Русский — язык с уникальным алфавитом, жестким произношением и репутацией одного из сложнейших для изучения. Но мы не задумываемся об этом, потому что он для нас родной.
AdMe.ru собрал несколько фактов, которые помогут взглянуть на русский язык по-новому.
Слово из 2 букв, в котором можно сделать 8 ошибок, — щи. Российская императрица Екатерина Великая, еще будучи немецкой принцессой Софи, написала простое русское слово щи вот так: «schtschi», а это 8 букв, все из которых неправильные!
Русский алфавит уникален. Некоторые буквы в нем точно такие же, как в латинском, а вот другие выглядят так же, но звучат совсем иначе. А еще две буквы — ъ и ь — не имеют собственных звуков.
Буква е может представлять два разных звука: [йэ] и [йо]. То есть для [йо] есть отдельная буква, ё, но эти две точки почти никогда не пишут, так что получается не ё, а е. Запутаться можно.
В современном русском языке слово товарищ уже не используется, так что носители языка остались без специального слова-обращения к другому человеку или группе людей. Иногда можно услышать дамы и господа, но это звучит несколько вычурно и неестественно. Могут использоваться и обращения мужчина, женщина, но это несколько грубо.
Не используется глагол быть в настоящем времени. А вот в будущем и прошедшем — используется.
Порядок слов в русском языке свободный, но это не значит, что вы можете ставить слова, как хотите. От порядка слов может кардинально зависеть смысл предложения. Например, «Я иду домой» означает «Я иду домой» (хотя, конечно, много зависит от интонации), а вот «Я домой иду» значит, что «Я иду именно домой, а не куда-то там еще». А «Домой иду я» — «Это я иду домой, а не ты и не кто-то еще. Все остальные остаются здесь и работают!». Так что порядок слов в русском языке зависит от того, что вы хотите сказать.
Чтобы превратить предложение в общий вопрос, менять вообще ничего не надо, только интонацию. «Ты дома» — это утверждение, а «Ты дома?» — уже вопрос.
У числительных один и два есть род, а у остальных — нет: один мальчик, одна девочка, две девочки, два мальчика, но три мальчика / девочки.
У числительного один есть множественное число — одни.
В прошедшем времени у глаголов есть род, а в настоящем и будущем — нет: он играл, она играла, он играет, она играет.
У русских существительных есть одушевленность! Это значит, что некоторые одушевленные существительные считаются «более живыми», чем неодушевленные. Например, в русском языке мертвец считается более живым, чем труп. (Вспоминаем школьную программу: виню кого — мертвеца, но виню что — труп).
Самые сложные русские скороговорки: «Шла Саша по шоссе и сосала сушку», «На дворе — трава, на траве — дрова, не руби дрова на траве двора».
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR., New York Times (July 23, 1989)
Little is more surprising these days than the revival of blasphemy as a crime. A secular age had presumably relegated blasphemy - irreverence toward things sacred - to the realm of obsolete offenses.
No American has been convicted for blasphemy since Abner Kneeland in Massachusetts a century and a half ago (for what was deemed a ''scandalous, impious, obscene, blasphemous and profane libel of and concerning God''); and the last prosecution, in Maryland 20 years ago, was dismissed by an appellate court as a violation of the First Amendment.
But a secular age, when it creates its own absolutes, may well secularize blasphemy too. Consider the deplorable role the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag played in a recent Presidential campaign; or the cries of outrage provoked by the Supreme Court decision in Texas v. Johnson, holding that punishment for the political burning of an American flag breached the Constitution; or the demonstrations protesting the ''desecration'' of the flag at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The very word ''desecration'' implies that the American flag is sanctified, an object of worship. We are witnessing the rise of what Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan's Solicitor General, calls the ''doctrine of civil blasphemy.'' Whether religious or secular in guise, all forms of blasphemy have in common that there are things so sacred that they must be protected by the arm of the state from irreverence and challenge - that absolutes of truth and virtue exist and that those who scoff are to be punished.
It is this belief in absolutes, I would hazard, that is the great enemy today of the life of the mind. This may seem a rash proposition. The fashion of the time is to denounce relativism as the root of all evil. But history suggests that the damage done to humanity by the relativist is far less than the damage done by the absolutist - by the fellow who, as Mr. Dooley once put it, ''does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts in th' case.''
Let me not be misunderstood lest I be taken for a blasphemer myself and thereby subject to the usual dire penalties. I hold religion in high regard. As Chesterton once said, the trouble when people stop believing in God is not that they thereafter believe in nothing; it is that they thereafter believe in anything. I agree with Tocqueville that religion has an indispensable social function: ''How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?'' I also sympathize with Tocqueville who, Andre Jardin, his most recent biographer, tells us, went to his death an unbeliever.
It would hardly seem necessary to insist on the perils of moral absolutism in our own tawdry age. By their fruits ye shall know them. It is as illogical to indict organized religion because of Jimmy Swaggart and the Bakkers as Paul Johnson is to indict the intelligentsia because of the messy private lives of selected intellectuals; but the moral absolutists who are presently applauding Paul Johnson's cheap book ''Intellectuals'' might well be invited to apply the same methodology to their own trade. As the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, ''The worst corruption is a corrupt religion'' -and organized religion, like all powerful institutions, lends itself to corruption. Absolutism, whether in religious or secular form, becomes a haven for racketeers.
As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide.
Religion enshrined and vindicated hierarchy, authority and inequality and had no compunction about murdering heretics and blasphemers. Till the end of the 18th century, torture was normal investigative procedure in the Roman Catholic church as well as in most European states. In Protestant America in the early 19th century, as Larry Hise points out in his book ''Pro-Slavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840,'' men of the cloth ''wrote almost half of all the defenses of slavery published in America''; an appendix lists 275 ministers of the Gospel who piously proclaimed the Christian virtue of a system in which one man owned another as private property to be used as he pleased.
Human rights is not a religious idea. It is a secular idea, the product of the last four centuries of Western history.
It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake, the abolition of torture and of public executions, the emancipation of the slaves. Only later, as religion itself began to succumb to the humanitarian ethic and to view the Kingdom of God as attainable within history, could the claim be made that the Judeo-Christian tradition commanded the pursuit of happiness in this world. The basic human rights documents - the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man - were written by political, not by religious, leaders. And the revival of absolutism in the 20th century, whether in ecclesiastical or secular form, has brought with it the revival of torture, of slaughter and of other monstrous violations of human rights.
