Here’s a snapshot about what the rest of the world — or at least that portion that isn’t living under the guns, missiles, armored divisions, and fifth columnists sponsored by goons like Putin, the Muslim Brotherhood, and/or Chavez — thinks about the U.S. presidential race. It’s the sort of thinking that folks who have the luxury of not having to defend themselves either at home or abroad can indulge.
When writing about a foreign place, it’s generally a good idea to have, you know, some actual knowledge about the joint before hunker down at the keyboard.
Just by way of fish-in-a-barrel: No president can “sign a law” making illegal what the Supreme Court has decided (whether or not incorrectly) is a constitutional right.
Secondly, he seems to think that the separation of powers designed into the constitution means that the same party isn’t supposed to dominate all three branches of government. This would be, um, you know, news for any American who lived from 1933 through 1953, or from 1865 through the 1890s. In fact, the very notion of “parties” would have struck the framers as something repellent; they’d have excoriated any “party” dominating any branch of government.
And of course it’s just horrid, unthinkable that Congress should be primus inter pares, and have the stones to act like it. Tell that to the first half-century worth of Congress-critters, who were outraged when Jackson began to veto legislation not because he thought it beyond the scope of powers granted by the constitution or otherwise prohibited by it but simply because he didn’t agree with it. The modern imperial presidency, where the Congress, toad-like, meekly does whatever the president of the moment decides he wishes, is decidedly a modern invention. This feller seems much, much more comfortable with the system practiced by Stalin: He humbly proposed to the Plenum and if they didn’t approve it unamimously right off, he just had them all shot and started over with a more cooperative bunch.
State education is in line for a “haircut,” ignoring that comparatively little of education is federally-funded in the first place. This goober of an author doesn’t quite seem to understand that neither a president nor the president and Congress together can decide that state-level education funding is going to take a haircut. The fiscal literacy of this clown is demonstrated by his profound insights on what the “sudden removal of trillions of federal dollars from US GDP” will do to the world’s economy. I have news, Ranger Bob: Those dollars don’t really exist. They’re fiat money that’s being, metaphorically speaking, printed by the trainload by the Federal Reserve, and “loaned” to the U.S. government, which is already borrowing . . . I can’t recall the exact percentage, but it’s ominously close to 50% . . . of every “dollar” it spends, and now that the Fed’s the one buying over 90% of all long-term Treasury debt, we’re just making it up (as ol’ Mittens quite correctly pointed out). So pulling value-less paper money out of the economy is going to do, what, again?
Listen up, ol’ sport: The political structure of the U.S. was intentionally set up to be slow and obstructionist. That’s what “checks-and-balances” means; that’s what “separation of powers” is all about. They weren’t devices to implement a playground teeter-totter system of “you’ve had your turn; now I’ll have mine.” All three branches of government were set up to answer to different interests, at different intervals, and to be selected by different methods. It’s only by doing so that you ensure that (i) decisions are limited to Very Important Things, and (ii) the scope of the decision is limited to those areas in which genuinely broad consensus actually exists (see Hayek). In other words, it’s Not A Bad Thing that Mittens, if he’s elected president, may find himself dealing with a Congress that’s dominated by people who don’t see eye to eye with him.
If this boy can get an appointment within the next eight months from his “free” NHS provider (and hoping his doctor doesn’t just decide he really needs to be on the Liverpool Path or whatever their slow-motion “assisted” death glide path is called), he needs to get him a prescription for a chill pill and then take them, all at once.
I can’t recall who it was who first observed that fascism is always descending on America, but always landing on Europe. Certainly that’s been the case up until now. Our most recent assurances that fascism was on its way was during the Bush administration, when the hand-wringers at the NYT and those like them were just convinced that the administration’s monitoring international cross-border communications among known terrorist affiliates was somehow the foundation stone of a new chain of concentration camps — one coming soon to a neighborhood near you — and bearing the smiling face of Bushitler over the gates. These hand-wringers would be the same crew who haven’t weighed in much about Dear Leader’s assertion that he has the right — unilaterally and secretly — to promulgate a kill list disposition matrix under which anyone in the world outside the U.S., including U.S. citizens, may be blasted to shreds of meat by a missile fired from a lazily-circling drone.
But what do I know?
