-two hours of play,” including the hand for “four thousand dollars in the last pot,” “with three natural queens” (ATPH 12). Judging by the reduced circumstances of his domestic space in the hotel, we know that Cole Sr. has lost more money than he has ever won. The one “queen” he had in life deserted him, long before the war took away his masculinity in some other way. He tells his son that “It aint her fault. I aint the same as I was” (ATPH 12), even though well before Cole Sr. left for World War II, John Grady’s mother abandoned them both. “She left out of here. She was gone from the time you were six months old till you were about three” (ATPH 25). Like many of McCarthy’s young male would-be fathers, this mother headed West, to California. The failure of Cole Sr. as a father figure originates in this, and subsequent, emasculations. He is just as ruined as Bell, and even shares the idiosyncrasy of stirring his coffee out of nervous habit—with no sugar in it (ATPH 24, NCFOM 90). Like Bell, he cannot assimilate the news, where even the domestic conflicts of movie stars echo his own private sense of failure: “How can Shirley Temple be getting divorced?” he asks his son. Then he continues, “The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that’s probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I’ll tell you what. I’m a long way from bein convinced that it’s all that good a thing” (ATPH 13). Cole’s cynicism here may seem atheistic, but no more so than Bell’s ultimate inability to believe in a God who can, or will, intervene on earth. Nonetheless, Cole Sr. gives his son a saddle as an early Christmas present (ATPH 14), and it is the father, rather than the son, who at least verbally pushes for some time together—riding horses—telling John Grady, “You dont have to if you dont want to” (ATPH 9). This remains the only scene in all of McCarthy where a father makes any gesture toward emotional connection with a main character. What follows? First, John Grady puts off this ride. But eventually, they go out together, and we seem to see the son from the eyes of a father who appreciates him: The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been. (ATPH 23)
The highly biblical language here (“but as if were he begot” and the finality of “and it would have been”) is actually King James diction. As such, it points us as readily to myth as to the religion that seems less powerful for John Grady, that seems unrecognized by his father, and that has failed Bell. Spatially, this scene enacts a dream fulfilled as it could rarely be in that fenced country of 1949, and as it never occurs for McCarthy’s other protagonists. These two, father and son, are moving through open spaces without the violence of the Glanton gang and yet among ruins that suggest the impermanence of some of the constraints on space that have appeared here since the kid rode through. “The wreckage of an old wooden windmill fallen among the rocks” and “[a]n ancient pickethouse” almost suggest the decay of a pastoral. They even pass “crippled fenceposts propped among the rocks that carried remnants of a wire not seen in that country for years.” This could be the fencing from Blood Meridian’s Epilogue. Indeed, after that fallen windmill, we get the quintessential Blood Meridian sentence: “They rode on” (ATPH 23). John Grady knows his father is dying, however, and that he is already powerless—was always powerless—to preserve the family’s reserve of a land where horses can still be found. As I have argued in Chapter Six, he must ride on to replace everything he is losing outside San Angelo. But we have now seen that not only his grandfather, but also his father will be left behind—one buried, and the other heading for the grave. Bell’s father has also died, while Bell was still relatively young. Meanwhile, Bell’s marriage has survived the loss of an only child. At his first mention of her, he immediately says he will not talk about her. Then, later, as the chapters collapse around his monologues, he confesses that he talks to her. “She would be thirty now. That’s all right. I dont care how that sounds. I like talkin to her. Call it superstition or whatever you want. I know that over the years I have give her the heart I always wanted for myself and that’s all right. That’s why I listen to her” (NCFOM 285). This confession turns out to be only an admission that the father keeps a lost child alive through his own voice. But either this remains too private for Bell to elaborate on, and end with, or it does not ring in his heart as does the loss of his father, or even his confessed feelings of guilt over combat and as a failed father-figure for his county. Because here we have an idea, a thought, more than an image. And thinking never matches the power of image. Bell’s evocation of his daughter remains at the level of sound—possibly quite powerful to him, but we cannot know for sure. “I listen to what she says and what she says makes good sense. I with she’d say more of it. I can use all the help I can get.” It may be moving that here the father is listening to the child, and has indeed traded places with her, taking advice from her. But we know nothing about what it is that she
tells him. Bell cuts off these thoughts and we never return to them: “Well, that’s enough of that” (NCFOM 285). This is thinking. And for the first time since Suttree, and fundamentally in a different way, McCarthy has characters thinking all over the place in No Country for Old Men. Bell sometimes uses the phrase to lead up to what he is actually thinking about. But more often, a phrase such as “he thought about that” refuses to tell us more than what we could already have inferred. McCarthy also uses such phrases to collapse the space between psychology and a social tension between characters in this novel. In a parody of this, Chigurh picks up a signal from the transponder and wonders who still has it. “He could think of no reason for the transponder unit to be in the hotel. He ruled out Moss because he thought Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that” (NCFOM 171). This “thinking” is nothing like Suttree’s interior monologues, but is rather the often meaningless expository thinking on the part of characters in genre fiction—again, filling in the spaces of their absent characters with plot machinations of no import. The inclusion of the full name of the evil corporation involved in the drug smuggling even takes us back to fetish; here the specificity of the name stands in for the much deeper complexity of the relationships between real corporations and drug smuggling. But that would take time, and Chigurh is busy thinking. My reference to this last evidence of the genre book we have already left behind is meant to point out how much Bell, too, has been “thinking.” And it does him no good. Rather, his “thoughts” revolve much less around matters of immediate responsibility and possibilities of action than do Moss’s and Chigurh’s. Rather, Bell is continually trying to think himself free from feelings without denying their power. Rejecting the Western assumption that all psychological phenomena are the products of each individual mind that is experiencing them, Jung argued that the contrary is the case: “Psychic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image. Only psychic existence is immediately verifiable. To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually nonexistent” (Portable 486, his emphasis). It may be that the loss of his daughter remains an important component of Bell’s character. And Bell’s confession about his actions in combat may also inform his sense of guilt as a failed father. By telling his uncle that story, we approach an image that occasions Bell’s thoughts about it. But the description of Bell’s actual use of the machine gun nearly tilts back to the gun fetish of the earlier book.
That thing was aircooled and it was belt fed out of a metal box and I figured if I let em run up a little more on me I could operate on em out there in the open and they wouldnt call in another round cause they’d be too close. I scratched around and I dug around some more and come up with the ammo box for it and I got set up behind the section of wall there and jacked back the slide and pushed off the safety and here we went. (NCFOM 275)10 This has its merits, but they are not strongly related to Bell’s guilt. In fact, this is not at all the language of a confession, but rather the deftly handled transcription of a good storyteller not at all averse to having himself imagined in a heroic act. Furthermore, there is no image here, but rather another of the good storyteller’s stock in trade: expert “doing.” In place of “thinking,” we have the same kind of impressive “doing” that I earlier characterized as another aspect of the crime novel genre: the things handled, and the way they are handled here, is what is important. And in another echo of Moss and his guns and truck fetishes, this is a scene of modern warfare, centering on the specificity of technology involved. It can of course be objected that any question of Bell staying in that position is absurd, as eventually a half-competent officer among the Germans would have them pull back as a shell blows this machine-gunner to pieces. Bell earned his medal by picking up the machine gun at all. Beyond that, his guilt is misplaced. Why? Because the power of images around his father keeps that man at an impossible remove from Bell. Even as Bell confesses that he knows he is, in some ways, “a better man” than his father (NCFOM 308), it is hard to believe that Bell truly feels this way.11 The image we have of the father includes in him an impossible power, one that Bell can never hope to assume. We might imagine this broken-down sheriff waking from his dreams, pleading as did Jeremiah, “Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child” (1:6). Here is the image of the father who was not even on the battlefield with Bell that day, and yet is so assumed to possess a superior courage that this image will surpass Bell’s description of fumbling for an ammo box. In Bell’s words, his father would have “set there till hell froze over and then stayed a while on the ice” (NCFOM 279). Bel l’s Dr eam Bell’s final dream includes an image familiar in Freud, but with a figure whose archetypal power can best be understood through Jungian theory. First, the fact that the father is carrying fire. In Civilization and its Discontents,
Freud discusses a primeval scene around a fire. In a now-famous footnote, Freud ponders what might have been a first realization of the human (and particularly, and as Freud would have it, only male) capacity for control of emotions in order to control nature. In this mythic scene, Freud imagines the first person to realize that fire might be preserved, and carried forward. Putting out fire by micturating—a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back—was [. . .] a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. (37) This imaginative idea suggests the overemphasis on constraint and repression that refers most accurately here to Moss, and the Young Man book. But we can keep this in mind as something behind Bell’s dream.12 Second, as I have argued in my interpretation of Bell’s combat confession, his father looms too large in his imagination. And the tension between image and “thought” running through Bell’s monologues further calls on Jung for another interpretation of the final dream. In Jungian terms, the image precedes all of Bell’s ideas, and the grotesquely heavy mythological weight of the father in his dream explains Bell’s inability to work out any coherent thoughts to explain an overwhelming feeling that, in comparison to his father, he must forever remain a child. Jung insists that before the idea comes the image, tracing “idea” back to the ideal forms in Plato and before that, to “the ‘primal warmth’ of the Stoics” and the “ever-living fire” of Heraclitus (Archetypes 33). Because Bell cannot see an image of himself realizing his father potential, that potential is only available projected outside him, in the form of the archetypal father figure we recognize in his final dream. As Jung also saw that in the presence of the image, there is a release of emotion, we can also see why this dream closes No Country for Old Men: the archetype in this dream is so emotion-charged that it generates more emotion than any other for Bell. Archetypes also become strongest during abandonment, or after a loss. The murders in No Country for Old Men, particularly the death of Moss and the hitchhiker, remind Bell of the death of his daughter. He talks about his daughter in the second monologue after he views the bodies in the morgue (NCFOM 240–241, 285). Another reason to continue with Jung, more than Freud, is that Jung’s acceptance of a mythological explanation for “oceanic” feeling provides
us with an explanation for Bell’s thoughts and visions without merely pathologizing them, as would Freud. For Jung, the telos of humanity is the recognition of godhood, and the self is the recognition of the god-like in temporal life. Instead of projecting this out into religion, Bell’s recursive and obsessional thinking about the problems besetting his sense of place and his relationship with both his lost father and his lost daughter eventually move him away from his role as Jeremiah. But he cannot manage to find the god in himself, particularly as he feels that he is a failure for the citizenry he will leave behind. He therefore falls back on an archetypal image that signals his past and current failures, even as it seems to point to nostalgia. The move to archetype for Bell becomes clear in his comments about the water trough: You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I’ve read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. He had to know bettern that. [. . .] And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intention of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that’s what I would like most of all. (NCFOM 307) Thinking about this trough, Bell nearly advances farther than he does in his last dream toward Jungian individuation. Of course, the creator of this trough did have faith—in himself, but also in all those who would follow his passing in archetypal terms. The “promise in his heart” had to be that he would simply show up, and do this work for the sake of its own creative exercise, the skill it takes, and some sense that what he works at would indeed endure. That promise is the promise one makes in creating something in a bid for immortality. Three resonances we find in the trough advance all this in Jungian terms, but also in more particular terms for McCarthy. First, in Jungian terms, the trough represents the mythical possibilities of taking over the power of God. One of the first complaints that God makes to Jeremiah involves the control of water: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed
them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (2:13). By hewing their own troughs, humans become as gods, as Jung would see it, both in their assumption of a power previously thought by unindividuated people to reside only in a transcendent God, and also in their exercise of an allimportant creative impulse that Jung argues is crucial to individuation. Second, in biographical terms, the trough remarked on by Bell, seen together with the complaint of God to Jeremiah, recalls work of the TVA, of which McCarthy’s father played a crucial role. The dams hewn from the rocky terrain around Knoxville in Suttree, the artificial reservoirs they created, and the usurpation of the power supposedly held only by a transcendent god over “the fountain of living waters”—there the Tennessee River—all point to a powerful father figure in control of both the creative impulse and its use to usurp the power of God. Third, Bell’s emphasis on the craft involved in a human being taking the time to create something “to last ten thousand years” brings both the biblical and the patriarchal power derived from this object under the power of the son of the man who worked for the TVA: Cormac McCarthy. As I have remarked in Chapter Two, McCarthy’s regular valuation of skilled manual labor remains central to his vision.13 Despite some ambiguity embedded in both the language concerning this water trough, and in the language regarding the cistern in Jeremiah, it is possible to imagine that in Bell’s admiration for the durability of the trough, we might have a metaphorical recognition of the work McCarthy Sr. helped accomplish (good, as well as bad, for the people in that area) with the TVA. Perhaps. But the enormity of the TVA project, and the lack of individual skilled artisanship in building a cistern more likely comparable to the one that angers God in Jeremiah, seem all to make that unlikely in any direct way. Nonetheless, it might be possible that the metaphor, although perhaps not intentional (or conscious, as Jung would have it), still arises from feelings on the part of the son to make peace with the father—perhaps. Jung’s famous dream of moving a candle through darkness was interpreted by him to mean that we must guard the light of reason and consciousness from the dark storms of the unconscious. The brighter the candle, the deeper the surrounding darkness (Memories 87–90). But unlike Freud, Jung acknowledged that the demands of the unconscious cannot be overcome. Hard necessity—such as running from Anton Chigurh—can relieve you from the burden of demands arising from the unconscious. But Bell avoids hard necessity. Indeed, he lives a relatively slow life, which for Jung opens him up to the neurotic obsessions we hear in his ruminations on evil threatening his community from without, evil being purchased from within his community, and evil being adopted by his community’s children as they live lives of increasing leisure.
In this last worry, Bell actually doesn’t go far enough: it is not in the lack of “Sir” and “Mam” that children run astray, but in an almost total lack of hard necessity in the lives of even many underprivileged children. If Bell wanted to make a difference there, he would open a horse riding camp and get them all busy from an early age. He might learn, and then teach these children, the craft of hewing stone. He would in this sense realize the father archetype that is still outside him, figured only in his dreams of his literal father leading the way. Despite having lost a child, he would become an active father in his community. But this is not that story. And indeed, Bell’s severe limitations—he has no creative outlet, no craft nor art, and he seems amazed even at the idea of working on something “maybe just a hour or two after supper”—confound him. Whatever the assorted overlaps may be between Bell’s politics and McCarthy’s, this sheriff is in no resonant way the writer, whose devotion to craft and creativity is continually established on his pages, and whose habits with every hobby he could find have been remarked on in interviews with him and with Knoxville residents and what family will speak to an interviewer. Bell’s limitations here leave him projecting all his potential power for creative and procreative power onto his dead father, until that father disappears behind an inflated archetype. Bell cannot achieve a dialogue with such an archetype, particularly as this one, in the form of Bell’s laconic father, remains silent in the dream: he “never said nothin” (NCFOM 309). Rather than recognize all the various elements of his identity, Bell struggles among them, at times fracturing, such as when he veers wildly from one complaint to another seemingly unrelated one. This means, however, that the power of the silent figure riding before Bell in his dream carries with him more than one element of Bell’s desperately various projections. The father archetype in the dream furthermore resists interpretation into a single identity, for two reasons. First, this father represents not only Bell’s father, but all fathers. As a symbol from both Bell’s individual unconscious, and as Jung would have it, a collective unconscious as well, the dream’s father figure cannot be reduced to an actual figure at all. The situation itself, particularly in the primeval aspect in which Freudian theory would interpret this carrying of a sacred fire, in Jungian terms reaches beyond a literal historical moment, as much as beyond Bell’s individual psychology. The scene recalls Jung’s; archetypes of transformation. They are not personalities, but are typical situations, places, ways and means, that symbolize the kind of transformation in question. [. . .] They are genuine symbols precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings,
and in the last resort inexhaustible. [. . .] The discriminating intellect naturally keeps on trying to establish their singleness of meaning and thus misses the essential point; for what we can above all establish as the one thing consistent with their nature is their manifold meaning, their almost limitless wealth of reference, which makes any unilateral formulation impossible. (Archetypes 38, his emphasis) Bell’s obsessions survey a variety of possibilities, unable to settle on a single problem that might explain his general sense of a world gone wrong. Things missing, that he somehow assumes were always there before, worry him: a lack of manners, a lack of discipline in schools, a lack of religion. Meanwhile he continues to fear evil as something that will be smuggled in from the outside, and eagerly adopted by his community’s children. “These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldn’t even understand, well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you” (NCFOM 295). This neurotic fixation on the details that somehow indicate to Bell a lack of social codes (rather than an alternative set of them) of course echoes Blood Meridian: there were such people in their Texas towns, and they were scalped and killed or run off. But here Bell’s fixations also point back to the inflation of the father archetype: unable to follow his father (feeling guilt for the loss of his child, the abandonment of fellow soldiers, and his departure from his job as sheriff ), he is caught between two extremes: the heathen pollutions of his community’s children, and the impossible power of the father image that he cannot integrate into himself and thus which he all too easily imagines in ideal terms. This nostalgic final image of No Country for Old Men follows Bell’s father, carrying fire in a horn, riding into the darkness of the past. The image returns us to the title. Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” in 1927 and it appeared in The Dark Tower in 1928, three years after he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but three years after the Free State. “The memory of terrible struggles was fiercely alive [. . .],” as M. L. Rosenthal recounts. The poems of The Tower “report the hopes and disillusionments of those years, and Yeats’s feeling of inadequacy for the physical side of the struggle” (xxv). Rosenthal’s proof of this is most obvious in “The Road at My Door,” and indeed, that tide might work as well for McCarthy’s novel. An affable Irregular, A heavily-built Falstaffian man, Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were The finest play under the sun. [. . .] I count those feathered balls of soot The moor-hen guides upon the stream, to silence the envy in my thought; And turn towards my chamber, caught In the cold snows of a dream. (113) Bell ends with a dream, just as McCarthy’s narrator did in the enigmatic epilogue to Cities of the Plain. This dream follows yet another confession, beginning in the tacked-on phrasing of a guilty afterthought that the speaker cannot allow himself to leave unremarked on. This book knows it has struggled, that indeed many of the previous books have struggled, with something it often refused to directly address: “The other thing is that I have not said much about my father and I know I have not done him justice” (NCFOM 308). Our West Texas Hamlet then ends in two dreams. The first is the child’s dream, quotidian, faint, about money given and lost—exchange value and the power of the father in nearly literal terms. The second is the grown child’s inflation of the father to an archetype: like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. (NCFOM 309) This could be Jung himself in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Jung’s transformative dream of a candle surrounded by darkness was interpreted by him as the place of consciousness moving forward through the neverending space of an unconscious too dark to be held away beyond that small sphere of light. “It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive.” But Jung sees himself carrying this light, and when he looks back, the “gigantic black figure following” him proves to be a threatening “vita peracta”—the life already accomplished, lived, and perhaps ended. Here, the
leading figure is the dreamer, breaking free with every difficult step from that dark figure that would negate its progress. The storm pushing against me was time, ceaselessly flowing into the past, [. . .] It exerts a mighty suction which greedily draws everything living into itself; we can only escape from it—for a while—by pressing forward. The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who cannot save his skin with a satisfactory answer. (Memories 88) In Bell’s dream, the dreamer has no answers, and is already turning backwards to follow the vita peracta—in his case, a father archetype moving backwards—through an already sterile landscape (through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin). Bell has no satisfactory answers to the challenges of life, and the dark figures of his failings are indistinguishable—despite what he claims—from the dark future he sees in the soulless eyes of Chigurh, or the man he visits before his execution. Bell can only register that fear that swallows up the self and erases all distinctions between inside and outside, past, present, and future. Beyond melancholia, Bell grasps at the words of Jeremiah, of his disappointed, jealous, and ineffectual God, of a grumpy old man’s conservative politics, of a Lord Jim somehow carrying a burden of guilt under his medal, of a father who’s only child has died. These problems overwhelm him, but they are the manifestations of deeper anxieties with which his conscious mind can grapple while his dreams ride off into the dark following someone else’s light. Bell has yielded his failed father’s position to become again the son. And the distant father leads him in a way that Bell’s father seems not to have done in life. In Bell’s own implicit understanding of the dream, locating it as he does as a dream specific to his father and himself, the longing here is strongly conservative, even reactionary, with a pull backward in time to a selective moment when one might, presumably, with nothing but horse and fire in a horn, start over. Of course, one still has to wonder how far these two would get by riding human hopes along like that with no woman in sight. The father alone seems to be the answer here, with some promise of realigning values and practices toward a pure direction that can only be indicated by him. And the nostalgia here hangs on the dreamer’s hope that through that pass in the mountains he will find just the right earlier time—not so early as to get scalped, but before the fences might hem this father and son into the narrowing spaces of the West after Blood Meridian. The initial conflicts powering No Country for Old Men, then—conflicts of genre and structure—resolve themselves only by falling out of the way
of a new (older) generational conflict that itself falls away to older fears yet. Bell’s dream insists on its interpretation, however much we might go beyond it, that Bell is finally, in this vision, paying some attention to his father, doing “him justice” (NCFOM 308). We should return to this level of interpretation because it both extends and reverses McCarthy’s ending of The Border Trilogy. With the death of John Grady, we had the slightly older brother figure Billy acting as something of a patriarch. But No Country for Old Men’s father wins the book’s arguments so overwhelmingly and insistently that many readers will want to throw the thing away, rejecting it as an unredeemable conservative jeremiad. Even if one rejects the hazy but implied politics of Bell’s monologues, it would be a mistake to reject out of hand the force of emotion that occasions them. Bell’s rants may sound like those of a grumpy old man, but their frustrations center on nostalgia for a world of impossible safety—especially for young people. Behind his regular accusations against the younger generations that, to Bell, have lost their way, his loss of innocence in World War II (deepened with the losses in Vietnam), and the unbearably personal loss of his daughter, Bell’s relationship to his father seems to lie deepest toward the root of his individual psychology.14 The reactionary call of Bell’s dream to follow only the father also stands in contrast to the motherly function of Betty at the end of Cities of the Plain, which was to console and forgive. Where Betty essentially tells Billy that he is too hard on himself, the silent father in Bell’s dream as much as says yes, you are right; the world has gone awry. Follow me, as I carry the proper fire of truth into a better future. But of course, this dream stretches and strains, as do all conservative visions, to get back to a past where the possibilities remain sufficiently uncorrupted by the chaos of change. In Jungian terms, we can also see that the image of Bell’s father presents us with Bell’s projection: where he feels he cannot travel, he imagines his father to lead the way—backwards. The paradoxes here suit the solution of No Country for Old Men, as the father’s solutions to the problems of the son are inevitably conflicted between setting him out to a future incomprehensible to the father, and recalling him to the values already lost in time to the father. Bell’s dream says to us do not go a further step forward. That’s a harsher generational shift to the past than the blind man’s mysterious talk with Culla Holme. But ultimately, to put my original conceit to work in reverse, the fact that the collapse of the jeremiad into Bell’s unresolved Jungian vision is not up to starting the novel, but must rather slip into its form when the crime genre collapses, ought to remind us that No Country for Old Men says more to us than Bell’s dream. It tells us two stories—one hard-boiled and one worn down—and thus eventually it tells us a third story, about the inadequacy of
both responses to a world of male violence. After the struggles of several sons (and a few fathers) in eight McCarthy novels, the ninth ends with a vision of the father’s most reactionary solution: the older generation wins only in retreat, while Anton Chigurh limps away to future evil. Not e s 1. Whatever the politics of No Country for Old Men (which are not only more discernible, but more relevant to us, than those of the author), Bell’s worries surprised me with their eventual ability to alter my thoughts. Noting the desperation behind Bell’s sentiments reminds me how pain of loss and fear of uncertainty is, after all, a universal condition, reaching beyond binary arguments on whether Bell’s particular pains and fears are accurately located by him, or what to do about them. As much as my politics might differ from this character’s, I must recognize the validity of feelings prompting even those ideas I might find objectionable. Furthermore, this is where aesthetics returns as an important part of reading even a politically-charged novel: to expand on thought and feeling without particular requirements on how that happens, or on what thoughts and feelings are added, seems to me a crucial part of any aesthetic experience, and an authentic value in novels— whatever their more quotidian exchange value. 2. John Grady’s self-conscious smoking in the theatre lobby draws the attention of the other patrons to this boy who “rolled a cigarette and stood smoking it with one boot jacked back against the wall behind,” dropping his ashes into the jeans he has cuffed for this purpose (ATPH 23). The waitress at the first cafe he goes into there assumes he must be in town for the rodeo (ATPH 20). In San Antonio, at least, he is a walking anachronism in 1949. 3. Compare this description, for instance, with the one of John Grady “settin” in his grandfather’s office (ATPH 11), to see how important the masculine quality of wood and metal and leather and stone are to a young man’s sense of strength, of family identity, and ultimately of security within a medial position that controls both domestic space and those wilderness spaces outside the young man’s immediate surroundings. 4. Wallis Sanborn, and other hunters familiar with that area of Texas, had never heard this word used as a verb. 5. If I were falling for all this without seeing the underlying intent, I could grouse that no cheap motel in that part of Texas would have central air conditioning for innumerable reasons, not the least would be the cost of cooling all rooms somewhat equally, let alone obviating the possibility of any one room having much control over its temperature. But again, realism is beside the point. 6. I am indebted to Wallis Sanborn for confirming this suspicion that despite Llewelyn’s experience as a sniper in Vietnam (NCFOM 293), Moss is too far from his prey. His shot at the antelope takes an unreasonable risk that he will indeed wound but not kill one of them. 7. Holloway’s discussion of the “utopian wish object” (20) might be extended here to argue that narcotics are the ultimate object that has no value except in their ability to fool a user into feeling that he or she has escaped a world of material exchange. If so, then mindaltering drugs become contraband closest to money in their almost purely symbolic value. This makes them different than other exchange goods. I do not believe that John Grady’s idealization of horses means he has no meaningful relationship with Redbo. Drugs, by contrast, have no similar value beyond the same degree as money.
8. It might also be argued that in Bell, McCarthy has created a deeply sympathetic portrait of a man preternaturally weak in the knees, who—like most of us, outside of our dreams—simply finds rhetorical justifications of old fears and desires, without the possibility of recognizing how he is thus manipulated away from free will by his—and most of our—simple, non-heroic nature as human beings. Here again it seems ironic to me the combination of sly indulgence and vitriolic condemnation that Bell has received in the majority of the reviews of No Country for Old Men. Lester Ballard found more tolerance than this frightened man so old before his time—as if the neighbor who does not vote the way you do poses more of a threat than a murdering necrophiliac. 9. I am indebted to two conference papers here: to Stacey Peebles’s “Bean, Bell, and the Efficacy of Texas Lawmen” for historical information on West Texas Sheriffs, and to Meredith Farmer’s “Coining a new standard for judgment: Cormac McCarthy’s use of Complexity Theory” for seeing the undeniable “ant-on-sugar = Anton Chigurh” connection I could not see. I will return to Farmer’s larger argument, which also partially informs this paragraph’s sense of subsumptive hierarchy, in my concluding chapter. 10. This scene, between Bell and his uncle, is given in roman type, in the place heretofore reserved for action. This makes some sense inasmuch as this placement provides the uncle with the space of a character; we see him out side, as it were, the stricter confines of Bell’s consciousness in the monologues. But the fact that this scene takes up a significant portion of Chapter IX signals the degree to which Bell must take over the book after Moss is killed and the generic elements of the crime novel have dwindled down. 11. Not to conflate Bell with McCarthy, but simply to again examine one connection between the author’s life and his creation of a character, we might place this claim of Bell’s again McCarthy’s in the second interview with Woodward, that McCarthy’s six-year-old son is “the best person I know, far better than I am” (104). 12. It must be mentioned that Freud goes on to restrict “woman” with the domestic sphere, as “guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.” In case it isn’t obvious, I find much of Freud’s explanation simply bizarre: as often happens, it seems to be the case here that again we have someone thinking about a situation in which they have never been: standing in the cold dark around a communal fire that provides the only warmth and light was not a common pastime in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Freud may have found among his upper-middle class patients “how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between ambition, fire, and urethral eroticism” (37). But to put it bluntly, even among the toughest group of homophobic (and thus aggressively homosocial) men on a back-country backpacking trip, the first man to put out a fire if the snatches are lost would not be allowed to think he has won some contest. I regard the irrational sexism (as much as the more outlandish and unlikely imaginative explanations) in both Freud and Jung as weaknesses—even sometimes fundamentally damning weaknesses—in their theories as justifications for the domination of women for nothing but accidental evolutionary reasons that become as oppressive as they do only through their reinforcement in culture. I use both of them here because it seems obvious that McCarthy, through Yeats, is playing with the same material as they were. 13. “They listened with great attention as John Grady answered their questions and they nodded solemnly and they were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand” (ATPH 95–96). 14. It is even curious that McCarthy has made Bell’s lost child a daughter. This fits with the shift in which Bell insists that his wife is better than him, the best thing to happen
to him, etc. But everything we have as evidence of this remains in Bell simply telling us so—with one exception. Bell returns home from Eagle Pass to his wife Loretta, who has cooked dinner and “put on music, a violin concerto.” Outside it is snowing, and Loretta reminds him of “the last time it snowed” there. When Bell finally retrieves the memory, he says, “That’s nice,” but he means that “music. Supper. Bein home” (NCFOM 136–137). The memory recalled by snow remains private: her smile seems not to point to the loss of the daughter but to some moment of intimacy between them. But the snow outside will be reflected in Bell’s dream, where, no matter how “nice” it is “[b]ein home,” he will ride off behind his father, two men without women. And the connection of snow and memory, especially as the memory’s quality (sad or happy) remains mixed to the reader, suggests infertility and death, and recalls Joyce’s “The Dead.” I am indebted to Dianne Luce for this last point.
Wa l l i s R . S a n b o r n III
Animals and Death in The Gardener’s Son, The Stonemason, “Bounty,” and “The Dark Waters”
he dominant theme in McCarthy’s major works, death, can also be found in the author’s other texts. In keeping with the subject of animal presentation and death, four works other than the novels must be addressed. These four texts, the drama, The Stonemason, the teleplay, The Gardener’s Son, and two scenes from The Orchard Keeper published as titled short stories, “Bounty” and “The Dark Waters,” all present animals prominently and are worthy of individual attention and analysis. The Stonemason is a bleak drama, which calls attention to the end of the art of stonemasonry and argues the theme of the unceasing mortality of all living things; everyone and everything dies, and the cycle of birth, life and death affects all. The narrative protagonist, Ben Telfair, watches as his family is decimated by death and his father, grandfather, nephew, dog, and others, die off; these deaths are analogous to the death of the trade of stonemasonry; as the practitioners of stonemasonry die, so does the promotion, artistry and practice of stonemasonry. Additionally, the Telfair family dog, Bossy, dies near the end of the drama. In McCarthy’s drama of family death, even the dog dies. Bossy dies, and so the canine’s importance lies with its position as one of the dead family members. By killing off the dog, McCarthy is including the dog in the Telfair family. In McCarthy’s teleplay, The Gardener’s Son, the author frames the opening and closing scenes of the text proper with passages in which mule From Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy, pp. 15–26. © 2006 by Wallis R. Sanborn III.
Wallis R. Sanborn III
teams are prominently displayed and play the role of harbinger to human death. In the teleplay, a revisionist account of a nineteenth century murder and subsequent execution, stock mules, teamed on wagons, signify human death. Where mule teams are present, pulling wagons, there is human death, and the mule team as a framing device is analogous to James Gregg’s and Robert McEvoy’s deaths, as a mule team pulls and carries, literally and symbolically, the body of the dead. In “Bounty,” the first of two passages from The Orchard Keeper to be published as a titled short story, a boy finds a wounded sparrowhawk and takes the animal home, thus he takes control of the avian predator and thus takes control of the natural world; after the bird dies, the boy redeems a one dollar chickenhawk bounty on the carcass. The boy uses the bounty as down payment on a set of traps to further his bounty-hunting career. This bounty scene is the seminal scene of a major McCarthy theme, the theme of the bounty-value of dead wild animals, and one of many in the body of work where a dead animal is worth more to man than a live animal. “The Dark Waters” is the second passage from The Orchard Keeper to be published as a titled short story. In title, in theme, in action, this short story is a preface of McCarthy’s ongoing textual battle between man and the natural world in the constant struggle of biological determinism. In the short story, a boy is taken on a raccoon hunt by his mentor, and what happens during the hunt initiates the boy into manhood. Of course, this coming of age story is also a narrative of the hunt, the deterministic battle between man and coonhound, and wild animal, and as such, is the seminal scene of the ballet of the hunt. Both short stories foretell McCarthy’s oeuvre-wide fascination with the animal world and man’s ceaseless attempts to control the animals in the natural world, and as well, the drama and the teleplay slot well into the author’s body of work, in that both texts deal primarily with the theme of death, human and animal. The theme of death and animal presentation in The Stonemason is McCarthy’s bleak argument regarding the unceasing mortality of all living things. The action chronicles the deaths that occur in the Telfair family, as a catalog of family members die or are alluded to as dead by the time the textual action is completed. Those chronicled as dead by the close of the text include Ben Telfair’s paternal grandmother (6), paternal Uncle Selman (50–1), paternal great Uncle Charles (62), father Big Ben (102), nephew Soldier (120), beloved paternal grandfather Papaw (98–9), and all of Papaw’s brothers, sisters and children (94). In fact, early in the text, Ben refers to all of the dead Telfair “ancestors black and white” (32). Additionally, as the drama is family-centric, a majority of the action occurs in the Telfair family kitchen. Those present in the Telfair kitchen or alluded to in the conversations within the Telfair kitchen are members of the Telfair family.
Animals and Death
This familial membership even includes the Telfair family dog, Bossy, who not coincidentally, is dead by the close of the text. Early in the text, in fact in the very opening lines of the textual action, Act one, scene two, McCarthy posits Bossy in the Telfair family kitchen, thus McCarthy includes the dog in the Telfair family. McCarthy uses direction, not character attention and dialogue, in this introduction of Bossy [McCarthy’s italics]: “Early the following morning. The lights are on in the kitchen and outside it is just graying with daylight. Papaw is sitting in his chair by the stove as Ben enters . . . Ben goes to the window and looks out at the yard. There is a small dog sleeping by the stove and it looks up” (12). As the action of the drama opens, the two protagonists of the text, Ben Telfair and his paternal grandfather Papaw, are present in the family kitchen, the family meeting place. The importance of the two human characters is indicated by their introduction prior to the dialogue in the scene. Introduced immediately thereafter is the Telfair family dog. This immediate placement of the canine within the family, in the family kitchen, indicates that the dog is indeed a member of the Telfair family. Later in the same scene, as Ben and Papaw leave to work stone, the family dog is named, and the beast’s advanced age is indicated: Ben opens the door. MAMA: And let Bossy out. BEN: (To the dog) Let’s go. The dog looks at him. BEN: Let’s go, I said. The dog climbs slowly out of the box and goes to the door and looks out. BEN: Hit it. The dog goes out. Ben and Papaw turn up their collars and pull on their caps and let down the earflaps. Ben watches the dog out in the snow. BEN: Mama what are you going to do about this dog? MAMA: Aint nothin wrong with that dog. BEN: He raises his leg to take a pee and then falls over in it. MAMA: You dont need to be worryin bout that dog. That dog’s just fine [24–5]. In this comic passage, McCarthy names the dog, or more correctly, identifies the Telfair’s name for the dog. And as only family have the right to give a name (Outer Dark 235–6), Bossy is identified as a Telfair family member— because he has been named by the Telfairs. Though circular in logic, this naming situation has precedent in Outer Dark, when the leader of The Three
indicates to Culla that the tinker did not have the right to name the infant child, but Culla or Rinthy could have and should have named the doomed child—by right and by duty. Family members are to be named, and as the dog is a member of the Telfair family, the dog receives the inclusive gift of a name. Interesting also, is McCarthy’s use of dialogue here. Ben says to the dog, let’s go; in doing so, Ben is using a contraction with an inclusive pronoun—let us go. Using a pronoun such as us indicates that the dog is a part of the collective that encompasses the Telfair family. Again, McCarthy has clearly indicated that Bossy is a Telfair. Finally, the canine seems arthritic, or at the least elderly and unable to move about well, for he cannot balance long enough to void without falling into the waste. But Ben’s mother indicates that the dog is acting as it should at that point in life, and as such, should be left alone to live comfortably. This acceptance of the creaky dog is the loving maternal acceptance of one who loves an elderly family member. Of course, as the text is McCarthy’s, the dog is not going to be just fine, for death waits. By Act five, scene one, Ben is the Telfair patriarch, for his father, Big Ben, has committed suicide and his beloved grandfather, Papaw, has died of old age. Literally and symbolically, the Telfair family has died, for the family no longer inhabits the same kitchen in the same home. From the stage-left podium, Ben articulates on family and death: “The big elm tree died. The old dog died. Things that you can touch go away forever. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what it means that things exist and then exist no more. Trees. Dogs. People” (104). The familial structure of Ben’s life has collapsed, and he searches in grief for a graspable, palpable meaning to the deaths that have occurred within his family, for the Telfair family, as a collective unit, is dead. McCarthy’s direction indicates the family house is no longer lived in or even livable, while Ben’s narrative lists a number of deaths unseen by the audience; the big elm in the front yard has died, as has the Telfair family tree. And as a dead tree must be cut down, the Telfair family has been cut down. The tree, now dead and in scraps or burned, is no longer touchable. The androcentric Telfair family tree has also fallen because the taproot, Papaw is dead, as is the trunk, Big Ben. Consequently, neither father figure is touchable, either. Also included in Ben’s lament is Bossy, the now dead canine, for Bossy, as a beloved member of the Telfair family, is also mourned. Like the other dead, the Elm, Big Ben and Papaw, Bossy is now untouchable, and because of this untouchability, Ben mourns the loss of Bossy. Bossy’s death is an inclusive act by the author, for the dog’s death clarifies the canine’s place within the Telfair family. Nowhere in McCarthy’s oeuvre is a dead dog so lamented and so mourned as is Bossy in The Stonemason—a drama ultimately about the death of a family brought about through the deaths of the members of the family.