Take a look at the world around us today. Most of the organized killing now going on is the consequence of absolutism: Protestants and Catholics killing each other in Ireland; Muslims and Jews killing each other in the Middle East; Sunnites and Shiites killing each other in the Persian Gulf; Buddhists and Hindus killing each other in Ceylon; Hindus and Sikhs killing each other in India; Christians and Muslims killing each other in Armenia and Azerbaijan; Buddhists and Communists killing each other in Tibet. ''We have,'' as Swift said, ''just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.'' The Santa Barbara Peace Resource Center, reporting on the 32 wars in progress around the planet in 1988, found that 25 had ''a significant ethnic, racial or religious dimension.'' And when religious religion is not the cause, then the totalitarian social religions of our age inspire mass slaughter.
It is natural enough, I suppose, if you believe you have privileged access to absolute truth, to want to rid the world of those who insist on divergent truths of their own. But I am not sure that it is a useful principle on which to build a society. Yet, as I noted earlier, the prevailing fashion is, or was a year or two ago, to hold relativism responsible for the ills of our age. A key document, of course, is Allan Bloom's best seller of a couple of years back, ''The Closing of the American Mind.'' Indeed, one cannot but regard the very popularity of that murky and pretentious book as the best evidence for Mr. Bloom's argument about the degradation of American culture. It is another of those half-read best sellers, like Charles Reich's murky and pretentious ''Greening of America'' 17 years before, that plucks a momentary nerve, materializes fashionably on coffee tables, is rarely read all the way through and is soon forgotten.
Now one may easily share Mr. Bloom's impatience with many features of higher education in the United States. I too lament the incoherence in the curriculums, the proliferation of idiotic courses, the shameful capitulation to factional demands and requisitions, the decay of intellectual standards. For better or for worse, in my view, we inherit an American experience, as America inherits a Western experience; and solid learning must begin with our own origins and traditions. The bonds of cohesion in our society are sufficiently fragile, or so it seems to me, that we should not strain them by excessive worship at artificial shrines of ethnicity, bilingualism, global cultural base-touching and the like. Let us take pride in our own distinctive inheritance as other countries take pride in their distinctive inheritances; and let us understand that no culture can hope to ingest other cultures all at once, certainly not before it ingests its own.
But a belief in solid learning, rigorous standards, intellectual coherence, the virtue of elites is a different thing from a faith in absolutes. It is odd that Professor Bloom spends 400 pages laying down the law about the American mind and never once mentions the two greatest and most characteristic American thinkers, Emerson and William James. Once can see why he declined the confrontation: it is because he would have had to concede the fact that the American mind is by nature and tradition skeptical, irreverent, pluralistic and relativistic.
Nor does relativism necessarily regard all claims to truth as equal or believe that judgment is no more than the expression of personal preference. For our relative values are not matters of whim and happenstance. History has given them to us. They are anchored in our national experience, in our great national documents, in our national heroes, in our folkways, traditions, standards. Some of these values seem to us so self-evident that even relativists think they have, or ought to have, universal application: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for example; the duty to treat persons as ends in themselves; the prohibition of slavery, torture, genocide. People with a different history will have different values. But we believe that our own are better for us. They work for us; and, for that reason, we live and die by them.
At least this is what great Americans have always believed. ''Deep-seated preferences,'' as Justice Holmes put it, ''cannot be argued about . . . and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far-reaching, we try to kill the other man rather than let him have his way. But that is perfectly consistent with admitting that, so far as it appears, his grounds are just as good as ours.''
Once Justice Holmes and Judge Learned Hand discussed these questions on a long train ride. Learned Hand gave as his view that ''opinions are at best provisional hypotheses, incompletely tested. The more they are tested . . . the more assurance we may assume, but they are never absolutes. So we must be tolerant of opposite opinions.'' Holmes wondered whether Hand might not be carrying his tolerance to dangerous lengths. ''You say,'' Hand wrote Holmes later, ''that I strike at the sacred right to kill the other fellow when he disagrees. The horrible possibility silenced me when you said it. Now, I say, 'Not at all, kill him for the love of Christ and in the name of God, but always remember that he may be the saint and you the devil.'''
These ''deep-seated preferences'' are what Holmes called his ''Can't Helps'' - ''When I say that a thing is true, I mean that I cannot help believing it. . . . But . . . I do not venture to assume that my inabilities in the way of thought are inabilities of the universe. I therefore define truth as the system of my limitations, and leave absolute truth for those who are better equipped.'' He adds: ''Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.''
Absolutism is abstract, monistic, deductive, ahistorical, solemn, and it is intimately bound up with deference to authority. Relativism is concrete, pluralistic, inductive, historical, skeptical and intimately bound up with deference to experience. Absolutism teaches by rote; relativism by experiment. ''I respect faith,'' that forgotten wit Wilson Mizener once said, ''but doubt is what gets you an education.''
I would even hazard the proposition that relativism comports far more than absolutism with the deepest and darkest teachings of religion. For what we have learned from Augustine, from Calvin, from Jonathan Edwards, is not man's capacity to grasp the absolute but quite the contrary: the frailty of man, the estrangement of man from God, the absolute distance between mortals and divinity - and the arrogance of those who suppose they are doing what the Lord would do if He only knew the facts in the case. That is why Reinhold Niebuhr acknowledged such an affinity with William James - far more, I would warrant, than he would have found with Allan Bloom.
When it came to worldly affairs, Niebuhr was a relativist, not because he disbelieved in the absolute, but precisely because he believed in the absoluteness of the absolute - because he recognized that for finite mortals the infinite thinker was inaccessible, unfathomable, unattainable. Nothing was more dangerous, in Niebuhr's view, than for frail and erring humans to forget the inevitable ''contradiction between divine and human purposes.''''Religion,'' he wrote, ''is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.'' He particularly detested ''the fanaticism of all good men, who do not know that they are not as good as they esteem themselves,'' and he warned against ''the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink . . . when they try to play the role of God to history.''
Niebuhr accepted, as James did, ''the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historic configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue.'' His outlook is as far away from Mr. Bloom's simple-minded absolutism as one can imagine. It represents, in my view, the real power of religious insight as well as the far more faithful expression of the American mind.
I would summon one more American, the greatest of them all, as a last witness in the case for relativism against absolutes. In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln noted that both sides in the Civil War ''read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . the prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.'' Replying thereafter to a congratulatory letter from Thurlow Weed, Lincoln doubted that such sentiments would be ''immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world.''
