Cronaca, who has returned from a brief hiatus, has an interesting post on art forgeries.
Author Archives: Joel
Cronaca on Forgeries
Filed under art
Jodi in Kyrgyzstan, 11 September 2001
Jodi of the Asia Pages, has posted a memoir of where she was three years ago on 11 September.
I was in the town of Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in a country not too far from Afghanistan. As one of the few volunteers who had a telephone, I was automatically designated as a safety warden, the go-to person Peace Corps contacted in a time of emergency and the person who is then responsible for relaying that message to the many phoneless volunteers in her area.
September 11 also happens to be my birthday.
When I received the phone call, the selfish person that I am thought, “Oh, how nice! Peace Corps is calling to wish me a happy birthday.”
Filed under Afghanistan
Good Soldier Outlier: Boot Camp Methodologies
As soon as our bus full of new privates arrived at the Basic Training barracks, our “wait” phase was over and the “hurry up” phase hit full crescendo. The DI aboard the bus must have softened us up with a lot of doom-talk, then as soon as the bus stopped he joined the welcome party of DIs, all angrily shouting at us to get ourselves and our gear off that bus yesterday and form a straight line. Then they went down the line, checking each name off their list and finding something to insult or criticize in each of us.
These boot camp teaching methodologies were new to a nerd like me. I would have preferred gentler methods of instruction, The Silent Method, say, or Suggestopedia. But our DIs preferred The Shouting Method. They addressed us at a full shout, even directly into our faces, and we quickly learned to respond at a full shout, invariably announcing our agreement with a hearty “Yes, sir!” or “No, sir!” or “Yes, drill sergeant!” or “No, drill sergeant!”
Sins of omission, commission, or hesitation often elicited a different methodology, Total Physical Response. For instance, we might be ordered to drop to the “front lean-and-rest position” and do 10 or 20 push-ups, sometimes more, as if the DIs were priests dispensing so many Hail Marys and so many Our Fathers as penance after confession.
The primary goal of TSM was to reinforce hierarchy and unequivocal response to orders. TPR had much wider uses, perhaps the most common being PT (physical training).
Sometimes TPR reinforced verbal objectives, as in a chamber full of tear gas, where we each tested our mask, then in turn took it off and stood at attention while reciting name, rank, and serial number before being allowed to cut and run for the door, as tears, snot, and slobber began to overwhelm us. I have never forgotten my old (pre-SSAN) serial number–which started RA119…–despite never having used it in 35 years. (Nor have I forgotten my name!)
Sometimes verbal cues aided TPR objectives, as when we chanted cadence while jogging or marching, both to keep in step and to keep our minds from drifting. Cadence calling was one of two areas where DIs could indulge a little creativity. The other was thinking up amusing exercises or punishments, like having the whole platoon lie on our backs, wave our arms and legs in the air and yell, “I am a dying cockroach!”
I still remember a nonce couplet our DI concocted to razz the DI of a competing platoon. These were like jazz chants, another language-teaching methodology.
Sergeant White is turning green, 1, 2, 3, 4
Someone pissed in his canteen, 1, 2, 3, 4
TPR also helped teach an important distinction that some of us needed to learn, the difference between our rifles and our guns. The physical portion involved each of us raising our (M-14, not yet M-16) rifles into the air with our right hands, and grabbing our crotches with our left hands. (I can’t remember the M-number assigned to our reproductive equipment.) The poetry that accompanied that motion follows.
This [shaking right hand] is my rifle
And this [shaking left hand] is my gun!
This [shaking right hand] is for fighting
And this [shaking left hand] is for fun!
We also did a lot of group and pair work. We always had to go across a horizontal ladder on the way to the mess hall entrance, and had to carry each other from the exit back to the barracks. If someone was waiting, you got to ride piggy back. If no one was waiting, you got to carry the next soldier.
The showers and toilets, too, involved groupwork. There were only six commodes for 40-50 privates, with no partitions, so you sat face-to-face and cheek-by-cheek during the peak times. At least we didn’t have to shout while grunting.
