Decadent Massachusetts

It turns out that decadent liberal homo-loving Taxachusetts has the nation's lowest divorce rate.

Maybe everyone should go to Massachusetts to get married.



Hat tip to IT.

Perhaps gays and liberals don't have quite so casual an attitude toward marriage, as do right-wing political and religious leaders with their serial marriages and spectacular public adulteries.

Perhaps for gays and lesbians, marriage is not an entitlement to be taken for granted.

Presidents

I still really like this guy...

... but I really miss this guy

Jean Edward Smith compares and contrasts Roosevelt and Obama on the issue of bipartisanship.

Roosevelt relished the opposition of vested interests. He fashioned his governing majority by deliberately attacking those who favored the status quo. His opponents hated him — and he profited from their hatred. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he told a national radio audience on the eve of the 1936 election. “They are unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

The Puzzlement of Reading History

I'm in the middle of re-reading, 20 years later, a major book on Italian Renaissance History, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance by Hans Baron. I'm realizing as I reread it what a huge impact this book had on me, shaping of my view of early Renaissance Florence. Baron argues that the war between the Duke of Milan and the Republic of Florence, which Florence almost lost, and won by a bit of miraculous luck (an outbreak of plague killed the Duke) forged a new kind of civic humanism. Baron said that the near disaster of the war created a new humanist culture of political and civic engagement as Florence set itself up as a champion of "civic liberty" in the face of tyrants like Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, seeking to unify Italy in the name of national identity and "peace."

The art historian Frederick Hartt later applied some of Baron's ideas to the understanding of early Quattrocento art in Florence.

Later historians like John Najemy point out that this new civic humanism may have been more directed at a domestic threat rather than the foreign threat of invasion from Milan. He reminds us of one of history's first labor uprisings, the Ciompi Revolt in Florence in 1378, when the underpaid and unrepresented textile workers, whose labor made the city's prosperity, briefly took over the city government and tried to break into the guild system. The city's guilds brutally suppressed the rebellion. The city became in its wake much more oligarchic with the wealthiest guilds (the bankers, naturally, the wool manufacturers, and textile merchants) taking more exclusive control of the city's politics paving the way for the Medici signory. Najemy argues that this new civic humanism was about legitimizing the claims of this rising oligarchy through appeals to patriotism and republicanism.

How to decide when I have a certain measure of sympathy for both points of view? And is this really some ivory tower problem? It strikes me that historians always bring their own experiences to the understanding of history. They can't help it. They can't step out of their own skins. No one can. Great historians understand this and hope that somehow they come close to the truth of the matter.

Hans Baron was a German Jewish scholar who fled Nazi Germany in 1938. That experience of the Second World War informed his outlook. He is even explicit about it, comparing the Florentine Republic facing down Milan to Britain facing down Napoleon and Hitler.

Najemy is much more recent. His view is naturally shaped by a world grown much more oligarchic with corporate interests dominating international and national politics. It is also a world where the alliances and consensus needed to face the threats of Nazism and Japanese imperialism have long since disintegrated. It is a world of competing and conflicting national and sectarian loyalties.

I think both men are on to something, despite their differences. I must confess to a deep emotional sympathy with Baron's book. However, I think Najemy is right about the ambitions of the oligarchy after the Ciompi Revolt. They were very frightened by the prospect of proletarian democracy. I also think Baron is right. I think those appeals to patriotism by leaders like Salutati and Bruni were heard with receptive ears, not just by the Florentine oligarchy, but by all of Florence's inhabitants. There's nothing like a threat of foreign conquest to really pull people together.

Another surprising tidbit from younger reading days, I remember reading Hannah Arendt's glowing praise of Niccolo Machiavelli as a pioneering political philosopher. I'm becoming more and more convinced that The Prince is satire. It is dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, who had Macchiavelli imprisoned and tortured when the Medici returned to power in Florence. The record of Macchiavelli's life is not that of a schemer, but of a Florentine patriot.

I remember reading about Napoleon ending the ancient Venetian Republic. The city's nobility, faced with the loss of their mainland estates, capitulated readily. The city's populace, however, resisted all the way to end, greeting Napoleon's army with shouts of "Viva San Marco!" Viva La Serenissima!" when they entered the city unopposed.

I think there might be a lot here that would speak to our own national experience.

Our Future, 17th Century Spain

Velazquez, Queen Mariana

For once, I actually agree with Andrew Sullivan completely.

Real reform - tackling health care costs and access, finding a way to head off massive changes in the world's climate, ending torture as the lynchpin of the war on terror, getting out of Iraq, preventing an Israeli-led Third World War in the Middle East, and reforming entitlements and defense spending to prevent 21st century America from becoming 17th Century Spain: these are being resisted by those who have power and do not want to relinquish it - except to their own families and cronies.

Seventeenth Century Spain; arrogant, impoverished, isolated, fanatical, nepotistic, and backward, clung tenaciously to an empire it could no longer afford. Spain clung tenaciously as well to the notion that it still dominated the world, when in fact, the world had long ago passed it by and ceased to pay it any attention. Then one morning, Spain woke up to find itself as a semi-feudal agrarian state in the middle of an industrialized world. The way things are going, this could be our destiny in the later days of the American Empire.

Speaking of Obama Personality Cult, Anyone Remember...

Translate that into German and you get unser Fuehrer.
Translate it into Italian and you get Il Nostro Duce.

Obama is Moving "Too Fast" on Health Insurance Reform

Here are all the Presidents of the USA who have attempted serious health insurance reform:



















That's a century's worth of Presidents ...

... a century of trying to split the baby between the public interest and business interests.

Is that gradual enough for you?

70 Years Ago Today

Germany invaded Poland beginning the Second World War.

September 1st, 1939
WH. Auden

	I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.