Happy Birthday Jenny Lind

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One of the things I like about old music is that it seems (I may be just imagining it, but then maybe not) to give a glimpse into worlds gone by.  It’s one of the reasons I enjoy Sweelinck’s music, especially played on the sorts of instruments it would have been played on back in the day, e.g. the virginals or a chest organ.  Ditto Buxtehude.  Music has always had the power to move people powerfully and for reasons that the hearer doesn’t even necessarily understand.  It just soaks in and makes us want to do.  Even music without words will do the trick.

We can read the books, the pamphlets, the sermons that were written in any particular period to see what got folks all in a twitter back then.  But those are all more-or-less intentionally didactic exercises, thought out, tried out, very frequently written for a specific occasion or in address to a specific audience.  And of course in a world in which huge chunks of the people were illiterate or nearly so, even of the middling orders, the written word as a statistically valid sample (to use a metaphor a bit out of place) has to be questioned.  So I humbly submit that if we want to place our hands as closely as possible — if unavoidably imperfectly, since we hear with different ears than they would, just as we read with different eyes — we need to listen to their music.  To borrow a phrase someone once used about Bach, “we must follow him to the organ.”

And so, from way back in the day when famous people had songs, marches, quick-steps, dances, etc. written in their honor, we reach out to touch the Jenny Lind Polka, written to honor the Swedish Nightingale, born on this day in 1820:

Once upon a time I had a cassette recording including this tune, done on mountain dulcimer, which really works excellently.  The mountain dulcimer is by the way one of the better-kept secrets of American music, I suggest.  You ought to hear “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” on it; I bet Luther himself would observe, “Ja, das ist das echte Zeug!”

Monty Python and Modern Memory

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In which one of history’s greatest comedy troupes is firmly anchored in the mud of the Western Front.

Today marks the anniversary of the first broadcast, in 1969, of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an exercise in farce, irony, absurdity, word-play, and slap-stick which over forty years on remains a benchmark. The world divides neatly into two groups, those who get the Pythons and those whose lives are barren wastelands. Even now in certain circles all one need do is announce, “I wish to register a complaint!” and be perfectly understood. To describe someone as being a Mr. Creosote conjures up vivid pictures in the minds of millions all over the world (I’ve always wondered, however, how one would translate the Pythons into another language, so much of the humor being bound up in the play of English words, their pronunciations and meanings).

In the best traditions of English humor poking fun at religion and ecclesiastics forms a large element in the Python canon, e.g. “The Bishop,” or the interjections of the Spanish Inquisition – which no one expects – or the street preacher scene from Life of Brian. For an earlier illustration of the exercise one can do no better than Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, in which character Jane Austen perfectly captured the unctuous insincerity of the used car dealer nearly a full century before his creation. But taking swings at preachers, howe’er so skillfully done, really comes more under the category of shooting fish in a barrel. 

What I’m after here is a fundamental structure, a pattern of organizing the canvas of Python-land that is so closely woven into its fabric that you really don’t notice it’s there, necessarily, unless you look for it. One refers to grotesque irony, all the way from the anarcho-syndicalists scraping about in the mud to the Queen Victoria Handicap to crowds worshipping a sandal to a waiter who kills himself over a poorly-washed piece of cutlery to an actual government bureau for exaggeratedly silly gaits. Depictions of the grotesque are nothing new, either in English, continental, or American popular entertainment. I mean, think of the circus freak-show, or the vaudeville act featuring the Amazing Man With No Skeleton, and so forth. Nor had the humorous possibilities of Things Not Being as They Are Presented escaped English-language writers, as witness Pudd’nhead Wilson and The Importance of Being Earnest. Nor is farce anything new to the landscape of modern humor; P. G. Wodehouse’s first Blandings novel, Something Fresh, was published in 1915 (in America, by the way, as witness the constant conversational references among English characters to U.S. monetary units). And of course sophisticated comedy goes back to Shakespeare and before. 

But irony, especially irony taken to a level of grotesque juxtaposition of What Is and What Ought to Be (“The Architect Sketch,” anyone?), understood as something specifically amusing, does strike me as something not widely encountered prior to a certain point. That certain point is World War I. Without repeating the argument in too great detail (besides, I’ve slept since last re-reading it), Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory could well be subtitled something along the lines of “; or, Irony Sweeps the Field.” A large portion of Fussell’s thesis is that British authors finding themselves tossed into the troglodyte world of the Western Front were confronted with contrasts, sickening beyond all former human points of reference, between farm, woodland, stream, wildlife, integration, stability, and sense on the one hand, and gore, fear, violence, uncertainty, randomness, wantonness, and degradation on the other. The authors, steeped as they were in pastoral traditions (there’s a reason that within recent times the largest group of members in the principal British garden club were retired senior army and navy officers), found themselves forced into irony as the principal framework and method of expressing the horror, the enormity of what was happening. And of course the more extreme the contrast, the greater the irony. 

Fussell lauds Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” as the best and in many ways the quintessential Great War Poem, precisely for its understated irony, and likewise Blunden’s Undertones of War for its recurring theme of the pastoral violated (in case you haven’t Got It by then, his final sentence describes himself as a simple shepherd-boy in a military greatcoat). By contrast Fussell “breaks on the wheel” the “butterfly” of McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” largely because of its entirely unironical treatment of the dead and their address to the living. [N.b. I have to say that I diverge from Fussell’s opinion, at least to the extent that he excoriates the poem as “stupid” and brutal. The author was a doctor serving with the front-line artillery, who wrote the poem to the sounds of the guns and while sitting in the back of an ambulance . He wrote the day after a dear friend of his had been killed; McCrae had performed his funeral. So implying that the poem’s imprecations from the dead to the living to take up the fight against Germany is somehow the cheap moral equivalent of the women who went around London shoving white feathers (the symbol of cowardice, then) on every male not in uniform is a bit unjust.] 

Where Fussell’s book takes the second half of its title is what he identifies as the enduring quality of the shift in vision, in understanding, that the authors brought home with them. Irony is now not just a way of highlighting a particular point to be made in the narrative; irony is now the principal mode of understanding and expression, whether in a serious vein or humorous. Laughter has long been recognized as a coping mechanism; Lincoln once answered the question why he told humorous stories during the war by observing that he laughed in order that he might not cry. Pointing out absurd contrasts between the Purported and the Actual, not so much to illuminate any characteristic about either element of the contrast but rather in order to make the larger point that Our World is Absurd, Makes, and Can Make no Sense, is according to Fussell very much a post-Great War phenomenon. Fussell points to the mockery that attended the Empire Exposition, at Wembley in the 1930s, citing specifically its appearance as a plot device in a P. G. Wodehouse novel (I won’t spoil the plot, but it involves Roderick and Honoria Glossop, Bertie Wooster, and of course Jeeves, and is well worth the read) and observing that treating The Empire in this fashion simply would not have occurred in public discourse before the War, or been widely understood to be either funny or even permissible. 