In McCarthy’s teleplay, The Gardener’s Son, animals and death again are conjoined, as mules are harbingers of human death. In The Gardener’s Son, the author frames the opening and closing scenes of the text proper with passages in which stock mule teams play the role of harbinger to human death. As such, stock mules, teamed on wagons, signify human death. Consequently, where teams of stock mules are found in the text, human death is to follow. This theme is not unlike the stock animal as harbinger to human death theme found in Outer Dark, a text where the swine is the harbinger to human death. But The Gardener’s Son, like The Stonemason, deals with human death and the destruction of the family, but unlike the drama, the teleplay incorporates violence and nineteenth century class schism into the nexus of familial destruction. In the teleplay, a catalog of family members from the wealthy Gregg family and the poverty struck McEvoy family die, but the focus of the action revolves around the murder of James Gregg, scion to mill owner William Gregg, by Robert McEvoy, scion to the mill’s gardener, Patrick McEvoy, and Robert’s subsequent execution by hanging. Prior to each man’s death, mule teams are situated in either the text or the author’s direction, signifying the death(s) to come. In James Gregg’s case, the first paragraphs of McCarthy’s direction signify James as doomed (italics McCarthy’s): Series of old still shots of the town of Graniteville [South Carolina] and of the people. . . . They comprise an overture to the story to follow, being shots of the characters in the film in situations from the film itself, so that they sketch the story out in miniature to the last shot of an old wooden coffin being loaded into a mule-drawn wagon and a shot of the town. Freeze frame of the town, the rows of houses. Animate into action. A wagon comes up a street through the mud. Seated in three sets of spring seats are seven or eight stockholders of the Graniteville Company Mill and the son of the mill’s founder who is named James Gregg. James Gregg is pointing out various features of the mill village [5]. By presenting the photograph of the mule team, wagon and coffin as the final photograph of the montage, McCarthy immediately identifies the mule team with human death, and the position of the photograph can hardly be interpreted as an accident. Clearly, the author is developing a textual theme, for he posits the fated James Gregg in the paragraph that follows the opening montage. In this brief passage signifier and signified are quickly identified, and indeed James Gregg is later mortally wounded (56–7) by Robert McEvoy for crimes known and unknown to the reader. In this first example of mule
as harbinger to human death, McCarthy introduces the theme of the mule team and human death, and then, the author presents, by name, the character whose death has been tolled. Quickly caught, tried, found guilty, and condemned, Robert McEvoy is to die by hanging on 13 June 1876 (68–9). Regardless that the verdict comes before the mule, so to speak, McCarthy sees fit to continue to place the mule team in the text for the purpose of signifying human death, in this case, Robert McEvoy’s death; again, the author uses direction to posit the mule team in the text: Exterior. Jail. Two men arrive on a wagon in front of the doors and one climbs down and taps at the door with the butt of his whip. The door opens and the jailer looks out. The teamster nods toward the wagon and they talk and the jailer nods and the teamster goes back to the wagon and the two teamsters slide a black wooden coffin off the tailboard and carry it in [83]. In this paragraph of direction, the mule team, identified by the fact that the drovers are teamsters, delivers the condemned man’s coffin, McEvoy’s black wooden box. In this example, as with the example with the mule team and James Gregg, the signifying mule team is easily identified with the signified. McEvoy is hanged at 1313 hours on Friday the 13th, June 1876 (84–5). To make the mule and human death conjugation even more explicit, McCarthy hauls McEvoy’s coffined corpse off in a wagon pulled by a mule: Exterior. Long shot of jail and an empty wagon standing in the front with Patrick McEvoy waiting. The doors open and the men come out with the coffin and load it into the back of the wagon. The sheriff approaches McEvoy with a paper and gets him to sign it. The other men stand around somewhat uneasily. McEvoy looks at them and then turns and takes up the reins and chucks up the mule and they start off [86–7]. Here, no longer harbinger of Robert’s death, the mule nonetheless signifies Robert’s death. For the third time in this short text, McCarthy has conjoined the wagon-pulling mule with human death. The first time the theme is used, James Gregg is to be murdered; the second time the theme is used, Robert McEvoy is to be hanged; the third time the theme is used, McCarthy is presenting the death of the McEvoy family, as the only McEvoy son is now dead; there will be no more McEvoy scions. And the fourth and final time the theme of mule and human death is used in the text, McCarthy is presenting
the death of the Gregg family, for James Gregg was the only remaining living Gregg son; there will be no more Gregg scions. In the final directorial passage that contains the theme of the mule and human death, a team of mules removes the Gregg family plots and tombmonument, prior to Mrs. Gregg’s return to Charleston, her ancestral home: Exterior. Day. The Graniteville cemetery. A scaffolding of poles is erected over the monument of William Gregg and the monument is being hoisted with a block and tackle. A heavy freight wagon with an eight-mule team is waiting to be backed under and receive the monument. A crew of gravediggers wait on with shovels. Teamsters back the mules and the stone is lowered into the bed of the wagon and the diggers come forth with their picks and shovels and proceed to exhume the bodies of the Gregg family. Mrs. Gregg in her carriage waits on in the distance. It is a quiet and sunny scene [87]. In a lonely scene, not unlike the above scene with Mr. McEvoy, a lone remaining parent retrieves the dead for burial, or in this case, reburial. In each example, a mule team labors, carrying the weight of human death. Mrs. Gregg’s material wealth means nothing, because her family has been destroyed, and she is without husband (18) and sons (15, 59), and she is as broken spiritually as is Mr. McEvoy, who has lost his son (85) and his wife (36). McCarthy’s nexus to all of this human death is the mule team, for in The Gardener’s Son, where mule teams are found pulling wagons, human death abounds, and the mule team as a framing device is specifically analogous to James Gregg’s death and Robert McEvoy’s death, as a mule team pulls and carries, literally and symbolically, the body of the dead. In “Bounty,” the first excerpt from The Orchard Keeper (77–85) published as a short story (The Yale Review 54.3), McCarthy offers the first scene that contains the theme of the bounty-value of dead wild animals. This bounty-value, of course, means that a dead wild animal is worth more to man than a live one. The bounty-value theme is a major theme in McCarthy’s body of work, and is to be found, in some manner, in all nine of the novel length works of fiction. As man places bounty-value on specific animals, man kills said valued animals, and thus, controls the prey through killing. This act of controlling an animal through killing is one that man often repeats in McCarthy’s fiction; using force, man controls the wild animals he can, and man kills the animals he cannot control. Either way, man seeks and gains control over the natural world. “Bounty” contains another important McCarthy theme as well, the theme of man’s attempts to control flying animals. Flight symbolizes a freedom and a power that man does not possess. As such, man seeks to control avian freedom and power
through controlling avians, often resorting to killing the flying animals, namely birds and the flying mammals, bats. All of McCarthy’s novel length works except Outer Dark contain scenes of man explicitly attempting to control avians. Clearly, “Bounty” is an important work because the titled short story foreshadows the dominant, oeuvre-wide themes of bounty-value of a wild animal and control of the natural world—with attention here to a doomed sparrowhawk—through killing. And of course, bounty-value and control through killing are subthemes of McCarthy’s omnipresent theme of death. In “Bounty,” an unnamed boy finds a wounded sparrowhawk, and he takes the little avian home. Thus the boy takes control of the natural world through control and capture, but the little bird dies in captivity: It was in August that he found the sparrowhawk on the mountain road, crouched in the dust with one small falcon wing fanned and limp, eyeing him without malice or fear—something hard there, implacable and unforgiving. . . . He carried it home and put it in a box in the loft and fed it meat and grasshoppers for three days and then it died [368]. This passage, excerpted from the first published paragraph of McCarthy’s adult work, identifies McCarthy’s naturalist bent, while additionally, the passage includes the theme of death and the theme of man controlling the natural world, specifically here, man controlling the flying wild animals of the natural world. The boy captures the wild bird, and he boxes the animal; the flying animal, no longer free, dies in captivity, for a broken wing is not necessarily a mortal wound, and a sparrowhawk, a master predator, is not meant to eat pieces of meat and insects from the hand of a boy. This idea that wild animals are not suited for captivity is also an important idea in McCarthy’s later works, especially The Crossing. In McCarthy’s body of work, wild animals do not do well in captivity. However, a dead wild animal still has value, bounty-value. The boy still has use for the dead sparrowhawk, for there exists in the county, a chickenhawk bounty of one dollar, and the boy goes into town and to the courthouse to redeem his bounty: There was a woman at a small desk just inside the door. . . . He stood for a few minutes looking around the hall and reading the signs over the doors and finally she asked him what it was he needed. He held the bag up. Hawk bounty, he said. Oh, she said. I think you go in yonder [369].
For the first time, the author presents the oeuvre-wide theme of the bounty-value of a wild animal; certain wild animals are worth more to man, dead than alive. The boy commences to the second clerk, and she asks if the dead bird is a chickenhawk. The boy replies in the affirmative and states that the dead bird is not yet full grown. The boy tells a lie, for the baby chickenhawk is actually a sparrowhawk, but the bounty is not for sparrowhawks; it is for chickenhawks. Chickenhawks prey upon chickens, and man invests time, money and energy raising chickens for eggs, meat, and feathers, and financial gain. As such, a wild animal that hurts man’s profit must be controlled. One way to control the wild animals in the natural world is to kill the wild animals. One way to promote the killing of specific wild animals is to place a monetary bounty-value on the specific wild animal, in this case, the poultry ravaging chickenhawk. Subsequently, a wild animal’s value to man increases after death, and so the boy lies about the type of hawk he possesses, for a dollar is a large sum to the boy, and the boy has a preplanned use for the bounty money. After leaving the courthouse, the boy goes through town and arrives at a general store, where he gazes in the window and sees what he wants hanging from the wall. Concurrently, McCarthy continues his bounty motif. After entering the store, the boy is helped by an elderly gentleman: Can I help ye, son? He said. How much are they . . . your traps there. The man turned. Traps? Steel traps. Yessir. . . . what size? Them. He pointed. Number ones [373]. The boy is going to invest in traps and enter the bounty-hunting business, for the boy understands bounty-value, in theory and in practice, and as such, believes that collecting bounty money is quite easy. The boy uses his bounty dollar to contract for twelve traps, four of which the boy receives at the time of the transaction. McCarthy dates the action, as well, as the traps are to be paid for in full by the first of January 1941 (374). As this scene is set in August, it becomes clear that the year of the scene is 1940. Returning to the traps and the themes of bounty-value and death in the text, typical of man in McCarthy’s work, the boy seeks control of the natural world through the killing of wild animals; additionally, the boy understands the concept of bounty-value, and as such, seeks material gain through the trapping and killing of bounty-valued wild animals. Finally, the bountyvalue concept is discovered when the boy captures and controls an avian, thus taking from the bird its freedom and its life. This seminal short story
is an important work, regardless that it is an excerpt, because McCarthy’s oeuvre-wide themes of death, control of the natural world, control through killing, and bounty-value are present from the first paragraph of the work. “The Dark Waters,” also contains the dominant themes of the McCarthy body of work. “The Dark Waters” is, in title, in theme, in action, a preface of McCarthy’s ongoing textual conflict between man and coonhound, and wild animal, in a biologically deterministic world. In this titled short story (The Sewanee Review 73.2), also an excerpt from The Orchard Keeper (119–27), man, devolved to the point that he needs aid in hunting, uses coonhounds to hunt wild prey. As this titled short story is McCarthy’s first published narrative of the hunt, it is also the seminal scene of the ballet of the hunt— man and coonhound hunting in an unseen balance, which is the product of more than five thousand years of canine domestication and training (see Chapter 9). This narrative of the ballet of the hunt is also a coming of age story, where a boy is taken on a raccoon hunt by his mentor, and the boy passes an initiation right into manhood. Of course, as this story focuses on the hunt, the theme of death is omnipresent through the narrative. So, as with “Bounty,” “The Dark Waters” is a primer into the dominant themes in McCarthy’s body of work. The story opens with the ballet of the hunt as a man communicates with a coonhound, sight unseen, secondary to the pattern and direction of the canine’s calls: Her first high yelp was thin and clear as the air itself, its tenuous and diminishing echoes sounding out the coves and hollows, trebling to a high ring like the last fading note of a chime glass. . . . The strung-out ringing yelps came like riflefire. The boy was on his feet. Has she treed yet? he asked. No. She’s jest hit now. Then he added: She’s close though, hot [210]. In this scene, the coonhound and the man communicate; she bays, and he follows. As well, the man can ascertain how close she is to the wild animal and whether or not the canine has treed the prey animal. This is the balance between man and coonhound, each chasing the prey, but separately, not in geographic proximity. Easily understood by the reader is the boy’s secondary position in the hunt; the boy is obviously green, and his questions and mannerisms indicate his freshness as a hunter. The man is a willing mentor, and this relationship of paternal-mentor/male student is one that McCarthy will use again and again in the fiction.
As the action continues, the boy and the man race through the winter woods, above and parallel to a rushing, but freezing creek. The time is winter, and the hunting pack and prey are ominously approaching the water. Here, McCarthy is introducing a major motif, the drowning motif, for many, if not all of the later texts contain scenes of animals drowning, and clearly the author understands the deadly power of water over mammals human and nonhuman. Additionally, the winter setting increases the deadly power of water, for hypothermia increases the risk of drowning. The man and the boy continue their pursuit running “down” (211) toward the creek as they can hear the “rush” (211) of the freezing water of the creek, swollen from recent rain, which rumbles like a “freight” (211) train passing in the distance. McCarthy increases the danger of the water through the direction of the chase, downward, and the fact that rain has recently fallen; the water in the creek is rushing, not standing. Finally, McCarthy uses a simile of force and power and mass and density, the freight train, to evoke the mighty power of the water. The man, the boy, the coonhounds, and the prey animal must converge at the creek: . . . Lady’s clear voice was joined by another, lower and less insistent. . . . He could follow her progress. . . . Then she stopped. There was a moment of silence; then the other dog yapped once. Sounds of brush crashing. Two wild yelps just off to his right and then a concussion of water. A low voice at his side said: He’s got her in the creek. . . . [211]. The boy and the man race to the creek, and find the raccoon drowning the lead coonhound: “The oval of the flashbeam . . . came to rest on the combatants clinching in the icy water. . . . They could see Lady’s ear sticking out from under the coon’s front leg” (212–3). After the raccoon is spooked off, Lady is swept down the creek and is again in great danger of drowning. It is at this point that the boy risks his own life and leaps into the frigid, rushing water and, and after some struggle, saves the drowning coonhound (213–4). The boy proves himself adept at life and death, while he also impresses the seasoned hunters with his physical courage. This convergence at the creek, of hunter and hunted, wild and domestic, boy and man, is thematically indicative of the McCarthy body of work. The domestic canine attempts to hunt the wild raccoon in a deterministic battle, and in this case, the wild trumps the domestic, and but for the boy’s actions, the domestic would have died through drowning. Concurrently, man attempts to control the natural world through killing, and the thematic and textual ballet of the hunt is born. Of course, the theme of death is the unifying force of the narrative, as it is in all of McCarthy’s body of work.
McCarthy’s lesser-studied works are important because these works contain the major themes, motifs and action that dominate McCarthy’s major works. Both of the short stories, “Bounty” and The Dark Waters,” foretell McCarthy’s oeuvre-wide fascination with the animal world and man’s ceaseless attempts to control the animals in the natural world—very often through the killing of the wild animals of the natural world for bounty-value. Additionally, “The Dark Waters” contains a deterministic battle for survival between Lady, the coonhound, and the male raccoon, and the theme of the ballet of the hunt, and “Bounty” is the seminal scene of McCarthy’s bounty motif. As well, both The Stonemason and The Gardener’s Son offer prominent thematic and textual displays of both human and animal death, with the former using the family dog in the cycle of life and inevitable death, and the latter using mules as harbingers of human death. In theme, text and action, all four of the lesser-known works bear the McCarthy imprimatur, and as such, fit quite well into the oeuvre. Chapter 2 will be an analysis of the feline hierarchy present in The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy’s first novel. In the text, a feline hierarchy exists, by which felines, domestic, feral, legendary, and wild, can be posited according to the animal’s proximity to and dependence upon man. That is, the closer a feline is to man, the more dependent a feline is upon man, the lower the feline is on the feline hierarchy. A domestic kitten, utterly dependent upon man, exists at the abject position on the hierarchy, and a panther, a wild animal independent from man, exists at the apex of the hierarchy. In between the abject and the apex are felines in various states of existence.
J ohn C ant
When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you.
he Road is Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel.1 Its appearance has been greeted with acclaim by all and sundry, especially those who were less than impressed by No Country for Old Men. Press reaction has been enthusiastic and opinion in academic circles similarly positive, albeit only available in unpublished form at the time of writing. It is the only one of McCarthy’s books to have been received with uniform approval. In every case this approval focuses on the book’s stylistic qualities; McCarthy scholars read in it a return to the unapologetically rich and poetic rhetoric of Suttree and Blood Meridian; and to the author’s willingness to address fundamental philosophical questions in a manner generally out of fashion in a culture that has lost faith in the very notion of the grand narrative. The Grand Narrative of Western culture may he considered to have been McCarthy’s concern all along, focused in the main on that variant known as American Exceptionalism, but always presenting that variant within its broader cultural context, and also identifying it as a product of changing historical circumstances.2 My reading of the novel is that it is indeed a return, but not simply to a former daringly ambitious style, since it would be an exaggeration to claim that McCarthy ever completely From Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism, pp. 266–280. © 2008 by Taylor & Francis.
John Cant
abandoned this mode of writing. In my view The Road is a literary return, a retrospective on the author’s own previous works, a re-viewing of his own work that offers a different perspective to that of the young man whose vision was structured by the oedipal paradigm that we find in the aforementioned Suttree and Blood Meridian.3 In this respect it continues the development that I have identified in No Country for Old Men, but in this latest case the author’s eclecticism, so marked in that novel, has sources closer to home. The “other books” out of which McCarthy constructs The Road are his own; the road is that which he has trodden himself.4 I have already remarked on McCarthy’s habit of structuring his texts in different ways, to the extent that no two of his novels have the same form. The Road is no exception; it consists of a continuous sequence of discrete paragraphs, some only a few lines in length, none occupying much more than a single page. There are no chapters; paragraphs are separated by spaces that would occupy three lines of text: occasionally a pause is hinted by the indication of an ellipsis at the beginning or end of a page.5 This structure is clearly intended to reflect the nature of the journey that constitutes the action of the book. The journey itself is of a piece, a series of short stages, entirely on foot, and comprising a continuous whole. The movement of the travellers and the movement of the text are one.6 The long, painful journey is punctuated by infrequent intervals of rest and shelter or by rare but violent encounters with other travellers. Such a form creates for the writer the problem of maintaining the reader’s engagement with the text. McCarthy’s way of dealing with this gives him ample opportunity to express in rich language that metaphysical profundity that so many commentators have enjoyed. His descriptions of place and landscape are characteristically eidetic, an effect that is produced by sentences that are rich in nouns but devoid of verbs. But the paragraphs tend to feature a double style of a kind I mention in previous chapters and the sparse descriptions tend to lead up to final passages that are linguistically and philosophically ambitious. This creates an inner rhythm that carries the reader forward, buoyed up by the pleasures of the text. For example: He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. the world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.7 (My italics)
Passages like this cause the reader to pause, reflect, perhaps re-read. They contrast markedly with the headlong pace and action that so compels the reader through No Country for Old Men. The passage also illustrates another characteristic of the text: it is initially a representation of the inner voice of the main protagonist, but as the train of thought develops it seems to segue into that of the author. In this way McCarthy manages to imbue the text with a sense of his own presence without departing from the technique designed to elide it. A further passage illustrates the same point: He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.8 The sense of man’s insignificance in a godless universe, one of McCarthy’s constant themes, is powerfully conveyed here. The theme is addressed directly and the author’s characteristic answer to the existential question is provided in the working out of the tale. Both these passages convey the atmosphere of the novel as a whole. The “two hunted animals” are a father and son, cast adrift in a world in which civilization and its concomitants have been destroyed. Most commentators refer to this setting as post-apocalyptic and one can readily see why. A few brief passages are drawn from the father’s memory; one of them would seem to describe a nuclear attack: The clock’s stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didn’t answer. He went into the bathroom and threw a lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass.9 Given the reference to the atomic bomb in The Crossing (and possibly The Orchard Keeper and Cities of the Plain) this is, on the face of it, a not unreasonable interpretation. But the general scale of the destruction of not only a large area of the United States, but of the world as a whole, suggests the need for a more considered interpretation. There are no birds or animals left alive in this world. Most of the trees and many of the buildings have been burned. The air is filled with ash which necessitates the wearing of face masks in order to filter what is breathed in. This ash is present at all times
despite the fact that it rains with great frequency; at the same time, “The weeds they forded turned to dust about them.”10 Only human beings remain, and those few in number. Murderous feral gangs roam the country killing and eating their fellows, such is the reduced state of their being. Infants are roasted on spits and captives are locked in a cellar that is in effect a larder. These monstrous happenings signal to us that we are present in another of McCarthy’s allegorical worlds. The impression is strengthened by the fact that neither father nor son is given a name. If this was a post-nuclear holocaust world then ubiquitous radioactivity, especially in the ash and dust, would have long since killed everybody, the “event” whatever it may have been, having occurred some years prior to the main action of the text. None of the characters encountered in the novel have any of the symptoms of radiation sickness. In this case the “nuclear holocaust” is itself a metaphorical explanation for the state of the world that McCarthy creates as his wider metaphor for the condition of man in the realisation of his cosmic insignificance, powerfully signified in quotation (8) above. The image of the waste land is one that has recurred throughout McCarthy’s previous novels and is an intertexual reference to Eliot. In The Road, this image is reasserted more powerfully than ever before. The ash, the dust, the ubiquity of death, especially the death of nature, all contribute to this image: “He . . . looked out over the wasted country.”11 Ash and dust recall the words of the funeral service. The imagery of the poem reverberates through the novel: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” “I had not thought death had undone so many, . . .” “He who was living is now dead— We who were living are now dying.”12 The Road is replete with passages that express the same deathly sterility: The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put in your head are there for ever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, don’t you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.13 The father’s reason for the journey—“They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here”14 echoes “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”15 The ultimate challenge of cosmic insignificance arises in the contemplation of death. It is this challenge that the Professor fails to
meet in The Sunset Limited. Suttree was a young man; he conquered the fear of death but fled death itself. Sheriff Bell was wise enough not to challenge the unchallengeable. But the father in The Road is marked for death; he knows it and so do we. “. . . he stood bent with his hands on his knees, coughing. He raised up and stood with weeping eyes. On the gray snow a fine mist of blood.”16 This signifier of the father’s doom is encountered at an early stage of the journey and we know that the question the novel must answer is not what will happen to the father, but to the son? and how are they to confront the waste land and what I suggest it signifies? McCarthy’s favoured answer, expressed in each of his texts to a greater or lesser extent, is that of the inherent vitality of the ardenthearted, for whom the significance of life is asserted existentially and in defiance of mere reason alone. So it is in The Road. At various points of the text and journey the pair speak of “carrying the fire;” one thinks of Sheriff Bell’s dream of his father carrying fire in a horn at the end of No Country for Old Men, the fire that I suggest signifies civilization being passed from father to son. Here civilization is no more and this pair carry no fire in any literal sense; but the literal is not McCarthy’s concern. At first we can only guess at the meaning of this image: We’re going to be okay, aren’t we Papa? Yes. We are. And nothing bad is going to happen to us. That’s right. Because we’re carrying the fire. Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.17 The phrase is repeated on page 109 and again on page 182, but it is not until we are almost at the end of the father’s journey and his life that we learn its meaning. The father realises that the son must go on without him: I want to be with you. You cant. Please. You cant. You have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to. Yes you do. Is it real? The fire? Yes it is. Where is it? I don’t know where it is. Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.18 The fire signifies that vitality that burns within the ardent heart, the mystery that is the spark of life itself and that needs no reason to exist. McCarthy reinforces this idea in the last passage in which the dying father’s inner voice becomes that of the author: “In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return which was measured from the first by the light they carried with them.”19 I have argued that the oedipal character of McCarthy’s early and middle period works is notably diminished in No Country for Old Men. The Road reverses the oedipal theme completely and it is this reversal that gives the text a unique place in the author’s oeuvre. The entire novel is devoted to a journey motivated by the father’s heroic quest for a place in which his young son can survive. And this quest, undertaken in the certainty of his own impending death, is motivated by paternal love, a love that the son returns: He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a good father still it might well be as she had said. That the boy was all that stood between him and death.20 His own tenuous hold on life means nothing when the boy’s own life is threatened by sickness: “You have to stay near, he said. You have to be quick. So you can be with him. Hold him close. Last day of the earth.”21 Nothing could be further from the anguished conflict between father and son implied in Suttree and Blood Meridian. I have interpreted the oedipal trope in McCarthy’s work in terms of his raising of his own voice against that of the literary fathers—Faulkner, Melville, Eliot; many more have fed his eclecticism. How then to account for this reversal? The eclecticism was so apparent in No Country for Old Men that I suggested it was no longer a cause for “the anxiety of influence,” no longer an “ugly fact.”22 Jay Ellis suggests that McCarthy’s latest work is indicative of his changed familial circumstances,
his third marriage and his joy in his young and growing son.23 One can well imagine that this might be the case. Indeed McCarthy mentions his son John in his second Woodward interview, describing him as: “the best person I know, far better than I am.”24 This idealisation of the child is reflected in The Road: the father’s determined pragmatism in the face of potential danger is constantly challenged by the boy’s assertion of the claims of conscience. When the father reclaims their belongings from the thief on the beach and leaves him naked and bereft of any chance of survival, the boy weeps, not only for pity of the doomed man, but also for what his father has become: Let’s go, he said. And they set out along the road south with the boy crying and looking back at the nude and slatlike creature standing there in the road shivering and hugging himself. Oh Papa, he sobbed.25 As his death approaches McCarthy gives the father words close to those quoted by Woodward: “You have my whole heart. You always did. You’re the best guy. You always were.”26 However, the evident allegorical nature of the text suggests a further, more generalised and literary interpretation, best approached by a consideration of the novel’s location in fairly specific geographical spaces and the previous literary texts with which McCarthy himself has associated those spaces. The tropes of location, landscape and movement have been interpreted in previous chapters in relation to both individual novels and groups thereof. The “journey” of McCarthy’s work, commenting as I suggest it does on the United States’ sense of its own identity, has traced the path of the mythic representation of that identity, a path that has led from east to west. The road followed by father and son in this latest novel runs to the south however and its starting point is located in an area of woods and mountains where the winters are too cold to survive without shelter. As they journey they encounter features that gradually convey a sense of identifiable place: What is that Papa? It’s a dam. What’s it for? It made the lake. Before they built the dam that was just a river down there. The dam used the water that ran through it to turn big turbines that would generate electricity.27
This immediately suggests Appalachian East Tennessee as a possible location, a suggestion strengthened by “A log barn in a field with an advertisement in faded ten foot-letters across the roofscape. See Rock City.”28 Such advertisements are not uncommon in East Tennessee. They refer to a tourist feature associated with Lookout Mountain, near Chattanooga, in the Great Smoky Mountains, part of the Appalachian range. Any remaining doubts as to the generalised location of the start of this journey are soon dispelled: Three nights later in the foothills of the eastern mountains he woke in the darkness to hear something coming. He lay with his hands at either side of him. The ground was trembling. . . . It was an earthquake.29 This area of East Tennessee is the location of frequent earthquakes. McCarthy’s latest novel features a journey that commences where his own literary journey began, together with oblique reminders of those early texts. On the very first page the father wakes with his son beside him, just as Culla Holme wakes beside his sister in Outer Dark. Like Culla, he has had a nightmare: In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stones where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease.30 We are at once in the McCarthy world of Appalachian allegory: father and son are indeed “pilgrims in a fable,” their progress will be the substance of this tale. The dreamer’s cave recalls Lester Ballard’s womb-like underworld in Child of God. When the father lies in the dark, deliberately waking so as not to dream of “. . . a flowering wood where birds flew before them . . . with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth,”31 we recall the worlds of Wake for Susan and The Orchard Keeper. The image of idyllic boyhood is recalled by the father standing on a bridge over a stream, “Where once he’d watched trout swaying in the current, tracking their perfect shadows on the stones beneath.”32 The small boy of A Drowning Incident watched minnows in such a stream. The more horrific images of The Road recall the later works, those set in the southwest: People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. Others
would come to help them. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road.33 In Blood Meridian we read that, The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. . . . In the afternoon they came upon a village in the plain where smoke still rose from the ruins and all were gone to death.34 As my epigraph for my chapter on The Crossing I quote Billy Parham’s vain assertion “Yo no soy un hombre del camino.”35 In this latest text father and son are “men of the road” in more senses than one. I have already noted the way in which the author’s own voice seems to speak through that of the father in The Road. This trope is also reinforced by other aspects of the novel. East Tennessee is indeed the area in which McCarthy grew up and the father revisits his own boyhood places. “What is this place Papa? It’s the house where I grew up.”36 The dam mentioned above would have been created by the TVA.37 Thus in this novel there is a complex imbrication of previous work revisited, fictional and authorial voices and the author’s own distant past. If the last two of these must remain speculative to some degree the literary intertextuality seems clear. And like all such intertextuality, the interest lies not only in the similarities between texts, but in the differences—the re-visions. I wish to conclude my analysis by considering both differences and similarities, for although the former are radical the latter remain of fundamental significance. Certain characteristic McCarthy tropes are to be found in The Road and these maintain a sense of continuity with his previous work. I have already mentioned the use of poetic language and the expression of profound ideas, often in the form of a coda to a descriptive passage. Detailed and precise descriptions of activities requiring skill occur in all the texts, expressive of the value the author places on work well done—an attitude that he surely adopts regarding his own literary work. In such a passage we read of the father’s efforts to repair the trolley’s wheel mount: They collected some old boxes and built a fire in the floor and he found some tools and emptied out the cart and sat working on the wheel. He pulled the bolt and bored out the collet with a hand drill and resleeved it with a section of pipe he’d cut to length with a hacksaw. Then he bolted it all back together and
stood the cart upright and wheeled it around the floor. It ran fairly true. The boy sat watching everything.38 This passage comprises one of the separate paragraphs of which the text is comprised. The care with which the actions are described matches the care taken over the actions themselves, a characteristic matching of style and meaning. The wording is technical and accurate; there are no missing verbs. The effect of the passage is to divert the reader’s mind from the anxiety generated through identification with the protagonists in the extremity of their plight, just as it diverts the minds of the characters themselves to be absorbed in practical activity. A further level of meaning is added by the final phrase. The watching boy is learning both practical and moral lessons by observing his father’s endeavours. The moral value that McCarthy associates with well-made things is asserted with painful irony when the father seeks salvage on the beached boat, itself ironically named “Pájaro de Esperanza” (Bird of Hope): Inside [the box] was a brass sextant, possibly a hundred years old. He lifted it from the fitted case and held it in his hand. Struck by the beauty of it. The brass was dull and there were patches of green on it that took the form of another hand that had once held it but otherwise it was perfect. He wiped the verdigris from the plate at the base. Hazzaninth, London. He held it to his eye and turned the wheel. It was the first thing he’d seen in a long time that stirred him. He held it in his hand and then he fitted it back into the blue baize lining of the case and closed the lid and snapped the latches shut and set it back in the locker and closed the door.39 That the father feels that he can only return the beautiful object to its case conveys a sense of poignancy that is intensified by the realisation that this is another action that signifies cultural demise, a further sinking towards that cultural entropy that the text identifies as the waste land. In the novels of the Border Trilogy McCarthy discourses on the question of maps. His general refusal to assign psychological motivation to his characters, who are for the most part types, is of a piece with his refusal of gnosis. His characters tend to assert that maps are false, simplifications that cannot signify the full complexity and variation of the changing world, fixed in time, representations of space, myths which lead astray those who think that they can be read. In The Road the case is otherwise: the travellers have a road map, fallen into pieces but still representing a world that is no longer. This map signifies not much less than exists in the world, but now much
more. It is the world that will not suffice. Thus there is a profound sense of irony in the use of the map: Long days. Open country with the ash blowing over the road. The boy sat by the fire at night with the pieces of the map across his knees. He had the names of towns and rivers by heart and he measured their progress daily.40 In my reading the fragmented map, signifying a world that once was but is no more, can be seen as a metaphor for those texts that constitute McCarthy’s own literary past, his former works now revisited. I have consistently identified the overriding theme of McCarthy’s work as a critique of American Exceptionalism in particular and Western gnosis in general. This trope is expressed in the father’s reaction to books: Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.41 The books contain the “lies” that have led to this cultural demise and the faith in the future on which they based their validity has proved illusory. In this respect books and maps are alike. One of the ways in which McCarthy draws attention to his narrative style is by employing occasional changes of voice. I have pointed this out in Suttree when the eponymous hero suddenly speaks of his “father’s letter” in the narrative voice.42 The same technique is used in The Road : the pair make camp in the woods: He held the child and after a while the child stopped shivering and after a while he slept. . . . The dog that he remembers followed us for two days. I tried to coax it to come but it would not. I made a noose of wire to catch it. There were three cartridges in the pistol. None to spare. She
walked away down the road. The boy looked after her and then he looked at me and then he looked at the dog and he began to cry and to beg for the dog’s life and I promised I would not hurt the dog.43 This quite radical departure from consistent technique seems to intensify the poignancy of the scene as the father’s emotion can be more powerfully imagined as he tells his own story. The affective quality of the passage is heightened when one considers the significance of dogs in McCarthy’s works generally: they are frequently associated with friendship, family ties and affectionate relationships in general. It is abundantly clear that the great difference between The Road and earlier texts lies in the loving nature of the relationship between father and son, the complete reversal of the oedipal structure found previously. If I am correct in interpreting this as McCarthy’s assertion of his own voice against that of the literary fathers and that his late departure from the paradigm is evidence of his final confidence that his own voice can now be heard, then it is not surprising that he should turn his critical attention to his own work. Given his declared concern to write of death, it must also be the case that he considers the possibility of the end of his authorial career.44 This also must cause such a thoughtful and self-aware writer to look back at his own work and perhaps see some of it in a different light, or perhaps through different eyes, eyes made less pitiless by late experiences of love. The work on which I wish to focus in this respect is both the most allegorical of the earlier texts and also that which most directly relates to the myth of Oedipus, namely Outer Dark. The parallels between the two texts are clear enough. Each novel features a father and son; the father travels the road on a quest that will end in a death. Violence and murder punctuate the action which takes place in an identifiable but non-specific Appalachian mountain setting. The father of the earlier text betrays a complete indifference to the fate of his infant son, the son he abandoned at birth in the woods in the hope that he would die. In what is surely McCarthy’s most shocking and horrific literary moment Culla Holme remains an impassive spectator: The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands
outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. The man handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witless eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat.45 There is cannibalism in The Road also but the loving father tries to comfort the son and the passage strikes a more restrained note: He was standing [there] checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackened on a spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I’m sorry, he whispered. I’m sorry.46 The comparison is completed, similarity and difference, when the boy’s life is truly imperilled: He was a big man but he was very quick. He dove and grabbed the boy and rolled and came up holding him against his chest with the knife at his throat. The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and levelled the pistol and fired from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from a hole in his forehead. . . . He . . . put the boy down in the ashes and leaves. He wiped the blood from his face and held him. It’s OK, he said. It’s OK.47 The similarity between the two texts is further emphasised in the person of the tinker, Deitch in Outer Dark. I find in him a parallel with the Wandering Jew of Christian mythology.48 In the later novel father and son encounter an ancient man, “A small figure distant on the road, bent and shuffling.”49 Deitch, having spent a “lifetime . . . strapped in front of a cart . . . couldn’t stand straight to be hung.”50 He says his name is Ely—the only character in the novel to be given a name although he later says that the name is false. He it is who announces that “There is no God and we are his prophets.”51 Like Deitch, the old man has penetrating things to say: Where men cant live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone. So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on
the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope its not true. Things will be better when everybody’s gone. . . . When we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He’ll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He’ll say: Where did everybody go? And that’s how it will be. What’s wrong with that?52 The old man expresses the notion that when man goes his culture, capable of personifying death as McCarthy does in the person of Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, goes with him, the extreme of cultural entropy encountered in the passage related to note 7 above. The relation of this old man to Deitch is reinforced in our final view of him: When he looked back the old man had set out with his cane, tapping his way, dwindling slowly on the road behind them like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and spider thin and soon to vanish forever.53 Deitch was a “storybook peddler” and Rinthy Holme was associated with “an old dead time.”54 The relation between The Road and Outer Dark seems clear and intentional. The effect of the intertextuality is to confirm McCarthy’s rejection of the intensely oedipal nature of his earlier work. Although the mythic image of the American waste land is taken to a new, all-encompassing extreme, this is done to provide a space in which a more individual, and perhaps personal eschatology is traced out. Although individual death must come at the end, collective continuity remains a possibility if the generations can pass on that ardenthearted vitality which is the inherent motor of life. Just as Eliot’s “Waste Land” ends on a note of hope quite out of keeping with what has gone before, so McCarthy’s Road runs not “from dark to dark”55 but to a regaining of the lost female and the sense that the dead father’s quest has been fulfilled, that the son will survive: The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.56
The question that the text leaves unanswered is that of the need for that revolt, oedipal or otherwise. If the oedipal paradigm passes with the patriarchal culture that generated it, what will take its place and how will the revolt of those who wish to make books, inevitably “out of other books,” express itself in a mythic form that will carry the new writers against the voices of Fathers and Mothers alike? The authorial voice expresses the passing of the oedipal turn in a late interjected paragraph: “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”57 The Road expresses a sense of the passing of a culture. It contains no intimation of what might take its place. Ultimately the novel goes beyond all of the above and expresses what we all know: that in the long end all things will pass and the pattern of movement that was set in being aeons ago will one day cease and days will be no more since there will be no-one to measure their passing. Or as The Road ’s final paragraph has it: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.58 The mystery hums in the ardent heart but not forever. The Road expresses that paradox that lies at the heart of all serious pessimistic literature: its literary passion defies the very emptiness that it proclaims. It declares the inevitability of cultural entropy, but is itself an example of cultural vitality. Not e s 1. Despite the author’s claim I am not counting The Sunset Limited as a novel. Among the more considered, but still laudatory reviews of The Road is that of Steven Kellman who concludes that, Beckett-like, “. . . McCarthy offers a clear-eyed guide to how, though we can’t go on. We go on. It is, despite everything, a bracing potion, one for the road.” (“Cormac McCarthy Imagines the End”—Review of The Road for The Texas Observer, Oct. 20th. 2006.) Adam Mars-Jones writes, “The Road . . . [is] a thought and feeling experiment, bleak, exhilarating (in fact endurable) only because of its integrity, its wholeness of seeing.” (“Life After Armageddon.” Review of The Road in The Observer, 26/11/2006.)
2. McCarthy’s willingness to address ‘ultimate’ questions is exemplified in the old man’s declaration that “There is no God and we are his prophets.” (p. 143) This is surely a characteristic McCarthy inversion of the Islamist claim “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger,” Muhammad being the Prophet of course. The apocalyptic tone of the novel reflects the mood of America following the destruction of the World Trade Centre (if not its religiosity), just as (I argue) Blood Meridian reflected the mood generated by the Vietnam War. See also note 33. 3. Together with all the other texts to a greater or lesser extent as I have argued in preceding chapters; up to but not including No Country for Old Men. 4. I am referring here to the quote from Woodward that I have mentioned several times in previous chapters. See for example p. 283, Note 4, above. 5. These occur in a central position thus: . . . 6. This relation between language and movement is explored in Eva-Lynn A. Jagoe’s essay “Pace and the Pampas in Argentine Travel Narratives” in which she analyses the way in which narrative style reflects the motion that is described and also reveals ideologies inherent in the attitudes of the writers of the texts. 7. The Road, p. 75. In this passage McCarthy expresses some of his habitual concerns; the relation between culture and the material world; the way in which signifiers become unreadable when the world that generated them disappears—the dependence of the signifier on the signified. What the passage describes is the onset of a cultural entropy against which McCarthy himself seems to fight ardentheartedly in his texts, especially in ambitious passages such as these. 8. Ibid. p. 110. Faulkner uses the same technique to place in the consciousness of unsophisticated characters thoughts that they would not realistically be able to harbour. The father is not without sophistication but the narrative voice does seem to go beyond what he might possess in these metaphysical passages. McCarthy suggests that it is he himself who has “borrowed eyes” from his characters in order to “sorrow” the pain of the world. 9. Ibid. p. 45. The wife and mother is driven to despair at the destruction of her world. To avoid her inevitable fate, as she sees it, as a victim of rape, murder and cannibalism, she commits suicide. The father’s love for the son prevents him from joining her: his quest to enable his son to survive results in the recovery of the female at the tale’s end. This is consistent with the structure of myths of the redemption of nature and the conquest of death to which both “The Waste Land” and The Road conform. The same trope is found in Cities of the Plain. 10. Ibid. p. 6. The “Post Apocalyptic” can be regarded as a genre of its own. I have referred to its cinematic representations in Chapter 11 with respect to Blood Meridian, namely the “Mad Max” movies of the 1980s. (p. 307) A contemporary example is Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, itself an allegory of contemporary British paranoia regarding “otherness.” The text itself extends the cinematic reference: “We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film.” One thinks of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a satire on contemporary consumerism, given added relevance by the traveller’s use of a supermarket trolley to transport their meagre belongings. Extreme images are also conjured by very real fears concerning global warming and climate change: the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans provided the USA with images drawn from everyday reality that were apocalyptic indeed. The war in Iraq is also such a source, not to mention the horrors associated with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I have mentioned the attacks on the World Trade Centre in note 1 above. The Road seems to reflect the mood of fear that has permeated the Western mind in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
11. Ibid. p. 5. 12. “The Waste Land” ll. 30, 63, 328–9. 13. The Road, p. 11. 14. Ibid. p. 4. 15. “The Waste Land” l. 18. 16. The Road, p. 26. 17. Ibid. p. 70. 18. Ibid. p. 234. 19. Ibid. p. 236. 20. Ibid. p. 25. 21. Ibid. p. 210. 22. I have mentioned McCarthy’s first Woodward interview and his reference to the “ugly fact that books are made out of other books” on a number of occasions (eg p. 5). I have also referred to Harold Bloom’s well known treatise on “influence.” (p. 15) 23. I mentioned the importance Ellis attached to McCarthy’s personal circumstances in the previous appendix. See p. 330, note 26. 24. “Cormac Country” in Vanity Fair, August 2005, p. 104. 25. The Road, p. 217. 26. Ibid. p. 235. 27. Ibid. p. 17. 28. “Seerockcity” is the tag of a website that advertises the location to the world at large. 29. Ibid. p. 23–4. 30. Ibid. p. 3. 31. Ibid. p. 15–6. 32. Ibid. p. 25. 33. Ibid. p. 28. The reference to “failed sectarian suicides” is a further intimation of the text’s association of an apocalyptic consciousness with current political violence. See also note 2. 34. Blood Meridian, p. 57. 35. “I am not a man of the road.” The Crossing, p. 414 (and p. 211 above). 36. The Road, p. 21. His boyhood is also recalled in quote 32. 37. As noted previously McCarthy Senior was chief counsel for the Tennessee Valley Authority. 38. Ibid. p. 14. 39. Ibid. p. 192. 40. Ibid. p. 181. 41. Ibid. p. 157–8. 42. See p. 159 above. 43. The Road, p. 73–4. 44. There are rumours of another novel; they remain rumours only at the time of writing. 45. Outer Dark, p. 236. In chapter 6 I interpret this as a parody of the mass. (p. 87 above.) 46. The Road, p. 167. 47. Ibid. p. 56. 48. See p. 83 above. 49. The Road, p. 136. 50. Outer Dark, p. 192. 51. The Road, p. 143. “Ely” has Jewish connotations.
52. Ibid. 145–6. The old man paints a portrait of Anton Chigurh out of a job. 53. Ibid. p. 147. 54. Outer Dark, p. 98. 55. The Road, p. 220. 56. Ibid. p. 241. 57. Ibid. p. 165. 58. Ibid. p. 241. This final poetic passage marks McCarthy out as quite unlike anyone else writing today. As I claimed at the start of this book, he insists that literature must dare to address the serious questions. The reiterated image of the trout (see quote 32 above) once again recalls the boyhood scene of A Drowning Incident, linking the text’s closing lyrical passage to McCarthy’s earliest world and works. “Maps and mazes” are what he has been tracing in a writing career that has drawn on the culture of the USA and had its roots in the mountains and glens of East Tennessee.
