Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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August 1991 Putsch

Published by peter on 2012-05-21 in Decision theory, Game theory, History and Intelligence and Espionage. 0 Comments

Last August was the 20th anniversary of the short-lived revanchist coup in the USSR, which led directly to the break up of the Soviet Empire.   That the coup was ultimately unsuccessful was due in large part to the bravery of Boris Yeltsin and the citizens of Moscow who protested publicly against the coup.  Their bravery was shared by sections of the Soviet military, particularly the Air Force, who also informed the plotters of their disapproval.   I understand that the main reason why the plotters did not bombard the White House, the Russian Parliament which Yeltsin and his supporters had occupied, as they had threatened was that the Air Force had promised to retaliate with an attack on the Kremlin.

A fact reported at the time in the IHT, but little-known since was that the leadership of the Soviet ballistic missile command signaled to the USA their disapproval of the coup.  They did this by moving their mobile ICBMs into their storage hangars, thereby preventing their use.  Only the USA with its satellite surveillance could see all these movements;   CIA and George Bush, aided perhaps by telephone taps, were clever enough to draw the  intended inference:  that the leadership of the Soviet Missile Command was opposed to the coup.

Here is a report that week in the Chicago Tribune (1991-08-28):

WASHINGTON — During last week`s failed coup in the Soviet Union, U.S. intelligence overheard the general commanding all strategic nuclear missiles on Soviet land give a highly unusual order.  Gen. Yuri Maksimov, commander-in-chief of the Soviets’ Strategic Rocket Forces, ordered his SS-25 mobile nuclear missile forces back to their bases from their battle-ready positions in the field, said Bruce Blair, a former Strategic Air Command nuclear triggerman who studies the Soviet command system at the Brookings Institution.

“He was defying the coup. By bringing the SS-25s out of the field and off alert, he reduced their combat readiness and severed their links to the coup leaders,”  said Blair.
That firm hand on the nuclear safety catch showed that political chaos in the Soviet Union actually may have reduced the threat posed to the world by the Soviets’ 30,000 nuclear warheads, said several longtime U.S. nuclear war analysts. The Soviet nuclear arsenal, the world’s largest, has the world’s strictest controls, far stricter than those in the U.S., they said.  Those controls remained in place, and in some cases tightened, during last week’s failed coup-even when the coup plotters briefly stole a briefcase containing codes and communications equipment for launching nuclear weapons from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.”

And here is R. W. Johnson, in a book review in the London Review of Books (2011-04-28):

One of the unheralded heroes of the end of the Cold War was General Y.P. Maksimov, the commander in chief of the Soviet strategic rocket forces during the hardliners’ coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. He made a pact with the heads of the navy and air force to disobey any order by the coup plotters to launch nuclear weapons. There was extreme concern in the West that the coup leader, Gennady Yanayev, had stolen Gorbachev’s Cheget (the case containing the nuclear button) and the launch codes, and that the coup leaders might initiate a nuclear exchange. Maksimov ordered his mobile SS-25 ICBMs to be withdrawn from their forest emplacements and shut up in their sheds – knowing that American satellites would relay this information immediately to Washington. In the event, the NSA let President Bush know that the rockets were being stored away in real time.”

References:
R. W. Johnson [2011]:  Living on the Edge. London Review of Books, 33 (9):  32-33 (2011-04-28).

Musical Genealogies

Published by peter on 2012-05-14 in Hands, History, Music and Violin. 0 Comments

Thinking recently about tradition, I compiled genealogies for the lessons I have had in musical composition and in learning to play various instruments.

In composition, I once had lessons on serialist composition with James (“Gentleman Jim”) Penberthy, who in turn had had lessons from Nadia Boulanger. Although every mid-western American city was said to have had a music teacher who’d once been a pupil of Boulanger, the same was not true of Australia. As best I can determine the genealogy is thus:

  • James Penberthy (1917-1999)
    • Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)
      • Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)
        • Louis Niedermeyer (1802-1861)
          • Emanual Aloys Forster (1748-1823)
            • Johann Georg Pausewang (1738-1812)
        • Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921)
          • Fromental Halevy (1799-1862)
            • Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)

I am greatly pleased to find myself a composition student descendant of Cherubini, whose sublime string quartets influenced and were influenced by those of Mendelssohn.

