Baldwin is Lying

A grand jury in Northern New Mexico has decided to indict Alec Baldwin for the death two years ago of a co-worker, cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.  The death was a result of the careless handling of a firearm on the Rust movie set.  Despite the vociferous claims of Baldwin that he was not responsible (specifically, that he “never pulled the trigger”), Baldwin will likely stand trial for involuntary manslaughter.

 

I have a few thoughts I’d like to share about what has incorrectly been called an “accident”.

 

Baldwin has long been publicly contemptuous of gun owners and the organizations that support gun safety.  Accordingly, the people on the set charged with ensuring the safety of the actors and crew had relatively little experience and the customary safety protocols on movie sets were largely ignored.  Even after several members of the crew quit after complaining about the lax attitude about gun safety on the set, no action was taken.  Baldwin, in his capacity as the film’s producer, was negligent for failing to take action.

 

According to the testimony of some of the crew, the firearms used on the set were also used for occasional target practice by the actors and crew.  No movie set should allow live ammunition to be present on the movie set for any reason.  If the actors need training in the proper use of a firearm, that training should take place at a supervised range—never on the movie set.

 

Whenever possible, rubber guns should be used instead of real firearms.  When real firearms are needed for action sequences or closeup shots, those firearms should never be aimed at another person.  In addition, an actor should never touch the trigger until that actor intends the weapon to fire.  

 

On the day of the shooting, several horrendous mistakes were made sequentially.  Inexcusably, someone loaded live ammunition into the firearm.  There are commonly three types of ammunition on movie sets.  First, there are blanks, a type of ammunition that, while it has no projectile, is still so dangerous that the safe handling of blank ammunition would take more space than this blog allows.  Sadly, while blanks were not responsible for the death on the Rust set, actors are still frequently injured or killed by the improper use of blank ammunition. 

 

When filming scenes in which actors load or unload a firearm, special dummy rounds are used that contain no powder or primer necessary to fire.  Some movie sets even take the extra precaution of using non-firing replica guns for such scenes.  There are also dummy cartridges that have holes drilled through the side of the cartridge to indicate they are non-firing.  Such cartridges occasionally are filled with large metal balls so that they rattle when handled.

 

The person charged with insuring firearm safety on the Rust set was inexperienced and she failed to ensure that the firearm used that day was unloaded.  When the pistol was handed to Baldwin, he failed to check that the gun was unloaded, as well.  Both failures are enough to justify each being charged with criminal negligence criminal or manslaughter.  Then, Baldwin aimed the gun at a coworker and cocked the hammer…And the firearm fired.

 

Baldwin maintains that he “never touched the trigger”.  Not that it matters, but let’s look at that claim in detail.

 

The pistol used by Baldwin was a single action revolver, meaning that the hammer must be manually cocked before every shot.  Using your thumb to pull the hammer fully to the rear rotates the cylinder, bringing a cartridge in line with the revolver.  The hammer is held back by the sear portion of the trigger until the trigger is pulled, disengaging the sear and allowing the hammer to fall, firing the cartridge.

Can the hammer fall without the trigger being pulled?  Yes, there are three situations in which the gun can fire without the trigger being pulled.  First, if the hammer is down, with the firing pin resting on the primer of a loaded cartridge—a condition that is inherently unsafe in that model Colt revolver—a sharp blow to the back of the hammer (such as might happen if the pistol were dropped) can fire the cartridge.  That did not happen on the Rust set.

 

Secondly, the hammer has been wired back so that the sear cannot engage, so that releasing the hammer causes the gun to fire immediately.  Though very rare, there are a few “slip shooters” who prefer to fire that pistol that way.  Unless you are a very experienced marksman, this is almost a guaranteed way to miss your target.  I had an uncle who preferred to shoot in this bizarre manner, and even he didn’t recommend the method.  The Italian replica of the Colt revolver that Baldwin held when the shooting took place had not been modified.

 

The only other way for the pistol to fire without the trigger being pulled is for the sear to be defective or worn down and fail to hold the hammer in the rearmost position.  This is probably what Baldwin is trying to claim happened to the pistol he was handed.  The problem with this defense is that it requires the sear to be badly and visibly damaged.  Baldwin’s gun has been analyzed by experts, including the experts at the FBI laboratory, and the sear was documented to be not damaged.

 

Baldwin is criminally negligent because he hired an incompetent and inexperienced “expert” (whose hiring was a combination of nepotism and equity hiring) to oversee safety on the set.  Baldwin is criminally negligent because, even after experienced crew members complained about the lack of safety protocols on the set, he failed to establish appropriate safety protocols.  (Some crew members felt so strongly about this that they resigned rather than continue working in what they considered unsafe conditions.).  Baldwin is criminally negligent because, when handed a deadly weapon, he did not personally check to see if the pistol was loaded.  Baldwin is criminally negligent because he pointed a deadly weapon at a person and cocked it.  And lastly, Baldwin is criminally negligent because he absolutely pulled the trigger, shooting that poor woman.  There is absolutely, positively no other possible, credible explanation for the gun’s firing.

 

Baldwin is lying.

Everything Has a Precedent If You Search For It

Recently we had an extraordinary lapse of national security.  Our Secretary of Defense went into the hospital, evidently without notifying anyone either above or below him in the chain of command of his planned absence.   If what we read in the papers is to be believed (admittedly a rather large caveat), neither the White House nor the Secretary of State noticed his absence for several days.

Secretary of Defense Austin is a retired 4-star general, so there is no doubt that he is an expert on the chain of command, so I’m inclined to believe this was an inadvertent accident like the numerous times previous presidents have misplaced the launch codes or accidentally driven off without the military officer carrying the nuclear football.  Every administration is made up of people and we all know how unreliable people are.

Naturally, there was only one possible reaction to the news:  Has something like this ever happened before?  Of course, it has.

In 1897, after being elected president, William McKinley started assembling his cabinet.  The Republican Party had two competing factions, a group led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge—who favored more military expansion and American involvement in world affairs—and a rival group, led by Governor John Davis Long, that pushed for a more modest, slower military expansion, believing that large militaries encourage countries to engage in war (and in the process bankrupt their economies).  Each of the two rival factions had its own favorite candidate for the position of Secretary of the Navy.

Few Americans can name the Secretary of the Navy today, but at the end of the 19th century, the civilian head of the American Navy was much more important than it is today.  The ever so much politically correctly named Department of Defense was not created until 1949, so the military was divided into two main branches.  The army was led by the Secretary of War and the navy was headed by the Secretary of the Navy.  

Since President McKinley was a close friend of John Davis Long, Long became the new Secretary of the Navy while Lodge’s choice, a young Theodore Roosevelt was picked to be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  Since Roosevelt was the number two man, in a much less glamorous position, he should have become a minor footnote in history.

While Long wanted to modernize the navy, he wanted a small scale program of gradual growth and slow replacement of the aging ships.  His deputy, Roosevelt, wanted….well, everything and wanted it done yesterday.  Long let most of the established departments run themselves, Teddy on the other hand stuck his nose into everything and everywhere, constantly asking questions and making suggestions.  Think of it this way, an elderly Mother Superior was in charge and her deputy was Miley Cyrus on crack.

Luckily for future historians, both men were compulsive writers, and each wrote numerous letters, kept journals, and would later wrote conflicting books on the history of the US Navy.  In Long’s book, The New American Navy, he described his energetic subordinate.

He worked indefatigably, frequently incorporating his views in memoranda which he would place every morning on my desk.  Most of his suggestions had, however, so far as applicable, been already adopted by the various bureaus, the chiefs of which were straining every nerve and leaving nothing not done. . . . He was heart and soul in his work.  His typewriters had no rest.  

