A Soldier From the Wars Returning: Recap, Part the Second, New Technology, New Jobs

So I don't like doing this, but I lost another writing weekend this week, this time to eldercare issues: I'm going to see if I can write both November tech blogs next week, because, you know, it's only Christmas. This week, because I cannot do anything substantial, again, I want to tackle some recappable issues. Without ruining immersion, it's hard to say more than that tackling postblogging from a contemporary, local perspective makes it hard to step back and say, "Oh, wow, look what I found out!" That can be a little tricky, and never less so than when I discovered Alvin Hanson, somehow transmogrified into "Richards Hansen" in my last recap.

By the way, for the vanishingly small number of readers of this blog who might have heard of, much less seen, the City of Kelowna, new retirement/recreation/medical care centre of the southern interior of British Columbia, the mad, out-of-control building along the highway will be memorable.

A little bit of local history: British Columbia is on the edge of development on this continent, and it has suffered some setbacks have left a very peculiar pattern on its landscapes. The First World War, and the perhaps not-entirely unrelated crash in copper prices left its mark on the countryside.

The crash of 1929 led to a fall in property values and incomes that left our cities more-less unbuilt for thirty years afterwards. The highway through Kelowna from W.A.C. Bennet's floating bridge north towards Vernon led, in my childhood, through neighbourhoods of tiny old bungalows on drainage ditches so wide as to be practically canals. Much further north, it went by an airport with a terminal building approximately the same size as a one-room schoolhouse. By my 20s, the open ditches were gone, but the airport was still the same size. Today, north of 50, I am beyond astonished by the expansion of the airport.

However, our route to the laser surgery outpatient clinic took us up  Sutherland, the next major traffic artery south of the highway:

It turns out that the bungalows aren't gone, and, although I hadn't the patience to find it on Google Streetview, one of the ditches is still there, too. The houses look to be ninety years old, and old Kelowna's canal-sized drainage ditches are still open, although no longer large enough to have boats moored in them. Having lost three days off this week to various ramifications of our ongoing demographic crisis (NB: Author's Opinion), I may be seeing ominous signs where there's nothing to see. That Kelowna's topsy turvy development along the highway strip has not penetrated three blocks in is one of those Ominous Signs. 

Alvin Hanson was right, we have a problem, we should fix it, and the key to fixing it is to be found in the economic history of the war and postwar era. Etc, etc. 

Rain Follows the Plough: Harappa and the Cultural Defectiveness of Swarthy Foreigners

Edit: Just throwing in the whole crockpot: here's the link to the argument that a Bactrian king, Diodotus I,is the historical Ashoka. Pretty interesting from a linguistic point of view, since it raises the question of whether Sanskrit predates, or postdates the Hellenistic Prakrits.

Not exactly long on time this week, so I'm going to pull some old reading out of my --pants. It is, however, a bit of a response to various provocations. (Lameen sends me here, if you're interested.)

Wallace, Kansas. Source: Photo by Diddleysquat. (Probably not their real name.)

The joke here is that back in the late Nineteenth Century, a supposed "frontier of settlement" that delineated populated America from the "Old West" was passed by wheat farmers headed west. Supposedly, the improvements changes made by settlers would cause the micro-climate to become wetter. Rain would follow the plough, they said. Incorrectly, though there are other reasons for the abandonment of Kansas's numerous ghost towns. I could also make some strained point about the Middle East being dry, and the home of "Islamic extremists," and Kansas being dry, and the home of. . . But who would that be helping? The issue here is that we keep talking about culture (and language), where it wouldn't be unreasonable to start with rainfall.