The Almighty has His own purposes: this is the reverberant answer to those who tell us that we must live by absolutes. Relativism is the American way. As that most quintessential of American historians, George Bancroft, wrote in another connection, ''The feud between the capitalist and laborer, the house of Have and the house of Want, is as old as social union, and can never be entirely quieted; but he who will act with moderation, prefer fact to theory, and remember that every thing in this world is relative and not absolute, will see that the violence of the contest may be stilled.''
The mystic prophets of the absolute cannot save us. Sustained by our history and traditions, we must save ourselves, at whatever risk of heresy or blasphemy. We can find solace in the memorable representation of the human struggle against the absolute in the finest scene in the greatest of American novels. I refer of course to the scene when Huckleberry Finn decides that the ''plain hand of Providence'' requires him to tell Miss Watson where her runaway slave Jim is to be found. Huck writes his letter of betrayal to Miss Watson and feels ''all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now.'' He sits there for a while thinking ''how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.''
Then Huck begins to think about Jim and the rush of the great river and the talking and the singing and the laughing and friendship. ''Then I happened to look around and see that paper. . . . I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to hell' - and tore it up.''
That, if I may say so, is what America is all about. This essay has been adapted from a lecture given at Brown University on the occasion of Vartan Gregorian's inauguration as president.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is professor in the humanities at the City University of New York.
Early on in the Musée d’Orsay’s “Splendours and Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France, 1850-1910”—a compelling, if exhausting, exhibition of more than 400 works of art and ephemera in various mediums—we are confronted by the arresting juxtaposition of Edgar Degas’s familiar “L’Absinthe” (1875-76) with images of similarly dour women: “La Prune” (1878) by Édouard Manet and “Au Café: Agostina Segatori au Tambourin” (1887) by Vincent van Gogh. They set a fairly morose mood that never really lets up, despite the array of women, ranging from overly dressed to undressed, who fill the show’s canvases. That’s in line with what Guy Cogeval, the Orsay’s president, describes in the show’s catalog as the museum’s policy of taking “a fresh look at nineteenth-century art . . . [including] opportunities to highlight a darker side to modernity and its origins.”
Splendours & Miseries: Images of Prostitution in France, 1850-1910
Musée d’Orsay
Through Jan. 17, 2016
While the exhibition is more a lesson in the history of prostitution in France than a history of art, the curators—Nienke Bakker, Richard Thomson, Isolde Pludermacher and Marie Robert—include many significant works by artists too easily overlooked by those of us lured to the familiar. These include Louis Anquetin’s “Portrait of a Woman (Marguerite Dufay?)” (1891), whose come-hither smile and fleshy bare-breasted figure combine for a rare moment of jollity in a show that reeks of sadness. Among the many other notable and rarely seen works here are Jean-Louis Forain’s “Le Client” (1878), in which a seated man ogles five women in a red-walled brothel; József Rippl-Rónai’s Fauve-inflected “Prostitutes Getting Dressed (Red Furniture and Yellow Wall)” (1912-13); and the formally dressed men mixing with dancers in Jean Béraud’s “Backstage at the Opéra” (1889), which suggests a riff on Degas’s ballet images (whose better-known ones are also on view).
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Edgar Degas’s ‘L’Absinthe’ (1875-76).PHOTO:PATRICE SCHMIDT/MUSÉE D
It can be unsettling to view those beloved dancers in light of this exhibition’s theme. Did we once believe they were innocent young things? Suddenly we might sympathize with the arrogant “Woman in a Carriage” (1889), by Anquetin, as she peers disapprovingly through her lorgnette at something unseemly.
Alphonse Mucha’s famous 1889 poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite Gautier, the courtesan in “La Dame aux Camélias” by Alexandre Dumas, fils (better known to us as Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s “La traviata”), raises another issue addressed here: “that women who became famous on the stage risked assumptions being made about their private life,” as Mr. Thomson puts it in his catalog essay. This question of ambiguity—being unsure about how to interpret the subject in a painting—pervades the exhibition, and is likely to stay with viewers for a long time.
Another theme explored is the blurring of lines in pornography. In the most powerful of their images, the fetishism and occasional sadomasochism depicted by Félicien Rops and others exude a disturbing allure. This is missing from the work of artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose bizarre soft-porn nude sculpture “Corinth” (before 1903) is shown next to “Elle” (1905) by Gustav Adolf Mossa, an almost grotesque painting that resembles contemporary Japanese pornography and depicts a naked woman proudly sitting atop piles of naked bodies. Both seem comical in contrast to the hard-core porn of photographs and early movies (shown in age-restricted rooms).
Once your vision has been changed by a powerful exhibition, a lot else can start to look different. Nowhere is this more true than at the Musée d’Orsay. Entering “Splendours and Miseries,” one might not have noticed Thomas Couture’s gigantic “Romans of the Decadence” (1847) across from the entrance. But its overt sexuality—and that of much else on view throughout the museum—slaps you in the face once you’ve been corrupted by this show. I wonder whether that extra impact will be as evident when the exhibition is next on view at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, which co-organized the show.
Encountering Édouard Manet’s magnificent “Olympia” (1863) near the end of the exhibition provokes that “aha” moment when you are once again awe-struck by what makes a painting iconic. Its formal qualities, so deeply anchored in memorable art-historical precedents, along with its elusive meanings, make you wonder whether placing the work within a specific subject such as prostitution might trivialize it. But new contexts can provide added meanings, even to familiar works. Manet’s arresting study in black-and-white, “Masked Ball at the Opéra” (1875), and Picasso’s majestic Blue Period “Femme Assise au Fichu (Melancholy Woman)” (1902) are among the many works that will never look quite the same to me again.
It’s probably coincidental that the exhibition is occurring at the same time as the international debate sparked by Amnesty International’s call for the decriminalization of prostitution. Nor should we assume that there’s a tie-in with discussions, yet again, about the corruption of the art market. But Charles Baudelaire is quoted on the back of the excellent and informative catalog: “What is art? Prostitution.” Considering its French origins, perhaps this wonderfully sprawling exhibition should have been called “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Mr. Freudenheim, a former art-museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian.
In Philip Glass’s opera, Robert E. Lee’s surrender was only the start of the struggle for equality in America.
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Robert Baker as Edward Alexander, David Pittsinger as Robert E. Lee, Aleksey Bogdanov as John Aaron Rawlins and Richard Paul Fink as Ulysses S. Grant. PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/WNO
Philip Glass’s opera “Appomattox,” which had its premiere in 2007, was not just about the end of the Civil War, but rather about how that 1865 encounter, when Gen. Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee, was just the beginning of a whole new battle. In the opera’s revised version, having its world premiere at the Washington National Opera, Mr. Glass and his librettist, the playwright Christopher Hampton, make that point more explicitly. Their new Act II, set in 1965, introduces more characters, including Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon B. Johnson, to tell another chapter in the story of race relations in America—the passage of the Voting Rights Act. A series of vignettes, the opera is subtle, perhaps too subtle in an era when “Hamilton” on Broadway has changed the stakes about how music theater can bring history to life.