For piano, I was very privileged to be taught by nuns of the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, initially Sr Claver Butler RSM (ca.1930-2009), and then later Sr Clare Castle RSM (ca.1920-2000). Sr Claver enabled me, unlike all her previous students, to encounter music first through an understanding of theory rather than through practice. Together, through trial-and-error, we found that this approach suited far better my top-down mode of thinking, which was evident, apparently, even as a child. Sr Clare, with an articulate self-confidence that intimidated other students and their parents but which enlivened me, left me with the thought that nervousness in performance was to be welcomed, since “placid people never achieve anything.”

Although not taught by her, I was also given valuable advice and help by fellow-organist Miss Dot Crowe (ca.1915-1975), a pianist and organist who had led her own swing jazz band in the Northern Rivers of NSW in the 1940s, Dot Crowe and the Arcadian Six.

For the tuba, I was taught by my trombonist father and by trumpeter and band-master Mr Frederick Wedd (1891-1972). Wedd had been one of the trumpeters selected to play a fanfare for the arrival in Australia in May 1920 of the future King Edward VIII on his 1920 Royal Tour of Australia. For saxophone, my teacher Sig. Leopoldo Mugnai is a great-grand-pupil of Marcel Mule (1901-2001), so that makes me Mule’s great-great-grand-pupil. For vibraphone, I am very ably taught by Mr James Taylor.

In violin, I once had some lessons from Mr Leo Birsen, whose genealogy was:

  • Leo Birsen (1902-1992)
    • Jeno Hubay (1858-1937)
      • Joseph Joachim (1831-1907)
        • Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)
          • Eduard Rietz (1802-1832)
            • Johann Friedrich Ritz (1767-1828) (ER’s father)
            • Pierre Rode (1774-1830)
              • Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755-1824)

Subsequently, I have had lessons from two fine teachers whose genealogies are as follows. My first teacher Ms Gisela Soares was taught by:

  • Philip Heyman
  • Ryszard Woycicki
    • Stefan Kamasa (1930 – )
      • Jan Rakowski (1898-1962)
        • Karola Wierzuchowskiego
      • Tadeusz Wronski (1915-2000)
      • P. Pasquier

And my second teacher Dr Claudio Forcada was taught by:

  • Goncal Comellas Fabrega (1945- )
    • Joan Massia i Prats (1890-1969)
      • Alfred Marchot (1861-1939)
        • Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931)
          • Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880)
          • Henry Vieuxtemps (1820-1881)

Here, parallel indents show a student of multiple teachers. Thus, Ysaye was taught by both Wieniawksi and Vieuxtemps. As it happens, Wieniawksi was also a pupil of Vieuxtemps.

Note: This post has been updated several times, most recently on 2024-07-18.

XX Foxiness: Counter-espionage

Published by peter on 2012-04-15 in Decision theory, Game theory, Heroes, History, Intelligence and Espionage and Politics. 0 Comments