A week ago, Brad Delong took us on a dive into the superb research of Islamic medievalist Eduardo Manzano, who asks just how medieval Islamic institutions became so different from "Western." The implication is that this is going to  matter for the divergence between "Western" and "Islamic" economies. Why are we European-descended, give or take, people so rich, while Middle Eastern-descended (look, let's just go with it, okay?) so poor? It's because of  Roman law something Benedictine monasticism something feudalism something private property. Or so I imagine the argument. The fun thing about this is that we have someone with a fingertip feel for Islamic history sketching an overly broad and schematic history of medieval Europe, with the ultimate outcome teleologically explaining the outcome of the assorted crisies, reformations, renaissances and revolutions of European history. Well, fine. Once we've excluded other possible factors, surely institutional history is a thing to look at, and Manzano is exquisitely sensitive to precisely the objections I've suggested here, and does his best to guard against it. 

The question is whether we have, actually, excluded other factors.  Like rain. The Middle East is dry, or so I've heard. Not that this is going to be about the Middle East, Islam, and the Clash of Civilisations, because it is actually about something I've researched in the past, which is not that. It is Bench Grassish, though. Notice the new label!

East of the "Middle East," where Islam failed to thrive, lies the the Indian subcontinent, long since split from its Antarctic motherland, collides in slow motion with the Eurasian plate, producing the Himalayas, lies the Punjab, Land of the Five Rivers. (Maahi Ve, by Josh.) Much of the Punjab has been incorporated in the Muslim League's national home for Indian Muslims, Pakistan.

Before that, we are told, between about 2000BC and 1500BC, it was the home of something which we agree to call the Harappan Civilisation, after the archetype, an archaeological site fifteen kilometers west of Sahiwal, on the Lahore-Karachi Railway, on an abandoned bed of the Ravi River. Well-known to locals, who pointed it out to antiquarian Charles Masson, who described it in an 1842 book, Harappa was first excavated in 1925 by a team led by D. R. Sahni, commissioned by the Director-General of the Indian Archaeological Survey, Sir John Marshal. Subsequent digs, especially that led by British '50s television archaeologist, Mortimer Wheeler, have consolidated Harappa's reputation as one of the great Lost Civilisations of antiquity. 

Qualifying the adjectives, the Harappan Civilisation is great because, apparently, it had a lost language, written in an undeciphered script. (Whether there's anything in it about the the Hiss case, we may never know.) It is lost, because, Mortimer Wheeler says, because Indo-Aryan, Veda-reciting, chariot-riding, bronze-axe wielding warriors of the north descended on them and destroyed the mud-brick citadels. 

Later intepretations favour climate change or systems collapse or what-have-you, and absolve the Aryans on grounds of chronology, because the collapse actually happened about 1900, and everyone knows that the Aryans arrived at the stroke of 1500BC. Just count the generations back from the Trojan War. Uhm, science. Specifically, historical linguistics.  If you are not moved to follow links, pioneering German Indologist, Max Mueller, argued that since the Buddha lived c. 550BC,* and the Vedanga and and Sutra Vedas are in dialogue with him, they must be the latest of the Vedic writings. The chain of listed Brahmanic teachers of these Vedas takes us back to 800BC. The Samhitas, which are before these, must have been composed over, oh, say, 200 years (1000BC). The Vedic hymns were composed over about 200 years. (1200BC), a date confirmed by the date of the Trojan War archaeology's first good date for chariots down in these parts.  

Fine, fine, whatever. I'm not going to be the iconoclast here. As Terence D'Altroy points out, we probably would not infer the existence of Tawatinsuyu from the archaeology of Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, either. Having already used that excuse to suggest that the Uruk Expansion really might have been an empire, I am not going to exclude the idea of a vast, Indus Valley Civilisation/Empire, just because its existence would make modern Hindu nationalists very happy. As for kicking Veda-chanting, Indo-Aryan warriors out of the picture, at least since we realised that Conan the Barbarian isn't real, we haven't been big on the idea that barbarians burn down cities without replacing them, if at all possible. (In other words, our barbarian invaders have to be subordinated to a "systems collapse" model.)

So, uhm, about that "lost" part.

Harappa (1):

Source

Harappa (2):

By Sam Panthakya. Getty Images, scraped from Slate.

