Memes

Via the Wu Ming Foundation, here's A Book Bloc’s Genealogy, detailing the spread of Italian students' use of oversized book covers at protests against cuts to education funding. You never like to see police brutality, but there is something mordantly amusing about the idea of some rozzer beating up a copy of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.

Wake the @$!%# Up

Via Weird Universe, a list of fourteen annoying strange alarm clocks.

This one will make you get up in the morning, whether you like it or not. The Sfera mounts to the ceiling above your bed, when it goes off in the morning you simply reach up and touch it to go off. Here's the sneaky part, it then retracts towards the ceiling and goes off again, getting a little higher each time. It will keep doing this until you finally find yourself standing on the bed trying to turn it off.

Mmh hmmh.

Not listed is the carpet covered version of the one that rolls away and hides under your bed (the carpet making it harder to find by touch), or the one that reads your brainwaves in order to wake you at the point of your lightest sleep.

George Orwell advised leaving this Marcus Aurelius quote prominently displayed in your bedroom:

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present- I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm? - But this is more pleasant.- Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?

If that doesn't help, he went on, try hiding your alarm clock behind something heavy, like your wardrobe.

Fahrenheit 451

A blindingly obvious resonance I'm unlikely to be the first person to have spotted:

As it was announced ... at a "fathers' night" meeting on the Rumson High School PTA, the event was to involve a two-day drive to collect comic books "portraying murderers and criminals"... A group of forty Cubs would tour the borough in a fire truck, "with siren screaming, and collect objectional books at homes along the way." Then the mayor would lead the boys in a procession ... to Rumson's Victory Park, where [he] would present awards to the scouts and lead them in burning the comic books. The Cub who had gathered the most comics would have the honour of applying the torch to the books. When the national office of the Cub Scouts of America declined to support the bonfire, ... the Rumson event was revised to conclude with the scouts donating the comics to the Salvation Army for scraps.

From The Ten Cent Plague by David Hadju, citing various news stories from January 1949. Bradbury's famous book, in a shorter version then titled "The Firemen", was first published in Galaxy in 1951.

(A coda from two pages later in Mr Hadju's book, in reference to another youth-led comics-burning protest:

As the students collected comics for the bonfire, some of the boys kept them categorised by genre... Crime comics went in one box, superhero titles in another, and jungle books, with their covers of heroines swinging from vines in leopard skin bikinis, went in a pile that several of the young crusaders hid under a step in the boys' lavatory.)

Claus? Is that German?

So, what did the Lapp Sasquatch bring you this year? Apart from some super-old links, that is.

Cause

Of course, the thing that amuses me most about the Americans' regularly scheduled fracas over whether slavery was the cause or not of the Civil War is the impressive determination demonstrated by all sides to avoid contemplation of the possibility it had anything to do with the War of Independence.

Reconstruction

Four days after South Carolina seceded on Dec. 20, 1860, the state adopted a second document titled “Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” Loewen considers the record, central to his new collection, one of the five most important documents in the history of the country, launching as it did a seminal chapter in America’s ongoing struggle to define itself.

“So why does nobody ever read it?” he asked. “Everybody knew [secession was] about slavery. This document is all about slavery.”

In it, South Carolina laments the election of a new president “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” State leaders indeed sound incensed about “states’ rights,” but not in the way most people think today.

“They are against states’ rights,” Loewen said. “And they name the states and they name the rights that really upset them.”

Specifically, South Carolina spells out grievances with 13 Northern states that had passed local laws that “render useless” the federal Fugitive Slave Act. South Carolina is miffed at New York for denying slaveholders the right to transport slaves through its territory, and at Ohio and Iowa for refusing to surrender escaped slaves charged with crimes in Virginia. It’s angry at several Northern states for giving freed blacks citizenship and even the right to vote (a decision that was then the responsibility of the states, not the federal government). These northern laws were essentially an attempt to hold federal slave policy at bay — using states’ rights.