One example of pairwork was land navigation. Each two-man team was given a compass and a treasure-map set of directions: so many paces in this direction, then so many paces in that direction, and so on, through hilly, but not densely forested terrain. The person with the compass would direct his partner to the end of one leg, then move there himself, then they’d start the next leg. I held the compass on that one, and my partner and I were one of the few pairs who ended up close to the final target.
Whatever the Army’s goals and objectives might have been, I learned a few things not on the list.
I learned that DIs are capable of rough-and-ready sensitivity. Our (black) DI platoon sergeant addressed identity issues head on in his welcoming speech: “Y’all may think of yourselves as Georgians or Alabamans, as black or white, but y’all just look green to me.”
I learned that, despite being relatively unathletic, I could take at least as much physical punishment as anyone else in the rather sorry lot I trained with (about which more later).
Finally, I learned that, after a long day’s march, followed by live-fire night-infiltration exercises that involved a lot of low-crawling under barbed wire, Army field-kitchen food can taste mighty good, even when the only meat is liver.
Naipaul on the Fundamentalist Political Impulse
Naipaul finishes A Turn in the South at Chapel Hill, NC, not far from where he made his first foray into the American South.
I had been told that the politics of the region were “tobacco politics,” small-farmer politics, in which a promise of a continued subsidy for tobacco-growers could somehow also be read as a promise to keep blacks in their place.
But Reverend James Abrahamson, pastor of the Chapel Hill Bible Church, thought that this ridiculing or underplaying of the conservatism of eastern North Carolina was foolish.
He said, “The fundamentalist political impulse has always been there. From the 1930s it has been repressed, largely because it did not have the support of the universities. Ideologically, the universities pulled up their tent pegs and moved to another side. Ideologically, they moved from a world view which embraced a Christian God to a place where the only reality that was recognized was material, could be measured, scientifically defined. They are reappearing–the fundamentalists–largely because they have seen or felt the pressure of a secular society.
“That eastern-North Carolina conservative side is viewed by many as being redneck and knee-jerk. Irresponsible–fanatical, almost. Unenlightened, lacking what I call the three ‘I’s–intelligence, information, and integrity. But they’ve got a stronger argument. They’re easy to laugh at, and they’ll never be popular. Our culture may self-destruct before they have a chance to articulate clearly the common sense they represent–for a culture that is based on more than self and materialism.”
Jim Abrahamson–it was the way he announced himself on the telephone–was from the Midwest. He was a fundamentalist himself, and he felt that his Bible Church was meeting a need in Chapel Hill. He had a number of Ph.D.’s in his congregation; and his church was expanding. Extensive construction work was going on when I went to see him. American society, he said, had been built on a religious base. It couldn’t float free. A recent poll had found that one out of every three Americans was a born-again Christian. “That’s a lot of people.”
But he had his quarrel with the fundamentalists of North Carolina. “I think there are powerful and legitimate and almost eternal principles that would recur again and again. But the people fighting for those principles are not able to articulate them palatably. The religious right appear not to understand the world view the left or the secular intelligentsia embrace. They tend to dismiss them as God-haters or infidels. And they have a difficulty about knowing how to translate religious ideals into a political policy.”
It was the Islamic problem too–since the Islamic state had never been defined by its founder–and it was the prompting to fundamentalism in many countries: how to know the truth and hold on to one’s soul at a time of great change.
It was strange that in a left-behind corner of the United States–perhaps the world motor of change–the same issue should come up, the same need for security.
SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 284-285.
North Carolina’s Research Triangle is a “left-behind corner of the United States”? Anyway, it’s a book full of insights and fine writing. RTWT.
Tobago Tobacco Trinidado
Naipaul’s last chapter of A Turn in the South–entitled “Smoke”–is about eastern North Carolina. Now and then he draws parallels between aspects of the American South and his native Trinidad and Tobago. Here’s one such digression.
