Elective Acolytes

 

Not many are called, and even fewer chosen.

Tales from the Vienna Circle Woods

 

Vienna, 1927:

After several more appointments with Schlick alone, Wittgenstein had been persuaded to get together with a select group from the Circle, though he had never once attended an official Circle gathering.

Waismann began, subconsciously, to imitate Wittgenstein’s speaking-patterns.  Schlick began to attribute  some original ideas of his own  to Wittgenstein, though they had been expressed before he had even read the Tractatus.  Wittgenstein must have approved of this submissive attitude:  by the fall of 1929  he was choosing to restrict his discussions to Schlick and Waismann alone, usually at Schlick’s home.

-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 48-52

 

Though recalcitrant about joining, or even really following the lead of, the Wiener Kreis, Wittgenstein did attend their summer 1930 congress in Königsberg (the one-time hometown of Kant, who was the Circle’s Aunt Sally), which honored him with a presentation re “The Nature of Mathematics:  Wittgenstein’s Standpoint”.  Here he again encountered a couple who had known him as a teen:

Present too at Königsberg  were Professor Stanislaus Jolles and his wife, Adele.  They were the couple with whom Wittgenstein had stayed during his spell in Berlin, 1906-08.  Their relationship with their lodger had been affectionate;  Stanislaus felt protective and paternal toward “Little Wittgenstein”, as they called him.  But, as so often with Wittgenstein, there had been a rupture, and, typically again, it seems to have arisen from Wittgenstein’s perception that his hosts had fallen short of his exacting standards.

-- ibid, p. 97

It didn’t take much for the prickly master to cancel you (or, to use the term current among Berkeley lefty groupuscules during the 1970s before cancel acquired its later flavor among the Woke, to “break with” you).

If you did manage to remain in Wittgenstein’s good graces, it was a mixed blessing, for he tended to treat such scholars as acolytes or thuriféraires, rather than full colleagues.  Consider the case of Friedrich Waismann, mathematician and physicist, and a core member of the Kreis, who enjoyed the rare privilege of occasionally being closeted with Wittgenstein alone:

 

Waismann’s principal function was prompt and note-keeper.  One philosopher later described his relationship to Wittgenstein as one of “glove puppet to controlling hand.”  … There was something shocking about the degree to which he subordinated his interest to those of Wittgenstein, and the ingratitude with which his efforts were rewarded.
-- ibid, p. 101, 104

 

Bertrand Russell, a supremely well-established logico-philosophical panjandrum himself, could not be so scanted; yet “Bertrand Russell, according to Ayer, was now downgraded to being merely ‘a forerunner of the Christ (Wittgenstein)’.” (ibid, p. 109)

Russell himself was cordial to Wittgenstein, who had read Russell’s mathematical philosophizing, and who in 1911  showed up at Russell’s rooms in Cambridge, and soon formed a close relationship.   Russell had been a member of the Cambridge Apostles, cosily known to themselves as simply “the Society”;  and Wittgenstein received an invitation to join.  But once again, Wittgenstein held back from any circle whose multiplicity made them unwieldy to dominate as a whole.

In a letter of 1913, Russell wrote to a friend:

My friend Wittgenstein was elected to the Society, but thought it was a waste of time, so he imitated henry john roby and was cursed.

-- The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (v. 1, 1951), p. 364

 

(The reference is to an earlier selectee, who disdained ever to attend the Apostle conventicles;  the miffed members promptly canceled him by decapitalizing his name for all eternity, and pronouncing a ritual malediction from time to time.)

 

~  ~  ~

 

In 1932, through the good offices of Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer  was introduced for the first time  to Wittgenstein at Cambridge.   Queried by the eminent Austrian  as to what was the most recent book he’d read (cocktail-party filler or ice-breaker, one would have thought),  Ayer replied, La Vida es Sueño, adding modestly that he hadn’t understood it very well.  That was actually owing merely to his shaky Spanish; but Wittgenstein apparently took it as trenchant skepticism, much along the lines of the logical empiricists protesting that they “didn’t understand” (i.e., considered as rubbish) a great many everyday non-scientific statements.  “From then on he treated me as a protégé.” (-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 120.)

Ryle appears later to have some regrets about those good-offices:

 

Ryle had met  and got along with  Schlick, but his encounters with Wittgenstein left him with serious reservations.  This was evidently a man who needed acolytes, not colleagues;  someone always on the brink of an explosion,  too quick to divide the world into the saved and the damned.

-- Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure:  Philosophy at Oxford  1900-1960, p. 54)

 

In the same memoir, the mild-mannered Ayer recounts the brusque reception that met Waismann, who had so long sedulously served Wittgenstein, when they later became colleagues at Cambridge University:

Waismann was Jewish, and when Vienna fell to the Germans  he fled with his family to England.   He went to Cambridge, which was willing to accept him, but Wittgenstein did not desire that what he regarded as a deceptive echo of his own thought  should be audible in the same university, and therefore announced that anyone who attended Waismann’s lectures  would not be allowed to come to his.