1933 1951–52 1953 1957–59 1961 1965 1966 1968 1973 1976 1977 1979 1985 1992 1994
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, the third of six children, to Charles Joseph and Gladys McGrail McCarthy. Attends the University of Tennessee as a liberal arts major. Joins U.S. Air Force and serves for four years. Returns to the University of Tennessee. Marries Lee Holleman, who had been a student at the University of Tennessee; they have a son and later divorce. The Orchard Keeper is published. Marries Anne DeLisle in England. Outer Dark is published. Child of God is published. Separates from wife; divorces later. The Gardener’s Son, a screenplay, premieres on public television. Suttree is published. Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West is published. All the Pretty Horses is published; wins National Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Stonemason, a play, is published. The Crossing is published. 201
Cities of the Plain is published. Marries Jennifer Winkley; later has a son. No Country for Old Men is published. The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form and The Road are published. The Road wins the Pulitzer Prize.
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, Blake’s Apocalypse, Yeats, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, The American Religion, The Western Canon, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark. Steven Shaviro is a professor at Wayne State University. He is the author of Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism and The Cinematic Body, among other work. Terri Witek is a professor at Stetson University, where she is also director of the Sullivan Creative Writing Program. She is the author of a book on Robert Lowell and also has published other titles such as The Shipwreck Dress. 203
John Wegner is an associate professor of English at Angelo State University and was editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal Online. He has published articles on McCarthy, Hawthorne, Ellen Glasgow, and other subjects. Georg Guillemin is the author of The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. He is a translator and interpreter. Vince Brewton is an associate professor at the University of North Alabama, where he also is director of the honors program. Sara L. Spurgeon is an assistant professor at Texas Tech University. She is coauthor of Writing the Southwest. She serves on the advisory board of the Western Writers Series and the editorial board of the journal Western American Literature. James R. Giles teaches at Northern Illinois University. He has written Violence in the Contemporary American Novel and Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren. Jay Ellis teaches in the writing and rhetoric program at the University of Colorado. He is the author of No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy. Wallis R. Sanborn III has taught at the University of Texas. His work has appeared in The Cormac McCarthy Journal and other publications. John Cant is the author of Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. His work has also appeared in The Cormac McCarthy Journal.
Ambrosiano, Jason. “Blood in the Tracks: Catholic Postmodernism in The Crossing.” Southwestern American Literature 25 (1999): 83–91. Arnold, Edwin T. “Blood and Grace: The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy,” Commonweal, (November 4, 1994). ———. “Cormac McCarthy’s Frontier Humor.” From The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor, edited by Ed Piacentino, 190–209. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. ———. “Cormac McCarthy’s The Stonemason: The Unmaking of a Play.” Southern Quarterly 33, nos. 2–3 (Winter–Spring 1995): 117–29. ———. “Cormac McCarthy’s Whales and Men.” From Cormac McCarthy: Uncharted Territories/Territoires Inconnus, edited by Christine Chollier, pp. 17–30. Reims, France: PU de Reims; 2003. ———. “ ‘Go to sleep’: Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy.” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 34–58. Arnold, Edwin T., and Dianne C. Luce, ed. A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Bailey, Charles. “ ‘Doomed Enterprises’ and Faith: The Structure of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.” Southwestern American Literature 20 (1994): 57– 67. ———. “The Last Stage of the Hero’s Evolution: Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain.” Southwestern American Literature 25, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 74–82. 205
Beck, John. “Filibusterers and Fundamentalists: Blood Meridian and the New Right.” In Polemics: Essays in American Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by David Holloway, 13–26. Vol. 1. Sheffield, England: Black Rock Press, 2004. ———. The Second European Conference on Cormac McCarthy. Manchester: University of Manchester, England, June 2000. Bell, Vereen M. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Berry, K. Wesley. “The Lay of the Land in Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper and Child of God.” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 61–77. Bingham, Arthur.“Syntactic Complexity and Iconicity in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Language and Literature 20 (1995): 19–33. Bloom, Harold, ed. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Philadelphia, Pa. : Chelsea House, 2004. Bowers, James. Reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1999. Brickman, Barbara Jane. “Imposition and Resistance in Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper.” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 123–34. Campbell, Neil. ‘”Beyond Reckoning’: Cormac McCarthy’s Version of the West in Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West.” Critique 39, no. 1(1997): 55–64. Canfield, J. Douglas. “The Border of Becoming: Theodicy in Blood Meridian.” In Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film, 37–48. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. ———. “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. Contemporary Literature 44, no. 4 (2003): 664–96. Ciuba, Gary M. Desire, Violence & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Combest, Ashley. “Lester Ballard as Savior? Representations of Christ in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God.” Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (2003): 14–17. Cremean, David. “For Whom the Bell Tolls: Conservatism and Change in Cormac McCarthy’s Sheriff from No Country for Old Men.” Cormac McCarthy Journal 5 (2006): 42–61.
Cutchins, Dennis. “All the Pretty Horses: Cormac McCarthy’s Reading of For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Western American Literature 41, no. 3 (2006): 267–99. Eaton, Mark A. “Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 1 (2003): 155–80. Frye, Steven. “Cormac McCarthy’s ‘World in Its Making’: Romantic Naturalism in The Crossing.” Studies in American Naturalism 2, no. 1 (2007): 46–65. ———. “Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men: Art and Artifice in the New Novel.” Cormac McCarthy Journal 5 (2006): 27–41. ———. “Shamans and Savages: History, Historiography, and the Figure of the Mexican in Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy.” Journal of Indo-American Studies 1 (2002): 140–56. Giles, James R. “Violence and the Immanence of the ‘Thing Unknown’: Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” In Violence in the Contemporary American Novel: An End to Innocence, 84–99. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Hall, Wade, and Rick Wallach, eds. Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. El Paso: University of Texas Press, 1995. Holloway, David. The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. ———. “Modernism, Nature, and Utopia: Another Look at ‘Optical Democracy’ in Cormac McCarthy’s Western Quartet.” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 186–205. ———, ed. Proceedings of the First European Conference on Cormac McCarthy. Miami, Fla.: Cormac McCarthy Society, 1999. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne Publishers ; London: Prentice Hall International, 1997. Josyph, Peter. “Older Professions: The Fourth Wall of The Stonemason.” Southern Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 137–44. Lilley, James D., ed. Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Madden, David. Touching the Web of Southern Novelists. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.
Rothfork, John. “Language and the Dance of Time in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.”Southwestern American Literature 30, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 23–36. ———. “Redemption as Language in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” Christianity and Literature 53 (2004): 385–97. Spencer, William C. “Altered States of Consciousness in Suttree.” Southern Quarterly 35, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 87–92. Tebbetts, Terrell. “Sanctuary Redux: Faulkner’s Logical Pattern of Evil in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.” Philological Review 32, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 69–81. Wegner, John. “Whose Story Is It?: History and Fiction in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.” Southern Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 103–110.
Steven Shaviro, “ ‘The Very Life of Darkness’ ”: A Reading of Blood Meridian. From The Southern Quarterly, v. 30 (Summer 1992). Copyright © 1992 by The University of Southern Mississippi. Reproduced by permission. Terri Witek, “Reeds and Hides: Cormac McCarthy’s Domestic Spaces.” From The Southern Review 30, no. 1 ( January 1994): 136–142. © 1994 by Louisiana State University. Reprinted by permission of the author. John Wegner, “Wars and Rumors of Wars’ in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” From The Southern Quarterly, v. 38 (Spring 2000). Copyright © 2000 by The University of Southern Mississippi. Reproduced by permission. Georg Guillemin, “Introduction: The Prototypical Suttree.” From The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy, 3–17. © 2004 by Georg Guillemin. Reprinted by permission. Vince Brewton, “The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Novels and the Border Trilogy.” From Southern Literary Journal 37, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 121–43. © 2004 by University of North Carolina Press. Reprinted by permission. Sara L. Spurgeon, “Foundation of Empire: The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” From Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier, 19–40. © 2005 by Sara L. Spurgeon. Reprinted by permission. 209
James R. Giles, “Discovering Fourthspace in Appalachia: Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Child of God.” From Spaces of Violence by James R. Giles. Copyright 2006 by University of Alabama Press. Reproduced with permission of University of Alabama Press in the format other book via Copyright Clearance Center. Jay Ellis, “Fetish and Collapse in No Country for Old Men.” From No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy by Jay Ellis. Copyright 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group LLC—Books. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis Group LLC—Books in the format other book via Copyright Clearance Center. Wallis R. Sanborn III, “Animals and Death in The Gardener’s Son, The Stonemason, “Bounty,” and “The Dark Waters.” From Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy. © 2006 Wallis R. Sanborn III by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandpub.com John Cant, “The Road.” From Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism by John Cant. Copyright 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group LLC—Books. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis Group LLC—Books in the format other book via Copyright Clearance Center.
Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no editorial changes. In some cases, foreign language text has been removed from the original essay. Those interested in locating the original source will find the information cited above.
Index Characters in literary works are indexed by first name (if any), followed by the name of the work in parentheses Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 57, 80 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 52 All the Pretty Horses, 1, 7, 23, 107, 136 aesthetic achievement of, 8 Alejandra in, 26–27, 75–76 campsite in, 27 cowboy existentialism in, 138 hacienda in, 25 Lacey Rawlins in, 32, 41, 76–77, 145 narrative, 8, 75–76 publication of, 63 rescue plot of, 75, 77, 80 reviews of, 34, 74 war in, 36, 74 American Dream, 10, 20, 27 expansion, 32, 85–86 history, 32–33, 36–37, 63, 66–73, 85, 88–90, 104–105 imagination, 73 imperialism, 85 literature, 1, 23, 49, 107, 183 moral values, 146 pastoral tradition, 4, 49, 52, 57–58, 87, 97 southern fiction, 50, 64–65 wars in, 31–33, 36–43, 73 American Pastoral (Roth), 1 211
Arnold, Edwin T. on McCarthy’s works, 113, 120, 122, 124, 144 Art of the Novel, The (Kundra), 31 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 1 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 67 realism, 55 Bataille, Georges on McCarthy’s work, 19, 109–111, 123, 128 Bell, Vereen, 108, 113 on Blood Meridian, 59, 67, 69–70, 91 Benton, Thomas Hart, 117 Bible, King James, 16 Billy Parham (Cities of the Plain), 8 travels, 34–36, 40, 79, 81, 148, 167 Billy Parham (The Crossing), 8, 31 travels of, 32, 34–37, 40, 74, 76–80, 191 violence in, 41 Blake, William, 85 Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, 183–184, 191 American Religion of, 85–105 apocalyptic novel, 1–2, 93 archetypal myths in, 85–86, 88, 92–93, 95–96, 99–102, 104 campfires in, 25, 27
David Brown in, 101–102 death in, 10–11, 13, 16, 20, 90, 93 epigraphs, 13 epilogue of, 7, 137, 144, 147, 157 epistemology of, 14 language, 2, 9–10, 16, 18 lawless law in, 25 massacres and mutilations of, 1, 149–150 narrative, 8, 11, 17, 33, 92–93, 95, 97, 101, 144, 146, 164, 166 negative biocentrism of, 49 orphanhood in, 10 permanent masterpiece, 1–7 prose of, 2, 5, 17–19 publication of, 63 relationships in, 86, 90 religious imagery in, 88–92, 96, 98, 101–102 rituals in, 19, 89–90, 96 Shelby in, 15 Tobin in, 15, 91, 95–96, 101–102 Todadvine in, 13, 16, 98 Vietnam experience in, 65, 70–73 violence in, 1–2, 9–10, 13, 20, 32, 38, 60, 81, 96, 100, 107, 113, 135–137, 144 visionary center of, 5, 7, 10 weather patterns of, 34 White Lake brothel in, 34, 81 Bloom, Harold, 203 introduction, 1–8 Boone, Daniel, 92 Border Trilogy, the, 1, 7, 107 ecopastoralism of, 49 map of war and violence, 31–47, 64, 73–74, 78–79, 192 Mexican Revolution in, 32, 34–37, 39–43 violence in, 76, 78, 82, 135, 167 “Bounty” (short story) animal presentation in, 171–172, 178 bounty values in, 172
death in, 171, 177–178, 180 flight symbolism in, 177 Buffalo Bill, 92 Camus, Albert Myth of Sisyphus, 52, 54 The Plague, 115 Child of God dead wives in, 25, 67 dreams in, 60 family farm in, 23 Lester Ballard in, 23, 25–26, 28, 60, 66–68, 74, 108–111, 122–130, 140, 190 narrative, 66, 124, 127, 129, 149 publication of, 63 setting of, 108, 122 Vietnam experience in, 65–68 wilderness in, 49 Cities of the Plain, 8, 107 atomic bomb in, 185 collapse of space in, 144 conflicts in, 64 cowboy existentialism in, 138 Eduardo in, 80–81 epilogue to, 34, 148 narrative, 34–35, 75, 80 publication of, 63 rescue plot of, 79 Travis in, 32, 36 Troy in, 32, 40–41 war in, 31 Ciuba, Gary M., 108, 110, 128 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 159–160 Crockett, Davy, 87, 94 Crossing, The, 107, 191 atomic bomb in, 185 blind revolutionary in, 32, 37, 78 Boyd in, 74, 77–80 Mormon in, 60 narrative, 74–75, 78–79 patriot in, 32 publication of, 63
war in, 8, 31–32, 37, 78 wild animals in, 178–179 Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy, 52 “The Wood of the Suicides,” 51 “Dark Waters, The” (short story) animal presentation in, 171–172, 182 coming of age story, 172 death in, 171, 180 narrative of the hunt in, 172, 180–182 Darwin, Charles, 19 Deleuze, Gilles, 108 DeLillo, Don Underworld, 1 Díaz, Porfirio, 33 Dickens, Charles, 56 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 52 dwelling places in McCarthy’s books, 23–29 Eliot, T.S. influence of, 186, 188 The Waste Land, 52, 196 Ellis, Jay, 204 on No Country for Old Men, 133–170, 188–189 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7–8 Evenson, Brian on McCarthy’s works, 108, 110–111, 122, 125 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 70 Faulkner, William, 81–82 Absalom, Absalom!, 57, 80 As I Lay Dying, 1 influence on McCarthy, 1–2, 6–7, 108, 112, 123, 187 language, 6, 16 The Sound and the Fury, 52, 57 Faust II (Goethe), 55 Foucault, Michel Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 125–126
Freud, Sigmund Civilization and Its Discontents, 159–160 theories, 154, 159–161, 163 Gardener’s Son, The animal presentation in, 171, 175, 177 death in, 171, 175–177, 182 James Gregg in, 172, 175–177 Patrick McEvoy in, 175 Robert McEvoy in, 172, 175–177 William Gregg in, 175 Girard, René, 110, 119 Violence and the Sacred, 120 Glanton gang (Blood Meridian), 135 cannibals, 93–94 death of all, 3, 7 egotism, 11, 14–15 horses, 6, 11 initiation, 95 killing machines in, 3, 10–11, 16–17, 19–20, 25, 65, 157 paramilitary force, 2, 4–5, 34, 38, 147 scalping crusade, 3, 10, 13, 71–72, 81, 88–89, 92–93, 96–97, 99 unsponsored and free, 6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust II, 55 Great Depression, 31 Guillemin, Georg, 204 on Suttree, 49–62 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 8 Hawthorne, Nathaniel “Young Goodman Brown,” 114–115, 121, 123 Hearst, William Randolph, 34, 36–37, 74 Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms, 70 Huerta, Victoriano, 33, 37 Industrial Revolution, 91 Iturbide, Agustin de, 33
James, William, 53–54 Jarrett, Robert Cormac McCarthy, 108 John Grady Cole (All the Pretty Horses), 140 and Alejandra in, 26–27 alienation and isolation, 39, 41–43 father in, 31, 40–41 lower-class outsider, 25 quest for freedom, 8, 33–35, 39, 74–77 ranch house, 23 survival, 7, 36, 145, 155–157 John Grady Cole (Cities of the Plain) alienation and isolation, 39, 41–43 death in, 8, 77, 80, 167 drinking, 32 quest for freedom, 34–35, 79–81, 147, 148 Jones, James, 69 Joyce, James Ulysses, 52 Juárez, Benito, 33 Judge Holden (Blood Meridian), 9, 28 appearance, 4, 88 authority, 5, 34, 99, 102 cannibalization, 94–96, 101, 104 immortality of, 6–7, 93 last survivor, 3, 6–7 murder of the Kid, 1, 3, 6–7 notebooks, 18 prophet of war, 2, 4, 19, 38, 72, 81 rituals, 19, 89–90, 96, 98 and sleep, 3, 7, 18 spiritual leader, 2 villain, 1–5, 13–15, 133, 154 weapon, 4, 137 Jung, Carl Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 165 theories, 154, 159–163, 165 Kid (Blood Meridian) author detachment of, 8 moral maturation of, 3, 99, 101–103 murder of, 1, 3, 6–7, 16–17
personality, 3 relationship with Holden, 90–91 shooting at fifteen, 1 skeptical reserve, 15 wanderings, 23, 32, 34, 74, 146 Kolodny, Annette, 86–87, 91, 98 Korean Conflict, 31 Kundra, Milan The Art of the Novel, 31 Last Exit to Brooklyn (Selby), 52 Luce, Dianne C., 39, 124 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 57 Madero, Franciso, 33, 36–37 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Foucault), 125–126 “Masque of the Red Death, The” (Poe), 51 McCarthy, Cormac absurdist humor, 117 aesthetic, 52, 56, 59, 61, 68, 109, 121, 126 chronology, 201–202 ecopastoralism, 60–61 imagination, 23 language, 6 Melville, Herman influence on McCarthy, 1–4, 6–7, 188 language, 6, 16 Moby-Dick, 1, 3–4, 7, 14–16, 51, 90 Memories, Dreams, Reflections ( Jung), 165 Mexican-American War in the Border Trilogy, 32 Mexican Revolution in the Border Trilogy, 32, 34–37, 39–43 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 55 Moby-Dick (Melville), 1 Ahab in, 3–4, 7, 14 Ishmael in, 3, 7, 14–16, 90 weaver god in, 51 Myth of Sisyphus (Camus), 52, 54
Nietzsche, 13–14 No Country for Old Men, 183–184 Anton Chigurh in, 136–142, 144, 148–149, 153, 158, 162, 166, 168, 196 Carla Jean Moss in, 139 Carson Wells in,149 crime and violence in, 135–136, 148–149 depth and darkness in, 134 dreams in, 134, 159–168, 187 drugs in, 145–146 Ed Tom Bell in, 133–135, 137, 140, 143–167, 187 fetish and collapse in, 133–170 film, 136 language, 157, 162 Llewelyn Moss in, 134–135, 138–148, 150, 152, 158–160 madness in, 133 narrative, 137, 150, 165 son and father struggles in, 136, 159, 163, 168, 185, 187–188 structure of, 133–134, 136 symbolism in, 142–143 Oates, Joyce Carol, 135 O’Connor, Flannery, 90, 123 Orchard Keeper, The, 190 atomic bomb in, 185 “Bounty” in, 171–172, 177–178, 180, 182 conflicts in, 64 “Dark Waters” in, 171–172, 180–182 Kenneth Rattner in, 23 Mildred Rattner in, 23, 26 publication of, 63 setting, 146 traditional pastoralism in, 49 Uncle Arthur’s house in, 25 wonderful inn in, 25 writing of, 50 Othello (Shakespeare), 8 Outer Dark, 178, 195
anti-pastoralism in, 49 butter farm in, 26 campsite in, 27 central vision of, 115 Cindy Holme in, 23 Culla Holme in, 111–122, 127, 174, 190, 194 death theme, 175 grime triune of, 126 incest, 23, 112 murderous outlaws in, 108–111 naming situation, 173–174 narrative, 108, 120, 128–130 nihilism in, 113 publication of, 63 religion in, 113–114, 116, 118 Rinthy Holme in, 23, 26–27, 111– 113, 115, 121, 127, 174, 196 savage tableaux of, 60 Paul Bunyon legend, 87, 94 Peckinpah, Sam The Wild Bunch, 65 Phillips, Dana, 90–92, 104 Plague, The (Camus), 115 Poe, Edgar Allan “The Masque of the Red Death,” 51 Reagan, Ronald, 63 Road, The cannibalism in, 195 death in, 186 father and son in, 185–189, 191, 193–194 fire in, 186–188 language, 184, 193 philosophical questions in, 183 structure, 183 ultimate wasteland of, 183–200 “Road at My Door, The” (Yeats), 164 Roth, Philip American Pastoral, 1 Sabbath’s Theater, 1 Zuckerman Bound, 1
Sabbath’s Theater (Roth), 1 “Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats), 164 Sanborn, Wallis R. III, 204 on visions of the wasteland, 171–182 Selby, Hubert Last Exit to Brooklyn, 52 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 8 influence on McCarthy, 1, 6–8 Macbeth, 57 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 55 Othello, 5 tragedies, 7 villains, 1 Shaviro, Steven, 203 on Blood Meridian, 9–21, 72 Slotkin, Richard on Blood Meridian, 65, 74, 76, 87, 104 son and father struggles in No Country for Old Man, 136, 159, 163, 168, 185, 187–188 in The Road, 185–189, 191, 193–194 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 52, 57 Specimen Days (Whitman), 60 Stonemason, The animal presentation in, 171–173 Ben Telfair in, 171–174 Bessy in, 171, 173–174 death in, 171–175, 182 narrative, 174 Stone, Oliver, 69 Stone, Robert, 66 Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form, The, 187 Suttree, 7, 144, 183 death in, 53–55, 59 domesticity pattern in, 52 ecopastoral, 49–62 fleeing the cruel huntsman, 18–19 Gene Harrogate in, 24, 26, 28, 51, 58 houseboat in, 23–24, 51 Joyce in, 26 memories in, 53
narrator of, 53, 55–57, 59, 69, 107– 108, 193 publication of, 63 quest for survival and truth, 52, 187–188 Reese family in, 24, 26 self-chosen outcast in, 52 setting, 146, 154, 162, 184 society and nature in, 58 urban setting off, 50 Vietnam experience in, 65, 68–70, 74 Tolstoy, Leo, 53 transcendentalism, 58 Twain, Mark Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 52 Ulysses ( Joyce), 52 Underworld (DeLillo), 1 Vietnam conflict in literature, 65–73, 75, 77–78 Villa, Pancho, 32–33, 36–37 Waste Land, The (Eliot, T.S.), 52, 196 Whitman, Walt, 54, 58 Specimen Days, 60 Wild Bunch The (Peckinpath), 65 women in McCarthy’s novels as catalysts for destruction, 25–27 “Wood of the Suicides, The” (Dante), 51 World War I in literature, 31–32, 35, 37–38, 40 World War II in literature, 24, 31–32, 36, 38–43, 73 Yeats, William Butler, 134 “The Road at My Door,” 164 “Sailing to Byzantium,” 164 “Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne) Satan in, 114–115, 121, 123 Zapata, Emiliano, 33, 36 Zuckerman Bound (Roth), 1
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
McCarthy, Cormac - The Road
John Irving (Modern Critical Views)
Octavio Paz (Modern Critical Views)
Tom Wolfe (Modern Critical Views)
Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy, Cormac - Border Trilogy 2 - The Crossing
Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (Southern Quarterly Series)
G. K. Chesterton (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Truman Capote (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
David Mamet (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Robert Hayden (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Jose Saramago (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
C. S. Lewis (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
The Romantic Poets (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Native American Writers (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Hans Christian Andersen (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Derek Walcott (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
H.G. Wells (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Robert Louis Stevenson (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Toni Morrison (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
T.S. Eliot (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Samuel Beckett (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Sylvia Plath (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Thomas Pynchon (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
George Orwell (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Mark Twain (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Synopsis: A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk a...
Modern Critical Views Edward Albee Maya Angelou Asian-American Writers Margaret Atwood Jane Austen James Baldwin Samuel...
Modern Critical Views Edward Albee African-American Poets Volume I American and Canadian Women Poets, 1930–present Ame...
Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy Peter Josyph THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK 2010 Pu...
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Aquaman's Amber Heard Throws Shade at Fans, Says She's Good at Being a Villain
Aquaman Actress Amber Heard Pays Tribute To Her Recently Deceased Mother
Wonder Woman 1984 Director Patty Jenkins Loves DC Being So Different From MCU
Logan Director Explains Why He Took a Shot at Snyder Cut Fans
Aquaman star Amber Heard may be playing an inspirational female hero in the DC Extended Universe but behind the scenes, she's being portrayed by many as a bonafide villain all thanks to her highly publicized personal issues with ex-husband Johnny Depp.
Currently. Heard stars in CBS All Access' series The Stand, an adaptation of Stephen King's hit novel where she plays the role of Nadine, a woman torn between doing what's right and just being pure evil.
In her recent interview with The Hindu, Amber shared her preparations for her new role and how exactly she interpreted the character. "During the course of the show, I’ve tried to do Nadine justice and bring out her humanity. A seducer can also be vulnerable, right? The seduction and vulnerability are not mutually exclusive. I don’t feel as a woman, I have to apologize for one in order to justify the other or vice versa. I think Nadine is no more of a seducer than she is a survivor; she’s using the tools that she has to survive in a world that’s treated her a certain way."
The ever-so-controversial actress also seemed to throw shade at her detractors, claiming that she's a pretty effective villain. "Both Nadina and Mera are totally different. What I seem to be really good at is getting an audience to believe in the villainous woman character! (laughs). Actually, in Aquaman, it was a bit of a departure for me to play someone who’s not using her womanly ways to bring evil to the world. But Nadine, on the other hand, is a character coming with a lot of psychological baggage."
The Justice League star continued: "There’s a lot of preparation for frankly, how people behave when they have been groomed. Owning her journey was understanding people who come out of cults or those who have committed horrendous crimes."
It's no secret that Amber is also a feisty individual who's ready to fire back at fans if necessary and at this point, I believe that she's just out to troll fans and she doesn't care anymore if the hate towards her increases. One thing's for sure though, fans won't get tired of throwing criticism at her until she's proven guilty of the allegations.
Amber Heard is scheduled to return in Aquaman 2.
Also Read: Aquaman Star Amber Heard's Latest Interview Gets 280,000 Dislikes on YouTube
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Is a Tri-lingual Psalter for singing worth publishing?
Chris_McAvoy May 2015
I've been working on matching a traditional spanish and traditional english translation of the psalter and canticles to the ancient versification ment for singing in the gallican/vulgate latin psalter. I realized that there could be a value in having all three translations mixed together, side by side in a single book. What I would like to know from you is whether this book idea is worth publishing - as in - for money. How many people would actually pay $20 for a tri-lingual psalter ment for singing? Besides the psalms and canticles it would include various prayers and possible psalm collects at the end too, so in some sense it would also be a prayer book.
Although monetary gain is not going to dissuade me from continuing my work, it would encourage me to finish it faster rather than put it on the back burner. The english/latin version will move forward no matter what but the spanish translation might go on the back burner. I think this idea is important, but I wonder if it would be seen usefulto the average Catholic lay person.
Here is a side by side comparison:
Thanked by 1melofluent
Earl_Grey May 2015
Which Spanish translation are you using?
If it were available in electronic format so that one could copy and paste them into a document for cantors it would be even better.
Thanked by 1irishtenor
Adam Wood May 2015
If it were available in electronic format markdown or YAML so that one could copy and paste them into a document for cantors output it into a variety of formats, it would be even better.
Fixed. Pull request submitted.
CGM May 2015
I think these are beautiful. I have a few questions, though:
1. How would you fit all three languages side-by-side on a two-page spread? Would it be, say, English and Latin on the left page, and then Spanish and an illustration of some sort on the right page? (It seems to me that it would be important to have Latin in the middle somehow, so that either an English or Spanish speaker could quickly scan from Latin to his preferred vernacular.)
2. What's the rationale for using an older (some might say archaic) English translation, instead of a more contemporary one intended for singing (such as the older or newer Grail)?
3. Will the Spanish be pointed, as the Latin and English are?
4. Will there be a brief appendix of tunes or tones to be used for the chanting? and indications of which tone should go with which psalm?
(5. And should the heading at the top of the Spanish page be in Spanish, instead of English?)
I know this doesn't answer your original question, but your answers to these questions would help me determine my answer to yours. At the moment, I'd consider myself quite interested, but undecided.
Thank you for the support. My guess is that with the right promotion, this could sell, but it might not happen without endorsement ..it would take a shrewd campaign. Through the power of prayer anything is possible.
The translation for spanish:
Biblia - Translation por Phelipe Scio de San Miguel - La Biblia o el Antiguo y Nuevo Testament (Catolica obispo) (from the late 18th century, same time as the challoner revision of the Douay Rheims. It is in public domain and closely matches the vulgate text, even the versification was preserved nicely in this bible, unlike the english edition of the Douay Rheims which paid no attention to it;s versification for singing purposes. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felipe_Sc%C3%ADo_de_San_Miguel
For english: A Psalter for Prayer (An Adaptation of the Classic Miles Coverdale Translation) - by David Mitchell James. http://www.amazon.com/Psalter-Prayer-Adaptation-Translation-Instructional/dp/0884651886/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1430976185&sr=8-1&keywords=psalter+for+prayer In order to keep the versification and meaning identical to the vulgate text, there were particular verses which had to be adapted or rewritten even further, but 98% of the text is James original text. So this would be with the permission of Mr. James. I have spoken with him and he is a kind fellow who wants his work to be used to serve the church. I am certain he would give permission for its use. The original edition of the coverdale while acceptable was not without it's omissions, this adaptation gave it an equality to the Douay translation which it previously lacked. This was the best compromise.
#1. Although I have no definitive answer, my preference at this time is to have the english language on the first page, the latin language on the second page and the spanish language on the the third page and so on in that order. This would mean that the order of languages would be consistent but the they would not always be facing each other. As in - every other page would have either english or spanish open next to the latin. That is the only sensible solution I could think of.
The idea of illustrations is very nice, I am inclined to consider that as a possibility. Since I happen to have the knowledge of where to find medieval psalter illustrations, it would make good sense to use them , they bring new insights into the meaning of the text.
Having a fourth page with an illustration would be nice, but it could also be a bit of a distraction because many psalms take up two pages, meaning 2 X 3 = 6. In the long term having a more elaborate illuminated version would be ideal... but in the short term this is ment to fill a practical need, rather than artistic ideal. Actually I am inclined to think it could make even more sense as simply a bi-lingual psalter of only english and spanish - but that would make it less useful for the traditional latin mass, which would seem a bad decision.
#2. The rationale for not using the Grail translation is that it contains heresies and errors of omission in it. When I first saw the Grail was being corrected I was excited. I toyed with the idea of using it, but quickly changed my mind. Although the 2010 revised grail is an improvement over the original version it ultimately remains a book which does not fit the criteria of orthodoxy - such as what the orthodox church would consider acceptable. The principal I go by is that all languages should be unchanging liturgical languages if they are going to be sung in prayer. Additionally they need to be an accurate translation of the original latin and greek texts, not a paraphrase. You need one - one good translation - or at least two that closely overlap, which are almost the same. It is a principal of unity I am going by, not to mention a higher standard of culture.
The other principal is that the majority of genuinely timeless liturgical music in english or spanish uses archaic language. There is not a great deal of outstanding music made in contemporary language, therefore it is for the most part a waste of my time - and I dare say yours too. I do not believe in reinventing the wheel. I do not agree with many of the liturgical principals associated with second vatican council - the use contemporary language in particular.
In fairness, I did look at some of the contemporary english translations of the psalter used in certain eastern catholic and eastern orthodox jurisdictions. Even the very best contemporary english psalter - the kathisma psalter - while better than the grail - continued to have a fuzzier understanding. That was the opinion of my family members they were my unbiased test subjects. I remember setting the psalms of the kathisma psalter for singing saturday vespers, it did work very very well, it was something I could find myself far more comfortable with than the grail psalter, but at the same time, since it was so close to the corrected coverdale, that in the long run, I went with it instead.
I found the meaning of the archaic spanish and archaic english texts to be more clear for many people than the contemporary versions. In attempting to make them modernized english there is often a way in which they fix what is not broken. It is like rewriting Shakespeare - except that it is in fact easier to understand than Shakespeare.
#3. Yes the spanish would be pointed too in about the same way as the other two languages. The goal of a psalter is that you memorize the psalms overtime, like any other prayer. Once you know the psalms, pointing them, singing them comes much more easily. My idea was to pointing for the four heavier syllables at the end of each verse, rather than something specific to particular tones. Although the pointing that Palmer and Douglas came up with for their anglo-catholic coverdale translation psalters was good, that pointing does not apply to fauxbourdons. That system of pointing also makes it overly complicated. Additionally the physical appearance of the psalter is less attractive with tiny little numbers at the end of each verse. (see. sarum-chant.ca if you want to know what they look like).
#4. I would put a table of fauxbourdones tones in the back with modern notation chant tones and neume versions next to them as the combination of both together has been what I have found works best for me and my friends (we become bored if we use only one tone for an entire psalm, whereas when we mix two tones, a monodic and harmonic antiphonally - the fun never seems to end. When you mix them together you don't ever grow tired of the tones.
#5. Yes the heading at the top of the page should not be in english. I was going to change it to latin, that's just a leftover mistake because I have not focused on the spanish version very seriously (I have about 15 psalms of it).
It will not be used for liturgical purposes unless it has the Grail Psalm translation.
It will only be of interest to literary an devotional types if it uses the DR or the original Coverdale.
I think the current plan is unfeasible for any but the tiniest niche.
chonak May 2015
The English text is approved for use by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. That doesn't make it more likely to be used by many Catholics, but it's good to see that the translator/editor's work attained some recognition. Here's some discussion of the book on an Orthodox site.
benedictgal May 2015
I would buy it save for one thing; we already have the Grail Psalter (English). The Spanish, though, is sorely needed. I just wish that we had a better setting for Spanish Responsorial Psalms. The stuff from OCP is miserable and sounds like Latin night from Dancing with the Stars. It is hard to turn these compositions into something solemn.
Thank you for your comments. I will take these ideas into consideration. On another forum it was recommended that a bi-lingual psalter works better. I believe I will keep it in that direction. Probably I will keep the english and spanish side by side for the first half and put the latin alone at the very end of it, rather than all three in a row on every three pages is better. I too share the view that the spanish translation is especially valuable.
It has already been used for liturgical purposes by lay people...(maybe it could be considered for "devotional vespers"). I think concerns over it being an official translation are unnecessary. Psalters do not play a very prominent role in the average Roman Catholic Church services and I do not believe this will be used with responsorial psalms. Although official approval is the ideal, the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is not in a position to approve good psalter translation at this time in history. Since they will not do it, lay people must take the lead. If in the early history of the Church multiple latin psalter translations existed without conflict, surely multiple english translations can also exist without explicit conflict.
Canon law allows religious orders to use whatever psalter they wish in the divine office if their bishop approves it for them on an individual basis. That could theoretically include this translation. Either it is a good orthodox translation or a bad heterodox translation. Time will tell.
Have you settled on a system of notation for pointing? I find the notation used in the Latin sample unattractive. If you are still looking at options, check the notation in the book "Versus Psalmarum et Canticorum" ( on the CMAA site ).
Since the Revised Grail psalms received approval from the Holy See for liturgical use in 2010, it is curious if you have the opinion that they contaIn heresies.
This book, when complete, should be submitted for ecclesiastical approval of its publication (even apart from the question of permission for liturgical use). If I remember right, Scripture translations need approval from the bishops' conference.
M. Jackson Osborn May 2015
Besides the problems with the Grail(s) which Chris enumerates is the sorry fact that it is almost agravatingly unsingable to the Gregorian tones, to Anglican chant, or to any tones other than the very very simple (and quickly tiresome) modern tones such as those found in the Mundelein Psalter and others. Somewhat better is the modern version in the 1979 BCP. But, of course, this and any others, is not usable liturgically in the Catholic Church.
It is not clear to me what tones, Chris, you envision being used with your psalter.
And, as for the objection above about an English translation that is 'older' and less 'archaic', I have an increasing inablity to fathom why this is a problem for people who love Latin, and worship with a Latin that hasn't changed in a thousand years. No one can say that he doesn't comprehend this hieratic, liturgical English. If we aren't upset by a Latin that isn't 'up to date', then why should we pretend, yes, pretend, that we don't understand an English that 'isn't up to date' but remains quite understandable and is exquisitely beautiful?
The 1979 BCP version, incorporated into the Book of Divine Worship, was approved for liturgical use. I don't know whether that permission extends to all Roman rite Catholics in the US or is expressed with some limitation.
Thanked by 3M. Jackson Osborn Adam Wood CHGiffen
An interesting point. I would think not, but am not certain. By such reasoning one could argue for the liturgical use of Coverdale in the Roman rite: I don't think that this would get very far. Too, in the revised liturgical books which are currently in development, there will only be one rite and one psalter for all the world's ordinariates. The BDW, though, will remain in force for those parishes (such as Atonement in San Antonio) which remain of the Anglican Use, but have opted, thus far, not to be within the ordinariate.
Thanked by 1Adam Wood
Well, let's see if there is a clear indication about the permission one way or the other.
I envision using any tones one desires. Mostly the ones I use, fauxbourdon, gregorian "anglican". I have used simple meinrad tones for particular tones before though, such as Tone three. Meinrad tone three is far easier for beginners than the Gregorian tone in mode three. The psalter is ment to have a convenient one stop book that provides a basis for text for singing in three languages, the pointing question is one for someone other than I.
The way the Latin text in the Latin Psalter looks is replicating the typesetting of the psalms in the "Antiphonale Romano-seraphicum Pro Horis Diurnis" (Desclee, 1928) (The Franciscan Order's Antiphonal). I felt that it was a good way to see the harder vs. soft syllables in the latin making pointing a little bit self explanatory. It's not ment to be attractive, only to help one sing it. This psalter's end goal is not to be a balance of useful and attractive both, not one more than the other.
This book is mostly intended to recite, pray or sing the divine office with good texts actually. The mass was an afterthought, a secondary use whether rightly or wrongly. I'll take your word for it if you say it's inappropriate for the mass, I do not mind either way, even though that sounds a bit surprising to me. And as for the Ordinariate, one can't very well inculcate a protestant text into the Catholic Church without some type of scrutiny or correction, I take issue with that approach. I think the Coverdale translation is better than the grail, but I don't claim it's as good a Roman Catholic psalter should truly be. I believe a text such as this is what rightly belongs in the future replacement for the Book of Divine Worship.
I am amazed at all the legalizing tendencies promoted on this forum. My impression is that no matter how many rules you expect to be followed in the post-1969 "new mass" it is not going to happen. The built in expectations associated with the liturgy influenced by the vatican II council encourages variety/creativity and/or rule breaking. I do not expect most parishes to follow strict rules regarding liturgical music, I gave up on that many years ago. Since it exists for me, I take the option of only attending anglican use and latin masses in order to escape that problem and pretend it does not exist. I'm happy people here are trying to help but...to me a legalistic approach is a bit futile, especially over a translation of psalms. A translation that is based on the two most accepted english language psalm translations, the coverdale and douay rheims ought to have some type of credibility simply by those two facts alone being known.
My understanding is that there are endless loopholes to allow almost any text you want to be sung in the liturgy. Perhaps you are saying that those loopholes no longer exist and times have changed? I'm not concerned one way or the other. This book will be for whoever likes it. If I thought the Catholic bishops cared about a book like this I would be happy to send it to them, but I'm not very confident that their reviewing of it would be relevant. I'll consider that after the project is finished. Perhaps a bishop such as Athanasius Schneider would be the one to receive a book like this...it would not be an average bishop.
I'm happy to take suggestions.
Richard Mix May 2015
...encourage me to finish it faster rather than put it on the back burner… This psalter's end goal is not to be a balance of useful and attractive both, not one more than the other.
You're not exactly ;-) doing much to inspire us with confidence in the proofreading; I think haste is probably the last thing we'd want to encourage, legalism aside.
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13 minutes ago, Sgt_Markoff said:
Oh I certainly agree that taken in context, Rathbone knew his topic (fencing). My quibble is just that his statements lend themselves too readily to Hollywood backbiting.
A former crony of mine was heavily involved with swordfight choreography; all these nuances have been aired many times on other forums and that's why I haven't bothered to restate the plain and obvious such as Rathbone's expertise. I'm just focusing on what I thought was a good point you made, namely that Rathbone's approval or disapproval in itself, ought not always be blandly accepted outright.
By the way my fave flick with Flynn and Rathbone together is 'Dawn Patrol'. No swords at all. They are finally on par with each other there and demonstrate some good chemistry.
Yeh, I'm a Dawn Patrol fan, as well, with Flynn, Rathbone and Niven all giving outstanding accounts of themselves. Rathbone brings a neurotic edge to his commanding officer on the verge of a crackup from the pressures of command, and it's wonderful to see Flynn's transformation from devil-may-care to nervous intensity once he assumes command of the post.
The scene in which a suddenly gleeful Rathbone hands over command of the post to a stunned Flynn who can't believe his ears is one of my favourites.
