Artistic Destruction

The Georgia Guidestones are no more.  The quarter-of-a-million-pound granite artwork, sometimes referred to as the American Stonehenge, was so badly damaged by a vandal’s bomb last July that the government toppled what was left of the megalith this week.  

The nineteen-foot-tall granite tablets were inscribed with a message to the future in ten languages, sort of a modern-day Rosetta Stone.  While exactly who detonated the bomb is unknown, the act was most likely motivated by the losing gubernatorial campaign of an idiot who ran on the platform of leaving up Confederate monuments while tearing down those that were “obviously used for satanic rituals”.  Part of the message inscribed on stone was: “Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts….Avoid petty laws and useless officials.”

No doubt it was the attack on useless officials that upset the would-be politician.

In June, a young man broke into the Dallas Museum of Art and smashed three 2500-year-old Greek artifacts valued at more than $5 million.  When he was finished wielding his hammer on the artifacts, he called the local police and calmly announced, “Hey, I’m in the Dallas Museum of Art.”

At left is one of the artifacts the vandal smashed, a 6th century B.C. Greek amphora.  Think of the history that has passed since this vessel was created.  It survived the Peloponnesian Wars, the Age of Alexander the Great, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and… 

Never mind.  It was destroyed by a 21-year-old moron who spent a total of 12 minutes in the museum after using his hammer to break through the glass of the museum’s doors.  When questioned by the police, he explained that he did it because he was “mad at my girl.”

In October, an American tourist at the Chiaramonti Museum in Rome calmly asked for an audience with the Pope.  When told that was impossible, the man became irate and knocked a 2,000-year-old bust off a pedestal, smashing the piece on the marble floor.  When the 50-year-old tourist saw guards rushing to apprehend him, he knocked a second statue to the floor.

Added to these, consider the other recent attacks on our shared cultural heritage:

• The ongoing debate about whether or not street art by Banksy should be left in situ or removed so the work can be seen in a museum now must deal with a new trend—the graffiti by Banksy is now almost immediately a target by other graffiti artists hoping to get their work in the news.  
• Museums of contemporary art and costumes are horrified by Kim Kardashian’s recent appropriation of a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe to wear at the Met Gala.  (My distaste of actually typing the word ‘Kardashian’ is mildly assuaged by the fact that spell check has never heard of her.  Wish I hadn’t.)
• An art exhibit at the Musée Picasso in Paris consisting of a blue coat with pockets filled with postcards depicting the works of Picasso was stolen by an elderly woman who had a tailor alter the coat to better fit her.  She was a frequent patron of the museum and did not mistake it for a simple garment.
• 
  Two ‘boisterous’ children smashed a $64,000 glass sculpture of the Disneyland castle on exhibit at the Shanghai Museum of Glass.  The parents’ claim the event was an accident is belied by security camera footage of the parents using their cellphones to record the children smashing the sculpture.
• The historic Spanish steps in Rome were damaged when a Saudi tourist tried to drive his Maserati down the steps, crashing into a wall and breaking off a piece of the travertine marble.  Two weeks later, two American tourists attempted to ride motorized scooters down the steps.  Technically, one of the scooters made it to the bottom, but it was driverless.
• Vandals in the Koonalda Cave in Southern Australia have destroyed cave art that dates back more than 22,000 years.  The authorities are still searching for the vandals.

It is no accident that these attacks on artwork are escalating, since in the last year, public art has been a frequent target of protestors trying to make international news.  The protestors-turned-vandals are usually trying to make some form of statement about the environment, but this in no way justifies the attacks on priceless art.  Not only does this form of protest do nothing for the cause the protestors claim to care about, but it cheapens the artwork targeted in the minds of the public.  In the worst case scenario in which the artwork is destroyed, the vandals have robbed the world of a piece of its history and its heritage.

This year alone, protestors have glued themselves to four different paintings in England to protest the use of petroleum.  The irony that the glue they used is a petroleum product evidently escaped them.  In addition, more than two dozen famous paintings have been attacked, including works by Picasso, Vermeer, and Klimt.  Buckets of mashed potatoes were thrown at Monet’s Haystacks.  Pea soup was thrown at Van Gogh’s The Sower and tomato soup was smeared across his Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers.  A man disguised as a wheelchair bound woman smuggled a cake into the Louvre so he could smear it across the Mona Lisa, though I forget what unrelated cause he was supposedly protesting.  Bedwetting by bald cross-dressers?

We already lose too much art through non-preventable causes like wars, natural disasters, and the inevitable wear and tear of time.  There is nothing we can do about the art that went down with the Titanic.  We tried and failed to protect all the treasures stolen during World War II.  Museums flood and Notre Dame burns and we all suffer.  These kinds of losses that we can’t stop are bad enough without our having to worry about idiotic vandals.

Many paintings have recently been protected from vandals by thick unbreakable glass—so far, anyway.  But such protests always escalate—otherwise they become mundane and fail to garner sufficient Twitter clicks and Facebook ‘likes’.  So, the “protestors” will keep at it, growing ever bolder and using more extreme tactics until, inevitably, we will permanently lose more priceless treasures somewhere.  And these attacks will continue to trivialize the value of such works in the minds of the public.  

The only way to stop such vandalism is to vigorously prosecute the vandals.  Unfortunately, none of the events listed above (with the exception of the Dallas museum incident, which has yet to come to trial) has resulted in more than small fines, partial restitution, or community service.  

Art theft is a white-collar crime and thus it gets fairly lenient treatment.  If you are convicted of stealing a million-dollar Picasso, chances are that you will receive a more lenient punishment that the guy who robbed the local convenience store of $300 and a pack of cigarettes.  You will note that a conviction for an attempted bank or convenience store theft carries the same punishment as a successful bank theft.

There is a reason that these protestors throw soup at Mona Lisa and do not stage mock holdups at banks.

If we treated the theft of art the same way we treat the theft of an equivalent amount of cash from a bank, this would help deter art crime.  We should also treat the destruction of art as severely as the theft—in both cases the public has been deprived of the art.  And so it follows that we should treat the attempt to destroy art by vandalism exactly the same as the destruction of art, and prosecute accordingly.

If we did that, it would send a powerful message that we value our cultural heritage and will do whatever is necessary to protect it.

The Newspaper Headline

Like every good Texan, as I grew up, I both knew of and actively participated in the rivalry between Fort Worth (good) and Dallas (evil).   Usually, the rivalry took the form of jokes and the occasional high school football games, but occasionally you heard stories about how both cities competed in attracting new businesses.

The rivalry started almost a century and a half ago, when a lawyer heard that a railroad was about to lay tracks to the then tiny village of Fort Worth.  The lawyer quickly relocated, hoping to prosper as the village grew.  Unfortunately, the railroad changed its mind and decided against laying tracks to the town, so the lawyer moved to Dallas where he wrote an article for the Dallas Daily Herald stating that there was so little activity in his former home that a panther had wandered into the village at noon and had taken a nap in the middle of Main Street.  For weeks, said the lawyer, the chief topic of conversation in Fort Worth was to point at the middle of the thoroughfare and say, “He slept rite thar.”

In the end, Fort Worth had the last laugh, since not only did the railroad eventually come to the town, but the community gleefully adopted the panther as its mascot.  Early in the twentieth century, Amon Carter, the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, used the panther as the paper’s logo.  Carter, an enthusiastic booster of his city, supposedly always packed a lunch when business forced him to visit Dallas, so that he wouldn’t have to spend a nickel in that city.  It was Carter who labeled Fort Worth as “Where the West Begins,” a slogan that still appears on the masthead of his paper.  The paper did not print the rest of the phrase, “Dallas, where the East peters out.”