-- A.J. Ayer, Part of My Life (1977),  p. 132

 

Horresco referens, but such petty and revanchist behavior reminds me of Tr*mp.

~

 

The incomparable logician Kurt Gödel  played a notably honorable role in this Kreis of often quarrelsome prima donnas.   While faithfully attending their gatherings, he was content so remain modestly in the background, and be taken for a subaltern, while all the time excogitating, leading to work more important more lasting than anything any of the others in the Kreis would accomplish.   Again, let the portraitist tell it:

 

Although almost all Circle members became convinced that, drawing on Wittgenstein and Ramsey, they had solved the problems of mathematics -- that mathematical truths were a type of tautology -- Gödel had sat quietly at Circle meetings  without believing a word of this.  He was a mathematical Platonist.
-- David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick (2020), p. 148

 

Those affordances of the Circle, and of Wittgenstein in particular, were worse than useless: positively stultifying for the practice of mathematics.  [For our essays on the subject, consult

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Platonism  

]

 

As for the excesses of acolytism, Gödel kept a level head:

 

While Schlick and Weismann revered Wittgenstein, Gödel was among several  bemused by the cult-like deference he inspired in his acolytes. … [And later, when Wittgenstein reigned at Cambridge:]  Many students became disciles -- who, like Waismann in Vienna, subconsciously came to mimic his mannerisms.

-- ibid, p. 149, 247

 

The socio-historian and polemicist Ernest Gellner  provides a glimpse of the Cambridge period of Wittgenstein’s ascendency.  There grew up

 

… the first set of ‘companions of the prophet’.  Initially, there was a small, carefully vetted, conventicle of devotees in Cambridge, in the years preceding the Second World War. … But the movement grew …

Maor premise:  all cultural cocoons, all forms of life, are valid and self-sufficient, and Wittgenstein has shown this to be the case.  Minor premise, never spelt out or discussed, but operationallly taken for granted:  only our cocoon is of any interest. … Entry to Wittgenstein’s seminar was restricted at the master’s whim, and the ideas circulated in privately-copied typescripts which Wittgenstein himself refused to have published.  This esotericism greatly enhanced the appeal of the ideas, which were treated as a major revelation by the adepts.

 

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), pp. 160-165

 

(Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced…)

~  ~  ~

 

Let it not be supposed that the field of philosophy is at all atypical  among academic specialties, as regards such interpersonal rugosities.  Parallels from the history of linguistics  during the Chomsky years, could be adduced.  As, the mathematician Mark Kac, father of the linguist Michael Kac, remarks in his memoir:

 

Linguistics is a strange field, full of cliques and fiefdoms, each fiercely attached to its staked-out territory, and consumed with enmity toward the others.

-- Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance (1985), p. 107

 

For an extended look at academic acolyte relations, pour yourself a brandy  and relax with these:

 

=> http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/chomsky-freud-and-problem-of-acolytes.html

and its appendix

=> https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-agony-and-acolyte_28.html

 

These include anecdotes about my fondly former Berkeley Doktorvater  in Rom. Phil.,  Professor Yakov Malkiel, including portraits of the (pro tem) Malkielitas, and one (canceled) Malkielito.  One will detect, in the telling, a Nabokovian tone;  which is only just, as the Malkiel family and the Nabokov clan  were BFFs in Berlin, back in the ‘30’s (while it lasted).

 

Bonnet Blanc vs. Blanc Bonnet

Bonnet Blanc versus Blanc Bonnet

(Or, synonyms, at daggers drawn)

I once wrote an MA thesis called Linguistic Life on the Left, a historical-semantic survey of the Berkeley linguiscape during my time there as a graduate student.  It sifted out correlations between a sect’s self-expression,  and its (sometimes partly subconscious) ideology.  A favorite schematic example  was this  one:

Given that: Groups A, B, and C are all part of what popular or pre-theoretical conception would consider “the Left” (albeit that seeming Big Tent  turns out to be a granfalloon).

And that:  Group A denounces Group C as ‘pigs’, while Group B denounces group C as ‘swine’.

From this we can conclude: virtually nothing about Group C; but that Group A and Group B are bitter enemies, barely sharing any verbiferous ether that could even attempt to pass coherent messages between them.

For: Group A derived the epithet from the rants of the American Black Panthere; Group B derived theirs from the European Marxist polemical tradition (nineteenth century et seq.)  A vast host of incompatible cultural assumptions go with each.  In keeping with the expressive ethos of the two groups, we can call the vituperative practices of A as "badmouthing"; of B  as "the ironical-polemical style".  Both manners, when well done, can afford aesthetic pleasures.

