Death, the Father of Invention

In the news, there is a story about an enterprising young engineer working on a new design for a storage battery.  Unfortunately, the battery prototype exploded, killing the young man.  Truly a shame, not only for the young man and his family, but also because the choke point in our nation’s plan for alternative energy is the current lousy capability of storage batteries.

Unfortunately, such accidents with inventors and engineers are sort of the norm.  New technology has a history of biting its creators in the ass.  Perhaps this is nature’s feedback mechanism against an over-supply of mad scientists.

One of the earliest examples of this is Li Si, a Chinese philosopher, politician, and man of science during the Qin Dynasty (roughly 2200 years ago).  As a sort of Renaissance man before the Renaissance, Li Si was an enlightened advisor to the emperor.  Unfortunately, his enlightenment did not quite extend far enough to cover his inventions.  This was a time of harsh physical  punishments for crimes—some of which were known as the Five Pains, which included the amputation of hands, the cutting off of your nose, the amputation of all genital organs and finally—not to mention mercifully—the death of the unfortunate victim by decapitation or literally chopping the victim in half.

This gruesome process was as difficult as it was bloody, so Li Si developed a machine that would perform all the steps, one at a time, automating the torture and death of the prisoners.  After Li Si was convicted of treason, he was given the chance of observing the machine’s operation first hand (thankful, no doubt, for his machine’s smooth operating efficiency).

Being killed by your own invention happens more frequently than you might imagine, particularly in hazardous fields like aviation.   Frank Reichelt, a Parisian tailor, developed an overcoat that he believed could convert into a glider.  When he begged to be allowed to test his invention from the Eiffel Tower, skeptical authorities grudgingly granted permission, but required Reichelt to test the invention first on a life-sized dummy.  The inventor agreed, but once at the top of the tower, he decided that his hesitancy to test his invention himself might deter future investors.  In the end, Reichelt’s descent still discouraged future investors.  Permanently.  

Aviation has been rather hard on inventors.  Otto Lilienthal might have beat the Wright Brothers in developing powered flight had he not crashed his glider.  Henry Smolinkski tried to develop a flying car, but unfortunately chose a Ford Pinto as the base for his futuristic vehicle.   Sheikh Ismail hoped to develop a simple helicopter so inexpensive that it would available for the common man—sort of a flying Volkswagen.  Unfortunately, during a test flight, the inventor perished when a main rotor blade malfunctioned and struck him in the head.

The auto industry has been equally unkind to innovators.  Francis Stanley died when he drove one of his Stanley Steamers into a wood pile.  And Fred Duesenberg, the developer of a car so beautiful that it inspired the phrase, “That’s a doozey!”, died while racing one of his cars.   Perhaps the strangest automotive death happened to Sylvester Roper, the developer of the first true powered motorcycle.  In 1896, while test-driving his latest steam-powered velocipede, he reached a speed sufficiently fast enough—roughly 40 mph—to give the inventor a fatal heart attack.

Inventors have fairly regularly gone down with their ships.  Thomas Andrews went down with his Titanic, Horace Hunley developed three different submarines for the Confederate Navy, all of which sank, the last of which was the first true combat submarine and was lost with the inventor on board.  Cowper Phipps Coles developed an innovative turret ship that promptly sank on its maiden voyage, killing all 480 on board, including Captain Coles.

If you work in the chemical industry, deaths relating to you work are damn near a job requirement.  Madam Curie died of anemia caused by the radium she discovered, the first of many such deaths that occurred to scientists attempting to use the material in luminescent paint.   Countless scientists died during the 20th century while trying to perfect chemical and biological weapons of war, with other details of some of these deaths just now coming to light.  And, of course, we still don’t know the name of the Chinese chef who perished oCovid  while attempting to perfect the recipe for Bat Tartare.  

There is one truly dark prince of the invention world, Thomas Midgley.  Probably a very nice guy who took care of his mother and had lots of friends…but his inventions definitely left the world worse off than before.  First, he was the guy responsible for developing tetraethyl lead, thus putting lead in gasoline, and while this made internal combustion engines run better, it also put enough lead in the environment to cause significant health issues including a measurable drop of IQ among urban dwellers.  Personally, I’m convinced that if enough research were done, we would probably find that this increased lead in the environment was responsible for the rise in reality television shows and New Coke.

When damn near everyone who understood the dangers of plumbism objected, Midgley (then an employee of General Motors) held demonstrations in which he poured bottles of tetraethyl lead over his hands, held the bottle under his nose while he inhaled deeply for more than a minute at a time, generally demonstrated the overall safety of his product.  He stopped doing the demonstrations after he took a leave of absence from General Motors to be treated for severe lead poisoning.

If that wasn’t enough, Midgley then developed an improved gas for refrigeration units, chlorofluorocarbon, commercially known as Freon.  You remember Freon—the gas responsible for depleting the ozone layer until a giant hole appeared in it over South Pole.  For the life of me I can’t remember all the details about exactly why this was so bad (something about it let in so much ultraviolet that it created a herd of blind sheep in Patagonia).  There was more to it than that, but there have been so many imminent catastrophic climate disasters looming on the horizon that I can’t keep track of them between leaded gas and Freon, even as I write this, there are environmentalists somewhere throwing darts at photos of Midgley, but they really need not bother, because just like the other inventors mentioned, Midgley eventually died at the hands of his own creation.  

After contracting polio as an adult, he created a  motorized system of wires and pulleys that would lift him out of bed and help him sit up up and be comfortable.  In 1944, the system malfunctioned and strangled the inventor.  

I have no idea what happened to Midgley’s pet, a blind sheep.

The Usury Battle Continues

The New Mexico state legislature just finished its session with surprisingly good results.  Only a couple of the lawmakers were arrested to drunken driving, there were no reported fistfights, and no one filed any new lawsuits for sexual harassment against the governor.  Even more surprising, the state finally did something about the exorbitantly high interest rates charged in the state.

Usury, the unethical charging of an exorbitant amount of interest on a loan (long a hot topic of debate here in New Mexico) is finally changing.  About four thousand years after Hammurabi solved the problem, the lazy lawmakers up in Santa Fe finally got around to fixing the problem, too. 

If you were to measure the speed at which the legislature moves to solve problems, you’d be hard pressed to find a chronometer.  By comparison, lame Mississippi mud turtles and crippled hearse horses are streaks of lightning.  Eventually, you’d probably end up pacing these sluggish politicians against the formation of stalagmites or the erosions of canyons.  Naturally, you’d have to give the legislature a generous head start.

Supposedly, the argument against the prohibition of interest rates that would make a mafia loan shark blush was that capping the rates would deny the poor a source of credit during an emergency.  Using the same logic, we should allow arson to provide a source of heat during the winter.  It would be cynical of me to suggest that the opponents of such measures receive financial contributions from PACs supported by the loan industry.  

Loans are a necessary part of an expanding economy, and connecting those with money to lend with those who wish to borrow funds to build or expand a business is one of the primary purposes of a bank.  But, what is a fair interest rate to charge for this service?  Across history, there has been an active debate on where to draw the line between a fair rate and an interest rate that takes advantage of the desperation of the borrower.

In roughly 1790 BC, Hammurabi established his code containing a prohibition of interest rates above 33%, a fairly generous rate.  Obviously, the monarch would not have felt the need to establish a maximum rate had there not already been people willing to take an unethical advantage of the desperate need of the borrowers.  