And the Pythons are thoroughly in that post-war tradition. Why is it that the “Dead Parrot Sketch” is so funny? It’s not just the cross-talk or the slippery pet shop-keeper. What makes it funny is the customer’s recitation of every greeting-card euphemism for death he can think of while returning a dead bird, itself of an ironic, non-existent species – a Norwegian parrot? really? – to a shop-keeper who insists that it’s just “pinin’ for the fjords.” The pseudo-elevated yet blandly commercialized language grafted onto an ordinary consumer fraud transaction is the engine that makes the sketch work. The sketch isn’t “about” pet shops, or crooked merchants, or the vicissitudes of consumer relations. The sketch is “about,” if anything, the absurdity of the world in which it takes place, a world whose essential absurdity has been a central theme of English language and literature since the days of Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches,” or Owens’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” And in fact what could be more viciously ironic than Owens’s parents receiving, quite literally while the village bells were pealing to celebrate the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the telegram informing them that their boy had been killed a week before, leading his men across some torpid, poisoned canal in France? 

Think this has no relevance to American literature and arts? The same technique is what makes Raising Arizona or O Brother! Where Art Thou? such hilarious movies. Ed’s insides “were a bare and rocky place where my seed could find no purchase,” as spoken by the multi-loser convenience market robber H. I. McDonough is a line that I will submit would not have been written before July 1, 1916.

 

Oh God! The Humanity of It!

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I don’t care who you are, this just ain’t right.  Some Chinese artist put this . . . representation on a ladder in Kassel, in Germany.  Presumably he was permitted to by the authorities, which I deduce that the place is irretrievably lost.  I didn’t see any mention of the reactions of the unfortunates in the building at whom this . . . representation is leering.

Um, are you planning on finishing that hoagy?

Flash! Kaiser’s Troops Invade Belgium!

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Which is to say, the outcome of last night’s “debate” really didn’t reveal much new about either candidate, did it?  At least not to anyone who’s actually been paying attention for any length of time.  The feller who is supposedly just the most gosh-darned brilliant person who’s ever so far debased himself as to condescend to accept the same office Washington and Lincoln held (though not quite so ineffably sublimely masterfully as the current feller has done) turns out to be an inarticulate, arrogant, sneering, stumble-bumpkin when he’s not reading some 30 year-old’s word from a Telepromptr.  And the other feller is someone who knows how to take a stack of data and tell you where your firm is going off the rails, and make a bunch of working-the-levers recommendations.  The one feller’s arguments rested a bit much for comfort on trotting out bogey-men (Trump! etc.); the other’s, on the I’m going to do X, Y, and Z.

Errmmmm, a bit of news for both of them:  Neither one “is going to do” a damned thing.  Either will at most to propose some things to Congress which, by the time it’s done larding it with pork, carving out exceptions for its pet constituents/donors, and pasting sympathetic children’s names all over the bills (e.g. “Little Patti’s Budget Reconciliation, Cosmic Justice, and Omnibus Prevention of Playground Bullying Act of 2013”), will if we’re lucky accomplish zero.  If we’re not lucky it will just make it all worse (cf. Dodd-Frank).  Well, there is a slight difference; if the one feller wins he just won’t bother with that silly ol’ outdated Congress thing anyway.  Flash of pen and another ream or seven of executive orders come down.  Mandatory birth control irrespective of religious belief?  That’ll seem tame in a second OPromptr term.

Much as it pains me to admit that any publicly touted slogan is actually correct, the “Character Counts” tag has it right.  No one, not these candidates, not any of the pundits, not any voter, not any illegal voter — no one knows precisely what challenges the winner is going to be confronted with over his term.  We can be fairly confident of some of them: a nuclear-armed Iran; a rising tide of Islamofascism; a bankrupt entitlement system; a tax code that is pretty good at punishing success but not so good at funding the government; an entrenched bureaucracy that is likely to do a good deal of whatever the hell it wants no matter what any particular president says (we should never forget how much of the damage done to the Bush 43 presidency was accomplished by leaked information from outfits like the CIA, information that was leaked precisely to undermine the president and his agenda).  But in truth no one really knows.  Remember when George W. Bush’s Big Legacy was going to be No Child Left Behind?  When we’d got out of the nation-building business?

And it’s there, in the area of character rather than competence, that neither candidate is without genuine cause for concern.  The incumbent is . . . well, he got his political start (as in his very first fundraiser) and his early mentoring from a fellow who in his youth “declared war” on the U.S. and who with his friends actually set bombs which actually blew up and actually wounded and killed people (including fortunately some of those friends).  This fellow — who happens to be one of OPromptr’s few Old Guard associates whom he’s never thrown under the bus — to this day remains sneeringly proud of what he and his buddies did, and has in fact since his protegé’s election said in so many words that (i) he doesn’t regret what they did, and (ii) in fact he rather thinks they should have done a great deal more of it.  This president is a fellow one of whose first actions in office was to travel abroad to slime his country in a part of the world in which that is one of the unforgivable sins.  All he bought himself was contempt, for himself and for us.  This is a feller who’s run an administration marked by truly extraordinary corruption: $535 million “loaned” to a company that was already going under, but was owned by a major campaign bundler, and the “loan” was subordinated to the owner’s equity; complete failure to investigate Jon Corzine, (still) a major campaign bundler who personally presided over what may be the single largest private theft in modern history; leaning on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (illegally, the statutes specifically prohibit such outside influences) to gut the pensions of the thousands of non-union employees of Delphi, while topping off the UAW pensions of ditto; and let’s not forget Operation Fast and Furious, in which the U.S. government, with approval at the highest levels, got into the illegal gun-running business into a neighboring country, without that country’s knowledge or consent.  And then we have the more purely political corruption: a senior advisor accepts $100,000 from a shady foreign power to make two — two! — speeches right before he takes office as such advisor; the president himself offers to sell out national interests for political gain, begging Putin, who still thinks of himself as a Chekist, to go easy on him until after the election, after which he’ll have “more flexibility” to give him what he wants; the administration deep-sixes an oil pipeline through areas already criss-crossed with such lines, and by curious coincidence one of his most prominent supporters just happens to own a railroad a large portion of whose business is hauling oil from one of the areas that would have been served by that pipeline; the administration defies court orders to process and issue off-shore drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico, while yet another billionaire supporter invests in the much deeper-water Petrobras field off the coast of South America.  And so on.  This may be just about the most personally corrupt administration since Harding’s.

On the other hand, the other fellow, while so far as is known a sterling fellow personally, shares some frames of reference that I don’t find wholly assuring.  He’s a manager.  That’s good.  It’s also not so good, because the management of a firm, or a collection of firms, or even a state of the union, is a task lesser by quantum orders of magnitude than somehow keeping an enterprise like the U.S. federal government out of the ditch.  Managers, at least those I’ve known, have a susceptibility of varying strength to see the world in terms of one-to-one (I know I’m over-simplifying here) correlations of Problem:Solution.  The smaller the enterprise, and the more limited the scope of its mission, the more valid that framework is.  General Motors can “solve” a problem with much greater comprehensiveness and predictability than, say, Massachusetts.  The latter can do so much more so than, say, the Department of Defense.  The DoD can do so more easily than the fellow hunkered down in that Oval Office trying to make sense of it all.