The ominous quotation from this article about Golden Dawn, Greece’s nascent and increasingly fashionable fascist party, comes from the fellow — an MP for Golden Dawn — who allows, “Most nations, well, not the US or Australia, have a single nationality that defines its culture and Greece must return to this ideal. The Golden Dawn is a very well organised party that is intervening to support and help people. Without us in a country where two million of ten million people are illegal, there would be chaos.”
Some years ago I read a book by Ludwig von Mises (can’t recall the title any more, alas) in which he identifies as the point where Europe began the course change which pointed it towards the rocks of the 20th Century that point at which became common currency the idea that each linguistic group needed to be gathered into one polity purged of other linguistic groups. At that time, of course, we had two — actually, three — enormous polyglot empires in Europe, the Habsburg, the Ottoman, and the Russian. Each of their dozens of native languages, in many cases fragmented across the map, had sullenly chafed under distant monarchs for centuries. But then pretty much everyone chafed under monarchies for centuries, when you get right down to it. The German-speaking serf in 18th Century Austria was neither in better nor worse shape than his Polish- or Hungarian-speaking counterpart in the 19th Century . . . or the 14th. The wheels began to loosen on their hubs when someone whispered in his great-grandchild’s ear that it was an outrage not so much that he was a peasant but that he had all these Czechs cluttering up the place. To say nothing of all those filthy Joooooosssss. And so forth.
How deeply that idea took root we got to see when the restraining forces of the monarchies crumbled with the end of the Great War. The fistful of nation-states that sprang into existence in Central Europe were not creations of the peace-making process; they were called into being by whichever dominant ethnic group happened to live there and by the time of the Paris Conference in 1919 they were facts on the ground that could not be ignored. What didn’t change, however, was the geographic distribution of the groups within those new states. Every single successor state had within its borders large numbers of language groups which had — from their perspective, at least — only traded dominance by some lantern-jawed Habsburg or nitwit Romanov or strutting and puffing Hohenzollern for dominance by the People’s Party of Whatever-the-Hell majority ethnic group happened to have seized the levers of power in the neighborhood.
In short, they all had the Minorities Problem, only this time the groups’ jealousies and resentments had the blessing of America’s first quasi-fascist national politician, Woodrow Wilson, and his pernicious doctrine of “self-determination.” For all his posturing as a Deep Thinker and Mr. Cosmos himself in the flesh, Wilson like any other human could not see the world from any frame of reference other than his own. Of course everyone ought to have the right of “self-determination,” because it had worked so well in the U.S. Everyone pretty much rubbed along (well, except for that lynching thing across the South and up into Indiana, which Wilson really doesn’t seem to have had much problem accepting) and whether it was the Tammany Democrats or the Boston Brahmins in charge at any particular moment, we all more or less agreed on the rules of the game and we’d self-determined to throw in together. Hell’s bells; we’d even fought a civil war that decided once and for all that we really had thrown in together and for keeps.
So what could go wrong with transplanting that notion of “self-determination” onto an ethnic mosaic the forms of which had begun to coalesce with the latter days of the Western Roman Empire (there’s a reason “Romania” is nowhere near Italy, guys) and the massive migrations of the next few hundred years? The Sudeten Germans who had migrated to Bohemia beginning in the 1300s and by the 1900s comprised around a quarter of the total population of ancient Bohemia were simply among the more prominent groups — and more pregnant with mischief. The Sorbians, a Germanic people who spoke a Slavic language, and who gave names to such places as Drežhdany — “forest swamp dwellers” — which we now know as Dresden, were among the lesser. Toss in several million Roma and Sinti, Ruthenians, Slovenians, Rumelians, Bulgars, Croats, Ukrainians, and millions upon millions of Jews (Wilson’s high-falutin’ principles don’t seem to have applied to them), mix them in with several centuries’ worth of genuine grievance and several generations of demagoguery, and you’d think anyone with more than just walking-around sense would expect something along the lines of what actually happened.
But not Wilson. To understand how disastrous Wilson’s influence on history was, you have to understand how nearly universally admired the United States was back then, even among people who couldn’t stand Americans because we were . . . well, we acted like Americans. [One of my favorite Twain passages is from The Innocents Abroad, in which he describes some American in a Paris restaurant loudly proclaiming himself a “free-born sovereign, sir,” an American, who never dined without wine, sir, and so forth; Twain observed that he failed to mention that he was also a “lineal descendant of Balaam’s ass, but we all knew that without his saying so.”] When Wilson spoke he did so not as some momentarily-successful politician. When Wilson spoke he gave words, specific words, to an abstract and idealized Promised Land, a secular Zion for the Gentiles, which millions of people all over Europe looked up to. Many of them had family members, fellow villagers, friends, or fellow parishioners who had crossed the oceans and sung the praises of the Land of Unlimited Opportunity in writing. When Wilson began to bloviate it was the same as if in ancient Rome the massive statue of Capitoline Jove had in fact opened its mouth and said, “So let it be done.”