Today, I live in a New Mexico town that has an ongoing rivalry with a city just 40 miles away, just across the border in Texas.  As businesses flee the heavy taxes and extensive regulations of California, they are relocating across almost al of the Southwest.  Almost all southwest states and cities are eagerly competing to bring home new jobs to boost their economies and expand their tax bases.  Unfortunately, New Mexico is not part of the competition.  

Businesses are definitely flocking to cities in Texas.  Every time I drive south across the border, I’m amazed at all the new businesses and warehouses being built along the interstate.  Unfortunately, the new construction dramatically stops at the state line, heading back north, into New Mexico.

Have you seen the satellite photos of night lights in North and South Korea?  South Korea is ablaze in lights, but North Korea is as dark as the grave, with only a dim glow around Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.  Unfortunately, the satellite photo of the New Mexico/Texas border is starting to share some of the same characteristics.  The photo at left shows the two communities separated by the state border.  The long line leading south and north of the brighter city is Interstate 10.  The red arrow points to the point where the interstate reaches the New Mexico border—the point where almost all commercial activity simply stops.

Businesses are highly unlikely to move to New Mexico for some very simple reasons.  This is a closed shop state with very strong labor laws favoring unions, despite the fact that the only large unions in the state are for school teachers and public employees.  California and New Mexico are the only closed shop states in the southwest:  the rest are right-to-work states, and all of those have expanding industrial bases.  It doesn’t seem to be a hard test, but it seems clear that our state is flunking.

New Mexico has relatively high business taxes, extensive anti-business regulations, and a state legislature so unstable that if a lobbyist spent $50 on an advertising campaign, the state would repeal the law of gravity.  These conditions are unlikely to attract new businesses, despite the state’s having an educated workforce, a low cost of living, cheap land, and great access to transportation.  The state also shares with California the dubious distinction of having run off a number of good-sized, well-established businesses.  Some of those formerly New Mexican businesses have relocated just across the border in Texas (and one even took its employees with it—a further loss to the tax base of a state that had no excess tax base to lose).  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the most valuable export from this state is not pecans or green chile: it is our college graduates, who have been educated at state expense and who must leave the state to find good-paying jobs they cannot find here.

All of the above came to mind this week as I read the local newspaper.  While cities across the southwest are competing for new industry, at right is a front page headline from one of the largest cities in New Mexico.   Happily, the city has a new tattoo parlor that must employ two or three people.  Now, all our problems are solved.

Hey!  Did you hear that a coyote wandered out of the desert into town and took a nap on Main Street?  He was rite thar.

The Other Jab

With rapidly ebbing enthusiasm, I watched several politicians making speeches this week.  I am somewhat shocked to learn that our elected officials evidently do not understand the difference between fiscal policy (actions taken by the independent Federal Reserve) and economic policy (actions and policy set by the president, Congress, and regulatory agencies).  Congress can only effect economic policy and seem to have little idea of the effects of such policy.  Perhaps this is why Congress, the White House, and the Federal Reserve have so frequently worked at cross purposes for the last two years.

One of the policies that various politicians emphasized was a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act (the name was obviously chosen by the Federal Bureau of Anti-Aptronyms) that will limit the cost of most insulin and insulin-related drugs to Medicare recipients to a maximum of $35 a month.  

While I certainly sympathize with those who have diabetes and genuinely wish the cost of insulin were much lower, this new act will not accomplish what Congress desires.  The actual result will be:  1.  The cost will be transferred to the taxpayer.  2.  The availability of insulin will decrease.  3.  The measure will not lower inflation but possibly raise it.  4.  The cost of insulin will rise.

Let’s take those points in order.

Instead of Medicare recipients paying the full price of insulin, they will now pay a maximum of $35 a month, with the balance to be paid by Medicare.  The pharmaceutical companies will be paid a “negotiated” price and the burden of payment will just be shifted to taxpayers.  While this may be a laudable goal, inflation is not caused by just consumers spending, but by the total spending going on in the economy, and this includes the government.  Since the recipients of this Medicare benefit will have an increase in their discretionary income, their increased consumption of other goods and services will drive inflation upwards.

Inflation is always caused by too many dollars chasing too few goods.  It doesn’t matter where the dollars come from—if these conditions exist, the result in a free market is always rising prices.

The bill gives Medicare the right to “negotiate prices” with the pharmaceutical companies producing insulin.  Since Medicare will certainly not negotiate higher prices and private insurance companies usually peg their maximum payments to equal those of Medicare, Medicare is essentially setting price controls on the sale of insulin.

Once price controls have been implemented on any product, the availability of that product always diminishes.   All goods are produced up to the marginal cost of production and if that cost is set lower than the market price, the amount of production must decrease.  Any government action that would attempt to coerce manufacturers to produce goods below cost—a clear violation to the 5th Amendment—would simply force the company out of business.  

Government’s putting a price cap on insulin will inevitably lower production, resulting in an inevitable shortage of insulin.  The timing of this new Medicare policy is problematic, as there is already a world-wide shortage of insulin.  The rising middle class in emerging nations increasingly has access to more food and enjoys the luxury of a less active lifestyle, which two conditions together result in an increasing number of people with diabetes.  Already, more than 20% of the people with diabetes worldwide come from China and India and this trend will certainly increase in the future.  Even without price controls, a worldwide shortage in insulin is inevitable.  

Even if the shortage did not exist, the lack of free markets and effective methods of distribution means it is all but impossible for enough insulin to effectively reach the growing number of patients needing the medicine in most of Asia and Africa.   A good case in point would be a recent study in Mozambique, which showed that even when large quantities of insulin were rushed to the country, over 75% of the supply remained in the capital, resulting in sever shortages in the rest of the country.

Shortages of a product, even without increased worldwide competition for the product, will raise the price of the product.  Whether the goods are sold on a black market or sold  in markets without price controls, the average price will go up.  There are good studies of the effects of government-imposed price controls all the way back to the time of Hammurabi and without exception, attempts by governments to dictate prices result in shortages and higher prices.  

What can be done?  There are two possible ways to ease an all but inevitable crisis.  Government regulation—particularly by the American Food and Drug Administration—could ease restrictions on the creation of competing companies manufacturing insulin.  Today, three multinational companies—Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly and Company, and Sanofi—control 99% of the $21 billion global insulin market in terms of value and 96% in terms of volume.  Throughout history, the most effective way to lower prices while increasing quality has been through increased competition.   Insulin was discovered 97 years ago, so there is no reason why there should be so few pharmaceutical companies producing the medicine.

Unfortunately, the imposition of price controls will make it even harder for new companies to begin profitable production.  The three existing companies producing insulin welcomed the new Medicare regulations since it guaranteed they retained their market share and created massive roadblocks for competition.

The only other possibility of reducing the insulin shortage is through increased medical research, not only for a cure for diabetes, but for a generic version of insulin—something that does not yet exist.  Biosimilar insulins are also available but are not yet effective enough to reduce the need for insulin.  More money is needed for research and innovation, but the traditional source of such funds (private market investing in order to secure future profit) is impeded by government controls on market prices.

Since it is far easier for politicians to simply claim they have solved difficult problems than actually solving them….  Don’t expect to see the number of diabetes deaths worldwide to drop anytime soon.