~

And now we have the following situation, in the context of the controversy over illegal immigration.

Entity A described the immigrant-source regions as “shit-holes”.

Entity B described them rather as a ‘snake-pit’.

Once again, these two entities, along with their fanbases, are not on speaking, let alone reasoning terms.

Entity A is POTUS;  Entity B is a Circuit Court of California.  [My source for that was NPR’s All Things Considered; for some reason, a string-search in Google news is not turning up anything relevant.  Thus evanescent are the bubbles that burble from the media.]  From similar observations, A and B draw opposite conclusions.  A: Who would want to bring in people from such areas?  B: Who would be so unconscionable as to send people back to such areas?

There is another linguistic/political parallel between that case and the one described in the previous section.  In either case, one term of the “synonymic antithesis” is more populist in tone (pigs; shithole), the other more literary and traditional (swine; snake-pit).

What did you do in the Linguistics Wars, Daddy?

Awhile back I offered an essay in Mathematical Lexicography:

What is Mathematics?

It led off with this:

    First, a sociological/tautological non-definition:

  What is mathematics?  One proposal, made in desperation, is ‘what mathematicians do’.

  -- -- Ian Stewart,  How to Cut a Cake (2006), p. 27

That stab in fact fails to offer even the virtue of a tautology, since it isn’t even true, without the further qualification that it is what mathematicians do… when they are doing mathematics.  -- If you’d tried similarly, without qualification,  to define linguistics based simply on the activities of linguists (ex officio: faculty and students in the Linguistics Department) at Berkeley during the years I was there, you would conclude that the field consisted of:  fixing your Volkswagens[**];  eating Chinese food;  and dabbling in neighboring fields like psychology and philosophy (later all these fields hopped into the hot-tub together and were newly baptised as Cognitive Science) -- all this while studiously ignoring most of the work done in the previous centuries of philology and language-sciences.

[**]  Sprawling supine beneath one's VW Beetle or Bus  was known locally as the "Berkeley lotus position".

[Note:  The title of this post  alludes to an insightful, delightful sociohistory of the era,
Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (1993)]



[For further reflections on Berkeleyana, click here.

For the place of linguistics among the sciences, here.

For sociohistorical reflections on other sciences, here.]

Dysphemism of the Day: Khmers Verts

During the years that I was living impecuniously in Berkeley, unable to afford an automobile, I rode a bicicyle -- or, after that was stolen, walked or took the bus.   So it was with a certain detachment that I beheld the maneuvers of that People’s Republic to make life unpleasant for the drivers of cars -- as, laying down a slalom of road barriers, which bikes could zip around easily, but cars must slow to a crawl.  Part of this was motivated by legitimate concerns about environment and quality of life, but -- Berkeley being Berkeley -- there was an ideological edge to it, and an odor of self-righteousness.

Now the “Socialist” mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo (really more of a socialo-bobo, rather than anything to do with the historical struggle of the working class) has stirred up controversy by closing off the Seine-side roads to vehicular traffic, predictably resulting in snarls elsewhere, and possibly actually raising the amount of automobile polution as drivers spend more time in jams and thus more time traversing the same trajectory -- spewing pollutants all the while. 

Let Le Figaro tell it:

Révélé par Le Figaro, le rapport commandé par Valérie Pécresse, présidente de la région Île-de-France, sur les effets de la fermeture des voies sur berge est accablant pour la Mairie de Paris.

C'est désormais la grande pagaille dans la capitale mais aussi en banlieue. La piétonnisation des voies sur berge rive droite, qui a indiscutablement aggravé la circulation dans Paris, provoque, en effet, de sérieux ralentissements bien au-delà de ses murs. Le trafic est désormais plus dense sur un périphérique déjà saturé et les temps de parcours se sont aggravés sur la rocade plus éloignée de l'A86.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2016/11/16/01016-20161116ARTFIG00382-voies-sur-berge-le-rapport-qui-denonce-l-explosion-des-embouteillages-a-paris.php

Thus it was with a pleasure of recognition that I encountered the following Reader’s Comment:

Et la pollution due aux embouteillages ! ... ça ne gêne pas Mme Hidalgo et ses Khmers Verts ?? 

Ils vivent dans l'air conditionné de leurs jolis bureaux et font changer souvent les filtres mais les enfants sur les trottoirs ... on s'étonnera qu'ils aient toujours plus d'asthme !
Quant aux habitants de banlieue qui viennent à Paris juste pour travailler... pas pour voter pour elle... ils peuvent bien étouffer ! ...

Khmers Verts.  But exactly!

A selection of some further linguistically-interesting comments from Le Figaro’s sharp-nibbed readers:

un petit dessin avec les bobogochos enfumés par les voiture bloquées sur le chemin du travail tout autour de son nid .