Postblogging Technology, October 1945, II:

Source: "Television's Early History"

Mr. R. C.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada

Dear Father:

Before you blanch at the thickness of this week's missive, do take a look down at the bottom. Only a month into the subscription, and already Ziff-Davis has let me down with a July number of Radio News packed in the October sleeve. So it could be worse, is what I am saying. I thought about talking about it (there's a very interesting piece on attempts to establish UHF radio service in Britain, and another on radar, so my last chance to write "Radar is (Secret/Not Secret) This Week," but it isn't topical, and that is the theme of this correspondence, such as there is one.

Now that you're not blanching, may I broach a proposal? You will see below that the General has involved himself in the question of German industry. If I read the story right, the British have thrown in with the idea of reviving the German steel industry, and the General is advocating for it at Eisenhower's headquarters. Now, I do not know the General well enough to know whether he's in Krupp's pocket, but the left press certainly thinks that he is. My question: we, or, rather, the Earl, obviously needs a lot of steel to hit the shipbuilding targets he has set. Could we steer a contract to the Germans via General Draper, in return for getting him to roll over the Harriman papers? I do not think that Averell will care. Admittedly, I am having trouble understanding why I care. The "junior university" can go hang, for all that I care, and the Engineer simply isn't capable of gratitude, in my judgement. 

On the other hand, the Engineer, as we know, arrived at his "uncle's" school under his birth name. It wasn't until Leland, Jr. died, that little "George MacKay" was sent off to be "buried" on the Colville Reservation, and a little Engineer "arrived" to take his place. Now I have word from Fat Chow that he found a scrap of the Agent's letter register: "George MacKay" received an annual statement (or so I conceive it to be) from the Oregon and California Railroad in 1887. (Don't you hate it when a correspondent fails to update his information by letting you know that he has died?) If there are more, they are not in the Agent's fonds in the State archives. But they may be in the papers Great Uncle asked his son to leave to the university, to keep them out of Bancroft's hands. Access to that, and we may yet find proof that the Engineer is the actual beneficiary of some of the university's endowment. Not enough to cover the Earl's friends' losses, so many years ago, but enough for revenge. . . Obviously the Engineer will not go for this, but he is far from the only man to make decisions on campus. 

So with that in mind, and with your permission, I shall bring "Miss V.C." before me and entrust her with a more confidential mission to the General than we had previously imagined. But I need the Earl's permission. Money does not grow on trees, and a sweetener to the General adds to the cost of the ships. (See, I am not a complete ninny about business!)

On travel plans, though, perhaps. . . Now we have news that, due to the strike, the Engineer's son is at loose ends. He is talking about shooting something in Canada, and has gallantly offered to conduct the Santa Clara collegiate 4H to a Christmastime show in Montreal. Our young housekeeper (barely that, as she can only work half a week) is over the Moon about it, understandably, and now there are all sorts of plans afoot to reunite the whole gang --her, "Miss V.C.," your son, Lieutenant A-- in Montreal in December. It seems like an awful lot of travel and trouble, and I am sure that you are going to claim to detect feminine wiles, no matter how many times I tell you that "Miss V.C." is too obedient to her parents' wishes to give in to your son's blandishments. . . No matter how "sweet" she says he is. 

"GRACE."

"When praises mean raises!"

Postblogging Technology, October, I: Forest for the Trees

Mr. R_. C_., 

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver, British Columbia,

Dominion of Canada.

Dear Father:

I hope that you had a Happy Thanksgiving. Uncle George certainly did! When we collected him at the airport, he claimed that he was still so stuffed with turkey that he might as well have flown south on his own. (Turkeys can fly, right? I've heard that they are so inbred that they cannot, any more, but what would they do will all that breast meat, otherwise?) 

It will, alas, be a while before Uncle George takes up the brush again. He claims that he is more than ready to enjoy retirement, but in his eyes you see that it will not be easy for him.  