In the Dark

One of the few benefits of being a retired university professor is that I can take classes without paying tuition.  I’m not sure how many of my former colleagues take advantage of this perk since I have yet to encounter a single retired faculty member in any of my classes.  After years of telling students that education is important, it turns out that phrase was just a mantra.

Note.  To be fair, Enema U also gives retirees a “special price” on parking permits.  Since the price is exactly what they  charged for a regular permit, I guess the special part is that they didn’t raise the price.

Free tuition means that I get to study interesting subjects besides history, that frequently look at the same events from different perspectives.  For example, consider those periods of time that historians call ‘boom or bust’ cycles:  economists tend to call them, “periods of economic expansion or contraction.”  What is fascinating is that the two disciplines do not agree on when, why, and how long the periods lasted.   Anthropologists and art historians have different views on how those events shape culture, and I’m sure that if I ever became an education major I would learn that they have never even heard of those events.  

A while back I wrote about a research trip to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.  The country has been suffering from a water shortage for years.  Whether this is a result of climate change or due to the simple fact that if you cut down a rain forest it is no longer a forest and it stops raining is still being debated.  Regardless of the explanation, the capital’s water utility company had a unique method of rationing the water.  

About an hour before sunrise, the town’s water supply was turned on for two hours and only two hours.  The town’s water pressure was a little on the anemic side, so as the water slowly refilled the pipes through the city, the escaping air made an eerie moaning sigh.  The sound was impossible to sleep through, even if every inhabitant were not planning to get up and fill buckets and assorted containers with sufficient water for the day.  

There were several consequences of this water rationing.  Unless you ate in a large, well-established restaurant that could afford to install a large water tank, it was reasonable to assume that your eating utensils were cleaner at breakfast than at supper.  I also learned that it  is far better to brush your teeth with a bottle of beer than with Coca Cola and I learned that one of the reasons the locals hated the American Embassy was that embassy  had its own well and flaunted it by hosing down the sidewalks in front of the building every day at noon.  

Of course, another consequence of having your morning sleep interrupted daily by that unnaturally low moaning noise was that the town had a spectacularly high birth rate.  As one resident explained it, “At that hour, it is too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep.”

Unfortunately, the water situation has gotten worse since I visited thirty years ago.  Today, the water is only being turned on once a week and the city is contemplating changing that to only once a month.  As a consequence, the birth rate will probably plummet.

I was reminded of this about a week ago, when one of my economics professors stated that there was a definite correlation between the availability of electrical power, rising productivity, and a declining birth rate.  Naturally, I trust all the professors at Enema U, so I promptly researched this myself.  Sure enough, there are well-documented studies, done not only in the United States as the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) brought electrical power to remote homes, but also recently as the power grid was extended into the remote regions of Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Ghana.  Regardless of the location, when communities were able to use modern lighting and electric-powered appliances and tools, productivity increased dramatically while the birth rates invariably dropped.

The increase in productivity is easy to understand.  Better tools meant more work was accomplished more quickly and more effectively.  Less obvious is that the use of electricity for home heating and cooking eliminated the long hours necessary to gather wood, freeing more time for productivity.  The increase in productivity is obvious, but why the drop in fertility?

There are several studies done to answer just this question, almost all of which offering theories that suspiciously confirm the convictions and desires of the groups funding the studies.  Groups promoting the laudable goal of increased access to contraception have studies that show that, as access to radio and television reached women, this caused increased the knowledge of family planning.  Unfortunately for proponents of this theory, the drop in fertility in third world countries today almost perfectly matches the drop in fertility during the 1930’s when the American Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to American farms and ranches.  None of these homes had television nor was information about fertility and contraception being broadcast on the radio.

Other countries offered other, very reasonable explanations for the drop.  In Indonesia, for example, as remote villages connected to electrical power, the birth rate in “electrified” villages declined 24%.  Indonesian authorities attributed most of the decline to the significant number of hours the villagers devoted to watching television.  Similar conclusions were reached in Ghana and Bangladesh:  increased television watching was the chief reason for the drop in their birth rates, and it had nothing to do with the wider availability of knowledge about contraception.

The real cause seems to be a little less technical:  Before electricity, there are far fewer things to do for recreation in the dark.

Hearing Bells

A good place to start would be to admit right up front that I do not believe in the paranormal, psychic ability, or anything close to the supernatural.  I don’t believe in anything that cannot be measured and explained by science.  

Recently, I read an article about people making split second decisions, guided only by a “gut feeling” that resulted in the people avoiding a disaster.  Events such as not boarding a plane that subsequently crashed or leaving a party moments before a catastrophic fire or an earthquake.  Almost all the stories could be explained by either random chance, human nature, or the veracity of the tale in question.

Some of the stories, and the ones that I am about to relate, just show that given enough contact with people, it is possible to develop the ability to interpret human nature, to be able to detect a pattern in the way people interact with you and make a prediction, perhaps subconsciously, on what is about to happen.

For many years, during college and for several years afterwards, I worked in the hotel business.  Over the years, I think I did just about every job imaginable in a hotel, from boiler mechanic to manager, bartender to short order cook.  It was a hell of an education in human nature since it is a sad fact that people behave their worst while on vacation.  I remember a sign in the basement of the old Shamrock Hilton that said, “Vacation is 2 weeks where people are 2 tired and 2 sick 2 go home but 2 broke not 2.”  

More than once, while working in my office behind the front desk, I would notice someone checking into the hotel and without alerting the desk clerk, picked up the phone and called security to send someone to watch the room the new guest had been assigned.  Sure enough, within minutes, someone would be caught trying to sneak the television out of the room while the new ‘guest’ was calling the front desk to report that the television was missing from his room.  The good news is that over the years, the hotel stopped over a dozen people from stealing televisions.  The bad news is that every single time, the person trashed the television by throwing it to the ground before attempting to flee.

I wasn’t the only person in the hotel that could somehow just know that someone checking in was about to do something stupid.  After working with people, sometimes it just seemed like you knew in advance.  Collectively, my staff and I called this “hearing bells”.  

A perfect example of ‘hearing bells’ came one night at the old Flagship Hotel in Galveston.  I was the resident manager, generally responsible for the hotel's operation from dusk to dawn, at which time the general manager would take over.  The Flagship had a very nice night club that featured live music and was very popular with the locals.

Note.  The poor old Flagship is now long gone.  The Flagship was an unfortunate victim to multiple storms and was finished off by Hurricane Ike.  The photo at right shows the hotel and some of the hurricane damage.

One Saturday night, the bar was very busy, but I happened to notice one very attractive young woman with extremely long black hair sitting alone in the bar, and not seeming to have a very good time.  I stopped at her table and asked her if she was okay.  She assured me she was, so I continued my way through the bar and back to the front desk.  A few minutes later, she came out to the desk and asked us to call her a cab.

Resisting the urge to scream “Cab!” at her—a frequent temptation—I called the local taxi company and asked for Tony.  The hotel had a special relationship with Tony, we threw a lot of business his way and in return he took special care of our guests.  Not coincidentally, he drove the only cab that my wife, The Doc, used to go back and forth from our house to the hospital, making sure that she reached her door safely.  The hotel gave Tony a lot of business.  

Tony arrived and picked up his passenger.  I gave him the signal to take special care of her and he nodded before he drove off.