---

Vivement le roller en famille sur l A86

---

Madame Hidalgo et son aréopage de noctambules désoeuvrés considèrent Paris comme une ville dédiée à l'amusement.
Sa politique de circulation n'est jamais que la traduction de la vision de quelqu'un qui n'a jamais travaillé et a toujours vécu de cocktail en cocktail de voiture avec chauffeur à voiture avec escorte et qui n'a comme vision de l'action publique que d'arriver au fare niente institutionnalisé.

---
le socialisme, l'art du bien vivre sans travailler. Les gens qui bossent  polluent, c'est bien connu.

Bean gatha

I

In a saucepan,

place two tablespoons of water,

one tablespoon of butter,

and the vegetables.

Bring to a full boil

over medium-high heat,

separating vegetables with fork

to hasten thawing.

II

Reduce heat to low,   cover,

and simmer,

ve - ry      gent -   ly,

until vegetables are   tender --

eight to ten minutes.

(If all liquid   evaporates

before vegetables are      tender,

add a small amount of water.)

Do not drain.

Makes 1 ¾ cup.

[found on the back of a package, Berkeley, ca. 1972.
I was vegetarian at the time.]

[For further examples of "found poetry", click here;  or just look around you.]

Zitronenblume

Zitronenblume 

Fleur de citron,

comme tu sens bon !

Ô doulce fleur

qui ranimes mon cœur !

Et moi, abeille,

je te conseille,

m’admettre céans

pour prendre mon sens.

~

Gratuit !

Lisez le conte entier

“Le détective  et la fillette”

~

[Note:  The first sens is from the Latin verb, sentire;  the second is used as in the fabliau “La bourse pleine de sens”, and is bivalent, one possible origin being from Latin semino.  This latter plays as well upon the double-entendre of bourse. -- I am indebted to Professor  Howard Bloch’s course on the fabliaux, which I audited (lo these many years ago) at Berkeley, for pointing out this rather recherché ambiguity.]

 

~

~ Recommendation posthume ~

“Si j’étais encore en vie, et que je  désirais un bon whodunnit,

que lirais-je?"

Micmacs divorce --Pouah!

Murphy sur la montagne

(Je suis Ronsard, et j’ai approuvé ce message)

.

Leçons de français

A Marthe

Ô si pure déesse,

je ne saurais te dire

à quel point  tu m’es chère …

Mais sache, et sois sûre:

je garderai toujours

l’image  et la mémoire

de ta chère jeunesse …

Il y a d’ordinaire  une rumeur incessante  dont on ne s’aperçoit pas, en règle générale, pas plus qu’à la plage, où pourtant l’océan rugit comme Démosthène :  le frou-frou des vêtements, des papiers;  le remue-ménage des livres;  des baîllements, des soupirs, des rots, des pets;  les petites conversations à part, y compris une sorte de maquis de traduction, car le professeur ne parle qu’en français, et les étudiants doivent s’entr’aider en catimini.  Mais quand Marthe a commencé a parler un peu, de sa voix douce et à peine audible -- tout le monde se tut.  C’était très curieux.  Car il y a toujours des élèves bêtes ou timides  qui parlent bas, qui se trompent, qui s’embrouillent, qui mâchent leurs mots,  et on ne se tait jamais pour eux.  Mais -- Marthe.   On pensera plutôt au silence instinctif qu’on observe (que l’on soit croyant ou pas) en entrant dans une église, ou n’importe quel lieu profond et sacré.   Même le professeur, Monsieur Gigant, d’habitude assez bruyard, s’est mis à chuchoter quand il fallait lui corriger, à elle, une petite faute d’énoncé, une bribe de grammaire.   Sa voix à elle   n’est pas  vraiment faible, ce n’est pas ça …. je n’arrive pas à la décrire.  Comment décrire d’ailleurs  l’amour,  ce besoin atroce et interne, autrement qu’en de fermes figurés  et à portée douteuse?  Elle parle  comme a dû parler  les vierges intangibles  de la Grèce antique, au temps où il n’était pas besoin  de beugler pour se faire entendre, paisibles parmi les vagues et les vents et les brebis qui paisent:   où les vièrges étaient fières, et point bégueules:  de calmes triomphatrices, telle Diane.  Voici un mois que -- silencieux et inapperçu tout au fond de la salle de classe, avec les autres assistants-apprentis de l’art d’enseigner -- voici bien un mois que, moi, qui ne parle mais qui entend, qui voit sans être vu -- me voici qui, chaque jour  d’une façon plus pénible et plus pure -- je l’adore, cette déesse : et soudain on voit se former une sorte de culte autour d’elle !

Que ne me suis-je  prosterné à ses pieds?  Par peur de scandale?  -- Il n’en fut rien.  C’était  par peur  de la  gêner.