Had Lloyd George or Clemençeau blathered about a bunch of “self-determination,” it would have swirled about the floor a few times then gone right down the drain. Wilson gave the idea the sanction of Idealized America.
After World War II, that is, after the next round in the fight which Versailles made if not inevitable then something which only phenomenal luck could have avoided, Central Europe solved a large measure of its Minorities Problem. The minorities got their country asses kicked out, is what happened, frequently on twelve hours’ or less notice. Ox carts full of possessions (and frequently pulled by their owners, the animals in the span long since having dropped dead or vanished into a cooking pot somewhere along the line), parents slogging along loaded down with pathetic bundles, filthy, emaciated children in tow, their faces bearing the pole-axed look that only violated innocence can show, the corpses of those who could no longer keep up lining the road sides: all those were part of the landscape in 1945-46. Who has counted the loss? Who has measured the suffering? Who today traces the psychic scars of those savage adjustments on the survivors and their descendants?
The EU is no more exempt from the Law of Unintended Consequences than is any other human undertaking. Its intentional obliteration of barriers to human movement has encouraged exactly that. And with it is returning the Minorities Problem. Whether it’s “illegals” in Greece or cheap Polish labor flooding Germany (won’t someone please explain to Germany that fixing their demographic issues is fun? I mean, guys, c’mon, you’ve got a statistically irrefutable mandate to hop in the sack as frequently as you can and with as little precaution as possible; so shuck them clothes and Get it On), or the Islamization of wide areas of ancient European cities, the tide is setting towards the rocks, once again.
Pray God we may not see Europe visited with Wilson’s legacy once more.
Prostitution may be the world’s oldest profession, but its practitioners can certainly no longer claim to be the most supine when at work. That title has to go to the U.S media, from roughly late 2007 until . . . well, until right about now.
They resolutely buried any and all information that came their way which might have reflected poorly on their Golden Boy, their Great One, the vessel of all their dreams. And so we bought a pig in a poke.
But a few journalists are finally, less than one week from an election, at the point where they’re willing to look things straight on and call them by their correct names. The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s headline sums it up: Benghazi blunder: Obama unworthy commander-in-chief. As the Blogfather a.k.a. Instapundit, would say, read the whole thing.
. . . being in the tasting, in evaluating the relative merits of the two visions of the citizen-state relationship on offer this coming Tuesday, might we not with profit ask ourselves: From which of the two systems are people most intimate with it willing to endure the greatest hazards to escape it?
Exhibit B: The Antifaschistische Schutzmauer, better known over here as the Berlin Wall, which up to 200 people died trying to cross between its 1961 construction and its 1989 breach (this ignores those shot elsewhere along the border between the two Germanies).
Exhibit C: The periodic waves of people fleeing Castro’s Cuba.
You know, I’m not a Deep Thinker, and certainly not one of them Sophisticated Northeasterners, and so I tend to ask real damned simple questions, and to weigh the answers accordingly. But I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that if large numbers of people are willing to throw everything they’ve ever worked for overboard, if they’re willing to risk being shot, if they’re willing to consign their nearest loved ones staying behind to prison (if they’re lucky), just in order to escape your system . . . then you might ought to think real hard about whether you need to change how you do things.
. . . to sell its daughters into marriage when they’re anywhere from 11 to 15 years old. One of the girls in this picture series was married off to a man in his mid-20s. She was eleven at the time of marriage and was delivered to her husband shortly after her 12th birthday, when she still had not had her first period. She attempted not to consummate the marriage . . . until the village women (way to stick together, sisters!) got after her, whereupon she gave in. I can understand, just barely, selling a daughter into marriage when the choice is she gets married off to someone who may be able to feed her or she starves at home with you. Just barely.
But according to this report “even in good times” a full third of all girls in Niger are married off by the time they’re 15. According to the lead-in, world-wide among women now between 20 and 24 years old, a full one-third were married off while still children.