Hotels do most of their accounting work at night, and that night the books were a little off and I spent some time helping the night auditor finish her work.  About an hour after Tony had left with the mysterious young woman, a desk clerk brought me an envelope and said Tony had brought back a message for me.  I opened it and the letter inside was a suicide note from the mysterious woman with the long black hair!

After calling Tony and getting the address of the young woman, I called the police and left the hotel myself, driving to the young woman’s house, arriving at roughly the same time as both the police and Tony.  Knocking on the front door got no response, but all three of us could smell gas.  As the police officer called both the fire department and the gas company, Tony and I forced the front door.

Like many of the houses in picturesque Galveston, this was an old wooden building with wooden sash windows and old open flame gas heaters.  The gas had been turned on in the stove and the heaters, but none of the appliances were lit.  As Tony and I raced around the single-story home opening windows and doors, the policeman carried the unconscious woman outside.  An ambulance crew was successful in reviving her and transported her to the hospital where I later learned she spent a week in the psych ward under observation.  

When Tony asked me why I had singled her out for him to transport and watch, all I could answer was that something about her made me hear bells.  

About a month later, there was another similar event.

The Flagship was built over a long pier stretching out from the shore over the Gulf of Mexico.  At the end of the pier was a small wooden dock for fisherman and a small shop that sold snacks and bait throughout the night to the fishermen.  While technically part of the pier, it was a separate business and had no ties to the hotel.  

About four in the morning, I was at the front desk helping the desk clerk block out rooms for the incoming reservations.  The lobby elevator opened and a well-dressed man in his fifties, obviously a guest of the hotel, stepped out and came to the desk asking where he could get a cup of coffee.

Right around the corner from the front desk was a small table with a pot of coffee and cups for guest use that was prepared each night as the bars closed at two in the morning.  Before the desk clerk could direct the guest to the waiting coffee, I told him that the nearest coffee was at the bait shack on the end of the pier.

The guest smiled, thanked me, and walked out the front doors heading towards the end of the pier.  Ignoring the bewildered desk clerk, I called the security shack at the entrance to the pier and directed the guard to follow the guest.  Then, I called the police.

I didn’t see any of what followed as I remained inside the hotel, and the police arrived too late.  According to the security guard and the poor clerk running the bait shop, the man bought a cup of coffee, pleasantly discussed fishing for a couple of minutes, said goodbye, and walked towards the exit.  Then he sat down in the doorway, pulled a revolver from inside his jacket and shot himself in the head, dying instantly.

We later learned that the man had left no suicide note and had not awoken his wife as he quietly left the room.  She had no idea why her husband had committed suicide and as far as I know, they never did discover what had driven the man to kill himself in such a bizarre fashion.  According to his wife, it had been his idea to come and spend the weekend at the beach.  Though people committing suicide in hotels occurs fairly frequently, this case was unique.

As for me, well, I spent half the day explaining to openly skeptical police over and over again why I had phoned them before he pulled the gun from his jacket.  Though I was later frequently wary about the behavior of other hotel guests, I never again told anyone, particularly the police, that I “heard bells”.

Everyone Has a Crazy Titanic Theory

The Titanic sank 110 years ago and its sinking touched off a storm of conflicting theories, a maelstrom of wild accusations, and a tidal wave of urban legends.  Suddenly, everyone was an expert on nautical disaster simply because they watched a movie 25 years ago.  (Yes, it has been 25 years since Cameron’s movie “Titanic” came out.  We’re all getting old.)

One of the more outlandish theories is that the Titanic did not sink the night of April 12, 1912, but that the ship that foundered that night was the Olympic—the slightly older sister ship that had been damaged twice in accidents.  According to this absurd theory, the White Star Line staged a switch, substituting the older ship for the newer one, then deliberately ramming the iceberg to to sink her to collect the insurance.  

Exactly how you go about the massive sleight of hand of switching two ships (each over 880 feet long and weighing over 46,000 tons) is never quite explained.  Considering simply that the Titanic was being watched constantly by sightseers and news people, the switch would be impossible.  Nor were the two ships identical:  there were substantial differences between them and many of those which would clearly differentiate Titanic from Olympic have been documented on the wreck of the Titanic. 

Recently, another wild rumor has surfaced:  that the design of the Titanic was known to be flawed and that the ship’s owners deliberately let the vessel sail, anyway.  The ship’s owners supposedly knew that the Titanic could not be repaired and allowed the ship to sail to its doom in order to collect the insurance money.    This theory ignores the fact that the Olympic continued to sail until 1937, during which time the ship earned the nickname “Old Reliable”.

Recently, this last theory has received an update from the most unreliable source imaginable:  QAnon.   I’m not going to waste any time trying to explain these folks, but they have been pushing a rather wild tale that links the passengers on the Titanic to the United States Federal Reserve.  Crucial to this wild tale is that if you cut through the various layers of corporate identities, the real owner of the Titanic was the American tycoon, J. P. Morgan. 

Morgan, says QAnon, was behind the formation of the United States Federal Reserve.  Supposedly, Morgan knew  that the design of the Titanic was flawed, so he cancelled his reservation for the maiden voyage while allowing some of the wealthiest Americans to board at their peril because they were opposed to the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Okay, let’s apply a little reality to this crackpot theory.  Yes, J. P. Morgan did indeed own the Titanic and did support the formation of a central bank.  There is no proof, however, that the prominent millionaires on board the doomed vessel were opposed to the creation of the Federal Reserve.  No one has ever been able to link passengers like Astor or Guggenheim to any opposition to the bank, nor would their opposition have done anything to stop the formation of the bank.  And for even Morgan, sinking a ship full of people was a little over the line.

I was surprised, however, to learn that the historians who follow all things Titanic have never been able to determine why Morgan cancelled his reservation for a luxury suite on the maiden voyage of a famous ship he owned.  So many prominent people had booked passage on the Titanic that it was being referred to as the ‘Millionaire’s Ship’.

I was surprised to learn that this was a mystery.  I think I know why he didn’t make the trip.

For an explanation, we must go to Honduras and move backwards in time a few years.  Honduras was a desperately poor nation that had almost no income other than the taxes it collected for imported goods as ships docked at a handful of port cities along the Gulf of Mexico.  Worse, the country was politically unstable, with revolutions occurring at a frequency  of less than every two years (seventeen administrations in twenty years).  While the country did export a few agricultural products—chiefly bananas—if the government attempted to tax their export, buyers would simply move up or down the coast to a country willing to sell their fruit at a cheaper price.

For decades, each new government had followed the same path:  banish your opposition, move the military into the customs houses, and then borrow money from Europe to pay off your revolutionary army, while pledging future tax monies collected at those vital customs houses against the loans.  With each revolution, the total debt climbed and the interest rate on new loans climbed ever higher.  You have to wonder at the intelligence of some of the people willing to loan additional money to a country that hadn’t made a debt payment in thirty years while having all those different administrations in twenty years.

The European holders of those Honduran bonds began pressuring their countries to do something about the outstanding debts.  England was discussing sending the Royal Navy to take over those customs houses and collect the taxes until the debts had been paid.  This obvious violation of the Monroe Doctrine was particularly egregious since England was the last European power to hold onto territory in Central America, British Honduras (Belize).  