~

C’est curieux comme Gigant -- grand gaillard -- est pourtant sensible à cette fille, sensible au fait qu’elle appartient  à vrai dire   à un monde  autre que le sien;  elle est moins expérimentée et plus pure, et il la ménage un peu:  tel un guerrier qui, au milieu d’effroyables tueries, s’arrêterait un instant  donner sa jaquette à un enfant frileux  égaré sur le champs de bataille.  L’autre jour, pendant la leçon au sujet du “vocabulaire de la parenté”, suivant l’image qu’en ont les français, un fils unique est : capricieux, boudeur, se croit être le prince, a ses idées à lui.  -- “Tenez,” fit-il soudain, rêveur, “qui est probablement fils unique ou fille unique dans cette classe?”  (C’était sa manière socio-pédagogique habituelle et bien fondée pour motiver les éle<ves, et les induire à s’intéresser au contenu du discours, et point se concentrer sur la grammaire comme telle;  pourtant, cette question semblait le concerner pour de bon.)  “Te-nez….”  Son regard planait sur cette vague mer de braves gars et de bonnes gourdes, de jeunes athlètes et sorority girls, mastiquant des ordures  ou faisant leur ongles -- puis tout à coup  tomba sur Elle.  “Tiens, Marthe est bien peut-être fille unique !” (elle qui ne ricane jamais à ses badineries). Il disait cela de bon humour :  c’est un type bien, à la fin;  il ne lui en voulait pas de ne pas pouffer quand il plaisante.  Mais, unique fille qu’elle est,  en ceci  elle ne lui répondit d’aucun signe, à part une certaine gêne.

Chaque jour apporte de nouvelles précisions à son compte.

Elle écrit avec la droite, et, depuis que j’ai pris l’habitude de m’asseoir au fond de la classe  du côté  vers lequel elle incline physiquement, (tout comme, en son esprit, elle se penche sans doute  vers le soleil qui brille dehors, ….)

[A suivre ...]

"Scum Villages": student edition

[In our essay here

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/french-phrase-of-day-scum-villages.html

we wrote of the controversial European  tuigdorpen or  Abschaum-Dörfer.
The following puts this in perspective.]

Of course, what counts as habitable housing, and who counts as scum, is a relative matter. 

The most inhumanely compressed living-space I ever witnessed, was in undergraduate housing at the University of California at Berkeley.   There was just room enough for a camp bed, and to stand beside it with the door closed, and little else.   The reason this view sticks in my mind is that the student whose misfortune it was to spend his life in that room, was apparently going mad, as he had drawn on the wall, in ink, the outline of his erect penis.

Actually I did live in something just as bad, in the downmarket Sunset district of San Franciscio the summer before I began graduate studies in math at Berkeley:  I lived, literally, in what had been a pantry, just off the kitchen that was now a communal kitchen for everyone who roomed at the dwelling.

Another instance of students  pickled and packed-in like kippers:

Israeli students find affordable housing — in metal boxes

Three years after mass protests against living costs, a student village made of shipping containers rises.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israeli-students-find-affordable-housing-in-shipping-container-apartments/2014/11/03/0349cf5e-5f9a-11e4-9f3a-7e28799e0549_story.html

.

Parallel Lives (protracted)

What was originally merely an occasion-note, has ballooned to Plutarchean proportions, and is accordingly reposted under a different name.

We begin with the relevant portions of our original post from June the sixth.

~   ~   ~

A factoid for D-Day

I’m currently reading William Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic (published in 1969).  The title might be confusing;  unlike for his better-known book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer did not retain the political term in the original language;  he means La Troisième République.  Anyhow, regarding the aftermath of the first World War (whose groaning later echo  we commemorate today), he writes as follows  about the much-derided reparations, often pointed to as a burden on Germany that fueled the resentments that eventually led to WWII (p. 150):

Actually, Germany never had to pay a single mark out of her own resources.  Her borrowings from America bankers, which were never repaid, amounted to more than her total reparation payments.  Naïve American investors footed the German reparations bill.

The matter is even more curious in light of a companion fact mentioned on the next page:

Though the United States refused to take a cent of reparations from Germany, its government and Congress insisted that its Allies, especially Britain and France, pay their war debts in full and with interest.

Meanwhile, we are once again not being very gentle with our former French ally:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/05/bank-robbery.html

[Update, 7 juin, D-Day’s “Boxing Day”, or “D+1-Day”.  AKA le lendemain du Débarquement.] 

During that post-War period of wrangling over debts and reparations, France and Germany each repeatedly stomped, stabbed, and shot themselves in the foot:  bitterly remarking, “Take that!”