By the time of the Roman Empire, while banking was a relatively small-scale activity for shopkeepers and the lower classes, loans were usually private affairs between rich men seeking to make a profit or to secure funds until harvest time.  While there were no restrictions on the amount of interest that could be charged, the rates usually were 4%, 12%, 24% or some other multiple of four, evidently because of the difficulty of doing math with Roman Numerals.  

After the Romans, the first usury laws were set by religions, the majority of which considered that any form of interest charged against a loan was a sin and thus prohibited, though several religions applied the prohibition only to other members of the same faith, allowing the lender to freely charge interest against non-believers.  

During the Crusades, first England, then many other European countries, used the charge of usury to expel the Jews (although though the Crown’s seizure all of the property of those expelled was probably the chief motive).  After the reformation and the concomitant slow growth of pawn shops, religious leaders relaxed their prohibitions against lending money.  This slow acceptance of loan making and charging interest on the loans was central to the plot of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Slowly, most of the world’s religions either relaxed or completely dropped their prohibitions on lending money.  The Muslim faith still officially prohibits any form of usury, and the twisted logic—both legal and theological—to circumvent this prohibition would require far more space than this blog to explain.

In the United States, there are few federal laws regulating loans, leaving the matter of regulating interest rates up to each state.  The federal government outlaws the use of force to collect a debt and mandates both racial and sexual equality for applicants, but has no laws mandating how much interest can be gouged out of a borrower.  The matter has come up for debate in Congress repeatedly, and the Supreme Court has ruled that Washington has the authority to regulate such rates under the interstate commerce provision of the constitution, but so far Congress has failed to pass any meaningful regulations on the subject.

The states, free to do what they wished with the matter, quickly scattered like a herd of puppies, providing no consensus whatsoever.  Some states mandate a maximum rate on regular loans, but allow short term emergency loans, those Payday Loans marketed to the poor, to charge exorbitant rates.  It is fairly hard to find two neighboring states with the same interest rate.

Here in New Mexico, our legislature met that challenge by passing such impressive legislation as the official state question (“Red or Green?” A reference to your preferred chile.”)  We also built a train no one rides and a Spaceport for a loony Englishman, that has lost at least a quarter of a billion dollars, so far.  It is also still against the law in New Mexico for a woman to pump her own gas or change a flat tire.  It is a petty misdemeanor to play the national anthem “inappropriately”.  What do you expect from a state where the most commonly googled recipe is for Frito pie?

What the state legislature did not do was pass any meaningful measures to regulate the loan sharks that masquerade as Payday Lenders.  

Up until a few years ago, those payday lenders could charge rates up to 1000% in addition to various fees and surcharges:  Fees like the “I Want A Bass Boat Fee” or the “You Are My Bitch Fee”.  Four-digit interest rates were necessary, it was argued, to provide emergency funds for poor people with no established means of credit.  A few years ago, the legislature reached a compromise and lowered the rates to only 175%, and left the various handling fees in place.

Finally, just last week, the New Mexico state legislature got around to fixing a problem that was solved long ago by the Mesopotamian and Hittite civilizations:  they finally brought the maximum interest rate on emergency loans down to only 36%.  Even as I write this, astronomers are searching for a bright star in the east.

While I hope the governor signs the legislation, I would still like to point out that the new rate is still higher that what Hammurabi allowed 4000 years ago.

Do You Live in a Dystopian World?

Secretly, I have a fondness for post-apocalyptic fiction.  Admittedly, if you were to rank this genre of literature, the red-haired stepchild of science fiction, it would probably only rise slightly above bodice rippers, Watership Down, or anything written by Jean Auel.  I can’t help it, however, I’m completely hooked on these novels.

All of these books follow a firmly established 3-step pattern:  The good life is unexpectedly ended forever by the catastrophe leaving the protagonists to struggle for survival in a dystopian world.  This formula was firmly established by Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis and rarely does an author stray from this well-beaten path.  (And just to make sure you understood the lesson, Noah repeated the formula.)

There are some great books in this genre:  Power Play by Kenneth Cameron, Farnham’s Freehold by Robert Heinlein (though I hate the last half of the book), and my personal favorite, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank.  I have to mention I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson, The Postman by David Brin, and Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle—all of them good books, and far better than the poor movies they spawned.  And since her work is very popular right now, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is a much better book than The Handmaid’s Tale.

It was while reading a new entry in this genre—sadly, one that doesn’t deserve mentioning—that it occurred to me that frequently the protagonists don’t realize the world they knew is gone forever, that they have slowly slid into a dystopian world without realizing they have irrevocably passed the apocalyptic threshold.  Instead of a dramatic apocalyptic event, there was a series of small steps that transpired so slowly, that by the time the situation became desperate, the problems had no solution.  And more often than not, this future world is a desert exactly like the New Mexico I call home.

Naturally, these realizations reminded me of the current pandemic and the inevitable personal question:  Am I already living in a post-apocalyptic world?   Guessing that you, too, are wrestling with this question, I have prepared an informative quiz.

The “Do I Live in a Dystopian World” Quiz.

1. Are you currently hoarding more than 20 rolls of toilet paper?  Though the vast majority of toilet paper is manufactured domestically and the availability is not affected by the problems in the supply chain, grocery stores still report a periodic ‘runs’ on wiper paper.  Meanwhile, all of the upper management at Procter & Gamble (the manufacturers of Charmin) are currently shopping for mega-yachts.  
2. Have you walked into any business unmasked any time recently?  Covid mandates may have been eased, but are there still places you can’t go without wearing a mask?  Five years ago, if I entered my bank wearing a mask, I would have been shot.  Today, everyone in the bank resembles Jesse James.
3. Is your pantry overflowing?  Is your freezer packed?  Do you have still have more than two dozen bags of Ramen noodles you bought during the early days of the pandemic?  Did you buy more cans of Campbell soup than you are likely to need in the next twelve months?  Are you still wondering why you bought all those cans of Spam?
4. Have you bought a gun in the past year?  Twenty million Americans bought a firearm in the last year and one in five of them were first time gun owners.  The last time I went to the local gun range, it seemed like every damn one of those newbie gun owners was there.  Compared to staying at the range with those morons, it would have been safer to drive across Texas in a pink Prius sporting a “Hillary 2024” bumper sticker.
5. Has it been more than 30 days since you ate dinner at a table inside a restaurant, went to a movie theater, visited a museum or library, or had a beer with a friend at a bar?  
6. Are you buying substantially less gas for your car than you did three years ago?  (I think I only filled my car twice in 2021.) 
7. Are the only people you regularly see a small handful of close friends who could qualify as your gang?  Have you gone weeks without smiling at a stranger?  Smiling behind a mask doesn’t count.  Because you are wearing a mask in public and know that people can’t see your facial expressions, do you find yourself acting rudely more often?  (I hope this is common, otherwise, I’m becoming a real asshole…Or perhaps just a bigger one.)
8. 
   In the last year, have you binge watched all of the seasons of more than three television shows?  (I’m guilty of this one, having polished off Bones, Psych, and House.  Currently, I’ve downloaded all 271 episodes of the original Perry Mason and am slowly working my way through them.  Did you know that in season six, while Raymond Burr was recovering from surgery, Bette Davis stepped in and took his place?
9. Does it seem like evil is growing by leaps and bounds?  Is meaningless violence becoming more prevalent daily and…  Oh, hell yes!—This one is a given.  Did you know that violence against Asian women is up 4300% over the last twelve months?  Why?  It is hard to imagine a more gentle, harmless group of Americans. 
10. Have you totally lost confidence in anything any government leader now says?  Has the phrase “follow the science” lost all meaning for you?  Do you still trust and listen to your own personal physician, but believe anyone on television wearing a white lab coat is incapable of correctly stating the date?
11. Do you have masks and hand sanitizer in your coat pocket, in your car, in your purse, or in your office drawer…or (Heaven help us!) in several of the above convenient locales?  Isn’t it kind of strange that your car doesn’t have a first aid kit, but has several surgical masks?