Now, as to Christmas. You have asked about plane tickets. I have bad news. It turns out that Lieutenant A_. has official business in Montreal this December, and our Chicago relations have kindly offered to foot the ticket for a return flight to San Francisco for both the lieutenant and their daughter. So "Miss V_.C_" will be flying from Montreal to Santa Clara via Chicago, where her parents will join her. Your son will now be returning by rail after the end of exams. 

Miss v. Q. and Fat Chow were married in a quiet, civil ceremony last month. They are still at loose ends in regards to a place to live. It's all a bit complicated, in that they are trying to find a place where they can also accommodate Queenie, and a neighbourhood which prizes the necessary privacy and convenience. Miss v. Q. argues for the Mission district, although the rents are high, Fat Chow for Chinatown --the difficulty there being a Berkely instructor with that address. 

Speaking of Queenie, Tommy will be getting Christmas leave --and then on to the South Pacific, where he has a confidential mission of some kind. 

As for Fat Chow, well, your commission was a bust. Your equestrian neighbour is not a blowhard. His stable reallly is doing well on the California circuit, and we did not need an ace private investigator to discover it! We did, however . . . Well, therein hangs a tale, or half of one. You will by now have heard of Eric W. Johnston's new position. I therefore notice with raised eyebrow that Fat Chow was so bored following up on your neighbour that he put some time in, and located the new head of the MPAA's father. "Mr. Johnston Senior" turns out to be living on the Colville Reservation with his third wife. Exactly what I am to do with this information is not clear to  me, but Fat Chow is keen to blackmail the network over Uncle George's friend, if some leverage vis-a-vis the MPAA and Columbia can be found. 

Essentially, we have some first-grade blackm,ail material, and no real reason to use it. Perhaps Mr. Johnston can get the Engineer off our backs? I am beginning to get a bit itchy about the FBI, for all that they owe us over the break-ins last summer. (We might hear more about that soon, I am told.) The first special delivery went well, but the next one is next month via San Francisco, and the port authorities on the Bay are more familiar with the old tricks and are close to the FBI. 

By the way, speaking of large commitments hastily entered into, I have recruited our old merchant marine friend for some of the work on the water with our special delivery. He is glad of the money, but reminds me about his his writing career, and I am still anxious about satisfying that promise. I have recruited Miss K. as a second eye --she is young, but has good taste, and she assures me that his stories are "fun." 

I just don't know. Placing a few shorts in pulp magazines is not going to make a career. . . Perhaps we could arrange for him to sell some movie rights?

Your suite in Arcadia will be ready by the middle of next month, if you care to join us for American Thanksgiving. If not, enjoy your November, and we will see you at Christmas.

"GRACE." 

Christ Stops at Kingcome: Yarns of the Plantation

A Viking Yarn

Kingcome Inlet is, as has been mentioned before, a mainland region opposite Port McNeill, the site of my senior high school. The site of the Dzawada'enuxw First Nation reserve, it has sent its children across the strait to be educated in Alert Bay (First Nations) and Port McNeill (White).

So I could say something about how poisonously racialist policies work on the ground, but I won't. The point here is that Kingcome, to which I have never been, is a bog-standard "early" mission site, where a small number of early missionaries, along with some provincial technocrats, established a cattle-raising, pastoral society on land previously used to grow camus bulb to eak out the returns of the sea. The ranching days didn't last, and they're now trying to restore the estuarine meadows to their "pristine" state, but Kingcome may, or may not be a model for understanding Gardar. (More dramatically, Erik the Red might, indeed, be an Eskimo.)

"Christ stops" at Eboli, the end of the rail from Naples. The action in Christ Stops at Eboli takes place beyond Eboli, in the hills of the Basilicata of Lucania, where an internally-exiled Carlo Levi ministers to poor, ignorant peasants, far beyond the reach of modern civilisation. More dramatically, I always think of a Venetian mariner, who once told me about sailing out of Naples at night, and seeing the light of fires above the forest belt, high in the mountains, and supposing to himself that those primitive hill folk lived a life unaltered since the days before Christ. 