Roosevelt, on the other hand wrote about how only a strong navy could uphold the honor of a country, that a strong navy was the best possible guarantee of safety for a nation and that if you didn’t understand that, you probably had to sit down to pee.  (That’s loosely paraphrased.)  All of Roosevelt’s plans probably would have come to naught if Henry Long had not been absent from the office so often.

Whether Long was truly sick or was just a raging hypochondriac is a matter of debate among naval historians.  What we are sure about is that  Long was frequently absent from the office, traveling for his or his daughter’s health to distant health spas, thus leaving the Navy in the hands of Roosevelt (and his rabid typewriter).  

As war with Spain over the independence of Cuba grew closer, Roosevelt began to make frantic plans.  Wanting to strengthen the US fleet on the east coast, Roosevelt took advantage of Long’s absence to order the USS Oregon to sail from San Francisco to Florida around the tip of South America—a journey of 14,000 nautical miles.  The entire nation eagerly read newspaper accounts of the perilous 66-day voyage.  Years later, Roosevelt would use that long delay as a reason for seizing Panama and building the Panama Canal.

While the Oregon sailed, Roosevelt continued to make plans.  He ordered Admiral Dewey to resupply his fleet in the far East and move closer to the Spanish-held Philippines.  Having prepared the navy for war, Roosevelt then resigned his post and began organizing a volunteer force, commonly called the Rough Riders.  

Secretary of the Navy Long thought this last move was foolish.  As Long recorded in his daily journal:

He has lost his head to this unutterable folly of deserting the post where he is of most service and running off to ride a horse and, probably, brush mosquitoes from his neck on the Florida sands.  His heart is right, and he means well, but it is one of those cases of aberration-desertion-vain-glory; of which he is utterly unaware.... Everyone of his friends advises him, he is acting like a fool. And, yet, how absurd all this will sound if, by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark. 

Well, as we all know, Roosevelt led his men up Kettle Hill, across the connecting saddle to San Juan Hill—site of the last land battle for Cuba—and became a public hero, eventually being honored with the Medal of Honor.  His success in battle had one other memorable result.

In 1899, Vice-President Garrett Hobart died of a heart attack, leaving the country without a vice-president until the next election.  Once again, each of the two camps of Republican leadership had a candidate they urged President McKinley to select.  The traditional Republicans wanted John Davis Long, while Senator Lodge urged McKinley to pick the newly-elected governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt.  Obviously, McKinley chose Roosevelt as his new vice-president and after just a few months in office, Roosevelt became our 26th president when McKinley was assassinated.  

Long, somewhat bitter, resigned his post as the Secretary of the Navy and Roosevelt replaced him with someone more to his liking, sending the new secretary a letter of warning about the men in the department.

You will have to struggle against the men who believe in the old system of quiet and rest; of ships that never wear out by work but only by rust, and of respectable men who live long and never do anything wrong because they never do anything at all.  

Once retired, Long wrote his history of the Modern Navy, carefully explaining that Roosevelt had been wrong about everything and anything good in the navy was due to his careful leadership.  Roosevelt, as Commander in Chief, ordered that no copy of Long’s book be allowed aboard any ship of the navy.

Actually, Roosevelt never found the right man to head the Navy during his time as President:  by the time he left office, four different men had attempted to run the Navy to his standards.  (One of those short-term appointees was Charles Bonaparte, the grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, but I promised not to mention the Corsican anymore.)

It is interesting to think what might have happened if Long had stayed in the office more instead of running to various mountains and springs for his health.  Would we have even fought in the Spanish American War?  Would the Panama Canal ever have been built?  Would the United States have had a large enough navy during World War I?  Would Theodore’s cousin have followed in his footsteps and served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and eventually become our 32nd President?

One last point.  The USS Oregon did arrive in Florida in time to fight in the war.  The last and culminating battle of the war occurred on July 3, 1898 when the Spanish fleet attempted to break the American blockade outside the harbor of Santiago de Cuba.  The Spanish Fleet was old and was no match for the American Navy, led by the USS Oregon.  One by one, the Spanish ships were either destroyed or forced to beach themselves to avoid the larger American ships.  The last ship to run aground and be scuttled by its Spanish crew was the Cristobal Colon.

The Spanish Empire in the New World began with Christopher Columbus and ended 406 years later with the scuttling of a ship named after Columbus.  There’s a pleasing symmetry in that.

Salmon and Gluckstein

One of the great benefits in being retired is that I no longer feel obligated to re-read the books that I assigned to my students and I don’t have to read the newest publications in any field…. In short, I don’t have to read anything I don’t want to.  Having said this, I still read just about anything put in front of me, but I no longer feel guilty about it.

The wonderful people at Penzler Publishers (the publishing company started by Otto Penzler and the Mysterious Bookshop) have been reprinting quality hardbacks of great mysteries long out of print.  Unfortunately, this series does NOT include any of the works of Rex Stout, one of my favorite authors, because Bantam Books holds the rights to all of the author’s works and stubbornly refuses to reprint any of them except in cheap paperback editions.  Otto Penzler once assured me that if Bantam ever relinquishes the rights, he will reprint the entire Nero Wolfe series.

One of the books currently being offered by Penzler Press is Vincent Starrett’s Murder on “B” Deck, a book that has been out of print for almost a century.  Starrett was a prolific American writer who might be better known for having been one of the foremost authorities on all matters related to Sherlock Holmes as well being known as a newspaperman who wrote a weekly column on books for a Chicago newspaper for over 25 years.  Since Starrett was born in an apartment over a bookstore, perhaps his occupation was in his DNA.  When he passed away in 1974, his Chicago gravestone was carved in the shape of an open book.

While I regularly purchase “new” Penzler books, I also found a first edition of Murder on “B” Deck from a London bookseller at a reasonable price.  (I receive a lot of books from England and occasionally one arrives in a distinctive bag bearing the imprint of the Royal Mail Service, something my postman enjoys as much as I do.).  The book arrived in good condition, but the book’s flyleaves bear an interesting inscription:

This book is the property of 
SALMON & GLUCKSTEIN LTD,
And is loaned at the rate of twopence
Per period of seven days or part
Thereof counting from date of issue.
If lost, will finder kindly return it to
any S. & G. BRANCH
BRANCHES EVERYWHERE

Salmon Gluckstein sounds like a like a Kosher brand of lox.  And if they have branches everywhere, why have I never heard of them?  And a tuppence a week sounds like a bargain to rent a book.  Obviously, I needed to do a little more research.

The story starts with Samuel Gluckstein, a cigar maker who left Prussia and moved to London sometime in 1841.  By 1855, he had opened his own company that made and sold cigars, helped by his four sons.   In 1873, the company was incorporated as Salmon and Gluckstein after Samuel took in Barnett Salmon, who had married one of Gluckstein’s seven daughters.  Over the next century, the company would change, spin off new companies, and branch out in ways never imagined by the founder, but would remain a family business with leadership remaining with either a Salmon or a Gluckstein.

The two families established an unusual form of partnership wherein every member received the same salary, a home, and (eventually) a car, but the rest of the profits were plowed back into the company, enabling a remarkable amount of growth.  Almost immediately, the company expanded its production from cigars to cigarettes and other forms of tobacco, as well as producing its own line of briar pipes.  Eventually, there were over 120 S. & G. tobacco stores across England.  If you are wondering about the picture, Navy Cut refers to a specific cut of tobacco used by the British Royal Navy where instead of an entire leaf of tobacco being cut, the leaves were pressed into blocks that were then cut across the grain into chips, making tobacco that was easier to pack and store in humid environments.  The lifeboat image was to inspire confidence.  