If you answered even half of these in the affirmative, then (unfortunately) you are already living in your own personal science fiction story.  The zombies aren’t staggering down your street:  they are confined to the anchor desks of the evening news and to your state legislature.  There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it, either, beyond grabbing one of the above novels and studying for the final exam.

One last novel I’d recommend:  Try The Children of Men by P. D. James.  Instead of there being a sudden apocalyptic event, it portrays a world transformed by a series of small events that reach a climax in the year 2021.  You know the book has to be great—the main character is a historian.

The Lost Novel of Jules Verne

After decades of dedicated hoarding, I have an extensive library at home, brilliantly organized in such a way that for any given book, I can probably tell you in which room I have misplaced it, with at least a 50% accuracy.  

I also own a Kindle with sufficient memory to hold thousands of books—a virtual library that I can carry in my coat pocket (an unimaginable luxury just a few decades ago).  Unfortunately, due to Amazon’s somewhat unreasonable and stupid policy, my Kindle is no better organized than my home library.  (C’mon Amazon!  At least allow Kindle owners to organize their book collections into directories!)

Luckily, a great many of the books I need to reference frequently are now in the public domain, meaning that I can download them either for free or at a very low cost.  The works of Herodotus, the collected letters of Abraham Lincoln, and the complete Sherlock Holmes stories can all be downloaded for free.  Recently, I was offered the collected works of Jules Verne for only 99 cents, an offer I happily accepted.    

After I downloaded the books, I spent a couple of hours happily rereading some of my favorite stories, and checking to see if the collection was complete, as was advertised.  Unfortunately, it was missing Jules Verne’s latest novel—the one you have probably never heard of, the lost novel of Jules Verne.

Yes, there is a new novel by Jules Verne.  In 1863, Verne was already extremely popular due to the recent publication of Five Weeks In a Balloon.  When Verne submitted his next manuscript to his publisher, he was shocked to discover that his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, refused to publish it, saying, "I was not expecting perfection — to repeat, I knew that you were attempting the impossible — but I was hoping for something better."

Discouraged, Verne never submitted the manuscript to another publisher and began work on his next novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.  Almost everyone forgot about the manuscript for more than a century, except for a few scholars who discovered the correspondence between Verne and Hetzel, and speculated endlessly on whether the author had destroyed the manuscript.

In 1989, the great-grandson of Verne was disposing of a mountain of collected junk and memorabilia in preparation for selling the rambling four-storied house of the author.  One of the items to be disposed of was a rusty old safe that hadn’t been used in decades.  Since the combination to the safe had long been lost, it took a workman with a blowtorch to open the metal safe.  Inside, the grandson discovered the linen-wrapped manuscript that had been rejected for publication more than a century before.

Finally published in 1994, 131 years after Verne wrote it, Paris in the Twentieth Century was published in France.  Unlike the wide publicity the book received in France, the English translation received little notice in the rest of the world.  In fact, I was unable to find a copy in any nearby library and had to order one.  

In the book, Verne describes life in Paris during August, 1960, some 55 years after the author’s death.   This is a grim dystopian world in which business and technology have completely taken over society, completely eclipsing traditional cultural activities such as the arts and literature.  While more books than ever before are being published, very few Parisians bother to read the current bestsellers, such as “Poetic Parallelogram”, “Meditations on Oxygen”, or “A Practical Treatise for the Lubrication of Driveshafts.”  Verne presents a Paris where the love of painting and sculpture for their own sakes is a discarded ideal of the past that is no longer consistent with the “age’s industrial goals”.

While music is still being produced, it is more of a work of mathematics than an artistic pursuit.  The result is a cacophony of sound and disharmony.  (Here, Verne was a trifle early, as it seems that happened about thirty years after Verne predicted.)

As might be expected from a work by Verne, the author prophetically describes a variety of technological accomplishments long before their actual invention.  The streets are lit with electric lights, people travel in horseless carriages powered by internal combustion engines, driverless pneumatic rails travel underground allowing passengers to disembark and board at Metro stations.  In Verne’s future Paris, the guillotine has been replaced with the electric chair (roughly a quarter of a century before the actual invention) and its use is popularly supported because the method is closest to the “better imitation of divine vengeance”.

Although Verne has the entire world connected by a tight grid of telegraph wires that use fax machines to send photos and documents, he fails to predict telephones or the television.  And strangely, though metal nibs were already used on ink pens in the 1860’s, the people of Paris in the 1960’s use quills to write.  

I really don’t want to give too much of the plot of this book away…just how often in a lifetime are we likely to be able to read a new book by an author who has been dead for 117 years?  Be forewarned, however, that this is not the Jules Verne of Around the World in Eighty Days or 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea, this book is more along the lines of Franz Kafka meets George Orwell, decades before either author were born.  Far from an adventure story, this work is a tragedy that resembles the pessimistic work Verne published later in life, after the death of his editor, Hetzel.

Because of a peculiar loophole in our copyright laws, even though the book is ‘new’, it is already in the public domain because the author has been dead for more than 75 years.  If you would like to read a copy, you will find it here for free.  You can download it, and keep it on your Kindle, like I did.

If Elected, I Will Not Serve

I was making chicken fajitas, and I used half of both a red and a green bell pepper.  The remainders I sliced up for use the next day, securely locking them into a nice glass container that I use just for that purpose.  Then I very carefully opened the dishwasher, placing the vegetable container on the rack.  While the fajitas were cooking, I went ahead and ran the dishwasher.  The bell peppers are very clean.

There is an easy explanation for this behavior:  I’m old.  Not very old, but definitely old.  I’m still just short of being a septuagenarian, but I do remember President Eisenhower played too much golf.  (Perhaps it’s because I’m a historian, but I tend to date things by presidential eras.)

There are many subjects where I have a greater knowledge or ability to understand far better than when I was younger, but I am definitely finding it much harder to memorize specific details about some subjects.  During a recent Art History course, I found it extremely difficult to memorize the artists’ names and the dates paintings were created.  I could understand the paintings, and even remember details about the artists’ lives (and could probably discuss the iconography in detail) but I sometimes couldn’t quite remember the artists’ names.  

As I have aged, I’ve changed in other ways, too.  I have become both more intolerant and critical about a wide range of subjects that I will just lump together and call stupidity.  (For the sake of kindness, I will not specifically name all the members of the Enema U Administration that should be neutered in a medical procedure involving two bricks and a bucket of rubbing alcohol.)  My wife, The Doc, suggests that—perhaps—I become a trifle “intense” at times.

All of the above gently suggests that I am probably not a good candidate to become the next President of the United States.  Neither is anyone else who is either as old as or older than, I am.