President Taft and J. P. Morgan worked out a complicated scheme to prevent European intervention, to protect American financial investments in Honduras, and to promote political stability in Honduras.  With the eager acceptance of Honduran President Davila, the United States would send the U.S. Navy to protect the ports while Morgan’s bank would take over the customs houses in the ports.  Morgan would buy all outstanding Honduran bonds at the discounted price of 5%. Those who refused to accept five cents on the dollar would receive nothing and their bonds would be declared worthless.   President Davila would benefit by having his government protected by the U.S. Marines and the amount of tax money reaching the capital after Morgan took his cut would probably be more than his own dishonest customs collectors had been sending.  (This was exactly what happened when the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic and took over its customs houses.)

There was one fly in the ointment, however.  Sam Zemurray, infamous for the actions of the United Fruit Company when he owned it two decades later, had just bought a huge banana plantation in Honduras.  This plantation would be worthless unless Zemurray was able to bring in large amounts of heavy machinery and pumps to develop the plantation—something that couldn’t be done if Morgan was diligently collecting import taxes.  Zemurray appealed to Morgan for an exemption and was denied.  So Zemurray did what had come to be expected in Honduras:  he staged a revolution to overthrow the government of Honduras.

It was a great revolution!  In less than a year, Zemurray bought a surplus ship from the U.S. Navy, the Hornet, he hired six American mercenaries who were led by Lee Christmas, he bought a Colt machine-gun and a case of rifles, and he promptly collapsed the government of President Davila by seizing the only source of income to the Honduran government:  Lee Christmas seized the customs houses.

Zemurray installed his own president, Manuel Bonilla (the former president that then Vice-President Davilla had ousted), who naturally immediately agreed to allow Zemurray to bring in his equipment without the need for paying any taxes.  This brought a halt to the loan from J. P. Morgan.

Morgan was not about to forego the opportunity to make huge profits out of Honduras, which he now expected to be even larger because of the money generated by a modern banana plantation, so he simply restarted the negotiations with President Bonilla, who was more than happy to have both the money Morgan promised and the protection that President Taft could provide.  Negotiations were almost completed when President Bonilla suddenly died of a heart attack in late March 1912.

For the next two weeks, J. P. Morgan was busily communicating via telegrams with his agents in Honduras as negotiations were held with the newly-installed President Bertrand.  These negotiations meant that J. P. Morgan missed the sailing of the Titanic because he was busy protecting his future income from Zemurray’s banana plantation (later known by the trademark Chiquita Bananas).  

So, Christmas and Chiquita Bananas saved J. P. Morgan from dying on the Titanic.

The Street

There is a current controversy in our nation’s capital.  No, not the election, or inflation, or even about the two elderly—and perhaps mentally challenged—men who want to run for president.  It is about the city council’s recent decision to decriminalize public urination and defecation.

While the measure was intended to help the homeless and the mentally ill, I suspect that since both groups were already ignoring the previous restrictions, the only outcome of this legislation is that political protests are about to become bizarrely more interesting.  Perhaps everyone should immediately go to the Russian Embassy and take a dump just outside their gates.  (Conveniently located at 2650 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Washington DC.  Tell them I said, “Howdy.”)

But, the discussion about the streets of Washington did make me start thinking of a topic that I don’t think anyone has seriously written about.  The history of city streets and sidewalks.  If I were a history student thinking about writing a new master’s thesis, this might be fun.

I suppose that such a thesis would have to start with the Romans, who designed city streets complete with drainage, standardized street widths, and even with stepping stones set in the street at set distances so that carts could pass between them.  There is even some evidence that the set wheelbase the Romans established influenced the width of modern railroad gauges.  

The Romans did not have a systematic way of lighting their streets, but the wealthier citizens did light the front of the their houses with vegetable oil lamps or candles to help reduce crime.  There was even a special class of slave, the lantern slave, who was responsible for cleaning the lamps and insuring there was sufficient oil for the lamps to burn all night.  

In Western Europe, the fall of the Roman Empire meant an end to the orderly urban street scene for quite a while, at least until the late medieval period.  With the rise of the absolute monarch, there was also a tendency for the monarch to want to impose as much stability and order in society as possible.  A better way of putting it might be that once a monarch began exercising absolute power, he tended to use that power to regulate as much of other people’s life as possible.  

Some of the first regulations on the urban street concerned making sure that the thoroughfares were accessible to commerce.  The old medieval signs that partially blocked the street were removed by order of the monarch, with the new signs only extending no more than two feet from the side of the building.

Since orderly streets first appeared where there were absolute monarchs, it is reasonable that Paris was the site of all the modernizations of the urban street.  Early in the seventeenth century, homes and businesses were required to light the front of their buildings with oil lamps visible from the street.  The lamps were required to burn during the winter months or on moonless nights.  By the end of the century, these lamps were hung from cables between the buildings and directly over the street and the installation and care of the lamps were contracted out by the police, with the money provided by special taxes to the buildings.  If you were wealthy and wished to cross town at night, you could hire a torch bearer to guide you through the dark streets.  It was an open secret that these torch bearers operated as spies for the police, as they went everywhere and saw everything.

In London, with a more restrained monarch, there was no real attempt by the monarch to control the appearance of the streets.  There were no mandates for lighting, and while there were torch bearers for hire, it was an open secret they were taking bribes from the footpads and petty thieves who preyed on the unwary rich.  There were no organized police at the time, just a collection of inefficient watchmen and the occasional guard.  London was without organized police until Robert Peele created the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard in 1829.  (Which is why the London cops are still informally referred to as Peelers or Bobbies.)

It was in Prussia that lamps were first hung from posts specifically erected to hold lamps for lighting the streets.  These would slowly change over time into modern streetlights.  Then, as now, there was a constant fight over how far apart these lamps should be located.  Those worried about crime wanted more lamps while those concerned with the taxes imposed for the lighting wanted fewer.  

By the start of the 17th century, the lamps were producing much more light than a single candle.  Almost all lights for the street were burning oil and increasingly utilized reflectors and glass lenses to focus the light where needed.  In 1763, the Paris Police sponsored a contest to develop the brightest lamp, ultimately producing a multi-wick lantern with thick lenses that focused the light up and down the street, with a mirror above the flames to reflect the light downward.  This lamp, the réverbère, was quickly adopted across Europe.

At the same time, the Paris Police began contracting out the job of producing uniform paving bricks, each to be exactly nine inches square.  While these streets were still not as efficient as the old Roman streets, with each passing decade Paris became brighter with the new lamps, as well as the older lamps, torch bearers and the occasional building light lighting up the city.  Fully 15% of the police budget was spent on lighting up the night.  While Paris is called the City of Light because it was the home of the Enlightenment, contemporary accounts frequently linked the new age of reason with the brightly lit streets.

Since the lamps obviously represented order in Paris, it was simply human nature that smashing the new lamps became a small but dangerous sign of rebellion.  There is something perverse in the spirit of mankind that forever has Man pulling at the threads of his parachute.  Gentlemen walking home smashed the lamps with their canes when they could reach them.  When they could not, they cut the ropes supporting them, letting the lamps smash to the ground.

These rebellions against the King’s imposed order were treated as serious crimes.  If caught, the offender was sentenced to the gallies.  By comparison, in London where there was no association between street lamps and the authority of the King, smashing a public lantern meant the payment of a fine of only twenty shillings. 

The strict punishment in Paris only made the smashing of the lanterns even more attractive, and when the French Revolution began, the smashing became almost compulsory.  Perhaps this is why the French verb, lanterner originally meant to do nothing or dally around, but after a few years of the French Revolution, the verb changed to mean to hang a man from a lantern.  Years before the guillotine became de rigueur, the first two public executions of the revolution were the hanging of two representatives of the king from a lantern on the front of the Hotel de Ville.