Managers, or rather people who think of themselves as managers, are highly exposed to the temptations of hubris.  It is so easy to lose sight of the fact that there are in fact no “solutions” but only trade-offs.  It is also easy to forget that what Hayek identified as the knowledge problem never goes away.  The more you attempt to accomplish the more information becomes necessary to make the best choice and avoid the worst.  The problem is that the more information you need the less likely you are to obtain a great enough proportion of it that you can avoid making a bloomer. 

A guy who owns a factory making, say, bass boats, is going to have to make decisions in the absence of complete information.  That’s part of life and certainly part of business.  But he’s going to come a great deal closer, a great deal more often, to achieving a sufficient level of knowledge relevant to his decisions than the CEO of Ford will (the Edsel was the most heavily consumer-researched vehicle in history on its introduction).  The guy owning the bass boat factory will have a much less difficult time predicting the outcome of his management decisions than his Ford counterpart, and both of them will have a cake-walk compared with some guy in the Oval Office.  People who think of themselves as “managers,” especially if they’re phenomenally talented, are much more exposed to overlooking what they don’t know, what they in fact can’t predict.

I will offer an illustration that is precisely on point.  OPromptr’s modest self-assessment notwithstanding, he’s probably nowhere near the brightest guy ever to win that office.  The strongest contender that I can think of for that honor was an internationally famous engineer, whose services were actively sought literally all over the planet.  He was the last president born in a log cabin, an orphan, and he’d become fabulously wealthy off his chosen occupation.  Working for the Red Cross he’d successfully coordinated the feeding of the entire civilian population of an occupied nation in the middle of combat operations, through a sea blockade and behind “enemy” lines, for years.  He’d been Secy of Commerce during a rapidly expanding economy.  He never met a problem he couldn’t solve.

His name was Herbert Hoover.  For a decent overview of how he did in responding to the 1929 crash, and just how badly out of his depth he was (and never seemed to realize, more than a little like OPromptr), I highly recommend Amity Schlaes’s The Forgotten Man.  It’s an economic history of the Great Depression, from its roots in the late Coolidge administration, through Hoover’s bumbling, to Roosevelt’s disastrously driving the stake ever deeper.  Executive summary of thesis:  The 1929 crash was a much over-due market correction, which produced a recession.  Hoover’s fumbled response morphed a recession into a depression, and Roosevelt’s socialistic and ham-fisted mismanagement and machinations turned a depression into the Great Depression.  She does a particularly good job at explaining the depression-within-a-depression of 1937, a point that lefties like Krugman never quite seem to get around to explaining away.

So my worry with OPromptr is that I have no confidence at all where his loyalties lie, and so far as is known there is no level of political or personal corruption in his associates and his political allies which he will not cheerfully endorse, subject only to the requirement of keeping the dollars flowing.  My worry with Romney is that he’ll turn out to be another Hoover.

No amount of “debate” is going to change either of these leopards’ spots, and one of the is going to be the next president.

Why yes, thank you; I would like another drink.

When the Only Tool You Have is a Hammer

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I guess everything does look like a nail to you.  Here we have Slate attributing a predicted (although by no means certain) Democrat presidential blow-out in Missouri to — wait! don’t get ahead of me here, folks — racism and religious bigotry. 

The Won running poorly in a heartland state just can’t, it just can’t have anything at all to do with four years of not doing what he said he was going to do, doing what he said he was not going to do, of hurling descriptions of them and their occupations that could easily be epithets lifted from some 1920s-era penny-ante socialist newsrag in Eastern Europe, of calling them bigots every time someone has the gall even to ask whether all this crap is really a good idea.  Having the NLRB try to shut down Boeing for daring to open a non-union shop won’t have impressed anything on anyone in the defense industries in Missouri.  His “you didn’t build that” snark will have had zip, zero, nada to do with his flagging popularity among a population that is proud of its “Show Me” attitude.  What, precisely, has OPromptr shown Missouri over the last four years?  He’s shown them a not-even-thinly-veiled contempt for them, their values, their country, and their livelihoods.  He’s superintended an economy that’s staggered under 8%+ unemployment continuously (that’s not unimportant) for more months than the previous eleven presidents experienced collectively, at any time during their tenures.  He’s told those unemployed people that “the private sector is doing fine.”  I have news for the navel-gazers at Slate:  Missouri is chock-full of people who remember the “clinging bitterly to their guns and religion” crack.  They hunt and they go to church, even the ones who live in the cities.  But not a bit of that has anything to do with his chances in 2012.

Let’s see: a guy who doesn’t match over 80% of the electorate still wins the state, notwithstanding some nut-job of a third-party candidate who siphons off four times OPromptr’s margin of victory.  Kewl.  But without that nut-job running the Democrats expect to lose that same state four years later, when the same people who statistically had to vote for the guy who didn’t look like them in order for him to win constitute a lower percentage of the electorate.  So obviously the only explanation can only be . . . racism!!!!

This clown has nothing left but the race card, the bigotry card. 
So he plays it over and over, until its edges are frayed and it’s worn so thin that even the blind can see through the paper.  Run on yer damned record, OPromptr, if you can.  But don’t have your cheerleaders call me a racist because I have the temerity to think you’ve done a lousy job and haven’t proffered anything other than a proposal to do more and more extreme of the same thing.

At Least They’ve Got the “Einigkeit” Part Back, Mostly

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Today is the Day of German Unity, the Tag der deutschen Einheit.  Effective October 3, 1990, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the DDR, or the GDR in its English rendering (but also known among a certain generation of Germans as the “Sowjetische Besatzungszone,” the Soviet Occupation Zone, or sometimes simply “die Zone”) merged with and into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Federal Republic of Germany.  Once again, for better or worse, Europe had a single, compact (much more compact than used to be the case) mass of German united into one social and economic unit.

It would be idle to pretend that this development was welcomed universally outside Germany.  I still recall a college professor of mine, who as an infantry grunt had fought his way into Germany during the war, sort of wistfully (and not without an unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice) observe that, “When I think about a divided Germany I get a very peaceful feeling.”  Even before 1990 West Germany was the economic powerhouse of the continent; what, one could be excused from asking, would be the effect of adding to them the further human and economic resources of a crew that had been conveniently sealed off behind barbed wire (literally) for 45 years?  Still today the notion of Germany as the 400-pound gorilla in the room makes some nervous.  The Italian prime minister as recently as this past week was actually suggesting Germany’s departure from the Euro zone would be desirable.  Too hegemonic.  Too prone to throw its weight about.  Pay attention to the Greeks and you’ll hear much the same thing.  Those dastardly Germans!  You ask them to foot the bill and the next thing they’re telling you that you can’t retire with full pay at age 55!  How dare they!!  And so forth.