While I disagree with President Joe Biden on many political issues, I firmly believe that he is, fundamentally, a good and decent man who genuinely wants to serve his country.  Unfortunately, I also believe that he is too old to do the job well.  Frankly, every morning when I read the newspaper, I expect to see a story about how the United Nations is taking America to the international court in The Hague and collectively charging us with elder abuse.  

That last sentence isn’t just tongue-in-cheek blog humor—the literally hardest and most demanding job in the world is currently held by a man 79 years old.  Of the leaders of all industrialized nations in the world, only the Queen of England and Pope Francis are older than our president.

I’m not picking on President Biden—there are clearly politicians in both parties who have….well…let’s just say their ‘sell by dates’ are long passed.  If we were to set a maximum age for political leaders at age seventy (like many countries), 71% of the Senate would have to retire.  I picked age seventy as a retirement age because over half of the states have already picked seventy as the upper age limit for judges.  Arkansas is particularly punitive to the elderly:  the state now has a law specifying that any state judge who refuses to retire at age seventy loses all retirement benefits.

Scientists who have studied the problem of aging suggest that cognitive decline by age seventy is inevitable.  While more years may provide the elderly with more experience and more wisdom, it doesn’t alter them fact that as we pass our sixties, we can’t do quite as much nor do it quite as quickly.  While the level of decline may vary with individuals, there is measurable decline in everyone by the time they reach seventy.

Recent studies conducted at Harvard and M.I.T. suggest that there are several different kinds of cognitive activity that reach their highest peak at different ages.  While vocabulary, a good indication of overall intelligence, doesn’t reach an intellectual peak until the sixties or early seventies, all other intellectual activities peak much earlier.  

Most mental processes like memory, pattern recognition, and the ability to mentally react quickly peak in a person’s twenties.  The ability to recognize and remember emotional states in other people reach their utmost in the forties, while general knowledge and reading comprehension peak in the fifties.  Unfortunately, after the early seventies, it’s all downhill.  All measurable mental tasks slowly erode with time.

Perhaps the most significant erosion occurs in an elderly person’s ability to pay attention to more than one task at a time.  While mental multi-tasking is difficult at any age, tests reveal that the ability drops by half between the ages of 35 and 65.  Needless to say, the job of President requires the ability to multi-task far more than most jobs.  

It all of the above weren’t dishearteningly enough, there is a long list of diseases that target the elderly.  Aging is a key risk factor for most of the common neurodegenerative diseases, specifically dementias like Alzheimer’s disease, cerebrovascular disease, Parkinson’s disease and Lou Gehrig’s disease.  While the risk of an individual’s developing these diseases is incredibly difficult to calculate, their incidence definitely increases with age.

As we age, there is a natural tendency for us to be more conservative and to insulate ourselves from new ideas, new technology, and new fashions.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does make it more difficult to make decisions that will affect those who do not share our history and traditions.  These traits don’t necessarily disqualify someone from a position of authority, but they hardly serve as attractive traits.

Perhaps it is time for Congress to enact legislation that restricts candidacy to those under the age of seventy as of the date of the election.  Those still in office when they reach age seventy could remain in office, but would not be allowed to run for reelection.

I’ve noticed that the elderly are frequently credited with honor and distinction simply because of their age and are given respect for experience and wisdom in advance of any evidence of its existence.  From my experience, the net distribution of intelligence and stupidity seem to be about the same regardless of age.  Perhaps we need to remember that growing old doesn’t require a lot of brains…it just takes a long time.

One of America’s Forgotten Wars

Most Americans have little or no knowledge about the Spanish American War, which is understandable since the conflict could easily have been avoided and it was largely fought for the wrong reasons.  It was also a brief war, lasting only four months, during which only 379 died in battle.  Unfortunately, since the majority of the battles occurred in tropical locations, fourteen times that number perished from malaria, typhoid, dysentery, or yellow fever.

Strangely, a larger and far more deadly war was the result of the peace negotiations.  That war, the Philippine Insurrection, has been almost completely forgotten by most Americans—if they ever heard of it.

The peace negotiations ending the Spanish American War specified that Spain would give up Cuba, the United States would annex Puerto Rico and the US would continue to occupy Manila pending the final disposition of the Philippines Islands.  While we knew we wanted Spain out of the Philippines, did America really want to keep the islands as a territory?

The problem of what to do with the Philippines touched off a huge debate, with even President McKinley being unsure of what to do.  (Privately, the president admitted that he couldn't find the Philippines on the map the first time he looked.)  While some Americans railed against America's growing Imperialism, others saw Asia as a fertile market of millions (note that is millions with an ‘m’, not a ‘b’) waiting to buy American goods.

Some Americans were worried about how such an alien culture could be blended into the American way of life.  As one senator said, "Bananas and self-government cannot grow on the same piece of land."  Still others saw keeping the islands as a chance to "save the heathens" of Asia by extending missionary activities.  

McKinley finally reached a conclusion.  As he later explained to a gathering of missionaries:

And one night late it came to me this way--I don't know how it was, but it came:  (1) that we could not give them back to Spain--that would be cowardly and dishonorable;  (2)  that we could not turn them over to France or Germany--our commercial rivals in the Orient--that would be bad business and discreditable;  (3) that we could not leave them to themselves--they were unfit for self government--and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and (4)  that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died.  And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly.

That's quite a statement.  It neatly summarizes all of American Imperialism.  It encompasses national honor, business commerce, a feeling of racial superiority, and even a little altruism—it might even have been real.

When Spain pointed out that, technically, America had no claim by right of conquest because the United States had not actually occupied Manila until the day after the armistice, we settled the point by giving Spain $20 million in compensation:   Kind of “shut up and leave us alone” money.

The final treaty, the Treaty of Paris, signed December 10, 1898, added Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to American territory.  

Note.  If you are ever on a quiz show and they ask you the name of the treaty that ended a war, and you have no idea of the correct answer—just say Treaty of Paris.  Since 1299, there have been more than a dozen of that name.

The Treaty of Paris did not make everyone in the United States happy.  Most Democrats, and some Republicans were against it.  The occupation of a foreign country was counter to the ideas of democracy, countered American traditional isolationism, and could easily involve us in foreign entanglements.  Some military experts even pointed out the impossibility of defending a possession so far from home…a prediction that would prove true 40 years later.

The same month the treaty was signed, Rudyard Kipling published the poem, The White Man’s Burden.  He calls the American people to a new duty:

Take up the White Man's burden--

Send for the best ye breed--

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captive's need;

to wait in heavy harness

On fluttered fold and wild--

Your new-caught sullen peoples, 

Half devil and half child.

I wish I could say that Kipling wrote this in irony.  He did not.

President William McKinley issued a proclamation on December 21, 1898, declaring the United States policy to be one of "benevolent assimilation" in which "the mild sway of justice and right" would be substituted for "arbitrary rule."  Unfortunately, by this time, our helping our "little brown brothers" had taken a strange turn.  Very shortly, we were to be at war with them.  We had forgotten to ask if the people of the Philippines wanted our help and they really, really didn't.

It is ironic that before we could impose colonial rule to help the Filipinos, we had to fight a violent war in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902 to crush a Philippine nationalist insurgency.  Filipino insurgents had already been fighting the Spanish for independence long before American forces arrived.  Indeed, part of the reason for the American Navy’s success in driving out the Spanish had been because the Spanish forces had been also fighting a Filipino revolutionary force led by Aguinaldo.