Oh, I am tempted to go on and talk about the introduction of gas lighting and the furious debates that caused in London…. But, the original point of this lengthy, wandering diatribe was to talk about how public policy shapes protests on the city streets and how I think that the latest bizarre ordinance from the Washington city council will backfire on it and quite literally turn to shit.  The council needs to be careful as to what it turns into a symbol of its authority.

Wouldn’t it have been far easier and so much more sanitary to just construct a few public toilets?

The Army Picks a New Gun

There are a couple of dozen versions of this story floating around, most of which have the gist of the story correct.  An economics professor a couple of weeks ago told his class a version and got most of the points correct.  None of the accounts has everything correct, and since I’m going to try and put down my version of the story, I can’t help but wonder just exactly what I’m fornicating skyward.

Here's a simple account of what most of the stories say:

During the Spanish American War, the Army was using this lousy little .38 revolver that just didn’t have enough stopping power.  There were several cases where a soldier shot attacking Filipino natives, hitting them in the chest, and the lousy small bullet just didn’t stop them.  This scared the army so they went to the Chicago stockyards and shot steers with every handgun then commercially available and discovered that the Colt .45 automatic would kill more steers, and kill them faster, than any other gun then available on the market.  And that is why the U.S. Army used the Colt .45 for the next 75 years.

Some of the above is correct.  Most of it is nearly correct.  The real story is actually more interesting.

When the United States entered the Spanish American War in 1898, the standard service revolver was the Colt M1892 chambered in .38LC.  This was the first double revolver with a swing out cylinder adopted by the Army, which meant that the gun could be fired more quickly and reloaded faster than the previous single-action revolver the Army had used.  The downside of the gun was, however, the relatively weak .38 caliber black powder cartridge.

The firearm was used in the Spanish American War, but it was in Cuba, not in the Philippines.  Technically, although our Navy did totally destroy the Spanish fleet anchored in the harbor at Manila, no American troops were landed and no Americans fought on land before the armistice.  The Colt was used in combat during the fighting in Cuba, but the conflict was so brief that there wasn’t enough time to record more than a few reports of the firearm’s suitability.  

Following the war with Spain, the United States fought a second war—the Philippine American War—to stop the resistance by the Filipino forces that had already been fighting against Spain when the U.S. Navy arrived.  Of all the wars in which America has fought, this is perhaps the least remembered.  It was during this conflict that the shortcomings of the M1892 revolver were well documented, particularly against the Moro juramentados, fanatic swordsmen who made suicide charges against the American soldiers.  

Take the case of a Antonio Caspi, who attempted to escape from American soldiers from a POW camp.  When Caspi refused to stop, he was shot four times at close range with the M1892, including three of the bullets striking the escaping prisoner in the chest, perforating both lungs.   Caspi continued his escape, finally being stopped when a trooper struck him in the head with the butt end of a carbine.  I think it is fair to say that this kind of incidents scared the crap out of the Army, who began reissuing the venerable M1873 Single Action Army revolver in .45 Long Colt, a cartridge no one has ever said was too small.

The Army decided to assign the task of finding a better cartridge to two officers, Colonel John T. Thompson and Major Louis LaGarde of the Medical Corps.  In 1904, the two officers tested a variety of ammunition currently available for revolvers.  At this point, they were testing ammunition, not guns, confident that after they had selected the right ammunition, they could solicit bids from a variety of handgun manufacturers.  Among the cartridges tested were the .455 Webley, the .30 Luger, the .45 Colt, and the 9mm.  

The tests were done at a Chicago slaughterhouse where cattle and horses were shot and the results were recorded.  Despite the common myth, very few of the steers died because of the gun shots, as there is a reason people usually go hunting with rifles instead of handguns.  Most of the steers were dispatched with blows to the head with sledgehammers, that being the customary way then for slaughterhouses to kill animals before butchering.  Accounts of these tests rarely include the detail that similar tests were also performed on human cadavers.

The two officers concluded that nothing less than a .45 caliber weapon would give a reasonable chance of incapacitating an enemy with a well-placed shot to the torso.  These tests have been argued over for more than a century now, with well-known experts either confirming or denying the results.  The tests have even been repeated, with cattle, sheep, ballistic gel, and pine logs, resulting in experts both confirming and denying the selection of the .45 caliber bullet.  (I would point out that while the Army has used a 9mm cartridge since 1986, the ongoing arguments about the best handgun cartridge—at least for military purposes—is pointless.  In modern warfare, the usefulness of handguns is about as statistically important as the color of toothbrushes.)

In 1905, the Army sent invitations to several handgun manufacturers to produce working models at a selection trial to be held in two years.  In 1907, the Army began testing automatics by Colt, Luger, Savage, Knoble, Bergman, and White-Merrill, revolvers by Colt and Smith & Wesson, and an automatic revolver by Webley.  The pistols supplied by Luger in .45 caliber are of particular interest.  It is still uncertain whether one, two, or three of the guns were brought to the trials, but the existence of only one such Luger is known today, and it is generally recognized as the most valuable handgun in the world.  If you happen to find one of the missing Lugers at a flea market, it would easily sell for millions at auction.

The pistols were tested extensively by several Army officers, with over a thousand rounds fired.  At the end of the test, the panel of judges had rejected all but the Colt and Savage automatics, ordering 200 of each pistol for field trials from which suggestions for modifications would be forwarded to the manufacturers for a finished model.

In March of 1911, a final trial was held between the two pistols.  In the intervening years, John Browning—perhaps the best gun designer in history—had worked tirelessly to improve the functioning of his design that he had licensed to Colt.  At the final trials, over 6000 rounds were fired through both pistols.  The Savage had 37 misfires while the Colt had none.  Further, the Colt proved to be more accurate and easier to dismantle and clean than the Savage.  The M1911 Colt was the unanimous choice of the board, with the Army placing an initial order for 30,000 pistols.

Over the next 75 years, the U.S. military would purchase another 6 million M1911 pistols.

One more thing.  If the name Colonel Thompson rings a bell, he went on to design his own firearm, the Thompson Submachine Gun, that was beloved by everyone from the Mafia to Winston Churchill.  The gun is chambered for, of course, the .45 Colt.   

Fun with the City

This is New Mexico.  I live in a town when Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy once walked the streets, where Pat Garret used to be sheriff and where Pancho Villa came to buy supplies for his army.  Unfortunately, what used to be the Wild West is now the Mild West.

Our local government has decided that the citizens of this sleepy little burg need nannies and caretakers as we are all uneducated boobs.   (The latter might be hard to argue with if you look at the state’s ranking in education.) Our city council has passed regulations and ordinances covering just about any activity that anyone might find interesting. 

Some of the stupid laws on the books are statewide, such as the one that outlaws betting on camel and ostrich races, the statute against spitting on the floor of the state’s single opera house, and the one that prohibits riding a bicycle in a cemetery.  It is okay to play the national anthem or the state anthem in its entirety but playing only half of either song in a public place is punishable by a $500 fine.  

It is also a misdemeanor for a woman to change a flat tire or to pump her own gasoline.  We have a law that specifically states that it is against the law for idiots to vote, but it is clearly okay for them to run for public office.

Not to be outdone, the city has passed a few stupid laws as well.  For reasons that only the city fathers can understand, it is against the law to dance while wearing a sombrero or to walk down Main Street carrying a lunchbox.  I guess it could be worse, a town about an hours drive away has an ordinance requiring women to be clean shaven before appearing in public, but doesn't specify exactly what has to be shaved.