Shortly after the turn of the century, the stores added a lending library service, providing books for patrons to read for a fee so small that it is obvious that the books themselves were not a source of profit and someone in the business understood human nature.  While a burning cigar smells to everyone but the person smoking it like it was not hand rolled by a skilled tobacconist, but collected from the fetid field of grazing sheep, the aroma of a fully stocked cigar store is all but heavenly.  I don’t smoke, but whenever I visit a good tobacco shop, I am tempted to start.  Obviously, the customer who rented and later returned this book bought enough cigars to make the whole program profitable.  

Even as S. & G. tobacco shops merged with other companies, merged again, and then shut down the little shops as they expanded their sales worldwide, the Salmon and Gluckstein families spun off another “small” business, the J. Lyon tea shops and cafeterias, that spread across England roughly around the turn of the century.  One of the things that made the tea shops so popular was that the waitresses, called “Nippies”, wore distinctive uniforms and acted as chaperones to the fashionable young ladies of High Street who met there.  

By the middle of the twentieth century, there were over 200 such tea shops and the company had branched out into making cakes, teas, and various sweets.  By the early 1950’s, the company was selling the first business computers and had a large string of restaurants under a variety of names and franchises.  The company eventually sold its computer division to Fujitsu.  While the tobacco shops and little tea shops have all closed, the company continues on.  I wonder what Samuel Gluckstein would think of it all.

So, I can now sit down and enjoy Murder on “B” Deck without worrying to whom I should pay my tuppence.  I really wish I could know more about the people who read this book before me.  Most likely most of the readers were men, since—though it might just be my imagination—my book smells ever so faintly of cigars.

Napoleon III and the Impressionists

This blog, in general, stirs up a couple of recurring themes in my email.  The majority accuse me of being either a lefty academic socialist or of being a right-wing fascist, then a few mad people want to know how they can apply to Enema U, and most of the rest complain about the “too damn many stories about Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Please forgive me: I can understand why people might tire of French history—particularly if they have seen that recent horrible bio-pic about ‘the Little Corporal’.  I’ll try and tone it down for a while.

So, Napoleon III—a totally different guy—had successfully gotten himself elected President of the French Republic and, by skillful and underhanded use of his executive power, had managed to seize the country and (like his uncle, who shall remain nameless) make himself the emperor.  

Note.  I’m still thinking about that awful movie.  Of course, Josephine was worried about not bearing a certain Corsican an heir.  Despite the movie showing a middle-aged emperor with a young Josephine, it was actually the other way around with a post-menopausal Josephine terrified that she would be tossed out on her tired ass in favor of a fertile tart who could produce an heir.  So, Josephine came up with a plan to keep that ass on the throne by marrying off her daughter from an earlier marriage to the emperor’s favorite brother, Louis Bonaparte.  Josephine hoped that, if that union produced a baby boy, the emperor would be satisfied with a combination nephew and grandson for an heir.  The plan did produce a male child, but the emperor still divorced Josephine and remarried.  That male child eventually became Napoleon III, so while Josephine’s plan did not save her marriage, it did provide an heir.  Why didn’t that dreadful movie tell that story?

While Napoleon III initially came to power through a popular vote and was initially seen as a proponent of some liberal reforms, his rule gradually became more authoritarian.  As he consolidated power, curtailed freedoms, and limited political opposition, he faced criticism for suppressing democratic ideals.  An inept example of 19th century authoritarianism, the emperor might have been termed a fascist a century later.

Napoleon III's foreign policy involved military interventions, and he faced significant setbacks (“He chose…poorly.”).  One notable example was the French intervention in Mexico, which resulted in establishment of the short-lived, French-supported regime of Emperor Maximilian I.  The military venture faced resistance and it ultimately ended in failure for Napoleon III (It ended even worse for Maximilian, who was executed!).  The French Army, after losing in the Crimean War, suffered one setback after another, seriously eroding any sense of French national pride. 

Chief among Napoleon’s problems was the problem that plagues all bad leaders.  As James Carville once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  Economic issues, including financial crises and difficulties in managing the economy, contributed to public dissatisfaction.  The French economy experienced “challenges” and there were concerns about inflation and rising unemployment.

Napoleon III may have been a lousy emperor who ran France like a carnival on acid, but he wasn’t stupid and he knew that he was losing the support of the people, so he sided with a strange group in order to gain the support of the common people.  

In one of his more public roles, the Emperor supported the arts—he was a patron of the arts and supported various artists and cultural initiatives.  He sponsored the construction of grand public buildings and monuments, including the renovation of Paris under the direction of Georges-Eugène Haussmann.  The redesign of Paris included the creation of wide boulevards, public squares, and parks (in large part giving the city of Paris the look that we know today).  While the emperor supported the arts, this support was used to enhance the regime's legitimacy and present an image of prosperity and refinement.

During the mid-19th century in France, the annual official art exhibition, known as the Salon, was organized by the Académie des Beaux-Arts.  It was a prestigious event, mostly because of its exclusivity and was the venue where artists could showcase their works.  However, the selection process for inclusion in the Salon was highly competitive and many artists found their works rejected by the conservative jury of the Academy, a group that firmly believed that the pinnacle of artistic expression had already been reached and there was no need for either growth or change.

In 1863, a significant number of artists, including some who were trying to portray both light and color, had their works rejected from the official Salon.  The rejected artists, feeling that their innovative and non-traditional styles were not being given due recognition, loudly protested against the decisions of the staid Academy and appealed directly to their emperor.

Napoleon III, recognized the growing discontent among artists and saw an opportunity to align himself with public sentiment.  By authorizing a separate non-government exhibition, the Salon des Refusés, he could appeal to the public's appreciation for new and unconventional artistic expressions.  This move allowed Napoleon III to position himself as a supporter of artistic freedom and innovation a move far more calculated to curry public favor than an actual appreciation of a new art form.

The artists who participated in the Salon des Refusés included Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, and Paul Cézanne.  While the public was...intrigued…by the daring new art, the Academy and most art critics were appalled.  The new style was light, bright, and painted in a hurry, even appearing unfinished and scandalous.  The unconventional and daring nature of the artworks appealed to a segment of the public that was eager to see something new and different from the academic norms.

The art critic, Louis Leroy, reviewed a later exhibition in the satirical magazine "Le Charivari," and used the term "impressionists" to describe Claude Monet's work, Impression, Sunrise.  In his review, Leroy commented sarcastically that the painting looked more like an "impression" than a finished artwork. He used the term "impressionists" as a way of deriding the artists who painted in a style that he perceived as unfinished or sketch-like.  According to Leroy, it was not a real painting, only an impression of one.

Leroy's use of the term was not intended as a compliment, but the artists embraced it, and the term "Impressionism" became associated with a revolutionary and innovative approach to painting.  The Impressionist movement was a rebellion, a markedly radical change from the academic conventions of the time.  Impressionist painters sought to capture the effects of light, color, and atmosphere in their works, often employing loose brushstrokes and focusing on everyday scenes.

Over time, the term, "Impressionism", became widely accepted and is now used to describe one of the most influential art movements of the late 19th century.  The Impressionists played a crucial role in challenging traditional artistic norms and paved the way for new approaches to painting.

So, in an unintended consequence of his quest to curry public favor, it was Napoleon III who gave the world the art of the Impressionists.

Free Croissants for Everyone!

A couple of weeks ago at the bowling alley, my shirt did not cover the top of a long scar from my chest surgery.  “What’s that from?” someone from the other team asked.

“Autopsy scar,” I answered.