THE WORD “tobacco” is thought to have come from Tobago [doubtful!], the dependency or sister island of Trinidad. And before “Virginia” became the word in England for tobacco [huh?], tobacco was sometimes called “Trinidado,” after the island of Trinidad, part of the Spanish Empire since its discovery by Columbus in 1498. Tobacco was a native Indian crop. But after the discovery and plunder of Mexico in 1519-20 and Peru fifteen years later, the Spaniards were interested only in gold and silver; they were not interested in tobacco. It was the English and the Dutch and the French who went to Trinidad to load up with tobacco. ‘there were hardly ever more than fifty Spaniards at a time in Trinidad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Gulf of Paria, between Trinidad and Venezuela, a vast safe harbor, was nearly always full of foreign ships. An English explorer and diplomatist, Sir Thomas Roe (who later went to the Mogul court at Agra in India as the representative of King James), came to the Gulf of Paria one year and saw fifteen English, French, and Dutch ships “freighting smoke.” Another English official reported that the tobacco trade might in time be worth more than all the Spanish gold and silver from the Americas.
The trade was illegal, however–even though crops were grown in Trinidad with the complicity of the Spanish governor. Under Spanish law only Spain could trade with a Spanish colony. Occasional sweeps were made by the Spanish navy against foreign interlopers in the Gulf of Paria; and foreign sea captains and sailors who were caught could be hanged on the spot. And the Indian tobacco fields–tobacco a crop requiring such great care, as I was to see in North Carolina–were flattened: part of the process by which in three hundred years both the native Indian population and tobacco were to be rooted out from Trinidad.
The island that the British captured (without a shot) in 1797 was a sugarcane slave colony. And it was to work in the sugarcane estates that, thirty years or so after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, Indians were brought over from India on indenture. It was sugarcane that gave a rhythm to the life of rural Indian communities. Tobacco was no longer a local crop.
I would have been disbelieving, and delighted, to be told as a child that Trinidad had once been known for its tobacco. To me tobacco was glamorous, remote, from England (in absurdly luxurious airtight tins), or American (in soft, aromatic, cellophane-wrapped packets), something from an advertisement in Life.
SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 278-279.
Here are a few additional tidbits from the Webster’s Dictionary Online entry for tobacco.
The Foolish Dictionary (1904) defines tobacco thus: “A nauseating plant that is consumed by but two creatures; a large, green worm and–man. The worm doesn’t know any better.
A “Special Definition” adds more history about the plant, including this bit.
Bright Tobacco
Prior to the American Civil War, the tobacco grown in the US was almost entirely fire-cured dark-leaf. This was planted in fertile lowlands, used a robust variety of leaf, and was fire cured or air cured.
Sometime after the War of 1812, demand for a milder, lighter, more aromatic tobacco arose. Ohio and Maryland both innovated quite a bit with milder varieties of the tobacco plant. Farmers around the country experimented with different curing processes. But the breakthrough didn’t come until 1854.
It had been noticed for centuries that sandy, highland soil produced thinner, weaker plants. Abisha Slade, of Caswell County, North Carolina had a good deal of infertile, sandy soil, and planted the new “gold-leaf” varieties on it. When Stephen, Abisha’s slave, used charcoal instead of wood to cure the crop, the first real “bright” tobacco was produced.
News spread through the area pretty quickly. The worthless sandy soil of the Appalachian piedmont was suddenly profitable, and people rapidly developed flue-curing techniques, a more efficient way of smoke-free curing. By the outbreak of the War, the town of Danville, Virginia actually had developed a bright-leaf market for the surrounding area in Caswell County, North Carolina and Pittsylvania County, Virginia.
Danville was also the main railway head for Confederate soldiers going to the front. These brought bright tobacco with them from Danville to the lines, traded it with each other and Union soldiers, and developed quite a taste for it. At the end of the war, the soldiers went home and suddenly there was a national market for the local crop. Caswell and Pittsylvania counties were the only two counties in the South that experienced an increase in total wealth after the war.
So “bright” tobacco is God’s gift to Piedmont farmers with bad soil, just as moonshine is God’s gift to mountaineers who don’t have the roads to get bulkier products of their corn to market. And then, of course, there’s the opium poppy, the coca leaf, etc.