Of course, there are more stupid local laws.  I’m required to recycle, even though the contents of that blue dumpster are taken to the same dump where the rest of my trash goes, with practically nothing being recycled except the aluminum and other metals that were already being collected before the recycling program started.  The cost of this faux program is enormous, but the city claims that being ‘proactive’ will pay off in the long run if we ever succeed in finding someone to purchase all that ‘recycled’ crap.  

Recently, the city decided it was in our own best interests if we stopped using plastic grocery bags and that, if we received a paper bag from the store, we must pay the city a dime.  Research has shown that such laws do practically nothing to improve the environment, that reusable bags have to be used hundreds of times before you are actually using less plastic, and by that time the reusable bags have become so contaminated with food particles that they are too unsanitary to use.  The actual purpose of such rules is to make the city council feel better while it plays with our dimes.

It is only fitting then, that I should occasionally get to play with said employees.  I confess: I love messing around with the city employees and I should probably be ashamed of myself for hassling government employees, but I’m not.  After all, I, myself, am a retired government employee, and I freely admit that as a generalized group, government employees are about as industrious as stalagmites.  Besides, now that I’m retired, the doctor said I should take up a hobby.

A couple of years ago, the city decided to mandate that all homes have their street numbers painted on the curb and violators would receive a ticket from the codes enforcement police.  I promptly complied, even though my address was already displayed on both my mailbox and the side of my house.  Almost immediately, I had some idiot in a reflective vest ringing my doorbell.

“Your street numbers are wrong.”

“Why?” I asked.  “They are four inches tall and black on a white background, just as required.”

“Your curb says M-M-C-X-X-X-V.  That’s Roman Numerals!  The law says you have to use Latin script.”

“Latin as in Roman?”

“Eh…yes.”

“Roman Numerals are written in Latin script.”

“What if first responders can’t read your address?”

“If they aren’t smart enough to read it, they’re not likely to be much use when they get here.”

As it turned out, I had to have pretty much this same conversation more than once.  Over the next week, city employees arrived regularly at my driveway, and held small conferences regarding my street numbers.  Photographs were taken.  No citation was ever issued.  About a year later, the city rebuilt the curb for the entire block with enlarged curb cuts for wheelchairs.  They repainted the street numbers for the entire block, including for my house, in what is known as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system.  (Yes, that is what it is correctly called.). 

When the paint fades, I’m going to rewrite it in binary, 100001010111.  The city ordinance does not specify which number base to use.

This week, I noticed a city crew in a pickup, slowly working up the block doing something to the utility poles.  I have no idea what the mission was, but the work took half a day per pole.  Long before they got to the pole at the corner of my yard, I had attached a small handwritten sign to it.  Knowing the city’s penchant for all things Latin, I even used the appropriate language.  As you can see from the photo at right, the little cardboard sign says “Polus Utilitatus”.

Today, they finally arrived at the corner of my yard.  After spying the small cardboard notice, another conference was held, then a supervisor in a city car arrived and helped the workers examine the notice.  I have no idea what the eventual decision was, but the workers skipped that pole and went on to the next block.

I cannot predict what will eventually happen.  As they say down in the Codes Enforcement Department, tempus narrabo.  However, while I wait for further developments, does anyone know the Latin for ‘fire hydrant’?

The Christmas Bookcase.

Christmas is almost here!  At least, that is what I see at my neighborhood Lowes.  The hardware chain seems to be suffering from schizophrenia as it features large displays of both Halloween and Christmas decorations.  Neither holiday display motivates me to purchase anything, since what few decorations we put up have been up for years.  As I write this, there are still stockings hanging from the mantle: we’ve decided to leave them there until somebody puts something in them.

There is one Christmas decoration that I have long wanted, one that I used to unsuccessfully lobby for:  the Christmas Bookcase.  Every Christmas, my wife, The Doc, would demand a live Christmas tree, which come January, we would plant in the yard.  Over the years, we planted so many trees in the yard that even though we live in New Mexico, we can only see the sun for about a half hour a day.  Our house is in the middle of a self-imposed forest.  (In hindsight, planting pine trees around a pool is an act of incredible stupidity.  Fishing the needles and pinecones out of the pool is damn near a full-time job.)

“Instead of a tree, why not put up a new bookcase for Christmas,” I argued.  “It’s made from wood, we can still decorate it, and instead of putting the presents on the ground where the cats will unwrap them, we can put them on the shelves.  Then, after Christmas, we can push it up against a wall and put all the books we read this year on it.”

My annual holiday suggestion was always rejected out of hand, and yet another tree was planted in our yard.  Neighbors look at our shadowy mini-forest and mutter, “They love darkness rather than light for their deeds are evil.”  

The idea of a Christmas Bookcase may yet come true, though.  While I’m probably never going to have one of my own, the tiny country of Iceland may come to love my idea, since they are more than halfway there already.  In the incredibly wise and civilized country of Iceland, books are exchanged as Christmas Eve presents, then the recipients spend the rest of the night in bed reading them and eating chocolate.  This tradition is called Jolabokaflod, which evidently translates out to “The Christmas Book Flood”.

Jolabokflod is a relatively new holiday for a country already rich with Christmas traditions.  Thirteen days before December 24, the children of Iceland leave their shoes by the window so that the 13 Yule Lads, the elves who are the sons of mountain trolls with impossible names desperately in need of vowels, can fill their shoes with presents.  There are the usual Christmas trees, the exchanges of presents, and family feasts, but during the partying, you have to keep an eye out for Jólakötturinn, the giant Yule Cat who lurks around the holiday parties, snatching up and devouring anyone who has not received new clothes by Christmas Eve.

To show the true genius of the Icelanders, they split New Year’s into two separate days, Old Year’s Day for the last day of December, and New Year’s Day for the first day of January.  Both days are celebrated with parties and fireworks.  Then, thirteen days after Christmas Eve, there are bonfires and more celebrations, so everyone can say goodbye to the elves until the next Christmas.  These are people who clearly understand the value of a good party.

With all these rich traditions, why would the people feel the need to add a new one, one that involved books?  The answer, like the unfortunate answer to so many history questions, is “war”.  

At the start of World War II, Iceland was still more or less part of Denmark and recognized King Christian X as the head of state.  When the war started, Denmark declared its neutrality, as did Iceland.  Germany, however, ignored such claims, occupied Denmark and was clearly interested in having a military presence based in Iceland.  Britain, which could not possibly survive the war without sea trade with America, tried desperately to pressure Iceland into joining the Allied cause as a co-belligerent.  When this failed, Great Britain invaded the neutral island nation with both British and Canadian troops.  By the summer of 1941, these troops were replaced with American troops, who would stay in Iceland until the end of the war.  Despite the occupation, Iceland remained neutral and declared itself an independent republic in June 1944.

During the war, Iceland continued to export fish to England, but imports of manufactured goods to the island slowed to a trickle, and those of luxury goods stopped completely.  By the second year of the war, some restrictions were lifted, particularly those for paper products.  Iceland, already a highly literate society, promptly began producing its own books.  This sudden availability of books after years of wartime privation made new books the perfect Christmas gift (with a little help from Hobson’s choice).  By 1944, Iceland began publishing the Journal of Books, a list of all the new books available in Iceland.  The publication is freely distributed each year in the months just before Christmas so that everyone can select the books they want to read and the books they want to give as gifts to their friends and family members.