Intent on not letting a cent of reparations to go to France, after the Ruhr occupation the German “government deliberately organized the destruction of the currency, the mark falling to … 25 billions [to the dollar], becoming worthless” (id, p. 148).  (The folk term for this is:  Cutting off your nose to spite your face. )  France, facing much larger infrastructure reconstruction costs than did Germany (a point often forgotten, since France was ultimately the nominal victor:   but the war had been fought largely on its own soil), was left in the lurch by the French rich, who vigorously evaded such direct taxes as there were, and squirreled their capital abroad (p. 154).   The State was allowed to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy for years.  The tacit strategy of the wealthy was:  fiat opulentia, et ruat respublica :  for if the Republic did fall (as, in 1940, it did) “were there not other forms of government possible which promised more security for entrenched wealth?  The thoghts of some of the biggest entrepreneurs began to turn to the Fascist ‘experiment’ in Italy, and to the growing success of the Nazi Party in Germany” (p. 157).  Meanwhile, “instead of raising taxes, the government raised loans, a habit it had acquired during the war.”   As for those (mostly the thrifty French petite bourgeoisie) who were foolish enough to buy those government guarantees, “In the end, the state, in effect, repudiated most of it  by allowed the franc to fall to] one-fifth of its prewar value” -- an 80% haircut for those who had retrieved their savings from beneath the mattress, and entrusted them to the stabilization of the State.

~

At this point, a light-bulb begins dimly to flicker, in the mind of the suspicious reader.  “Wai-ait a minute!  Is this whole thing intended as some kind of allegory of the Bush Administration, and subsequent obstruction/destructivism of the Tea-Party types?”  Well, it didn’t start out that way;  but as you read along, the parallels become stark.

And the point here, indeed, is not to rake over the chronicles of another place, another time, but to remind ourselves that “He who forgets History is condemned to …” …. to … darn it  it was on the tip of my tongue … something-something …  Forgotten.  Anyhow (to quote our gnomic ancestors again), “If the shoe fits, wear it.”  

(Note, and not:  “If the shoe fits, buy it on credit and stash it in your fashion-closet and then go out and buy a dozen more pairs.”

-- Though actually, that was exactly the scene in Paris, in July of 1926:
“Along the boulevards, large crowds of women were storming the department stores  and the smart shops  in a frenzy to convert their falling francs into something more durable” [p. 162].)

[For our essays touching on this Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose aspect of things, click here.]

~

And so to the parallels:

The bankers and businessmen, and even the more thriving peasants and shopkeepers, came to believe, with a certainty that brooked no compromise, that the political “Left” -- which, aside from the small Communist Party, was in reality little more than reformist and middle-of-the-way, -- was incapable of governing the country.

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 166

(Cf. the meme of the centrist Obama as “socialist”.)

The employers’ associations, having lost their fight to prevent Parliament from enacting the modest social-security legislation, continued their well-financed campaign  in rthe press and on billboards  to render it ineffective  and to get it repealed.

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 167

(Compare the continued assaults on “Obamacare” -- a program that Congress itself passed not long ago.)

There are even parallels in the sideshow characters.   On the magnate François Coty:

Flattered by the politically discontented,  who used his money to assault the Republic, Coty began to conceive himself as a savior of the nation who one day  not too far off  might be called upon to take over the helm of state and save it from democracy.  Ridiculous as the thought was, for Coty was a political nincompoop, he seems to have taken it with growing seriousness.

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 158

Remind you of someone whose name rhymes with “rump”?   (A further parallel:  Both Coty and Trump made their fortunes in the degraded armpits of the Lucullan-Bacchanalian economy, the former in fancy perfumes, the latter in casino gambling.)

~

So, then as now, the picture isn’t pretty.   But the wan hope is, that if the Plutocratic Party ever manages to get rid of that Nigerian-born socialist and control both houses of Congress,  they will immediately cease their antics and their Wrecker strategy, and begin to govern responsibly.  Something like that did happen in France in 1926, with the election of the sensible conservative Raymond Poincaré.

[Note:  Readers of this blog will feel their ears prick up at the surname.  Any relation to Henri, eponym of the Poincaré Conjecture, and one of the immortal heroes of both physics and mathematics?  Indeed;  they were cousins.  And since I’m not especially fond of Cousin Raymond, I’ll post a photo of Cousin Henri instead.]

To restore national solvency, the new French President  “rushed through Pariliament, practically without debate, a number of laws calling for new taxes, and increase of old ones, which the bankers and businessmen and the political Right  would never have accepted from a less ‘conservative’ government.” (p. 164)

Such is the fond faint hope of the Left and Center, that by knuckling under and electing a ‘conservative’, some necessary reforms might be enacted (as happened under Nixon and under Reagan) which the same party would oppose hysterically they came from the Democrats (compare the very different treatment of those twins, Romneycare and Obamacare).

