Sliding Sisyphus

Okay, yeah, I know—this may get up PETA’s nose, but I think it’s the perfect illustration of the Myth of Sisyphus, and by posting it I’ve spared you from having to read the essay about that by Albert Camus:

Plus—it’s, you know, really funny. Which I assure you, you will not get from Camus.

You’re welcome. 

God's hobby

Yeah, alright, you knew I’d have some questions about the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision. The majority ruling said it has limited application, but as near as I can tell, it’s actually opening such a sack of snakes that it’s going to keep several thousand law firms in Testonis for decades.

Not to mention filling campaign coffers for Congressmorons of every political stripe.

Because first of all, the decision (as written by Justice Samuel Alito) speaks of “closely-held corporations” as essentially humanoid and being entitled to run their business on the values of their closely-held owners, including claiming exception to Federal law by reason of closely-held religious conviction.

But you know—they’re talking about Christian religious convictions, because the Hobby Lobby owners were objecting to providing insurance coverage for several types of contraception that they believe (and it is belief, because scientific definitions pretty much refute their notions) these devices and medications are abortifacients. And they oppose abortions.

Well, maybe that’s indeed a limited application, because outside some parts of Pakistan and Africa where Islamist extremists have been murdering medical teams trying to vaccinate people against polio, it really has been only Christians who seem to object to 21^st Century health practices. Actually, they’re objecting to 20^th Century health practices.

(Although I imagine there are many aspects of sharia law that appeal to our Baptist Taliban, so there may be some accommodation down the road.)

I’m kind of spitballing here, that the Hobby Lobby crowd are getting their guidance in these matters directly from the Almighty, Who has somewhere decreed that these forms of contraception are somehow in violation of…well, the will of God.

So I therefore find it really interesting that Hobby Lobby (and therefore presumably God) is totally down with vasectomies. Oh—and Viagra.

Well, what’s up (um) with that? Because I’d have thought that erectile dysfunction was pretty much God’s way of telling you your shagging days are over. And therefore taking anything for it is interfering in God’s will. Big time.

(I worry that the God of Hobby Lobby seems overly concerned with a voyeur's view of women's sexual activities. Like some omnipresent-but-not-omniscient omnipotent-yet-impotent Hugh Hefner. Am I the only person creeped out by that?)

Or what about antibiotics? They screw with biological destiny, don’t they? They kill off little lives in their millions; how come they’re okay? Oh, only human life in its most rudimentary cellular form is of concern? Okay.

Well, what if you’re prescribed antibiotics because you have some kind of sexually-transmitted disease? Seems to me that curing the clap ought to be a clear no-no, because good Christians, engaging in “legitimate” sex (c.f., Todd Akin, R-Mo., and “legitimate rape”) surely would not be visited with an STD, right? So any kind of, you know, condition of questionable provenance is going to be on the non-coverage list.

And how long after that comes stoning adulterous women, honor killings and bride burnings? Because those are all deeply-held religious values also.

Unintended consequences

When I was writing my quick-and-dirty précis about the Sarajevo assassination that set off what we now call the First World War, I should perhaps have slapped on a caveat: there was a whole lot of simplification involved in that.

Well, I had to take liberties, didn’t I—historians are destroying rain forest resources at a rate of knots churning out monographs on the subject. So I was kind of doing you a favor by synthesizing it down to a couple of paragraphs. Okay—25. If you want all the details and nuances, you’re going to have to man up and read some seriously heavy (literally and metaphorically) tomes.

It got me thinking though, about how the major powers and Serbia were each thinking that what they were embarking on was a short, localized war that would result in territorial gain at little or no cost. There wasn’t a one of them that wasn’t planning on how they’d rule over new acquisitions, made either by conquest or post-war negotiation from a position of strength. (Well, okay—maybe the Ottomans weren’t. They really were just trying to hold on to that leprous, tottering conglomeration they already had.)

So it’s both a mitigation and an accusation to say that these bozos could not do the math and realize that Germany plus Russia plus Britain plus Austria-Hungary plus Serbia plus Turkey plus France could not possibly mean a small, localized war that could turn a quick profit. I mean—what kind of blinkers do you have to be wearing to not see that?

Well, I guess you have to be wearing single-focus nationalist doesn’t-matter-what-anyone-else-does blinkers. Serbs didn’t care what the Germans might be doing to their allies France and Russia; all they saw was the opportunity to grab up lands under the rule of the Dual Monarchy to build a “Greater Serbia”, as they thought had existed some centuries before.