James Loewen interviewed, among others, by Emily Badger, on the reasons for Southern secession and the attempts to rewrite history in the Reconstruction period and after.

In the post-Reconstruction era of national “reunion,” Yale historian David Blight says the country came back together around the idea of the common valor of soldiers on both sides of the war, around a common economy and around the imperial adventures of America as it began to grow into a world power.

“But primarily — and this is complex — but primarily the country reunified ultimately by the 1890s and the turn of the 20th century around white supremacy,” Blight said, “around the Jim Crow system, which took deep hold in the South but also in the North.”

Some historians call this era the most racist in American history — even more so than the age of slavery. This racism, and the new narrative of an unfortunate war between brothers, took hold in popular fiction, in presidential speeches, in monument building. The story of the emancipation of 4 million slaves — and of the 200,000 blacks who fought for the Union army — “all but vanished from the national story by 1900, 1910,” Blight says. For several decades to come, most children would not even read much about it in their textbooks.

The ſ-Word

LibraryThing detects an unfeasibly large amount of sailor talk in the 18th century.

Moderation

When South Carolinians decided unanimously in their secession convention to leave the Union, the Charleston Mercury declared: "The tea has been thrown overboard. The revolution of 1860 has been initiated." One of the delegates admitted that the convention worked "to pull down our government and erect another." In Louisiana, a broadside declared: "We can never submit to Lincoln’s inauguration; the shades of Revolutionary sires will rise up to shame us if we shall do that." Many Southerners saw themselves as carrying the banner of their ancestors who had fought a revolutionary war against a tyrannical king; by rebelling against the United States, secessionists believed they were engaged in a revolution to restore the principles of 1776. When Texas left the Union on Feb. 1, 1861, the secessionists there proudly announced that "for less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England."

But talk of revolution was dangerous. Alexander Stephens, who would become the Confederacy’s only vice president, warned that "revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them, seldom end them." ... By the time the Confederate government was formed in Montgomery, Ala., in February 1861, many Southerners - like Jefferson Davis, the new Confederate president - jettisoned the extremist rhetoric and espoused moderation, denying at the same time that secession constituted revolution. "Ours is not a revolution," Davis maintained. "We are not engaged in a quixotic fight for the rights of man; our struggle is for inherited rights." He claimed, in fact, that the Southern states had seceded "to save ourselves from a revolution."

...

... Confederates cringed at the persistent description of their revolution as a revolution ... and turned instead to defending their actions by arguing that secession was, in fact, legal and not revolutionary at all. Harking back to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, written by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in response to the Federalist Party’s enactment of the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts, Southerners advanced the idea that the Union under the Constitution consisted of simply a compact among the states and that any state, by means of its retained sovereignty, could divorce itself from the Union if it ever desired to do so.

Glenn W. LaFantasie on 19th century insurgency in Salon.

Guidance

For the next three years, Americans ostensibly boycotted the tea of the East India Company, Britain’s licensed monopoly provider, though in practice they drank what they liked. Indeed, for consumers, anger over the tea tax had never made much economic sense. For one thing, many drank Dutch-supplied tea, which was smuggled and therefore tax-free... Meanwhile, the tax on legal tea was largely offset by a tea-tax refund passed the same year. But in 1772 that tax refund shrank, making British tea more expensive and enhancing smugglers’ price advantage. Tea piled up in the British warehouses of the East India Company, which owed money to the British government and also needed to ask it for a loan. Someone had an idea: why not raise cash by dumping the company’s surplus tea on the American market? Parliament agreed to help by restoring the old refund in full and by allowing the company to export tea directly rather than through merchant middlemen. With the new measures, the price of legal tea was expected to halve. Consumers would save, Parliament needn’t lose quite so much on its bailout of the East India Company, and smugglers would be driven out of business.