I have just read Ben MacIntyre’s superb “Double Cross:  The True Story of the D-Day Spies” (Bloomsbury, London 2012), which describes the succesful counter-espionage operation conducted by the British against the Nazis in Britain during WW II.  Every Nazi foreign agent in Britain was captured and either tried and executed, or turned, being run by the so-called Twenty (“XX”) Committee.  This network of double agents, many of whom created fictional sub-agents, became a secret weapon of considerable power, able to mislead and misdirect  Nazi war efforts through their messages back to their German controllers (in France, Portugal, Spain and Germany).
The success of these misdirections was known precisely, since Britain was able to read most German encrypted communications, through the work of Bletchley Park (the Enigma project).  Indeed, since the various German intelligence controllers often simply passed on the messages they received from their believed-agents in Britain verbatim (ie, without any summarization or editing),  these message helped the decoders decipher each German daily cypher code:  the decoders had both the original message sent from Britain and its encrypted version communicated between German intelligence offices in (say) Lisbon and Berlin.
This secret weapon was used most famously to deflect Nazi attentions from the true site of the D-Day landings in France.  So successful was this, with entire fictional armies created and reported on in South East England and in Scotland (for purported attacks on Calais in France and on Norway), that even after the war’s end, former Nazi military leaders talked about the non-use by allies of these vast forces, still not realizing the fiction.
One interesting question is the extent to which parts of German intelligence were witting or even complicit in this deception.  The Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization, under its leader Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (who led it 1935-1944), was notoriously anti-Nazi.  Indeed, many of its members were arrested for plotting against Hitler.  Certainly, if not witting or complicit, many of its staff were financially corrupt, and happy to take a percentage of payments made to agents they knew or suspected to be fictional.
Another fascinating issue is when it may not be good to know something:  One Abwehr officer, Johnny Jebsen, remained with them while secretly talking to the British about defecting.   The British could not, of course, know where his true loyalties lay while he remained with the Abwehr.   Despite their best efforts to stop him, he told them of all the German secret agents then working in Britain.  They tried to stop him because once he told them, he knew that they knew who the Germans believed their agents to be.  Their subsequent reactions to having this knowledge  – arrest each agent or leave the agent in place – would thus tell him which agents were really working for the Nazis and which were in fact double agents.
Jebsen was drugged and forcibly returned to Germany by the Abwehr (apparently, to pre-empt him being arrested by the SS and thus creating an excuse for the closure of the Abwehr), and then was tortured, sent to a concentration camp, and probably murdered by the Nazis.  It seems he did not reveal anything of what he knew about the British deceptions, and withstood the torture very bravely.  MacIntyre rightly admires him as one of the unsung heroes of this story.
Had Jebsen been able to defect to Britain, as others did, the British would have faced the same quandary that later confronted both CIA and KGB with each defecting espionage agent during the Cold War:  Is this person a genuine defector or a plant by the other side?  I have talked before about some of the issues for what to believe, what to pretend to believe, and what to do in the case of KGB defector (and IMHO likely plant) Yuri Nosenko, here and here.
 

Comrade Bourbon

Published by peter on 2012-04-08 in Communism, History and Politics. 0 Comments

The Bourbons, in Talleyrand’s famous formulation, learnt nothing and forgot nothing.  Further to my speculations as to what Czechoslovakia’s last Communist ruler, Gustav Husak, thought about his life’s work after he was deposed, along comes an interview with Margot Honecker, wife of the last-but-one leader of the DDR, Erich Honecker.   This is apparently her first public interview since defenestration.

Friedler [her interlocuter] said that over the several days he interviewed her, Honecker, who during her 26-year tenure as education minister introduced weapons training to schools, and ordered every teacher to report all incidences of deviation by pupils from the communist line, remained bizarrely detached from reality and resolute in her defence of East Germany.
“Margot Honecker showed no remorse, or discernment, she expressed no word of regret or apology,” he said.”

Her dogged devotion to the cause is to be admired, although it might better be termed recalcitrance. 
In one of history’s great ironies, when the Honeckers were  pushed from office in 1989, they also lost their (luxurious) state housing and benefits.  Having spent both their careers as members of the nomenklatura, they were now homeless, and were forced to ask dissident Lutheran pastor, Rev. Uwe Holmer,  for help in finding somewhere to stay.  He and his family hosted them for several months.   Somehow, one cannot imagine Margot Honecker acting likewise, if the situation were reversed.
 

Husak Agonistes?