The next time one is tempted to condemn the patriarchal, phallo-centric power structure of entrenched dominance &c. &c. &c. &c., in the fashion of those tiresome all-sex-is-rape gas-bags, remind them that pretty much not any of that one-third of the forced marriages of children occurred in a Western country. And the next time one hears someone gush about “it takes a village,” remember the child in this picture series (she’s no. 5), whose daddy back in the ol’ village has three wives and 23 children, which, you know, just may have something to do with his difficulties feeding them all. Just sayin’.
But most of all, remember, ladies: It’s Mitt Romney and all them awful Rethuglicans who are after your lady parts.
This is the view from someone who lived and grew up in the socialist, re-distributionist utopia that Dear Leader really thinks the U.S. ought to be more like. These are vignettes from the “single-payer” healthcare system that he and his allies tout. This is what the ways of the U.S. looked like to someone so fresh off the boat that she spoke almost no English (and having tried to function — even a little — in a society of whose language I spoke almost zero, her coming here, to live and work in NYC, fills me with immeasurable awe).
And these are the thoughts and discussions that are current among those who played the game, honestly, correctly. Who paid their dues, digging fans for an un-airconditioned NYC apartment from the garbage, digging up a mattress from the same source. Who walked 16 blocks to the subway through early 1980s NYC dirt and crime.
To pretend that there can be no two good-faith sides to the discussion about immigration policy, about government hand-out policy, about tax policy, about socialized medicine, is neither more nor less than dishonest. This woman’s intellectual legacy isn’t of patriarchal, dominant-culture, slave-holding exploitation over sundry oppressed minorities on whose necks she and her ancestors stood to enjoy the Good Life. Her legacy is just about the diametric opposite of that. Her resentment of shucking out her taxes to fund drug habits and sturdy beggars is not that of someone who’s finally being asked to “pay her fair share” to those whose misery is the foundation of her prosperity.
Disagree with her if you want. But you cannot dismiss her out of hand.
. . . Or something like that. Special Operations Speaks is a group of former U.S. military special operations types (beg pardon, but is that descriptor in and of itself not sufficient warning not to screw around with these guys?) that doesn’t like how the present administration is running things and wants it out of office. You know, sort of like that ol’ freedom of opinion thingy, right? This being the 21st Century — except inside the administration’s policy groups, where it’s still 1935 — they’ve got themselves a Facebook page. They have a third-party administrator run it for them.
Their administrator recently posted on their Facebook page a composite picture showing Dear Leader, the late Mr. bin Laden, and the U.S. Navy SEAL trident-and-eagle insignia. You know, the one all SEALs wear on the left breast of their uniforms, as prescribed by official regulations of the U.S. military. Both Dear Leader and Mr. bin Laden were, insofar as their pictures showed them, clothed to their ordinary sartorial standards.
The picture bore a legend, in two parts: “Obama called the SEALs and THEY got bin Laden. When the SEALs called Obama, THEY GOT DENIED.” Oh, and they had the URL of their website.
You can quibble a bit with the second part of that; in truth two of the four Americans that Dear Leader abandoned to their deaths were not active-duty SEALs any more. They’d left the navy and were working for the CIA tracking down all the stray ordnance that’s washing around Libya and finding its way into the militias’ hands. But true to the parole, “Earn your trident every day,” they’d run to the sound of the guns; I suppose just like former Marines (which there aren’t any, except for John Murtha), there aren’t any such animals as former SEALs. My first cousin, currently a four-striper SEAL, would likely confirm that supposition.
Facebook took the picture down, after it had been shared some 30,000 times and got 24,000 “likes,” all within 24 hours. Their message to the account-owner? “We removed content you posted. We removed the content you posted or were admin of because it violates Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”
Apparently one has a right to support Dear Leader, irrespective of what he actually, you know, does while in office, and a corresponding responsibility to cheer oneself hoarse for him. Or something like that. The Washington Post has a fuller version of what happened next, together with a deconstruction of the only “rights and responsibilities” that the post might even arguably have been said to violate (plot spoiler: you can’t square that circle).
Whereupon things hit the fan.
Facebook has now graciously allowed a group of people who have quite literally put their lives on the line for their country (that’s you and me, friends), and more than a few of whom have the scars on their bodies to prove it, and who count themselves fortunate, having seen their close friends come home in boxes, to express an opinion about Dear Leader. Facebook admits to an “error” in taking down the post, not once but twice.