“Really?”

“Yes.  I’m the first living heart donor.”  I replied.

The strangest part of the story is that I think the guy believed me.  He's not alone, from the mail I get, more than a few of my readers fully believe that I’m heartless.  And after today, that number is likely to increase because I’m about to dump a lot of cold water on something we all wish was true.  Who doesn’t want to feed the hungry?

In 2016, France passed a law that made it illegal for any grocery store larger than 4000 square feet to throw away food that was reaching the end of its salable lifespan.  Instead of simply tossing this still useful and nutritious food, it would go to a charitable non-profit organization that would make sure that the food reached those in need.  Not only would this help reduce a ridiculous amount of food waste but would help clean up the environment since decomposing food releases carbon into the atmosphere.

Who could possibly be against that?  Well, me.  This seemingly kindhearted proposal costs more than it is worth.

Before going into why I think the program is misguided, I should point out that the program has two goals:  to feed the hungry and to eliminate food waste and its negative effects on the environment.  I don’t know anything about food waste, but since the French government says only 5% of the nation’s food waste comes from grocery stores, it doesn’t seem like this program will do much to solve the problem.  I will, however, comment about the program’s goal of feeding the hungry.

This is a misguided and economically unsound idea that, while it will feed some hungry people, will do so at an exaggerated price, creating relative shortages and higher prices for all consumers, which results in lower profits for both farmers and retail establishments while increasing the cost of government.  It would be far cheaper for the government simply to buy the food and give it away.  The program is inflationary, and it creates what economists call “dead weight loss”, meaning that resources could be more efficiently allocated.

That sounds unreasonably harsh, so let me explain.

First, this will lead to a higher cost for the grocery store.  No matter how simple the government program is made for the stores, it will be more expensive than simply throwing the food away.  Stores will not be able to sell remaindered produce to those who currently use the waste to feed farm animals or to make compost.  And while the people may be poor, they were buying food before the program was implemented and those sales, as small as they might have been, would have been sales that will be lost for the store.  

In addition, implementing the law requires supermarkets to establish mechanisms for the proper sorting, storage, and transport of unsold food.  While these measures contribute to the overall goal of reducing food waste, they also incur additional operational costs for businesses.

As profit from selling produce diminishes, stores will attempt to minimize their losses by buying less produce, which results in less unsold surplus.  Farmers faced with a decline in sales will produce less.  Since governments raise revenue through taxing sales, a decline in sales will reduce tax revenue even as the cost of enforcing the new program will increase government cost.  

It might be easier to visualize how this works if we consider the extra cost imposed upon the retail organizations as a sales tax.  Since the sales tax increases the cost of an item, it reduces the amount sought by consumers, moving the supply line left on the graph (right).  Since consumer demand (red line) stays constant, the intersection of the demand line with the new supply line shows that the price goes from P1 to P2 while the quantity sold drops from Q1 to Q2.  

There are two general rules about any government program:  1.  The program expands over time, and in only the seven years this program has been in place the punitive fines to stores in violation of the program have increased substantially.  2.  Anything you tax decreases while anything you subsidize increases.  Already in France, the number of people receiving the free food has increased.  Since more people are obviously in need of food assistance, there are calls to expand the program.

The bottom line for the program is simple.  The cost of “free” food has been shifted to food producers, retailers, and consumers.  The French government spends money regulating and enforcing the transfer of food, financed by taxpayers.  The availability of “free” food entices more people to use the program, and the increased number of people on the program serves to validate not only the initial need for the program but justifies the program’s expansion.

It would have been cheaper for the French people if the government had directly subsidized food programs for the poor.   This reminds me of the tariffs imposed a few years ago by the government to save jobs in manufacturing.  Ten years later, the Congressional Budget Office released data that showed that several thousand jobs that had an average payroll of $65,000 a year were saved at an overall cost of only $200,000 each.  It is a wonder the program wasn’t immediately expanded.

Now, seven years after the implementation of the French law, what has been the result?  If you search the web, all the charitable organizations love the new regulations—as do the climate activist groups.  If you do a Google search, the top dozen responding sites have names like FoodNOW.com and ZeroWasteEurope.eu and, predictably, these organizations think the new regulations are fantastic.  There are no organizations on the web representing the tired French economists who are weary of being called heartless for trying to explain macroeconomics. 

Currently, France is pressuring the European Union to adopt the law, and it is only a matter of time before California, Oregon, or one of the other liberal states that substitute ‘caring’ for ‘thinking’ adopts a similar law.

The Last Gasp of Bed, Bath, and Beyond

Two weeks ago I wrote about the causes of the corporate murder of Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  While the company is as dead as Julius Caesar and the remains have been thoroughly scavenged by jackals, there is still one last chapter about the demise of the company.  I need to tell you the other half of the story.

Wait!  Haven’t I seen numerous recent television commercials for BB&B offering me all sorts of remaindered junk for incredibly cheap prices?  Of course you have, but that company is actually Overstock.com who bought the name of the defunct company.  They own the name and they can call themselves Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but it is not the same company where you used to shop for towels.  When companies like Polaroid, Bell and Howell, or Sharper Image go bankrupt, marketing companies buy the name and use it for advertising purposes, hoping to milk any remaining goodwill and legitimacy the name still generates.   This is why no one tried to purchase the name “Enron”.

The defunct corporation, that we will now call Used-To-BB&B, is still going through the bankruptcy process and one of the last pieces of business is it’s $37.65 million lawsuit filed with the Federal Maritime Commission against Overseas Orient Container Line, the company that brings its merchandise from China to ports in California.

Think back just a few years to when we were all staying home for just a few days to “flatten the curve” of new Covid cases.  Those few days turned into quite a few months and all over the globe, factories shut down, dock workers neither loaded or unloaded ships, and with all the ships waiting their turn to be unloaded, the waters off the coast of California began to look like a seagoing used car lot.  

When a cargo container was unloaded, there were no trucks waiting to haul the container away, so those containers of merchandise took up most of the storage space in the dockyard.  Since there were no workers to load an empty container back on the ship, what little storage space left was overcrowded with empty containers.  Depending on your political party, this was either a mild kink in the supply line or a galloping clusterfuck.

Since freight companies don’t make any money while ships sit idling at anchor and both the banks holding the loans on the ships and the crews on the ships expect to be paid whether the ship moves or not….the shipping companies started to playing dirty.  They began charging extra for “expedited” shipping, which was basically nothing more than moving a ship up to the front of the line to be unloaded first, if and when both dock workers and trucks could be located.

Since the shipping companies were under contract to provide timely service at a set price, the extra fees do seem something that Used-To-BB&B might be able to sue about.  But the shipping companies added to the extra fees by charging both demurrage and detention fees.  Let me explain—no, that will take too long, let me sum up.

Demurrage refers to the extra charges incurred when the consignee (the party receiving the cargo) exceeds the allowed free time for the use of a shipping container at a port or container yard.  Since the filled containers couldn’t be removed from the shipping yard because of the congestion in the port and the shortage of trucks, this hardly seems fair.  Even if the congestion were magically removed, the ports were closed due to the need for social distancing.  Effectively, the shipping companies wouldn’t allow the containers to be picked up but were charging extra because they weren’t.

Detention charges, on the other hand, are incurred when the shipping container is retained by the consignee or shipper outside the port or container yard for longer than the allowed free time.  This charge by the shipping companies was really cute since the container couldn’t be returned because the ports were closed, and even if they were open, the containers could only be returned if you had an appointment and the shipping companies refused to give anyone an appointment.  And even if you had an appointment, and the port magically opened, there were no trucks to return the container.

