Monetary Predicaments

Athena Street, AD 2000

Sovereign Wealth and Debt

We take such a drubbing from our legistlators’ speeches.  They seem to be composed, like the lamest, latest interpolations into the Homeric epics, of threadbare fragments all of the same platitudes.  By now one is convinced that the quotations of strings of huge numbers really mean nothing in these persons’ mouths.

One Representative says, “a lot o’ things we’re doin’ we can’t afford to do” and never specifies what we’re doing and can’t afford.  No matter.  We’ve been hammered with this stuff so relentlessly that we know that it merely encompasses whatever the opposing political party thinks worthy.  No need to spell out anything.  It’s like the members of the insane asylum in the old story, who knew all one another’s jokes so well that they just said the number of each and laughed or groaned accordingly.

But I care deeply about economics, and I’ve been working to master the vocabulary, at least, for the last four years.  More.  Ever since Enron was victimizing California more than a decade ago, and I began to learn a bit about ‘creative’ accounting; one had to digest the fact, that such disrespect for the ideals of real wealth could go uncorrected for so long.  Yes, one knew that ever since the end of antiquity money has been ‘debt’ money (even where some governments managed to maintain gold and silver reserves to back it up), but in school they taught us that the arithmetic of the Gross National Product had to be correct.  When one of our own, USA, newsmen today remarked that Christine Lagarde would be able to speak truth to nations who hadn’t faced it, another observed that he hadn’t meant Greece but ourselves.  That’s just what I’ve been thinking, how Greek we all are, how philotimoi, not to say vainglorious, with our Great Nation stuff.  We have lived way beyond our means.  We have believed our stock-market averages, and so forth.

We have let those most capable of paying taxes pay least.  For let no one think that wage-earning Greeks do not pay taxes, but they can’t pay enough to cover the expenses, the legitimate expenses, I mean, of their nation.  Just our own problem: school teachers and bus drivers and builders, and all, no matter how late they wait to retire, have paid for and must have something to live on when they can no longer work.  And that is the least of what a nation must pay for.

Why do we bad-mouth Greece so?  We don’t bully Iceland so badly.  We forget that UBS (to name the most eminent) had some of the Madoff stuff.  He made it, but they ought to have known better, surely, just as our banks ought, than to be tempted by it. 

I take for granted that our own economists as well as Greece’s Papandreou know better than I do, just as surely as Swiss or Scotch bankers do.  But that means that our presidents and premiers and prime ministers may be practically helpless relative to the banks and brokers.  I take some hope, even so, from knowing that Papandreou is a very sound economist.

But I headed this post “Sovereign Wealth”.  That was the first term that I had to look up in 2008.  I gather it is analogous to Capital relative to Income, which persons who are not wage-earning workers refer to in old novels: nice people live on their incomes.  As I recall, however, when I looked it up, only one European nation, Switzerland, had sovereign wealth and only one American State, Alaska.  It seems that sovereign wealth is a good thing to have.  I guess that the USA, even more than one of the large South American nations when in money trouble, has a store of natural resources such as Greece lacks.  Of course, as one who professes Greek art and archaeology, one who loves Greece second only to my own country (without supposing that either of them is faultless or superior, intrinsically, to any other place), I have been agonizing over Greece for months, and I am angry when transalpine nations speak of Greece condescendingly.  It is painful even to a mere philhellene; think how Greeks must feel.  I read their newspapers on line every day, and I am proud of them.  If only I knew the real resolution of all these problems, which (of course) are ours as well as theirs, both in their causes and in their possible effects.  I hope that Christine Lagarde can help.

Taking Positions

WHY NOT USE MY BLOG TO TAKE POSITIONS?

Is this why the radical 1960s called me wishy-washy liberal?  It almost always seems to me that questions, or “issues”, as stated in the media, can only be debated in terms that preclude obvious reasonable solutions.  Is it only because these seem to be politically impossible that they are carefully avoided?

Let me take one question prominent in the News over the last weekend, that of gay marriage.  The word, marriage, itself does not imply a religious rite or consecration, but in common parlance it is felt to entail a divine blessing and a holy vow.  Fine.  A word’s meaning is not necessarily identical to its etymology.  Be that as it may, the question seems to me simply a question of the separation of church (vel sim.) and state:

(a) the state cannot demand of a religious institution that it consecrate a civic right or privilege.  Thus, a church, such as the Roman Catholic (but not her alone), cannot be required to give its sacraments to those outside of it and/or at odds with it, whether it be a sacrament such as communion or marriage or last rites or burial in cemeteries of its own, consecrated to the use of its members.  Also,

(b) in a pluralistic constitutional democracy (in our instance) none of the faiths that are free to worship as they believe has the right to impose its own institutions on the citizens, whether many or few, who believe otherwise.  It is the state that determines what is necessary to keep us civilized.  Nor can the state privilege any one religious institution’s social traditions.  All of the rights of citizenship as such must be available to all.