Either he'd read Levi, or this was a common cliche. Probably the latter. As it  happens, if those primitives emigrated to B.C., they would live in nice houses, just a little outside Prince George, so that they could afford big back yards, screened from the road by a woodbreak, so that Mama won't be ashamed of the big backhoe discretely parked away on its semi-trailer bed, waiting for Papa to hitch it up again and head out into the woods on another two-week stint of building and maintaining roads and bridges for logging operations. 

I don't know what that says about anything, except that Levi was pedallling patronising cliches. It is a shout-out to my sister-in-law, although her papa had a place to put his machine, and didn't have to take it home with him, which meant that he could live in the city, back in the day before he retired to follow his grandchildren to Campbell River. And as I love my sister-in-law and my nephews and neices, so I am not inclined to believe that Christ really stopped at Eboli. (There's an entire section of Corrupting Sea about Christ not stopping at Eboli, so it's not like I'm being original, here.)

Specifically, the question is whether he stopped at Nanook:

If you're thinking "Nanook of the North," you can be forgiven. Nanook is one of a number of archaeological sites near the old Hudson's Bay post of Kimminut, on the south (Hudson's Bay) coast of Baffin Island. and archaeologists were directed to it by local Inuit. 

Well known, easy to reach, available to archaeologists --a perfect place to look for Norse. Nor were the scientific archaeologists from the south by any means the first.

A Dorset drum recovered from Bylot Island, now at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation.  Source.

To Eastern Arctic Inuit, the Tuniit were  an enigma and a legend.. Who could resist a piece like this, recovered from an ancient site? Surely these ancients, giants, dwarves and shamans, had a connection with the spirit and the land that could be recovered by beating their screaming drums. Driven off the land by the ancestors of the Inuit, the shades of the Tuniit lingered in the mossy tent rings of their people. 

Or, they're Irish. Crazy as Farley Mowat was, the bits of The Wayfarers that wanders along the coasts of Newfoundland touches real, if neglected history --Nineteenth Century history, to be sure, when the Beothuks "disappeared" by becoming ordinary Newfies, but neglected history, all the same. The point is, giants, Irish, if everyone else can be romantic about the Tuniit, so can I.

Benedict's Atlantic: The Last Emperor, the Second Crusade, the Fall of Lisbon, and the Plantation of the Atlantic

It's not a point that gets the attention it deserves, but on 23 May, 1147, an army of, uhm, let's say, ten thousand men, embarked on 150--200 ships, sailed from the Dartmouth, bound for the Holy Land --and fully expecting to get there. 

Dates can get a little unmoored. We have an image of a "medieval" feast as involving candied citron, figs, dates, raisins and sweet Malmsey, and sailing from Devon. That's where Sir Francis Drake comes from, after all! The diet implies the Levant trade. Ladies of Spain, and the wind, imply the West of England. "From Ushant to Scilly is forty-five leagues." 1147 is "medieval." Sou'west winds carry Joseph of Arimathea, citron of Candy, out of the Levant, from Santiago de Compostella to the pastures green. As if to make it all the more uncanny, we have the vast deposits of sub-Roman African Red Slip Ware at Tintagel Castle, where Arthur was conceived, at least as of 1135.

The problem comes when you try to moor 1147. It is seventy-nine years from the conquest, for example, 158 years from Erik the Red's arrival in Greenland, 94 years before the death of Snorri Sturlusson, nine years after the Battle of the Standard, in the midst of the Anarchy of Stephen and Matilda, just after Geoffrey of Monmouth writes, and while William of Malmesbury was composing. It is also not actually the earliest date at which we know North Sea society could mobilise such an effort, since an English fleet appeared off the Levant in March of 1098, pushing the economic context back another two generations, with Sigurd the Crusader's six-year adventure from here to there and back again to place in between. Which I will, if only to get in mention of Sigurd's crusading around Lisbon. If the Levant trade is, indeed, already centuries old in the Twelfth Century, then Sigurd's sailors would have known the Tagus-mouth well. That it is about to become Portuguese in no way erases an obscure past in which it was already a waypoint on the Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land in spite of lying well within al-Andalus, as we anyway know from, of all sources, Adomnan, for a Gallic bishop fetched up, shipwrecked, on the Iona of Adomnan, and furnished him with the information he needed to write a guidebook for the Holy Land, presented to a Northumbrian king in 698.