So, Used-To-BB&B had merchandise sitting offshore that they had paid for but couldn’t get delivered unless they paid extra.  Then, they were charged extra because they couldn’t get a truck to pick up the freight because the trucks weren’t running and the port was closed.  When they finally did get the merchandise, they were charged extra because they couldn’t get an appointment to return the empty container with trucks that weren’t running to a port that was closed.

These extra fees and charges were not what bankrupted the company, though that is exactly what is being claimed by Used-To-BB&B in court.  In the long run, I’m not sure how interested the Federal Maritime Commission will be in finding for a company that no longer exists, and against the shipping companies that work daily with the commission.  Only time will tell, and even if Used-To-BB&B wins, the funds collected will not come close to paying off all of the outstanding debts.

I am sure about one thing, though.  The lawyers on both sides will make a fortune.

Another Napoleon Story

The movie Napoleon is out and The Doc and I went to see it.  Interesting.  Lavish sets, good music, and gory battles all combined to make a rather lackluster movie about one of the most exciting personalities in history.   I can’t really put my finger on what went wrong, but somehow the movie just missed the Mark.  (Pun intended.)

I wasn’t overly upset by the numerous historical mistakes.  He was too old, she was too young, he didn’t witness the execution of Marie Antoinette, and there was no need to invent a story about Napoleon’s army shooting a cannon ball into the side of a pyramid.  Nor was there any need to invent a totally bogus version of the Battle of Austerlitz, turning a minor incident that killed at most a few men into a catastrophe that wiped out the Allied army.  The technical advisor for the film was probably a sociologist.  

Of more interest than the actual movie was the fact that the theater had only four people for the noon matinee, perhaps because the tickets were twice the normal price.  Even worse for the theater was that the screening room next door was showing a Beyoncé movie to a completely empty theater.  I’m studying economics, not marketing, but wouldn’t it make more sense to fill the theater with people who had purchased discounted tickets?  After all, people who aren’t in the theater can’t buy the overpriced popcorn.  Shouldn’t the people who run movie theaters being doing something different before their whole industry collapses?  According to the news, 3000 theaters have closed nationwide since the start of Covid.

Instead of wasting your time watching a three-hour movie in an empty theater, there is a far more interesting story about Napoleon out there, and it involves a painting by one of the best Spanish artists, Diego Velazquez.  If you are unfamiliar with his work, you can read about his most famous painting that is one of my favorites, here.

What art historians call spoliations napoléoniennes (and what everyone else calls “Napoleon stealing European art from every country he marched an army through”), started in 1794 and lasted for almost two decades.  Exactly how much art was looted is impossible to determine but it numbers in the thousands of pieces.  Most of it was sent to the newly established Musée du Louvre in Paris, with significant numbers ending up in the hands of various military officers, both French and British.  After Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo, the coalition of victors—calling themselves the Congress of Vienna—declared that all of the art had to be repatriated.  Surprisingly, some was.  Not very surprisingly at all, lots of it still hasn’t been.

The Spanish Royalty had amassed a fabulous collection of art, and when Napoleon invaded Spain and put his brother Joseph on the throne as a puppet king, Napoleon ordered his brother to send the best works north to Paris.  The Emperor intended to build a new museum, the Musée Napoléon that would outshine the Louvre.  Joseph loved the idea of a new museum so much that he decided he needed his own museum, a Museo Josefino.  As he looted the various royal residences of Madrid, Joseph kept what he thought were the best paintings for himself and sent 50 of the rest—still fabulous works of art by famous painters—across the Pyrenees to Paris.  

Most of the paintings that Joseph kept for his museum were eventually seized the British Army when Joseph was forced to flee.  Over sixty of those paintings are on display at Apsley House, the home of the Duke of Wellington, with various other paintings scattered in museums across England.

One of the paintings sent north was a full-length portrait (right) of Queen Isabel de Borbón, the wife of Spain’s King Philip IV.  Velazquez had done the painting in 1620, but after the Flemish artist Peter Rubens suggested that Velasquez study the work of the Italian masters, Velazquez decided to make some changes to the painting in 1631.  If you look closely, even a poor dumb ‘ol country boy like me can see where changes were made in the outline of the skirt.

The painting hung in the Buen Retiro palace, a royal residence in Madrid, next to another Velazquez masterpiece, a painting of her husband King Philip IV, one of the last good Spanish monarchs before the royal family took up the hobby of inbreeding.  Joseph wasn’t a great judge of art, so Philip’s painting remained in Spain, where it now hangs at the Prado Museum in Madrid while that of his wife was sent to France.  Since Napoleon’s private museum was never built, it was displayed in the Louvre and since it was already part of that museum’s collection before Napoleon was sent to St. Helena, it was never returned to Spain (in defiance of the Congress of Vienna).  Another reason it remained in France is that as soon as the exiled King Ferdinand of Spain finally regained his throne, he was too busy attacking his enemies to worry about art.

France went through a few political upheavals, too, and as the Bourbon family regained the throne, a French official did a little looting of his own and moved the painting from the museum to his own home.  When the monarchy fell and Napoleon III came to power, the family in possession of the painting sold it to a British art dealer.  In the next century, the painting was sold twice more, both times to private collectors.

Today, the anonymous private owner has decided to sell the painting through the Sotheby’s auction house.  Since the majority of works by Diego Velazquez are in large museums, it has been a few decades since a painting of this quality from one of the Spanish masters has changed hands.  While the auction is not until February, it is expected that the painting will go for at least $35 million.  It is certain to set a new record high price for a Velasquez painting.

If Enema U would cancel football for the next five years, it could add this painting to the university art museum.  

If I had to bet, I would guess that the painting will disappear, probably in the hands of a private collector in Dubai.  What I’m hoping for—besides the obscure chance that sanity will hit Enema U—is that the Spanish government will buy the painting and reunite Queen Isabel with King Philip.

The Untimely Death of Bed, Bath, and Beyond

To start with, I should probably admit that I never really liked this store.   With the partial exception of the kitchenware, the rest of the inventory might as well have been invisible.  If the assorted bedding, towels, and whatever else was in there had been free for the taking, I doubt that I would have left with anything.

Since I enjoy cooking, and live in a New Mexican desert where there is a shortage of stores that sell kitchenware, I would occasionally pick up a small item or two there.  And I might window shop there to compare items before I bought them more cheaply online.  Overall, this was just another store, like Hobby Lobby, Michael’s, and Best Buy, that holds absolutely no interest for me.  After all, it’s not like they sell books.

Still, B3 was a Fortune 500 company whose 1530 stores had an annual revenue of over $12 billion and its demise needs to be examined.  Unfortunately—particularly for its employees—an economic postmortem shows that B3 committed suicide.

The company started 52 years ago when two managers, Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg, lost their jobs when a New York regional department store folded.  Correctly predicting that the day of the department store was over, the two men opened a specialty store that sold only bedding and linen.  

Originally called Bed ‘n Bath, this was one of the first of the specialty stores that eventually came to be known as “Meme Stores” or “Category Killers” that rapidly spread across the country.  Chains like Best Buy, Ikea, OfficeMax, and Barnes and Noble built large superstores overstuffed with narrow lines of inventory that overwhelmed the competition since a department store that could only hold a narrow inventory in each category.  Shoppers that needed a widget naturally went to Widget World where they could select between numerous models of both left and right-handed widgets.

Bed ‘n Bath faced competition from similar stores, so Feinstein and Eisenberg came up with a marketing plan that made their fledgling company a success.  Changing the name to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, they added kitchenware and standardized an appealing store design.  The stores were very large, roughly 20,000 square feet, with high ceilings and inventory stocked so high that customers could easily discern the different departments.  Instead of the usual advertising, B3 mailed out discount coupons.  Hundreds of millions of coupons each year, with at least half of those damn little blue and white discount coupons being mailed to my house.  