Appomattox
Washington National Opera
Through Nov. 22
For the new version, the creators compressed the Civil War story into Act I, taking out some of the vivid 20th-century events that depicted the continuing struggle and moving others into Act II. Act I now seems flat without them, its overwhelming musical environment one of exhaustion after years of war. A quartet for the wives— Julia Grant, Mary Custis Lee and Mary Todd Lincoln—plus Mrs. Lincoln’s ex-slave seamstress and friend, Elizabeth Keckley, sets that tone with its slow mournfulness, and Mr. Glass’s darkly transparent orchestrations are mostly retiring and sympathetic, with little of his trademark propulsiveness.
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Soloman Howard as Martin Luther King Jr.PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/WNO
There are a handful of such lyrical set pieces; another is Julia Grant’s poignant aria about how her husband is not really a butcher. (Melody Moore, a luxuriantly voiced soprano, was imposing; as Gen. Grant, Richard Paul Fink sounded strained and harsh.) Otherwise, the vocal writing is set for maximum intelligibility, more recitative than aria, leaning on Mr. Hampton’s compelling text without musically illuminating individual characters. This restrained style works best in the courtliness of the surrender conversations between Grant and Lee, who transact their endgame as gentlemen, all passion seemingly spent.
Matters perk up considerably in Act II, with the arrival of Lyndon B. Johnson (baritone Tom Fox), a whirlwind of salty language, uncouth behavior, and arm-twisting tactics that get the job—passing the Voting Rights Act—done. His scenes with Gov. George Wallace (a splendidly slimy Aleksey Bogdanov) and F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover (a brash Robert Brubaker) are hilarious. By contrast, Martin Luther King, sung with luminous authority by bass Soloman Howard, is a plaster saint. Composer and librettist tried to suggest King’s distinctive preacherly eloquence, but the smooth surface of their creation, even with the original setting of lines from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” doesn’t evoke the rhythm of his speech or transmit its full weight and power.
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Tom Fox as Lyndon B. Johnson.PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/WNO
The most striking musical elements of Act II came from the 2007 version: “The Ballad of Jimmie Lee Jackson,” an original protest ballad sung here by the eloquent tenor Frederick Ballentine, recounts the murder that inspired the Alabama marches for voting rights. Its vivid language, catchy tune, and infectious chorus—“A hundred years and we ain’t free / We’re marching to Montgomery”—even upstage King. Another gripping holdover is the jailhouse soliloquy ofEdgar Ray Killen, who, in a poisonously shocking performance by David Pittsinger, describes in graphic detail the 1964 murder of the three civil-rights workers in Mississippi that he orchestrated. It is now inserted into an imagined 2011 encounter with Trooper James Fowler (a strongTimothy J. Bruno), who was belatedly convicted of killing Jimmie Lee Jackson. Still, a pair of octogenarian Klansmen reveling in their unrepentant racism seems a bit passé in view of all that’s happened in the past few years. Sometimes one can be too subtle.
Donald Eastman’s simple, two-tiered white set, suggesting the veranda of a Southern house, provided the flexibility for the different locations, while Merrily Murray-Walsh’s somber period costumes and Robert Wierzel’s shadowy lighting reinforced the elegiac quality of Act I and the continuing unrest of Act II. Tazewell Thompson’s efficient directing stressed realism, and conductor Dante Santiago Anzolini supplied firm if sometimes plodding direction from the pit. The singers played double roles, and their Act II incarnations were usually more gripping: Mr. Pittsinger, for example, was stiff rather than noble as Robert E. Lee. Standouts included Mr. Ballentine, who also was T. Morris Chester, the black newspaperman who bears exultant witness to the fall of Richmond and then closes Act I with a chilling description of an 1873 massacre of black men in Louisiana, and Chrystal E. Williams, portraying a vigilant Coretta Scott King as well as Keckley. The WNO chorus was excellent, especially when supplying the rumbling voice of defiance.
Am working on another article, "Why Montaigne would have loved the Internet (but not necessarily the non-stop aggressions of the self/cell-phone social media)."
In his own lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as astatesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, 'I am myself the matter of my book', was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would come to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, "Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; directly rendered Que sais-je? in modern French). Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal storytelling.
Château de Montaigne, a house built on the land once owned by Montaigne's family. His original family home no longer exists, though the towerin which he wrote still stands.
Portrait of Michel de Montaigne byDumonstier around 1578.
The Tour de Montaigne(Montaigne's tower), mostly unchanged since the 16th century, where Montaigne's library was located
Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estateChâteau de Montaigne, in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, close to Bordeaux. The family was very wealthy; his great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time and had also been the mayor of Bordeaux. Although there were several families bearing the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) origins.[8] His mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism.[9] His maternal grandfather, Pedro Lopez,[10] from Zaragoza, was from a wealthy Marrano(Sephardic Jewish) family who had converted to Catholicism.[11][12][13][14] His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in Gascony, France.[15]
The coat of arms of Michel Eyquem, Lord of Montaigne
His mother lived a great part of Montaigne's life near him, and even survived him, but is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, is frequently reflected upon and discussed in his essays.
Montaigne's education began in early childhood and followed a pedagogical plan that his father had developed refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, in order to, according to the elder Montaigne, "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help".[16] After these first spartan years, Montaigne was brought back to the château. The objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus who could not speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin and they also were given strict orders to always speak to the boy in Latin. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he himself employed, and thus acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than the more traditional books.
The atmosphere of the boy's upbringing, although designed by highly refined rules taken under advisement by his father, created in the boy's life the spirit of "liberty and delight" to "make me relish... duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint";[17] yet he would have everything to take advantage of his freedom. And so a musician woke him every morning, playing one instrument or another,[18] and anépinettier (with a zither) was the constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing a tune to alleviate boredom and tiredness.