Boston’s big businessmen felt threatened. Not only might smuggling cease to be profitable but, if the experiment of direct importation were to succeed, it might cut them out of the supply chains for other commodities as well. Clearly, it was time for Sam Adams and William Molineux to rile up the public again. At the start of November, 1773, a public letter summoned merchants expecting tea consignments from the East India Company to the Liberty Tree. When they failed to appear, Molineux led five hundred people to the store where the merchants were huddled, and its doors were torn from their hinges. A second letter warned the consignees not to take it for granted that the colonists would remain "irreconcilable to the idea of spilling human blood." Amid the populist fervor, only a few noticed that the working-class Bostonian stood to gain little from the protest...

...

George Washington disapproved of the Tea Party, and Benjamin Franklin called it "an Act of violent Injustice on our part." But the Revolution was not yet in the hands of the Founders, although it had left those of the merchants, who now dodged and stalled as the people - passionate and heedless of economic niceties - called for a ban on all tea, even what was smuggled from the Dutch...

Britain overreacted, closing the port of Boston, restricting town meetings in Massachusetts, and giving the King the power to appoint the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature. British troops arrived in Boston in May... A few merchants still hoped that Boston might pay for the tea and reconcile with Britain, but they were too intimidated by the outbursts of popular anger to give voice to their proposal at a Boston town meeting.

Sympathy for Massachusetts broke out in other colonies, and radicalized colonists across the region threw off the guidance of the merchant class. "These sheep, simple as they are, cannot be gulled as heretofore," the wealthy New York City lawyer Gouverneur Morris wrote to a friend. "The mob begin to think and to reason."

Caleb Crain on 18th century insurgency in The New Yorker.

Text

'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan' prompted Doubleday in 1970 to pulp its first American edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ronald Reagan's presidency remained a complete mystery to most Europeans, though I noticed that Americans took him far more easily in their stride. But the amiable old duffer who occupied the White House was a very different person from the often sinister figure I described in 1967, when the ... piece was first published. The then-novelty of a Hollywood film star entering politics and becoming governor of California gave Reagan considerable airtime on British TV. Watching his right-wing speeches in which he castigated in sneering tones the profligate, welfare-spending, bureaucrat-infested state government, I saw a more crude and ambitious figure, far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 movie The Killers, his last Hollywood role...

[Preparing for an obscenity trial against a bookshop owner, a] defence lawyer asked me why I believed 'Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan' was not obscene, to which I had to reply that of course it was obscene, and intended to be so. Why, then, was its subject matter not Reagan's sexuality? Again I had to affirm that it was. At last the lawyer said: 'Mr Ballard, you will make a very good witness for the prosecution. We will not be calling you.'

...

At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of my Reagan text, minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was distributed to delegates. I'm told it was accepted for what it resembled, a psychological paper on the candidate's subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think-tank.

From J. G. Ballard's note to chapter 14 of The Atrocity Exhibition, in the expanded and annotated edition, Harper Perennial, 2006.

Reading

I can't believe I missed this tidbit from WIIIAI's round-up of 100 year old news on Monday:

Some people are complaining about the language spoken in moving pictures. Lip-reading deaf people. Evidently the actors in silent films cursed. A lot. A teacher of the deaf and dumb explains that "these shows are the chief source of amusement for the deaf, and they are prevented from enjoying them because they are able to understand what is being said by the characters on the screens." Tell me about it!

Wetter As It Dries

Tea towels get their name because, back in the day, they were delicate linen cloths that the lady of the house would use only to dry her fine bone china tea service.

In The Kitchen Linens Book, Ellyn-Anne Geisel writes that linen is the best fabric for tea towels (or "dish towels", as Americans call them), because it can absorb 20% of its weight in water and doesn’t leave lint on dishes.

Historically, women made their own tea towels - often embroidering them, or buying cheerful iron-on transfers, the first of which were marketed as early as 1879. Now tea towels are more commonly made from cotton, or a blend of cotton, linen and viscose - a man-made fibre manufactured from wood pulp, which speeds water evaporation.

Crikey! provides a little historical background to the Palace's decision that no folk-art will besmirch the nuptials of William and Kate.