Well, this topic could go on and on, so I’ll just close with a few startling items from Gene Borio’s fascinating tobacco timeline.
- 1633: TURKEY: Sultan Murad IV orders tobacco users executed as infidels. As many as 18 a day were executed. Some historians consider the ban an anti-plague measure, some a fire-prevention measure.
- 1634: RUSSIA: Czar Alexis creates penalties for smoking: 1st offense is whipping, a slit nose, and transportation to Siberia. 2nd offense is execution.
Those New World tobacco plantations were the Afghan or Burmese poppy plantations of their day. Three centuries later, however, Turkish tobacco was king.
By 1911, even though Duke’s American Tobacco Co. (ATC) controlled 92% of the world’s tobacco business, most popular American brands were Turkish blends, with names like Fatima (L&M), Omar (ATC), and Zubelda (Lorillard), to be followed in 1913 by Camel (RJR), which by 1923 had captured 43% of the US market.
Good Soldier Outlier: Induction
The Army recruiter in Charlottesville had sent word to the induction center at Richmond that he was sending them a couple of hippies. But my brother and I had shaved off our beards and trimmed our hair before arriving there.
We entered the Army on the same day in April 1969. My brother, younger but more precocious than I, had dropped out of high school, and then finished his GED in the States. After I had dropped out of college, we had whimsically decided to head for Mexico in my little Studebaker Lark, with hardly enough cash to pay for the gas.
We were broke by the time we got to New Orleans, so we worked as day laborers until the engine broke down. Dad would only send us money to fix it if we promised to come back home–which we did, and then began negotiating with the local Army recruiter. After taking a battery of aptitude tests, I signed up for language school and my brother for warrant officer flight school–flying helicopters.
Somewhere on the induction questionnaire I had tried to salve my pacifist conscience by opining that I was signing up for language school in hopes of eventually helping to increase international understanding rather than making war–or words to that effect. Well, somebody must have actually looked over our answers, because my brother and I were both called in for questioning, separately, and forced to affirm that we would indeed obey orders.
After the usual induction procedures–standing in line nearly naked while medics jammed their fingers into our crotches and asked us to turn aside and cough; holding our arms still so the immunization guns wouldn’t draw blood; demonstrating whether or not our bare feet were flat–we were herded onto a train, me as far as Ft. Benning, GA, my brother to Ft. Polk, LA.
I had grown up riding trains in Japan, but this was only my second train ride in the U.S. (The first was from Martinsburg, WV, to San Francisco, CA, on the way to Japan when I was one year old.) People were playing dollar-ante poker at the far end of the car; while we were playing nickel-ante poker at our end. I was on a winning streak, but my brother was the one losing the most, and I had to extend him credit. Whenever I was up a few dollars, I would buy a round of beers.
The next morning we got off the train at Columbus, GA, some of us more broke than others, and waited for the bus from Ft. Benning to come pick us up. When a Drill Sergeant finally arrived, one trouble-seeking punk from Georgia asked him whether Drill Sergeants worked bankers’ hours. He later paid dearly for that remark.
We were still innocent then of how fearsome a Drill Instructor (DI) could be, but we would begin to find out as soon as we reached the other end of that bus ride.
Naipaul’s Nashville: Baptists
Naipaul titles his chapter on Nashville, “Sanctities”: referring to both religion and music.
The magazine in my hotel room, mixing its metaphors, said that Nashville was “the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Churches took up twelve pages of the Yellow Pages directory. The Tennessean had a “religion news” editor, and there was a weekly page of “religion news,” with many advertisements for churches (especially Church of Christ churches), some with a photograph of the stylish-looking pastor or preacher. Most of the Protestants in Nashville belonged to the fundamentalist frontier faiths; the predominant denomination was the Southern Baptist.
The classier churches, the Presbyterian and the Episcopalian, looked at this Baptist predominance from a certain social distance, without rancor or competitiveness.