Published by peter on 2012-01-02 in Communism, History and Politics. 0 Comments

Posting recently following the death of Vaclav Havel, my mind returns to a question that has long pre-occupied me.  What did Havel’s predecessor as President of Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak, think of communism and of his role in it?  What did he think he was doing, at the time and subsequently?
Husak was a leading Slovak communist from before WW II (taking part in the brief Slovak National Uprising in September 1944), and afterwards.    However he fell victim to the Stalinist purges and trials that took place across most of Eastern Europe of the early 1950s (some of which which I wrote about here), and he spent the years 1954-1960 in prison.   Although most of the purges in Czechoslovakia at that time had an anti-semitic aspect, I do not believe he was Jewish. What does such an experience do to a good communist?  Does he, like Koestler’s bolshevik, Rubashov, come to believe that the Party, possessor of objective truth and the imprimatur of history, must always be in the right, and that therefore he, despite the evidence of his own lying eyes, is in the wrong?  Or does he maintain his innocence, believing that some error of judicial process has been made?  Such a view may require courage in the face of injustice and evil, as shown by Husak’s compatriot, the very brave Milada Horakova.   Or does he reject his prior beliefs in communism altogether, turning apostate like Cristóvão Ferreira, Portuguese Jesuit-turned-Shintoist, and the subject of Shusaku Endo’s great novel, Silence?    Or does he become some Vicar of Bray character, sailing – cynically, opportunistically – in whatever direction the prevailing winds point, not really believing or disbelieving anything?   A man is rarely just one straight thing, and someone may be each of these at different times in his life, especially someone sitting in prison with lots of time to think.
Husak was subsequently rehabilitated by the KSC, and served as Deputy Premier of Czechoslovakia from April 1968.  Was he appointed then because the reformers around Alexander Dubcek considered him a reformer too? Perhaps he was viewed by them as akin to the Polish communist leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had also been detained in the purges of the 1950s (although never tried or convicted, nor even, apparently, interrogated), and later rehabilitated and made leader.  If Husak was indeed a reformer in April 1968, then why did he adopt a collaborationist line after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August?  Was he, like the later Polish leaders, Wojciech Jaruzelski and Mieczyslaw Rakowski, convinced that collaboration was the only feasible and patriotic path for a national state inside the Soviet empire at the time.   General Jaruzelski still maintains this position regarding his imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981.  If, instead,  Husak was a not a reformer in April 1968, was he actively duplicitous, or merely some Vicar of Bray.
And after the fall, when the KSC-dominated Parliament of Czechoslovakia voted unanimously in December 1989 for Havel to be President, what then did Husak think?  That the winds had once again shifted, and that it was time once again for All-Change?  Or that, despite the revisionist winds, blowing this time from Moscow itself,  he had been right all along to be a communist, and that history, far from having ended in the present, would at some future point judge him so?
A Polish journalist, Teresa Toranska, published in the twilight days of Polish communism a series of interviews with leading communists who had led the party at its rise to power four decades before (Toranska 1988).  What was striking to me when I first read these interviews twenty-odd years ago was the variety of responses of those interviewed:  from regret and sadness, through to defiant recalcitrance.   Some begged forgiveness for what they had done or been complicit in.  Some had, apparently, subverted the system from within (for example, Stefan Staszewski secretly printing and distributing multiple unauthorized copies of Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956).  Others thought only that mistakes had been made, although apparently not by them.   Still others, like the Bourbons, had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.  I am intrigued by where Husak would have placed himself in this cabinet of wonders.
And, as always, how interesting it is that colonial empires so often collapse from the centre – France in 1958, Portugal in 1974, the USSR in 1989.
POSTSCRIPT [2012-01-21]:  Some of the diversity of views of Party members is shown in the first part of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1981 parallel-worlds film:  Przypadek  (Blind Chance).
POSTCRIPT [2012-04-08]:  And here is Margot Honecker, as obstinately recalcitrant as a rhodesian whenwe.
References:
Shusaku Endo [1966]: Silence.
Arthur Koestler [1940]: Darkness at Noon.
Teresa Toranska [1988]:  Them:  Stalin’s Polish Puppets.  HarperCollins. Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska.