(Two things about that—once they had Bosnia, Kosovo, Herzegovina and Croatia, they were planning to turn around and grab parts of Macedonia and Bulgaria, also for this mythical empire. And they were going to kill or drive out of these lands anyone not an ethnic Serb—so, Bosnians, Turks, Bulgarians, Jews, Albanians, Greeks, Kosovars, Muslims, Germans, Croatians, Hungarians, Slovenes…you get the picture. They’d already been doing this with conquests from the two Balkan Wars earlier in the century; this barbaric policy of “Greater Serbia” was not mythical.)

(Oh—third thing: that’s what the Serbs have been doing ever since Yugoslavia broke up in the early 90s. Come on—when was the first time you heard the term “ethnic cleansing”?)

Russians only cared about their allies as far as expecting Serbia to occupy the Austrians’ attention to the south and France to do the same with the Germans in the west so they’d have a shot at defeating them both in the east. The Germans actually had what they thought was a sure-fire cast-iron strategy for defeating France first and then mowing down Russia. The French were hoping that fighting a two-front war would mean that the Germans would not hit them full-force and that they’d be able to recover the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which they’d had to fork over at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The Austro-Hungarians were just pretty much delusional in general, and the Ottomans were focused on preventing the Russians from moving in on the Turkish Straits, which were indeed one of those tsarist grab-and-go objectives.

And the British were hoping to God that they wouldn’t have to do very much at all on the Continent, because they were a sea power. But they also were hoping that any continental war would halt the German naval expansion; preferably before the two fleets engaged.

So—every single one focused on the best-case scenario for their own national interests, and no one envisioned, let alone planned for, the worst one. Much less one in which everyone loses, and continues losing for decades.

(Well, except for the UK’s Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. He predicted that the war would last at least three years, require armies in their millions and result in ruinous casualties. His fellow cabinet members blinked a couple of times at his lunacy and went on with their own plans.)

Actually, now that I think of it, pretty much like most corporate senior management today. And national governments.

But here’s what I’ve been playing with: if, by some miraculous gift of prescience, the military and/or political leaders of the seven starting players in this death-game had been able to foresee what road they were marching down with chests puffed out and sabers clanking (yes, sabers—this is not metaphor)…would they have halted? Would they have looked for other solutions to the perceived problems? Some sort of negotiation or diplomatic discussion between Austria and Serbia, perhaps brokered by Russia, Germany and France? Would the other powers have sacrificed their hopes of scooping up Turkish assets as well as putting everyone else in their (inferior) place for the sake of saving 16 million lives?

How about if you add on the 50 million or so killed by the 1918-1920 global influenza pandemic—would that have tipped the scales away from declarations of war?

In short—would they have found a way out that didn’t involve the wholesale destruction of their economies, their citizens, their resources and their futures?

Yeah...no; I got nothin’. Sorry.

After studying the personalities of those leaders for a lot of years, I still do not know whether they could have subordinated their chauvinistic and imperial mindsets for the better angels of their nature. In truth, I’m not exactly convinced that many of them had better angels.

(Stormtruppe geht unter Gas, Otto Dix)

But I’m hoping that if their citizens could also see that future—maybe just even a fly-over view of the German, French, Belgian, British (and, later, American) military cemeteries that follow a line from Alsace to Amiens—they would have revived the guillotine and selectively removed some of those leaders from the gene pool.

Pour encourager les autres, as they say.

Gratitude Monday: Cringe-control

Gratitude Monday, and I’m grateful for the pretentious idiots in my life—at a distance, mind you. Because if they were close, I’d have to kill them and, while there’s no jury in the world that would convict, there would still be all that legal hassle. Unless I happened to be in Texas at the time, in which case all I’d have to do is enter the plea, “He needed killin’,” and maybe pay a fine or something.

There is one in particular, whom I only know third- or fourth-hand; virtually, in fact. This is a person who feels compelled to have the last word in every exchange, regardless of how inaccurate, irrelevant or idiotic that word might be. And he fancies himself quite the wit, although I only rate him half-strength (at most) in that department. (One of my journal comments: “He’d be Wildean—if Wilde were dim-witted and pig-ignorant.”)

However—here’s why I’m grateful for him and his ilk: he reminds me that not everything I think I have to say is worth the electrons it takes to transmit it. And that if I want to reduce my self-cringe factor, it’s not really a good idea for me to hit “Reply-All” and start typing at a rate of knots. Sometimes—well, frequently, perhaps—I should just shut the hell up.

(And to those of you who've received the thoughts that escaped that filtration process, I humbly apologize.)

Because I’m not always as clever as I think I am.

Just as this guy is never as clever as he thinks he is.