What West Germany actually got was the headache of dealing with socialism’s corrosive effects on an entire chunk of their country.  The Ostzone has been at best slightly better than an economic wash for the west for 22 years now; at worst it’s been a sump hole.  For starts the public infrastructure was in a disastrous condition.  In February, 1986 I spent a week or so being herded around East Germany.  We visited Eisenach (home of the Trabant, a two-stroke powered (if that’s the right word to use) econobox piece of crap that was the best the east could do for a “car,” and you still had to get in line for several years for the privilege of hating your very own), Leipzig, Dresden, and finally East Berlin.  I paid attention to things.  Paint peeling, rust icicles hanging down, busted rivets, patchwork everything:  it was obvious that no one had been keeping the joint up since 1945.  Even the places they shepherded us (and you must remember that the commies spared no effort to impress western visitors; they very, very much put their best foot forward, shod as best they were able) were, with the exception of re-built historical structures, distinctly seedy.

You can sand-blast bridge girders (which I paid particular attention to) and paint them.  You can drill out rusted rivets and bolts and replace them.  You can wash the windows.  Etc.  What has proven harder, I will suggest, is undoing the effects of two full generations grown up under socialism, almost three.  The children born in, say, 1938 or later have no practical recollection of anything other than Nazi or Soviet rule.  They would have reached adulthood in 1958; their children would have reached adulthood in 1978; that generation’s children could have been as old as 12 by the time of reunification.  Twelve isn’t too late, but it’s deep into the third quarter of forming a person’s character.

Last year I went back to the former Ostzone for the first time since 1986; specifically, I wanted to visit the re-built Frauenkirche in Dresden (teaser: future blog post coming).  So I grabbed me a train and headed thither.  Ended up staying in a hotel just a couple of blocks from the train station, in a building that was one of the very few in that entire part of the city to survive the bombing intact.  But that’s not germane to this post.

Part of the attraction for me of riding trains is that you get to see folks’ back yards.  Drive down the road and you get to see the fronts of their houses.  There’s something inherently Potemkin village about the fronts of properties.  Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing; it prompts people to cut their grass, after all.  But if you want to see a better reflection of how people actually live, peek around the corner.  And no one who can avoid it builds his house or his business to face out onto the train tracks.

For those who’ve never visited Germany, at least the western part of it, one of the strongest impressions is how well taken care of the place is.  You don’t see broken windows, or boarded up windows, or obviously broken things just left as they are, or stuff left out to rust or rot in the weather.  The overgrown fence line or the barn thirty degrees out of square is a sight you don’t see in Germany (or, by the way, in parts of the U.S. that were settled largely by Germans . . . cultural DNA lasts, folks).  Even in the backs of farm houses you won’t see piles of miscellaneous Stuff lying about.  If they can’t move it indoors they’ll stack it neatly and lash a tarpaulin over it.  If it’s a vehicle or large equipment that can’t be put up they’ll park it, neatly and out of the way.  If something breaks they’ll either jump on it and fix it as good as or better than it was, or if they can’t they’ll tear it down and do something else.

The former border facilities (auf deutsch:  Grenzanlagen) — the watch towers, barbed wire and electric fences, tank traps, mine fields, and so forth — are long gone of course.  But it was still possible to note when one was in the old Ostzone.  Gaping windows with broken glass still in them.  Sheets of metal tacked over holes in roofs.  Roof lines as sway-backed as any broken-down nag.  Obviously vacant buildings surrounded by over-grown weeds.  Stuff and Junk left to lie wherever it fell out of the hands of the last person to drop it.  Things, in other words, that just screamed no one’s taking care of this.  Well, you can write some of that off, surely, to economic depression (but seriously, for 21 years it’s been there?) and the sheer cost of trying to fix things that were built pre-1945 and scarcely modernized since (just ask some university facilities manager what it’s like dealing with that wonderful august building that Joe Alumnus built for the school in 1915).

What you can’t write off is people’s behavior.  There are two market squares in downtown Dresden.  The Neumarkt, or New Market, is where the Frauenkirche towers over everything, and that’s a hustling, bustling, over-run with tourist activity venue.  They’re still building back the streets and buildings destroyed in February, 1945 and so a good portion of it is construction site, fenced off appropriately.  The Altmarkt, or Old Market, is several blocks away (the site of the Frauenkirche was originally outside the city’s walls, and of course the original market square would have been within them; hence the two markets so close together).  It’s much larger than the newer square, probably close to 100 yards on a side; among its features is a rectangular outline in red-colored stones, maybe forty or fifty feet by twenty or so (I didn’t measure it, so don’t hold me to that).  Between some of the pavement stones within the rectangle they poured molten metal, with an inscription: 

“After the attacks of 13 to 14 February 1945 on Dresden the corpses of 6,865 people were burned at this location.”

That location was one of dozens where they burned the corpses, but that’s also not really relevant to the post.  What’s really relevant is that at 7:45 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, on the entire Altmarkt there were a total of six vendors, hawking cooked sausage and similar things.  At that same hour in any sizeable city in western Germany you can’t swing a cat without knocking over someone’s stall of fresh produce, typically from all over Europe, fresh meats, flowers, local crafts, etc.  I mean, even in a city of starveling students like Freiburg you can’t take more than a few steps in a given direction for all the people buying and selling stuff.

Twenty-one years after reunification, in the capital city of Saxony, six measly guys flogging over-cooked sausages is the best they can do?  That can only be attributed to a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, and that lack can only be attributed to 45 years of ruthlessly crushing anyone who dared to climb out of the place where the central planners had shackled him.  Folks, the existence of two Germanies for 45 years is as close to a perfect experiment as you’ll get (the Koreas aren’t even as good because North Korea is a hermit state, sealing itself off even from its fellow commie states, and East Germany was the Warsaw Pact showplace).  Same society, same culture, same history, similar levels of destruction. Two different economic systems for a prolonged period.  How’d it work out?  How is it still working out?

So yes, Virginia, Germany has achieved once more the “Einigkeit” (unity) of the Deutschlandlied that remains their national anthem (one does not sing the first verse any more, of course); however picayunish some of their laws may appear to Americans (particularly the laws relating to freedom of expression and affiliation, which are aftergrowths of the Nazi era), they’ve got their Recht (justice) and their Freiheit (freedom).  But 80 years on they’re still working through the consequences of their embrace of state-controlled collectivism and tyranny.  Cultural DNA lasts, and so does social trauma.  It took America almost exactly 100 years to begin lurching past the living impact of the Civil War and slavery.  A good bit of Germany’s history in the 20th Century has strands tracing back to the Napoleonic conquest and subsequent liberation, and in some cases even further back, to the Thirty Years’ War.