Whatever else it was, an “error” it was not. Facebook simply decided that there are some expressions of political opinions which, because of whom they damage and because of how effectively they do so, may not be held, known, or shared if they have anything to do with it. If Facebook’s censoring those special forces guys was an “error,” then the late Mr. Sutton’s transactions with all those banks were nothing more than inadvertent account over-drafts.
Does Facebook not understand they’re a public company now? That their censorship decisions, ex post disclaimers of such intent notwithstanding, will have deleterious effects for their owners, the shareholders? How about the employees, who while they haven’t dumped all their stock (yet), are the ones whose pocketbooks this sort of nonsense will drain?
I make no secret of my thoughts about Dear Leader and the legal and moral plane on which he and his administration operate. Disagree with me if you please, throw facts in my face if you can. But stuff like this is distressing for the same reasons that NOW’s unwavering support for Clinton was distressing. Here’s the President of the United States of America having it off with a 20 year-old intern; here’s a credible accusation of rape against the same man (admittedly while he was still governor of Arkansas); here’s a man willing to perjure himself over the whole mess and use his minions to destroy his accusers’ lives. Christopher Hitchens’s No One Left to Lie Tohas the full story; one of the most damning passages is when he describes a reporter asking Algore if he thought the woman accusing the president of rape might be telling the truth. As Hitch put it, a man who’d spent some six years working in harness with Clinton at that point could not bring himself to state unequivocally that he refused to believe that we had a rapist in the Oval Office. In fact it was how the Clintons dealt with Bill’s victims that turned Hitchens against him, once and for all. And NOW and all the other feminist hand-wringers closed ranks behind their beloved Bill.
Clinton did everything but drop his trousers and urinate on their skirts, and they kept on cheering. These Facebook people will experience the same from Dear Leader, sooner or later (in fact they have, with his relentless anti-private enterprise agenda), and my prediction is they’ll never miss a single bar of whatever eery Mao-ist ditty his people compose next.
Gee whiz, I’m so glad that Dear Leader tried to normalize relations with Iran. Is he still trying? It’s hard to say one way or the other. The recent claim that he’d sent word through the Swiss that he “recognized” Iran’s “nuclear rights” sure doesn’t sound too much as though he’d got his little fingers burnt enough to remember it.
I’m pleased, you see, I’d hate to think that we didn’t have a mutually helpful relation with a regime one of whose first acts on taking power was to arrest thousands upon thousands of its citizens, as young as 16 or 17, torture them, and then during the course of the first wave of arrests (cf. Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the “waves” that washed through GULag during the course of the years) in power slaughter between 3-5,000 of them.
This is a survivor’s story, as told in an interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was 17 years old in 1979. She’d been on the streets, protesting against the Shah. Her father, an academic, didn’t like the Shah but didn’t trust the mullahs, either. “They preach democracy,” he said; but wait until they get power, “then they’ll show you.” “You children will see it.” Shoulda listened to daddy, little girl. She was living in a commune with other students when she was arrested one day on her return. The thing they demanded of her was where were the others. She was taken, blind-folded, to prison.
While in prison, they were herded into cells, up to 70 women, some with children, in 20 square meters. There was no room to lie flat (try sitting on the floor with your legs scrunched up; now try sleeping like that. Now try sleeping like that for weeks, months on end. At night time they counted the shots in the execution yard.
This witness was placed in a cell roughly six square meters with five other women, the oldest of whom was 20 or so, the others still schoolgirls. Three were already badly wounded from their torture. The Islamic method is to sling them upside down and beat them on the soles of the feet; so was it with these girls. Some of them had been beaten so severely that the skin was gone from the soles; a doctor in the prison figured out how to remove skin from other locations on their bodies and sew it on to the feet. This witness describes such victims, years later, with oddly-shaped scars on their bodies, in the placed whence the skin was taken.
Islam — that religion of peace — forbids the execution of a virgin. What do you do with a prison full of 17 and 18 year-old girls? Right: You “marry” them to their guards, who then rape them; the next day you shoot them, and the grieving “widower” is then free to “re-marry.” They’d send the bodies to the families, together with the “decencies” due to a deceased married woman. It’s how the families knew what had happened to their daughters.