Part of the marketing plan was pure genius.  Individual store managers were given the authority to vary the inventory in their stores to fit the needs of the customers who shopped there.  If the corporate chain running the local grocery store was smart enough to do that, then the shoppers wouldn’t be forced to choose among items that some idiot in Chicago erroneously believes are the ingredients for Mexican food.  

The marketing strategy worked for a long time.  The company expanded, opening new stores across the country, and the stock price grew dramatically.  But, just as the department stores declined over time due to new innovations, so too did the new specialty stores.  Slowly over time, e-commerce began to steal sales from traditional large box stores.

Most of the surviving box stores countered this with an online operation of their own.  A few companies, like Sears, B3, Circuit City, and Federated failed to do this properly and none of them are still in operation.  Sears in particular failed at this, though they had an online operation, it was impossible to use.  I tried to buy a Craftsman weed eater from them once and found it listed on their website multiple times with five different prices, all of which were higher than the same product on Amazon.  If you can buy a Sears product from Amazon cheaper than you can buy it from Sears…. Well, it doesn’t take a fortune teller to predict the chain’s demise.

Facing declining sales, the Board of Directors for Bedbugs, Battleaxes, and Boredom held a small revolution, the founding partners resigned, and a new Chief Financial Officer was hired.  Gustavo Arnal was brought in to save the company with a new marketing plan.  At the same time, Ryan Cohen was elected to the Board after buying ten percent of the outstanding stock.  Each of these men had an independent plan for the company.

Arnal wanted to introduce store brands to the outlets.  A B3 labeled product would assure the customer of quality while simultaneously making the company more profits.  All the surviving big box chains do this, and it is usually a successful strategy.  In the case of B3, the new products were introduced too rapidly, and sales of the new line were sluggish—and when Covid hit they all but stopped.  To counter this, the company resorted to issuing even more little blue discount coupons.  While the strategy did continue to bring in shoppers, the discounted sales were not profitable.  For the last five years the chain was in operation, sales climbed each year even as profits steadily declined.

Still, the company would have survived if not for the actions of Ryan Cohen and the rest of the board of directors.  The Board began an aggressive campaign of buying back the company common stock.  As each share of stock is purchased, the value of the stock still issued rises on the market as the total value of the company is divided among a smaller number of stockholders.

Contrary to what numerous politicians scream about, there is nothing inherently wrong about a company repurchasing its own stock, just as there is nothing wrong when the company sells its stock.  As Warren Buffet once said, critics of stock buybacks are “either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue” or both, and all investors benefit from them as long as they are made at the right prices.

In the case of B3, the price was horribly wrong as the company paid an average of $44 a share for a stock that should have been valued in the single digits.  Worse, the company was selling bonds to raise the cash to buy the stock, incurring an ever larger debt.  Altogether, the Board of Directors paid over $12 billion to purchase some of the stock of a company that was worth, in total, an estimated $500 million.

Now there is a tactic for selling stock that is called “pump and dump” where you artificially raise the price of a stock you own so you can sell at an inflated price.  This “pump and dump” tactic is illegal.  Far be it for me to insinuate that someone in the company was guilty of this—at least in print—but some people made a lot of profit by selling their B3 stock off for a lot more than they had paid for it.  For instance, Ryan Cohen made a profit of $68 million by selling his stock in the summer of 2022.

If the company hadn’t borrowed so much money by selling those bonds, there would have been no problem.  Even with the bonds, it was possible for the company to survive, perhaps by selling more stock or selling off all or part of the company to raise funds.  Instead, Gustavo Arnal jumped out a window and committed suicide.  The fact that Arnal committed suicide just days after a $1.2 billion lawsuit was filed against both Arnal and Cohen is probably an accident.

You can imagine what that did to the price of that stock.  It dropped like….well, a CFO falling from the 18th floor of his apartment building.

The company folded and all assets were sold.  One of those assets was the company name, which sold to Overstock.com for $21.5 million.  Overstock, now rebranded as Bed, Bath, and Beyond, is now selling goods exclusively online.

So, did Cohen deliberately kill B3 to make a profit off of the carcass?  It's a little confusing and the Feds are still investigating.  But remember that weird stock trading scandal a couple of years back involving Gamestop?  The one where the stock shot up 1500% and the company officers dumped their stock just before the price crashed?  Cohen was on the Board of Directors of that company, too.

Twain’s Favorite Painting

Without a doubt, my favorite book on Art History was written by Mark Twain.  It is a splendid reference book on the European Renaissance that covers artworks displayed from Spain to Italy.  Twain, a noted expert on Western Art, wrote a series of newspaper articles as he traveled across Europe and the Holy Lands and these were collected in 1869 in a single volume, The Innocents Abroad.

After weeks of travel and study, Twain was able to wisely comment, “Who is this Renaissance?  Where did they come from?  Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?”

This is the kind of deep insight that only travel to foreign lands provides.

Naturally, Twain didn’t intend to write a textbook on art history and I may be the only person who thinks he did. Twain’s real aim was to provide a great travel book—one that would correct the many mistakes and overwhelmingly sugary prose of a popular contemporary travel volume written by William Cowper Prime.  Technically, Twain lampooned Prime’s book, but a more accurate description would be that Twain ravaged his competition like a pack of hungry wolves descending on a daycare right about lunch time. 

In particular, Twain was somewhat contemptuous of the tour guides who attempted to elevate every piece of art into a masterpiece simply because it had been around for five centuries.  And Twain was deeply puzzled by the tourists who seemed to believe everything these tour guides said, no matter how ridiculous.  Eventually, Twain summed up his feelings about the staggering accumulation of exaggerations and outright lies of the region with a single statement:

"If all the poetry and nonsense that have been discharged upon the fountains and the bland scenery of this region were collected in a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn."

Actually, Twain did appreciate some art, and he even had a favorite painting—one that you have probably never heard of.

Frederic Edwin Church was a mid-nineteenth century American landscape painter who was a part of the Hudson River School of painters.  The School’s members were known for their attention to detail and their realistic approach to portraying nature.  Their goal was to be as accurate as possible while emphasizing light as much as possible in their paintings.  Usually, their landscapes were very large and depicted a tranquil while majestic view of nature.  Or to put it more clearly, imagine one huge, highly-detailed painting with half of Yellowstone Park in it.

As the name of the school implies, the Hudson River Valley provided Church with scenes for his early works, but he soon expanded his source of inspiration to places that were “less civilized” than the Eastern United States.  Besides traveling across the United States, Church made two trips to South America, in particular, visiting the volcanoes of Ecuador.  He returned to the States with his sketchbooks filled with highly detailed drawings he later used as the basis for his paintings.

The Heart of the Andes was one of those paintings.  Roughly 5 ½ by 10 feet in size, the painting depicts a large plain in front of the volcano Mount Chimborazo, with a jungle in the foreground. Completed in 1859, the painting quickly became famous in the United States.  Church exhibited the painting in several cities, always carefully arranging the painting so that it was well lit from above.  

People stood in long lines to pay a quarter for the privilege of taking their turn to stand close to the painting.  Those people later said that they seemed to be absorbed by the painting, believing that they were entering the forest.  Many of the patrons said that the experience of viewing the landscape made them dizzy and that they seemed to forget where they were.