Of course, since this is a Power thread, it should be mentioned that he and Flynn would be co-starred at the end of their careers in The Sun Also Rises, with Ty getting top billing and Errol in support. That film gave Flynn a brief career comeback.
On 10/19/2018 at 5:29 PM, Dargo said:
Tom, I think your very use of the word "elegant" in the above is pretty much why SunAndMoon made the comment that they did about Errol and Tyrone.
21 hours ago, TomJH said:
Of course, since this is a Power thread, it should be mentioned that he and Flynn would be co-starred at the end of their careers in The Sun Also Rises, with Ty getting top billing and Errol in support.
A.k.a. the only memorable thing about that movie. Well, Errol's hilarious in it, but...yeah, still unmemorable.
There's something intensely emotional about watching two of your first crushes smile at each other and salute each other a la Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.
On 10/20/2018 at 6:56 AM, TomJH said:
Rathbone's opinion has weight, I feel, because he was generally renowned as the best fencer on the screen at the time (he fenced as a hobby) and neither Power nor Flynn ever looked better in their screen duels than when they faced him (in Zorro and Robin Hood, respectively).
But, having said that, as you stated, Sarge, he was human and who is to say with certainty that a prejudice or spite of some kind did not influence his statement about the fencing abilities of the two actors. I question the statement because of the fencing performances by Power and Flynn in their non-Rathbone films. Flynn is simply more impressive, in my opinion.
Having said that, Flynn, who was always quite modest about his film achievements, never claimed that he was a good fencer. He said he knew how to look good with a sword in his hand.
Looking back on those two beautifully choreographed duels that Rathbone had with the two, you have to wonder how much weight all three actors lost in their rehearsals for the duels, as well as the final product appearing on the screen. All three actors had reason to be proud when they looked back upon their fencing performances in these two films.
P.S.: By the way, Sarge, in case you missed it, there was a review of your performance in Beau Geste in the I Just Watched thread a couple of days ago.
All of this discussion about Basil Rathbone as a fencer takes me back to my high school days. And in those days I was mad about Basil as Sherlock Holmes.
As a teenager, I used to get the biggest kick then out of watching Basil fence with Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn and always lose. To me it was hilarious because I knew he was far superior to either one of them.
It was also confusing to me that he wasn't a bigger star.
But I have to admit years later I found out that Tyrone Power was quite a stage actor, as well as Basil Rathbone.
I have to give Tyrone Power Credit--
even though he was a tremendously big movie star he still had the desire, the ability and the courage to appear on stage whenever had the time.
The stage separates the movie stars from the actors.
The old-time Hollywood studio recruiters knew what they were getting when they hired Broadway actors and actresses like Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, or Miriam Hopkins et al. And they were never disappointed.
MaryGH
On 8/13/2018 at 2:19 PM, arpirose said:
Always wondered why he died so young at just 44, Flynn was a huge partier, but not Power?
There was a genetic component with his massive coronary. His father died at about the same age with the same condition. Perhaps, with advances in Medicine, his life would have been prolonged. But, that is pure speculation.
I will also add, the first Tyrone Power, William Grattan Tyrone Power (1797 - 1841) died at age 44 too (what are the chances of that happening??). Many years ago I read a really interesting biography about the first Power, will have to look up the title, I knew who he was, as some forget there are 3 Tyrone Power actors in the family lineage, up to the present one spoken about.
As for the Tyrone Power of the present subject, he was quite gorgeous, I think he had potential but was also underused. Personally I liked him in "Witness for the Prosecution" and "The Black Rose".
I just finished watching Nightmare Alley. I am not joking when I say that I had to lie down and wait for my nerves to glue themselves back together before I was calm enough to think (and type) clearly. I'm still shaking a little bit.
I have a few minor complaints. First, the movie didn't end so much as it just stopped. Second, I was expecting the Hanged Man card to show up again after Stanton's fall from grace, and it didn't. You want a motif, you've got to carry it all the way through. Third, the Death card does not signify actual death. (Though it does signify change, which is what happened, so same difference.)
But Ty lived up to his surname, as usual, so I'm not unhappy, just screwed up. That movie messes with your head, sort of like its main character. Adrenaline rush doesn't begin to cover it.
Any fan of Tyrone Power simply must view him in 'Abandon Ship!'. A role not as well-known as many of his others but its among his best work. And one of the greatest maritime movies ever. Its my personal favorite of all his films. Power really does have a superb filmography but this one stands out to me. Co-starring Stephen Boyd. What more could you ask?
p.s. NO, its not a lifeboat noir!!!
17 hours ago, SunAndMoon said:
Nightmare Alley was a great film. It's one of my favorite of the Fox Film Noirs. I especially liked Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray and Helen Walker. I loved this movie because it was so delightfully creepy.
LawrenceA
Is Tyrone Power the guy who was in Night Has a Thousand Eyes?
1 hour ago, speedracer5 said:
All those Power films you have recorded are worth viewing, Speedy.
But since you're a Flynn fan you might be particularly interested in The Mark of Zorro to compare Power as a swashbuckler to Flynn. Not only does the film have a magnificent, fast paced duel with Basil Rathbone, but Ty is extraordinarily effective playing Don Diego, fop by day, and Zorro, masked avenger of the common folk by night.
As you're watching you might also speculate how Errol would have fared in the same role. Could he have pulled off the fop scenes? We'll never know but Power certainly does, and he does so with a subtle humour that is most delightful.
rosebette
I don't think Flynn could have pulled off the fop masquerade. Contrary to those who say Flynn, compared to action heroes of today, comes off as "effeminate," I think he's much too innately masculine. I'm a Power fan, too, but feel that Flynn just exudes masculine sex appeal. I also think that Flynn had a certain insecurity (if you've read is autobiography and biographies on him, you'll see this) which may have prevented him from taking on that type of role early in his career. Flynn was also more of a "studio product"; I think Warner's had a lot to say about his image. Power's playing at effeminacy fairly early in his career is a fairly big risk as an actor, and Nightmare Alley was another risk, taken fairly early in his career. His early death was truly a loss of someone who could have been recognized as one of America's finest actors if his career continued. I believe that the heart attack was definitely from a hereditary condition. I wouldn't even chalk it up to smoking. Our favorite fencer/villain, Basil Rathbone, was often photographed on set with a ciggie hanging from his lip, and he managed to stay active until a fairly ripe old age.
On 12/9/2018 at 6:40 AM, Sgt_Markoff said:
I'll keep an eye out for it.
15 hours ago, rosebette said:
Power was five years younger than Flynn. In viewing Power's late '30s films (In Old Chicago or Lloyds of London, for example) he exudes a boyishness in appearance and manner that Flynn lacked during that same time period.
Take a look at Power in Alexander's Ragtime or, perhaps even more so, Marie Antoinette (where he really seems like a callow youth), as opposed to the maturity of Flynn's appearance in Robin Hood, Four's a Crowd or The Dawn Patrol, all made the same year. To me one is a male just edging past his teenage years while the other is a more adult man.
Even as late as 1939 and the early scenes in Jesse James Ty comes across as quite boyish, while Flynn (look at Dodge City, made the same year) is clearly a mature male in his late '20s.
As an actor I've always felt that Power demonstrated a more skillful and nuanced performance in The Mark of Zorro than he had in any of his previous work. He's clearly still a young man but that boyishness that had been so much a part of his '30s work (part of his appeal for some while, for me, perhaps a bit alienating) had disappeared. He's now demonstrating the same kind of maturity in both appearance and performance that Flynn had had on display for a few years on screen.
Power was a man with an acting heritage and stage background, who took his craft very seriously, while Flynn had been a young roughneck living by his wits (and skirting the law in the process, on occasion) in New Guinea and Australia. Flynn's adventurous life, which included interacting with fellow roughnecks (he always liked the company of hardened, carousing stunt men during his Hollywood years) had played a major role in the formation of his character.
I think that because of their contrasting pre-Hollywood backgrounds Power can be described as "softer" than Flynn, both physically as well as in personality (though Errol, of course, still had great charm and even a physical elegance when he was young). That "softness" in Power undoubtedly assisted him in his foppish scenes in Zorro (not to mention Ty's delicious subtle wit in those sequences, as well).
For the reasons stated above regarding Flynn, I can see why some would think those same scenes might have been more of a challenge for him to pull off. But Flynn was also a complex man who was an avid reader of, among others, G. K. Chesterton. He indulged off screen in some "Old boy" and "My dear sport" salutations of people at times, inspired by the author's books, that made some of his roughneck drinking buddies in Hollywood wonder, at times, about his sexuality. Flynn also liked to carry a cane and smoke his cigarettes through a silver cigarette holder, affecting the mannerisms of an aristocract that had nothing to do with his background.
Could Errol have used aspects of his literary knowledge of Chesterton characters to give a convincingly foppish portrayal? It would have been a different approach than Power's, I suspect. My money's on Errol but, of course, we'll never know. Can't you just see macho Rathbone sneering at him as Errol, with a cigarette holder in his mouth, calls him "My dear boy"?
But you're right, rosebette, about Warners concern in promoting Flynn's macho appeal so the studio may well have been reluctant to experiment with Flynn's image by indulging in scenes of that nature. For that reason Fox is to be commended for allowing Ty Power to do them, especially since those scenes allowed the actor to demonstrate a previously largely hidden subtle humorous technique in the process.
They were like night and day. Flynn was all about the flashiness and charisma, but there was something more subtle and much darker in Power. There were hints of it even in his more traditionally heroic roles, and he got to bring it out in films like Nightmare Alley and Witness for the Prosecution. Flynn wasn't all style and no substance as an actor, either, but he possessed invigorating energy instead of Power's dark magnetism. They complemented each other. I think that's why I love both men so much, and why I could never choose one of them over the other.
And who thinks Ty should've co-starred with Linda Darnell more often? They had some really nice chemistry together, maybe not Errol-and-Olivia levels, but still great.
I like Power and Darnell together very much but it was really only The Mark of Zorro that gave them the right material so they could really shine as a screen pairing, I feel. Their other three films together didn't give them the same opportunities.
The scene below set in a church, romantic but also performed with a gentle sense of humour, is one of their best in the film.
That scene saved my seventeen-year-old soul.
...Wait. Three other films? What?
Daytime Wife, a minor 1939 romantic comedy, Brigham Young 1940, in which they are cast as a bland couple, and Blood and Sand 1941, in which vamp Rita Hayworth steals the limelight from good, faithful wife Darnell.
Blood and Sand 1941, in which vamp Rita Hayworth steals the limelight from good, faithful wife Darnell.
Oh, I don't know about that. I thought Rita's character was the bland one!
I suspect most people find screen "bad" girls more interesting than virtuous ones.
Darnell's career would get more interesting when she started to play "bad" girls, though that takes nothing away from her charming performance in The Mark of Zorro.
She died young, too. Brutal.
Was it true, all that stuff about Ty wanting to be in an accident that would wreck his face? I mean, I know he said he did, but I don't know if that was a one-time thing or if he was genuinely as miserable as his IMDb page made him out to be.
On 12/10/2018 at 10:45 AM, TomJH said:
This is my favorite scene from the film. They have such a simple but warm chemistry together that brings me so much joy.
On 12/11/2018 at 4:09 PM, SunAndMoon said:
I don't think he necessarily a miserable guy what I've read over the years about him. He's always come off as a very passionate, eager, and mindful person to me. Just brimming with life and enthusiasm. I think he was just REALLY set on being taken seriously as an actor like his father was. It's an undercurrent that ran through his entire life and career. NIGHTMARE ALLEY was the first opportunity he really got to spread his wings and take on a role that didn't have that shiny studio gloss all over it. He had to fight to make the film, and even so, Fox didn't promote it well and didn't want to support him because Zanuck thought that the film would destroy Ty's ""pretty boy"" image. If I remember correctly, he cut some kind of deal with Fox in the 50s where they let him get on the stage more and he really enjoyed it. It let him take on roles that he viewed as more artistically legit (compared to increasingly vapid roles in costume flicks that he started getting shoved into around this time).
On 5/4/2019 at 8:11 PM, Judex said:
NIGHTMARE ALLEY was the first opportunity he really got to spread his wings and take on a role that didn't have that shiny studio gloss all over it.
I find that very depressing. Nightmare Alley gave us this glimpse of what could have been, and instead we got the mediocre Captain From Castile and The Black Rose, which is to date the only Tyrone Power film I've seen that I actively hated. My only consolation is that Ty wasn't having any more fun being in those films than I was having watching them.
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Hoboken Terminal to return to full service after train crash
A New Jersey Transit train crashed into a platform in Hoboken during Thursday, September 29, 2016 morning’s rush-hour commute.
HOBOKEN, N.J. — Hoboken Terminal will operate Monday at full service for the first time since a deadly New Jersey commuter train crash.
During the height of rush hour on September 29, the train had hurtled past its stopping point at the Hoboken station and rammed through a passenger concourse, killing a woman waiting on the platform and injuring more than 100 others.
Weeks after the incident, the station is still undergoing repairs. Some of the pathways have been reconfigured, according to the New Jersey Transit. Starting early Monday morning, Hoboken Terminal will open six more tracks and resume full service, according to a release from the transit agency.
The cause of the fatal crash remains under federal investigation. But investigators won’t be getting much help from one of the recovered data recorders.
The event data recorder retrieved from the New Jersey Transit train had not recorded any data since July, according to a source with direct knowledge of the investigation.
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This Awesome Graphic Breaks Down The UK's Entire Military Aircraft Inventory
The Royal Air Force, Fleet Air Arm and the Army Air Corps have shrunk dramatically over the last decade, but the recent Strategic Defense and Security Review has ordered the UK begin to reinvest heavily into its air arms. Our good friends from Contemporary Issues and Geography have made this awesome graphic showing all the aircraft and units of the UK’s air arms as they stand today.
Watch Harriers Launch For The Last Time Off The Drenched Deck Of HMS Ark Royal
It has been more than five years since the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense shuttered its…
Check out the full high resolution graphic at CIGs site by clicking here, oh and they are selling these as posters now so pick one up!
Seeing these inventory numbers visualized brings a whole new perspective when it comes to evaluating a country’s air combat capability. Of particular note in this case is just how small the UK’s front-line fighter force is. This small fleet seems out of balance with the UK’s capable and fairly numerous information, surveillance, target and reconnaissance fleet of aircraft. Even the Army Air Corps helicopter transport fleet looks particularly small, although it is pretty hard to fairly judge it after seeing how massive the U.S. Army’s chopper force is.
Here's Your Go-To Graphic To Understand The U.S. Army's Massive Aircraft Inventory
When most people think about the U.S. Army, aircraft don’t immediately come to mind. Yet the fact…
This graphic will dramatically change once again in the coming decade as the F-35 is introduced into the Fleet Air Arm and RAF inventory, as well as other aircraft such as the P-8 Poseidon. Still, its unlikely that the UK’s air combat end-strength will ever look anything like it once did as recently as 2003 invasion of Iraq. Then again, the same can be said for America’s air combat aircraft inventory.
JohnDiz
Another excellent infographic. I was with CJSOTF-West for the invasion in 2003 and part of our task force included 22 SAS. They brought some air assets, but part of the deal was that the US 160th SOAR and AFSOC would also assist. They literally didn’t have enough air assets deployed to accomplish the mission organically. It was very surprising to see their premier SOF assets with limited aviation support. And they have less now? The British Empire is truly for the history books.
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Commander in Chief? Let's Ask the Military (72% active duty for GW)
Human Events ^ | 10/20/04 | "Buz" Patterson
Posted on 10/21/2004 5:00:40 AM PDT by GailA
"Commander in Chief? Let's Ask the Military" Retired General Tommy Franks, former commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, recently commented "I know a commander in chief when I see one and there's only one on the ballot." The vast majority serving in uniform agree.
The Military Times, the parent company of the Air Force Times, the Army Times, and Navy Times, the weekly publications for current and former members of the Armed Services, conducted a poll. If the election were held today, 72 percent of active duty military members would vote for George W. Bush while only 17 percent support John F. Kerry. (Guard and Reserve respondents favored Bush by 73 percent to 18 percent). That's a 55 point margin! Media reporting of the results, as expected, was minimal. The Public Broadcasting System's NPR framed it this way, "Military Times Poll Gives Bush the Edge." An edge? It's a bludgeoning!
It's about leadership and our folks in uniform know it. From self-aggrandizing months with Swiftboats in Vietnam, to anti-war testimony in the halls of Congress in 1971, to twenty years of liberal votes and opposition to military systems and people on the Senate floor, John Kerry is unequipped to lead our forces…and our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines now it. Military service is about wearing the flag proudly, about selfless service, about loyalty to country and to the fellow next to you in the cockpit.
(Excerpt) Read more at humaneventsonline.com ...
TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Government; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: bush; cic; election; military; wot
1 posted on 10/21/2004 5:00:41 AM PDT by GailA
To: GailA
Yep been saying this all along... Kerry will be forced to institute a draft if he became president... Most Soldiers would be getting out at the end of their service obligation and Kerry is trying to increase recruitment by 40K... Kerry is an idiot.... If you want a draft vote for Kerry... simple.
2 posted on 10/21/2004 5:02:25 AM PDT by tomnbeverly (Kerry will bring the Big Dig to Washington in the form of Healthcare becasue thats what liberals do)
To: tomnbeverly
I'm proud to be part of that 73% for Bush.
3 posted on 10/21/2004 5:06:22 AM PDT by MadAnthony1776
When CITIZENS who VOLUNTEER their LIFE for their NATION are this solid behind President Bush, how can liberal grubby little ungrateful parasitic voters still disagree.
If there was ever an argument in favor of a Heinleinesque society, this is it.
First Cav!
Blackhawk Sir!
4 posted on 10/21/2004 5:15:37 AM PDT by animoveritas (Dominus nos benedicat, et ab omni malo defendant)
There are two types of Presidential Candidates:
Kerry, he cannot handle the ads by the Swift Boat veterans which criticize his Vietnam war record. Kerry has been crying and whining over these ads and the movie "Stolen Honor" and can’t handle it anymore, he has even filed a complaint. What type of Commander In Chief would he make if he can’t handle the heat?
Bush, he can handle the heat from moveon.org, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11 movie, war protestors, terrorists, and the world. He is a tough strong Commander In Chief and a fearless warrior who keeps on standing tall, positive, and strong. Nothing fazes President Bush.
On November 2004 I will vote for President Bush. I would like to see a real man as our President and not a rich spoiled crybaby Gigolo.
5 posted on 10/21/2004 5:17:23 AM PDT by Sadie789
To: Sadie789; All
IF our Military who lay all on the line to preserve freedom and liberty not only for us but for others can't TRUST the man who wants to be their CIC then that man is UNFIT FOR COMMAND!
6 posted on 10/21/2004 5:26:23 AM PDT by GailA ( hanoi john, I'm for the death penalty for terrorist, before I impose a moratorium on it.)
You're right. UNFIT FOR COMMAND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
To: Sadie789
I hope you know that I'm talking about Kerry when I say Unfit For Command, because I am.
That's a 55 point margin!
There's nothing marginal about an overwhelming vote of confidence for a wartime leader from people who are absorbing the heat of battle.
9 posted on 10/21/2004 5:35:18 AM PDT by TADSLOS (Right Wing Infidel since 1954)
To: MadAnthony1776
A customer in my office yesterday made an interesting point about the polls we're seeing all over the news. The majority, if not all, of these prominent polling agencies do not include our military personnel deployed all over the world.
10 posted on 10/21/2004 5:39:04 AM PDT by Quilla
Thank you for posting this. If the men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line for our country and endure hardship want President Bush to stay as their commender in chief, then the very least that those of us who are not serving can do is to go out and campaign for the person the troops overwhelmingly want!
God bless our troops, God bless President Bush, and God bless America!
11 posted on 10/21/2004 5:39:52 AM PDT by Steve Alafia
Of course I KNEW exactly who you meant...that crapweasle hanoi john f'n skerry!
As the daughter of a WWII Vet, the wife of a volunteer Vietnam Era Vet and a mom of 2 grown sons I KNOW who is the REAL leader..GW BUSH. I've already cast my vote Monday for Dubya, hubby goes Saturday to vote for GW. My youngest cast his also for GW.
Just over 418,000 have early voted in TN..a 63% increase over 2000 election.
12 posted on 10/21/2004 5:41:28 AM PDT by GailA ( hanoi john, I'm for the death penalty for terrorist, before I impose a moratorium on it.)
GailA Thanks for all of the information that we get from you here in the Memphis area.
13 posted on 10/21/2004 5:42:47 AM PDT by Coldwater Creek
I know exactly how you feel. My husband is a Vietnam Era Veteran and he volunteered too. There were brave young men back in those days.
14 posted on 10/21/2004 5:47:01 AM PDT by Sadie789
To: Steve Alafia
God Bless Our Troops!!!!!!!!!!!!!
God Bless President Bush and God Bless America!
These troops know that if Kerry gets in, they will sever the UN, not the US!
16 posted on 10/21/2004 6:01:54 AM PDT by 4everontheRight (John Kerry - Serving the UN, not the US)
To: 4everontheRight
They know their pay and their housing will suffer too. Their families will bare the brunt of the lack of pay raises and bad housing. GW has gotten them 4 pay raises in 4 years and is working on their housing issues.
There was a $1.3 Billion Veterans healthcare package in the $87 Billion, hanoi john voted for before he voted against. Be sure to tell any Vet you know about that. And he and breck girl were 'to busy' to vote for the latest pay raise for the Troops they supposedly 'respect'.
FYI....don't see Human Events listed here....
Good find on the article....some of my friends in the military will be glad to see it. :-)
Commander in Chief? Let's Ask the Military
Retired General Tommy Franks, former commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, recently commented "I know a commander in chief when I see one and there's only one on the ballot." The vast majority serving in uniform agree.
It's about leadership and our folks in uniform know it. From self-aggrandizing months with Swiftboats in Vietnam, to anti-war testimony in the halls of Congress in 1971, to twenty years of liberal votes and opposition to military systems and people on the Senate floor, John Kerry is unequipped to lead our forces...and our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines now it. Military service is about wearing the flag proudly, about selfless service, about loyalty to country and to the fellow next to you in the cockpit.
Why does it matter? Because it's our military whom we send to fight our wars and they deserve the best we can provide them and because they vote. There are 1.4 million personnel in active duty service today. There's an additional almost 900,000 in the National Guard and Reserves. Military members vote in higher percentages than the general American public. In the presidential election of 2000, approximately 70 percent of active duty members voted compared with about 51 percent of the general public, according to federal election figures.
Last week, the Annenberg Public Policy Center released a long-awaited study of the opinions and voting habits of service men and women. The conclusion: service members are upbeat on Bush, the war in Iraq, the economy and they intend to vote. The polling sample was comprised of 655 adults who have either served on active duty during this year or family members of those who served this year. The results are equally revealing.
Sixty-nine percent of those polled had a favorable opinion of Bush and 23 percent an unfavorable opinion. Only 29 percent had a favorable opinion of Kerry, while 54 percent had an unfavorable opinion. When asked who they would trust more in handling the responsibilities of the commander in chief, 69 percent preferred Bush to only 24 percent for Kerry.
Our folks in uniform want leadership. They deserve a commander who says what he means, and means what he says. They don't particularly care for nuance. They don't want to defer the fight; they want to take it on. While they are fighting for a just and noble cause, Kerry tells the New York Times, "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." Our troops think of many things when Al Qaeda and the Ba'athists come to mind, many of them unprintable, "nuisance" isn't one of them.
While they have liberated two nations from oppressive regimes, Kerry calls their efforts, "the wrong war at the wrong time." While they prepare Iraq for democracy and have eliminated another haven for terrorists, Kerry calls it a "grand diversion."
Liberals live in a September 10th, 2001, world. The tragic next day was an aberration. They want a return to the days of Bill Clinton and Richard Clarke when terrorism was something that happened overseas and generally to our military or our diplomats in embassies. Our troops deal with the life-and-death realities every day and they know better.
Our troops don't want a return to the failed leadership of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. That's what they see when they see Kerry. In fact, the Clinton hangover lingers. Our troops will have their say. This November 2 will be Veteran's Day. It's obvious and particularly troubling for liberals -- our troops have a strong and popular commander in chief in Dubya -- and they don't want to serve Kerry.
19 posted on 01/18/2005 10:53:26 AM PST by kinsman redeemer (the real enemy seeks to devour what is good)
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Applications Close 1 February 2021
Coast Participation Grants
The Coast Protection Board’s Coastal Participation Grants support volunteer groups to partner with local government to undertake small-scale coastal management initiatives. Grants of up to $10,000 are available. The grant funding will be delivered by the Coast Protection Board with the support of the Department for Environment and Water (DEW). In accordance with the Coast Protection Act 1972, the Board can provide grants of up to 80 per cent of the total cost of approved coastal projects. Applicants must contribute a minimum of 20 per cent of the total project costs, which can include cash or in-kind support.
The objectives of these grants are to:
Involve communities in coastal management.
Enhance community skills and knowledge in rehabilitation, restoration and conservation of the coast and marine environment.
Facilitate partnerships in coast and marine management.
Encourage environmental protection in the wider community.
Achieve practical management actions and on-ground works which enhance conservation values and/or tackle the causes of coast and marine degradation.
For further information visit: https://www.environment.sa.gov.au/topics/coasts/grants-and-opportunities/coast-participation-grants
Round 2 2020–21 is now open until 1 February 2021.
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The coalition is comprised of some of the state’s largest corporations—including the Coca-Cola Company, First Data, Google, and Marriott.
These companies know that treating all Georgians and visitors fairly is crucial to maintaining Georgia’s reputation as one of the best places to do business—and it’s crucial to attracting and retaining the top talent we need to create a vibrant workforce.
Ronnie Chance, a former state Senate majority leader who is heading the coalition, says this effort will help Georgia’s already booming economy ensure longterm success:
“Georgia’s economy is expanding, and with our commitment to an excellent business climate, we are poised for tremendous growth. When Georgia businesses prosper, Georgia families prosper, so we all have a stake in bolstering the image of our state and existing businesses to attract the diverse, skilled workforce that is crucial to future success.”
Dave Stockert, CEO of Post Properties, said Georgia Prospers simply builds on the qualities for which Georgians are already known.
“Part of what makes our business climate so appealing is Southern hospitality,” Stockert said. “Georgia Prospers wants the world to know this is a welcoming state. When people feel welcome, they feel at home and more likely to want to live here, more likely to invest here, more likely to open a business here. Georgia’s hospitality is genuine and isn’t just market-driven, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a market driver.”
“First Data prides itself on being a workplace free from discrimination whether it is based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation or gender identity. We know that it’s the right thing to do and it’s good for business,” said Cindy Armine-Klein, Executive Vice President and leader of UNITY, First Data’s LGBT Employee Resource Group. “As a leading Atlanta-based company, First Data is proud to stand with Georgia Prospers.”
In the coming weeks and months, the roster of Georgia businesses speaking out for non-discrimination will continue to grow. CLICK HERE to see the full list or if your business wants to join the coalition.
Today, Georgia businesses are standing together to announce the launch of Georgia Prospers, a coalition dedicated to the principle of nondiscrimination as a key to building and maintaining an economically competitive state.
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American Theatre Releases Annual October Season Preview Issue and Top 10 & 20 ‘Most’ Lists
Press Release (updated **)
American Theatre magazine, published by Theatre Communications Group (TCG), has released its annual October Season Preview issue, which includes lists of the Top 10 Most-Produced Plays and Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights for the new season.
Based on the 2018-19 seasons reported by 387 TCG’s Member Theatres, these lists customarily omit holiday-themed shows (The Santaland Diaries and A Christmas Carol) as well as works by Shakespeare.
Lucas Hnath will be the most-produced playwright, with 33 total productions, including 27 productions of the most-produced play, A Doll’s House, Part 2.
These lists appear online at AmericanTheatre.org, as well as in the October 2018 Season Preview issue of American Theatre magazine.
This year’s 11 most-produced plays include works by 9 female playwrights (and 2 female composers) opposite 3 male playwrights, a historic margin for this list, while the 20 most-produced playwrights comprises 11 women and 9 men. What’s more, there are 6 playwrights of color on the most-produced playwrights’ list, making it the most racially diverse it’s ever been.
On September 20 from 6 to 7:30 pm, American Theatre celebrated the launch of the lists through a free live-streamed event at The Lark, 311 W 43rd St #406, New York, NY 10036. At this free event, American Theatre editors discussed the lists and their significance for the state of the field. They also interviewed playwrights Lucas Hnath and Karen Zacarías, and actor Quincy Tyler Bernstine performed an excerpt from A Doll’s House, Part 2. The event was live-streamed on Facebook, and the audio will become an episode of American Theatre’s Offscript podcast.
“Ever since we began reporting on our Member Theatre’s seasons back in 1994, the Top 10 list has been a bellwether of trends in our field,” said Teresa Eyring, executive director of TCG. “While much work remains, these new lists give us hope that years of sustained activism for gender parity and racial equity on our stages may at last be gaining enough momentum to affect systemic change.”
“It’s humbling to think of these plays I’ve written being produced so widely,” said Lucas Hnath. “To think of theatremakers across the country having their own unique encounters with A Doll’s House, Part 2, in addition to The Christians, Red Speedo and others, rendering them in ways I could never anticipate or imagine. It’s an incredible honor.”
American Theatre’s Top 10 Most-Produced Plays of 2018-19:
A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath: 27
Sweat by Lynn Nottage: 16
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, adapted by Simon Stephens from the novel by Mark Haddon: 13
Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon: 13 **
The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe: 13
Fun Home book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel: 12
Indecent by Paula Vogel: 12
Native Gardens by Karen Zacarías: 12
Skeleton Crew by Dominique Morisseau: 11
Once, book by Enda Walsh and music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, based on the film by John Carney: 9
Pride and Prejudice by Kate Hamill, based on the novel by Jane Austen: 9
Lauren Gunderson, last year’s most-produced playwright, is back at #2. New to the top of the list is Skeleton Crew author Dominique Morisseau, who said, “To be named the 3rd most-produced playwright in the country makes me greatly hopeful that I can be part of shifting the cultural landscape of theatre. That it won’t be such an anomaly for artists like me to be produced. That students won’t be starving (as I once did) for representations of themselves in theatre curriculum. And mostly that I can continue to help normalize black women writers as part of our studied theatre literary canon.”
American Theatre’s Top 20 Most-Produced Playwrights of 2018-19:
Lucas Hnath 33
Lauren Gunderson 29 (including 14 co-writing credits)
Dominique Morisseau 26 (including 1 co-writing credit)
Lynn Nottage 20 (including 1 co-writing credit)
Karen Zacarías 18 (including 3 co-writing credits)
Kate Hamill 18
Paula Vogel 18
Lisa Kron 17 (including 13 co-writing credits)
Simon Stephens 17
August Wilson 16 (including 2 co-writing credits)
Sarah DeLappe 13
Ken Ludwig 12
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins 11
Jen Silverman 11
Christina Ham 10
Enda Walsh 10 (including 9 co-writing credits)
Tennessee Williams 10 (including 1 co-writing credit)
Bess Wohl 9
Duncan Macmillan 9
Sam Shepard 9
Photo (above) courtesy of American Theatre: Laurie Metcalf, Chris Cooper, and Jayne Houdyshell in A Doll’s House, Part 2 on Broadway in 2017.
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Witcher 3 Inspired Indie RPG 'Knights of Light' Kickstarter Campaign Launched
By Rishi Alwani | Updated: 7 August 2018 13:05 IST
Knights of Light is developed in Egypt by Rumbling Games
It has a goal of around Rs. 80 lacs
The campaign ends on September 23
Knights of Light is an open-world action role-playing game inspired by The Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed. It's being developed by Egypt-based Rumbling Games. In our interview with the studio's co-founder, Ahmed Mousa, he stated that development on Knights of Light was self-funded but would be on Kickstarter in time. And it appears that time is now. Rumbling Games has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Knights of Light. The historical RPG is slated for a PC release (both Windows and Linux) with the option of a DRM-free purchase. There are plans for console ports including the PS4 which should come as no surprise considering the studio is an official self-publisher on Sony's PlayStation platform.
"Targeted platforms are (PC / PlayStation / Xbox) with other platforms under consideration depending on the stretch goals. However the initial platform will be the PC (Windows and Linux). The console ports availability with the PC release will depend on the stretch goals," the team's Kickstarter page reads. Knights of Light Kickstarter rewards range from $12 (around Rs. 825) for 4K wallpapers to $9,251 (close to Rs. 6.36 lacs) which nets you a includes digital and physical copies in addition to an NPC, its custom dialogue, and its own location designed by you as well as a guided tour of Egypt by Rumbling Games' CEO. It has an all or nothing goal of $115,554 (around Rs. 80 lacs) with September 23 being the last day of the campaign.
Where Knights of Light differs from other games is in its setting, focussing on the battle of Al Qadissiyah between the Sassanian Empire and the Islamic Caliphate in 636 AD.
"The characters and bosses are based on actual historical figures, while the world and setting is more realistic much like Assassin’s Creed franchise," Mousa explained. It’s also planned as a franchise akin to Ubisoft’s historical series. "The theme and setting of the whole franchise will feature the Middle Eastern culture from the story to the gameplay elements,” says Mousa. "Even a simple cooking mechanic based on Middle Eastern recipes will be very interesting to the gaming community."
Despite having many inspirations, Mousa stresses on player choice playing a role in the proceedings giving them control despite the grounded setting. "Player choices in the main and side missions that can affect his motivation and interaction with NPCs and bosses," he said. "Along with gear and weapon customisation so players feel more connected to the character."
This isn’t all. Mousa says the team plans to introduce player depth in gameplay. Levelling up and progressing through the game isn’t just limited to combat, much like the Mass Effect series or Kingdom Come: Deliverance. "The basic levelling up through fighting of course but we plan to incorporate some kind of ranking system through commanding troops and allies,"he told us.
If you're a fan of video games, check out Transition, Gadgets 360's gaming podcast. You can listen to it via Apple Podcasts or RSS, or just listen to this week's episode by hitting the play button below.
Further reading: Knights of Light, Kickstarter, Rumbling Games
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Music Monday: Quinn singing “Heart of Glass” by Blondie
tags: Blondie, Heart of Glass, Quinn
It’s two weeks in a row for Quinn here on Gleeks United’s Music Monday! I’m back at the helm and I’ve picked a Blondie hit for our blondie former cheerleader. Check out the video for “Heart of Glass,” and read on to see why I think this song fits Quinn’s style perfectly.
Aside from the obvious cuteness of having the show’s starring blondie sing a song by, well, Blondie, I think this song would be a fun and suitable tune for Quinn. Blondie’s lead singer Debbie Harry definitely has a unique voice, but I think Quinn would be up to the task of putting her own twist on this classic. Sure Blondie is quite different from, say, The Supremes or Dionne Warwick, both of whom Quinn has tackled solo before, but I still see a common element in the vocal styles of these three songs. Just like in “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” and “I Say a Little Prayer,” the vocals in “Heart of Glass” are feminine yet self-assured, a balance which I think Quinn can emulate well.
As for how this could work well in a storyline for Glee, just take a listen to the lyrics for a moment. The song is about a girl who was once in love and it seemed like the real deal, until she discovered he was a liar and probably a cheat. With all the romantic drama circling Quinn, surely this idea will apply to her at some point, be it Finn, Puck, or someone else! I can definitely see Quinn belting this song out to express her frustration, just like she did with “You Keep Me Hanging On” (although I suppose she wouldn’t have the Cheerios as her back-up dancers this time around).
Do you have a song that you keep imagining being performed on Glee? E-mail me at suzie.gardner@gmail.com and you could do a Music Monday guest post!
from → Music Monday
← One more day ’til The Power of Madonna!
“We’ll change the world one girl at a time.”: The Power of Madonna (1×15) Gleecap →
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Home/News/Foreign News/Trump insulted foreign colleagues in classified phone conversations
Trump insulted foreign colleagues in classified phone conversations
The President of the United States Donald trump insulted foreign colleagues during secret telephone conversations. So, he called German Chancellor Angela Merkel “stupid”, and former British Prime Minister Theresa may “a fool”. This was reported on Monday, June 29, by the American TV channel CNN, citing knowledgeable sources.
According to one of the channel’s sources, the us leader’s diatribes were “almost sadistic”.
In conversations with Angela Merkel, the channel’s source notes, trump called her “stupid” and accused her of “being in the pocket of the Russians.”
“He shows the greatest harshness to those he looks at as weak, and he is the weakest with those he should be tough with,” he said.
As confirmed by an unnamed German official, because of the nature of the calls, special measures were taken in Berlin to keep the content of the conversations secret.
An unnamed German official called trump’s behavior “very aggressive” and noted that for this reason, the circle of people involved in monitoring Merkel’s calls has decreased.
“Humiliating and mocking”, according to the channel’s sources, were trump’s conversations with may, whom he called” a fool”, as well as” spineless ” because of her approach to Brexit, NATO and immigration issues.
French President Emmanuel macron, canadian and Australian Prime Ministers Justin Trudeau and Scott Morrison did not escape trump’s attacks.
At the same time, as the TV channel reports, Russian and Turkish presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan often “outplayed” their American counterpart. As a result, a number of high-ranking US officials became convinced that trump poses a threat to the country’s national security.
READ Trump called his Ex-aide Bolton "a war-seeking fool"
As two sources of the TV channel put it, trump often “raved” in relations with foreign leaders.
Former national security advisers Herbert McMaster and John Bolton, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, former Secretary of state Rex Tillerson, as well as former White House chief of staff John Kelly and intelligence officials came to the conclusion that trump was often “delusional” in relations with foreign leaders, according to two-channel sources.
Also Read: Trump mocked Biden for saying 120 million Americans died from COVID-19
Earlier, on June 22, former white house national security aide John Bolton expressed the opinion that US President Donald Trump is much inferior to Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the ability to prepare for negotiations.
According to Bolton, the Russian President demonstrates a level of preparation, pedantry, and planning “that is simply unthinkable in the case of Donald Trump.” He also noted that the head of the Russian state always “weighs” words and “thinks about the goals he wants to achieve.”
Boris Johnson UK prime minister complains of poor vision
Italian Prime Minister finds insulting hints about the policy of assistance from Russia
Russia creat an aviation group to help Serbia fight coronavirus
Russia suspend railway connections with other countries
Dr. Myasnikov predicts more deadly epidemic for the world
Trump called his rise to power saving the world from war with North Korea
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Climate Talks Begin in Tianjin, China – Countdown to COP16
By Thomas Schueneman · Comments (1) · Monday, October 4th, 2010
With less than two month before the start of the COP16 climate negotiations in Cancún, Mexico, the latest round of preparatory climate talks began today in Tianjin, China.
Following is the opening press statement from UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres:
Press release from the UNFCCC
Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres called on governments meeting in Tianjin, China, to accelerate their search for common ground to achieve strong action on climate change. With less than two months to go before the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico, she said that a concrete outcome in December was urgently needed to
restore faith in the ability of Parties to take the negotiations forward.
“Governments have restored their own trust in the process, but they must ensure that the rest of the world believes in a future of ever increasing government commitment to combat climate change,” she said. “Governments need to agree on what is doable in Cancún, and how it will be achievable in a politically balanced manner,” she added.
Ms. Figueres said there is a growing convergence in the negotiations that Cancún could deliver a balanced package of decisions that define the pillars of action to address climate change.
Such a politically balanced package of decisions could include a new global framework to help countries adapt to the already inevitable changes to the
climate system, the launch of a new mechanism to drive faster deployment of technology to developing nations, a decision to establish a new fund to oversee the long-term money raised for the specific climate needs of developing nations, and a decision on early and large-scale action to protect forests and the livelihoods of those who live in them.
“The agreements that can be reached in Cancun may not be exhaustive in their details, but as a balanced package they must be comprehensive in their scope and they can deliver strong results in the short term as well as set the stage for long term commitments to address climate change in an effective and fair manner,” Ms. Figueres said.
Ms. Figueres acknowledged there were areas of political disagreements, mainly over how and when to agree on a fair share of responsibilities of present and future action on climate change, but said they were not insurmountable.
“Governments seem ready to discuss difficult issues. Now they must bridge differences in order to reach a tangible outcome in Cancún,” she said.
For example, governments can formalise the many pledges and promises they have made to cut and limit emissions, along with providing clarity on the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol.
During the next six days of the Tianjin climate meeting, government delegates will discuss negotiating text under the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA). This negotiating group, comprising all 194 Parties to the UNFCCC, is tasked to deliver a long-term global approach to the climate challenge.
The Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) is meeting in parallel to discuss the emissions reduction commitments for the 37 industrialized countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol for the period beyond 2012.
Ms. Figueres said that this year’s floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia and mudslides in China had been a wake up call to the dangers of extreme climate.
“The bottom line is that it is in no one’s interest to delay action. Quite on the contrary, it is in everyone’s ultimate interest to accelerate action in order to minimize negative impacts on all,” she said.
The UN Climate Change Conference in Tianjin is being attended by around three thousand participants from more than 176 countries, including government delegates, representatives from business and industry, environmental organisations and research institutions. The UN Climate Change Conference in Cancún, Mexico, will take place 29 November to 10 December.