Ideas have consequences.  We should be very careful about which ones we embrace and how quickly we let ourselves be tempted by someone’s promise to “re-forge” us, to “transform” us, to guide (and it’s always guiding us, as if we’re not capable of finding our own way into our future) us to the sunny uplands of some utopian vision.  We should be profoundly skeptical of such as promise those things, lest they mean them, lest our remote descendants spend their lives suffering their effects.

Ringling Bros. Republican and Democrat

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Or, why the last thing you’ll learn about watching the forthcoming “debates” will be anything of substance about either candidate.

What will happen will be that mainstream media folks, pretty much every one of which is in the tank for the incumbent, will lob meatballs to him and will expend enormous effort to prevent the challenger from addressing any of the administration’s failures over the past four years.  I’ll go ahead and hazard a list of topics that will either not be mentioned at all, or if they are mentioned, will be brought up in a fashion that presupposes the validity of Dear Leader’s favorite pastime of it’s-someone-else’s-fault (e.g. “Mr. President, as we’re all aware the former Republican administration is ultimately the cause of why gasoline prices are almost $4.00 per gallon over much of the country; could you elaborate about to what extent Dick Cheney was in the pocket of the oil industry all along?”)  So here goes my humble little list:

  1. The 43 consecutive months that nominal unemployment has exceeded 8%;
  2. The 2009 promise that with the $780+ billion “stimulus” program unemployment would not crack 9% and by now would be back down in the 5-6% range;
  3. The U-6 unemployment measure, which includes the involuntarily under-employed, and which is in the 14% range, where it has been for months;
  4. The current labor force participation rate of roughly 63%, the lowest it’s been in 35-plus years;
  5. The assertion by a sitting president that he has the unilateral authority to order the targeted killing of even American citizens overseas; 
  6. The failure to secure the Benghazi consulate notwithstanding six months of known deteriorating security conditions and repeated requests by the (now-murdered) ambassador to Libya to beef up security at Benghazi;
  7. The crony capitalism of “loans” such as the $535 million to Solyndra, owned by major campaign bundlers for the administration and its party, to whose equity in the company the administration’s Department of Energy subordinated the taxpayers’ “loan,” which has now gone bad to the tune of over a half-billion dollars;
  8. The administration’s implementing, without the knowledge or consent of the government of a neighboring sovereign state, a program of intentionally permitting illegal sales of firearms, with the expectation and even desire that they be used by drug cartels within that neighboring state, but without making any arrangements to track those weapons past the common border;
  9. The administration’s claim that it has the right and power to compel private citizens to purchase any product or service the federal government decrees, through the device of a tax to penalize the failure to make the purchase;
  10. The wholesale selective enforcement of laws, such as granting “exemptions” from the new healthcare law to . . . surprise! wealthy entities in political allies’ home districts (e.g. the numerous swanky restaurants and bars in Nancy Pelosi’s district which have received ObamaCare waivers from Kathleen Sibelius’s office);
  11. The announcement that the administration will simply refuse to enforce those provisions of duly adopted statutes which might, theoretically, have the result of depressing the numbers of anticipated political supporters (e.g. refusing to enforce immigration laws against entire classes of illegal immigrants);
  12. Any inquiry into what, precisely, the president meant when he asked Vladimir Putin to go easy on him until after the election, after which time he would have “more flexibility” to accommodate Putin’s wishes;
  13. Any inquiry into why Iran has been permitted to continue its nuclear weapons development when its announced intention is to obliterate a United States ally (Israel) from the map;
  14. Whether there is a point at which the Federal Reserve ought to discontinue infinite expansion of the money supply by unlimited purchases of Treasury paper, and what are the administration’s plans to deal with the inflation that is headed this way now;
  15. What exactly are the environmental reasons that the Keystone XL pipeline ought not be constructed, when that portion of the country is already a spider-web of long-distance oil and gas pipelines;
  16. Why the federal government has refused to issue any new drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico for over two years now, notwithstanding a court’s order that it do so; or,
  17. Why the federal government has gone over three years now without a federal budget.

Of course, one could go on almost indefinitely.  No.  What we’re going to hear about is how the wife of a fellow who didn’t even ever work for a steel company that was sold by Bain Capital after Mitt Romney had left active management in that company, but rather who was a union organizer sent to organize the workers at the company, had a wife who had her own medical insurance through her own employer and who well after Bain sold the corporation her husband did not work for was diagnosed with late-stage cancer and died less than four weeks later.  Of course, that’s not how it will be presented.  We can anticipate questions like this:  “Governor Romney, exactly why did you kill the wife of that man who used to work for your company?”

Knowing he was in for that sort of treatment, why in the world would Mitt Romney, or anyone else in his position, agree to a “debate” that is to be “moderated” by people who consider themselves unpaid operatives for the other side?  That’s just crazy.  Irrespective of which side one supports, that’s just a kooky tactical decision.  Poor coaching.

One has to wonder what would have been the upshot of this response by the Romney campaign:  “We will agree to debate the opposing ticket upon terms and in a format identical to the Lincoln-Douglas debates.”  I mean, if it was good enough for the consensus greatest president we’ve ever had (barring possibly Washington), certainly it’s good enough for this fellow, even if Dear Leader doesn’t really consider Lincoln his equal.  Lincoln and Douglas debated on six or seven occasions; the first speaker had 60 minutes, the response was 90, and the reply 30.  If you really wanted to dumb it down shorten it for the attention span of several generations raised on television, you could cut it to 30, 40, and 10.  That would still give one hour and twenty minutes of solid, substantive debate.  Debate that could not be papered over with a Telepromptr (in fact one could ban them from the format), debate that could not be run past a focus group.

And I think the format is appropriate to the times.  Lincoln and Douglas were debating first and foremost the subject of slavery and its extension into areas of the country outside its origins.  This was, to put it mildly, a subject that went to the very heart of what the United States was supposed to be about.  It really, honestly did raise implications for whether Americans would “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of the earth.” 

This administration and its allies in Congress have proposed a fundamental alteration of the relationship between citizen and federal government.  No longer is the citizen to be a free agent who merely hires government to accomplish certain ends which he cannot attend to himself.  He is now to be a client of the state in the most intimate details of his physical existence.  Citizens no more have any colorable claim to sovereignty left, now that the government can by virtue of adopting a “tax” force the citizen to do whatever government decides he needs to do for his own good or that of his fellow citizens.  The citizen is now merely a marker, a bargaining chip, a utensil in the pursuit of whatever a governing faction happens at that moment to deem to be “social justice” or whatever label one wishes to slap on it.

Every human requires clothing (I’ve put on my pants quite a bit more frequently than I’ve dropped them at the doctor’s); clothing is therefore self-evidently a human right.  Textiles and clothing are therefore extremely important industries.  Congress decides that, in order to ensure that the American textile and clothing industries can operate at economical levels of turnover, every American must buy 15 new “eligible shirts” per year from — oh, let’s define this in language you might find in the Internal Revenue Code — “qualifying domestic clothing providers,” and then Congress defines what is an “eligible shirt” and what a “qualifying domestic clothing provider.”  It reserves to the Secretary of HHS the right to grant waivers to manufacturers of clothing as to what is or is not an “eligible shirt,” or to waive some portion or all of the number of shirts any individual or group must purchase.  But wait!  People need shoes, too.  And so on.