Twain went to one of those exhibitions while in St. Louis and wrote his brother about the experience:

“Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this city has ever seen––Church’s “Heart of the Andes”––which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all the bloom and glory of a tropical summer––dotted with birds and flowers of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners, and twilight groves, and cool cascades––all grandly set off with a majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in everlasting ice and snow! I have seen it several times, but it is always a new picture––totally new––you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first… When you first see the tame, ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon it, and say “Humbug”––but your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in––and appreciate it in its fulness––and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands. You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections––your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something––you hardly know what––will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture––It remains with you still. It is in my mind now––and the smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it.”

Over the years, Twain visited the painting he said was the “most wonderfully beautiful painting” many times and even mentioned it a few time in his stories.  Today, you can judge the painting for yourself, as it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Twain never claimed to be an expert about art, and cheerfully admitted that none of the works by the ‘old masters’ impressed him.  But like everyone else, he knew what he liked and didn’t pretend otherwise.  Or, as he once said:

“It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.”

Banned Books

Boy, am I ever against censorship!  I’m willing to bet good money that I own—and have read—more banned books than anyone reading this post.  Part of the irony of that statement is that this blog is still banned in a few countries.  And the majority of my hate mail (including a few fatwahs) comes from countries that are the most active in banning access to certain books.

Without a doubt my favorite banned book is Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.  Ever since the book was published 137 years ago, it is routine that some idiot, somewhere, has come out of his mother’s basement into the sunlight just long enough to scream that the book is harmful to children.  Most of the opposition comes in two forms:  First, that "the novel contains racist language and slurs (that were reflective of the time and setting in which it was written."  To which I answer, “Right.”

Secondly, the novel addresses issues related to slavery, racism, and the institution of slavery in the United States.  Once again, my answer is “Correct—Twain is openly ridiculing the White, stereotypically negative view of Blacks in society.”  (I wonder if this idiotic criticism of the book would be different if Twain had, as he originally planned, named the book after Jim?)  

It does seem that the controversy over banned books has changed its emphasis from race to sex recently.  With the exception of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which some teachers in the Pacific Northwest want to eliminate), most of the yammering about banning books seems to be over depictions of gay or trans young people in various books.  

My initial reaction to this controversy was to ignore it.  There is not much need to ban any book these days since it becomes increasingly and painfully apparent that the youth of today won’t read anything not operated by their thumbs.  According to the NEA, the average child today reads only about half as many books a year as children did in 1992—which was 30% less than those in the sixties read.  Perhaps the solution to the problem is to pretend to ban books so that rebellious children will discover what the inside of a library looks like.

To be honest, I’ve changed my mind about the above paragraph.  I routinely gift books to my grandchildren (including, of course, both Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird) and I try to keep up with some of the current authors of children’s books, including the current Newberry Award recipients.  While researching some recent publications, I was shocked to discover that there really are some books that schools might want to reconsider before putting them in elementary school libraries.  Remember that the average elementary school library has children ranging in age from 6 to 13 freely roaming all of the shelves.  I was reading several years above my age level by age 9 and several of the books I have discovered recently would have been profoundly confusing to me at that age.  (Hell, one of the books is still a little confusing.)

Before you rashly proclaim that all books are appropriate for anyone, consider that, from where I sit as I type this, I can spot copies of both Mein Kampf and a book containing horribly graphic photographs documenting the Rape of Nanking.  No library policy should be so rigid as to overrule a good librarian’s common sense, but it is just our unfortunate luck that common sense is not all that common.

Still, there is a great deal of press about groups banning books—particularly in Florida—so I decided to do a little quick research on my own.  In this pursuit, I relied heavily on the folks at Marshall University, who maintain an excellent website listing the most commonly banned books and the school districts in which groups have attempted to ban books.  I should point out that Marshall University absolutely does not ban any book, nor should it.  You can find its website here.  All of the books in the top ten are there because of sexual material or material  related to portrayals of LGBTQ lifestyle.

Allow me explain how I did my admittedly sloppy research.  For the ten most commonly banned books, I tabulated the states in which school districts considered banning a book last year.  I also made a list of the states in which school districts considered banning a book the year that it was published.  I must make two big warnings about the data:  First, a great many of the school districts turned down requests to ban the book.  Secondly, some of the books have been in publication for years and I did not tabulate the states in those years.  I would encourage some student in need of a major research paper to do a more thorough job of examining the data available.  

So, what patterns/fascinating facts did I find?  Florida, which has been made the poster child for being the nation’s greatest threat to literary freedom, showed up on the list for book banning last year only once, and it showed up only once on the list of states attempting to ban a book the year it was published.  A great many other states showed up on one or both lists several times, including Texas, California, New York, Virginia, Missouri, and Kansas.  States that showed up at least once included Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, and Oregon.  Despite my expectations, the only Southern state in the “Bible Belt” that showed up was Texas (five occurrences) and in many cases, those attempts to ban books were unsuccessful.  

The bottom line?  I suspect that attempts by well-meaning people to ban books show up wherever people live and if one state is garnering more news coverage about book banning than others, it probably tells us more about how the news is packaged and sold than about what the people in that state are doing or thinking.

Most people are against such obvious forms of censorship and almost everyone agrees that banning a book for high school students and above is wrong and should not be tolerated.  But, there are more subtle ways to censor books.  Are you against them, too?

Recently, I accompanied a colleague of mine to the campus bookstore.  As we passed a display of recent publications, my friend moved a random book over to cover a book written by a conservative talking head—one who writes highly inaccurate ‘history’ books that I despise.  Obviously, my friend didn’t want anyone to buy any of those books, so they were “censored” from view.  Yes, that’s censorship, too.

Do you follow the New York Times Bestseller List?  Are you aware that the number of books sold has absolutely nothing to with the ranking of books on that list?  Publishers, authors, other newspapers, and almost all of the digital media have complained about that for decades and there has been no change.  Want to know how the books on the list are selected?  So does everyone else and the Times isn’t saying.  But if you read the list for a couple of months, you can see a trend that suggests placement is highly influenced by politics.  That the Times does this is perfectly okay—it’s their newspaper.  But, it’s still censorship.

Ever heard of algorithmic censorship?  This involves the use of algorithms to filter out certain content from online platforms.  For example, social media companies may use algorithms to suppress certain posts.  They don’t have to tell you why or when they censor you.  They just shut you down.  When we use those social media platforms, we’re condoning their censorship.

Then there is corporate censorship:  This occurs when businesses use their power and influence to silence dissenting voices or to restrict access to information.  For instance, a media conglomerate might pressure its journalists to avoid reporting on certain topics, or it might use its financial clout to suppress unfavorable coverage of its business practices.  When we do business with those companies, we become their partners.

Censorship is all around us.  Perhaps we should stop worrying about a few parents who are a little overzealous about trying to protect their children until we have examined how much censorship we, ourselves, are partners in.

The Greater Fire

The devastating fire started on October 8, 1871.  Though there were several ludicrous theories about how the fire started—including a cow kicking over a lantern and a theory about flaming meteorites caused by a passing comet—the probable cause of the fire was simply high winds fanning a small fire during a year’s long drought that had turned the entire Midwest into a tinderbox that was just waiting for the smallest spark to ignite.

Whatever the cause, the flames spread and the fire quickly became uncontrollable, forcing people to flee.  While firefighters tried valiantly to extinguish the blaze, their task was complicated by lack of communications, by lack of professional training and by a shortage of equipment for those fighting the fire.  Even when firefighters raced to help other, distant neighbor firemen, they found their hoses would not connect to the hydrants or even to other hoses.

The unusually dry year, the high winds, the almost total lack of preparedness by civil authorities to be unable to fight all but the smallest of fires.  This fire, however it started, was the largest and most deadly fire in American history.  The really surprising aspect of the fire was that almost no one even noticed that it happened.  The New York Times didn’t even report the fire for three days, and even then, it was such a small story that few people even paid attention.