The Matherati: Matthew Piers Watt Boulton

Published by peter on 2011-12-23 in History, Matherati and Religion. 0 Comments

Matthew Piers Watt Boulton (1820-1894, pictured in portrait by Sir Francis Grant, ca. 1840) was the eldest grandson of the great engineer Matthew Boulton, and was named for James Watt, his grandfather’s partner-in-steam.   He inherited significant wealth and attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where his first tutor was the mathematician George Peacock (1791-1858), undergraduate friend of Charles Babbage and Alexander d’Arblay.    At Cambridge, Boulton studied mathematics, logic, and classics. He declined to apply for scholarships, despite his evident ability and in the face of entreaties from his tutor and his father, on the grounds that they bred unpleasant competitiveness – perhaps he was someone after my own heart.  It is likely that, for the same reason, he did not sit the Tripos examinations.
 

He was however of strong mathematical bent.  In 1868, he patented a method for lateral control of aircraft in flight, inventing what are now called ailerons.  Being a gentleman of wealth and leisure, he was able to read and write at will, and published translations of classic literature, some poetry, and pamphlets on solar energy, in addition to a work on aircraft stability.   Kinzer (2009) makes a compelling case for him also being the author of several works of philosophy published by someone calling himself “M. P. W. Bolton,” mostly in the 1860s.
Kinzer quotes the following words from Boulton’s paper,  “Has a Metaphysical Society any raison d’etre?”, read to a meeting of the Metaphysical Society, held at the Grosvenor Hotel on 9 April 1874 and chaired by William Gladstone:

There is no question, however apparently non-metaphysical, which may not be pursued till we come to the Metaphysical.  The question of whether Tarquin lived, and whether Lucretia committed suicide, is about as non-metaphysical as any question can be: yet disputants engaged in its discussion may persist till they open up the general question of the credibility of testimony; and this may open that of the credibility of memory, the nature of belief, what grounds we have for believing the existence of other persons, and an external world . . .  Whenever we try to bottom a question or subject, to use Locke’s word (the French word would be “approfondir”) then Metaphysics come in sight  . . . Every sentence involves, in some shape or other, the verb “to be”, and this, if pursued long enough, leads to the heart of Metaphysics  . . . Scientific persons often speak of Metaphysics  with scorn, calling them an Asylum Ignorantiae, useful enough to the vulgar, but in no way needed by themselves.  They imagine their science to be perfectly luminous, far above the lower regions where Metaphysical mists prevail.  But in reality they share the common lot:  the ideas of Force, Law, Cause, Substance, Causal or Active Matter, all dwell in the region of metaphysical twilight, not in the luminous ether. “

 
References:
For some reason, reading the quoted passage brought to mind Richard Dawkins and memes.
I am grateful to Bruce Kinzer for some information here.
There is an index here to posts about members of the Matherati.
Billie Andrew Inman [1991]:  Pater’s Letters at the Pierpont Morgan Library.  English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 34 (4):401-417.
Bruce Kinzer [1979]: In search of M.P.W. Bolton. Notes and Queries, n.s., 26 (August 1979): 310-313.
Bruce Kinzer [2009]:  Flying under the radar:  The strange case of Matthew Piers Watt Boulton. Times Literary Supplement, 1 May 2009, pp. 14-15.

Havel na Hrad!

Published by peter on 2011-12-19 in Heroes, History, Intelligence and Espionage, Obituaries and Politics. 0 Comments

A memorial salute to Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), who died yesterday.  I first read his Letters to Olga in the 1980s, and have found this and his other writings inspiring.  Havel’s life, too, reads like one of his own plays, and I long admired his courage, his profound self-awareness, and his integrity-of-purpose.