People need personal transportation (99% of the population needs to get from point A to point B a helluva lot more urgently than they need a health insurance policy).  The United States happens to own an automobile manufacturer that’s already gone bankrupt.  The administration stole that company from its secured creditors and handed it over to its labor union supporters.  It can’t very well steal it again.  The government’s hopelessly upside-down in its “investment.”  It will never get well unless the stock price rises, which will never happen until the company begins consistently to operate at a profit, which will not happen so long as people are free to choose a competing product.  Think about it:  Congress has established a principle, and the Supreme Court has blessed it, under which each American can be forced to buy a “qualifying domestic automotive product” from Government Motors ever two or three years, under penalty of, say, a $30,000 per year surtax for every year beyond two or three since the last “qualifying purchase.”  And of course government can now simply decree that since it’s really swell to have such things in a car, and for some people actually necessary, every “qualifying domestic automotive product” must have certain features, like, oh, say, heads-up display, or all-wheel drive, or a minimum of X cubic feet of storage space, or premium sound packages, or whatever.

The above situation is now perfectly possible, and legal.  There is no way, simply no honest way, to argue that this relationship of the state to the citizen, as such and upon the mere premise of existence (and not as the pursuer of a particular livelihood, e.g. merchant seaman), is not new.  The American people deserve to hear both sides of the argument about why this new state of affairs is or is not desirable.  If life in a European-style top-down world is truly preferable to what we’ve known for 220-plus years, then make the case for it.  We’ll listen, no kidding; some of us will even agree with you, whichever side you argue.  Americans can listen and decide for themselves (subject to any tax Congress may decide to impose for voting the wrong way).

And that’s just not going to happen in tomorrow’s debate or any other.  It will not happen because those “moderating” the “debate” have determined that the question should not be put to us.

Clairvoyant I am Not, But Still

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. . . I swear I didn’t see an advance copy of this post, about the “culture of cheating” at Stuyvesant High School before I put up that last post.  I ran across this post on plagiarism at Amherst this morning, and had thought about doing yet another update to add the link, but seeing two such posts on the same day seemed to suggest it might merit its own post, in a lions-and-tigers-and-bears-oh-my sort of way. Hence:

Let’s be honest about what we’re talking about here.  Pretty much every last one of the students at Stuyvesant would be a legitimate contender for valedictorian at almost any other high school in the country.  You don’t just get randomly zoned for Stuyvesant.  It’s one of those things on your high school transcript that admissions officials at every half-way decent college in the western world will recognize.  No kidding; I’d wager that a graduate could apply to Balliol and whoever it is who decides such things would know what Stuyvesant means on that applicant’s grade sheet.

So when cheating is simply viewed as a fact of life by such a large proportion of the students, that’s a problem.  These are the kids who oughtn’t need to cheat, or feel the need to cheat.  They’re the kids who are supposedly bright enough to understand on a moral plane why cheating is wrong, why it is corrosive to the very system that they are relying on to give them that leg up.  They’re supposed to understand on some level that if word gets around that cheating is how it’s done at Stuyvesant, suddenly that magical name to obtain the lustre of which they and/or their parents have sacrified so much in terms of time, money, and energy . . . becomes nothing more valuable than a high school diploma from P.S. Whatever-the-Hell.

Apparently they’re not.  Or rather, they’ve illustrated once more, for even the slow-witted out there, that “education” and morality are entirely severable concepts.  I mean, if “education” were enough in itself to guarantee a world of amity, progress, civility, and elevation, then we’d never have had a Nazi Germany.  The national socialists would never have been voted into power by the people who were at the time probably the most over-educated, over-cultured crew on the planet.

But in truth the rot evidenced by this article goes even deeper.  One of the reasons, the many reasons, why the Soviet Union fell apart was the universality of “tukhta,” sometimes spelled “tufta.”  Navy veterans will recognize it as the systematized practice of “gun-decking.”  Solzhentisyn, Shalamov, Dolgun, and Bardach, and the others cited in those men’s books, all contain descriptions of the practice, or illustrations of it, or recount themselves grasping at it to “fulfill the norm” and so avoid starvation and death (it’s not a coincidence, surely, that almost all the survivors’ memoirs are written by prisoners who managed to spend large portions of their sentences in the camps working in the medical wards). 

Under tukhta as practiced, a work gang was supposed to produce so-and-so-many cubic meters of timber per day, or however many cubic meters of ore at the pithead, or X-hundred bricks, or whatever else.  The daily norm was set by a person known as the “norm setter” and a norm setter was the difference between life and death.  They usually opted for hopelessly optimistic norms, which meant the prisoners had no realistic way to fulfill them, which under the system introduced into the camps by Naftaly Frenkel produced a concomitant reduction in caloric intake for the work crew falling short.  So what to do?  One stole from other work crews (especially the Article 58s); one bribed the tally-man (shades of the Banana Boat Song); one just falsified the documents.  And so one’s own crew was credited with a fulfilled norm or even better, an over-fulfilled norm which meant “Stakhanovite rations” for the fortunates.  As for the crews whose output got stolen?  In the language of Gulag, “You die today; I’ll die tomorrow.”  But wait, what happens when the timber, several thousand cubic meters short, is sent downstream to the mill and they’ve got papers showing all that timber that’s simply not floating out in the river?  Answer:  More tukhta.  And when it comes time to load it onto freight cars or barges?  The same.  And on and on and on.  A huge proportion of the Soviet population learned to survive on tukhta.  It wasn’t that they perceived it as a response to a “system intended to grind them down,” as the poor little students at Stuyvesant complain.  Successfully practicing tukhta was in the most literal way imaginable the difference between surviving your “tenner” or your “quarter,” or ending up as a corpse forever frozen in the permafrost of the Kolyma basin, or in some clearing in the taiga.

What tukhta meant was that in the Soviet Union, you couldn’t trust anything or anyone, beyond what you actually could see with your own eyes and touch with your own hands.  At all.  If I contract for so-and-so many tons of sand suitable for mixing the cement on my project site, how can I be sure my vendor does not deliver me something that is 30% cinders, ground glass, or something else?  How do I know that my foreman has not been paid to turn a blind eye as the defective material is mixed up into something I think is “cement” but is really just holding the concrete blocks apart . . . for the moment.  Come to think of it, how do I know the building I live in was not built to such “specifications”? 

There’s a telling scene in MiG Pilot, the story of Lt. Belenko, who flew his MiG-25 to Japan in the 1970s.  He was quite literally a poster boy for the Soviet Air Force, one of their elite.  Had he stayed in and not fallen afoul of some political trap, he likely would have worn multiple stars. There’s a description of the apartment assigned to him.  Neither the building nor his apartment would have passed electrical or plumbing codes in any western country, in any jurisdiction.  Its masonry would never have been accepted by any sober architect and engineer.  And that’s what they had available for the cream of their crop.