The difference is, before 1147, these are rousing adventures. In 1147, it was a crusade, and it stuck. There's a difference. I'm guessing that it has to do with St. Benedict.

St. Benedict, not exactly as pictured. Tangent Cafe on Commercial, so way too cool for school.

Recap, II: Economies, 1939 to 1943 as the On-Ramp to 194Q (Learning By Doing Number)

Koxinga: Because Taiwan is rich, and who, in 1950, would have thought it?

What do we make of Henry Luce? One thing we make is the terrible old man of the China Lobby, Madame Chiang's dupe, the patron of Whittaker Chambers, the enabler of McCarthyism. Or you could dig down, notice the Wikipedia article's provocative language in describing Luce's "lifelong partnership" with Briton Haddon. Suddenly one imagines a gay demimonde around Luce, Chambers and Alger Hiss that puts the whole McCarthy era in a framework of an intimacy that dares not declare itself, sordid only in its secrecy, infinitely less consequential than ever supposed. (And how did William F. Buckley go on through the forty years in which his wife appears to have been an invalid and shut in. Once we start inferring and implying there is no end!) 

Or I could talk about politics: about China, and about Chiang's Taiwan, advancing so improbably (at least by comparison with America's Latin American clients) into First World status. Surely that is a vital part of the story of 194Q! If I did, I would talk about family politics, too. Luce, like my maternal grandfather, was born to Presbyterian missionary parents active in China. Luce, however, was born in Penglai, Shandong, my grandfather in England, while his mother was on leave from Xiamen, Fujien. The doctor of Vernon, British Columbia, was thus linked to Xiamen in Fujien the remote, pirate-beset land, far beyond difficult mountains, poor and sea-girt, which produced Koxinga, last Ming loyalist and the conqueror who colonised Taiwan with Hokkien speakers. Shandong, in contrast, plays a central role in China's earliest history. The state of Lu in Shandong is the birthplace of Confucius, and the old implication was that he was born near one of the early capitals of the Shang dynasty. Shandong is older, and more purely Chinese, than even the heartland of the later Shang, never mind of the  latter-day Zhou dynasty that was declining away in Confucius' day, But, that Shandong is on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, where "China's Sorrow" curls like a snake against the mountains of peninsular Shandong, uncertain whether to lunge to the sea to the north or the south of the peninsula. Those mountains, in Confucius' time, were inhabited by barbarians, and so there you have Penglai, close, but not too close, perhaps not close enough, to the heart of the Chinese state. In the end, Luce's friends evacuated to Taiwan and imposed a north Chinese, Mandarin-speaking superstructureon the Fujianese, and the aboriginals before them. So, also, my Grandfather became a Marxist, where Luce was a Republican, and engaged in screaming rows with his mother China that disturbed family harmony and passed into legend.

That's my way of trying to imagine Luce as an insider-outsider-insider, enacting terrible politics out of an alienation he could never acknowledge, because now I am going to talk about Fortue as optimistic and progressive, a voice that deserves revival.  Fortune said that there would not be a depression after the war, that there would not be unemployment and misery, and against the doubters, conjured up a near-future postwar year of full prosperity, a year of televisions and deep freezes, Minute Maid in the fridge and Eggos in the toaster. As it turns out, Fortune was more than right. America had not one, but thirty, more or less, years of "Q." I leave it to economists to explain this, and social critics to unpack its various dark sides. The world is richer than even Luce's Fortune imagined it would be in late 1943, certainly richer than good Communists thought it would be when they argued with their mother's in the Okanagan gloaming of the mid-1950s. Who, again, would have thought that Chiang, of all people, would make Taiwan, of all places, work?