Thus, if everyone must register their marriage irrespective of their religious beliefs, if any, and obtain divorces, when needed, in the legal way, those who wish the wedding consecrated by the religious faith that they adhere to will arrange for the religious rite of their own kind; and if divorce or non-belief or their sex should preclude the consecration of marriage or the administration of last rites, or whatever, religiously, so be it.  The religions in a pluralistic democracy decide what is essential to each of them.

But I can just hear the claims during a political campaign: that would be requiring a “Soviet union” of everyone.  Is that why the obvious solution is politically impossible?

Can it be (I don’t know) that our president is afraid of alienating the Baptist churches?

Therefore, I do not rehearse in my blog postings what seems obvious to me.  After all, I am too old for the question of marriage to be urgent for me, and I come from a part of this nation where partnerships are just as respectable as marriages.  I am sure that questions such as inheritance could be worked out legally, in any case.  I confess, in fact, to being a little leery of marriage, since my parents made a rather poor job of it, but that is no reason to deny its excellence to others.

The most amiable author

The Kritian Boy

For two weeks now Book TV (C-Span 2 when the House of Representatives is not in session, and every weekend) has invited listeners to send in their current choices for Summer Reading.  The most astonishing variety of readers choose a book that I, too, have read with great pleasure, by everyone's favorite conservative, David Brooks, The Social Animal.  It is not original, ground-breaking neuro-science and social science.  It is just awfully well done and perfectly candid without being ickily confessional.  It is just like himself, whether writing columns or talking with Jim Lehrer and Mark Shields every Friday on PBS.  I enjoyed it so much that I read it in two sittings.

What is it, though, that I like so much about David Brooks?

I realized that it is his recalling a face that I've known for more than sixty years, indeed in the same photograph that is older than I am.

It is the face of that most candid and kaloskagathos from the Athenian Acropolis, the Kritian Boy, which may actually be Kritian, if you agree that it resembles the head of Harmodios, the young Tyrant-Slayer.

How can one possibly not like and trust a man who, in middle age (he is the same age as our President Obama), has all the candor of that most open-faced of all adolescent Athenians?

Besides, may I take this occasion to recommend his book, The Social Animal, to you all?  It is unpretentious and utterly free of malice.

With Reference to Yorkshire

Winifred Holtby, South Riding, Ilkley Moor, James Herriott, Virginia Woolf, The Princess Casamassima, the Kindle device

Discipline, I tell myself, is called for.  With a memory that works by free association, I find myself prompted by another blogger’s essay on Cromer, and its geology, to recall Girl Scout camp and singing “On Ilkley Moor bah t’at” to look up pictures of the real place and thus to recognize a reference to local dialect in the occasional use by Winifred Holtby of the “t’” in the speech of rural men, and so to wonder whether “All Creatures Great and Small” had been filmed, outdoors, in Yorkshire (it was).   And Henry James had gotten into the mix because recalling a bit of Hamlin Garland from school, I had gone back and finally read A Son of the Middle Border and gotten Henry James’ letters to William Dean Howells, who had encouraged Garland, which made me remember how I had loved The Princess Casamassima half a century ago.  Besides, Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, had promptly supplied a copy of Holtby’s biography of Virginia Woolf.  I think VW must have been scared silly by the idea of this younger and more literal writer doing a biography of her (it would account for her mixture of sarcasm and fair-mindedness  towards Holtby, who, at that, did fare better than Katherine Mansfield in VW’s letters and diaries, and, in my opinion, deservedly).  VW would really be scared, and angry, I think, if she had to see some of the posthumous studies and biographies.  Holtby alone published in V. Woolf’s lifetime, and, what’s more, she’s good—and not only because she can’t talk about, couldn’t guess about, Woolf’s death.  What she did know was The Waves, which Woolf sent to her pre-publication, and she grasped it all by herself; if she didn’t like the italicized sea scenes, unless as prose poems apart, well, neither do I. 

It is all because of the Kindle device and my love of literature even older than I am.  We old things are cheap or even free of charge.  The blogs allow me to write with no thought of selling, and the Kindle gives me a very choice library that only looks oddly assorted, because it is all my own, though I’m constantly reading several things at once.  Retirement gives me the leisure to look up the etymology of anything that takes my fancy and answer the question, why real Yorkshire has only three Ridings.  The OED obliges: the word, in the Domesday Book, is treding, and it means a third.  Not to mention making the acquaintance of the Cow and the Calf on the real Ilkley Moor.