During this time the Europeans (O! those sophisticated Europeans, not at all like our stoopid cowboy presidents at the time, were they?) came to Iran to celebrate the mullahs in much the same fashion they’d been to Lenin’s and then Stalin’s Soviet Union. Like Walter Duranty (have we mentioned that the New York Times still refuses to disclaim the Pulitzer he won for being Stalin’s willing mouthpiece?), they were shown the Potemkin portions of the prisons, the show-piece prisoners. They reported how wonderful it all was.
And at night they still counted the shots.
At least the Europeans of 1979 could claim some sort of innocence about the nature of the regime the mullahs set up. Just barely could they claim it; the ink on Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus was scarcely dry.
What’s Dear Leader’s excuse for sucking up to these murderous would-be genocidaires?
Judging by the subtle clues in the unnamed father’s query, I’m going to suggest that he is . . . From Around Here, as we say. In which event he may have already missed the boat. Teaching your daughter that she doesn’t have to marry if she doesn’t want to, that men don’t make her complete, that she is more than the sum of her primary and secondary reproductive attributes &c. &c. &c. is all very well. But you see, those are water-dripping-on-stone lessons, and they operate, if at all, first on the intellectual level. They must then seep into Princess’ sense of self sufficiently deeply that she internalizes them, makes them part of her understanding of herself.
Don’t get me wrong: All this is good. This father’s life lessons are important for his daughter to wear as armor as she sallies forth to do battle with what remains a world very hostile to the tenderness which (in my limited observations) most women in fact do desire, at some level and at some point in their lives.
But teenagers of either flavor don’t operate on intellectual planes. They operate at visceral and hormonal levels, and unless you can win that race with your arguments you’re sunk. Let’s be honest as well about our physiological traits. Hormones will hear the suggestion that, “I don’t need boys to be a whole person,” or “Girls? I can take ’em or leave ’em; plenty of time left,” and they scream unto the mountains high: “Bullshit!!” Guess what gets listened to, the arguments or the hormones?
So how do you get at least within a length of your daughter’s hormones when you’re rounding that last curve into the home stretch? You start the race with constant instruction about what is tacky and what is not tacky, what trashy and not-trashy.
Warning: This requires you to be judgmental and it requires you to raise a child to be judgmental. But you know what happens to little girls who lack judgmental capacity? They don’t judge. At age 17 they bring you home a strapping grandchild of doubtful paternity, got on them by whichever slack-jawed, droopy-pants, pattern-cut-into-his-green-hair, pierced-lip male your daughter failed to judge correctly. That’s what happens to little girls who don’t learn to be judgmental.
Little boys who lack judgmental capacity tend to end up in jail.
So what’s tacky, or trashy? Too much make-up. Too much jewelry. Too valuable jewelry. Teenage girls wearing anything other than costume jewelry in the first place. Hair dye on a teenager. Unclean. Too small clothes. Too few clothes. Tattoos (any, anywhere, at any age). Ears pierced more than once per. Any other body part pierced, visible or not. Being too interested in money. Being too interested in boys. Trying to be something one is not, unless one is trying to be a better person than one is inclined to be by nature. Being too concerned with one’s popularity. Being too solicitous of those in authority. Being insufficiently solicitous of those who are not a threat to one’s own position (even paranoids have real enemies, especially teenaged girls, but being tacky to the buck-toothed, cross-eyed girl whose clothes never seem quite to fit right . . . because you can get away with it? tacky). Being irreligious (do you really think you deserved to be born pretty, little girl? that all girls were born as pretty as you? that your parents somehow deserve to have a daughter as pretty as you?). Being too religious (Disraeli line to inculcate: He was asked what was his religion. “Sensible men are all of the same religion.” And what was that? “Sensible men never tell.”). Having one’s name appear on any personal possession other than one’s driver’s license (i.e., not on one’s license plate or one’s clothing). Driving an expensive car to high school. Not being committed to anything beyond oneself. Denying one’s commitments publicly. Wearing one’s commitments publicly.
Get the point? Children can understand “Eeewwwwww!” They don’t do so well with “You should do/avoid X because . . . .”
So this father, likely living as he does where “tacky” and “trashy” are well understood concepts that are current in everyday discourse, has or had a chance to learn his daughter the differences. Has he done so? Did it take? We can hope. But I’ll wager he’ll get a lot, a whole lot farther, if he’d present the issue as “trashy is as trashy does, honey, and that’s trashy,” than he will with pointing out, however correctly, the life lessons he describes. Will either set of lessons work? We don’t know. But both sets are necessary equipment for growing up. In any event, parents of daughters have my fullest sympathy; I was terrified that I’d have daughters. I haven’t (to borrow from Shakespeare) the stomach to this fight.