Oh!  You thought I was talking about that fire in Chicago?  That’s an understandable, innocent mistake, since both fires started on the same day—October 8, 1871–but I was referring to the big fire, the Peshtigo Fire, in northeastern Wisconsin…The fire you’ve probably never heard of.

In the 1870’s, upper Wisconsin was still being settled and most of the new farmers pouring into the virgin forests were poor immigrants.  The fastest way to clear the land was to fell the trees, burn them, then plow the ashes back under the soil.  This slash and burn agriculture was probably the source of the flames, but no one will ever be sure.  

Yes, some excitable people have actually theorized that both this fire and the one that torched Chicago were caused by meteorites.  We can probably ignore this theory since not only is there no evidence that such a thing happened in the Midwest in 1871, but there is not one case of meteorites ever starting a fire in history.

That night, a cold front hit the upper Midwest, bringing a temperature drop and very strong winds that  caught a small fire and turned it into a raging inferno that quickly developed into a fire storm.  When a firestorm rages through a forest, the diameter can be anywhere from 1000 feet wide up to two miles across.  With temperatures hitting 2000 degrees and traveling 110 mph across Wisconsin, this one destroyed everything in its path.  One of the reasons it took so long for the rest of the United States to learn of the fire was that it cut communications by destroying telegraph lines.  The few survivors described the swirling air rising, forming a giant flaming tornado that threw railway cars off their tracks and easily jumped rivers.

The other reason that it took so long for news of the inferno to reach the rest of the country was that there were very few survivors.  Due to the drought, there were so many fires across the Northern United States that residents had grown used to smelling smoke, waiting until they actually saw flames before responding.  The fire traveled twice as fast as the speediest locomotive and when the fire arrived at small towns and villages, it was if the little communities had been hit by nuclear blast.

The fire destroyed 1.2 million acres and 17 communities, killing somewhere between 1500 and 2500 people.

The exact number of dead will never be known.  While the state carefully prepared a list of the known casualties, along with the names of those missing, no one believes that the list is complete.  On a fairly regular basis, new mass graves have been discovered, containing unknown victims.  The hardest hit community was Peshtigo, where a mass grave contained over 350 bodies.  The primary reason that the deceased could not be identified was that there was no one left alive who could connect names with the corpses.  The town of Peshtigo was completely destroyed in an hour, with the loss of 800 souls.

It wasn't until days (or even weeks) later, when survivors and witnesses were able to reach larger cities and telegraph offices, that news of the Peshtigo Fire began to spread more widely.  The scale of the disaster and the high death toll gradually became known, but the Peshtigo fire never became a news sensation like the “Great” Chicago Fire, that had claimed 300 lives and destroyed 2100 acres.

The Chicago fire was far smaller and caused many fewer casualties than the Peshtigo fire, but it had made the news first, with graphic stories from the numerous survivors who gave detailed interviews.  Since it was an urban fire, there were lots of photos of whole streets with destroyed buildings.  By comparison, photos of burned trees—regardless of the number—just didn’t seem important.  By the time some of the horrific stories of the human losses made their way out of the Wisconsin forest, people were already bored with fires or they simply thought the new stories were about part of the Chicago Fire.  Some news sources didn’t even bother reporting the story.

Far worse, by the time the needs of the victims of the Peshtigo Fire were tallied, all of the charitable relief had gone to Chicago.  This was long before disaster relief was government-financed, so when the charitable organizations sought contributions from donors a second time, the results fell far short of need.  According to the Dictionary of Wisconsin History, there were an additional 1500 severely injured and 3000 made homeless.   

The Great Chicago Fire received widespread media attention and became a symbol of urban destruction, leading to significant changes in urban planning and firefighting practices. The Peshtigo Fire, despite being even deadlier, received less national and international attention at the time.  It is ironic that the fire that was larger and had a higher death toll—and remains the deadliest wildfire in US history—was less publicized and its victims were less provided for.

An Apology

For most of my adult life, I have believed that the reports of American antisemitism were probably overstated, a natural and justifiable reaction by American Jews to memories of the Holocaust.  Of course, antisemitism still existed, but surely such warped thinking was dying out, a lingering evil that was present only in the warped minds of people so ignorant they couldn’t spell the word.

Not being Jewish, I only rarely came into contact with that form of prejudice, and when I did, it was easy to shut it down, secure in my belief that such stupidity was an isolated and rare occurrence.  Growing up in the South, I occasionally ran across a few morons that still yearned for the South to rise again, but only among either the feeble-minded or those who resided on the political fringes.

Over the years, I saw prejudice and injustice against Blacks and Hispanics, and while I took a stand against such bigotry, in hindsight, I certainly didn’t do nearly enough.  Only rarely, however, did I actually witness any overt antisemitism, and when I did, I believed it was a rare example of aberrant behavior.  

When a friend told me that he had actually met people that believed he had horns, I thought he had found the last Nazis that weren’t hiding in caves in Argentina.  Surely such ignorance was extremely limited.

A business partner of mine from a few decades’ past didn’t want to do business with a certain company because of the ethnicity of the owner.  I laughed at my partner and said his thinking was a relic from an ancient past that never really existed.  My partner acquiesced and our two companies went on to have a profitable relationship for several years.  Today, I wonder if I should have done more or said more to my partner.  Why did I treat his prejudice as a joke?  That conversation still haunts me.

When I taught American History, I tried to the very best of my ability to portray the cruelty of slavery, the injustices of the Jim Crow period, and the struggles of the Civil Rights era (much of the last of which I had lived through with far too little self-awareness).  I still have my notes from those lectures and the points that I stressed were that I was embarrassed by the past injustices I had casually ignored, that there was still injustice in our society, and that I predicted that in the decades to come, many of my students would be made equally uncomfortable by their own lack of awareness.

That my students may have ignored what I was saying is forgivable.  What is far worse is that I wasn’t even listening to myself.  There was injustice all around me and, once again, I was ignoring it.

Of course, I lectured about the Holocaust.  I even showed my classes films so horrific that, when I was not using them, I kept them locked in the back of my gun safe because I was afraid that my own children might watch them before they were old enough to understand the documented pure evil in them.  

That locked safe may be the perfect metaphor for how I reacted to the antisemitism around me:  if I locked it away, I wouldn’t have to deal with it until I wanted to.  As soon as the worrisome details were shoved to the back of the safe, I could slam the door, spin the tumblers, and then ignore it because those injustices were not aimed at me.  

And that is how prejudice and hatred survive:  they live in the darkest recesses of society because there are not enough people who are willing to directly confront them and drag them  out into the light and demand an end to the stupidity.  Racial injustice must be actively sought out and confronted, for otherwise, it will always find another dark corner of society in which to fester.

It is not enough to simply confront prejudice when you are the target—that is as senseless as trying to stop a flood by only sweeping back the water that tries to enter your property.  Racial prejudice is something that must be confronted regardless of where it is happening, and who it is happening to.  It is not nearly enough to confront prejudice when it is aimed at you—it must be confronted when it is aimed at anyone, anywhere, anytime.

For years, I did not really believe that antisemitism in America was really a problem.  The events of the last few weeks have convinced me that not only was I horribly naïve, but that my naïveté was a real danger to my friends. It really shouldn't have taken people screaming in American streets for the death of my friends for me to see the obvious.

 In many ways, I failed my friends—Jamie, Carlos, Rachel, Victor, Andrea, and the rest of my friends—who face very real dangers that I have ignored.  I apologize.  I will do better.