In one of his memoirs, Havel mentions the trepidation which Mikhail Gorbachev apparently felt prior to their first meeting, a meeting that took place in Moscow in 1990 shortly after Havel’s assumption of the Presidency of Czechoslovakia in December 1989, and immediately following Havel’s first official trip to the USA.  Gorbachev, a victim like any other citizen of Soviet misinformation and propaganda, it seems had never met a genuine dissident before and feared what Havel would say or do in the meeting, perhaps even fearing that Havel would attack him physically.
This anecdote came to mind today while reading a surreal account (Chodakiewicz 2011) of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, which claims the entire process of political transformation 20 years ago there was engineered by the Russian Communist nomenklatura as a grand, multi-national, multi-party, multi-year, multi-political-party conspiracy to remain in power.   Among Chodakiewicz’s offensive absurdities is to claim that the leadership of the Polish United Workers Party (the Polish communist party) was second only to that of Bulgaria in its servility to Moscow in the post-war period.   One wonders just why, then, did Poland experience no Stalinist show-trials in the early 1950s?  Why then was Wladyslaw Gomulka arrested, stripped of his posts and detained for several years in the same period, without being interrogated or tried or punished or executed (as were, say, his equivalent colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia) and then later restored to a leadership position?  Was this, too, a charade that was part of the grand conspiracy?    How could such evident nonsense be published in a reputable refereed journal?
Footnote (2011-12-26):
In an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker (2003), Havel says regarding his first meeting with Gorbachev (in which the two negotiated the withdrawal of Soviet armed forces from Czechoslovakia):

I met Gorbachev about two months after I was elected President.  We went to Moscow, for my first visit to the Kremlin, and we met for eight or nine hours.  At first, Gorbachev looked at me as if I was some kind of exotic creature – the first living dissident he ever saw, who was coming to him as the head of a state that had been part of his realm.  But, gradually, we developed a kind of friendship, which had even begun to develop at the end of that first long visit to the Kremlin.”   

References:
Guardian obituary here, and Economist tribute here.  The Economist claims that Charter 77 was the “first open manifestation of dissent inside the Soviet empire”.  That claim rather ignores the various uprisings going back at least to 1953 (in the DDR), in Hungary in 1956, in Poland on numerous occasions, and even in Moscow – the public protest by the Moscow Seven in August 1968 against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was indeed, one of several protests in the USSR and elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc.
A salute to another Czech hero here, along with a note on the leninist nature of Gorbachev’s reforms.   And here a tribute to the Moscow Seven.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz [2011]: Active measures gone awry:  Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, 1989-1992.  International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, 24 (3): 467-493.
David Remnick [2003]:  Exit Havel.  The New Yorker, 17 February 2003.

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Published by peter on 2011-11-03 in Forecasting, History, Politics and Prophecy. 0 Comments

It has always struck me that Karl Marx’s prediction that capitalism would be eclipsed by socialism and then by communism was a self-denying prophecy: because he made this prediction, and because of the widespread popularity of his (and other socialists’) ideas, politicians and businessmen were moved to act in ways which allowed capitalism to adapt, rather than to die. It seems that the end of communism may have been partly due to similar reflective-system effects.
In her book, Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, Anna Funder writes the following about the opposition to the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the former German Democratic Republic (the DDR):

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that it appeared that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them. (pp. 197-198)
 

NOTE:  A comment about the processes which led to the end of communism in the USSR is contained in this post.
Reference:
Anna Funder [2003]: Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. (London, UK: Granta Books).

My heart remains in Orchard Street

Published by peter on 2011-10-22 in Culture, History and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

Just recalled this sad break-up letter from John Vorwald to the Lower East Side, published two years ago.

Dear Lower East Side,

I don’t know how to say this.

It’s over.

For years I defended you.  I stood by you — faithful to a fault. When people said you were dirty or unkempt, I called it character. When they said you were running with a shady crowd and staying out too late, I said it was a phase. And when they shook their heads and said you’d sold out, I’d say you’d come back around.

But I was wrong.