Categories : China, COP16, Global Warming News, Government, International, United Nations, Video
Tags : china climate talks, christiana figueres, climate change conference, climate negotiations, climate system, climate talks, unfccc executive secretary
Collins Pt says:
Great topic here.
Work of many people on this issue of plastic, there are several plastic materials recycling organic-based view. In February, for example, Imperial College London and bioceramic drug polymer biodegradable plastic from sugar derived from the decay of lignocellulosic biomass. There is also an existing plant more corn starch and plastics based on paper, including household goods and food packaging, bioplastics toys, plastic dynamic Cereplast. Metabolix also several lines of plastic products from corn, in cooperation with partner companies.
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The Exploitation of Asian Workers in Saudi Arabia
Dymphna has written on several occasions about the plight of foreign maids, mostly from Southeast Asia, who work in Saudi Arabia in near-slave conditions. Asian women in the region are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. But men are also subject to oppressive employment conditions throughout the Persian Gulf region.
This is a significant issue, since non-citizens comprise as much as one third of the population of the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). Of the 33 million people in the region, about 11 million are resident foreigners, mostly guest workers from Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.
I bring this topic up because of an email exchange with P. Mijhar, a native of Nepal who worked for a period in Saudi Arabia and then returned home. Mr. Mijhar has this to say:
I need your help to publish my article, in which I would like to shed some light on the government policy which is weaker and not enforceable in Saudi Arabia for most of the Asian migrant workers, because the government lacks the mechanism to monitor all the problems and issues concerning it.
Most of the privately owned companies are paying either very low pay wages, or force workers to work 9 to 10 hour shifts with a very low pay scale. As per international labor law only 8 hours is considered as the standard regular shift, but these privately owned companies are doing all sorts of monopoly abuses to their migrant workers every day, due to lack of a government policy to protect them from such acts.
If some of the employees try to react or protest to it then they will be punished or terminated from their work and then sent back to their country under another rationale. This is the really inhuman nature of Saudi Arabia for every foreign worker who is among them contributing to the work force and helping in developing their country for long periods of time.
There are no legal welfare funds for these migrant workers if they have some accident or some serious sickness and need medical payments. When they become physically disabled or not able to continue their work for the company, they are abandoned or thrown out of the company like waste material, or they stay unnoticed as their presence is denied.
It’s because there is no legal medical insurance or system to check these problems. Even when they try to make claims to the labor authorities, they are not able to succeed with companies, as some of those companies belong to high dignitaries or Royals.
That’s why even though King Abdullah recently changed and reformed the system, as there is still no international body present to implement it. Every international humanitarian organization knows that in Saudi Arabia all the Asian migrant workers are barred from the all those facilities and rights that are provided to others.
If people from other countries in Africa and other continents are paid S.R.1000.00 basic salary then Asian workers are provided below PAR, they are paid a range to S.R. 400.00 to 800.00 maximum. This is based on an the irrational method and partial terms they are applying to Asian migrant workers.
The truth is they have insurance policies in most of the companies, but if employees are discharged for medical reasons, some company officials claim this insurance money for themselves from the insurance company, and do not provide it to workers as promised in their contract, since there are no government legal rules they are bound by.
This is the most critical part of the Saudi government policy that should be changed for Asian migrant workers, as they are also contributing to the development of Saudi Arabia day to day by providing the work force. They cannot deny this statement, as this is true and whole world knows it.
I have more proof to show that all these statements are true, and it should be considered a priority to have international humanitarian organizations or international labor organizations monitor the situation, in order to obtain better results in the future.
I worked previously in Saudi Arabia in a reputable company owned by high dignitaries. They really abandoned me after I became sick, and discharged me after working for 13 years in their company in the post of supervisor. I know a lot about the company monopoly in employee management, and the wages they are providing in that company, if you compare to others’ basic pay scale, are not satisfactory or appropriate.
Some, as I told you, are forced to work 9 hour shifts with very low pay, and they are helpless, as their government officials couldn’t do anything about it, since the Saudi government lacks any legal mechanism to monitor their status or provide welfare to them.
I’m now physically disabled due to a stroke while working in Saudi Arabia. You can write truly about me; I’m not afraid of any consequence might happen to me.
I’m willing to offer myself as a candidate for your story about how Asian migrant workers are dealt with after they are sick and physically disabled.
The outcry over the conditions for guest workers in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the GCC has forced the governments involved to at least give the appearance of taking action. In August of 2005 the Saudi government set up a special department to guard against the exploitation of foreign workers, according to the Migrants News Monitor blog (the original news story is no longer available).
But has anything changed? Last August Global Voices reported on the situation in the Persian Gulf as it affects Asian workers:
South Asian migrant workers (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal) have a notable contribution in the developments of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. But the abuse and exploitation of these workers is shocking and serious issue. Migrant workers fuel the engine of the economy but they are exploited, abused, discriminated against, and rarely receive government protection.
There are numerous stories of human rights abuses. Just to give some examples:
Thousands of labors sell their belongings to go to Gulf countries for their dream job. Drishtipat reports how they are being exploited and come back with a broken heart.
Hundreds of Nepali workers in Qatar have been driven from the country for demanding better pay from their employers. United We Blog posts a shocking firsthand experience of a young Nepali student returning from America. He describes the inhuman treatment he received in Bahrain International airport because he protested the mistreatment of the deported Nepalis by the Gulf Airlines staffers.
In Kuwait, almost 60% of its 3 million population are migrant workers. Expositions of Arabia Blog chats with an Indian worker in Kuwait who claims he is underpaid.
In United Arab Emirates guest workers make up 85% of its population (reports IHT). Here people from the subcontinent earns about $1 an hour working in scorching 43 degrees heat. Their contracts are critiqued as servitude. While there are hotel rooms that rent for $1000 a night for the prosperous people, these migrant workers rise before dawn in guarded camps like an army base, work for six days a week at guarded sites. There are thousands of heat exhaustion cases of workers each month in one medical facility alone. The Government is under pressure to improve the working conditions and crack downs on Employers who does not pay them.
Human rights watch also has a report on abuse of workers in UAE titled “Building Towers, Cheating Workers”.
Non-Saudis make up 35 percent of Saudi Arabia’s labor force. An estimated 2 million workers are from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Human rights Watch publishes a 135 page report “Bad Dreams: Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia”, which depicts how many of the immigrant workers are abused and treated as slaves.
Some of the frightening and troubling findings of the reports are:
Sexual abuse and rape of women migrant workers, both in the workplace and in Saudi prisons by Saudi male employers.
Migrant workers from Bangladesh, India and Philippines were forced to work ten to eighteen hours a day, and sometimes throughout the night without overtime pay.
The pay is very meager (e.g. $133 for a month and 16 hours of work daily)
Hundreds of low-paid Asian women who cleaned hospitals in Jeddah worked twelve-hour days, without food or a break, and were confined to locked dormitories during their time off.
Migrant workers experienced shocking treatment in Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system.
Now, on January 23rd of this year, there is an “action plan”. According to AFP:
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) labour ministers and counterparts from Asia are to propose an action plan to protect the welfare of Asian workers, according to their Abu Dhabi Declaration.
The ministers have recommended the drawing up within three months of the plan aimed at “preventing illegal recruitment practices” both at the country of origin and in host countries.
The declaration also called for “promoting welfare and protection measures for contractual workers … and preventing their exploitation at origin and destination.”
Emirati Labour Minister Ali Al Kaabi said at the start of the ministerial meeting yesterday that “guest workers must be afforded the security that they will receive the benefits that they are entitled to”.
In 2005 a new department was created. This year, an action plan. Next year, a regulatory agency, perhaps?
More bureaucratic entities are created and funded. More task forces, committees, regulatory bodies, etc., etc.
But will anything change? Will Saudi Arabia accord any human rights to the infidel guest workers within its borders?
Considering the paucity of rights the king grants to his own subjects, I wouldn’t bet on it.
11 thoughts on “The Exploitation of Asian Workers in Saudi Arabia”
Yankee Doodle on January 31, 2008 at 8:13 pm said:
The plight of infidel women in the hands of their Saudi masters is particularly deplorable.
When their oil runs out, these guys are going to be left with a worthless pile of sand, with no industry and no work ethic, except for that which was brought to their desert by foreigners, whom they arrogantly exploit.
This is the real god they worship — one who promises them the fulfillment of their secret desires, especially sexual, for a price, but one who delivers only misery, and who leads only to oblivion.
leadpb on January 31, 2008 at 11:06 pm said:
This abuse cuts across various lines. Many of the workers are Muslim, which of course is of no concern to the hedonistic Saudis. Yemen, so often sidelined in discussions, is an interesting case. Prior to the Gulf War there were nearly 1 million Yemenis working in the Gulf region, especially KSA. The majority were sent back home during or after the war and this boosted unemployment levels and presented a great hardship for families accustomed to receiving income from relatives working abroad. Think of Yemen to Saudi Arabia as Mexico to the USA.
Relationships between these two countries are typically on-and-off. The darker skinned, “backward” and truly poor Yemenis are looked down on by the paler-skinned and often racist (or is it culturist?) Saudis. The history of Yemen includes 4000 year old agricultural terracing (still in use), outposts that resisted the Ottoman onslaught and the ancient Sabaean Kingdom which quite possibly predates the Fertile Crescent for a settled civilization. Like Iran and Egypt, Yemen has a striking and truly ancient history that was swept away by upstart Islam. The Saudis were nomadic and were treated with contempt by their neighbors until oil wealth made *them* into the self-righteous ogres. So it is interesting to observe their treatment of workers, Muslim and otherwise, and how once again the “international community” ignores these problems.
Homophobic Horse on January 31, 2008 at 11:36 pm said:
“often racist (or is it culturist?) Saudis.”
That made me smile an ironic smile. I would not be surprised if some Saudis no doubt placate their consciences with racial supremacism.
If the Saudis were culturist, they wouldn’t hire foreign workers at all; if they were culturist they would hire only Saudi workers to encourage a work ethic and not hedonism. They could also hire only Saudis on the grounds that high wage economies are successful economies. And in that light culturism is more a kind of protectionism.
To what extent is this exploitation legitimised with Islam? To me it seems like a standard class struggle. I expect Trade Union formation is probably impossible; there must be millions more desperate workers where the rest came from rady to take their place.
leadpb on February 1, 2008 at 1:45 am said:
“Culturist” is a new word for me, so thanks for allowing a little latitude. Logically it should be analogous to racism: an inability to distinguish one’s generalized prejudices toward another racial group from individuals of that same group. If your distrust of a group does not affect your personal interactions with members of that group, then you are not racist.
On the other hand, if your relations with others are based on maintaining your own culture first and foremost, and even at their expense, then I suppose this is culturism. Aside from the conquering of territory, the contrasting condition is when a group or nation allows or *encourages* massive and indiscriminate immigration of permanent residents. Thanks to false idealism and distorted notions of equality this is where the US finds itself today. The fact is that while the Saudis could not get anything accomplished without foreign laborers they are not inviting most of them in as resident citizens. They continue to maintain rigid and supreme authority over all of their subjects whether “native” or “guest”.
We will not cut through the Gordian Knot of race, culture and class in our lifetimes (or on this blog). More troubling– and more resolvable– is the fact that we in the West have turned over these primal struggles to an increasingly unaccountable bureaucracy on both sides of the Pond. If this is a mere artifact of culture can we not send it back to the swamp whence it came? The fight against Islam is simultaneously an attempt to reformulate ourselves.
heroyalwhyness on February 1, 2008 at 6:23 am said:
“Every international humanitarian organization knows that in Saudi Arabia all the Asian migrant workers are barred from the all those facilities and rights that are provided to others.”
They ALL know this . . .yet do they understand why? Culturalist is a term brought up. But no. That only addresses one aspect. Racist? Again, only partially addresses the thoroughly pervasive slave mentality.
It is far more all encompassing – say, like Islam itself. Will these international humanitarian organizations begin to comprehend? Don’t hold your breath. Why? Even the believers of this heinous belief system refuse to acknowledge (or are too ignorant to recognize) the Arab supremacist component of Islam, and continue to seek a ‘dream job’ in the great sandbox – more often than not, turning into their worst nightmare.
Some recent cases (caution graphic content):
Exploitation of Asian Workers
John Sobieski on February 1, 2008 at 9:06 am said:
THere is no surprise here. Arab Muslims are ‘the best of people’ and all others, incuding nonArab Muslims are beneath them. There’s a pecking order – Arab Muslims on top, nonArab Muslims, Christian infidels, Jews, Hindus/Buddhists, atheists. Coming to America – Arab Muslim superiority. Put your shackles on and sing the Praises of Mo (piss thee upon him)
spackle on February 1, 2008 at 9:53 am said:
shades of a dhimmi future?
Evan on February 1, 2008 at 10:19 am said:
I am very surprised that a country can get away for long with having 85% of its workforce, most of them doing vital work that the natives simply cannot do, be foreign. If these workers decided one day to revolt against their Dubai overlords, they might well be unstoppable. I assume that the people who run these countries are aware of this, and this explains the police-state tactics. (It also helps that the workers themselves are so desperate, and that there is an infinite supply of them, so the troublemakers can be immediately expelled and replaced.)
But if Europeans are worried about Muslim populations of well less than 10%, imagine the vulnerability of these countries, where infidels are much larger fraction of the population.
Ronbo on February 1, 2008 at 10:49 am said:
Excellent Point, Evan! While it is true that the West has a dangerous Fifth Column of Muslims living in our countries; the Muslim countries, in particular Saudi Arabia, have a potentially dangerous Fifth Column of Asians, Africans, Europeans and Americans literally RUNNING their countries.
CIA — Are you listening?
Chalons on February 1, 2008 at 3:08 pm said:
Not to worry, I’m sure the United Nations Human Rights Commission is on top of it!
/sarcasm/
Zenster on February 3, 2008 at 12:11 am said:
How can this possibly be of the least surprise to anyone involved? After all;
WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE LAST COUNTRY ON EARTH TO ILLEGALIZE SLAVERY!
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Burning Poppies to Celebrate the English Caliphate
Posted on November 11, 2010 by Baron Bodissey
Update: The arrest of Tommy Robinson on a “public order offence” is confirmed here.
In the United States, today is Veterans’ Day (formerly known as Armistice Day). It marks the ninety-second anniversary of the end of the Great War, and is a day of solemn ceremony honoring the veterans of all our wars.
In Britain the 11th of November is called Remembrance Day, and from today on it will be remembered as the day that England was publicly acknowledged to be an outpost of the new Islamic Caliphate.
In Kensington this morning, while “persons of British background” were remaining silent in remembrance of the nation’s war dead, Muslims — the ungrateful beneficiaries of the British welfare state who despise their host country — were burning poppies and proclaiming Islamic dominance.
According to The Daily Mail:
Islamic protesters sparked fury today after they burned a model of a poppy and deliberately broke the silence at Armistice Day commemorations in central London.
As millions of Britons fell silent to remember those who have died in war, members of a group called Muslims Against Crusades clashed with police during an ‘emergency demonstration’ in Kensington, west London.
As the clock struck 11am, the Islamic protesters burned a model of a poppy and chanted ‘British soldiers burn in hell’.
They held banners which read ‘Islam will dominate’ and ‘Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell’.
It is understood the event took place in Kensington because it is outside a protected zone around Parliament where spontaneous protests are banned.
Police were questioning people they suspected were preparing to travel to Kensington after arriving at Victoria Station.
It is thought Muslims Against Crusades is a splinter group of Islam4UK, founded by Anjem Choudary.
This was a celebration of Mohammedan conquest. If these scum face no consequences for their acts, it is as if the UK had officially declared itself an Islamic colony.
The English Defence League vowed that it would not take this lying down:
A series of incendiary comments were posted on a social networking website linked to the English Defence League.
Some members pledged to attend while others showered the Islamic group with abuse and criticised police for allowing the demonstration to take place.
English Defence League protester Clive Donnellan, 49, a construction manager said: ‘The MAC could have chosen a more sensitive day to protest. They are preaching hate and although it’s great to have free speech this shouldn’t be happening today. They can come down any other day and say what they think.’
And I just received this unconfirmed report from a contact in the EDL:
[EDL leader] Tommy Robinson was arrested for jumping the police barrier and launching into the Muslims who were burning poppies.
It’s enormously gratifying to learn that there is at least one Englishman who is willing to disregard the personal consequences to himself and stand up for his country.
On this Remembrance Day of 2010, let’s remember what Tommy Robinson and the English Defence League stand for during this, the twilight of England and the dawn of the Islamic Republic of Britain.
Hat tip: Gaia.
48 thoughts on “Burning Poppies to Celebrate the English Caliphate”
trencherbone on November 11, 2010 at 11:56 am said:
Humiliating the infidels by desecrating their symbols and ceremonies.
Eethie on November 11, 2010 at 12:11 pm said:
This is shameful. My 4 year old daughter and I were at Trafalgar Square for the silence this morning. Her school wouldn’t grant authorisation for her to have the time off yet Muslim pupils are allowed an extra 2 authorised days off for Eid. We pander to these pupil and now they do despicable acts like this. If they don’t respect this country then they should leave and go back to their third world slum.
Nick on November 11, 2010 at 12:13 pm said:
There’s something sick festering in the heart of this country. Yesterday evening there was an award ceremony called ‘Pride of Britain’ which honoured, among others, soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. Eighteeen surviving pilots from the Battle of Britain were given an award also. (By Prince Charles no less.)
Now we open the papers and read about this. There’s a fundamental disconnect between what this country used to be, and the doctrines embraced by the political class in recent years that have led us here.
Anyone who actually goes out in a boiler suit on each day and works for a living relies on the truth. You can’t just pretend to do a job, you need to actually figure out what’s wrong and whatever you do to fix the problem in front of you has to be in accordance with reality. If you didn’t rely on the truth, then you couldn’t get any work done.
Politicians and journalists don’t have that worry. They can come up with any fantastic theory they like, and they’re insulated from the consequences if they’re wrong (i.e. if they’re not using the truth to guide them but are instead expressing an illusion that exists nowhere in real life).
There’s a genre of crime novel, Mediterranean noir, which is hugely popular in Italy. Check out writers like Massimo Carlotto. One of the reasons these books sell in Italy is that they are a more accurate reflection of life in Italy than the ‘official’ version one finds in the media. Again, that disconnect …
Zenster on November 11, 2010 at 12:47 pm said:
How does one negotiate or reach any compromise with this sort of mentality? Is it even at all possible?
Most likely it will be far too late before Muslims, with their death obsessed culture, finally wake up to the fact that they have painted themselves into a coffin corner when it comes to how the West must deal with jihad.
Islam continues to make this an all or nothing proposition. Few others are better than Western culture in assuring a “nothing” outcome for its enemies. We did it with Imperial Japan, which had vowed against any form of unconditional surrender, and it is just as likely that Islam’s intransigence will meet with a similar fate.
Being resolute and stupid is a fatal combination. Rarely, if ever, has it proved otherwise. Islam will have to consider itself fortunate if it survives to learn this historical object lesson.
4Symbols on November 11, 2010 at 1:03 pm said:
@Zenster,
Zenster, I think you and I know the answer to that question NO negotiations and NO compromises are possible we can give no quarter.
Lynx on November 11, 2010 at 1:05 pm said:
Is this some kind of get-back for Muhammed caricatures and things like that?
Jedilson Bonfim on November 11, 2010 at 2:17 pm said:
And it sure has… Here is a little something we can all recap, words on signs brandished by black cube worshippers, to which none of Britain’s “hate speech” laws apply (and which are proof of how far the mahoundian colonization has come):
Slay those who insult islam
Behead those who insult islam
Europe you will pay, extermination is on its way
Butcher those who mock islam
Europe take some lessons from 9/11
Massacre those who insult islam
Behead those who say islam is violent
And this is perhaps the best, for its unthankfulness to Britain’s first real islam channel, BBC= British Blasphemic (sic) Crusaders
On the other hand, many GoV readers sure remember that Christian couple who owned a hotel in Liverpool who got arrested on charges of the most serious felony in Britain’s inJustice system these days, “hurting muslim feelings”; for saying to a mahoundian guest at their hotel that mahound was a warlord, and that they thought that the mahoundian veil was a form of bondage.
Today’s demonstrations are just yet more evidence of what we all have known for a long time… As far as Britain’s political elite’s decisions are concerned, the UK is now West Porkistan.
Fjordman on November 11, 2010 at 2:22 pm said:
Every single one of these bastards must be permanently expelled from the West. All of them. There is no other solution to this. Those who try to import more of them should be treated as the traitors they are.
Richard on November 11, 2010 at 2:27 pm said:
Actions like these hasten the day when all of Europe will be embroiled in a major war against Islam. The sad thing is that the first half of the war will be fought in Europe.
Cudoine on November 11, 2010 at 2:34 pm said:
criminalization of membership in the muslimbrotherhood
goethechosemercy on November 11, 2010 at 2:45 pm said:
Do the Britons feel themselves to be subdued yet?
ram on November 11, 2010 at 3:23 pm said:
This was a crowd that needed pig juice lobbed onto them. That wouldn’t be hard. Probably have much more impact on the jihadis than brawlers. Have the juice prepared ahead for the next incident.
Yorkshireminer on November 11, 2010 at 4:58 pm said:
How is all the photos show police arresting EDL supporters and none of the scum Muslim traitors who are openly inciting a riot when is this country going to wake up and deal with these traitors
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328703/Remembrance-Day-Poppy-burning-Muslim-protesters-mar-Armistice-Day.html#ixzz150kcqTYW
This is the lead comment in the Daily Mail concerning the lack of sensitivity by the Muslim community in Britain. I have to congratulate the muslims what a wonderful home goal. 6,000 people recommended this. The Daily Mail is a very conservative newspaper by the way. As Churchill most aptly put it this is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. Britain is slowly turning the corner, we have seen it in Germany a couple of weeks ago. Large countries have a lot of inertia and it takes them a long time to change direction, small countries like Denmark and Holland can do it a lot quicker which we have seen happen. All we need now is the E.U. to subsidies muslim groups to complain about Christmas burning Christmas trees etc, kill two birds with one stone foment contempt against the muslims and the E.U.
What I was really trying to say is that 5,000 middle class Brits saw through the spin, the bullshit is not working any more. We have turned the corner. Things are changing exponentially give it a couple of years, and this scum will be spending a few years behind bars, and not the other way round. Brilliant result.
Findalis on November 11, 2010 at 5:03 pm said:
It is time for the Native Peoples of Britain to take back your nation by force. You have allowed the idiot barbarians to disarm you, to confiscate your weapons, to ridicule your heritage, to rape your women and children.
And all you do is rant. How many of the British troops would back the second Republican Army?
Once you as a nation stood up to tyranny and won. It is time you do it again.
If this hasn’t woken you up, nothing will.
Janet on November 11, 2010 at 5:22 pm said:
Jedilson Bonfim said…
That’s really going to get the message across convincingly.
I despair at the dhimmitude of our supposed lords and masters. Why do these Islamic extremists not get arrested for hate crimes?
Henrik R Clausen on November 11, 2010 at 6:11 pm said:
Note the black flag. It’s the flag of Jihad against infidel countries.
@goethechosemercy,
This question deserves a reply any of my countrymen want to attempt an answer as there is some explaining to do, before we all die of embarrassment.
al-ttt on November 11, 2010 at 8:39 pm said:
EscapeVelocity on November 11, 2010 at 9:32 pm said:
at-ttt
Peaceful non violent protest only works against Christian authority.
Non violent protest doesnt work against Islamic states, it only gets you killed, locked up, charged with blasphemy, and so on and so forth.
Figure it out already.
Nick on November 11, 2010 at 9:35 pm said:
‘This was a celebration of Mohammedan conquest. If these scum face no consequences for their acts, it is as if the UK had officially declared itself an Islamic colony.’
You mean like American politicians and media people whitewashing what went on at Fort Hood, inventing pre-traumatic stress symdrome, a whole new disease, to excuse an Islamic terrorist’s actions, and the American general who actually said that he preferred ‘diversity’ ie having Muslims like Major Hasan in the American army to preventing such acts of Islamic terrorism from happening again? Like that, you mean?
This is an appalling event, to be sure, but let’s remember that should anyone in the UK wish to up sticks and leave, there aren’t exactly a whole lot of alternatives. The land of the free? Well, maybe not.
Baron Bodissey on November 11, 2010 at 9:48 pm said:
Yes, I mean exactly like that.
The USA is in worse shape than Europe. We keep telling ourselves that we’re better off, but we haven’t a clue. We simply have been so well-anesthetized that we can’t even feel the gigantic organ of Islamic penetration that is being jammed up our nether parts. The Europeans are at least aware of what is being inserted where it hurts the worst.
I post European news from time to time at Big Peace, where the readers are almost all Americans. Most of the commenters there react to what I write as if they hadn’t even read it, with that smug, “Well at least we’re not as bad off as Europe” mentality.
One of them even said, “Europe is done. Stick a fork in it.”
I want to shout at them, “You fools! You’re asleep! Don’t you realize that large parts of the upper levels of the federal government have been BOUGHT? The Muslim Brotherhood owns you! Your future is Islam! Wake up, dips***s!”
But I don’t. There’s no point.
Dymphna on November 11, 2010 at 9:56 pm said:
@al-ttt —
Someone on another thread said you were a troll. I reluctantly must agree. No name-calling, esp. against those who are r5isking everything in the attempt to save their country.
When you have a better solution, please come back and let us know. Otherwise, your comments are hostile and unfriendly and not welcome here. I’ve been blogging for too long to put up with that anymore
Dymphna on November 11, 2010 at 10:01 pm said:
Hey, Baron–
Amazing language, sir. I am going to have to turn you in to the Mouth-Washing Brigade. Tsk. Tsk.
But I know what you mean about the commenters on our posts there. Those are terminal cases of ignorant bloviation. If I see that oh-so-original phrase one more time –i.e., “Europe is done. Stick a fork in it”. I am going to make a citizen’s arrest and ask the judge to make them attend classes for the cliche-ridden mugwumps.
Imagine what Mencken would have done with those people.
Richard on November 11, 2010 at 10:53 pm said:
One place to start is to do what the Italians have done, they refuse to allow Islam the status of a religion until Islam, 1) Stops plural marriages. 2) Stops killing apostates. 3) Allows other religions to preach and convert people in Saudi. There are several more, including stopping the rape of wives and the beating of wives. Add what you want delisting them as a religion is a start.
Jedilson Bonfim on November 12, 2010 at 2:03 am said:
Just a day ago I read about a gigantic load of the signs of the islamization of America mentioned by the Baron in an article from the American Thinker. Americans trying to delude themselves into thinking that the ongoing opensewerization process in Europe is something the US has been immune from would be in for a hell of a shock if they found out about all this.
Nick on November 12, 2010 at 8:29 am said:
It’s quite incredible for those of us in the middle section of our lives, who actually have something to look back on, to see what’s happening to Britain and America.
The sickening thing is, wherever one looks one finds the same lack of what I can only call the human spirit. That which sustained Britain and America and their allies during WWII is now entirely absent.
The political class appear to have taken the place of any ‘authority’ in people’s lives. They are now the authority which must be obeyed, the source (so they’d like to think) of moral thinking throughout the society they now wish to shape in their own image.
It’s deeply troubling.
al-ttt on November 12, 2010 at 10:16 am said:
“Comment deleted” was a perfectly legitimate remark made by someone who actually lives in England and knows first hand how everything the EDL doies simply HELPS the Muslim agenda
Most of those posting here and the admin are Yanks who havent got the foggiest notion about life in the UK,even those whove lived here a few years
What I wrote was simply[with a couple of inserted revisions]:
“More aggro talk from EDL members. With “friends” like them we dont need the UAF.
Take it lying down is exactly what they should do. A lie down peaceful protest.
As it is, every time they open their lardy-gobs the rest of us [in the UK] who genuinely work to resist the Islamic agenda [rather than engage in impotent macho posturing] get slated with the same [rent-a-thug] image.
Frankly, Im getting sick of them.”
Now, theres plenty of talk about “free speech” here, but does it actually mean anything. The above comment (mine) is from someone (me) who lives adjacent to an illegal mosque and who is currently working to have it closed. I know, and you lot over there dont, how the current conduct of the EDL only HELPS these Muslims in my midst and HINDERS my efforts to address the problem. I have to continually watch my back for accusations that “hes EDL” which simply ends debate and hands victory on a plate to the Muslims on the other side of the issue.
You should learn from my experience. If you remove this comment, then clearly you dont really want to know but prefer to keep your head up in cuckoo land. It would also mean you also obviously dont really give a damn about free speech.
Nick on November 12, 2010 at 11:24 am said:
Recently on the EDL’s own forum, the question of whether expert witnesses (such as those at Geert Wilders’ trial) could possibly align themselves with the EDL arose. It was generally accepted that it would be very difficult indeed for such a person to do so, due to all the negative publicity surrounding the EDL. This on their own website mind you. So Al, I think you have made a fair point.
Jedilson,
That’s quite an article, thanks for the link.
“The EDL are terrible people, we would always keep these groups under review and if we needed to ban them, we would ban them or any groups which incite hatred.” – Prime Minister David Cameron. (See link.)
That’s what you get from the leader of the country – when you can get him to even acknowledge the existence of the English Defence League.
Here’s an interesting one, mind you – see link.
The bobbies didn’t just roll over and do what these people want. Which apparently is ‘disgraceful’, etc, etc.
al-att —
First of all, let’s get one thing clear: deleting comments from this blog has nothing to do with “free speech”. This is a private forum, not a public space, and it has rules of discourse which are clearly posted. According to Dymphna’s judgment, you violated rule #1 by displaying a lack of basic civility.
If you had been prevented by the state from publishing your own opinions as you might see fit, then that would violate your right of free speech, and would constitute censorship. But our enforcement of our rules violates no one’s right to free speech.
Secondly, the issue isn’t with the ideas behind what you said, but the insulting way in which you expressed them. If you had said: “I disagree with the statements and actions of the EDL. They are counterproductive, and harmful to our movement,” there would have been nothing amiss whatsoever, and no one would have considered deleting your comment.
But referring to the EDL’s “lardy-chopped gobs” is rude and insulting, as well as being totally unnecessary. We have many EDL members among our regular readers, and I object to your insulting them.
My tolerance for unpleasant comments is higher than Dymphna’s, so I had let it be. But she was acting well within our posted standards to give it the heave-ho.
One of the reasons why she allows less latitude for such behavior is that she has complex chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and other people’s unpleasant verbiage can cause her actual physical distress. Charles Johnson’s nastiness back in 2007 sent her to bed for months.
So not only was she acting within our own guidelines, she was protecting herself from the harm that can be done by unthinkingly crass and cruel behavior, such as what you displayed here.
IfYouCantStandTheHeat on November 12, 2010 at 4:01 pm said:
Baron with due respect (and I do respect your work here) I disagree.
All newspapers are privately owned forums but if the owners decided to blacklist and ban certain journalists from being published, that would be censorship. As indeed happenned when Mark Steyn was dropped by The Telegraph. Whether its public or private is immaterial.
Secondly you say:
But the phrase you (not exactly) quote me with there is descriptive and accurate as a characterisation of these people.Most of them appear to be men with a weight problem that gives them that distinctive swollen pasty-faced look satirised by Georg Grosz in his cartoons of life in Weimar Germany. However, referring to the latter doesn’t really convey as succinctly the image that is conveyed by the former. “lardy” means fat. “Gobs” means mouths. They do have fat mouths which appear to be regularly replensished with burgers and butties. None of this is irrelevant. It all plays into the gross image problem that not only afflicts the EDL but all the people whose views they decide to publicly associate with.
I am very sorry about Dymphnas sensitivity,I have similar problems in a different context. But unfortunately this whole topic area is a minefield of truly aggravating and distressing material. Let me illustrate with “my” story:
In the nineteen Seventies I was newly out of Sixth Form (High School maybe) when I read an article in New Statesman of all places about FGM. In those days the Left had not yet discovered their love affair with everything Islamic. The article explained what FGM was (although the discrete ancronym was not used in favour of some more explicit terminology) in horrific detail. Moreover, that at that time the WHO estimated there to be at least 100 million victims in the world.
I went out of the shop where I had read the article in a stunned state of shock. I was truly numbed. I really could barely grasp that such things had ever been done, let alone still in the 20th Century.I looked around me at all the people happily going about their business oblivious of this appalling nightmare that I had discovered.
At that exact point began my opposition to Islam and everything it represents, facilitates, permits and has culturaly associated with it. Not all Muslims practise FGM…thank God…but (with but scant exception) ONLY Muslims practice FGM and it is a direct manifestation of Islamic attitudes to women.My disgust of Islam and a burning desire to see it utterly eradicated from the face of this Earth was then ignited, that Summer afternoon in 1979.
This disgust burns in me still and FGM still strikes me as the worst evil in the world, dwarfing anything done by one community against another because it done by parents to their own children. I recently saw a picture of a young girl screaming in distress as she was overpowered by smiling family members about to inflict this horror.
I cannot see how it is possible to discuss Islam and its effect without raising the most distresing material. It is for fear of bringing such horror into the open that the Western media coined the heinous euphemism “female circumcision” and which stillmeans that most Westerners are ignorant of this worse than barbaric practice. Had this been discussed openly and widely thirty years ago, the present stranglehold that Islam has on us might well not have come about.
So, unfortunately, I believe the shocking and the distressing sometimes needs saying.
Compared to any of that, referring to a fat mans fat cheeks surely doesnt amount to much. Although I note your special reasons and will keep that inmind.
Zeke on November 12, 2010 at 4:18 pm said:
Well the people making those claims were widely ridiculed. The General’s resignation was called for by many commentators, including on TV and radio. So while there were some bleeding heart types doing this, by and large Americans rejected their interpretation of these events.
We don’t yet know what is going to happen buy I suspect he’s going to get the death penalty for his crimes. So it’s not all coddling over here, as you suggest.
If a bunch of muzzies tried to burn the flag in Arlington on veterans day they would certainly be arrested, and might well be beaten first, depending on who was around.
I know I’m in a minority here but I don’t think Islam has anywhere near the power and destructive force in the USA as it does in Europe. Their just are not as many of them here, and they have to get in line behind the native born blacks and Mexican invaders to be a threat.
For instance there are a dozen or more dead central cities that are huge ghettos that Blacks already control in the USA that are virtually no-go areas for whites. They are seething dung heaps of corruption, drug-dealing, petty theft, gang violence, welfare and food-stamp dependency, and open air prostitution — all of it on a scale that is difficult to imagine, even for many Americans who have never visited them. Places like Detroit; Gary, IN; East New York, NY, Newark and Trenton, NJ, areas around Miami, FL; a big chunk of Chicago; parts of Cincinati.
If you haven’t been to these areas it really is hard to believe how seperate from the rest of the USA they are.
Now we are adding 20 million plus “latinos” who are essentially unassimilatable instant under-class welfare dependents.
This is predictably resulting in many new Latin Barrios that, while not quite as violently depraved as the black ghettos, are non the less still essentially foreign enclaves in America.
Compared to this the few Muslims in the USA are just not that worth getting that worked up over.
Sure, it’s horrible when a US Army Major goes on a shooting spree. But the jihadis would have to pull off an event a day like that to equal the everyday rate of killing, robbing and raping that the two main minorities in the USA perpetrate already.
Islam is a not the first of biggest threat in the states, and that those who think it is are ignoring the much larger minority social-pathology all around them.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t pay attention to Islam in the USA, but if we ejected every muzzie in America we’d still have problems Europe can only dream of (in their nightmares).
Sorry; we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
When the New York Times chooses to spike one of its writers’ stories, that’s not “censorship”, it’s editorial discretion. And it violated nobody’s right to free speech.
No matter how you parse it, I find your wording insulting, and I’m not even a memeber of the EDL.
“Insulting” is in the eye of the beholder — in this case mine, and my wife’s. I don’t have to buy the definition of “insulting” provided by the people who hurl insults here, and I won’t. If it seems insulting to me, it’s insulting.
The rest of all this is casuistry, as far as I’m concerned.
You have a right to express your opinions in whatever manner you see fit. That’s why God gave you your own blog.
I wasn’t aware of your good wife’s health issue that you mention, however I can, for reasons I’d rather not go into here in any depth, appreciate more than most what you’re saying. Please pass on my best wishes to Dymphna then, and can I also say something that’s probably not said openly enough times, which is: Thank you for all your hard work, and for giving so many different people a forum to express themselves. When I was sitting in front of an old Amstrad (with actual ‘floppy’ discs etc) back in the early 90s, a forum like ‘Gates of Vienna’ would have been something one could only have found in a sci-fi novel. And yet here we all are.
@IfYouCantStandTheHeat:
Your heart-felt story about your own Muslim moment is quite a tale. It would make a good post, esp. if we asked readers to chime in on “their” Muslim moment. I know what mine was, i.e., the moment in which I said to myself, “this is truly malignant evil”. The woman who stood up to it had magnificent courage. What she really wanted to do was commit suicide but her father and her imam encouraged her to take her case to court. Seeing it in all of its brutal, dystopic horror was truly awful. But her responsive courage in the face of a whole state arrayed against her was magnificent.
Anyhow, let us know if you’ve any objection to my using your story to build a post. If I don’t hear back from you, I’ll presume it’s okay — I mean if you’re too weary with the argument to continue further.
I hope you will assent. It is a good story, well told. It deserves a larger audience and, who knows, it could become a meme. Never can tell what will resonate with others across a wide spectrum
Thank you for telling that.
I agree, that’s a powerful story, and maybe such a personal turning points will be effective in getting people to ‘tune in’ to what we’re trying to say.
We need young people to stand up for and defend Western Civilization.
Old Farts arent going to face down young Muslim colonizers, Jihadis, and gangs.
E! E! EDL!
EscapeVelocity on November 12, 2010 at 10:03 pm said:
al-att
Tommy Robinson just gained the EDL a lot of sympathy and good will by challenging those hate filled ingrates, and ripping their jihadi flag out of their hands.
Dag Reidar Bye on November 13, 2010 at 3:21 am said:
You can of course blame EDL for polarization. The good thing about it is that EDL are able to show very clearly what true Muslims are made of, that they can not handle opposition. When Muslims are provoked by EDL, they are the one who have a problem, and that problem will still be there if you want to oppose Muslims in a more moderate way.
I strongly believe that authoritarian people need to be treated authoritarian, and right now there seems to me that there are very few groups in England, beside EDL, who are willing to do so. (at least from a Norwegian view)
You do not discuss with the animal. There are no reason to believe that Muslims should have more respect for peaceful demonstrations compared to Islam. Peaceful demonstrations will only be seen as an opportunity to dominate even more.
Zenster on November 14, 2010 at 10:03 am said:
Dag Reidar Bye: You do not discuss with the animal.
Variously attributed to the American authors Mark Twain or Robert Heinlein, the following saying sums it up rather well:
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes time and annoys the pig.
You have also nailed the problem rather well by observing how:
When Muslims are provoked by EDL, they are the one who have a problem, and that problem will still be there if you want to oppose Muslims in a more moderate way.
Tolerance for the intolerable is quite clearly not a virtue.
Dymphna: It is a good story, well told. It deserves a larger audience and, who knows, it could become a meme. Never can tell what will resonate with others across a wide spectrum
Please do proceed with this idea. It is worthy of a permalink on GoV’s list of important articles.
Much like JFK’s assassination and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, most people can tell you their own exact “Muslim moment”. I’ll be all too happy for the chance to share mine.
BrightSi on November 16, 2010 at 11:53 pm said:
I think it’s best to make sure Choudary’s lot have as much publicity as possible. In this way people will open their eyes to the real face of Islam and start to see what the irreversible and devastating implications will be if we allow this country to become Islamised. The truth is that these individuals are actually practising Islam in it’s true form, not the benign, enriching and all-encompassing movement the leftist liars and traitors who run this country are constantly trying to make us believe.
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Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial
We decided not to bring the camera. We had carried it with us to every place we had visited so far. But for some reason, it did not seem right to us to bring it to where we were going tomorrow. It would feel strange, we thought, to stop and take time to frame a picture or to ask someone if they could photograph us together. It did not feel right to bring a camera with us to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to what has been rightly called “the residence of death.”¹
Today, Beth and I visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial.
We walk a short distance from our hotel in Kraków to join others on a bus that will take us to the Memorial. Our group is made up of English speakers. We start. Our driver puts on a film about Auschwitz-Birkenau. But I prefer to look out the window of the bus. It’s autumn in Poland. I see fields, and trees, and flowers, and small towns. It’s beautiful.
At the Memorial, a person meets us, collects English speakers from other buses, and walks us to the entry of the Memorial. Our guide, a young Polish woman, meets us there. We are given audio devices with headphones to hear our guide easily. We begin.
At one of our first stops, our guide draws our attention to a quotation from the Spanish philosopher and poet George Santayana. It is a well-known quote from his book The Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
As we move through the camp, there are times, before we go into a barrack, a hallway, a room, or a courtyard, when our guide will turn to us and ask us to be silent in the place we are about to enter. Even here, in a site devoted to death, some areas have special meaning.