The Soviet Union literally fell apart, physically and politically.  Think about it:  A sovereign nation, without a single foreign troop on its soil, possessed of the world’s second most-powerful military apparatus, and with hordes of sympathizers in the opposing camp, hangs it up, shuts out the lights, and goes home because the train just won’t move any more.  A huge, an enormous part of the explanation lies in the practice and internalization of tukhta by the general population.

Within the past several months it has come to light that LIBOR, one of the world’s most-frequently relied upon benchmark interest rates, has been thoroughly cooked for years now.  In fact, it turns out that our current Treasury Secretary (you may know him as TurboTax Tim), when he was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, knew that LIBOR was being gamed, and said nothing about it.  Nothing.

China’s economy is showing signs of unravelling.  Over at Zero Hedge they’s got a disturbing post on the phenomenon of phantom collateral for massive bank loans.  Either the stuff just doesn’t exist, or the would-be secured creditor discovers that its collateral has been hypothecated eleven times already.  Those loans are now bad loans.

And all of this, every damned bit of it, is nothing more than adults spinning out the same dynamics we see going on at and discussed in reference to Stuyvesant High School.  As a final bit of encouragement, may I add that these children, for whom cheating is simply a tool in the box to be deployed or not according to whatever calculus they find expedient, are among the ones who one day will occupy positions that will affect each and every one of us others?  At some point will the rest of us become like the dog in the fable, that watched as its fellows gobbled up his master’s meat and finally decided that if the meat was gone in any event he might as well get his?

A Bit of Healthy Bigotry

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By which is not meant what most Americans assume it to be, viz. racism (or as the British would term it, racialism).  Racism is only a small subset of bigotry (go into an Irish pub and propose God Save the Queen! and see what happens next).  “Much may be made of a Scotsman, if he be caught young,” is another relatively famous example of it, but who calls Dr. Johnson a bigot?

I mean here to speak a word in favor of a bit of healthy bigotry, of the sort which begins with an assumption that whatever the speaker is (as self-defined), is absolutely the bee’s knees, and then draws from that the implication that every member of that identity group has an iron-clad duty to live up to the ideal.  The condition of “superior” is inseparable from the obligation actually to be, you know, superior.  One may fall short in one’s duty, and if one does one merits a double measure of shame, not only because whatever one did fell short, but because one’s falling short demeaned and damaged all other members of the identity group.  This sort of bigotry begets traditions like that of the U.S. Marines; show the yellow streak and not only are you a coward, but you have introduced cowardice into “my Marine Corps” (and it’s always the speaker’s Marine Corps, as if he personally bore the sole burden of maintaining its reputation for integrity, bravery, and sacrifice).

I will suggest that such an outlook is not an attitude to discourage.

Yet we do discourage it nowadays.  We have adopted as one of the few articles of public faith the dogma that No One is Better Than Anyone Else, a proposition which a moment’s reflection ought to reveal to be what P. G. Wodehouse would call unmitigated apple-sauce.  Get caught cheating in school?  It’s OK; no doubt you were feeling over-pressured.  Update (01 Oct 12; did I nail this or what?):  Amherst professor resigns after getting-caught red-handed (but notice all the exculpatory nonsense smeared throughout the article).  Get caught stealing $1.2 billion in investors’ money, like Jon Corzine and his firm did?  But he’s so smart, you see, and he does after all provide so much valuable support to the Messiah president, so we won’t investigate too hard.  Torch the neighborhood because a couple of bad cops beat a criminal rap when they roughed up a druggie?  We understand your pain; here’s a few hundred million dollars to funnel into our pet contractors’ pockets (whence it comes right back in the form of campaign contributions, all distributed to the right folks).  Cut your 16 year-old daughter’s throat and watch her bleed out because she was foolish enough to get caught slipping out to see her boyfriend, who just didn’t have the right kind of prayer rug?  We respect your religious scruples.

Gone are the days of General Napier.  He was governor-general in India, and one of the quaint local practices he took a shine against was suttee.  You remember, don’t you?  That’s that Old Time Religion where when the husband dies you tie the wife up and burn her on the pyre as well.  Nowadays the Deep Thinkers (indebted to Thos. Sowell for the phrase) assure us that such things are just their faith and heritage and besides “Racism!!”  Genl Napier had a different take.  Some of the locals protested that it was their custom.  Replied Napier, “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

And so today, September 30, we remember the birth of Lt. Col. Alfred D. Wintle, MC, of the British army in both wars.  He rejoiced that he had been born an Englishmen and not, by way of comparison and contrast, “a chimpanzee, a flea, a Frenchman, or a German.”  He wangled his way into the army underage, and served at the front until severely wounded in 1917.  Told his war was over, he replied, “It may have escaped your attention, but there is no fighting to be done in England.”  And so back he went, without a kneecap, several fingers, and an eye, doing himself proudly enough that he won the Military Cross.  Coming across a severely wounded Trooper Cedric Mays, Wintle ordered him, “Stop dying at once and when you get up, get your bloody hair cut.”   Mays did so and lived to be 95.

Early in the Second War he finagled his way back into uniform and, convinced he had to get to the front in France, attempted to hijack the airplane of an air commodore, from the commodore in person.  Was arrested and tried at the Tower for, among other charges, treason and threatening the air commodore (he’d told him he deserved to be shot, and proposed to perform that office himself).  At his trial he not only didn’t deny having told the air commodore he ought to be shot, but produced and read aloud a list of others who merited similar attentions.  The charges were all dismissed.  Wintle finally did made it back to France where he was captured, and insisted on inspecting his German guard, whom he roundly ticked off for their slovenly bearing and poor turn-out.  Did the same thing when he was finally imprisoned by the Vichy regime.  He told the prison guards that he was going to escape (which he did), and that if any one of them was man enough they’d join him.  According to later accounts all 200-plus guards at the prison later joined the Resistance.

Wintle held that a gentleman never left the house without an umbrella, and a true gentleman never unfurled his.  His own, never unfurled, contained a note wrapped up in it that informed the reader that it had been stolen from Col. A. D. Wintle.

Wintle was a bigot.  But observe.  Once the landlord of a posh-ish London watering hole went to eject, upon entry, a West Indian laborer . . . a black patron, in plain language, who had mistaken the place for an ordinary pub.  [Jim Crow may have had a Southern accent, children, but he got around quite bit back in the day.]  As he was hustling the unfortunate towards the door, a voice from across the room barked out, “That gentleman is a friend of mine. I have been expecting him. Kindly show him to my table.”  Unable to refuse, the landlord showed the no doubt by this time thoroughly confused worker to Wintle’s table, where Wintle ordered them a glass of wine each, upon finishing which each went on his way.