Around the year 1539, Montaigne was sent to study at a prestigious boarding school in Bordeaux, the Collège de Guyenne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, where he mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year. He then began his study of law inToulouse in 1546 and entered a career in the local legal system. He was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux and, in 1557, he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux (a high court). From 1561 to 1563 he was courtier at the court of Charles IX; he was present with the king at the siege of Rouen (1562). He was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of St. Michael, something to which he aspired from his youth. While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, he became very close friends with the humanist poet Étienne de la Boétie, whose death in 1563 deeply affected Montaigne. It has been suggested by Donald M. Frame, in his introduction to The Complete Essays of Montaigne that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate" after losing Étienne, he began the Essais as his "means of communication" and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend".[19]
Montaigne wed Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, not of his own free will but by prearrangement and under pressure from his family;[citation needed] they had six daughters, but only the second-born survived childhood.
Following the petition of his father, Montaigne started to work on the first translation of the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond'sTheologia naturalis, which he published a year after his father's death in 1568 (In 1595, Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for its declaration that the Bible is not the only source of revealed truth). After this, he inherited the family's estate, the Château de Montaigne, to which he moved back in 1570, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. Another literary accomplishment was Montaigne's posthumous edition of his friend Boétie's works.
In 1571, he retired from public life to the Tower of the Château, his so-called "citadel", in the Dordogne, where he almost totally isolated himself from every social and family affair. Locked up in his library, which contained a collection of some 1,500 works, he began work on his Essais("Essays"), first published in 1580. On the day of his 38th birthday, as he entered this almost ten-year period of self-imposed reclusion, he had the following inscription crown the bookshelves of his working chamber:
In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.[20]
In 1578, Montaigne, whose health had always been excellent, started suffering from painful kidney stones, a sickness he had inherited from his father's family. Throughout this illness, he would have nothing to do with doctors or drugs.[21] From 1580 to 1581, Montaigne traveled in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, partly in search of a cure, establishing himself at Bagni di Lucca where he took the waters. His journey was also a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, to which he presented a silver relief depicting himself and his wife and daughter kneeling before the Madonna, considering himself fortunate that it should be hung on a wall within the shrine.[22] He kept a fascinating journal recording regional differences and customs[23] and a variety of personal episodes, including the dimensions of the stones he succeeded in ejecting from his bladder. This was published much later, in 1774, after its discovery in a trunk which is displayed in his tower.[24]
During Montaigne's visit to the Vatican, as he described in his travel journal, the Essais were examined by Sisto Fabri who served as Master of the Sacred Palace under Pope Gregory XIII. After Fabri examined Montaigne'sEssais the text was returned to its author on 20 March 1581. Montaigne had apologized for references to the pagan notion of "fortuna" as well as for writing favorably of Julian the Apostate and of heretical poets, and was released to follow his own conscience in making emendations to the text.[25]
Journey to Italy by Michel de Montaigne 1580-1581
While in the city of Lucca in 1581, he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he returned and served as mayor. He was re-elected in 1583 and served until 1585, again moderating between Catholics and Protestants. The plague broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his second term in office, in 1585. In 1586, the plague and the Wars of Religion prompted him to leave his château for two years.[21]
Montaigne continued to extend, revise, and oversee the publication of Essais. In 1588 he wrote its third book and also met the writer Marie de Gournay, who admired his work and later edited and published it. Montaigne called her his adopted daughter.[21] King Henry III was assassinated in 1589, and Montaigne then helped to keep Bordeaux loyal to Henry of Navarre, who would go on to become King Henry IV.
Montaigne died of quinsy at the age of 59, in 1592 at the Château de Montaigne. The disease in his case "brought about paralysis of the tongue",[26] and he had once said "the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation. I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice."[27] Remaining in possession of all his other faculties, he requested mass, and died during the celebration of that mass.[28]
He was buried nearby. Later his remains were moved to the church of SaintAntoine at Bordeaux. The church no longer exists: it became the Convent des Feuillants, which has also disappeared.[29] The Bordeaux Tourist Office says that Montaigne is buried at the Musée Aquitaine, Faculté des Lettres, Université Bordeaux 3 Michel de Montaigne, Pessac. His heart is preserved in the parish church of Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne.
The humanities branch of the University of Bordeaux is named after him:Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3.
His fame rests on the Essais, a collection of a large number of short subjective treatments of various topics published in 1580, inspired by his studies in the classics, especially by the works of Plutarch and Lucretius.[30] Montaigne's stated goal is to describe humans, and especially himself, with utter frankness. Montaigne's writings are studied as literature and philosophy around the world.
Inspired by his consideration of the lives and ideals of the leading figures of his age, he finds the great variety and volatility of human nature to be its most basic features. He describes his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disdain for the human pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for his timely death. He writes about his disgust with the religious conflicts of his time. He believed that humans are not able to attain true certainty. The longest of his essays, Apology for Raymond Sebond, contains his famous motto, "What do I know?"
Montaigne considered marriage necessary for the raising of children, but disliked strong feelings of passionate love because he saw them as detrimental to freedom. In education, he favored concrete examples and experience over the teaching of abstract knowledge that has to be accepted uncritically. His essay "On the Education of Children" is dedicated to Diana of Foix.
The Essais exercised important influence on both French and English literature, in thought and style.[31]Francis Bacon's Essays, published over a decade later, in 1596, are usually assumed to be directly influenced by Montaigne's collection, and Montaigne is cited by Bacon alongside other classical sources in later essays.[32]
Though not a scientist, Montaigne made observations on topics in psychology.[33] In his essays, he developed and explained his observations of these topics. His thoughts and ideas covered topics such as thought, motivation, fear, happiness, child education, experience, and human action. Montaigne’s ideas have had an impact on psychology and are a part of psychology’s rich history.
Child education was among the psychological topics that he wrote about.[33] His essays On the Education of Children, On Pedantry, and On Experience explain the views he had on child education.[34]:61:62:70 Some of his views on child education are still relevant today.[35]
Montaigne’s views on the education of children were opposed to the common educational practices of his day.[34]:63:67He found fault with both what was taught and how it was taught.[34]:62 Much of the education during Montaigne’s time was focused on the reading of the classics and learning through books.[34]:67Montaigne disagreed with learning strictly through books. He believed it was necessary to educate children in a variety of ways. He also disagreed with the way information was being presented to students. It was being presented in a way that encouraged students to take the information that was taught to them as absolute truth. Students were denied the chance to question the information. Therefore, students could not truly learn. Montaigne believed that to truly learn, a student had to take the information and make it their own.
At the foundation Montaigne believed that the selection of a good tutor was important for the student to become well educated.[34]:66 Education by a tutor was to be done at the pace of the student.[34]:67He believed that a tutor should be in dialogue with the student, letting the student speak first. The tutor should also allow for discussions and debates to be had. Through this dialogue, it was meant to create an environment in which students would teach themselves. They would be able to realize their mistakes and make corrections to them as necessary.