Although it was later disputed by the Americans, many Filipino patriots, including Emilio Aguinaldo, believed they had been promised independence for their efforts and they felt betrayed by the terms of the Paris treaty.  

Aguinaldo declared the Philippines to be an independent republic in January, 1899 and in response to McKinley's proclamation issued his own.  In it, he said that "violent and aggressive seizure" by the United States was wrong and threatened war.  Hostilities between the two groups began almost immediately.  

As the fighting escalated, the United States began shelling the Filipino forces from naval ships in Manila Harbor.  For months, the Filipinos tried to fight back the best they could using conventional warfare but this was suicide, because the Filipinos lacked the arms, the artillery, and the training to stand up to the American military.

The Filipino troops, armed with old rifles and bolos—and carrying anting-anting (magical charms)—were no match for American troops in open conventional combat, but when they finally switched tactics to guerrilla warfare, they proved to be highly effective fighters.

Suddenly, the United States was facing a problem that was totally new to American warfare.  How do you fight an enemy and win the people over at the same time?  It is, of course, a thorny problem for which we are still attempting to find a solution.

Aguinaldo fought back as he ordered the establishment of decentralized guerrilla commands in each of several military zones.  More than ever, American soldiers learned the miseries of fighting an enemy that was able to move at will within the civilian population in the villages.  "Pacified" ground only extended as far as a soldier's Krag rifle could shoot.

The guerrillas would not attack unless they were sure they could win.  If chased, they hid their weapons, went home and pretended they were the friendliest natives on the island.  But if they captured an American soldier, he would be horribly tortured.  And, inevitably, the American soldiers began committing horrible atrocities of their own.  

In September, 1901, guerrillas in Samar, which was one of the last remaining uncontrolled provinces, massacred a company of US infantry.  The troops that were ordered in to “pacify” the area were told to take no prisoners.  In fact, their orders included the following:  “I want you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn, the better it will please me.  I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.”  

When the officer in charge of the unit asked for clarification about what “capable of bearing arms” meant, he was told that it meant, ‘anyone over ten years old’.

Eventually, American forces came under the command of General James MacArthur (the father of the World War II hero), who had extensive experience fighting Native Americans in the American Southwest.  MacArthur, working with American civilian leaders like Judge William Howard Taft, began building a new civilian government.  The American army began building a new infrastructure for the Philippines:  New roads, schools, hospitals, bridges, railroads, telegraph lines, and telephone lines.  Disease, especially smallpox, cholera, and plague practically disappeared.  Slowly, an increasing number of Filipino people became  tolerant of, if not quite accepting, American occupation.

Eventually, most organized resistance to the American military simply dwindled away.  Aguinaldo—convinced of the futility of further resistance—finally surrendered, swore allegiance to the United States and issued a proclamation calling on his compatriots to lay down their arms.  

On the 4th of July, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that the war was over and that the United States had won.  No one argued the point with him.

The war the Americans called, “the Philippine Insurrection”, lasted nearly three years and claimed the lives of 4,234 US troops and 16,000 Filipino soldiers.  Another 220,000 civilian Filipinos died, largely of famine and disease, by the end of the war.  The cost to the US was $400 million—twenty times what the United States had paid to Spain for the islands in 1898.

The United States promised independence for the people of the Philippines as soon as the preparations for self-government were completed.  Those preparations were still underway when World War II started and the islands were seized by the Japanese in 1942.

How this war ended—with Roosevelt’s simply declaring that America had won—has been in my mind all week.  Is this the way that the Covid Pandemic will finally end?  Will the President just declare one day that it is over and that we have won?   We don’t seem to have a real exit play for this war and there seem to be no realistic achievable goals…

Already, many of the things done in reaction to the pandemic seem to be done more for show than for any real need.  We all know that cloth masks are useless, that there is no science behind “six-foot social distancing”, and that walking into a restaurant wearing a mask, only to take it off while you eat is ridiculous.  Or, in other words, anting-anting.

I believe in the effectiveness of vaccines and boosters.  But, I also believe that some of the measures we are taking to fight the pandemic may be causing more problems than the virus.  Drug use, suicides, child abuse, crime in general, business failures, and a host of other problems have been rising for two years now.   Maybe it is time to declare the war over.  It may be a little early for us in the United States, but perhaps the time is coming.

Simply declaring the pandemic over seems to be what Denmark has done.  According to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the pandemic will officially end on February 1, 2022, and the people of Denmark will be free to live their lives as they see fit.

Lincoln’s Last Day

Today, spring in our nation’s capital is inevitably linked with the blooming of the cherry trees that were a gift to our nation from the people of Japan during the Taft Administration.  During the Civil War, the coming of spring was heralded by the flowering of the dogwood trees.  On April 14, 1865, the trees’ white flowers were attracting butterflies.  The city, so long accustomed to war, was still celebrating the new-found peace that followed Lee’s surrender only a week earlier.

As was his custom, Abraham Lincoln, 56, woke at seven, and walked down the second-floor hall to his office, turning up the gas lighting so he could work at his high-backed mahogany desk.  Today, the large rectangular room is known as the Lincoln Bedroom, though in reality, the president never spent the night in the southeast corner room that he used as both an office and a meeting room for his cabinet.

Though the president received hundreds of letters a day, it was his practice to read about half a dozen a day, sometimes answering a few of them with a brief letter or writing instructions on the margin for a secretary to follow up.  Lincoln wrote two brief notes, then reached behind him to pull a velvet bell cord to summon a secretary to deliver the notes.  The first note was to Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward to call a Cabinet meeting for 11:00.  William Seward, the Secretary of State was recovering from a carriage accident.  The second note invited General Grant to attend the cabinet meeting.

At 8:00, the president sat down with his family for breakfast.  Sitting across from Mary, his wife, and with his two sons Tad, 12, and Robert, 21, at his sides, Lincoln had his usual breakfast of an egg and a cup of coffee.  Robert, a Captain in the Union Army and an aide to General Grant, had just returned from duty and had been present in the McLean House in Appomattox when General Lee surrendered.  Robert, in answer to his father’s questions, remarked about the difference in appearance between the Confederate general’s immaculate uniform and the shabby mud-spattered coat of General Grant.

Mary Todd Lincoln, 46, told her husband that she had tickets to Grover’s Theatre to see Aladdin, but having learned that tonight was to be the last performance of Our American Cousin, she had sent an invitation to General Grant for he and his wife to accompany them to Ford’s Theatre.  Tad Lincoln would use the tickets to Grover’s Theatre that night, accompanied by Tom Pendel, a member of the White House staff.

Returning to his office by 9:00, Lincoln sat at his desk reading the morning newspapers.  Within a day’s ride from the White House, there were more than 30 daily and weekly newspapers, this in addition to the important papers from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.  Lincoln was in the habit of using his pearl-handled pocket knife to cut clippings from the papers, storing them in his brown leather wallet.  Besides newspaper clippings, the only other item in the wallet was a $5 Confederate note, a souvenir of the President’s tour of the captured Confederate capital. 