We get back on our bus for the short ride to Birkenau. Our first destination is the spot where trains deposited new arrivals. Earlier, our guide had shown us a photograph of a “selection,” taken in the very place where we are now standing. First, the arrivals would be separated into two lines, one for males, one for females. Then SS doctors, with the pointing of a finger, would send the healthy men, and healthy women without children, to one side of the ramp; mothers with children, and the sick, and the aged, were immediately put into a line that leads to the gas chambers. Our guide walks us on the path that the mothers, children, sick, and aged took. It’s not a long walk. It runs alongside the train tracks in the direction of a group of trees, masking what lay there.
At the end of the path, the arrivals would enter a room where they were told to disrobe. Then they were ushered into another room, and the door locked behind them. This room is one of the places where our guide asked us to maintain silence. We entered this dark place. Light comes from a few small openings in the roof. Zyklon-B in the form of pellets of diatomaceous earth saturated with hydrogen cyanide would be dropped into the room through these openings. Within twenty minutes, everyone in the room would be dead.
Prisoners, tasked with removing gold teeth and shaving the heads of the dead, would enter the room. Even human hair was considered a resource. The bodies would be taken to the furnaces and cremated. The cremation remains would be disposed of in different ways, one of them was to be sold as fertilizer.
At the end of our tour of Birkenau, our guide gathered us together one last time, and asked us, why do this, why come to this place. It’s a good question. She reminded us of the quote from Santayana that we had seen at the beginning of the visit to Auschwitz. The idea, of course, is that perhaps if we remember history, make an effort to do so, we won’t make the same mistakes. What happened here won’t happen again.
I don’t know; I would like to think so. I hope so. But I’m not confident.
In his book, Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and a survivor of Auschwitz writes:
Many people—many nations—can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premiss in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is a Lager.²
Ben-Zion Gold, the rabbi at Harvard-Radcliff Hillel for over forty years, writes in his memoir The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust:
The knowledge that in the Holocaust human beings murdered other human beings who they had never met before has never left me. Its frightening implication that “we” are potentially “they” is always with me.³
Rabbi Gold lost every member of his family in the Holocaust. In 1944, his mother was murdered and burned in Auschwitz.
You don’t have to read far in the Bible before you come upon a murder, a fratricide, a brother killing a brother. The story appears in Chapter 4 of Genesis: “…it came to pass when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” And it doesn’t take much longer for the Creator to regret creating man, to understand “that every imagination of his heart was only evil.” So God destroyed all of his creation. Well, almost all of it. One family and a restarter set of animals are spared. In the Biblical tradition, everyone is a descendant of this one family. In this sense, we are all brothers and sisters, all murder is fratricide.
It is the Chabad custom to say the Morning Blessings at home. Then at the shul, after putting on our tallis and, if it’s a weekday, our tefillin, we can begin the Morning Prayer. The first words of the Morning Prayer in Chabad’s prayerbook are: “I hereby take upon myself to fulfill the commandment, ‘Love your fellow man as yourself.'”
Next time, Beth and I visit towns and villages related to Beth’s family’s history in Poland.
¹Zalmen Gradowski, quoted in Auschwitz: The Residence of Death, trans. William Brand (Krakow–Oświęcim, Biały Kruk, 6th ed., 2016), 5.
²Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. by Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 9.
³Ben-Zion Gold, The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: a memoir (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 152.
Posted in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland
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The Bourne Trilogy Gets The Honest Trailers Treatment
A few days late recovering from San Diego Comic-Con, the gang at Screen Junkies are back to work, and this week’s Honest Trailer is a package deal, three for one, all Bourne all the time! Prepping for the release of the new film Jason Bourne, in which Matt Damon returns to the character he first played more than a decade ago, narrator Jon Bailey and the SJ crew squeeze three kickass action flicks into one kickass 5-minute Honest Trailer. It covers Bourne Identity (2002), Bourne Supremacy (2004), and Bourne Ultimatum (2007)… sorry Jeremy Renner, but Bourne Legacy (2012) just didn’t cut it.
Check out the Honest Trailers video here below.
Tags: Bourne, Honest Trailer, Honest Trailers, Jon Bailey, Screen Junkies, The Bourne Trilogy
Matt Damon Pranks People With ‘Jason Bourne’ Spy Mission (Video)
The next movie in the Bourne series, Jason Bourne, is set to be released next month on July 29th. As we’ve seen more and more often with the big releases, an Omaze contest to benefit charity has been set up that will see one fan win a trip to Vegas to hang out with Matt Damon.
To help get the word out about the contest, Damon played a prank in which he gives a super secret spy mission to some unsuspecting people who just received a phone from a mysterious stranger. Some of them get a freaked out by it and bail, while others cautiously proceed with the directions given.
You can see how it played out and learn more about the contest below.
Topics: Because Awesome, Charity, Humor, Movies, News, Videos
Tags: Bourne, Jason Bourne, Matt Damon, Omaze
‘Jason Bourne’ Trailer: Matt Damon Brings Title Character Out Of Hiding
By eelyajekiM | @ | April 21st, 2016 at 10:00 am
Universal Pictures has released the first trailer for Jason Bourne, the fourth film involving the title character and the fifth in the franchise if you count The Bourne Legacy. The film marks the return of Matt Damon reprising the titular role with director Paul Greengrass also returning to the director’s chair.
Drawing inspiration from the computer hacking and Edward Snowden leaking highly sensitive government material to the world, the film centers on a hack against a highly secured U.S. government computer network that puts the world in unprecedented danger forcing former CIA agent is to come out of hiding after spending many years off the grid. Check out the full trailer below.
Tags: Alicia Vikander, Bourne, Jason Bourne, Julia Stiles, Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass, Tommy Lee Jones, Universal Pictures, Vincent Cassel
Best Super Bowl Ads 2016: Movies, TV, Celebrities
By Empress Eve | @ | February 8th, 2016 at 10:00 am
This year marked the 50th Super Bowl game, and while the lead-up to this event wasn’t as exciting as last year (which, amongst other things, saw the epic charity face-off between Chris Pratt and Chris Evans, aka Star-Lord and Captain America), there was, as usual, plenty of interesting and highly anticipated Super Bowl commercials that pertained to movies and television that were aired during the Big Game as well as during the pre-Game, Halftime, and post-Game shows that we covered throughout Sunday evening.
But, there’s still a lot more ad offerings that we didn’t get to post from Super Bowl 50 — which saw the Peyton Manning-led Denver Broncos go up against Carolina Panthers (the team Michael Oher, whose life was depicted in The Blind Side, plays for) in Santa Clara, CA, at Levi’s Stadium, which the home of the San Francisco 49ers. So we’ve collected a bunch of these Super Bowl ads here below for your enjoyment, since there was plenty of new TV and movie footage revealed, and of course, those clever and celebrity-filled product commercials.
Not every commercial is included, as some didn’t pertain to our type of entertainment and some I just didn’t enjoy or care about. Instead, I’ve embedded most of the movie and TV spots, along with my favorites from all those car and soda-type adverts, most of which feature celebrities.
Continue reading for the Best Of The Super Bowl Ads 2016: Movies, TV, Celebrities.
Topics: Commercials, News, Sports, Television, Videos
Tags: Audi, Batman V Superman, Bourne, Independence Day, Marvel, NFL, Skittles, Super Bowl, Super Bowl 50, Supergirl, TMNT 2, Turkish Airlines, X-Men
‘Jason Bourne’ Super Bowl Spot Reminds You Who Jason Bourne Is
By eelyajekiM | @ | February 7th, 2016 at 8:00 pm
After taking a break from the Bourne franchise, Matt Damon returns to the shaky cam spy genre he helped create. The first bits of footage from Jason Bourne has finally arrived in the form of a TV spot which aired tonight during the game.
Check out the first TV spot that aired during the Super Bowl for Jason Bourne here below.
Topics: Commercials, Movies, News, Sequels, Trailers, Videos
Tags: Alicia Vikander, Bourne, Jason Bourne, Julia Stiles, Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass, Super Bowl, Tommy Lee Jones, Universal Pictures, Vincent Cassel
Matt Damon Wanted To Play Daredevil But Chickened Out
By eelyajekiM | @ | September 25th, 2015 at 5:13 pm
Not every actor was born to play a superhero; we certainly saw that when Fantastic Four came out. And sometimes, the right role doesn’t come the actor’s way. For Matt Damon, the opportunity to play a superhero has passed him by, or at least that’s what he believes. While making the press rounds for Ridley Scott‘s The Martian, the actor shared his thoughts on which superhero he would like to play and who he would like to have seen be behind the camera. More on the story below.
Tags: Ben Affleck, Bourne, Christopher Nolan, Daredevil, Matt Damon
Movie Review: The Bourne Legacy
By Adam Frazier | @ | August 10th, 2012 at 10:04 am
Directed by Tony Gilroy
Written by Tony Gilroy, Dan Gilroy
Starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Albert Finney
Rated PG-13 | 135 minutes
“There was never just one.”
In the wake of Jason Bourne’s dismantling of Operation Blackbriar, the CIA decides to dispose of their other black ops programs and terminate their remaining field agents.
Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), a genetically-enhanced agent from Operation Outcome, escapes his execution and, with the reluctant help of Outcome scientist Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), sets out to expose the atrocities of his superiors.
Directed by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), The Bourne Legacy is the fourth installment in the Bourne series, based on Robert Ludlum‘s spy-thriller novels. Gilroy’s film, however, is based off a 2004 novel by Eric Van Lustbader. With permission from the estate of Robert Ludlum, Lustbader picked up the Bourne series where Ludlum left off with 1990’s The Bourne Ultimatum. Since 2004, Lustbader has written seven additional Bourne novels – which means Universal Pictures has plenty of material to mine for future sequels.
The Bourne Legacy‘s plot begins about two-thirds of the way through The Bourne Ultimatum, intercutting non-Jason Bourne scenes from Ultimatum throughout the film to communicate that these events are happening simultaneously. When we first meet Cross, he’s on a training mission in the wilds of Alaska. The first act of the film feels like The Grey meets Cliffhanger, with Renner’s character traversing treacherous terrain, super-jumping chasms, and fist-fighting wolves.
Topics: Movie Reviews, Movies, Reviews, Sequels
Tags: Bourne, Bourne Legacy, Edward Norton, Hawkeye, Jason Bourne, Jeremy Renner, Matt Damon, Rachel Weisz
Blu-ray Deal: The Bourne Trilogy
By Empress Eve | @ | August 9th, 2012 at 5:12 pm
The Blu-ray deal of the week over at Amazon this week is The Bourne Trilogy Blu-ray collection for only $27.99 (that’s 53% off the list price of $59.98).
This Blu-ray collection contains all three of the Jason Bourne action movies, which starred Matt Damon as the title character: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum.
The set also includes plenty of bonus features like deleted and extended scenes, directors commentaries, and featurettes covering the fighting sequences, chase scenes, explosions, and other bits of action goodness. There’s also a feature on Robert Ludlum, the author who created the Bourne book series. Exclusive to Blu-ray are character files, location analysis, and other information available as you watch the film, as well as the Bourne Orientation, which shows the connections of Jason Bourne’s actions in all three films.
Topics: Blu-ray, Deals, Movies, News
Tags: Bourne, The Bourne Trilogy
Watch Now: The ‘Bourne’ Franchise Gets Its Disco On In ‘Bourne To Be Alive’
By BAADASSSSS! | August 9th, 2012 at 3:00 pm
What do you get when you combine the action franchise spawned from the best-selling spy thrillers of the late Robert Ludlum that has become one of the most influential movie series of the past 25 years and the smokin’ funky grooves of late 1970’s disco?
Bourne To Be Alive, that’s what.
This video mashes up scenes from all three of the original Jason Bourne adventures – The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) – and scenes from the trailers for the forthcoming semi-sequel/franchise reboot The Bourne Legacy with the 1979 dance floor classic “Born to Be Alive” by Patrick Hernadez.
You can watch the video here below.
Topics: Humor, Movies, News, Sequels, Videos
Tags: Bourne, Doug Liman, Jason Bourne, Jeremy Renner, Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass, Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Legacy, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum
‘The Bourne Legacy’ Trailer: More Questions, Fewer Answers, Thrilling Action
By eelyajekiM | @ | May 31st, 2012 at 6:10 pm
The Bourne franchise proves that no matter how many movies or entries there are, you will only know less than half of the real story. A new trailer has emerged for The Bourne Legacy, and it gives a clearer picture of the characters surrounding the very people involved in the project that made Bourne the dangerous amnesia spy that he is (or was) today. You can check out the trailer below.
Jeremy Renner takes the main character mantle as he begins to be caught up in the conspiracy involving the people behind the Tredstone project. Renner joins fellow series newcomers Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, and Oscar Isaac, while franchise veterans Albert Finney, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, and Scott Glenn reprise their roles.
Tags: Bourne, Edward Norton, Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Stacy Keach, The Bourne Legacy, Tony Gilroy
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‘Dolittle’ Trailer: Robert Downey Jr. Goes Out To See A Wonderful World
By eelyajekiM | @ | October 15th, 2019 at 10:00 am
Doctor Dolittle is best known for being the only person who can understand animals. Literally. That’s because he can converse with them in a way that no other person on the planet can. While it may not be exactly the kind of film you would expect to see in a climate that is filled with superheroes, it is a family friendly bit that can work with the right people.
And Universal’s Dolittle starring Robert Downey Jr. could be just that kind of film, especially when it’s going to open the new year. The studio has released a new trailer which sees Downey Jr. as the titular character, who sounds an awful like Sherlock Holmes – and acts a little bit like him too – and who goes on an incredible journey where he will encounter animals that only he can talk to. Check out the trailer below.
Tags: Antonio Banderas, Carmen Ejogo, Craig Robinson, Doctor Dolittle, Dolittle, Emma Thompson, Harry Collett, Jessie Buckley, John Cena, Kumail Nanjiani, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Octavia Spencer, Ralph Fiennes, Rami Malek, Robert Downey Jr, Selena Gomez, Tom Holland
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By Hannah NAZRI March 19, 2019 November 22, 2020
First published on the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) website. For the full blog post with my other three amazing colleagues – please click here. Here I detail my journey in medicine, my research interests, the challenges I face, and my passion for women’s rights advocacy.
The RCS asked four female Associate Fellows working in the field of science to answer some questions about their experiences. There is still a great deal of gender bias in the world of science, so we wanted to share the stories of these incredible women to inspire others looking to create better gender balance in the world.
What do you do? I am a DPhil candidate in Obstetrics & Gynaecology (ObGyn) at the University of Oxford. I am also a medical doctor, having graduated from the University of Bristol in 2013. During my medical degree, I was also offered the opportunity to pursue a one-year BSc in Medical Sciences with Medical Physics and Bioengineering from University College London, for which I successfully obtained a Second Class Honours (Upper Division) in 2010. I became interested in endometriosis research during my MSc in Clinical Embryology, which I had pursued after my foundation training. I decided to pursue the MSc and not go straight into a specialty training programme, so I could explore my interests in reproductive sciences and research with a view to pursuing a clinical academic career in either ObGyn, or Reproductive Endocrinology (an Internal Medicine specialty). After graduating from my MSc in 2016, I went back to work in the clinical environment for one year as an Internal Medicine trainee before deciding that I preferred to do endometriosis research: so here I am in Oxford as a second-year DPhil student at the Nuffield Department of Women’s & Reproductive Health at John Radcliffe Hospital.
Why did you become interested in science? I can think of many moments in life that made me become interested in science. My mother, for one, is a Biochemistry & Pharmacology graduate from Monash University, and since I was young, she made a point to explain to me the science behind everything. For instance, if she was cooking eggs, she would turn it into an interactive science learning experience by explaining to me that the clear viscous egg white turns white and solidifies due to protein denaturation during which the egg protein loses its quaternary structure. I was also a very curious child and according to my parents, I could not stop yapping away about the things I have read and would ask them more and more questions! So, I became interested in science because my curiosity was encouraged by my parents who supplemented my interest with visits to science museums, buying books, helping me with school projects, and, of course, patiently explaining to me how things around me worked. I remember when I was about 3 years old, I was at the doctor’s office about to receive my measles and rubella vaccination and I wanted to run off. Unfortunately, my tiny legs did not take me very far. But what convinced me to have the vaccination was what my father explained to me, “This is so that your body can build an army of antibodies to fight infection.” Yay for antibody-soldiers!
From then on, I started toying with the idea of becoming a doctor (plus a bunch of other things, actually). But the most pivotal moment was when I almost died from the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever when I was 14. I had spent a week in hospital and luckily this was quickly diagnosed, and I survived to tell the tale.
Please share your greatest achievement to date. This is a difficult one. Last year was a very challenging year for me, in terms of my personal life where I suffered two family deaths and a relationship breakdown. Professionally, it was a great year as I managed to present my work at the largest conference of its kind for my specialty, the European Society of Human Reproduction & Embryology Annual Meeting with a travelling scholarship from my department. I was also enthralled to have a personal meeting with the first female Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia and medical doctor, Dato’ Seri Dr Wan Azizah, during the 12th Asia-Europe Meeting in Brussels.
What are your career goals and aspirations? Post-DPhil, I am hoping to pursue a career as a clinical academic in ObGyn. Ideally, I would like to combine my academic medical career with consultancy, non-profit work and a business of my own with a lot of travelling. At present, I am also the Chair of the Board of Trustees of The Kalsom Movement, a student-led education charity based in Malaysia.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced being a woman in science? Thinking about the experiences I have had, made me realise that not many are lucky enough to have parents like mine. Not surprisingly, parental influence has a huge impact on their children’s career choices. My parents have never forced their ideas onto their children, but they have made a huge effort to encourage our interests. For instance, when I wanted to pursue my DPhil and leave my clinical job, I was faced with a lot of tension and stress from many people because it also meant that I was leaving my source of income (and potentially becoming a burden to my ageing parents). To date, I still experience a lot of guilt and discomfort from this backlash, but my parents convinced me that I could do anything I want, even at this age. Why? At my age, society still expects me to settle down with a man and bear his children.
It is sad to think that I am a “trailblazer” for not going through the prescribed pathway of school, work, marriage then children. It still pains me that I disappointed my paternal grandmother in this way. It pains me when I go on to the Malaysian social media scene to read comments like, “There is no point studying so hard up to PhD level and demand a huge dowry when you cannot even cook or take care of your husband.” It is sad that degrees and qualifications are just for the husband-to-be to brag to others about having a doctor-wife, then make her quit her job or overwork her with housework – on top of clinical commitments. But a word of caution: while it is easy to generalise the Malaysian population, remember that 46% of the Princeton Class of 2006 expected their wives to quit/suspend their careers for the family in favour of their husbands’ career development.
It is true I have not truly suffered and could turn a blind-eye to all of these. I am lucky that my biggest challenge at present is just to finish up my DPhil. I am lucky there is provision for less-thanfull-time training and good maternity leave packages in the UK. But for those women who, for whatever reason, cannot speak for themselves, I am speaking for them.
Do you have any advice for women and girls wanting to become involved in science? My advice would be to stay curious and seek out relevant experiences. Stay strong amid societal backlash. Find your tribe. Some people will always want to discourage you, so don’t listen to them. In fact, I was once told that I couldn’t do medicine. Prove them wrong!
Who is a woman in science that you admire and why? Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify in Britain as physician and surgeon. She was also a suffragette, who wrote to her bosses asking to allow her to take part in the movement, and she also made sure she had cover for her shifts in case she got imprisoned. There, I have given you two reasons why you should admire this woman, do look her up! I truly believe that female doctors or scientists can be real agents of change. We are role models to younger girls who are thinking about becoming involved in science.
Can you share an interesting fact from your field of expertise? Do you know that the word “uterus” means hysteria in Greek? So, women, by default, according to men, are crazy.
Why do you think it’s important for women and girls to pursue a career in the sciences? Women and medicine have long been forgotten in scientific research. To date, most of research funding goes to more popular diseases and a smaller portion towards ObGyn research. Sampson’s theory of retrograde menstruation in 1932 remains to be one of the most important theories for explaining endometriosis, and while this partially explains endometriosis, we still do not understand the condition that plagues 10% of the female population with a societal cost of €9.9 billion to the UK. Women are more likely to have their symptoms dismissed by doctors as compared to men. They are more likely to be told by their doctors that their symptoms are just “all in their heads”. According to a 2014 study by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the science that informs medicine fails to consider the crucial impact of sex and gender. Yet women’s overall lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s disease is two-fold compared to men due to the impact of hormonal changes at menopause. Women also have higher rates of adverse drug reactions as compared to men. All of these should give enough reasons why girls should be encouraged to pursue medicine and the sciences.
CategoriesInterviewsTagsInterviewsLeadershipMedicineRoyal Commonwealth SocietyWomen
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Keep flying high, Dr!
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EPSRC Reference: EP/M01777X/1
Title: Re-Distributed Manufacturing and the Resilient, Sustainable City (ReDReSC)
3D Systems Inc Airbus Group Limited Babcock International Group Plc (UK)
Balfour Beatty Group Limited Bristol and Bath Science Park Bristol City Council
Cardiff Capital Region Board Cardiff Council Costain
DNV GL (UK) Dyson Ltd and Dyson Technology Ltd Future Cities Catapult
Knowle West Media Centre Low Carbon South West Motor Design Ltd
RepRap Professional Ltd (RepRapPro) Schumacher Institute West of England LEP
Department: Mechanical Engineering
Scheme: Network
01 Oct 2014 RDM Networks Announced
26 Nov 2014 RDM Networks Announced
The world's manufacturing economy has been transformed by the phenomenon of globalisation, with benefits for economies of scale, operational flexibility, risk sharing and access to new markets. It has been at the cost of a loss of manufacturing and other jobs in western economies, loss of core capabilities and increased risks of disruption in the highly interconnected and interdependent global systems. The resource demands and environmental impacts of globalisation have also led to a loss of sustainability. New highly adaptable manufacturing processes and techniques capable of operating at small scales may allow a rebalancing of the manufacturing economy. They offer the possibility of a new understanding of where and how design, manufacture and services should be carried out to achieve the most appropriate mix of capability and employment possibilities in our economies but also to minimise environmental costs, to improve product specialisation to markets and to ensure resilience of provision under natural and socio-political disruption. This proposal brings together an interdisciplinary academic team to work with industry and local communities to explore the impact of this re-distribution of manufacturing (RDM) at the scale of the city and its hinterland, using Bristol as an example in its European Green Capital year, and concentrating on the issues of resilience and sustainability. The aim of this exploration will be to develop a vision, roadmap and research agenda for the implications of RDM for the city, and at the same time develop a methodology for networked collaboration between the many stakeholders that will allow deep understanding of the issues to be achieved and new approaches to their resolution explored.
The network will study the issues from a number of disciplinary perspectives, bringing together experts in manufacturing, design, logistics, operations management, infrastructure, resilience, sustainability, engineering systems, geographical sciences, mathematical modelling and beyond. They will consider how RDM may contribute to the resilience and sustainability of a city in a number of ways: firstly, how can we characterise the economic, social and environmental challenges that we face in the city for which RDM may contribute to a solution? Secondly, what are the technical developments, for example in manufacturing equipment and digital technologies, that are enablers for RDM, and what are their implications for a range of manufacturing applications and for the design of products and systems? Thirdly, what are the social and political developments, for example in public policy, in regulation, in the rise of social enterprise or environmentalism that impact on RDM and what are their implications? Fourthly, what are the business implications, on supply networks and logistics arrangements, of the re-distribution? Finally, what are the implications for the physical and digital infrastructure of the city?
In addition, the network will, through the way in which it carries out embedded focused studies, explore mechanisms by which interdisciplinary teams may come together to address societal grand challenges and develop research agendas for their solution. These will be based on working together using a combination of a Collaboratory - a centre without walls - and a Living Lab - a gathering of public-private partnerships in which businesses, researchers, authorities, and citizens work together for the creation of new services, business ideas, markets, and technologies.
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What you need to know about plant nutrients
As a gardener, a basic understanding of plants' nutritional needs will help you tune into your garden's overall health. Plants give all kinds of warning signs when something isn't right, like yellowing leaves. Often, such symptoms can be traced back to nutrient imbalances in the soil.
There are 16 essential elements that, according to Missouri Botanical Garden, plants can't survive without. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are all major elements that plants need. Plants acquire these through water and air. The other 13 elements are considered plant nutrients and, according to Dr. Lois Berg Stack at The University of Maine Cooperative Extension, are provided to plants almost entirely through soil. Plant nutrients fall under two categories: macronutrients and micronutrients.
Macronutrients refer to nutrients that plants need in significant amounts. Macronutrients are further broken down into two subgroups: primary nutrients and secondary nutrients. Primary nutrients include nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) and are required by plants in larger quantities. Secondary nutrients include calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg) and sulfur (S), which plants require in smaller amounts than primary nutrients. Since plants generally require macronutrients in greater amounts, these are the nutrients most likely to be deficient in soils for adequate plant health.
When thinking of the main nutrients plants need, which are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, remember the adage, "shoots, roots and overall health." Nitrogen is important for the development of a plant's shoots, meaning the leaves and stems. Phosphorus plays a major role in root development (as well as flower development). And according to the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at University of California, Santa Cruz, potassium helps to build a stronger, more disease-resistant plants.
The University of Missouri Extension lists micronutrients needed by plants as boron (B), chlorine (Cl), copper (Cu), iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), molybdenum (Mo) and zinc (Zn). Some sources, including Cornell University, consider nickel (Ni) and cobalt (Co) as micronutrients, as well. Generally, plants require micronutrients in very small amounts. As a result, it is less likely that your plants will suffer from a micronutrient deficiency.
Farmspeak
The above images, provided by Karen McCarroll at Farmspeak, demonstrate the symptoms caused by nutrient deficiencies in plants. Do any of them look familiar? If you suspect a nutrient deficiency, get a soil test if possible to help confirm your suspicions. We don't recommend supplementing with isolated nutrients, even in organic form, unless you know your soil needs it. An overabundance of a nutrient can cause its own set of issues.
Tips for correcting nutrient imbalances
- Check the pH. Plant nutrients are most available at a soil pH of between 6 and 7, which is slightly acidic to neutral. Test the soil pH to see if it's out of range and may be contributing to the poor health of your plants.
- Make sure you're watering appropriately. Smart! points out that nutrient deficiencies may actually be a result of overwatering or underwatering. Overwatering can limit oxygen availability and result in poor root development, which reduces nutrient uptake. And underwatering limits the movement of nutrients through the soil, making them less available to plants.
- Rotate your crops. Different plants use different nutrients, and in different amounts. Rotating your crops year to year will help avoid nutrient depletion.
- Plant a cover crop. Cover crops, like white clover and winter rye, can be used in between growing seasons to rebuild the soil. Cover crops protect soil from erosion and provide organic material to dig into your soil to break down once you're ready to plant again.
- Use compost. The best way to ensure nutrient-dense soil is to add compost to your garden yearly. You can also make compost tea to use as fertilizer, which according to Off the Grid News is loaded with micronutrients and beneficial soil organisms.
Resources Missouri Botanical Gardens, University of Missouri Extension, Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, Cornell University, Farmspeak, Smart!, Off the Grid News, and The Masters of Horticulture
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Modernisation Committee
Mr. Andrew Robathan
(Blaby) (Con)
20. When she next plans to arrange a meeting of the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons. (301685)
The Parliamentary Secretary, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons
(Barbara Keeley)
Modernisation of the House is taken forward in a number of ways. The parliamentary reform Committee, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), is the most recent development, and it has now reported. The Procedure Committee also looks at ways of reforming the House. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman agrees that all that is important work.
Mr. Robathan
What the House of Commons desperately needs is sensible and considered reform. When this Government came into office in 1997, they set up the Modernisation Committee, under the cloak of which they have severely restricted the ability of the House of Commons to hold the Executive to account and, furthermore, have stopped us scrutinising legislation properly. Will the Government now scrap the Modernisation Committee, which has not met for over a year, and give us a proper opportunity, through making time available in the House of Commons, to debate the Reform of the House of Commons Committee report that has just been published?
I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman. The Modernisation Committee has achieved a number of things that have all helped with House scrutiny.
The commitment to more draft Bills, earlier sittings on Thursdays, sittings in Westminster Hall—[Interruption.] Select Committee reports can be debated in Westminster Hall. Deferred Divisions—
The Leader of the House of Commons
(Ms Harriet Harman)
Topical debates.
Yes, topical debates. For Select Committees, there has been the introduction of core tasks and the creation of the Scrutiny Unit. For oral parliamentary questions, notice has been reduced so that they are more topical. There are also earlier sittings, the carry-over of Bills, the connecting of Parliament with the public and Public Bill Committee evidence-taking. I rest my case.
Mr. Ian McCartney
(Makerfield) (Lab)
A Justice Department Bill is due to come before the House in early January. Can my hon. Friend give me a commitment that the compensation scheme for the victims of Mumbai, Sharm el-Sheikh, Bali and other terrorist incidents, which was promised by the Prime Minister and other colleagues and which the Government were supposed to put in the Queen’s Speech, will be included in the Bill?
Order. As always, the right hon. Gentleman’s ingenuity is to the fore, but the relationship between that question and the question on the Order Paper is at best tangential, and at worst non-existent, so I suggest it is not answered.
Sir Nicholas Winterton
(Macclesfield) (Con)
As the longest-serving member of the Modernisation Committee in this House, and as a past Chairman of the Procedure Committee, may I ask the Deputy Leader of the House whether she thinks it is time for the Modernisation Committee to meet again, not least to discuss the proposals in the Reform of the House of Commons Committee report, bearing in mind that many of them originated in the Modernisation Committee under the inspired leadership of the late Mr. Cook?
The hon. Gentleman put a question to me on this matter some weeks ago. As he has said, there is a continuum of modernisation. On that earlier occasion, I said that we would bring forward our proposals to establish a new Committee on parliamentary reform. It was established, it has reported, and we are now considering its proposals.
Mr. Barry Sheerman
(Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my hon. Friend agree, however, that we need to discuss the report of the Committee chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), and that we also need quickly to secure cross-party agreement to introduce the reforms before the next election? We must do this quickly.
Of course the House will need to debate the report and come to a decision on any changes, but we should reflect on the fact that the report was published only two days ago.
Mr. Greg Knight
(East Yorkshire) (Con)
The Minister has acknowledged that although the Modernisation Committee has not met for some time, the process continues. Can we therefore have an early opportunity to make a decision on the Procedure Committee’s report on the principle of electing our Deputy Speakers?
Recommendations have been made on that and are being considered.
Mr. David Drew
(Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
Having served on the Modernisation Committee, the Procedure Committee and, more recently, the parliamentary reform Committee, may I say that it makes eminent sense for the Modernisation Committee to be rolled into the Procedure Committee and for us to bolster the powers of that Select Committee, which has done valiant work and could do so even more?
I do not think that I can add to what I have said on that matter.
Sir Robert Smith
(West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (LD)
That is very disappointing, because a lack of urgency is being shown by those on the Government Benches, given just how little time is left to make these reforms stick before the end of this Parliament. The Modernisation Committee was a great betrayal, because it was meant to bring forward reforms to improve the accountability of Parliament. The promise was that we would get proper management of the business throughout the year in return for the programming of Bills, but instead we have just had guillotines by the back door. Many of the reforms that the Minister talked about have come from the Procedure Committee. It should be left to get on with reforming the procedures of this House and the Government should make clear how much urgency will go into ensuring that these reforms are introduced.
I have said that we are expecting to have a debate and to come to decisions about any changes on which we need to proceed. A great deal of work is going on in this place; I have read out a number of the things for which the Modernisation Committee was responsible, and a great deal of consideration is being given at the moment to reform.
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Business Listings in Droitwich, Worcestershire
We have searched for business suppliers in Droitwich, Worcestershire a town with an approximate population of 23,504 , that at the census in 2011 had a working population (aged between 16 and 74) of 11,461 people in work, and have found 2 suppliers of services such as Wall Art, & Accountants in Droitwich and have listed them below, we hope to add more in the near future.
If you know of any more suppliers of business related services, either matching the list of 2 services we already have or new services, in Droitwich that you can recommend please contact us and we will look at adding them to this page.
Accountants near Droitwich
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Wall Art in Droitwich
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Business Gift Ideas in Droitwich
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About Droitwich
Droitwich Spa (often abbreviated to Droitwich) is a historic spa town in northern Worcestershire, England, on the River Salwarpe. It is located approximately 22 miles (35 km) south of Birmingham and 7 miles (11 km) north of Worcester.
The town was called Salinae in Roman times, then later called Wyche, derived from the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce kingdom, referred to as "Saltwich" according to Anglo-Saxon charters, with the Droit (meaning "right" in French) added when the town was given its charter on 1 August 1215 by King John. The "Spa" was added in the 19th century when John Corbett developed the town's spa facilities. The River Salwarpe running through Droitwich is likely derived from Sal meaning "salt" and weorp which means "to throw up" i.e. "the river which throws up salt" which overflows from the salt brines.
The above introduction to Droitwich uses material from the Wikipedia article 'Droitwich' and is used under licence.
Weather forecast for the next three days for Droitwich
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When It’s Time for the CEO to Go
Go before you have to.
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries
At a directors’ meeting of a specialty appliance firm I was advising a few years ago, the agenda featured the selection committee’s report presented by Stefan, chairman and CEO. The board members had expected to get a list of the candidates to succeed Stefan, who was past retirement age. However, Stefan informed the board that, despite an extensive search, the selection committee had determined that no candidate was yet qualified: the three insiders needed at least four to six years’ seasoning, while the outsiders (in spite of their outstanding track records) lacked the kind of expertise that would fit the future needs of the company.
After a short discussion, the board agreed that Stefan should postpone his retirement for another four years. Yet several directors remained troubled. Something wasn’t quite right. Were there really no competent external candidates out there? And why did no one in the company qualify? What had happened to the leadership development pipeline all these years? As the company seemed to be on a holding pattern for the past two years, wasn’t it time to bring in somebody new? But was it also possible that the members of the selection committee, knowing Stefan’s attachment to his job, were in reluctant to confront him about succession?
How long should a CEO stay in his job? The most common response I usually have from CEOs is seven years, plus or minus two. It’s a reasonable number: seven years is probably the period of maximum effectiveness for most people in what can be a very stressful job. I think also that the nature and challenges of the job evolve over time, going through three distinct phases:
Entry: This is the “honeymoon period”, the one time that a CEO has an open playing field. Most likely, it’s the period when he or she is most willing to learn, experiment, and innovate. It is also the point at which a CEO is prepared to take risks and make major changes, particularly if brought in as an outsider. During this time the CEO is unlikely to perform at full potential. This is to be expected: many new things have to be assimilated: she has to gain control over a new environment, get to know her various constituencies, and select key lieutenants, the people who will help make it happen. She may also have to “kill” wounded princes, executives who had hoped to get her job.
Consolidation: After a new CEO has established what his or her leadership is all about, in terms of direction, strategy and style, the second phase, the period of consolidation sets in. If everything has gone well, he will start to see the fruits of all his work in the honeymoon phase. He has alliances with key stakeholders and top executives are committed to the course he has chosen. He has a good working relationship with the board. He delivers good results and is secure in his role. The traps here, of course, are complacency and rigidity; as they approach the end of this phase, some CEOs start to resist even minor changes.
Decline: You know that a CEO has reached this stage in the cycle when the company has few or no new products planned for the near future and there are no initiatives to find new markets. Furthermore, there is no new blood coming into the top ranks of organization. Everyone sings to the CEO’s same old tune. The company is probably accumulating a lot of cash because top executives are running out of ideas about how to use it. It’s during this phase that a CEO starts having problems. He may have stopped listening to other people’s ideas. The job has become routine. Performance is slipping. In a fast paced industry, the problems tend to become apparent quickly; declining CEOs in a relatively stable environment can get away with it for longer.
So what is to be done when a CEO starts to decline? The best scenario, of course, is if that the CEO himself realizes what is happening, acknowledges his increasing ineffectiveness, and looks for new horizons when the going is still good. Ideally, that is at the point when they are at that sweet spot of being at the peak of their performance, just before the decline.
But many CEOs find it very hard to admit that the time has come to pass on the baton. Paradoxically, this reluctance doesn’t mean they stay closely involved; many actually distance themselves from day-to-day operations. The reason is that because the day-to-day job has become routine, they look elsewhere for mental stimulation.
As long as they stick to safe pursuits (social, environmental or artistic causes, say), this is OK, maybe even reinvigorating. The danger is that they may instead look for stimulation by involving the company in risky new ventures — typically a big acquisition. This offers a quick and emotionally gratifying solution to the company’s operational inertia (that they’re often aware of) as well as their own sense of inner unrest, anxiety, and boredom. Deals are exciting, they impress the CEO’s peers, and they allow the CEO to pretend that he’s addressing the company’s growing problems.
It’s precisely at this stage that the board needs to step up. If the CEO was an exceptional performer during the honeymoon and consolidation stage, this is unlikely to happen; human instinct is to trust the track record. Over time, the CEO may even have filled the board with people indebted to him or her, who do not really take their review function very seriously. The result is that the board takes action only when things become really catastrophic — by which time it is often too late.
Leadership programs can also provide a form of stock taking. Through reflection — studying ”the leader within” — the CEO can increase his self-awareness and by working in a group he can exchange ideas with peers in similar situations. Quite often, leaders who engage in this discover that they do in fact want to step down and find another job in a new environment. Other CEOs take on a role as mentor or leadership coach to younger executives, which is a highly effective way of maintaining continuity in the organization and also helps to reduce the CEO’s anxiety about leaving.
In Stefan’s case, his reluctance and the board’s to contemplate change meant that it was eventually forced on them. A well-known activist shareholder bought a sizable stake in the company and laid out the case for major change in the financial press. It didn’t take long before he was given a seat on the board. With the help of fellow shareholders, he pressured the directors to push Stefan aside and appoint a new CEO.
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries is an executive coach, psychoanalyst, and management scholar. He is the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at INSEAD in France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. His most recent book is Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership: Leadership Pathology in Everyday Life.
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Interview: James Corden celebrates his transformation into a movie star
TTHE EXPRESS Oct 28, 2013
If just a fraction of those people watch the movie about his journey to that life-changing moment, One Chance, then James Corden will be celebrating his own transformational moment: to that of movie star.
“I don’t know about that” says a relaxed and trim Corden who plays the crooked-teethed former Carphone Warehouse salesman. “I think we’ve made a really nice, sweet and uplifting film and we’re all very proud of it.
But I certainly don’t feel like ‘this is it! I’m in one film people like so it’s done now.’”
One man who does, however, is Harvey Weinstein, the legendary movie mogul and one of the picture’s producers along with Simon Cowell. He believed in the film and Corden so much that he bought the script from Paramount when the studio went cold on the project.
Last week he was predicting awards for the Gavin & Stacey star who has conquered the stage and small screen but thus far on the big screen is best known for a misstep – 2009’s little loved Lesbian Vampire Killers.
“James Corden is definitely going to be up for a Golden Globe or an Oscar, it’s that kind of performance” trumpeted Weinstein last week.
The producer knew Corden was perfect for the part after seeing him in the Broadway transfer of comedy smash One Man,Two Guvnors for which Corden won a Tony Award, beating favourite Philip Seymour Hoffman.
So would Corden agree that Harvey is his Simon Cowell, steering him to big time stardom? Corden smiles at the suggestion. “I’ve got a lot of time for Harvey, I like him very, very much. I’ll be forever thankful for his unrelenting encouragement of me and my career from the moment he came to see me in the play. He hasn’t really let up.”
Indeed, at the Toronto Film Festival last month Weinstein bought for distribution a movie in which Corden stars alongside Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo called Can A Song Save Your Life? Shortly afterwards the star was signed up by powerful Hollywood agency CAA.
An Oscar nomination for One Chance may be pushing it (the competition is intense this year) but a Golden Globe nomination in the musical and comedy category is certainly within reach.
Corden gives a touching and funny performance as the shy, insecure Potts who pursues his unlikely dream while working at Carphone Warehouse in Port Talbot, encouraged by his girlfriend Julie-Anne, played by Alexandra Roach.
He admits that when he first heard that Paul Potts’ life was being turned into a film, his initial thought was: “Really? Honestly? Why?’”
However, after meeting the American director David Frankel, whose credits include hits like A Devil Wears Prada and Marley & Me, he quickly “got it”.
“David said: ‘Let’s be clear, we’re not making a film about a boy who wins Britain’s Got Talent. We’re making a film about a boy from an industrial steel town in Wales who dreams of being an opera singer in a world where no one really listens to opera, let alone wants to be a singer.”
In other words it’s another classic British underdog story in the vein of Billy Elliot or Brassed Off but with a more lighthearted comic tone (Sacha Baron Cohen collaborator Dan Mazer did a script polish).
The role is a perfect fit for Corden who is very funny and improvised several of his own jokes.
“I think the important thing for me was to find a charm in him that makes you root for him. That’s what’s important and I would hope that I’ve pulled it off.”
He may not have suffered bullying like Potts did – at school the quick-witted Corden defused any potential tormentors with his humour – but he certainly understands the urge to perform.
“I don’t really remember a time I didn’t want to” says Corden, 35, who grew up in Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire and started acting straight after leaving school aged 17.
In the film Potts says he is only truly happy when listening to or singing opera. I ask Corden if he’s only truly happy when acting.
“I certainly felt that when I was doing One Man, Two Guvnors” he says. “There were nights when I was doing that show that I genuinely genuinely thought ‘I never ever want this moment to stop’ because it’s so intoxicating. That feeling of 1200 people laughing on a look or an arched eyebrow. You feel like a conductor and laughs are your orchestra. You’re just in complete control.”