Dr. Tom Ward, the Episcopalian pastor of Christ Church, said that the Southern Baptists who sometimes came to his church found it too quiet: “‘Y’all don’t preach.’ The Baptist ethos is the preached word. Which is the ethos of the Christian church in the South. Preaching meaning the emotional speech rather than the learned essay of the Church of England–preaching the word and counting the number of saved souls. But I have to say this. To say, ‘I’m a Southern Baptist,’ is another way of saying, ‘I’m a Southerner.’ What I mean is that that is the ethos, religiously. What is buried in their psyches is the fear of hellfire and damnation. My father was read out of the United Methodist Church in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1931–when he was seventeen–because he went to a dance. That’s the Methodist Church. A lot of the Ku Klux Klan literature is Christian. Revivalism–why? To rekindle the spirit. What spirit? One bad step; many bad steps; and you have the Ku Klux Klan.”
The Presbyterian pastor of Westminster, K. C. Ptomey, agreed that the Southern Baptist identity was in part the Southern identity. “That’s very accurate. You see, a Southern Baptist distinguishes himself from an American Baptist. American Baptists are much more open-minded; they are not so rigid. I would add about the Southern Baptists: it has to do with sharing biblical literalism; it has to do with morality. For example, to be a Southern Baptist is to be a teetotaler. Morality, dancing, drinking–it encompasses the whole of life.”
I asked him about the revivalism. “The revivalist mind-set is ‘to get back to God.’ You often hear the words used.”
“‘Back’?”
“‘Lost’ is the word they use. And what they mean by that is ‘damned.’ And therefore they need to be revived.”
SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 233-234.
Naipaul’s Nashville: Music
Naipaul interviews Nashville songwriter Bob McDill.
No amount of questioning, no amount of explaining, even from someone as willing to talk as Bob McDill was, could take one to the magic: the calling up and recognition of impulses that on the surface were simple, but which, put together with music, made rich with a chorus, seemed to catch undefined places in the heart and memory.
Mama said, don’t go near that river.
Don’t go hangin’ round ole Catfish John.
But come the mornin’ I’d always be there
Walkin’ in his footsteps in the sweet delta dawn.Almost nothing at first. But then the images and the associations come: Mama, river, catfish, footsteps, delta, dawn.
Bob McDill said he had had to learn the subculture. But the Southern images and words of his best songs are far from the stylized motifs of a good deal of country music. And though he makes much of writing in an office in a matter-of-fact, day-to-day way–and perhaps because he talks in a matter-of-fact way, since the mystery cannot be described–it is probably true that, when moved, he writes with that most private part of the self with which Proust said serious writers write.
He says that his best song is “Good Ole Boys like Me.”
When I was a kid Uncle Remus he put me to bed,
With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head.
Then Daddy came in to kiss his little man
With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand.
And he talked about honor and things I should know.
Then he staggered a little as he went out the door….
I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be.
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?Every detail there was considered. His aim, he said, was to get as much of the South as he could in a few lines. And the song has become very famous; many people I spoke to referred to it; the mood of the song spoke for them. A “good ole boy” … was a redneck; but it was also a more general word for an old Southerner, someone made by the old ways. The song might seem ironical, then celebratory. But below that it is an elegy for the South, old history and myth, old community, old faith.
SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 247-248.
U.S. Army Deserter Charles Jenkins Talks
NK Zone links to a Far Eastern Economic Review story on Charles Jenkins that is the most sympathetic portrait I’ve read so far–engineered by his very capable military lawyer apparently.
Kudos to Jeremy Kirk of the Far Eastern Economic Review for getting the first interview with U.S. defector Charles Robert Jenkins. He is now in Japan with his Japanese wife Hitomi Soga (who as a young girl was abducted to N.Korea), and is wanted for desertion by the U.S. military. Several interesting things came out of the interview:
– He plans to turn himself in to the U.S. military, to “clear my conscience.” He pleads guilty to at least 1 of the four charges against him.
– He was beaten frequently by another U.S. defector, James Dresnok (who will soon be profiled in a documentary as noted recently by NKzone).
– He suffers from panic disorder as a result of the way he was treated in North Korea.
– He once attempted to leave N.Korea by requesting asylum at the Russian embassy.