The first of many visitors that morning was the Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, with whom he discussed the nation’s future policy toward the Southern states.  Colfax made no secret of the fact that he desired to join Lincoln’s cabinet as Secretary of War, to replace Edwin Stanton.  Lincoln was waiting for a vacancy to appoint Stanton to the Supreme Court, thus fulfilling a promise he had made to Stanton when he had compelled the man to serve in the cabinet for the ‘good of the country’.

For the next two hours, Lincoln saw visitors, most for only a few minutes each.  Of particular note was the former senator from New Hampshire, John P. Hale, who Lincoln had just appointed to be the new minister to Spain.  Hale was eager to take his family to Spain, as his daughter had just become engaged to the actor John Wilkes Booth, and the senator disapproved of the match.

In between meetings, Lincoln wrote a message to Ford’s Theatre, requesting the State Box for the evening.  When the message arrived, John Ford, the manager, was delighted, since the presence of both Lincoln and Grant guaranteed that the theatre would sell all of its tickets to a crowd eager to see the two men.  Ford quickly wrote out a handbill announcing that that the president and the general would be present, sending the bill out to be quickly printed so that it could be distributed across the town.  While he was drafting the handbill, John Wilkes Booth dropped by the theatre to pick up his mail from a ‘pigeon hole’ box he maintained in the office.

The cabinet meeting started at 11:00, with the president sitting sideways at the head of the long table so that he could stretch out his long legs.  Everyone was eager to hear General Grant relate the details of Lee’s surrender.  There was also a brief discussion of what to do with the leaders of the Confederacy, along with a general discussion regarding the future reconstruction of the Southern states, during which Lincoln was open to suggestions.  

During the meeting, Vice-President Andrew Johnson, who had not been invited to the cabinet meeting, arrived, expecting to meet with the President.  Hearing that the meeting was running longer than expected, the vice-president elected to go for a walk, leaving word that he would return later.

At 2:00, as the cabinet meeting broke up, General Grant told Lincoln that he and his wife would be unable to attend the play that night, as they had planned to travel to New Jersey to visit their children.  Though the trip north was real, the reason was a fiction:  Julia Grant disliked Mary Lincoln intensely, and was still angry about a recent confrontation with the First Lady at City Point, Virginia.  Mary Lincoln, who preferred to be referred to as “Madame President”, was not popular in Washington social circles.

Alone in his office for the last time, the President signed a document authorizing a new government agency.  Though he would write a few more notes and brief letters, this was his last official act.

After the President met with his Vice-President for about twenty minutes, he walked over to the War Department to have a brief conversation with Stanton.  Invited to take the place of the Grants, Stanton, too, declined an invitation to the theatre.  Lincoln then asked if Major Eckert, the Chief of Telegraphy, would be free that evening for the theatre.  Eckert, a large and powerful man, would be an excellent bodyguard, as Lincoln had personally observed the Major breaking iron fireplace pokers across his arm.  Stanton, regretfully, told Lincoln that he needed Eckert to supervise the telegraphs being sent to the army that evening.

Though the President met several more people that day, his work day was officially over and he had promised to take his wife, Mary for a coach ride.  As the couple came out onto the White House porch, a one-armed soldier yelled, “I would give my other hand if I could shake that of Abraham Lincoln.”  Lincoln walked to the soldier, grasping his hand.  “You shall do that and it shall cost you nothing.”

The couple entered their barouche, driven by Francis P. Burke, and the carriage made its way down the gravel driveway, accompanied by two cavalrymen.  According to Mary Lincoln, the president was happy, discussing future travel plans once the president left office.

Upon arriving at the Navy Yard, the president left the coach to briefly tour the USS Montauk, a single-turreted ironclad monitor.  Though the ship was used throughout the war, after the war she was decommissioned and left in the harbor, where she was used as safe location for John Wilkes Booth’s autopsy and as a floating prison for his six accomplices.

Returning to the White House, Lincoln briefly chatted with two old friends from Illinois before he ate dinner with his family.  Though truly indifferent to what he ate—his favorite foods were coffee and apples—the family sat down to an elaborate formal dinner to honor Captain Robert Lincoln’s safe return.  Dinner courses included mock turtle soup, roast Virginia fowl with chestnut stuffing, baked yams, and cauliflower with cheese.

During the meal, Mary informed her husband that a young couple, Clara Harris, 20, and Major Henry Rathbone, 28, would accompany the Lincolns to the theater and they were to pick up the couple on their way to the theatre.  (Though the couple later married, the traumatic events of the evening, during which Major Rathbone was seriously injured when Booth stabbed him, would torment the man for years.  Blaming himself for having not prevented the attack on Lincoln, he finally succumbed to madness in 1883, shooting and fatally stabbing his wife, before stabbing himself five times—using both a gun and a knife just like Booth.  Though badly wounded, he recovered physically, but spent the rest of his life in an asylum, dying in 1911.)  

At 7:00 P.M., Lincoln’s personal bodyguard, William H. Crook, was relieved by John F. Parker and was immediately sent to Ford’s Theatre so that he would be present when the president’s party arrived.  Parker, who was three hours late reporting to work, was hardly a model policeman.  He had been repeatedly in trouble for drinking on the job, once being found unconscious and riding a city streetcar.  He was nearly fired after it was discovered that he had lived for three months in a whorehouse, and eventually he was fired from the Metropolitan Police in 1868 after he was discovered sleeping on the job while intoxicated.

The president (dressed in a tailored wool suit from Brooks Brothers) arrived with his party  at the theater late, at 8:30.  They made their way to the State Box (actually just boxes 7 and 8 with the partition removed), and as the party entered the box, the play stopped and the orchestra struck up Hail to the Chief.  Over a thousand patrons stood and clapped until the president took off his trademark hat and bowed.  Lincoln sat at the rear of the box in a mahogany chair with red upholstery that had been brought from the Fords’ private residence.  The two ladies each had a private sofa and the major sat in a gold chair between them.  Lincoln’s chair was positioned behind a curtain, affording him some privacy from the stares of the audience.

During the play’s intermission, John Parker left his post (which was a chair outside the State Box’s only entrance) and exited the theatre to go for a drink at the Star Saloon next door.  Whether or not he ever returned to the theater has never been determined.  Though he was charged later with dereliction of duty, the transcript of his hearing is lost and Parker remained one of the four Metropolitan Police officers charged with guarding the president for three more years.

There is little need to retell the rest of the evening’s tragic events since few Americans are not thoroughly familiar with them.  Some of the items mentioned above are still available for inspection at Ford’s theater:  Lincoln’s clothing, his pocket knife, and the wallet containing newspaper clippings can be seen in the museum there.  The Lincoln barouche is on display at the Studebaker Museum in South Bend, Indiana.  One of Lincoln’s desks—he seems to have had several—is now in the Lincoln Bedroom.

One last point:  That piece of legislation that Lincoln signed on his last day in the White House authorized the creation of a new branch of the United States Treasury—the Secret Service.

Nixon and The Great Library of Alexandria

The other day, I walked the two blocks down the street to a very large retirement center.  As neighbors, I really like these people—they never shoot off fireworks, never hold loud parties, and always mow their lawn regularly.  Other than a few residents whose driving skills have deteriorated in the six decades since they were first licensed, these people make great neighbors.

The retirement home features a library for residents and I was taking them a bag of novels that I no longer needed.  All of the books were new hardbacks, in excellent condition, and written by prominent authors that most readers would instantly recognize.  Since the retirement center also serves as my neighborhood’s polling center, I knew the library to be fairly large, but with less than full shelves and with ample room to expand.