Sarajevo, Samarra

It may or may not have come to your attention if you’re in the United States, but today marks the centenary of the spark that ignited a conflagration which over the next four years would consume more than 37 million people, either whole or in part.

(As in: more than 16 million dead, 20 million wounded, most of them concentrated in the area circumscribed by the English Channel, the North Sea, the Mediterranean and a line roughly from the Baltic to the Black Seas. More than six million of the deaths were civilian.)

And then it would live on, and on, and on.

That event would be the assassination in Sarajevo of Franz-Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, by Bosnian nationalists, who were badly equipped but thoroughly propagandized by the early-20^th Century Serbian equivalent of the CIA.

It seems a little odd today, 100 years on, to think that this sort of individual act could set off such a catastrophe, but of course it wasn’t really an individual act. There were what Californians would call “issues” (long-standing ones) between the Serbs and the Austrians—well, between the Serbs and pretty much everyone, since they did not play well with others.

(And you’ll note from their non-stop aggression ever since the break-up of that post-WWI construct, Yugoslavia, that they still don’t. There are multiple reasons why so many of their political and military leaders have ended up in the Hague.)

The Serbs didn’t much care what they started because they were confident that their brother Slavs in Russia would back them in whatever whackjob enterprise they embarked on. (This confidence was based on years of assurances to that effect from the Russians, who thought the Austrians were in worse shape than they themselves were.) And since they’d been getting up Austro-Hungarian noses for decades, the latter were thinking that the time had come to crush the Serbs like cockroaches. And they were feeling pretty feisty despite their lack of, you know, modern armies, on account of their friends of the recently-established German empire thought this would be as good an occasion to stick it to the Russians as they were ever going to get, and so they were all in favor of that cockroach-crushing exercise, which they figured would draw the tsar's armies towards Austrian territories to the south, leaving them free to attack Russia in the north.

Meanwhile, the French were egging on both Serbia and Russia (having huge investments in the form of massive loans and arms sales to both), and the Brits were really hoping to stay out of all this Continental chicanery. But on the other hand they did not like the idea of Germany’s empire expanding at the potential cost of their own, so...

And with the Ottoman Empire creaking and shaking and dropping off miscellaneous parts like fingers from a leper’s hand, the Russians, Serbians, British, French and Germans were positioning themselves to each grab up the bits and pieces while trying full-on to prevent everyone and anyone else from taking any.

Well, as you can imagine, it was a whole thing.

Historians have been making their bones on the long- and short-term causes of and responsibility for the war pretty much since they scraped the trench mud off their khakis and field greys and replaced their rifles with pens. If you’re not a historian, you might be surprised at the vehemence of some of the discussions; there are a lot of hifalutin multisyllabic versions of “No, you’re a poopy-head” involved. In the past couple of years there has been a spate of detailed monographs (some less meticulous than others, Max Hastings), and I expect to see a lot more over the next few years.

As you might deduce from my précis above, I believe that it was started and fought for reasons of empire—acquiring, defending, expanding what you had or thought you deserved to have. Military and political leaders were ignorant (woefully or wilfully? I don’t know; maybe some of both) of what advances in technology were about to do to warfare, and they were criminally slow in realizing what was happening and what it was costing as the war wore on.

And after they’d all been in it for a couple of years, and had been depleting their treasuries, exhausting their citizens, consuming their resources, killing off their young men in their tens of thousands on a daily basis—well, a surreal stubbornness seemed to grip them all. Essentially, the argument was, “We’ve already spent this much and lost that much, now we have to stay in it until we win.”

Right up until almost the very end, the Germans were still marking out territories on maps of Western Europe that they intended to annex upon victory—parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg to which a noble and martial people like the Teutons were entitled.

Meanwhile the French and Brits had a slightly tighter grasp on the geopolitical possibilities before them, and were secretly negotiating to carve up pieces of the Middle East which they expected the Ottomans were going to lose control of. They were haggling between themselves, you understand, not with any of the peoples who actually, you know, lived in those areas. Oh, yeah, they were making promises, to Arabs, to Jews, to Kurds; but those were measures of expediency and not agreements between gentlemen such as the ones they made among themselves. Meaning—not anything they really expected to have to honor.

And so many, many of those imperial chickens have been coming home to roost ever since those shots echoed through Sarajevo. World War I reverberated throughout the 20^th Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed off much of the presumptive ruling youth in the nations of Western Europe, it left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued.

But we’re even now feeling the effects of what was known at the time as the Great War. (People came to understand the magnitude of it; they didn’t realize they would have to start numbering them until 20 years on.) The nearly farcical assassination carved a pretty straight path to the collapse of the Russian government and the communist revolution. Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and more than 70 years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.

The viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on this date in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more ruinous indemnities from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Just think about that for a minute: talk about sticking it to your defeated foe...) It was that whole sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that settlement. "Germany started it; the rest of us are victims." 

The Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary) set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade. And if they’re not actively committing acts of aggression against their neighbors at the moment, they will be doing so as soon as they think they can get away with it. This is not over.

The Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire along the lines that Britain and France had mapped out earlier in the war, picking up choice parcels of real estate in the Middle East. As with the Balkans, those arbitrary geographic divisions, ignorant or dismissive of ethnic, religious or other loyalties of the resident peoples, are still reverberating on the global stage.

Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost for more than 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being produced.

German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian empires were all shattered, although the Soviet Union pretty well replaced the last one. And since the break-up of the Soviet empire in the 1990s, we see Putin attempting to rebuild the tsarist holdings. If I were a Finn, a Latvian, an Estonian or a Lithuanian, I’d be nervous.

Even the Brits and the French were not going to hold on to their empires for more than a few decades.

For the entire month of July, 1914, the European powers and Serbia would jockey back and forth—not to prevent a war starting so much as to ensure that the war that ensued was the one they wanted: small, localized and one they could win. But the conflict that creaked into action in August was none of those things. Sixteen million dead, 20 million wounded, lands laid waste, nations paupered, and the bands, basically, just played on.

There are no more archdukes to assassinate, so that’s a good thing. But basically the weaponry has advanced tremendously in the past hundred years, while the notion of restraining human greed and national arrogance hasn't. This is a situation that worries me.

Uncovered and untouched

I’m not sure what the deal was, because I almost never actually see TV commercials. That’s on account of I either fast-forward the DVR, flip channels or just completely tune out. However, this time I watched the commercial:

And it turns out that having to touch your toilet to flush it is…an issue in many homes. At least in enough of them to warrant Kohler and other manufacturers making and marketing these touchless-flush toilets.

Apparently there are a lot of homes whose occupants would rather pay upwards of $900 for such a fixture than, you know, wipe it down with Lysol every once in a while.

Well, okay, but what I worry about is where are people going to put their crochet-covered rolls of toilet paper, since they can’t display them on the top of the tank? You know, like:

And:

Or what about:

End of an era?

When you have to shoot, shoot--don't talk

Oh—I am so sorry to hear of the death of Eli Wallach, age 98. One of the best character actors ever.

I first saw him in The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges’ reworking of The Seven Samurai. He was such a deliciously arrogant bandito, preying on villagers year after year until they called in, well, hit men.

Wallach once told an interviewer, "The big secret in acting is listening to people." Well, that's pretty much the big secret to being a human, and yet so few seem to grasp that notion, much less implement it. Wallach was a great role model in this regard; you definitely saw it on the screen.

In every film, he imbued his character with that deep-seated passion—spaghetti westerns, gangster flicks, comedies: well, I think the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle pretty much says it all, so read his appreciation.

But here’s how good he was: every time some cable channel shows The Holiday, a really awful, treacly rom-com, I record it. Then I fast-forward through all the crap and just enjoy the scenes with Wallach.

What a mensch!

Whoa, man--like, psychedelic!

A friend of mine led me to this very colorful video. No, not that kind of colorful—beautiful, amazing and delightful colorful.

Post by Denise Deitz.

(If you really need an explanation for why this does what it does, okay. It’s about reducing the surface tension on the milk. But does that really matter?)

It’s supposed to be an activity for kids (although in my opinion, you want to closely supervise kids and food coloring), but I think everyone should try it.

It’s the sort of result that people used to consume many strange natural and chemically-produced substances to achieve. And you can do it for pennies. With no post-experience downer, man.

Oh—you’re welcome.

Chances are

I was IMing with a friend the other day and in-between discussing job interviews, Topper on TCM and house repairs, the topic of Virginia came up. I’d said that if I get this next gig I’m interviewing for, I’d take a quick trip back to the D.C. area at the end of July because a couple of friends are renewing their wedding vows.

My friend, who also misses the area, said that if she wins the lottery, she’ll go with me. And I urged her to bring her daughter, too. Here’s how I left it:

“Okay—either of us wins the lottery: 1)House repairs; 2)Virginia; 3)Everything else.”

But some hours later I believe I might have twigged to the flaw in this plan, so I shot her another IM:

“Say—about this lottery-winning… Are you buying tickets? Because I’m not. And this may affect our chances of winning. Um.”

But it’s okay—she replied saying she’d buy one the next day. So all systems go.

Gratitude Monday: A walk

It’s Gratitude Monday and I’m grateful that this morning I went for a walk.

Because I can.