The big difference between him and the Potts of One Chance who suffers the taunts of his steelworker father is the support he enjoyed from his dad growing up, a musician in the RAF.
“I grew up with a dad who would say ‘the difference between doing something and not doing something is doing something. So do it. Don’t talk about it. The only thing stopping you doing it is you.’
“If you grow up in a household like that you really do have a sort of confidence which instead of asking ‘why should it be me?’ constantly asks ‘why not me?’”
That confidence nearly got the better of him in 2009 when all his success seemed to be going to his head, along with large amounts of alcohol.
He famously stuck it to Sir Patrick Stewart after a perceived insult at an awards ceremony and, while picking up a second BAFTA for his TV show Gavin & Stacey, complained that he hadn’t been nominated for a third.
That was before a few career setbacks and family life calmed him down; he married TV producer Julia Carey last year and they have young son Max.
Now he’s more popular, prolific and hard-working than ever. We meet in London during a quick break in filming his latest movie, Into The Woods, a big budget adaptation of the Eighties musical by Stephen Sondheim based on the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairytales.
H’s part of crackerjack cast including Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp and Emily Blunt. Corden plays The Baker, a role once earmarked for Billy Crystal in a previous incarnation of the project.
“When I did the workshop in New York last year it was genuinely always at the back of mind that I’d do the workshop and then they’d cast someone very famous” says Corden. “But God bless Rob (director Rob Marshall) for sticking by me. I’ll forever be thankful for the sort of risk he’s taken on me because it’s part of my dreams really.”
Corden won’t even be giving himself much of a break over Christmas. He’ll be using the time to write a Christmas comedy with Mathew Baynton, his co-star and writing partner on recent TV hit The Wrong Mans.
It’s called School For Santas and Corden is developing the project with UK hit maker Working Title. “We thought it was important to write it at Christmas” he says before telling me the plot. In confidence.
All I can say is, it sounds like another tailor-made Corden classic.
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Why does God say he only revealed his name, Yahweh, to Moses?
Responding the the meta call for contradiction In Exodus 6:2 we find the following quote:
And God spoke to Moses and said to him
I am Yahweh. And I showed to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as El-Shaddai, and by my name, 'Yahweh', I did not make myself known to them.
How can this be? Abraham hears/says Yahweh in Genesis 15:2,15:7,15:8,18:14,22:14, and his servants/relatives do in ch 24.
Isaac and Jacob use "Yahweh" less frequently, only in Gen 27:20 and 27:27.
Why does God say he didn't reveal his name "Yahweh", when he obviously glaringly did so in Genesis, many, many times?
genesis contradiction exodus names-of-god
Ron MaimonRon Maimon
The way it is worded here (likely due to the - questionable? - reference to El-Shaddai) this text truly is problematic in his - again questionable - negating of YHWH as having been known to the patriarchs. – hannes Aug 6 '13 at 9:40
Because the writer of the Exodus passage believed it, and the writer of the Genesis passages believed differently.
While scholars continue to debate its exact shape, source criticism – in Documentary, Supplementary, Fragmentary, or other form – continues to be among the most helpful tools for examining apparent inconsistencies of exactly this sort in the Pentateuch.
Brief Background: The consensus within modern critical scholarship sees within these Books two or more earlier, written sources, woven together, redacted, and amended over several centuries. The original sources can be distinguished, or at least hypothesized, by differences in vocabulary, tone, ideology, and historical detail. Such obvious inconsistencies and variations in the Bible often puzzle close readers (see below). But Jeffrey Tigay notes:
“Their preservation side by side [in the final text] has led modern scholars to conclude that the redactor(s) was/were fundamentally conservative. Perhaps they believed all the traditions valid, perhaps even inspired, and therefore preserved them with minimal revision even if that left inconsistencies, non sequiturs, and redundancies.” (p.104)
For source critics an awareness of the possibility of multiple authors or sources adds a level of richness to the text. It also often makes simple work of otherwise puzzling problems.
So it is with this question: The two most popular names used for God in the Pentateuch – Jehovah (YHVH) and Elohim – were among the first and most consequential differences to be explored and mapped by source critics. The obvious discrepancy between the use of the name YHVH by the Patriarchs (e.g. Gen.15.7, 28.13) and the revelation of the divine name to Moses centuries later ostensibly for the first time (Ex.6:2-3) is therefore well known. Like most scholars today with an eye for possible source issues, Tigay easily explains:
“[I]t is another indication that different sources underlie the present narrative. One source (J) holds that the name YHVH was first known in the days of Enosh (Gen. 4.26), while others (E and P) hold that it was first revealed in the days of Moses.” (p.115)
Some exegetes see in the apparent inconsistency of Ex.6:3 a profound problem, as for example The Pulpit Commentary: “The explanation of this passage is by no means easy... The apparent meaning of the present passage cannot therefore be its true meaning. No writer would so contradict himself.”
That's true, but two or more authors might. Source criticism not only offers insight into the original sources and intentions of biblical texts, it also suggests clear and meaningful explanations for some of their apparent problems.
James H. Tigay, “Introduction and Notes on Exodus”, The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford, 2004).
Marc Zvi Brettler and Adele Berlin, "The Modern Study of the Bible", The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford, 2004); pp.2084-2096.
SchuhSchuh
This apparent contradiction can be resolved without the documentary hypothesis. As Bruce Alderman pointed out, Gen 17 is considered an E passage, yet it uses YHWH in the very first verse. Similarly, there are J passages that use Elohim (the very first J passage actually uses YHWH-Elohim). There are certain patterns in Hebrew thought for when one name would be preferred over the other in a given situation.
The Meaning of the Names
YHWH is a proper noun referring to the God of Israel. It is often translated "LORD" (with either all caps or with small caps to keep it distinct from occurrences of "adonai"). Elohim is the generic term for god or gods that only later became a proper name.
As such, YHWH is used whenever the Bible stresses God's personal relationship with His people and the ethical nature of His character. Elohim refers to God's power, His creating all things, and how He is the ruler of all life and all things. Psalm 19 is one of the best examples of how these names are used. The first 6 verses speak of Elohim and His relation to the material world. However, beginning in verse 7, YHWH appears and the focus of the Psalm shifts to the law, precepts, and His relationship with humans who know Him.
The name YHWH is used to show the personal nature of God and how He relates to human beings. On the other hand, Elohim refers to the transcendent creator of the universe, who shaped it. YHWH is appropriate when emphasizing the relationship with Him in personal and ethical matters. Elohim connects deity with existence and humanity.
Accordingly, Genesis 1 uses Elohim to show God's power in creating all things. Genesis 2:4-3:23 uses YHWH-Elohim to show the very intimate and detailed relationship between God and Adam and Eve. Both names are used to show that the same Elohim who created all things maintains a personal relationship with those who walk in His ways. Note that in the very first "J passage," (who is supposed to know God as YHWH) the name is YHWH-Elohim.
However, a complication comes in the verse in question. In Exodus 6:3, God states, "I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name [YHWH] I did not make myself known to them.” YHWH is used some 150 times in the patriarchal period. How is this to be made sense of?
The Beth Essentiae
However, a technical point of Hebrew grammar, known as beth essentiae, renders the contradiction moot.* This refers to how a name in Hebrew may not just be a construction of pleasing sounds but refer to a person's essential character and nature. The beth appears at the front of the name El Shaddai, meaning "in the character of the Almighty I appeared to them." Thus, Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac certainly heard and used the name YHWH but it was not until Moses that the essence of the name was revealed. As summarized by Kaiser, "'By the name' is better translated 'in the character [or nature] of Yahweh [was I not known]'" (Kaiser, W. C. 1997, c1996. Hard sayings of the Bible . InterVarsity: Downers Grove, Il). However, Kaiser has now changed his mind about and reads the verse as a rhetorical question, "By my name YHWH was I not known to them?" (Kaiser, The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and Relevant, 142).
Kaiser has changed his stance based on the fact that the Hebrew has the beth only on El Shaddai. He argues that a beth essentiae should be on both names if the second is also to be read as such. However, Motyer argues that the first use sets the stage and it should be understood as on the second. He uses Isaiah 48:9 ("For the sake of My name I delay My wrath, And for My praise I restrain it for you, In order not to cut you off." [NASB]) as an illustration. The governing preposition, "for the sake of" makes better English (and something is required). However, "for the sake of" only appears on the first phrase in Hebrew. We add the "for" to the second for clarity in English. Thus, we do the same for the beth essentiae in Exodus 6:3.
Beth essentiae appear also in Exodus 3:2, 18:4, Isaiah 66:15, and other places. What is perhaps most significant to our study here is the usage in Exodus 3:2. The beth essentiae will be in bold below.
Exd 3:1 Now Moses was pasturing the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. Exd 3:2 The angel of the LORD appeared to him as a blazing fire from the midst of [fn]a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. [NASB with a modification by this author to show the beth essentiae. NASB transs. it as "in."]
Just as the beth essentiae on flame here shows the nature of God, we can similarly conclude that the same construct is being used in Exodus 6:3 and carry it over to both nouns. Motyer translates the verse 'I showed myself ... in the character of El Shaddai, but in the character expressed by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known.'
Likewise, the Hebrew understanding of shem includes a person's reputation and glory (Brown, Driver, Briggs Lexicon s.v. shem. See Gen 11:4, 12:2; 2 Sam 7:9; Isa 63:14; Dan 9:15; and others.)
Jewish Commentators
The Targum of Pseudo Jonathan and medieval Jewish commentaries take it similarly. TPJ says that the name was known to them, but it was just sounds as the Shekinah glory had not appeared to them. Rashi said that El Shaddai was God's characteristic of giving promises and YHWH showed the fulfillment of said promises. However, Rambam said that El Shaddai demonstrated the providential power of God while YHWH showed the miracle-working power. Umberto Cassuto said El Shaddai referred to God as the giver of fertility (because El Shaddai is connected to Gen 17:1-2 and other passages with being fruitful) while YHWH is the One who carries out those promises. The patriarchs knew the name but they had no experience of what was entailed in the name.
W. J. Martin has suggested this translation.
I am YHWH. I allowed myself to appear to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shaddai. My name is YHWH. Did I not make myself known to them?
Martin argues that the translation of the key clause as a question is demanded by verse 4 beginning with "And also I established my covenant." That would seem to imply that the preceding clause ought to be taken in a positive sense and not a negative sense, such as "by YHWH I was not known to them."
My understanding of Exodus 6:3 is that they knew the name but now they would experience the character of YHWH.
*More information on the beth essentiae can be found in Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar, § 119i. If that is not on hand, Waltke/O'Connor's Hebrew Syntax should have an entry on it. You may also see Zondervan's Pictoral Encyclopedia of the Bible s.v. "Name".
This is a just-so story allowing you to make the text self-consistent. None of these readings is supportable. "Be-El Shaddai" is an artsy but acceptable way of saying "using El Shaddai". I don't like unlikely stretching of text to fit a theology, when the text is unfriendly to this reading. The grammar contortions by theologically minded people make their analysis untrustworthy. As for the connotation, Shaddai->fertility/providence Yahweh->Miracles/direct-action, I agree. The distinction between the personal Yahweh and the impersonal Shaddai is due to the different vision of God in J and E. – Ron Maimon Apr 9 '12 at 0:56
@RonMaimon, shem with the connotation of reputation is well supported throughout the Old Testament (I listed several). Are you saying this is not the case? Also, are you saying that the beth essentiae is nowhere found in the Old Testament? – Frank Luke Apr 9 '12 at 2:01
@RonMaimon, the downvote is your prerogative. However, "intellectual dishonesty" implies that either I am committing plagiarism or I have written something that I know is false. I have listed my sources above, and I assure you that I do believe what I have written. I am not committing any kind of intellectual dishonesty. – Frank Luke Apr 10 '12 at 2:16
@hannes, Abraham did know him by YHWH, that is seen many times in Genesis. A promise was given to Abraham (and one to Eve as well). – Frank Luke Aug 4 '13 at 22:43
Without getting into documentary hypothesis at all... since shem means BOTH 'name' and 'reputation'... and since others knew his name previously; the proper and simple answer is: Common courtesy does not presume a contradiction by an author, therefore God intended 'reputation' to be understood. – Bob Jones Aug 23 '16 at 14:48
In addition Frank Luke's excellent answer, I've found some additional material that might be of interest. Duane A. Garrett (coauthor of A Modern Grammar for Biblical Hebrew) writes on Exodus 6:2c-3:
But the Hebrew text, as Francis I. Andersen points out, contains a case of noncontiguous parallelism that translators have not recognized: “I am Yahweh...and my name is Yahweh.” The “not” is therefore assertative in a rhetorical question rather than a simple negative, and it should not be connected to what precedes it (1974:102). In fact, the whole text is set in a poetic, parallel structure beyond what Andersen notes (see fig. 1).
The Structure of Exodus 6:2c–3
A I am Yahweh.
B And I made myself known to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai.
A' And My name is Yahweh;
B' Did I not make Myself known to them?
Unlike modern poetry, which is typeset in very conventional and often obvious ways, Hebrew poetry was often indicated through parallelisms. It would be rash to say that the Garrett's interpretation is certain, since parallel thoughts can occur in prose and would not force B' to be a rhetorical question. But by the same token, it does provide a reasonable doubt that the author of Exodus asserts that Moses was the first to hear the Tetragrammaton.
He further quotes Andersen:
There is no hint in Exodus that Yahweh was a new name revealed first to Moses. On the contrary, the success of his mission depended on the use of the familiar name for validation by the Israelites—The Sentence in Biblical Hebrew (1974:102).
A portion of the NET Bible note on this text addresses the question directly:
[The] texts of Genesis show that Yahweh had appeared to the patriarchs (Gen 12:1, 17:1, 18:1, 26:2, 26:24, 26:12, 35:1, 48:3), and that he spoke to each one of them (Gen 12:7, 15:1, 26:2, 28:13, 31:3). The name “Yahweh” occurs 162 times in Genesis, 34 of those times on the lips of speakers in Genesis (W. C. Kaiser, Jr., “Exodus,” EBC 2:340-41). They also made proclamation of Yahweh by name (4:26, 12:8), and they named places with the name (22:14). These passages should not be ignored or passed off as later interpretation.
Personally, I find it odd that the redactor of Genesis and Exodus (assuming of course that it was just one person) would have missed this obvious contradiction. In the context of the story, this is the first time God has spoken to His people for many generations. All of God's promises, which seemed certain to be fulfilled at the end of Genesis, have seemingly been destroyed within the first chapter of Exodus. In fact, God immediately emphasizes that it is His intention to remember the covenant He had made to the Patriarchs:
I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners. Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the people of Israel whom the Egyptians hold as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the LORD.’—Exodus 6:4-8 (ESV)
The plagues are structured to show God's power against the pantheon of Egyptian deities and His authority over creation. The emphasis of the entire passage seems to balance a continuity with the God of Genesis with the discontinuity of what He is about to do. It seems that the Israelites have forgotten, but the story tells us that God has not forgotten His previous commitment to them. He is preparing to shake them up and out of slavery to another nation in order to establish a nation of His own.
This begins with the most ridiculous of all possible answers. The words "lo noda'ti la-hem" cannot be a question, and this text is obviously all (high quality) prose. – Ron Maimon Apr 11 '12 at 19:18
Ah, following W. J. Martin (or maybe Martin followed them). Poetry in Biblical Hebrew has it's own rules. Something I forgot to mention (I see it hinted at in your answer) is that when Moses asked who shall I say has sent me, God answers as if they are familiar with the name YHWH. – Frank Luke Apr 11 '12 at 19:18
@FrankLuke: No he doesn't! He says "I am that I am", then he says "My name is Yahweh". There is no familiarity. – Ron Maimon Apr 11 '12 at 19:20
@Ron: Your argument is with Garrett and Andersen, not me. I'm just parroting what I read and what makes sense to myself as a layman. I'll leave the disagreements to the authors of Hebrew grammar texts, professors of Biblical studies, and translators of Hebrew to battle out. – Jon Ericson♦ Apr 11 '12 at 19:44
@JonEricson: Please exercize your own judgement as well--- if you post the Hebrew, I can give a word-for-word gloss, and there are other experts here who can do the same. It is important to check what people say, to keep them honest. – Ron Maimon Apr 12 '12 at 0:04
The verb נֹודַעְתִּי (noda'ti) is exceptionally rare. It is conjugated in binyan Nif'al, 1st person, singular number. It only occurs twice in scripture, the other instance being in Eze. 20:9 which actually has a similar context.
In Eze. 20:9, it is written,
And I did for the sake of My name, in order to prevent it from being dishonored in the eyes of the Gentiles whom they were among, which was made known to them in their eyes when I brought them forth from Egypt.
וָאַעַשׂ לְמַעַן שְׁמִי לְבִלְתִּי הֵחֵל לְעֵינֵי הַגֹּויִם אֲשֶׁר־הֵמָּה בְתֹוכָם אֲשֶׁר נֹודַעְתִּי אֲלֵיהֶם לְעֵינֵיהֶם לְהֹוצִיאָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם
According to this scripture, the name יהוה was made known to the Israelites when they were brought forth from Egypt. Therefore, it is possible to say that it was not known to them before they were brought forth from Egpyt. What is it about the exodus from Egypt that had the ability to make the name known to the Israelites?
The name יהוה reveals God's faithfulness to His promises, including the covenants He makes.
In Deut. 7:7-9, it is written,
"YHVH did not set His love upon you nor choose you because you were more in number than any people. For, you were the fewest of all people. Because YHVH loved you, and because He would keep the oath that He had sworn to your fathers, YHVH brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. And know that YHVH (יהוה) is your God. He is God, the faithful God (הָאֵל הַנֶּאֱמָן), who keeps covenant and mercy with those who love Him and keep His commandments to a thousand generations."
YHVH made a host of promises to the fathers, but the fathers never saw those promises fulfilled. In fact, they still will not have experienced their fulfillment until they are resurrected from the dead. The fathers — such as Avraham, Yitzchak, and Ya'akov — "these all died in faith without having received the promises" (Heb. 11:13). Yes, they knew of the name YHVH, but they did not see it made known to them or revealed to them like the Israelites, for יהוה is הָאֵל הַנֶּאֱמָן, "the faithful God."
The name YHVH was made known to the Israelites when YHVH brought them forth from Egypt because it was fulfillment of God's promises to the fathers (cp. Gen. 15:7-21).
In Exodus 6:8, it is written,
And I will bring you into the land, concerning which I swore to give to Avraham Yitzchak, and Ya'akov, and I will give you it for an inheritance. I am YHVH."
So, in summary, the meaning is that YHVH, which represents God in His faithfulness to His promises and covenants, was not realized by or made known to the patriarchs who died in faith without having received the promises. Rather, it was made known to the Israelites when God brought them forth from Egypt because that was the fulfillment of God's promises and covenant (in part).
Well put. God revealed His faithfulness and "Am-ness" to Israel in a new way via the Exodus. His promises don't have an expiration date. (I note in passing that the quote from Hebrews (a Christian text) is really secondary to the argument. The main point is that the promises of God were not fulfilled by the end of Genesis. If anything, they were further off than before. God used the events of Exodus to bring the promises closer to fulfillment.) – Jon Ericson♦ Nov 19 '12 at 20:10
Good answer. In the Exodus, they experience God as the great I Am while before they had heard the name. The difference is in knowing someone and knowing of someone. – Frank Luke Dec 4 '12 at 19:05
Abraham did receive a son at the old age of Sarah and his. He as good as sacrificed him and received him back. He did not enter into God's rest as surely as the Israelites didn't who died in the wilderness and their children didn't who were lead into the land by Joshua.
I can not favour the thought that those Israelites should have experienced God differently from the way Abraham did. If so, how is he supposed to be(come) their father in his faith to God? Most of the difficulties with these texts arise from the introduction of the name El-Shaddai in connection with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This name does not appear elsewhere. Shaddai is found in the oracle of Bileam, in Ruth, in Job (first being used there not by Job but by Eliphaz of Teman) - Job adresses God by the name YHWH.
Interestingly God is referred to throughout all scripture including the sayings of Jesus as the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. It seems to me a textual-semantic difficulty, if God introduced himself as God Almighty, when being their God. The early Greek translation (Septuagint, LXX) does not have any remembrance of El-Shaddai in neither Genesis nor Exodus. However, it does have this: EGO EIMI HO THEOS SOY. I am your God. (The like with the personal pronouns of my, your, their in all instances where the later Massoretic text introduced El-Shaddai, possibly for universalistic reasons, after the destruction of the second Temple. A replacement of El-Shaddai by THEOS SOY (your God) in the Greek is a lot less than likely. There is nothing that would have spoken against translating THEOS HO PANTOKRATOR (God Almighty), on the contrary, given the context of antique Alexandria for this 3rd B.C. translation.
As Frank Luke and Jon Ericson have shown, there is good evidence for end of Exodus 6:3 really having been a question affirmative:
I am YHWH I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob Being their God I am YHWH Did I not make Myself known to them?
It is here probably in place to reference to this:
And God said again to Moses: Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel - YHWH, the God of your fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is an everlasting name of mine and for memorial of generations to generations. - Exodus 3:15
hanneshannes
But the Samaritan has El-Shaddai, so it's not something that's introduced, and the Hebrew roots don't allow an interpretation of "Your God" very naturally. But perhaps it was a borrowing in a different language, who knows. "Shaddai" means something like "my breast", or "my teat", in Hebrew, and perhaps has a fertility goddess connotation, but I am not sure, it's too isolated. If only there were more ancient texts... +1 for the sources and interesting thoughts, thank you. – Ron Maimon Aug 5 '13 at 15:45
@Ron Maimon. I keep thinking about it. In Ruth the LXX renders Shaddai as ho Ikanos (the Sufficient One). In Job as Pantokrator (Ruler of All), Ikanos, and Kyrios (Lord). El-Shaddai is nowhere used for God except Gen and Ex these few instances where it is foreign and confusing everything. None of the Prophets, not a single Psalm speaks of El-Shaddai. – hannes Aug 5 '13 at 21:09
Ezekiel has El together with Shaddai ones. The translator of the LXX here simply writes (genitive) THEOU SHADDAI, employing a double Delta (of the Overpowering One), not the single one of breasts and fertility. The meaning may be close though. – hannes Aug 6 '13 at 8:42
Without getting into documentary hypothesis at all... since shem means BOTH 'name' and 'reputation'... and since others knew his name previously; the proper and simple answer is: Common courtesy does not presume a contradiction by an author, therefore God intended 'reputation' to be understood.
In verse 1, God explained that he would bring woe upon Pharaoh.
In verse 3, he says the Fathers knew him by the reputation of the God who suffices.
In progressive revelation of his character, he is now making his reputation as the God 'Yah' י of woe 'hovah' הוה.
Bob JonesBob Jones
Just a poor sojourner through the text and I appreciate all the above answers. Like the poetry aspect, the question aspect, etc.
But maybe another part of it is taking a look at the big picture of the Exodus story - God calling the nation of Israel - (whose patriarchs after Abraham all struggled to be firstborns but actually weren't) - in Exodus 4 God comes along and says this story is going to be about you as a nation becoming "my firstborn" to carry out my purposes and inheritance into this currently mostly polytheistic world. Then in Ex 6:3 we get this juxtaposition between ra'ah "seeing' and yada "knowing". Perhaps the patriarchs "saw" or "became aware" of Yahweh as El Shaddai in their Genesis stories, but now they were going to yada "experientially know" Yahweh as the one true God i.e. Ex 3:15.
Maybe one of the ideas in this passage is they as His firstborn had to go through a process beginning with "seeing" this God (be His Name El Shaddai or Yahweh, or even "I am that I am" in Exodus 3 when He first meets up with Moses) and ending with "knowing" this God, that He is worthy to be their God and they "believe" in Yahweh at the end of the story Exodus 14:31. Maybe this story was about the Israelites "knowing", (Ex 6:7) the Egyptians"knowing" (Ex 7:5) and Pharaoh "knowing" (Ex 5:2, 9:14) that Yahweh was God.
mostlyconfusedmostlyconfused
If Moses actually wrote the Pentateuch, and since he knew that the name of that Elohim is YHVH, then as an author of those books, he would use the name that he knew. Thus, Moses used YHVH, but he also emphasized that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew that Elohim to be El Shaddai.This should not be problematic at all as one sees how that authors of the books in the New Testament called this YHVH, the Creator God, Messiah is called Jesus Christ. So, if I only know Jesus as the name of YHVH, when I do my narrative of events, I would write, "Jesus was not known to Abraham,Isaac and Jacob but known to them as El Shaddai and to Moses as YHVH". What is so difficult about that narrative?
FoundationActsFoundationActs
Welcome to Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange! Be sure to visit the tour to learn more about this site. Due to the nature of this site, references may be required in order to support your conclusions. – Paul Vargas Sep 23 '14 at 13:14
The Father of Christ is the creator of all but actually did the creating through the Word. And according to John, this actual Creator and Word was the incarnated Jesus/YahShuah and Genesis confirms that the same person was YHVH to Moses but El Shaddai to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The same person with different names depending on his function. – FoundationActs Oct 2 '14 at 16:44
The Father of Christ is the creator of all but he actually did the creating by and through the Word. And according to John, this actual Creator and Word was the incarnated Jesus/YahShuah and Genesis confirms that the same person was YHVH to Moses but El Shaddai to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The same person with different names depending on his function. The Father was never introduced as YHVH; rather he is the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7. – FoundationActs Oct 2 '14 at 16:55
The reason is that there were (at least) two independent narratives for Genesis and Exodus that are combined to make the modern text. The Elohist narrative does not use Yahweh until Exodus 6:2, while the Jahwist narrative uses Yahweh throughout.
The two narratives are clearly distinguished, and have slightly different versions of the same stories. The best evidence that the Elohist narrative was an entire coherent narrative, and not just some incorporated stories, is from this verse--- which requires a consistent story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob using El-Shaddai to match, and this is provided by some of the stories in the book of Genesis (but not by the J ones).
Again, this contradiction is simply resolved using the documentary hypothesis. It cannot be resolved in any other reasonable way.
Why do you translate the words “לא נודעתי” as “I did not make known” rather than the reflexive “I did not make myself known”? In order to get at the translation you’re using, the text should have been “לא הודעתי”. – J. C. Salomon Apr 11 '12 at 4:57
The b- prefix would better translate as “with” rather than “in”, hence “with my name YHVH I did not make myself known to them”. Considering the strong association between name and identity, this can equally be read as a lacuna in the Patriarchs’ understanding of God’s YHVH-ness as their ignorance of the name. – J. C. Salomon Apr 11 '12 at 5:14
@Ron "you have complete academic consensus on DH" - not according to wikipedia? What is your source for that assertion? – Jack Douglas Apr 11 '12 at 18:15
@RonMaimon, I'd trust someone who has studied Biblical Hebrew, but that's just me. I can suggest some BH grammars for you. They may be written by Christians and Jews, but I've never seen theology factor into their teachings of the grammar. And Gesenius follows the Documentary Hypothesis. I usually don't recommend him for first books. He's just too deep for those just coming into Hebrew at all, but that wouldn't be you. Look for Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar. If you want something more current, others have suggested Jouon & Muraoka, but I have no personal experience with that one. – Frank Luke Apr 11 '12 at 19:12
@RonMaimon, you have already admitted that you have never studied Biblical Hebrew. Yet, now you say that those who do make up grammar exceptions. Which book of grammar have you seen this in? I need titles and authors, please. Grammar books. Not commentaries. – Frank Luke Apr 11 '12 at 19:29
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged genesis contradiction exodus names-of-god or ask your own question.
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All Places > Legislative Records > Discussions
2 Replies Latest reply on Jun 25, 2020 11:07 AM by Legislative Archives
Senators involved in Fair Housing Act 1937
Paul Adam Kobylarz Bongiorno Jun 24, 2020 10:50 PM
I'm searching for any resources documenting the lives of the senators who supported Fair Housing Act 1937. My attention is on Senator Ellender of LA, but any others will do. Also want to learn more about beginnings of Housing and Urban Development.
Tags: none (add) franklin d. roosevelt, urban planning, new deal, fdr
Re: Senators involved in Fair Housing Act 1937
LOC Manuscript Division Jun 25, 2020 9:16 AM (in response to Paul Adam Kobylarz Bongiorno)
Thanks for your History Hub question.
The Library of Congress Manuscript Division holds the papers of over 900 members of Congress, dating back to the Continental Congress convened in 1774. Many of these collections are described in Members of Congress: A Checklist of Their Papers in the Manuscript Division, compiled by John J. McDonough, and published by the Library of Congress in Washington in 1980. An electronic copy is available through the HathiTrust website. The Checklist does not contain any reference to Allen Joseph Ellender, but you may wish to check it for other names associated with the Fair Housing Act 1937.
Each collection in the Manuscript Division is briefly described in the Library’s Online Catalog. Several of the search options in the catalog allow you to limit your search to the holdings of the Manuscript Division only (see the “location” option in the “limit” window). A search of the General Collections for Allen Ellender yielded a number of published works and photographs, but no collections of personal papers. When conducting a search of the Library’s General Collections, you can sort manuscript collections to the top of a list by using the "Sort by" feature, and selecting "Date (oldest to newest)."
A keyword search of the catalog for the authority term “United States. United States housing act of 1937" will yield over 20 titles, but no manuscript collections.
The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress provides brief biographies of members, a list of “Research Collections” for the study of their lives and careers, and an “Extended Bibliography” of published works about them. The Directory is not maintained by the Library of Congress, but rather by historical offices in the U.S. Congress. The Directory lists a number of collections of papers and published titles related to Allen Ellender. If the Biographical Directory does not list a location for a senator’s papers, there may still be small collections in held by colleges they attended, or by historical societies in their states.
Please use these resources to search for the papers of other senators associated with the Housing Act of 1937. If the Manuscript Division holds any of them, please contact our reference staff for further assistance.
Reference Staff/BK
Legislative Archives Jun 25, 2020 11:07 AM (in response to Paul Adam Kobylarz Bongiorno)
Hi Paul -- thanks for posting to History Hub!
For information on the lives of individual Senators, I'd recommend personal paper collections -- we recently published a blog post on the topic. It looks like the majority of Senator Ellender's papers are held by Nicholls University.
The United States Housing Act of 1937 (sometimes called the Wagner-Steagall Act) was introduced as S. 1685 by Senator Wagner on Feb. 24, 1937. The Senator requested that the text of the bill and an explanatory statement be printed in the Congressional Record -- jump to page 1521. The bill was signed into law as PL 75-412 on Sept. 1, 1937.
The Congressional Record is the official record of proceedings and debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. It's freely available online via GovInfo. To find the debate on S. 1685, start with the History of Bills and Resolutions section for Volume 81 of the Congressional Record (1937). Jump to page 647 for the entry on S. 1685 -- here you'll find all the page numbers relevant to the bill throughout Volume 81.
The Wagner-Steagall Act created the United States Housing Authority. Records relating to the US Housing Authority are part of Record Group 196 -- Records of the Public Housing Administration. For more information on RG 196 you can either search the National Archives Catalog or contact an archivist by emailing archives2reference@nara.gov.
I'd also recommend the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library website. They put together an acknowledgement of the 75th anniversary of the Wagner-Steagall Act.
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Former face of Hong Kong police will no longer be travelling to UK for training after programme suspended
The coronavirus pandemic was cited as a reason for the suspension, but the British also pointedly mentioned the city’s new national security law. The move follows the suspension of a similar programme with the US last month
Amid worsening relations between Britain and Beijing following the imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong, the city’s police force will no longer be sending its former public relations chief and other officers to Britain for an extended training programme.
The force stressed that the decision was based on the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, which the British also cited, though the UK’s announcement confirming the suspension earlier this week also pointedly mentioned the security law, adding that whether the programme would continue in the future would be subject to review.
A Hong Kong police source said on Sunday that John Tse Chun-chung, formerly chief superintendent of the police’s public relations branch during the city’s months of social unrest last year, had been expected to undergo a one-year training programme in Britain from next month.
The former head of the police public relations branch, John Tse, speaks to the media at Police Headquarters in August of last year. Photo: Sam Tsang
Tse was the face of the police as the city was rocked by the months-long protest movement that erupted in June last year in opposition to a now-withdrawn extradition bill. For months, Tse had come under heavy criticism from the protesters and their supporters for the police’s handling of the demonstrations.
Earlier this year, however, he was transferred to become the commander of Kwai Tsing district.
A police spokesman declined to comment on training arrangements for individual officers, but stressed that it was the Hong Kong police who decided to suspend sending its officers to mainland China and overseas for training because of coronavirus concerns.
While the purpose of such overseas training was to broaden officers’ horizons and to engage them in exchanges about their experiences, the future of the programmes will be subject to review, the spokesman added.
Earlier this week, The Observer quoted Britain’s Ministry of Defence in saying that, because of the Covid-19 outbreak, “all training with personnel from Hong Kong has been paused,” and that the programmes “will be re-evaluated when restrictions are lifted”.
The ministry added that the British government had been clear that the sweeping new national security law imposed on Hong Kong constituted a breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, directly threatening the rights and freedom of the people in Hong Kong.
The British government had also previously agreed to allow all 3 million eligible British National (Overseas) passport holders and their dependents to relocate to Britain in light of the law, drawing an angry response from Beijing.
Hong Kong was a British colony for 150 years until it was returned to China in 1997 under the agreement that it would continue to enjoy a high degree of autonomy.
Last month, the US government similarly put an end to years of trainings for members of the Hong Kong police and other local security services at the Department of State’s International Law Enforcement Academy.
Senior Hong Kong officers, however, insisted that the end of the US programme was a “non-issue”, as the US was not the city’s only partner.
The Hong Kong police have only sent about 604 officers for trainings overseas in the past five years, and it had been almost a year since any officer was sent to the US.
According to a document obtained from the Hong Kong Police College, selected officers with ranks of senior superintendent or above have the option of attending overseas courses at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, the Institut Europeen d’Administration des Affaires in France, the Royal College of Defence Studies in Britain, as well as Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in the US.
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What’s On Second
Here’s the breakdown as of 7:30 pm ET this evening of the filings in the Texas v. Pennsylvania, et al. lawsuit.
Texas has filed its complaint. Donald Trump, in his individual capacity, has filed to intervene as an plaintiff-intervenor. Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah have also filed to intervene as plaintiff-intervenors. Others have also filed to intervene as plaintiff-intervenors as well—
One such filing is from a group of state legislators from Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Another is from an organization called the Freedom Fund. A third is from another group of private citizens and state legislators for the four defendant states.
Amicus briefs in support of Texas have been filed by group of 106 members of the House of Representatives; by the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House and Majority Leader of the Pennsylvania Senate; and by a group of state legislators from Alaska, Arizona, and Idaho. A group called the Christian Family Coalition has also filed a brief in support of the plaintiff. Oh, and Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia have filed a joint brief supporting Texas.
Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania have all filed oppositions to Texas’ motion to file and Texas’ complaint.
The District of Columbia, the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and the territories of Guam and the U.S. Virgin Island have filed a joint brief in support of the defendants. The City of Detroit has also filed a brief in support of the defendants, as have a group of RINO ex-public officials.
Arizona and Ohio have filed briefs in support of neither side that ask the court to resolve the matter in order to prevent future elections from having to deal with the same question again.
IANAL, but from my initial scan of the filings, the basis for Texas’s complaint seems plausible to me. The general thrust for the arguments from the defendants and their amici is that the Supreme Court has no business butting in on how states conduct elections, that Texas doesn’t have standing to bring the suit, and that res judicata resulting from various low ercourt suit forecloses any further litigation.
Fasten your seatbelts and stay tuned.
UPDATE—When I checked the Supreme Court website around 8:30 pm, I found one more brief had been submitted. It is from a group of state legislators from Georgia in support of Texas.
UPDATE 2—When I checked around 11 pm, L. Lin Woods amicus brief had been filed. He supports Texas.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized by wjjhoge. Bookmark the permalink.
1 thought on “What’s On Second”
I hope the Supreme Court will take the case.Thank you for the update
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ON PUBLISHING BERG'S DYNASTY (by Tom Russell)
Tags Dynasty, game publishing, Richard Berg
Shortly before we released Richard Berg's Dynasty, I got a message from a friend who wanted to know if I had played the game, and if it was any good. Well, of course I had played the game, and of course it was good; what kind of question is that? While I know there are some publishers who don't play their games before pushing them out into the world, that's not how Mary and I operate, and I can't imagine any circumstances where we could operate that way. And we wouldn't publish a game if it wasn't good, or, at least, if we didn't think it was good - tastes vary, of course, and there are games I love that maybe you don't, and probably vice-versa!
The friend was asking because he had found Berg games to be somewhat hit-and-miss in his experience. I admitted that, with a couple of exceptions, I wasn't a huge fan of the Berg games I had played in the past. Not that I thought they were bad; they had their passionate defenders and a great sense of the history, they just hadn't done all that much for me as a player. Part of that might be that a lot of those Berg games I played had command-spans and facing and used ten-sided dice, and generally, I don't like command-spans, facing, or ten-sided dice. To the point that, when we had started up Hollandspiele, we hadn't even thought of approaching Mr. Berg. In fact, he approached us, pitching us several titles. Among those was Dynasty.
Dynasty was different than any Berg game I had ever played. It won me over almost as soon as we got it on the table. The shifting asymmetries of the player positions, the vulnerabilities created every time you advance your own position, the feedback loops that made those positions brittle and the game itself fragile: if you've read even a small portion of the dozens of blogposts I've written over the last year or so, you know that these are the kinds of things I love when I play games, that I love putting in my games, and that I love pontificating about ad nauseam. So, yes, Dynasty got my attention and my adoration roughly ten minutes into our first play.
It was like one of my games, only it wasn't, because it was a three-hour multiplayer game with lots of swingy event cards and a very Bergian sensibility. (Only Richard Berg would tell players to settle a tie with longswords; only Richard Berg would have an event card bemoaning the sudden lack of General Tso's chicken throughout the land.)
Mary and I discussed the game. We knew that, potentially, it could have some broader crossover appeal with eurogamers, though that might be limited by the game's three hour play time. (Shortening the play time was an avenue we explored, but ultimately abandoned: the thing needs time to breathe and to develop.) Gamers who might be into the longer playtime and the rich multiplayer dynamics - what I guess you could call the "heavy" gamers - might be put off by the Bergian randomness. Our core audience of solo and two-player wargamers might have trouble getting it onto the table as the game really needed three or four players to sing. They might also be looking for something that's a deeper and more granular simulation.
And all those are things that can conscribe a game's marketability to a given segment. You're really looking for folks who like long games and euro-style abstraction and random event cards and have a group to play it with, and that's a lot of ands. I don't know if that's why the game, which has been in development for perhaps a decade or more, had so much difficulty finding a publisher - I once heard an interview with Berg where he said that he was told by publishers that a game about tenth-century China simply wouldn't sell.
Of course, people told me the same thing about Supply Lines of the American Revolution, and my forthcoming (and seemingly hotly-anticipated, and thank you for that!) For-Ex: that there was no market there. Those games were likewise also tailored to such a specific, particular, peculiar taste - they were also games with a lot of ands. In the case of For-Ex in particular, I had someone tell me that the game was great, but that there was no way they could ever publish it. At the time, as a game designer desperate to get something out into the world, I thought that was nuts. After I got more experience, I became more sympathetic to the business end of things, and understood that, at least through traditional methods, that you can't publish a game just because you personally think it's great.
One reason why Mary and I use a print-on-demand method is that it gives us the ability to publish games just because we think they're great. (Some games might end up being too expensive to produce; publishing an 18xx game with our methods would cost us close to a hundred bucks per game.) And so, even though we could see that, yes, there are a lot of ands there, the simple fact of the matter is that Dynasty is a great game that we're passionate about, and so we agreed to publish it.
Components-wise, Dynasty posed some challenges, as it had a lot of wood bits and a lot of cards. We had used wooden cubes in An Infamous Traffic (and, later, in Supply Lines), but here we would need cubes in different sizes and colors, as well as wooden discs and special "sticks" to represent segments of the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. It was a much larger and more complicated order than we had ever made previously, and would require a large money transfer. After our last experience, we were kind of dreading it, but it went (relatively) smoothly on the bank's end, and our German wood bits supplier came through with the quality and professionalism we had come to expect. We likewise had to borrow some friends to assemble and bag the bits for the first set of games.
We had also used cards once before, in Brian Train's Ukrainian Crisis, which coincidentally, we'll be discussing in Friday's blogpost. The short version is that the card printer we had used didn't quite perform as we had hoped, dropping the ball on a project that only had 18 cards. We certainly weren't going to give them a project that required a deck of 54 cards. So we needed to scramble and find a printer we could depend upon that wouldn't charge us an arm and a leg. We found someone who would settle for just one appendage, and as luck would have it, our next three games (Table Battles, Objective Shreveport, and For-Ex) all use cards from this manufacturer, who has not disappointed. In fact, they've worked with us to ensure the cards would print as intended, helping us through technical issues rather than just pushing it through.