When I walked into the library, the librarian was seated at her desk reading a copy of Death of an Expert Witness by P. D. James.  I thought that was a good omen, for if she liked that mystery, she’d likely approve of several of the books in my bag.

“Hello,” I said.  “Does your library accept donations?”

Carefully putting a bookmark in her book and placing the book on the desk in front of her before answering me, the librarian said, “Yes, but only if they have published in the last four years.  We don’t have the room to handle books older than that.”

“Really?  The book you are reading is almost 50 years old and the author has been dead for eight years.”  Frankly, I was a little irritated.  The retail price of the books I was bringing was a couple of hundred dollars, and the librarian was acting like I was imposing on her.

“We don’t have the room for old books,” she repeated.  “What do you have there?”

As I turned to leave, I answered, “Oh, you wouldn’t like them…they’re old.  It’s a Shakespeare First Folio and a Gutenberg Bible.”  

A week later, I donated the books to a post library on a nearby military base where the books were accepted without question.  The fact that I just dropped them through a book return slot on their door might have something to do with their not commenting.

Naturally, I have been thinking of libraries all week.  I hope to share a little of that obsession with you.

Most librarians probably disagree with me, but I’ve always thought there are several absolute necessities for a great library.  It should be abundantly stuffed with overflowing bookshelves, with plenty of stuffed chairs and with wooden tables for patrons.  And, if it is to be a truly great library, there should be at least one cat.   A good corner alcove with windows and leather reading chairs would be nice, but I would trade that for a single, totally necessary cat.  Why is it that so many good bookstores and so few libraries have cats?

The greatest library historically was the Great Library at Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, though not finished in his lifetime.  Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, who instilled in the young general a great love of books (these were then growing increasingly popular owing to the recent invention of papyrus.  Books, in the form of papyrus scrolls, were readily available to most educated Greeks, prompting the start of libraries.  When Alexander decided to transplant Greek culture to Egypt, his plan to build a great city included plans for the greatest library of the ancient world.

Historians are unsure exactly how many scrolls the library contained, with estimates ranging from 40,000 up to a million.    What is known is that the collection was organized by genre and alphabetized, so that paid librarians could locate the necessary works for researchers…And the library very aggressively expanded the collection.  Agents scoured the countryside to buy or arrange for the copying of books.  According to legend, library agents searched every ship coming into the port of Alexandria for unknown books, either seizing them for the collection or holding the books until they could be copied.  Since the process of copying a book took more time than most ships could spend idling in a port, most such ‘borrowing’ was likely to become permanent.

We know that the library remained a center of learning for centuries, with some salaried scholars provided with room and board to stay, study, and write.  Among these ‘tenured’ scholars were Euclid, Strabo, and Archimedes.  The first professional librarians kept the library running and expanding, however, the library eventually came to a tragic end.  While most of the facts surrounding the library’s demise are simply lost, there are countless legends and wild stories about the library’s end.  One of the wilder stories recounts how the Romans burned the scrolls to heat their baths.

It’s much more likely that some of the scrolls were actually taken to Rome after a fire destroyed the largest Roman library.  Some warehouses that may have stored library property were lost to fire that engulfed the harbor at Alexandria during fighting while Julius Caesar captured the city.  The most likely reason for the destruction of the library however, was simple neglect.  While papyrus was far superior to the clay tablets used before its invention, papyrus was highly vulnerable to dampness and had to periodically be replaced with new papyrus.  The collection of irreplaceable books at Great Library of Alexandria most likely just rotted away from neglect, only to be resurrected by the most unlikeliest hero.

Centuries passed and then, in 1974, just months before his resignation, President Richard Nixon toured the Middle East, flying into Cairo and taking the train to Alexandria.  When the president innocently asked to be shown the site of the former library, his hosts were embarrassed:  Even the site of the greatest library had been lost to history.

A few city leaders saw this as an opportunity.  Even since the presidency of Nasser, whose anti-colonialism had resulted in the city of Alexandria being officially slighted, local politicians had looked for a way to return the city to a position of world prominence.  Rebuilding the long-lost library looked like a perfect opportunity.  And who would not want to donate to rebuilding the lost great library?

Well, one of the people who couldn’t refuse was Saddam Hussein, who became the largest private donor.  Donations of books and funds came from countries around the world and the project received large donations from UNESCO.  Finished in 2002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has space for eight million volumes and is the National Library of Egypt.  After more than 1700 years, the library is once again open for business.  

I checked:  Unfortunately, the library’s only cat is a statue of Bastet in one of the four attached museums. 

“Trickle down” Economics

About half a lifetime ago, I went to Honduras to research a peculiar military revolution that had toppled the government back in 1913.  Finding the documents necessary for my history thesis meant traveling to almost every corner of the Central American country, searching through libraries and government records. 

Happily, while traveling around the country, I got to take in some of the sights—I toured a banana plantation, saw what little was left of a tropical jungle, and visited a coffee plantation that had been gifted to my alma mater, Enema U.   The foreman graciously gave me a tour before we returned to his office to try some fresh coffee from beans that had just been roasted.

I can vividly remember the three best cups of coffee in my life.  The first has to be when I was about nine years old.  A freezer case stopped working in my father’s grocery store, and early Sunday morning, the two of us moved all the contents to other freezer cases or one of the walk-in freezers in the backroom.  We had to shift a lot of stock around, and by the time we had finished the job, we were tired and cold, and we could barely feel our freezing hands.  As we slowly warmed up, my father brought me my very first cup of coffee.  I didn’t really like the taste, but my father had given it to me and I would have gladly drunk it even if it had been on fire.

The second-best cup of coffee was in the basement of an aging and crumbling building on the campus of Enema U.  Fred Dabney, the swing shift DJ at KRWG, the campus radio station, somehow produced an incredible cup of coffee from a pot that hadn’t been cleaned properly since the fifties.  Whether it was because he ground the beans in an ancient hand-cranked antique or because the water he used came from aging basement pipes, his coffee was always spectacular.  While Fred was busy announcing the next jazz record, I’d guzzle his coffee and read news from around the world off the teletype.

For third place, it has to be that cup of coffee at the Honduran plantation.  Freshly roasted and ground just seconds before being placed in the French press, the coffee was consumed within sight of the coffee plants.  I’ve also eaten trout that were grilled beside the stream where they had been caught, and I have this theory that everything tastes better close to the source.   I’m trying to convince The Doc we need to take a trip to a certain distillery in Islay.

Coffee, of course, is not native to Central America, but was introduced to the New World by the Spanish in the 16th century.  For many years, only small amounts were produced, mainly on the islands of Haiti and Cuba until early in the 19th century, when shortly before independence movements swept the Spanish from power in Central and South America, planting coffee was encouraged to bolster the economy.  Though coffee production was most successful in Costa Rica, the mountain slopes of Honduras also had the right combination of soil and climate to grow exceptionally good coffee.

Costa Rica was so successful in exporting coffee that the country developed economically faster and earlier than the rest of Central America, [[a condition that lasts to this day]].  Following the success of Costa Rica, the other countries soon expanded their coffee production, as well.  Though the amount of coffee produced in Central America has never been a very large part of the world market, the coffee has always been known to be of exceptionally fine quality, lending itself to mixing well with beans grown elsewhere.