Recently, on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow (the once-proud site of the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” album cover), a photo shoot was taking place. Two rugged men — shaved heads, chiseled jaws, cultivated stubble — were decked out in full prep-school regalia. Tweed plaid pants, sweater vest, looming crest. Pose, flash, pose. A bearded photographer angled for an incongruous blend of uptown couture and downtown street grit. Princeton ghettoway. Slytherin in the City. Call it what you like.

At that moment, I knew two things were true: Somewhere, someplace, Lou Reed was crying. And you and I were finished.

Sure, we’ve had our good times; you’ve been there for me. When I was coming off a breakup with a sleepier borough, you gave me your stripped-wire energy. I loved your pulse — the crackle and hum that only downtown Manhattan could provide (shut up, Fort Greene). Who needed pretty brownstones and an inferiority complex? I had your tenement castles. Forget backyard gardens; I had your grid of fire escapes, my own urban picket fence.

I’ll always remember our early days. I wasn’t exactly promiscuous, but I’d been around — Greenpoint, SoHo, East Village, Boerum Hill. You reminded me of a gracefully aging rocker, grizzled and sage. I admit it, I liked the cougar in you.

By the early 2000s your renaissance was well under way, but it was your past lives that spoke to guys like me. A simple walk along Orchard Street conjured nickel-and-dime vaudeville, turn-of-the-century Jewish grandparents, ’70s punk, bargain leather and the odor of garbage and sour beer. Richard Price once described you as a modern-day Byzantium. You were more like my very own Alexandria, richer for your rag-and-bone ruins. So, I nestled into a fourth-floor perch over Ludlow and listened to the street pop like a 45 track, like so many broken bottles.

It was perfect. For a while.

True, I’m no Reagan-era squatter. My forebears did not immigrate to your streets. But I know a thing or three about you now. Only a few years ago, you’d reserve your special mayhem for the weekends. Amateur nights in your arms — a beautiful mess. All trussed up like a ’50s-era pinup model, you were the Queen Bee welcoming one and all with a knowing wink. We were still O.K. then, you and I. I knew that the workweek was our time, when I could still catch glimpses of the real you: the Chinese ladies returning from the Essex Street Market, the local kids playing ball at Roosevelt Park, the tattooed cartoonist stationed in the window across the courtyard. Even the din of bands rehearsing in errant basements along Ludlow.

Then they came — your new friends.

You gussied yourself up with shiny new hardware: Thor, Fat Baby, Spitzer’s. Hordes of banker boys in J. Press checked shirt/chino uniforms and manicured necklines swarmed to you faster than to the promise of a government bailout. They enjoyed sausage-party dinners at Schiller’s (“It’s like Pastis, but edgy!”), used winter as a verb and eyed sun-speckled Germans and Australians “on holiday.”

Toothsome Upper East Side girl packs (never fewer than four) tarted up in too-new Lilly Pulitzer dresses and slurped down sugar-free Red Bull and Grey Gooses at the Stanton Social. Hipster millennials, rocking extra-skinny jeans, oversize Elton John glasses and cocked-back fedoras, turned Pianos and Welcome to the Johnsons into their own private Thompson Twins video. Hold me now. Hold my heart.

At first you shrugged, as if to say, “Can I help it if I’m so popular?” The truth is, you liked the attention. And who could blame you? Wasn’t it better than the heady days of strung-out junkies on every corner? So, I tried looking in the other direction. I took whole weekends away. I’d leave you to your affairs — the girls and the boys.

I told myself that you’d get it out of your system, that you’d grow out of it. I visited neighbors — precious NoLIta, wizened East Vil — but I kept coming back to you, forgiving your indiscretions. Then, one day, I realized we had both changed. Truth is, you like the new you, this Guitar Hero version of yourself: the mallternative bands, the squeaky-clean beer halls, the rooftop parties at glass hotels. And me? Well, I could say that the ironic T-shirts have lost some of their charm (they have), or that I am not like them (I’m not). But, really, isn’t the awful truth that yours is a love only for the very young and carefree? And I am decidedly neither.

So, as the new year dawns, I must vow to leave you, dear L.E.S.