The whole financial crisis had been a charade (again, compare the Republican push to go over the “fiscal cliff”):

In six months, Poincaré had stabilized the franc. … There was -- there had been all along -- plenty of French money to restore the finances of the state.

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 165

~

Back when I was a grad student at Berkeley, the fashion in the Generative Semantics circle  was to construct politically-slanted example-sentences to illustrate some basic semantic/pragmatic point.  Perhaps the best-known was:

John called Mary a Republican, and then she insulted him

(with contrastive accent  indicated by italics).   Here the sentence as stressed and worded  necessarily implies a presupposition that (for John, for Mary, and probably for the speaker of the sentence as well), for John to call Mary “a Republican” constituted an insult (to which she replied in kind).   Contrast

John called Mary a Republican, and then she [went and] insulted him

where the presupposition is reversed.  (This sort of thing was considered quite amusing in the student lounges of the time.)

Anyhow, what dredged from memory that moss-worn anecdote, was seeing Shirer write of President Poincaré,

Though conservative, he was a man of utter integrity.

The expression sounds quaintly prejudiced, coming from the pen of a historian.  But Shirer knows his materials;  and perhaps things stood then as now, on the Right.  For the likes of Boehner, Trump, Perry, Rove, Delay, et alia, are not “men of utter integrity”.    The hope of the Center, that the next Republican President might be a Poincaré -- or a Nixon, with all his faults -- may be a pipe-dream.  Instead of a Nixon, we might get an Agnew;  instead of a McCain, a Palin.

And not only have the ranks of potential Republican leaders  degenerated after years of stewing in the vile juices of ressentiment,  so too the electorate has taken an ugly turn.  Again, a parallel from late-1920s France:

A certain proletarianization of a good many solid citizens of the middle class took place at this time.  Like the workers, they found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, but  contrary to the workers  they turned politically  not to the Left  but to the extreme Right  in hopes of salvation.

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 165

This is the old problem of “false consciousness”, which in America (both in this century and the last) has gone under the catch-phrase of “What’s the matter with Kansas?”

~

Yet another parallel, between something in France of the 1920s, that makes no sense, and something that makes no sense in our own day:  yet together, they may illuminate each other, with their spectral swamp-spawned light.

The weakness of the presidency,  and the mediocrity of the politicians who held it  in the last years of the Third Republic,  contributed to the instability of French governments.  We have seen Clemenceau confessing that, in the elections of the National Assembly  for President of the Republic, he always voted for the most stupid candidate.

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 170

But -- Why would anyone do that?  Because “The members of Parliament preferred  … weak and mediocre men for President” -- men they could control.  (George Dubya, without an idea in his head, was a reliable mannequin for Cheney and Rumsfeld -- and whoever-all lay behind those. -- Hugenburg had thought that the comic-opera Hitler would fill that bill;  but Hitler got out of hand.)

So, seriously, ideology aside -- Let us all agree for the sake of argument, that we all subscribe to the doctrines of Calvin Coolidge, Alexander Hamilton, Kaiser Wilhelm, Attila the Hun -- whoever you please.   Why should the party carrying on that illustrious tradition, be reduced to the present pack of morons?  

It’s effing embarrassing, for one thing.  And though I have satirized it, I don’t really understand it.  How did the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Luger, manage to drive out all men of substance from its ranks?

~

The scene in 1937, in the waning days of the premiership of Léon Blum:

As the first Socialist -- and Jewish-- Prime Minister in the history of France, he was determined to keep his word, as he said, “to exercise power only within the framework of capitalism.”  His scruples do him credit.  But in a harsh world of conflict, in which it was evident that the economic and financial elite were out to destroy his government --at whatever cost to the country -- his lack of boldness, of toughness, proved his undoing.

-- Wm Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969), p. 323

Remind you of anyone we know?

Note:  It is no part of the purpose of this post, to criticise or second guess, from the plush comfort of hindsight or the sidelines, either Barack Obama  or Léon Blum.  Both are admirable statesmen.   Merely, their predicaments are similar.

Further:   For anyone who imagines that the perverse obstructionism which our President has been dealing with, is anomalous,  check out Shirer’s account of the premiership of Blum.

Foot-Note:  Well aware (alas) of our shallowness and deficiencies  in matters of historical commentary, we can at least play to our long suit -- linguistics -- in offering this:  The surname Blum  is pronounced “Bloom” in French.