Particularly valued are the Arabica coffee varieties that grow in the volcanic soil on the sides of mountains at altitudes above 3000 feet.  While the bulk of Honduran Arabica coffee is actually seven different types of Arabica, I’ll just lump them all together as ‘Arabica’.  Coffee makers around the world purchase this coffee and combine it with other types of beans to produce superior blends.

Like a few wines and some scotch, a lot of ‘name brand’ coffee we consume is blended.  The Arabica beans are a little milder and less acidic, and are relatively low on caffeine.  The other major variety of coffees are the Robusta beans, which—while still very flavorful—are a little bitter and have more caffeine.  Traditionally, Robusta beans are used to make instant coffee.  People who will settle for instant coffee just desire a liquid version of caffeine and are probably the kind of heathens who ruin good coffee with sugar and cream, too.

In a typical year, Arabica makes up 60% of the world’s coffee production, while almost all of the the rest is Robusta.  Unfortunately, this is not going to be a typical year.  We are either all going to have to pay more for coffee this year, or we’re going to have to settle for a noticeably different flavor in our coffee.  There is a worldwide shortage of Arabica beans, and those that do reach the market are likely to cost more than last year’s.  There are two reasons for the shortage.

First, we can blame the La Niña weather pattern:  After a year of severe weather that damaged a lot of the Arabica plants, a once-in-a-century severe frost killed a lot of the coffee bushes in Brazil last year.  If that weren’t enough, La Niña is projected to significantly reduce rainfall to both Central America and Brazil, this year, further decreasing production.  As a result of these difficulties, many planters are taking advantage of the off year to replace damaged, older bushes with fresh seedlings that will take at least a year to produce mature beans.

Second, the problems plaguing the supply chains in every other industry are hitting the coffee industry, too.  Since ports in most coffee producing countries are rarely among the most efficient and coffee is shipped in containers of which there is a worldwide shortage, as I write this, millions of bags of green coffee beans are being stored in dockside warehouses, waiting for containers.  On the London commodities market, Arabica bean futures are currently up 80%.

The prices of Robusta beans, however, will probably not see as much of a rise in prices.  Vietnam, the largest exporter of Robusta beans, has produced a bumper crop this year.  And while the ports in Vietnam are also currently congested, those ports are far more modern and efficient than those found in Central and South America.

For the retailers of either the beans or coffee by the cup, there are only two options:  Either the prices are about to rise significantly or the manufacturers of blended coffee are going to change the flavor palette and use more Robusta bans in your morning cup of joe.  

The Greatest Magician You’ve Never Heard Of

Since I doubt that you keep close track of prestidigitators, illusionists, and escape artists, I’ll prove it.  His name was Sigmund Neuberger, but his stage name was The Great Lafayette.

Neuberger was a contemporary of Harry Houdini, who was a close friend:  the two magicians worked together before Neuberger became famous and toured by himself.  At the height of his fame, Neuberger played before audiences of thousands of people and was earning £1000 a week (the equivalent of $4 million a year in today’s money).

Like his act, most of Neuberger’s early life is a mystery, with only bits and pieces available—and much of that information may be fiction that the performer made up to enhance his reputation.  Born in Munich, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1889.  Within a few years, Neuberger was touring Western mining camps as part of a vaudeville troupe, performing as a trick shot artist with a bow and arrow, who was occasionally billed as a quick-change artist.  Both skills would later be incorporated into his magic act.

By the turn of the century, Neuberger was traveling across America in private railway cars and touring England, billing himself as The Great Lafayette and performing spectacular tricks in which he would vanish, only to reappear seconds later across the theater in a flash of light while a cloud of smoke rolled off the stage towards the audience.  As time went on, the performance included animals (in particular, a lion and a horse).

Neuberger was particularly devoted to Beauty, a dog given to him by Houdini.  When the dog accidentally escaped his handler and ran off the stage towards the audience, people clapped and cheered, believing that it was part of the act.  From then on, the magician not only made his dog an integral part of the act, but quickly realized that the press was far more likely to write favorable articles if his dog was the center of the act.  Beauty wore a diamond-studded collar, stayed in the finest hotel rooms, slept on silk beds, and ate the most expensive items listed on the menus of the finest restaurants, from a custom golden bowl five times a day.  Predictably, the press loved it.

Now highly successful, Neuberger bought a fine London home to which he affixed a plaque that read: “The more I see of people, the more I love my dog.”  Guests were cautioned that they could drink the performer’s liquor and eat his food, and they were free to issue orders to his servants—but they had to treat his dog with respect.

Beauty died on May 4, 1911 (perhaps as a result of an overly rich diet).  Heartbroken—at least in the press—the magician predicted that without his beloved Beauty, he would soon die, himself.  Neuberger turned out to be eerily correct, and his death would result in his most amazing illusion.

The Great Lafayette’s finale was a reenactment of one of Scheherazade’s tales from the Arabian Nights, the story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou.  The 25-minute act included multiple costume changes, with Neuberger appearing, vanishing, and reappearing at multiple points on the stage.  The elaborate act ended with the magician galloping across the stage to rescue the princess, who had been locked in a cage with a real lion.   As the hero leapt from the horse, whereupon the lion’s head came off, revealing the Great Lafayette inside the costume.

On May 11, one week after the death of Beauty, halfway through the finale, a faulty lamp above the stage set some decorations on fire.  The fire quickly spread through the elaborate decorations on the stage, engulfing the front of the theater.  The heavy fire curtain was lowered, but the mechanism jammed with the curtain still three feet above the stage, causing a chimney effect, sucking in a strong draft of fresh air under the curtain, greatly fanning the flames.    

The audience, believing that the flames and smoke were just another illusion, remained in their seats until the orchestra started playing the national anthem.  While the audience safely exited the theater, those working backstage found it difficult to escape as Neuberger had ordered the stage doors locked to prevent escape of the lion.  (And to prevent his rivals from learning the secrets of his tricks.)

Neuberger briefly escaped, then slipped back under the fire curtain in an effort to save his horse.  (Nobody, but nobody, tries to rescue a real lion from a burning building.)  Whether it was the heat or the smoke that killed him was never discovered, a total of eleven people backstage died in the fire, including the Great Lafayette.  

The body of Neuberger was cremated and a ceremony was planned to inter his ashes between the paws of his beloved dog, Beauty.  Shortly before the ceremony, as workmen were picking through the ashes of the theater stage, the real body of Sigmund Neuberger was found under the stage.  The magician evidently had sought to escape the fire by crawling through one of the many hidden trap doors he used during his act.  Eventually it was determined that the first body was actually that of a double the magician had used in his many vanishing and reappearance stunts.  

When the body of the real Neuberger was finally interred, a quarter of a million people turned out to watch the funeral procession.  The Great Lafayette’s last—and greatest—stunt was dying twice in the same fire.

Because he died in 1911, before the age of mass media, it means that Neuberger is not nearly as famous today as Harry Houdini.  There are a few photos, but the only video even remotely connected with the magician is a grainy black and white film—available on YouTube—of workmen recovering the charred body of the unfortunate lion as they pick through the rubble of what had been the stage.

Today, other than the grave marker, the only reminder of the famous illusionist is the Lafayette Bill.  Familiar to anyone who has attended the theater in London, the Bill requires all British playhouses to briefly lower the heavy fire curtain and then immediately raise it back up before every performance, in order to ensure that the safety device works correctly.