We had Ania B. Ziolkowska, who has done the stunning map art for several of our games, handle both the map and the counters this time around. I generally do the counters myself for all of our games, but we wanted to ensure that the art really felt of apiece with Ania's map. Said map was infused with period detail; Ania explained her approach thusly:
I was committed to fit the 10th century China way of drawing, so:
I used only black lines as artists back then used only black and black ink alone;
all lines are drawn with small round brush - again as artists back then;
lines are long and uninterrupted, as the Chinese art back then was well known for - by steady hands of artist who could draw the longest line in just one, perfect and even stroke;
as far as I was able to research the topic ornaments as we know it were rarely used - the geometric ones came with the Ming Dynasty later. In 5th-10th century they used flower-shaped white stamps, but on the cloths not in a drawing, unless to depict a cloth;
back then colors were used only sporadically and when they were, it was always watered-down color ink or pigment which were distributed evenly inside the lines;
I used市 symbol (city) in a form of a seal which was widely used on artworks and documents during 10th century and later. They always used cinnabar paste which is red;
I did the same for the Silk Road;
Huang He is often depicted on old Chinese maps as actually yellow, so I copied that idea;
all the art from those times were either produced on the silk or paper made from china grass, so I made the texture to best copy that type of paper look;
the font is actually drawn by the same type of small round brush.
I tried to give a feeling that the whole map (except the title) was really drawn back then.
The result we think is a very handsome production of a very interesting game. It doesn't always see our table as often as we'd like - sometimes all those ands just aren't aligning - but when it does, it's an entirely unique and captivating experience.
Right now, we have sitting on our table, waiting to be played, another of Mr. Berg's designs. It's also something of a euro-wargame hybrid, and it's a multiplayer game, and it has lots of event cards, and a longer playing time. That's a lot of ands. But if the game is great...
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Yoshiki feat. Hyde's "Attack on Titan" theme scores two awards in Hong Kong’s 30th International Pop Poll
Action Anime, Military Anime [Genres]
"Red Swan" (Attack on Titan anime theme) - Official Lyric Video
Fans who've been following both HYDE and Yoshiki will be happy to know that the two won two awards at the 30th International Pop Poll in Hong Kong on May 10th, 2019.
YOSHIKI feat. Hyde’s single “Red Swan” – the first Season 3 theme song from the hit anime Attack on Titan – was voted “Top Japanese Gold Song” at the event hosted by the major Hong Kong radio station RTHK Radio 2.
The awards were sponsored by RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong), the public broadcasting network founded in 1928, and the Top Gold Songs Awards are the oldest major music awards in Hong Kong. This year, YOSHIKI feat. Hyde was also named the “Top Artist from Japan”, ranking above fellow superstars Namie Amuro and Hikaru Utada. YOSHIKI is the leader, drummer, and pianist of the band X JAPAN, and Hyde is the lead singer of the band L’Arc-en-Ciel.
Released in October 2018, “Red Swan” debuted at #1 on iTunes Rock Charts in 10 countries. The single also reached the Top 10 on mainstream iTunes Charts in 16 countries and climbed the iTunes Rock Charts in the U.S. (#6) and the UK (#8), becoming the first Japanese anime song in history to rank this high on iTunes Rock charts.
Every time this song plays I cry. Is that a problem??
No bee-kun, you just have good taste, that's all. It's so beautiful.
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Building partnerships in care
Call to widen hepatitis screenings
Novartis announce details of $1billion investment
Pharmaceutical physicians ‘overwhelming support’ for clinical trial transparency
COVID-19 rapid guideline summary: Immunocompromised children and young people
Higher exposure to antibiotics increases risk of developing IBD
As a first-time attendee of an ISOPP meeting, Nick Duncan was impressed by the breadth and scope of the conference programme and welcomed the opportunity to share experiences with oncology pharmacy practitioners from around the world
Nick Duncan, MRPharmS MSc
Principal Pharmacist – Haematology/Oncology, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, UK
Email: Nick.Duncan@uhb.nhs.uk
During the first week of April, the fourteenth meeting of the International Society of Oncology Pharmacy Practitioners (ISOPP) took place in Montreal, Canada, and attracted over 300 delegates from across the globe. The main theme of the symposium was Building Partnerships in Care, with a focus on both patient factors such as adherence, pharmacokinetic variability and co-morbidities and on inter-professional working, particularly in the area of risk reduction.
Practitioner–patient empathy
The importance of patient engagement was elegantly demonstrated in the opening plenary presentation given by Mike Lang, a cancer survivor, who has spent the past decade working with young adults during and after their cancer treatment, primarily through organising regular ‘adventure’ trips during which participants have the opportunity to talk about their cancer journey with their peers. He emphasised the importance of listening to our patients, trying to put ourselves in their shoes and ensuring that we personalise the patient experience by providing bespoke information in the same way as we are beginning to provide bespoke cancer treatments. As we struggle to get our heads around the latest developments in pharmacogenomics and personalised medicine, it was reassuring to hear that there are other, perhaps simpler, ways of also delivering patient‑centred care.
The second plenary session focused on safety concerns in the use of oncology medications and was a joint presentation by Eric Cropp, a pharmacist from Ohio, USA and David U from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), Canada. Eric’s story had a profound effect on the audience as he described how a preparation error (involving the selection of hypertonic saline instead of normal saline) by a pharmacy technician under his supervision led to the death of a paediatric patient and Eric’s subsequent conviction for involuntary manslaughter and a six-month jail sentence. After that sobering illustration of the impact of a single error, the speakers broadened the discussion by presenting the findings of a study involving three outpatient adult oncology centres and one paediatric centre over a nine-month period. During the study period the authors found that:
7% of adults and 19% of children received the wrong dose or experienced medication mistakes.
61% of mistakes could have
harmed an adult patient; 11 errors caused harm.
41% of errors in children had the potential to cause harm to patient. Four children were actually harmed.
David then discussed, in detail, strategies to prevent chemotherapy errors, particularly focusing on ‘Helpful Do’s and Don’ts for Writing Chemotherapy Orders.’ He also presented the web-based medication safety self-assessment tool that has been developed by the ISMP and ISOPP to allow centres to benchmark their practice and identify areas for improvement. It is designed to be completed by a multidisciplinary team and allows for data to be collected in a number of main domains , for example, drug labelling and packaging, drug information, workflow, staffing, staff education, patient information and education, quality processes, etc. Snapshot data from 13 countries were then presented. Unsurprisingly, there was significant variation in levels of adherence to the 180 different elements/standards, ranging from 12% at one extreme (item 116 – when multiple chemotherapy/biotherapy infusions are being administered intravenously, the distal ends of all tubing are clearly labelled with the drug name) to 98% at the other (item 88 – chemotherapy/biotherapy drugs are purchased from authorised distributors or manufacturers who can verify the source of the drug). For those centres who have not yet utilised this tool it struck me as an extremely valuable resource with huge potential to assist in the improvement of our practice at a local level (available at: www.ismp.org/selfassessments/).
At the end of this comprehensive presentation, four key take-home messages were delivered:
Chemotherapy safety continues to be high priority for oncology pharmacy practitioners.
Address emerging issues.
Make improvement on systems.
Share learning internationally.
Focus on systems failures, not human error
The themes of patient safety and risk reduction flowed into the Friday programme, which started with a fascinating plenary presentation by Rachel White (Human Era @ University Health Network, Canada) entitled Human Factors 201: Human error in Complex Dynamic Systems. After hearing of Eric Cropp’s experiences, it was noteworthy that one of the main messages within Rachel’s talk was contained within the following quote from Lucian Leape, a physician and professor from the Harvard School of Public Health and a leading authority on medical error: “The single greatest impediment to error prevention in the medical industry is that we punish people for making mistakes.”
Rachel argued that we should be focusing our attention on failures in systems rather than individual errors and used a case study of a patient receiving chemotherapy to demonstrate how a series of system failures led to an avoidable death. She was able to breakdown the failures into a series of categories: staff and psychological; equipment and surroundings; team, management/organisational and political and professional practice – with each of these functioning as a layer within the classic Swiss Cheese Model of accident causation. She then encouraged the audience to be more proactive in the area of error prevention by challenging us to:
Learn more about human factors.
Prospectively assess risk using failure modes and effects
analysis (FMEA).
Retrospectively analyse incidents.
Implement safety improvements.
She closed her presentation with another thought-provoking quote, this time from James Reason, Professor of Psychology, University of Manchester , UK and one of the original developers of the Swiss Cheese Model: “We cannot change the human condition but we can change the conditions under which humans work.”
Global oral anticancer medicine practice
The closing plenary on the Saturday focused on oral anticancer medicines and featured an eminent panel of pharmacists from Canada, Australia, UK, USA, Singapore and Germany who discussed the similarities and differences in practice around the world when dealing with such agents. Given that more than three-quarters of anticancer drugs in development are oral formulations, this is an area that is becoming increasingly important for oncology pharmacists.
During the session it became apparent that although significant efforts are being made to treat oral agents in the same way as we treat parenteral treatments, we still have a long way to go before we can be confident that our systems for both pathways are equally robust. For example, a number of panellists expressed concern that the majority of oral anticancer drugs that are prescribed in their centres are then dispensed in a community setting by pharmacy staff with limited experience and expertise in screening such prescriptions. There was also a valuable discussion of adherence to oral anticancer medicines and there was general consensus that this is an under-researched area and one in which health professionals are often guilty of assuming (perhaps erroneously) that cancer patients will have much better adherence rates than patients taking long-term oral treatments for other conditions. Lita Chew, Head of Pharmacy at the National Cancer Centre Singapore, presented findings from an adherence study of breast cancer patients that she had been involved with. Patients taking hormonal therapies were assessed using a modified Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS) and the non-adherence rate was found to be as high as 60%. There was some debate as to the validity of the MMAS score in the oncology setting but the take-home message was very much that we need to be doing more to both investigate and then, hopefully, improve levels of adherence within our patient populations.
Intruiging, informative posters
As with previous meetings, there was an interesting and varied selection of posters on display. A number of authors focused on developments in symptom control: topics included aprepitant and palonosetron for chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, minocycline for skin rash in non-small cell lung cancer patients receiving epidermal growth factor inhibitors and rasburicase for prevention of tumour lysis syndrome in the paediatric setting.
Within the technical services arena, groups from Italy, Germany and Saudi Arabia presented their experiences with robotic dispensing of chemotherapy, and there were also stimulating posters on logarithmic dose banding and the use of near infrared spectroscopy to accurately determine concentrations of cytotoxics.
Considering the prominence given to oral anticancer medicines within the main conference programme, it was not surprising to see a large number of posters on this topic. For example, a Canadian group led by Heather Logan surveyed 45 cancer centres to explore current practices in relation to the safe use and handling of oral agents. They found that between 30–40% of centres did not have standard operating procedures in place for prescribing, dispensing or monitoring of these drugs, with the majority of centres using handwritten prescriptions rather than the pre-printed templates or electronic systems that we would expect to be used routinely for parenteral treatments. Their conclusions that standards for intravenous (IV) chemotherapy are less commonly used for oral chemotherapy echoed the sentiments of the participants in the closing plenary and should act as a stimulus to all oncology pharmacists to examine practices at our individual centres with the aim of standardising our approach to oral and parenteral treatments.
One eye-catching poster was presented by Nadia Ayoub and colleagues from Karachi and investigated the use of more dilute gemcitabine solutions to reduce the incidence of infusion-related pain. Their relatively small intervention (reducing the final concentration from 9–10mg/ml to 3–4mg/ml) resulted in a large and statistically significant benefit in terms of patient-reported pain scores and struck me as an extremely simple but effective way of improving the patient experience.
Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma management
The clinical programme provided a series of updates on the management of a number of common solid and haematological malignancies. Jim Siderov (Senior Pharmacist for Cancer Services at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer & Wellness Centre, Heidelberg, Australia) provided an excellent overview of recent developments in the management of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. His presentation included encouraging data on the use of mini-R-CHOP in patients over 80 years (with a 50% overall survival rate at two years) and the intriguing suggestion that older males (>60 years) may require higher doses of rituximab (for example, 500mg/m2) than other patients due to enhanced clearance of the drug. He also discussed new targeted therapies, including Bispecific T-cell engagers (BiTE therapy). These are novel bispecific monoclonal antibodies that bind to both antigens on tumour cells and cytotoxic T lymphocytes (via the CD3 receptor). Blinatumumab (which targets CD19 on B cells) is undergoing trials in both non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) and there is interest in using similar molecules in a variety of other tumour types.
Advances in the treatment of multiple myeloma
As a haematology pharmacist, I ensured that I attended an update on multiple myeloma given by Steve Stricker (Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice at the McWhorter School of Pharmacy at Stamford University in Birmingham, Alabama, US). As treatment options continue to increase for this malignancy, it was instructive to note that newer agents currently in clinical trials or being employed as a third- or fourth-line therapy in the UK are being positioned much higher up the treatment pathway in the US. For example, Professor Stricker presented data on the combination of carfilzomib, lenalidomide and dexamethasone as first-line treatment for newly diagnosed myeloma, which is producing response rates in excess of 95%. In a similar vein, he also discussed the Frontline Investigation Of Lenalidomide + Dexamethasone Versus Standard Thalidomide (FIRST) trial (originally presented at the American Society of Hematology 2013), which demonstrated a 28% relative risk reduction in the primary endpoint of progression or death for a combination of lenalidomide and dexamethasone compared with the current standard of care (MPT – melphalan, prednisolone and thalidomide) in newly diagnosed patients ineligible for stem cell transplantation.
Counting down to Chile
It is difficult within the confines of a short conference report to do justice to the breadth and scope of the ISOPP XIV programme. As a first-time attendee, I found it to be a fascinating meeting with an excellent mix of science and practice and with the unrivalled opportunity to compare and contrast experiences with other oncology pharmacy practitioners from different parts of the world. Roll on ISOPP XIV, which will take place in Chile in 2016.
The main theme of ISOPP XIV was ‘Building Partnerships in Care’.
A number of key plenary sessions focused on risks associated with cancer treatments and the role of pharmacists in reducing those risks.
Both plenary sessions and poster presentations discussed the increasing use of oral anticancer medicines and the challenges in delivering a safe and patient-centred service to patients receiving these agents.
The clinical programme delivered valuable updates on the management of a variety of solid and haematological malignancies.
The meeting provided an excellent opportunity for sharing practice with, and learning from, colleagues from across the globe.
Actavis plans to enter into Biosimilars
Teva Launches TevaGrastim (filgrastim)
Selincro enters the market in Spain
Innovations and challenges
RECOVER study presents benefits of Neupro
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Posted in Science Fiction, Space
Another “what if” story depicting what would have happened if the global space race had never ended” in the 70s. For All Mankind is an American science fiction-web television series created and written by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi and produced for Apple TV+.
The first crewed mission to the Moon during the Space Race in the late 1960s was a global success for NASA and the United States. This alternate story poses the question: “What if the Space Race had never ended?”. In the alternate timeline, the Soviet cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, becomes the first human to land on the Moon. This outcome devastates morale at NASA––but also catalyzes an American effort to catch up.
Alexei Leonov in April 1974. Leonov is wearing a pin with a version of the emblem for the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, then in development. The emblem can be found at File:Apollo-Soyuz Test Project patch.svg. Photo credit: NASA
With the Soviet Union emphasizing diversity by including a woman in subsequent landings, the US is forced to match pace, training women and minorities who were largely excluded from the initial decades of US space exploration.
This actually happened in real history where the USSR included a pool of women astronauts including Valentina Tereshkova, who pioneered the space flight. She was the first and youngest woman to have flown in space with a solo mission on the Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. She orbited the earth 48 times, spent almost 3 days in space and remains as the only woman to have been on a solo space mission for example.
Valentina Tereshkova, pilot-cosmonaut, first female cosmonaut, Hero of the USSR. Pictured as a Major of the Soviet Air Forces. Photo Credit: RIA Novosti archive.
The series begin with special focus on Edward Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), a fictional astronaut whose career is impacted by the Soviets progress. He was moments before attempting to land on the moon, circling so close he could see the surface, where his superiors pulled him away claiming he was not ready yet to make such a big step.
Promotional poster from Season 1 Photo Credit: Apple
As the show continues there’s an expansion in the story starting to get even more interesting where Russian’s second manned mission places a female astronaut on the moon provoking Richard Nixon to demand that the US do the same.
Women cast for the TV series. Photo credit: Apple
So the plot progresses from a disappointed straight white men group of astronauts to inspired white and black women while also looking at the rise of female employees at Nasa on the ground. This allows for some non conventional tensions to arise in a setting such as this, with one woman trying to play a double hat role as a mother with a newfound career as an astronaut while also dealing with the men around her who don’t give the credit she deserves. With the space race getting high temperatures, there is the desire from Nixon to build a military base on the moon, recalling current Trump’s space force plans, and the narrative leaps between the various strands and characters.
The technology depicted on the drama in some cases certainly was quite close represented to the real used, but in some other cases the representation of the spaceships and the moon bases looks quite advanced vs the existing technology at that time.
Tagged future, history, science, science fiction, space
WE MIGHT BE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE: THE FERMI PARADOX AND THE ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN IT.
A LEGACY FROM THE BIG BANG: THE GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
← A BRIEF HISTORY OF AN EXPERIENCE OUT OF THIS WORLD: EXTRAVEHICULAR ACTIVITY
On these uncertain times, one thing is for sure, there are millions of anonymous heroes working for all of us to make the world a safer place. Thanks a million to all those medical heroes around the world, this video is dedicated to all of you. →
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030520Guidance4interruptionsrelated2CoronavirusCOVID19
Guidance for interruptions of study related to Coronavirus (COVID-19) (Updated June 16, 2020)
Note: We updated this Electronic Announcement on June 16, 2020, by expanding flexibilities for standard term programs and extending the timeframe for those flexibilities through the end of the academic year that includes December 31, 2020 or the end date for the COVID-19 Federally declared emergency, whichever occurs later. The changes can be found at the end of the section entitled “Approval to Offer Distance Education.”
Note: On May 15, 2020, we posted further updated guidance at https://ifap.ed.gov/electronic-announcements/051520UPDATEDGuidanceInterruptStudyRelCOVID19May2020.
Note: On April 3, 2020, we posted further updated guidance at https://ifap.ed.gov/electronic-announcements/040320UPDATEDGuidanceInterruptStudyRelCOVID19.
Note: We updated this Electronic Announcement on March 20, 2020, by adding an attachment titled “COVID-19 FAQs” to the announcement. We will continue to provide answers to questions we receive in response to this and any future guidance.
This electronic announcement addresses concerns expressed by higher education leaders regarding how they should comply with Title IV, Higher Education Act (HEA) policies for students whose activities are impacted by Coronavirus (COVID-19), either directly because the student is ill or quarantined, or indirectly because the student was recalled from travel-abroad experiences, can no longer participate in internships or clinical rotations, or attends a campus that temporarily suspended operations. This information provides flexibilities for schools that are working to help students complete the term in which they are currently enrolled.
These instructions do not contemplate accommodations for students who have not yet enrolled or whose term has not yet begun, with certain exceptions. We will continue to monitor the situation and make a later determination of what accommodations may be necessary should longer-term interruptions become likely. We will continue to provide updates to this information as appropriate.
We encourage institutions to visit the Department’s Coronavirus webpage, https://www.ed.gov/coronavirus?src=feature, on this topic frequently, as we will post updates as they become available. In addition, the Department’s webpage has links to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including for how Institutions of Higher Education should manage human health risks associated with Coronavirus.
We address five potential student and campus scenarios: that may prompt an institution to have questions about how to comply with Title IV, HEA requirements if the Coronavirus impacts a student or a campus:
A student was enrolled or was supposed to begin a travel-abroad experience and either the student has been called back to the U.S. or was never able to begin the travel abroad experience;
A student was enrolled in a program and met the requirements for full-time enrollment; however, due to the COVID-19, one or more classes – such as an internship, a clinical rotation, student teaching or fieldwork – have been cancelled and now the student has fallen below the 12 credit hour minimum and is no longer considered to be a full-time student;
A student is quarantined and misses class or a student is incapacitated due to COVID-19 illness;
A campus temporarily stops offering ground-based classes in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19;
A foreign school that serves U.S. students who participate in title IV programs temporarily suspends operations due to COVID-19.
We offer information below about options we are making available to institutions under our current statutory authority to provide as much flexibility as possible so that you can continue to serve students. In some instances, we have been asked to consider providing flexibilities that are beyond our statutory authority. As a result, we cannot provide those flexibilities. If you have questions about the information provided in this electronic announcement, or you are encountering a scenario that we have not addressed, please email the Department at COVID-19@ed.gov.
We recommend that institutions document, as contemporaneously as possible, any actions taken as a result of COVID-19, including those actions described in this document.
Accommodating Students Whose Enrollment is Disrupted by Coronavirus
Our goal is to work with institutions and find ways to enable you to accommodate students and help them continue their education despite interruptions caused by COVID-19. For many institutions, online education will provide a viable option for continuing to teach students through COVID-19-related interruptions. In some instances, students enrolled in ground-based programs at campuses that must temporarily close could participate in distance education for a period of time and then resume ground-based attendance when the campus reopens. In other instances, an institution may provide online learning opportunities for a student who was recalled from a travel-abroad program but the student is too late into the semester to enroll in other classes offered by the home campus, or the student who arrived in a foreign country intending to complete a travel abroad experience finds that the program has now been cancelled or temporarily suspended. We are providing the following flexibilities to institutions to help them understand what options they can make available to students and remain in compliance with Title IV requirements.
Approval to Offer Distance Education
The Department is providing broad approval to institutions to use online technologies to accommodate students on a temporary basis, without going through the regular approval process of the Department in the event that an institution is otherwise required to seek Departmental approval for the use or expansion of distance learning programs. This flexibility only applies to a program during a payment period that overlaps the date of this electronic announcement or the following payment period. If an institution chooses to continue offering a new program or use distance education in a manner requiring the Department’s approval after that point, it must seek approval under the Department’s normal process.
We are also permitting accreditors to waive their distance education review requirements for institutions working to accommodate students whose enrollment is otherwise interrupted as a result of COVID-19. We currently are limiting that permission to distance learning opportunities developed for the purpose of serving students who were already in attendance, but whose attendance was interrupted by COVID-19. Please note that this flexibility is not available for clock-hour courses that lead to licensure if the licensure body will not accept distance learning courses or hours or give credit for them toward the number of hours a student must complete.
We want to make clear to institutions that for Title IV, HEA purposes, distance learning does not require the use of sophisticated learning management systems or online platforms, though accreditors may have additional standards included in their review of distance learning programs. We are, however, permitting accreditors to waive those standards for schools implementing distance learning programs solely for the purpose of allowing currently enrolled students to complete a term that is interrupted by COVID-19 closures. To meet the Department’s requirements for providing distance education, an institution must communicate to students through one of several types of technology – including email – described under 34 CFR § 600.2, and instructors must initiate substantive communication with students, either individually or collectively, on a regular basis. In other words, an instructor could use email to provide instructional materials to students enrolled in his or her class, use chat features to communicate with students, set up conference calls to facilitate group conversations, engage in email exchanges or require students to submit work electronically that the instructor will evaluate.
Institutions may provide distance learning temporarily to accommodate students as a result of a COVID-19 interruption, including in cases where students began attendance in classes offered in a brick-and-mortar setting but were transitioned to a distance education format in the middle of the term. In these cases, we will accept the accreditation and state authorization of the institution for the programs in which those students were enrolled prior to the interruption due to COVID-19 to enable students to complete the current term.
Institutions may also enter into temporary consortium agreements with other institutions so that students can complete courses at other institutions but be awarded credit by their home institution. In addition, in instances where accrediting agencies require students to complete a final number or percentage of credits in residence at the institution, accrediting agencies may waive that requirement for students impacted by COVID-19 without objection by the Department.
The Department will permit students who wish to take an approved leave of absence for COVID-19-related concerns or limitations (such as interruption of a travel-abroad program), to take such leave, even if the student notifies the institution in writing after the approved leave of absence has begun. In such a case, the institution may retain those Title IV funds to apply when the student continues enrollment. If the student does not return to complete their program within 180 days, the school would then be expected to perform the Return of Title IV funds calculation based on the date on which the leave-of-absence began. Note that in term-based programs, if a student takes an approved leave of absence from a term-based program, the institution must ensure that the student is permitted to complete the coursework he or she began prior to the leave of absence.
Finally, because we understand that some students may have been recalled from travel abroad programs or canceled-out of experiential learning opportunities after the semester began, institutions may offer courses to those students on a schedule that would otherwise be considered a non-standard term, if doing so enables those students to complete the term. These flexibilities will also be provided to institutions, or their additional locations or programs, that must temporarily close as a result of COVID-19.
[Updated as of 06/16/2020] The Department is aware that, due to ongoing concerns over the COVID-19 emergency, many institutions have found it necessary to adjust their academic calendars. In recognition of this, we are expanding these flexibilities to include all programs, regardless of whether students are returning from travel abroad programs or have been cancelled out of experiential learning opportunities and extending applicable deadlines. All standard terms will be permitted to overlap with an adjacent term without the program being considered non-term. Additionally, a standard semester or trimester may consist of as few as 13 weeks of instructional time and a standard quarter as few as 9 weeks of instructional time without the program being considered a non-standard term program. It should be noted that any reduction in a program’s defined academic year to less than 30 weeks of instructional time must be specifically approved by the School Participation Division (SPD). Submit your request by email to CaseTeams@ed.gov. This guidance is applicable through the end of the academic year that includes December 31, 2020 or the end date for the COVID-19 Federally declared emergency, whichever occurs later.
Foreign Schools
We cannot extend flexibility regarding the use of distance learning to foreign schools since the Higher Education Act does not permit foreign schools to provide distance learning to U.S. students who participate in Title IV, HEA programs. We continue to consider if there are any other flexibilities we could extend to foreign schools that temporarily close due to COVID-19.
Federal Work Study (FWS)
Federal law includes a provision allowing an institution to make FWS payments under certain limited circumstances to disaster-affected students who are unable to continue working. Given the unique nature of this situation, it is unlikely that an entire region would be declared a Federal disaster area, yet to students enrolled at a campus that must close temporarily, the loss of this important form of financial aid can be devastating. The impact may be magnified if the institution accommodates students by providing alternative instructional opportunities and the student is required to continue paying tuition, but the student loses FWS as an important part of their financial aid award. For students enrolled and performing FWS at a campus that must close due to COVID-19, or for a FWS student who is employed by an employer that closes as a result of COVID-19, the institution may continue paying the student Federal work-study wages during that closure if it occurred after the beginning of the term, the institution is continuing to pay its other employees (including faculty and staff), and the institution continues to meet its institutional wage share requirement. Students who were prevented from beginning a term at the institution as a result of a COVID-19-related disruption would not be eligible for Federal Student Aid for that term, and therefore could not be paid FWS wages for hours they did not work. Graduate students who are paid FWS wages on salary may continue to be paid for the remainder of the term if the institution is also paying its faculty and staff during that period. In these instances, institutions should document (as contemporaneously as feasible) that the COVID-19 disruption was the reason the student received FWS funds without documentation of hours worked.
Length of Academic Year
The Department is authorized under 34 CFR § 668.3 to approve a reduced academic year. If at any point an institution determines it will close as the result of a campus health emergency, it may contact the School Participation team to request a temporary reduction in the length of its academic year.
Financial aid administrators (FAA) have statutory authority to use professional judgement to make adjustments on a case-by-case basis to the cost of attendance or to the data elements used in calculating the EFC to reflect a student’s special circumstances. The use of professional judgement where students and/or their families have been affected by COVID-19 is permitted, such as in the case where an employer closes for a period of time as a result of COVID-19. In making professional judgement determinations, FAAs must obtain documentation and retain it in each student’s file. This documentation must substantiate the reason for any adjustment. Institutions are reminded that, regardless of how broadly an event may affect its student population, professional judgement determinations must be made and documented on a case-by-case basis.
An institution’s SAP appeal policy (34 CFR § 668.34(a)(9)) must, among other things, describe the basis on which a student may file an appeal: the death of a relative, an injury or illness of the student, or other special circumstances. Circumstances related to an outbreak of COVID-19, including, but not limited to, the illness of a student or family member, compliance with a quarantine period, or the general disruption resulting from such an outbreak may form the basis of a student’s SAP appeal even if not specifically articulated in the institution’s SAP policy.
Students Who Did Not Begin Attendance
We are aware that many U.S. students enrolled in eligible foreign institutions and in study abroad programs offered by domestic institutions have already been affected by local outbreaks of COVID-19 and the measures taken by institutions in response. Of immediate concern are those students who travelled to overseas destinations but were unable to begin classes due to school closures. There may also be instances where students at domestic institutions are similarly affected and unable to begin classes. Because these students did not begin attendance in a payment period or period of enrollment, 34 CFR § 668.21 (rather than Return of Title IV Funds) applies. In such a situation, the institution must return all Title IV grant funds disbursed for the payment period or period of enrollment and all Direct Loan funds that were credited to the student’s account at the institution for that period. The institution must also return Direct Loan funds in the amount of payments made directly by or on behalf of the student to the institution for the period, up to the total amount of the loan funds disbursed. The institution is not responsible for returning Direct Loan funds that were disbursed directly to the student in the form of a credit balance as long as the institution was not aware that the student would not attend prior to the disbursement, and students will be able to repay those funds as a part of their educational loans. In these circumstances, institutions are permitted, but not required, to return all of a student’s Direct Loan funds, including the amount comprising the credit balance.
Normally institutions, once aware that a student will not begin or has not begun attendance, must notify the loan servicer which results in issuance of a final demand letter to the borrower. However, we have determined that in the case where a student was unable to begin attendance due to a COVID-19-related school closure, the provisions of 34 CFR § 668.21(a)(2)(ii), requiring the institution to notify the servicer of that student’s failure to begin attendance, do not apply because the option for the student to begin attendance did not exist. Accordingly, the institution should not notify the servicer that the student did not begin attendance. He or she will be permitted to repay any Direct Loan funds received under the terms of the promissory note. This will also prevent a student from being required to enter repayment within six months of withdrawing if the student withdrew as a result of a Coronavirus-related interruption.
Enrollment Status Changes
We do not have the authority to waive the requirement to award or disburse Title IV funds based on a student’s actual enrollment status. For example, assuming an institution defines full-time enrollment as 12 credit hours, when a full-time student enrolled for 12 credit hours drops or withdraws from three credits, that student is now enrolled at three-quarter time status. However, we remind institutions that for Direct Loans, the institution must only confirm at least half-time enrollment status as of the time of disbursement. It is not necessary to recalculate a student’s Direct Loan eligibility based on changes in enrollment status that occur after the institution originates a Direct Loan. For enrollment status changes that occur after an institution’s established Pell Grant recalculation (census) date, we do not require recalculation. Note that the student must have begun attendance in all courses comprising the enrollment status on which the Pell Grant payment was based.
Even in the case of a disruption from COVID-19, an institution must return any Title IV funds for which it is responsible in accordance with the provisions of 34 CFR § 668.22 when a student withdraws. Currently, we do not have the authority to waive the statutory requirement for the return of unearned Title IV funds in the case where a student (who receives Title IV assistance) withdraws from an institution during a payment period or period of enrollment after having begun attendance. However, the guidance provided below explains the requirements for performing Return of Title IV Funds calculations in situations where an institution has temporarily ceased operations as a result of a COVID-19 disruption.
Definition of a Withdrawal Date
If an institution ceases operation during a payment period and fails to reopen by the end of that payment period, its students are considered no longer in attendance and must be considered withdrawn for that payment period or period of enrollment, and would be subject to Return of Title IV funds requirements. Similarly, if an institution closes and subsequently reopens during a payment period, any students who began attendance during that payment period but failed to return when the institution reopens must be considered withdrawn for that payment period. If the institution is required to take attendance, the withdrawal date is the last day of documented attendance prior to the closure. If the institution is not required to take attendance, the institution can use any applicable option under 34 CFR § 668.22(c), including the midpoint of the payment period or period of enrollment under 34 CFR § 668.2(c)(1)(iii) or, because the closure was a circumstance that the student could not control under 34 CFR § 668.22(c)(1)(iv), the date that the institution ceased operation. When determining the number of days in the payment period or period of enrollment (the denominator of the calculation), the institution should include all the days that the student was scheduled to attend during that period on the date of the withdrawal. For a clock-hour program, an institution should not include as “scheduled hours” any hours on days that it was closed.
Date of Determination and Timeframes for Returns
Normally, if a student does not provide notification to an institution of his/her withdrawal, the date of determination that the student has withdrawn is the date that the institution becomes aware that the student ceased attendance. This is, in most cases when an institution closes for reasons beyond its control, the date of the closure. Therefore, the timeframes for completing Return of Title IV Funds calculations and making the appropriate returns or post-withdrawal disbursements begin on that date (e.g. 30 days to perform the calculation, 45 days to return the funds, etc.).
Reentering the Same Payment Period
If an institution that has closed subsequently reopens during the same payment period or period of enrollment, and permits students to continue coursework that they were taking at the time of the closure, students that return to class at that time are considered to have reentered the same period and retain eligibility for Title IV aid that they were otherwise eligible to receive before the closure. If a student in this situation subsequently withdraws, the institution must exclude the number of days that it was closed (if the closure was for at least five consecutive days, in combination with weekends or other scheduled breaks) from both the number of days the student completed and the total number of days in the payment period or period of enrollment. If the institution altered the number of days in the payment period or period of enrollment following the closure (e.g. if it adds days to the term to make up for the time when it was closed), the institution should use the new number of days in the student’s Return of Title IV funds calculation.
NSLDS Enrollment Reporting
In general, when a student withdraws during a payment period, the effective date for the withdrawn (‘W’) status for enrollment reporting purposes is the withdrawal date used by the institution in accordance with 34 CFR § 668.22(b) or (c). However, notwithstanding the requirement that the institution perform a Return of Title IV funds calculation for students when an institution unexpectedly ceases operation during a payment period and fails to reopen during that payment period, we permit an institution to defer reporting an affected student’s enrollment status as “withdrawn” in these circumstances when the institution has a reasonable expectation that—
The institution will reopen at the start of a payment period that begins no later than 90 days following the closure; and
The student will resume attendance when the institution reopens.
In these cases, the institution should continue reporting the most recent enrollment status that it reported for the affected student prior to the closure. If the student does not resume attendance as expected, the institution must change the student’s enrollment status to “withdrawn” using the student’s actual withdrawal date as the enrollment status effective date.
While the coronavirus threat to the American public remains low, we encourage school communities to take all steps to ensure the health and well-being of students, faculty, and staff. We established the website, https://www.ed.gov/coronavirus?src=feature, to provide general information and guidance for school communities, including links to information posted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We appreciate your cooperation and welcome any additional questions at COVID-19@ed.gov.
COVID-19 FAQs, 4 Pages30.43 KB
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Luc Robitaille Spotted At West LA Restaurant
By Jon Rapoport December 26, 2012
Last Friday night, Los Angeles Kings legend Luc Robitaille and his wife Stacia were spotted at the Seasons 52 Grill, located in the Westfield Century City Mall. The tony West Los Angeles outdoor shopping/entertainment complex sits in the Century City neighborhood of LA, immediately west of Beverly Hills.
The 46-year-old Hall of Famer looks like he could still lace up his skates and take to the ice today. Of course, due to the ongoing NHL work stoppage, that sheet of ice would have to be found at the minor league level, or somewhere outside the borders of the United States and Canada. Despite being retired from the game for more than six years, the eight-time All-Star maintains the same youthful look he has always possessed, going back to when the then 19-year-old Montreal native first arrived in Southern California, a whopping 26 years ago.
While Robitaille (Kings President of Business Operations) must be brimming with pride, regarding his franchise's first-ever Stanley Cup victory. The number of December night's spent going out to dinner, as opposed to watching the game and team he is so closely associated with by NHL fans, must be driving the hockey lifer/Kings' all-time leading goal scorer absolutely bonkers.
Rob Scuderi Signing Autographs On Off Day (Video)
Zetterberg & Datsyuk Appearance In Hockeytown | Video
Daniel Girardi Signing Before Game 1 (Video)
Sharapova & Vujacic Grabbing Brunch (Photos)
Mike Richards Embracing The LA Lifestyle (Video)
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Uber Goes Local with their New Brand Identity
By Chloe Ayres, Head Designer
AirBnb, Tinder, Yelp! – all of these apps provide location-specific information content on a global scale. All of these companies have also adopted the “McDonald’s model” of “a burger should taste the exact same in every McDonald’s.” While consistency is certainly key in establishing a strong brand identity, it also leaves very little room for a local, digital experience to become a personal one–one that gives you a taste of the personality of the location.
Uber, one of the fastest-growing apps that serve local content, is taking a bold step in a different direction. Uber recently annouced that they have rebranded to meet the needs of the company that they are right now, as opposed to the company that they were when they first came out with their black and white logo.
As Travis Kalanick, Uber CEO and Co-Founder, writes: “Uber began life as a black car service for 100 friends in San Francisco—everyone’s private driver. Today, we’re a transportation network spanning 400 cities in 68 countries that delivers food and packages, as well as people, all at the push of a button. And thanks to services like uberX and uberPOOL we’ve gone from a luxury, to an affordable luxury, to an everyday transportation option for millions of people.”
Realizing that this one company now serves as so many different things to so many people, Uber decided to diversify their visual identity enough that it could be personal, but at the same time feel like a global brand.
The first change that they made was to update their logotype. Their new look is sturdier, more streamlined, and closer together–much like their new focus. This logo will represent the company globally, without individual local identities, which is a smart choice.
Secondly, Uber has introduced country-wide color schemes which have been carefully researched and created to reflect the history, personality, and day-to-day life of each country. For instance, as Kalanick writes, the Mexico color scheme was inspired by “Mexican pink and the patterns in the local tiles.” This change is a huge step forward in personalizing a huge brand like Uber.
Lastly, Uber has divided its app into two different apps – one for partners, and one for riders. At first, the riders far outnumbered the minimal number of partners, but that is simply not the case in the Uber of 2016. Uber adds an average of 50,000 drivers per month. In fact, Uber is the most popular job for actors and models in LA because it allows them the flexibility to work when they are able – a need that is also reflected in the number of college students that have started to drive for Uber. There is even a page on the Uber website dedicated to the benefits of driving as a college student! The more partners Uber has, the more money Uber makes. Period. So, they have decided to “localize” their partner service to one app, separate from the rider service. They are making their global brand work for individuals.
Rider app
Uber says their ultimate goal is to “celebrate the cities that provide Uber services,” but I think they have accomplished something different entirely. I think they have given the world a new idea of how a global brand can become provide a localized, more personal experience.
To read the entire letter from Travis Kalanick, please click here.
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Conveniently Scapegoating Obama Is Cool Now?!
The arguments Donald Glover is making here is nonsensical. Barack Obama wanting to become president, and then actually becoming president did not make it any more harder than it already is on Black people in this country. If I aspire to be in a socioeconomic position that has always been held and favored by whites, but have not been reluctant about embracing my racial identity, nor shy about confronting racism, then why would my experience appear to be making it harder for black people? Actually it is quite the opposite. We could only be seen as contributing to setting a new precedent by doing away with stereotypical perceptions and disabusing ourselves of the dominant framing of racist ideologies. The fact of the matter is that there remains far too many unnecessary obstacles for a person of color to have to course and navigate through if the goal is to live up to one’s potential.
Comparatively speaking, Glover has badly misspoken about the current plight of Black people in this regrettable instance. Apparently you can be a talented celebrity figure and be misguided and unenlightened at the same time. The lived experiences of police brutality today being captured and shared in the advent of social media and video technology should not be mistaken as worse than those Blacks that have perished or have had endured a far worse quality of life in the past. Undocumented stories do abound and do evidence a racial strife that was far more prolific in the past, especially when such egregious incivility was sanctioned eras ago–when conditions were comparatively more hostile for Blacks.
Any period between the end of the Civil Rights Era and prior to the election of President Obama should also not be confused as some dormant period of hospitable racial relations either. That would be asinine. There has always been a persistent struggle and fight for civil rights and equal justice at work that contribute to our advancement. Therefore, and again, Obama’s presidency is a continuation of that and cannot be seen as making it worse for Blacks.
This apparent “let down” of the first African-American president that some people have mistakenly grief-stricken themselves into being is puzzling to me. This idea that President Obama has “done nothing” or “can’t do anything” is contextually deceiving in terms of expectations. Without going into much detail, I will sum this up conclusively as this. It is highly improbable for change on the magnitude of 1) receiving reparations, or 2) ending institutional racism, or 3) ending racism period in a majoritative democracy like this one in one fell swoop of electing the first black president of the United States. Many so-called Americans are still in denial, quite uninformed, and have unwittingly or wittingly subscribed to the dominant frame (the white frame) as they continue to reap the tremendous benefits sown (with white privilege, affirmative actions, and appropriations in tow) from a racialized and violent American history and society.
In fact, what this presidency has shed light upon is what has often been hidden in the dark from plain sight or has been glossed over in reporting. The institutional racial discourse has now rightfully received far greater attention and extensive examination than it has ever before, which brings us definitvely much closer to finding a resolve to racism in the future for humanities sake. But simply put there is just a whole lot of misinformation and misinterpretations being rambled off in this somewhat influential and popular “Breakfast Club” interview.
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