Today, in part because of this new tradition, Iceland is the third most literate country in the world, ahead of both England and the United States.  Even more surprisingly, Iceland is one of the most creative societies that has ever existed, where artists and authors abound.  One out of every ten adult Icelanders has authored a published book.  One in four adults works as a creative artist of some form.  The island has almost no crime, a very high standard of living, and consistently ranks the safest country in the world.  (Mothers let their infants take unsupervised naps outdoors!)  Perhaps, this is why the island nation has been ranked as one of the five happiest places to live on earth

Iceland is by all accounts one of the most civilized, free-thinking, and creative places on Earth.  I’m confident they will understand and accept my idea of the Christmas bookcase.  If it weren’t so damn cold, I might move there.

For the Record

Back in the 1970’s, the only form of entertainment available to The Doc and me were a rather small collection of records (almost exclusively hers) and our stereo.  We spent long hours listening to the Beatles, Cat Stevens, Rick Wakeman, Simon and Garfunkle, and The Mamas and the Poppas.  We loved those records and still have most of them.

By the end of the eighties, though we still had those old records, we seldom listened to anything but our newer, and better sounding compact discs.  Today, another few decades later, just as compact discs are inevitably going the way of 8-track tapes and cassette players, The Doc refuses to give up her CD player.  And even more strange, What’s-His-Name, our son, has become convinced that the best music comes from those age-old vinyl records.

By the end of the eighties, CD sales had passed those of records.  Twenty years later, the few records still being produced were almost a novelty item.  Then, suddenly, in 2007, the demand for vinyl records began increasing.  Misguided enthusiasts, like my son, became convinced that vinyl records with analog recordings were far superior to any digital recording method.  (I’m not going to argue the matter:  these days if I’m listening to something, it is going to be an audible book.  My iPhone has almost 300 books on it and about a dozen songs—half of which are songs from the Civil War.)

Record production is now close to 200 million platters a year, and that is just for the American market.  According to the manufacturers, the present demand is easily twice what can be produced, and the producers of such records are ramping up production as fast as they can. 

That music records are having an unexpected revival is surprising.  Almost as surprising as the fact that such records ever existed at all, since the inventor of the phonograph was absolutely certain that there was absolutely no market for such recordings.

There is some confusion as to the exact date that Thomas Edison completed the invention due to conflicting entries the inventor made in his notebooks.  Depending on which entry you want to believe, sometime late in November 1877, Edison gave the plans for a working model to John Kruesi, one of his machinists at his Menlo Park laboratory. 

“What’s this supposed to be,” asked Kruesi, as he delivered the finished brass and steel model.  Powered by a hand crank, It had a grooved cylinder, three and a half inches wide, onto which a tinfoil cylinder could be attached.

Edison replied, “The machine must talk.”

Edison recorded that Kruesi thought the idea was absurd and bet a cigar that the experiment would not work.  The inventor carefully wrapped a sheet of thin tinfoil around the cylinder, moved the needle into place, and then began cranking the machine while speaking loudly into the diaphragm:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

Edison then moved the needle back to the starting point and began cranking the machine again.  To the amazement of everyone, the high-pitched voice of Edison was easily recognized as he repeated the Mother Goose rhyme.  Edison himself was surprised that the first attempt had worked, and called the machine a phonograph, the Greek words for “sound” and “writing”.

For a full year, the phonograph was a technical novelty, frequently displayed at fairs and exhibitions, but was never used for any practical purpose due to the machine’s limitations.  The tin foil was incredibly delicate, wore out quickly, and could hold at most about sixty seconds of recorded sound.  The machine was fragile, required constant adjustment, and had to be cranked at a steady speed.  Positioning the needle was such a tedious task that even Edison admitted that only an expert could do it properly.  Edison simply abandoned the project for a year while he worked on his light bulb.

For the newspapers, Edison compiled a list of ten possible uses for his new invention:  Letter writing, audible books for the blind, the teaching of elocution, talking clocks and statues were the prominent items on the list.  While music made the list, it was fourth, behind the teaching of elocution.  Privately, Edison doubted that the machine would prove useful for any of the uses listed.  For the inventor, his newly invented device was just an offshoot of experiments to improve the telephone.

A year later, Edison admitted to a newspaper reporter that the phonograph was “a mere toy, that has no commercial value.”  The inventor believed that rival inventors wouldn’t even bother to pirate his invention, since it was little more than a scientific curiosity.  Edison abandoned work on the phonograph for a full decade while he began work on the incandescent lightbulb.

Note.  In a coincidence too wild to be believable, while writing this blog, my eight-year-old granddaughter, Bailey, called me to tell me that today was the anniversary of Edison’s light bulb.  She had no idea I even have a blog, much less that I was writing about Edison tonight.  Weird.

A decade later, Chichester Bell, the brother of Alexander Graham Bell, came to Edison a decade later with an offer to partner with Edison’s company to produce phonographs commercially did the inventor decide to devote himself once again to improving the phonograph.  Over the next few weeks, the machine was completely redesigned.  A clockwork mechanism was developed to turn the cylinder, which in turn had been improved by replacing the delicate tinfoil with a cardboard tube coated with a specially hardened wax that could hold two minutes of recorded sound.

And though Edison invited several famous musicians to come to Menlo Park to demonstrate the phonograph, he was convinced that the phonograph’s future lay in the business world, not in entertainment.  Even as Edison hired thousands of employees to manufacture and market the phonograph, the inventor was determined that it be used as a dictation device for producing letters.

Secretaries, then almost exclusively male, were so concerned that the new phonograph would cause mass unemployment in their ranks that a boycott was organized, and protests were held.  As with most protests against new technology that increases productivity (usually referred to as  creative destruction), the protests failed to prevent the machine from selling.  

Edison was adamant against marketing the phonograph for the purposes of entertainment.  “I don’t want the phonograph sold for amusement purposes.  It is not a toy.  I want it sold for business purposes only,” said the inventor.  When told that a company was selling cylinders in Germany with recordings of orchestral music, Edison refused to believe it.  

Edison was nearly deaf and had some particularly strange ideas about music.  He hated Italian and German music and he did not care for most of the music popular at the time.  Nor did he have much respect for musicians, refusing to put their name on the few entertainment recordings he allowed up until 1910.  After recording a famous pianist, Edison unflinchingly told the artist that he had played a note incorrectly.  When the musician insisted that he had not, Edison offered to play back the recording and point out the errors.  The now indignant pianist left the studio without replying.

It was only after the competing Bell Gramophone Company was sold and reorganized as the Columbia Phonographic Company (since reorganized as the Columbia Broadcasting System or simply CBS) and it began focusing on producing cylinders for entertainment that Edison changed his mind and began to produce large numbers of recording cylinders with music..  The decision to focus on entertainment came too late, allowing his competitors to capture a large share of the market.  By the end of the 1920’s, the Edison Phonographic Company had closed its doors, moving the employees to Edison’s radio production company.

I have no idea how long the current craze for phonograph records will last.  If it ends tomorrow, it will have lasted about 140 years longer than Edison thought.

I can’t resist one last story about Edison.  When the famous African explorer Henry Stanley visited Edison to see the newly invented phonograph, Stanley impulsively asked which person throughout history the inventor would most like to have a recording of.

“Napoleon,” Edison answered immediately.

“No, no, no,” replied Stanley.  “I would prefer the voice of our savior.”

“Well,” said Edison.  “I prefer a hustler.”