Bon chic bon bio

In a recent post,

A fou-faraw in France

 we suggested above that the reporter’s somewhat “off”-sounding “the male demonstrators” might have been in part a crypto-Gallicism, unconsciously inspired by the special contemporary French political use of the ethnic codeword les jeunes (literally 'the young-folk', but that wouldn't render the flavor at all).  A similar apparent case of unconscious loan-translation appears in this morning’s New York Times, datelined Paris.   In prose reminiscent of a gourmand's menu, as gooey and thick as pâté de foie gras, we read of a state-subsidized (and rather louche-sounding) real-estate speculator, remaking the Marais section of Paris (“one of the city’s trendiest” districts, the reporter reassures us, lest some francophone-capable American readers hesitate to venture into a section whose name literally means ‘swamp, morass’) into an “Epicurean Village” (epicurean  not in the sense of the  ataraxia of Ἐπίκουρος,  but of self-indulgent sybarites):

“It’s going to be totally designed, with a library so people can think about the meat.”

(I blink.  Did the sentence really say that?  Let’s re-read it slowly:

It’s

going to be

totally designed,

with a library

so people can think

…
so people can think

…

so people can think

…

about the meat.

Yep, that’s what it says all right.)

Quoting the silk-scarf bedraped entrepreneur, our blithe and flighty reporter goes on:

“Over there will be the cheesemonger, where the cheese will be hidden in designer drawers, and taken out and explained.”

All right -- now I’ve lost the readers’ confidence;  you must think I’m making this up.  So here’s the link; go see for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/world/europe/an-epicurean-village-is-too-rich-for-some-paris-appetites.html?ref=world

One pictures the scene:  “You, cheesemonger!  Explain that cheese!”   -- "Ahh, ma-dame.... Allou mee too extract heem, from zee deesigneur draweurs..."
(Actually, shouldn't 'designer drawers' refer to panties by Yves St-Laurant?  Strange place to stow the cheese...)

Our reporter continues, this time in her own prose, rather than that of the sleek little Frenchman:

Fashionably dressed butchers, …

(Actually we must pause here, overcome.  “Fashionably dressed butchers”, what an image.   Trendily attired plumbers;  dishwasher-repairmen in gay raiment …  -- Let’s try again.)

Fashionably dressed butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs  will work in an upscale collective  --

(No, sorry,  got to pause again for breath.  A “collective” -- shades of those olden times in Berkeley!  But -- faut préciser -- an upscale collective.   Très chic. -- Truly, today’s feminized-and-yuppified New York Times  is priceless.  And this is the news section, Gawwd help us; not the Gomorrah of "Style".  --- Let’s try one more time:)

Fashionably dressed butchers, bakers, and restaurateurs  will work in an upscale collective, dominated by the principal of zero waste, 

[ => “The  Principle   of  Zero   Waste”  <= ]

peddling [Is that really the verb you want? -- Copy editor] high-concept foods from mod spaces …

(“High-concept foods” -- “Mod spaces”.  Can’t make this stuff up.  -- Well, she can. -- To resume: )

… high-concept foods from mod spaces, using  biological products  sourced only from French farmers.

(We fall exhausted on our labors.)

Anyhow, en tant que philologue,  allow me to draw your attention to that phrase, “biological products”.   For the average American reader, I suspect, that does not have quite the effect that the gushing author intended.   To the ear of the anglo-saxon (as the French call us), that sounds suspiciously like a tissue sample, or an excretion, or something suspected in an ebola outbreak.   But what is really meant is what, in the preceding paragraph, she styled more idiomatically as “farm-fresh gastronomy” (semantically, there is a bit of an enallege adjectivi there, since what is “farm-fresh” here is not really the gastronomy, but the food which the gastronomes are shoving down their pie-holes, washed down with a nice chablis;  but let that pass).   The sense, surely, is an unconscious semantic loan-translation from French biologique: it means ‘natural, organic’, and (among the trendy) is usually abbreviated bio  (as in : des produits bio;  the modifier does not inflect for number or gender)

That word gastronomy, although correctly used (albeit modified askew), has perhaps a faint aura of Gallicism as well:  gastronomie is quite common in French, and has no untoward associations;  whereas, in its article gastronomy, Wikipedia feels obliged to caveat: “Not to be confused with Gastroenterology” (that’s the discipline that peers into those icky “biological products” deep in the unmentionable places of the anatomy).     Fate, though, does sometimes intervene, when the oleaginous or mycological excesses of the gastronomes (another word common in French, rare in English;  it means ‘food-fetishist’;  we generally employ the euphemism gourmet -- another French loan -- which means ‘narcissistic food-fetishist with too much unearned disposable income (sweated from the hides of the working class) and too much goddam time on their hands’)  does lead them into the operating-rooms of the gastroenterologists.

(Enough, enough.  Epicurean village delenda est.  Times, cancel my subscription.)

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*

[Update 1 July 2017]  And now this, a headline of a rare stupidity, even for the Saturday New York Times:
 

‘That First Crisp Bite Can Make or Break the Hot Dog Experience’

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/insider/that-first-crisp-bite-can-make-or-break-the-hot-dog-experience.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

.