Full disclosure: I have neither teenagers nor daughters, but rather three boys whom I will learn the distinctions between what is and is not tacky, trashy, and common, or die in the effort.
Seven years ago today, the re-built Frauenkirche in Dresden was reconsecrated.
When I first saw the church it was a very tall (I’d guess thirty or more feet) pile of black-stained rubble, with two hunks of burned stone wall sticking out. It stood all alone in the middle of a very wide open space, the new market. It was February, 1986, and although no one could know it at the time, the whole German Democratic Republic thing had only three-and-a-half more years to run before it got irretrievably stuck in the ditch.
The church, the second on that site, had been built between 1726 and 1743 and was designed by the city’s municipal master builder, a boy name of George Bähr. He’d been born in 1666, in Füurstenwalde out in the sticks, and then moved to Dresden to make his bones in the city. Augustus the Strong – sufficiently strong that he was rumored to have fathered some 300 children (not by the same woman, I understand) – had become King of Poland (and converted to Catholicism for the occasion, he perhaps agreeing with Henry IV on the point) and wanted a proper residence city. What the people who were going to pay for his building schemes had to say is not well-recorded. Perhaps they weren’t asked (poor old Augustus; he lived before people knew to label that sort of thing “stimulus”).
The city of Dresden had joined the Reformation. The original Frauenkirche of course pre-dated all that and had thus begun as a Catholic church, but was converted to Protestant use when the city made the jump. It was a municipal church; that is, it belonged to the city and not to any particular organizational unit of the Protestant church. And it was in very, very bad shape. In fact by the second decade of the 1700s it was more or less unusable.
Money was the hang-point, as it always is. But they could plan. They invited proposals from Matthäus Pöppelmann, the builder of the Zwinger (a summer palace down by the river), from several others, and from their newly-appointed master carpenter. [N.b. Bähr was appointed municipal master carpenter before he was actually a master carpenter, a pretty high compliment, when you think about it.] Bähr’s proposal, for an enormous stone octagon supporting a stone dome, got the nod.
Inside the lay-out is very much in tune with the Protestant emphasis on preaching the Gospel, and in baptism as the becoming one of God’s children. The pulpit juts out towards the congregation like the prow of a whaling boat, the baptismal font just behind it, and both well in front of the altar. The main floor for the congregation is arc-shaped in a rounded space formed by the eight pillars which support the 12,000 tons of inner dome and double-shell outer dome. Above the main floor are three galleries in a horseshoe shape. The effect is as nearly as possible to project the central function of the church – preaching – front and center into the physical space occupied by the congregation.
They’d finally scraped up enough money to start by 1726. During construction the money kept running short, however, prompting Bähr to spend his own money to keep the work going. He ended up impoverishing his family with the effort, and worn down by intrigue and mounting criticism of his church’s stability, he died the day after his birthday in 1738. It wasn’t until five years later that the final touches were added.
Dresdners promptly fell in love with their church. The loved her magnificent beauty indoors, play of light off copious gilding and the almost luminescent paint of the interior; they loved how she towered above their city, visible for miles around. They loved how people from all over Europe came to marvel at it (it was and remained for over 200 years the largest domed structure north of the Alps). They loved the magnificent pipe organ, designed by the great Gottfried Silbermann and played by no less than Bach himself. Silbermann and Bähr had got cross-ways on the design of the organ case. Silbermann was accustomed to design everything about the organ (which he in fact had done for the church at Forchheim, also built by Bähr), but Bähr decided that the organ was part of the architecture of the space and so insisted on his prerogative. They loved the paintings on the inner dome, four representing the evangelists, alternating with four showing the virtues of faith, hope, love, and mercy (the virtues are represented by females figures, all of which showed the same face; the speculation is that the artist might have used Bähr’s third wife as the model).
Shortly before midnight on February 13, 1945, the Lancasters of Air Marshal Arthur Harris appeared above the city, in two waves. Dresden had not been bombed yet. Her medieval inner city streets, tightly packed with ancient buildings, was a tinder box. The bomber fleets that night carried almost no high explosives; the British just set out to see how big a fire they could start. The flames were visible to the aircrew over 200 miles away. In the morning the 8th Air Force B-17s showed up and added of their plenty.