Not sure yet where I’ll end up. I should let you know that I’ve been seeing someone, someone a little less flashy, someone who isn’t trying nearly so hard, and — it must be said — someone who actually enjoys the company of an older man. No, it doesn’t matter who. What matters is that we’ve come to the end, my lovely Loisaida. I know I’ll miss you, and the spell you once cast over me. But as an old flame of yours named Lou Reed once said, “There’s a bit of magic in everything, and then some loss to even things out.”

Regretfully,

John Vorwald

Romani ite domum!

Published by peter on 2011-10-06 in Classics, History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

Rory Stewart, with his personal experience of foreign military adventures, writes an insightful post about the Roman occupation of Britain, after visiting Hadrian’s Wall:

But for me the walk along the wall was an unsettling revelation. It is easy in Cumbria to feel a connection to our Norse and Anglo-Saxon past: we can worship in a Saxon church in Morland; my cottage follows a Viking floor-plan; our dialect can be understood by a Dane; Norse words like fell and beck are part of our modern vocabulary; and there is, I imagine, Scandinavian blood in all of us. But, the wall is the most dramatic reminder of our Celtic-roman history. And it suggests things far more alien, extravagant and brutal than I had ever imagined.
I have heard historians describe the wall – as ‘a permeable trading post’ – and emphasize how much melding there was between the British and Roman populations. But at Wallsend, the excavations have revealed a line of fortification, hundreds of yards wide – a ten foot turf wall, followed by a twelve foot ditch, followed by a berm set with spikes and thorns, then a fifteen foot stone wall, then another ten foot mound, another fifteen foot vallum ditch and a ten foot mound. These fortifications run almost unbroken for eighty miles and they do not suggest to me gentle inter-cultural communication.
I once lived in a fortified camp in Al Amara in provincial Iraq, with five hundred British soldiers, surrounded by a line of giant sand-bags. The nearest neighbouring camp was in Basra, sixty miles away. But in the Roman wall, there was a manned tower every three hundred yards, a castle every mile, a fort – with a garrison the size of ours in Al Amara – every seven miles, and an additional line of large forts, two miles South (as at Vindolanda and Corbridge), and other smaller outposts, just North (as at Bewcastle). These were auxiliary positions. There were also three full legions in Britain – more than in any other comparable province of the Roman Empire. And the Romans held these positions not like us in Amara, for three years, but for three hundred years.
There are some British details but overwhelmingly the inscriptions, the clothes, the buildings, even the shoes, found along the wall, are relentlessly Roman. In the North-West, the British continued to live a life in round-houses, similar to those that existed long before the Roman arrival. A Libyan could become an Emperor but very few ethnic Britons were given jobs in the Roman Empire. Even the auxiliaries may not have been as integrated into British life as we imagine. The Syrian archers beyond Housesteads worshipped a Syrian God; the Batavians in Vindolanda were like Gurkhas – a separate ethnic military elite – and they have left notes, referring contemptuously to the ‘britunculli’ – the pathetic little Britons.
Why did Rome maintain this cripplingly expensive occupation? The smaller walls on the German, Saharan and Iraqi frontiers protected Rome from millions of people in Africa, Europe and Asia. But in this case, there was only a sparsely populated Scotland beyond. Britain never posed a serious threat to the Roman empire; and it never brought in enough revenue to justify the expense of holding it. 
. . .
If Britain had really had the comfortable relationship with Rome which some imagine, more would have survived (as it did in France for example).  But when the legions left in 410 AD, almost four hundred years of Roman civilization collapsed overnight. Within a decade, from Cumbria to Kent, there was no coinage, the potteries and aqueducts had stopped, the villas had been abandoned, writing had largely been forgotten. And for us no trace remained except for some ditches to inconvenience the plough, and this great symbol of the brutality, the stubbornness and pride of Empire, reduced to a stone quarry, eighty miles long, which could be robbed, for fifteen hundred years, for house, and barn, and dry-stone wall.”