Maybe what we need is a touch of that old-fashioned healthy bigotry.  The all-join-hands-in-a-circle approach doesn’t seem to be doing too well.

Fannie Mae Needs a New Day Job

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Within the past few days I’ve come to understand something more about exactly how Fannie Mae managed to blow a whacking great hole in the American housing market and crash the world’s largest economy into the bargain.

Our firm has run a title company since the mid-1960s. Knock on wood, but not a single policy we’ve ever written has had to pay or defend a claim. A large measure of that is attributable to the fact that we’ve always done our searching in-house, and for 38 or so years we had a title searcher with a nearly photographic memory for deeds, titles, and people. She also had the kind of personality that is nearly impervious to tedium. A further reason is that our philosophy has always been that land titles must be like Caesar’s wife; “Oh let’s get it closed and we can take care of that later,” as a point of departure has been a non-starter in our office (and yes, it’s lost us a lot of business over the years, but either you do your job right or you’re an ass-hat). All of which is to say that, very humbly, I submit that we in our office know just a bit about land titles in our state and how to convey them correctly so everyone knows what he’s getting and gets what he’s been wanting. 

A few years ago two things happened, more or less simultaneously. 

The first things was that some bureaucrat at HUD who had obviously never practiced law – and more to the point, never searched a title anywhere outside the cookie-cutter subdivisions of northern Virginia – decided that he knew how to set up and close a residential real estate transaction better than the people who’d been doing it for several generations. The upshot was new regulations for closing real estate transactions subject to the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), which if anything made the process less transparent for the borrower/buyer, provided an incentive for everyone to mark up his prices and generally put his thumb on the scale, and slowed down the loan approval process measurably. Whoever this pin-head of a government employee was required a bank to promise a hard number for “title services” within 72 hours of loan application. “Title services” was to include title examination, title insurance, closing agent’s fees, document preparation, and several other things that should never have been lumped together, and which in fact the “old” Form HUD-1 – the settlement statement – broke out, so that you could actually tell, you know, what you were paying for. The new HUD-1 required it all to be lumped in together and forbade anyone to break it out. 

Now, maybe you can reliably get a good title examination back on a cookie-cutter subdivision in northern Virginia in less than 72 hours. Folks, outside those sorts of environments that just doesn’t happen. You get all manner of cock-eyed legal descriptions, estates that either were never opened or nor properly administered (like having a personal representative without authority executing a deed), multiple chains of title that split, join, and split again, minors’ interests, gores in multi-tract parcels, unrecorded conveyances . . . just all kinds of stuff that can take days to do, if you do the work correctly. And of course until you know what’s out there you can’t quote a fee for what it’s going to cost. You just can’t assume that every title search will take your searcher 45 minutes. But that’s what the new RESPA rules required the bank to state to the borrower. Oh, if you discovered something in the search you could drag the borrower back to get a new good faith estimate, but then your borrower begins to get cold feet. So the situation HUD created was to pit lenders against title service providers, with the lenders having an incentive to low-ball and lean on the service providers to cut every corner they could to get it done as cheaply as possible. How’s that likely to work out? 

The second thing that happened was that our three senior staffers took one look at the new RESPA regulations and retired. As in we all attended a seminar on the new rules and within three weeks we had their letters on our desks. They took 45, 40, and 38 years experience with our firm out the door and left us majorly under-staffed. 

So we quit doing RESPA closings for a while until the dust settled (HUD kept changing the RESPA rules and the HUD-1 rules for months after they were supposed to have taken effect). But now we’re doing them again and finding out what’s changed while we were out. 

Fannie Mae, the clowns who brought you the sub-prime crisis, have a set of uniform instruments which it promulgates and requires be used for loan transactions in which it is buying or guaranteeing the paper. Those instruments vary by state, but the whole idea is that someone can buy several billion dollars of bond backed by thousands of these notes and deeds of trust (or mortgages, if your state rolls that way), and every note and security document in the package that backs those bonds will grant to the beneficiary of the note and security documents rights which are in all material respects uniform, no matter in which state the land happens to lie. Makes a great deal of sense, and in fact if were it not for the uniform instruments, the secondary market for residential loans would not exist, meaning much, much, much less home mortgage lending could occur. The secondary market is, after all, a good part of how the money gets into the system. 

Life is simple as long as you have married couples who both own the property and who both sign the note. Drop out one or the other and things get interesting. 

The instructions for our state-specific Fannie Mae uniform instrument set out those local alterations to the form document that must be made or that may be made, each depending on the precise circumstances. F’rinstance, if the trustee(s) of a “living trust” is to be the property owner, Fannie Mae wants certain portions of the document phrased certain ways. Again, makes sense. But their instructions contain no guidance at all to the situation in which both spouses are owners, but only one is the borrower (happens all the time, too). 

The instructions do contain language that applies when you have only one borrower spouse and one owner spouse (presumably the same spouse, but that’s not necessarily the case, is it?). The instructions tell you to provide that the non-debtor spouse “signs as Borrower solely for the purpose of waiving dower rights without personal obligation for payment of any sums secured by this Security Instrument.” There are several things wrong there. For starts, one does not “sign as Borrower” unless one is actually the borrower (I cannot sign “as” the president of a corporation if I am actually the janitor). Secondly, the uniform instrument contains a raft of affirmative obligations, many of them requiring financial imposition, but which are completely extrinsic to and unrelated to paying “any sums secured by” the instrument. The only sums “secured by” the instrument are those payable under the promissory note. Thus, the non-debtor spouse who “signs as Borrower” is in fact signing up for all manner of personal obligation. You as a closing agent dare not tell that non-debtor spouse that “Oh, honey, you’re not signing up to pay any money; they just need you to sign here to make sure the bank gets a good lien on the property.” Can you say, “consumer fraud,” anyone? 

But the most hilarious thing about this form document and its instructions is that “dower” as an estate in property was abolished in our state . . . in the spring of 1977. And by the way, males had “curtesy,” not “dower.” We now have “marital rights” in property, including especially property used as one’s principal residence, but those rights are very much distinct from the rights an owner has in that property (e.g., an owner has her own homestead exemption; a non-owner has only the inchoate right to her husband’s homestead exemption, should he die first). 

So if you have a non-debtor owner spouse sign the Fannie Mae uniform instrument, using the language they provide, you’ve just created an invalid lien on the property, and one which can’t be insured. The non-debtor spouse may have waived, for example, the right to claim the deceased spouse’s homestead exemption in the property, and waived the right to an elective share in the property on the first spouse’s death, and waived any right to participate in the property’s division in divorce (that, too, is a marital right against the property). But actual ownership as a cotenant far exceeds any of those inchoate interests – the tenant by the entireties owns an undivided whole interest in the entire property. 

So Fannie is only about 35 years behind the power curve, and of course does not understand the distinction between marital rights and ownership rights, it seems, at all. 

Is anyone still wondering how these muddle-headed imbeciles managed to get the housing market so wrong?