The city was full, and was known to be so, of civilian refugees from points farther east, fleeing from the Red Army. No effort was made, at all, to target the few military or quasi-military targets (thermite bombs will not wreck a railroad switching yard, or drop a stone or steel bridge into the water; the few armaments factories in the area were at the edge of town or completely across the river, well outside the attack’s target zone). Depending on whom you ask, between 35,000 to 150,000+ people died that night. Many of them were so completely incinerated by the firestorm that no trace of them was left to count when the stones had cooled. The firestorm generated winds sufficiently powerful that they sucked streetcars through the air towards the core of the flames.
The Frauenkirche was not hit by any high explosives, and of course the incendiaries couldn’t penetrate the dome (the outer shell is 30 or more inches thick, depending on precise location). But the thermite lit the fires of hell; the temperature inside the church is estimated at close to 1,000 degrees Celsius. The eight pillars supporting that massive dome glowed bright red, until the sandstone itself disintegrated.
And the church came down, late morning of February 15, 1945. There she lay for the next 45 years. The locals kicked up enough fuss to prevent the ruins from being cleared off in the immediate aftermath of the war, and eventually the whole site was declared a war memorial.
By 1985 the city had decided to rebuild, once they finished with the palace and its church (the latter sporting its own Silbermann organ) and the opera building (designed by Gottfried Semper). Reunification caught them first, but the idea had taken hold, and shortly after the Wende (the “turn”) a group of a dozen or so citizens put the word out. What sort of church should they re-build? Being Germans they worried that question half to death, with some designs being suggested that were as hideously ugly as only modern architecture can be. In the end, though, they decided that it should be as it originally was (which was somewhat different, by the way, from how it looked in 1945; for instance the interior pillars had been re-painted a sort of greenish color at some point, while their original was a multi-hued faux marble appearance).
Reaction started modestly, but boy howdy did it grow. The eventual reconstruction cost €180 million, of which €100 million was raised by public subscription. The Dresdner Bank chipped in €7 million of its own, and raised another 70 or so through sponsoring various fund-raising drives. An American doctor (born in Germany, as a young child he’d been one of the refugees who made it through Dresden before the bombing and had seen the church) gave his entire prize money for his Nobel in medicine to the effort. The British paid to re-build the cross atop the church, and by ironic happenstance the silversmith who got the commission was the son of one of the men at the stick on one of those Lancasters. A Polish survivor of the resistance drummed up the cash to sponsor one of the vase-and-flame structures on an exterior tower. There were charitable trusts set up in Britain, the U.S., Switzerland, and France. Masons and other craftsmen came from all over Germany (and from even further afield; one of the apprentice stone cutters was American).
Being German, when they began unstacking the rubble, they mapped out exactly where in the pile they found each re-usable stone and measured it, compared it to the original plans (which, being German, they also still had), ran it through a computer simulation in 3-D to see how it would fit, and then, as and when they could, being German, they put it exactly right back where it came from. According to the chief builder Eberhard Burger, of the roughly 21,500 cubic meters of rubble they were able to salvage approximately 7,000 of it for re-use, which when added to the remaining structural components would yield about 40% or so original material in the re-built church.
The original stones are still stained black, and so it lends a curious speckled appearance to the fassade, the balance of which is a sort of light honey colored sandstone.
On October 30, 2005, they reconsecrated their Frauenkirche. The prime seats on the main floor, other than those reserved for dignitaries, were allocated to surviving members of the congregation, with preference for those baptized or married in the church (two older women participated in the service itself; one had been baptized 81 years before). Ludwig Güttler, the world-famous trumpeter and professor, lead the musicians from the organ loft (I don’t see how he could have the breath to blow; I’d have been too choked up, were I in his place). Eberhard Burger likewise participated, and in places if you watch you can see him choking back tears. The three bishops who had superintended the whole process were the chief celebrants.
Here’s an excerpt, from immediately after the consecration of the entire church (they had done the pulpit, the baptismal font, the altar, and the organ separately). The chorale is “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr,” one of the very earliest Protestant hymns, dating from the mid-1520s.
One of the nice things about running a blog is you get to write about stuff that interests you, even if no one else. This day I claim my rights in that regard.