– He says he and his wife Hitomi shared a hatred for the North Korean regime.
– He says that earlier this year, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi had offered to take him back to Japan. He declined because North Korean authorities had threatened him.
– He is offering the U.S. government information about other foreign nationals used as spies in exchange for an agreement in which he would be sent home to his family in the U.S. rather than to prison.
Here are a few snippets from a longer FEER article linked via Oranckay.
Jenkins arrived in North Korea already a service veteran. He dropped out of school in North Carolina in the seventh grade, not long after the death of his father, and in 1955, at 15, he entered the National Guard. After an honourable discharge in April 1958, he enlisted in the regular Army. By August 1960 he had begun a 13-month tour in South Korea, during which he was promoted to sergeant; he was returned for a second tour in September, 1964. Then, on a bone-chilling night early the following January, on patrol along the Demilitarized Zone, the 24-year-old sergeant with an unblemished nine-year service record vanished. The U.S. government considers him a deserter, saying that he left behind letters stating his intention to defect; members of his family in the U.S. have said they are convinced that he was captured by the communist state….
Now that he’s left the country, Jenkins no longer disguises his bitterness at the North Korean regime. His legal defence is based in part on the notion that he learned to feign fealty to a regime he despised to avoid death and keep his family together….
What he wants now is an end to a nearly four-decade Odyssey, as he prepares to turn himself over to the Americans. He has no interest in getting a civilian attorney. “The American Army has supplied, assigned a very capable man to me, to help me, bring me to military justice. I don’t think I need no civilians. All I want to do is clear myself with the American Army.”
I don’t know why I feel any emotional investment in this story. Maybe it’s watching a stoically emotional Hitomi Soga with a camera in her face on so many Japanese news stories. Maybe it’s wanting to get beyond the absolutely idiotic fixation on Vietnam in the current U.S. presidential campaign.
Please, can we just forgive Clinton and Cheney and Brokaw and Matthews and O’Reilly and Russert and everyone else who avoided military service altogether, and Bush and Gephardt for taking the National Guard route, and Gore and Safire for taking the military reporter route (and me for taking the language-school route), and Kerry for bailing out on his Swiftboat “Band of Brothers” just as soon as he got his third purple heart? Jenkins wasn’t a politically ambitious officer. And he was very far from being a Yalie. He was a hardscrabble, ill-educated NCO, who seems to have done something very stupid nearly 40 years ago. He’s willing to face military justice–as he should–and to pay a price to keep his family together.
Could we please just concentrate a bit more on current atrocities and continuing atrocities?
Filed under Vietnam
The Mississippi Frontier
Naipaul’s chapter on Mississippi is entitled “The Frontier, The Heartland.” Until reading him, I had never considered Mississippi to be a frontier state. But it is, at least in part. And I should have remembered from reading Frederick Law Olmstead‘s The Cotton Kingdom many years ago.
“My mother and father used to tell me about when they would hang people in the courthouse square. Legal hangings, not lynchings. That was when my father and mother were children. And my daddy was born in 1897. And that was just abhorrent to me–and it was to them. These were stories that people would tell you as you were growing up. I think we’ve come a long way. It seems like people are becoming more civilized, I hope.”
The stories told to Ellen as she was growing up were frontier stories; that was how I regarded them. They had echoes of any number of Western films; and it was remarkable to hear them from someone who had just turned sixty. In one lifetime, then, it seemed that she had moved from frontier culture, or the relics of a frontier culture, to late twentieth-century Jackson and the United States. It gave a new cast to my thoughts, and a new cast to my conversation with people….
Ellen’s thoughts, just before we separated, were of her father, who had died when she was thirteen. “My father told me you never got ahead by stepping on somebody’s back. We all need to come up together.”
That had been the great discovery of my travels so far in the South. In no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life. And that was true for black and white.
SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), p. 164.
I must confess a family scandal. One of my great great uncles was hanged as a horse thief in Wyoming (via Texas) in 1878, a fact which so scandalized my maternal grandfather as to cause him to scratch his middle name (which he shared with that uncle) out of the family Bible.
Far Outliers 