Individualized learning was also integral to his theory of child education. He argued that the student combines information he already knows with what is learned, and forms a unique perspective on the newly learned information.[36]:356 Montaigne also thought that tutors should encourage a student’s natural curiosity and allow them to question things.[34]:68He postulated that successful students were those who were encouraged to question new information and study it for themselves, rather than simply accepting what they had heard from the authorities on any given topic. Montaigne believed that a child’s curiosity could serve as an important teaching tool when the child is allowed to explore the things that they are curious about.
Experience was also a key element to learning for Montaigne. Tutors needed to teach students through experience rather than through the mere memorization of knowledge often practised in book learning.[34]:62:67He argued that students would become passive adults; blindly obeying and lacking the ability to think on their own.[36]:354Nothing of importance would be retained and no abilities would be learned.[34]:62 He believed that learning through experience was superior to learning through the use of books.[35] For this reason he encouraged tutors to educate their students through practice, travel, and human interaction. In doing so, he argued that students would become active learners, who could claim knowledge for themselves.
Montaigne’s views on child education continue to have an influence in the present. Variations of Montaigne’s ideas on education are incorporated into modern learning in some ways. He argued against the popular way of teaching in his day, encouraging individualized learning. He believed in the importance of experience over book learning and memorization. Ultimately, Montaigne postulated that the point of education was to teach a student how to have a successful life by practising an active and socially interactive lifestyle.[36]:355
Student taking notes on Montaigne's Essays at Shimer College.
Thinkers exploring similar ideas to Montaigne include Erasmus, Thomas More, and Guillaume Budé, who all worked about fifty years before Montaigne.[37] Many of Montaigne's Latin quotations are from Erasmus'Adagia, and most critically, all of his quotations from Socrates. Plutarchremains perhaps Montaigne's strongest influence, in terms of substance and style.[38] Montaigne's quotations from Plutarch in the Essays number well over 500.[39]
Ever since Edward Capell first made the suggestion in 1780, scholars have suggested Montaigne to be an influence on Shakespeare.[40] The latter would have had access to John Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essais, published in English in 1603, and a scene inThe Tempest "follows the wording of Florio [translating Of Cannibals] so closely that his indebtedness is unmistakable".[41] However, most parallels between the two can be explained as commonplaces:[40] as withCervantes, Shakespeare's similarities with writers in other nations could be due simply to their simultaneous study of Latin moral and philosophical writers such as Seneca the Younger, Horace, Ovid and Virgil.
Much of Blaise Pascal's skepticism in his Pensées has been traditionally attributed to his reading Montaigne.[42]
The English essayist William Hazlitt expressed boundless admiration for Montaigne, exclaiming that "he was the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man. ... He was neither a pedant nor a bigot. ... In treating of men and manners, he spoke of them as he found them, not according to preconceived notions and abstract dogmas".[43] Beginning most overtly with the essays in the "familiar" style in his own Table-Talk, Hazlitt tried to follow Montaigne's example.[6]
Ralph Waldo Emerson chose "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic" as a subject of one of his series of lectures entitledRepresentative Men, alongside other subjects such as Shakespeare and Plato. In "The Skeptic" Emerson writes of his experience reading Montaigne, "It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience." Friedrich Nietzsche judged of Montaigne: "That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth".[44] Saint-Beuve advises us that "to restore lucidity and proportion to our judgments, let us read every evening a page of Montaigne." [45]
The American philosopher Eric Hoffer employed Montaigne both stylistically and in thought. In Hoffer's memoir, Truth Imagined, he said of Montaigne, "He was writing about me. He knew my innermost thoughts." The Welsh novelist John Cowper Powys expressed his admiration for Montaigne's philosophy in his booksSuspended Judgements (1916) and The Pleasures of Literature (1938). Judith N. Shklar introduces her bookOrdinary Vices (1984), "It is only if we step outside the divinely ruled moral universe that we can really put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another each day. That is what Montaigne did and that is why he is the hero of this book. In spirit he is on every one of its pages..."
20th century literary critic Erich Auerbach called Montaigne the first modern man."Among all his contemporaries," writes Auerbach (Mimesis, Chapter 12), "he had the clearest conception of the problem of man's self-orientation; that is, the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support."[46]
Being Americans, we think we're pretty awesome. Across the globe, not everyone will agree with that sentiment, however. If you don't want to stick out like a sore thumb, try to avoid these stereotypical aspects of an average American traveler.
[JB -- among the images/text in the entry]
3. Trying Someone Else's Accent
Of course, when you're trying not to sound American, that's when you sound most American. We're notorious for being convinced that we can sound just like the people we're around, and that's when we break out an Australian accent in London or a Northern accent in Wales. If you try this in the U.K., you should know that being compared to Dick van Dyke is not a compliment in this context.
I posted an article a few days ago about the changing demography with lower population growth. Here is another example of the already changed world. Our immigration debate is about the past, not the future.
We had a few big waves of immigration from specific areas. The largest was NOT the Hispanic wave; it was Germans. We also had big waves of Scots-Irish, Irish and Italians. Each time it seemed like it would go on forever and each time it abruptly stopped. Looking forward, we will suffer a shortage of labor and will be hoping for more immigrants, at least those with specific jobs or skills.
Yesterday's debate was about how to keep them out; tomorrow's will be how to attract them in.
Between 2009 and 2014, about 140,000 more Mexican immigrants have returned to Mexico from the U.S. than have migrated here, citing family reunification as the main reason for leaving.
Protesters in the Princeton University president’s office (Photo by Mary Hui)
Student protesters filled Princeton’s historic Nassau Hall Wednesday afternoon, sitting in the university president’s office and refusing to leave until their demands to improve the social and academic experiences of black students on campus are met — starting with an acknowledgement of famous alumnus Woodrow Wilson’s “racist legacy” and the removal of his name from all buildings.
At a time when protests over race are spreading across the country, gaining heat at many campuses — forcing administrators to step down, buildings to be renamed and course-offerings to be changed — the sit-in at one of the world’s most prestigious universities was another sign of the movement’s impact.
But it’s a movement that has also generated opposition — as at Dartmouth, where some students reported being frightened by protesters screaming and swearing at them about being racists last week, at Yale where a debate about free speech clashed with demands from students angry about the racial climate on campus, at Claremont McKenna College where some students said protests turned hostile, and in a few places such as the University of Missouriand Howard, with racist death threats.
But it’s a movement that continues to gain strength and lead to changes.