A friend just wrote asking me whether she should really read The Princess Casamassima, and, since she is an excellent reader and this is the most readable Henry James you’ll ever find,  I do recommend it, to her and to all true readers.  This is no Daisy Miller or Wings of the Dove, which, of course, are great, but even if you think that you don’t like Henry James you will very probably love The Princess Casamassima.  And even if you didn’t like the recent BBC version of Holtby’s South Riding, which was too telescoped into three episodes, which was photographed with relentless use of darkness and side-lighting (I think that must be cheaper?), which lost all the literary character and much of the nuance of the book and was so chopped up that you needed to read the book along with it just to follow it and remember who was who in the story (not that you could tell in the dark, either), you should read Holtby’s novel, too.  She is a wonderful writer, and she is describing her own world, with neither sentimentality nor condescension.

P.S. It is true: I still haven’t read Wuthering Heights.  But first I’ll finish some of what I have begun.

The accidental triad, put to use

On May 5 I posted a snapshot of three short logs that some neighbors had put out with the trash.
Reminded that, despite my age, I could move them if I simply rolled them, I did so:

Rolled onto my parking pad

And a younger friend, Amber, moved them for me; perhaps Buster the Cat could, like the Three Bears in the Goldilocks story, eat from them.  The next afternoon, just one week ago, I saw him curled up asleep on the largest one, but he moved when he saw the camera: it flashes.

Triad of logs positioned beside the deck

I thought that if I put out cat food there he would discover it.  Since he patrols his territory very thoroughly, I'm sure he did, but he wasn't the only one.  Does everyone know that birds love cat kibble?

Cat food put on the logs never lasts more than a couple of hours.

And it isn't only blue jays and crows; smaller birds come, too.  On my front porch I saw the pair of cardinals calmly consuming Purina Cat Chow–and they have little grosbeaks for cracking nuts.

I never am quick enough with my camera.  The closest I came was in trying to photograph one of the grey squirrels, but just as I raised the viewer to my eye he was up on the shelf afforded him by my neighbor's privacy fence.

Four feet above the logs, the squirrel (I made the inset to help you see him)

Click on the pictures to zoom them.
This post is for my friend Nina, who immediately also saw the logs as an aniconic triad and liked them.  She has been ill, and I hope she'll be better soon.

Perhaps Final Flooding Report

In bright sunlight, the Vatican statue of the Nile River, with all his little cubits.  Our own Old Man Mississippi cubits also are looking as tame as these restored ones.  It doesn't matter that the sculpture is not easy to study in such a photo as this, since it is so heavily restored.

Actually, it is nice to report that the Mississippi flood looks like being successfully managed, though it would be foolish to assume that a saturated levee can be trusted to hold firm for another couple of weeks. So far as I know, only parts of Vicksburg down here are actually flooded.  I waited this evening till the 10pm news was complete and can report that some folks are taking crawfish wild, that some farmers, owing to heat and drought, were able to harvest Spring wheat before the fields were inundated and hope, if the waters recede and evaporate quickly enough, to plant another crop or two.  Between assiduous work on the levees built after the 1927 flood, and the judicious use of the spillways, and the thirst of the drought-dry Atchafalaya basin, this flood may have been managed—though who am I to say, a Californian from away back?  Anyhow, the local TV stations no longer seem very anxious about it.  There remain the towns nearer the gulf, but already the crest measurements have been reduced in their forecast, and that is great.  Anyhow, we'll be watching our little cubits.  I understand that one can get a good view looking west over the basin from the top of our State Capitol, climbing and driving on the levees being forbidden, but, hey, it's too darned HOT.

I don't say that there won't be loss and damage, but nothing like the chaos that was Katrina.  I almost am afraid to believe that all will be, if not well, not so bad down by Morgan City.  And I'll be interested to see what this will have done to the salt and fresh water balance down there.
That the flood event is a real and serious one is plain from the frightening speed of the current.

Updating the River

02 III 00  AE28  Nicopolis ad Istrum.  Commodus / River God.  Obv. AVT KAI MAR AVRE KOMODOS (in Greek); Rev. NEIKOPO PROS IST [H]EGEMO KAIKI SERVEILIA (his full name was Servilianus).  Pick p. 352, no. 1235, pl. XVII, 31.  Pick, p. 350, says that the large coins of Commodus are of quite exceptionally bad style and seem all attributable to the same die cutter.