At Princeton, the protest came on the same day university officials announced that the leaders of the residential colleges would change their traditional names, effective immediately, from “master” to “head of the college.”
Protesters at Yale have demanded a similar change, concerned that the term “master” has ugly connotations associated with slavery.
“The former ‘masters’ of our six residential colleges have long been in conversation with the Office of the Dean of the College about their anachronistic, historically vexed titles,” Dean of the College Jill Dolan said in a statement. “We believe that calling them ‘head of the college’ better captures the spirit of their work and their contributions to campus residential life.”
“Though we are aware that the term ‘master’ has a long history of use in universities (indeed since medieval times), it seems to me by now to be anachronistic and unfortunate for the positions we hold,” Sandra Bermann, head of Whitman College, said in a statement. “We are glad to take on the designation as ‘head of the college’ that describes our role more aptly.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Princeton’s Black Justice League pushed harder.
The group demanded that the name of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. president, a segregationist who some believe supported the ideas of the Ku Klux Klan, be removed from a residential college, from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs, and any other buildings — and that his mural be scrubbed from the dining hall.
It demanded “cultural competency training” for all faculty and staff, including discussion of “the true role of freedom of speech and freedom of intellectual thought in a way that does not reinforce anti-Blackness and xenophobia.”
The organizers demanded that classes on “marginalized peoples” be added to the university’s required courses. “Learning about marginalized groups, their cultures, and structures of privilege is just as important as any science or quantitative reasoning course,” the group wrote in its demands.
And it demanded a space for black students on campus. The document ends with a request that President Christopher Eisgruber sign it.
Wilglory Tanjong, one of the student organizers with the Black Justice League on campus, said they began with a demonstration in front of the hall and are now holding a sit-in “indefinitely.”
Tanjong wrote of her efforts to convince administrators that they should not honor Wilson. “I was told that Princeton honors Woodrow Wilson because of the contributions he made to higher education, America and the world. I was also reminded that Wilson did more to improve Princeton than anyone else…” There was no disagreement that Wilson was racist, Tanjong wrote, but rather that the same could be said for many of the country’s historic leaders.
Tanjong argued that the university must “acknowledge that our past was white-centered, white-focused and plagued with white supremacist ideology. That Princeton was built for wealthy, white, cisgender, Christian males. That everyone who does not fit that definition was not meant to be here. That our campus culture still tells people who don’t align with that demographic that they still are not meant to be here.”
On Wednesday afternoon, speaking by phone from the president’s office, Tanjong said the protesters had had a heated discussion with Eisgruber. According to Tanjong, the president had agreed that black students should have their own space on campus, but did not agree to their other two demands. She said he objected to the idea of renaming the buildings because all people are flawed, and the university honored Wilson for the good he had done for the university. She said he didn’t want to force staff to undergo training; he thought they could choose to have it but it should not be required.
Martin A. Mbugua, a spokesperson for Princeton, wrote in an e-mail, “President Christopher L. Eisgruber and Jill Dolan, Dean of the College, spent about an hour speaking with a group of students in the president’s office. We expect the conversation to continue beyond today’s meeting.”
Mbugua confirmed that the president supported the idea of a cultural space for black students, did not agree to the idea of mandating a ‘cultural competency’ course, and did not agree to remove the Wilson name from buildings. In the latter case, Eisgruber “was expressing what he believes, not a decision. The conversation about that will continue.”
Tanjong said the protest will continue. “The university locked the doors to Nassau Hall earlier today, so we are concerned that once we leave, we will not be able to re-enter in the morning. Thus, we are not planning to leave.”
I posted an article a few days ago about the changing demography with lower population growth. Here is another example of the already changed world. Our immigration debate is about the past, not the future.
We had a few big waves of immigration from specific areas. The largest was NOT the Hispanic wave; it was Germans. We also had big waves of Scots-Irish, Irish and Italians. Each time it seemed like it would go on forever and each time it abruptly stopped. Looking forward, we will suffer a shortage of labor and will be hoping for more immigrants, at least those with specific jobs or skills.
Yesterday's debate was about how to keep them out; tomorrow's will be how to attract them in.
Between 2009 and 2014, about 140,000 more Mexican immigrants have returned to Mexico from the U.S. than have migrated here, citing family reunification as the main reason for leaving.
For the first time in more than four decades, more Mexican immigrants are returning to their home country than coming to the United States, according to a report released Thursday.
From 2009 to 2014, an estimated 870,000 Mexicans came to the United States while 1 million returned home, a net loss for the United States of 130,000, according to the report from the Pew Research Center. That historic shift comes at a time when immigration has become a contentious focal point in the 2016 presidential race, as Republicans and Democrats argue over how best to modernize the nation's immigration system.
Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the center, said the net decline in Mexicans was driven by the Great Recession in the United States that made it harder to find jobs, an improving economy in Mexico and tighter border security.
In coming years, he said, the number of Mexicans may increase again if the U.S. economy continues to improve. But steady growth of Mexico's economy and tighter controls along the southwest border mean the United States won't see another massive wave of legal and illegal immigration like it did in recent decades, when the number of Mexican-born immigrants ballooned from 3 million to nearly 13 million, he said.
"The nature of immigration itself is beginning to change," Lopez said. "It looks likeMexican migration is at an end."
The reversal of Mexican migration doesn't mean that the United States is seeing fewer immigrants overall, just that their countries of origin are changing.
The United States has seen a record number of Central Americans fleeing violence in the past few years, straining the country's ability to process their requests for asylum. In addition, Lopez said, immigrants from China, India and other Asian nations are coming as students and high-tech workers. Eventually, Asians will become the dominant share of the immigrant population, he added.
Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, said it would be a mistake to view the slowdown in Mexican migration as the end of the United States' immigration boom. He said the country continues to see a massive stream of foreign workers entering on work visas, sometimes overstaying those visas and sometimes sponsoring their entire families to come with them.
He said those workers, combined with their relatives who can later join them in the United States through the country's generous family migration rules, represent constant job competitors for underemployed Americans.
"The effect on the American worker is pretty much the same, whether they're coming from Mexico or anywhere else," he said.
The slowdown in Mexican migration also means that the profile of Mexican-born immigrants in the United States has changed dramatically. They have become more settled in the U.S., are older on average and have completed high school and college at higher rates. For example, 76% of Mexican-born immigrants in the United States had not completed high school in 1990. By 2013, 42% had completed high school and 18% had started or graduated from college.
Among the other findings in the report:
• Only 14% of the 1 million Mexicans who returned to their country since 2009 said they did so because they were deported. A majority said they returned of their own accord, with 61% saying they did so to reunite with family.