Fully developed river gods meant as Father Danube / Ister are relaxed and comfortable, even idyllic in appearance, but this one of Commodus is not.  I've had this image in my files for more than a decade, and here is a chance to use it, to head this thread.  No one seems to talk about the Danube delta with its many tributaries, though surely (together with the Tigris & Euphrates, the Nile not having the same sort of tributaries) it is the Great River most comparable to North America's, if I may judge from from its vast delta of wetlands as seen from the air.  I don't know very well how the Amazon works.
So here is a heading for this post, and as soon as they decide how much of the Morganza Spillway to open, to divert water to the Atchafalaya basin, when its force becomes too great for the modern channel, I'll finish this posting.  Note the Native American name, from the language of one of the peoples who lived off the swamps before the relatively modern European Americans (not only Anglos and Acadiens but also Spanish and German and lots of Irish) made it their home.  And, for that matter, the main channel of the great river in geologically recent times was still in that basin, but that was a long time ago in the minds of present-day Louisianans.
Just after midnight, now May 14, Chicago Time
Well, they are going to open that Morganza Spillway that I'd barely heard of until this week.  Let me first correct the impression given above: The Morganza Floodway is parallel to and to the east of the Atchafalaya Basin.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morganza_Spillway
I was right that it had never been opened in the 30 years that I've lived here.  Even though the land that will be flooded is owned as a floodway, and is only used otherwise with that understanding, as with certain lands below old earthen dams on the Sacramento River in California, no one wants either to destroy crops or to displace families that have lived on the land for generations, unless it is necessary.
Consider, though, up in Pointe Coupee Parish parts of the old town of St. Francisville, just to name one, are already flooded (Morganza is just up river from it).  Notice, too, all the worm-shaped water thereabouts which are, literally, pieces of the Mississippi, left behind when it shifted to its present course (no, Man didn't make it do that; we think that the river has shifted more than once in the last few thousand years).  The Morganza Floodway will carry water where the river has at times been before.
But Industry, chemical and specifically petroleum, is not just something to yell at, as if it were the Viet Nam War.  Louisiana is no place for five million population were it left as the Native Americans enjoyed it.  The New Bridge, the one over I-10, was built high so that it needn't be opened for ships, but just yesterday, Reuters said, a ship (registered in Baikal!) had to turn back, because the River was already so high that clearance was insufficient.  And, it was bruited about, the Exxon-Mobil plant was already flooded today, at least enough that it couldn't operate, enough that liquid cargo (you know what) couldn't be unloaded.
I honestly don't think that my neighborhood will be flooded; it IS a little higher than some others, but I'm just as glad that opening as many gates as necessary in the Morganza Spillway will bring down our crest, estimated to be on the 22nd of May, by a couple of feet.  I'm sure that the University and the refineries and Dow Chemical and BASF, et al., are just as glad, too.
Already US 61 up by Tallulah is closed and a number of other highways; even parts of the Interstate are expected to be awash.
I confess that the Mississippi fascinates me.  Not because of its might so much (look how it meanders for much of its length) as how it gathers so many Waters together.  When I came here, I was consoled for the absence of mountains by the presence of the great river.  When I was little, there was a black-and-white movie, a biopic, about Mark Twain.  When I was in university, I was taught to understand the history of Europe as the history of its rivers.  And so on.
It isn't simply the height of the water, it's the mass of it this year.
When I lived in Oregon, they said that it only snowed in the mountains--and then one year I had 35 inches of the stuff on my ticky-tacky FHA-built roof (which naturally couldn't take it).
When I came to Louisiana, they said that New Orleans lived a charmed life, because hurricanes never actually hit it (of course, there were professors at LSU that thought otherwise).
Now, just when I thought I might live out my remaining years without a repetition of "Lanterns on the Levee" (on the 1927 flood), they are having to take measures lest the levees built after 1927 may not be sufficient to handle 2011.  The suburbs flood every several years, anyway, but they are saying that people will not be able to go back to where they lived below the Spillway.  This is different from Missouri.  Our Old Man River may just, they say, change lanes once again and flow down the Morganza way once again, once allowed to do so, incorporating once again those bits of Old River up by Pointe Coupee.
Bah!  I do not like Nature; physis is not theia; and, no, it's not homo sapiens' fault, really; he, too, is part of Nature.  Our only advantage is in being able to be interested in it.
So, now I know no more than any of you do.
P.S. They are waiting as long as possible to open the Spillway, so that folks can finish moving everything before the water comes.
N.B.  The first gate was opened on schedule at 3pm.  BTW, the experts say the water is going to the Atchafalaya...
Note: I won't add everyday to this post, but I'll make a new one in a week, when more results should be apparent.  Please note, however, that it is not a question of choosing between flooding big cities or else small communities (many of whose inhabitants have jobs in the ports or need to ship from them) but of minimizing tragedy: should the places where the main levee has shown weakness over the years break, not only the ports and cities but much of the areas west of the river would be flooded anyhow and with potentially far worse consequences.  And that spillway at Morganza, which ordinarily retains water, now partly, judiciously opened, may also prevent much worse flooding in places north of Morganza, places like Vidalia, for example, now that diversion through the spillway will, as I understand, reduce the mass of water there when the cresting at Natchez occurs.  It is NOT a question of victimizing the basin-dwellers.