• Mexicans have fewer ties to people living in the United States. In 2007, 42% of Mexicans surveyed by Pew said they kept in contact with friends or family in the United States. In 2015, that figure had fallen to 35%.
Am currently reading a quite interesting book, Rosemarie Ostler's Founding Grammars: How Early America’s War Over Words Shaped Today’s Language, which I picked up while roaming in my neighborhood's public library in Washington, D.C. (For all of America's faults, our public libraries cannot be included among them.)
So far as I can tell, the author of Founding Grammars does not deal with the issue of sequence of tenses (I abbreviate it as sot; see also (a) and (b)). The term, fully spelled out or abbreviated, is not mentioned in the index.)
In order to make sure I actually understand sot (which I use "intuitively” while writing), I checked Wikipedia, which states that "[i]n some languages the tense tends to be ‘shifted back’, [JB - note the British usage of the comma after the quotation mark] so that what was originally spoken in the present tense is reported using the past tense (since what was in the present at the time of the original sentence is in the past relative to the time of reporting). English is one of the languages in which this often occurs." (As Russophiles know, such is not the case in Russian.)
But, if you'll allow me to speculate -- "me" being a plain, non-specialist grateful user of a public library -- author Ostler often does not seem to respect the sequence of tenses in English, at least in spirit, in her text, by rather abruptly shifting tenses, within individual paragraphs in order (I speculate) to “liven up” her prose. Among many examples (p. 258):
“Lexicographer Bergen Evans was a vocal champion of the new [Merriam-Webster] dictionary. Several months after Follett’s savage attack, the Atlantic published a rejoinder by Evans. [And now here's the abrupt change of tenses, from past to present:] Evans also tackles the question of what purpose a dictionary is supposed to serve. In answering it, he takes on the major criticisms ….”
Authors/grammarians/linguists of the world unite! What are your thoughts on forget-the-sot prose?
Michelle Chan Brown was born in London and grew up in Prague, Krakow, Moscow, Belgrade and Kiev. Her first book, Double Agent, was winner of the 2012 Kore First Book Award, judged by Bhanu Kapil. Her second book, Motherland, with Wolves, is forthcoming in 2015 [JB: it has just appeared]. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Cimarron Review, The Missouri Review, Witness and many other journals and anthologies. A Kundiman fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Michelle is poetry editor of Drunken Boat [see]. She lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where she is a Fulbright scholar, at work on non-fiction and a third poetry collection [JB: Michelle has just returned to the USA, upon the completion of her fellowship].
Almost half of Americans — 49 percent — say racism is a “big problem” in society today, according to a poll conducted by CNN and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
That’s a greater percentage than in 2011 — 28 percent — or in 1995, when 41 percent said racism was a “big problem.”
About two-thirds of blacks (66 percent) and Hispanics (64 percent) said racism is a big problem, compared to 43 percent of whites.
María Cristina García | The Washington Post, adn.com
November 22, 2015
For a growing number of politicians, this month's attacks in Paris mean it's time to stop bringing Syrian refugees to the United States. The risk that the Islamic State might send infiltrators in disguise, the theory goes, outweighs America's usual attitude toward taking in desperate people from around the world. "Our nation has always been welcoming, but we cannot let terrorists take advantage of our compassion," House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wisconsin, said Tuesday. "This is a moment where it's better to be safe than to be sorry." By the middle of this past week, more than half the country's governors had declared that their states wouldn't accept any resettled Syrians. Things had changed after Paris.
In truth, they hadn't. The outcry over resettling a relatively small number of Syrian refugees - far fewer than France vowed to take in even after the attacks - isn't an exception; it's more like the rule. Yes, the United States has been generous: Since 1948, close to 4 million refugees have come here. But despite our reputation as a haven for the oppressed, those admissions have always been controversial. There is one way the Syrian refugees are different, though: They, and others who have arrived after 9/11, are among the most carefully vetted in American history.
U.S. refugee policy dates to the end of World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, the nationturned away thousands of Jews fleeing the Third Reich, even though our immigration quotas remained unfilled. Politicians justified their actions by arguing that German spies and subversives might be hiding among the refugees, but anti-Semitism was the more likely motivation for American neglect.
After the war, President Harry S. Truman and his allies on Capitol Hill urged Congress to authorize the admission of displaced and stateless people from Europe. Financial aid to war-torn nations was not enough, they argued; the United States had a moral obligation to accept a share of the refugees. Even as Americans became more fully aware of the horrors of the Nazi death camps, Congress resisted. It took three years to pass the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, which brought in more than 200,000 Europeans (mostly ethnic Germans) over the next two years. The law discriminated against Jewish and Catholic refugees, and Truman was tempted to veto it because it was "wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice." Still, the law officially launched U.S. refugee policy. Together with the 1953 Refugee Relief Act, it facilitated the entry of almost 600,000 European refugees.
In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower had to convince a wary American public that it was in the national interest to accept Hungarian refugees. A Hungarian rebellion against Soviet domination had elicited a brutal crackdown that forced more than 200,000 refugees into Austria and Yugoslavia and destabilized two countries still reeling from World War II. Opponents argued that communist spies and saboteurs would arrive with the refugee flow and harm the nation. Supporters said the United States had a moral responsibility to the Hungarian rebels and to the European host nations - especially since the U.S. government had encouraged the rebellion through propaganda broadcasts on Radio Free Europe.
The Eisenhower administration enlisted the help of public relations firms to generate positive press for the refugee program and "sell" the Hungarians to the public. For the next year, Americans were subjected to a massive media blitz, with story after story on Hungarian freedom fighters, comparing them to American patriots and stressing their love of liberty and democracy. Eventually, 38,000 Hungarians were admitted, many of them screened and registered at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.
Subsequent groups faced similar backlashes. The 200,000 Cubans who were paroled into the United States from 1959 to 1962 after Fidel Castro's rise to power were predominantly white, middle-class and professionally trained, but that did little to pacify Americans, especially those living in South Florida, who bore the brunt of the refugee crisis. While the national media celebrated the refugees' heroism and "American" values (one Newsweek story enthusiastically told readers, "They're OK!"), letters to politicians and civic leaders revealed growing anger and frustration in Miami. Over the next five decades, South Florida residents would see many more refugees from Cuba - through the freedom flights from 1965 to 1973, the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the attempts in 1994 by more than 30,000 Cubans to flee by boat - as well as arrivals from Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Colombia. Today, Miami is home to one of the most successful Latino business communities in the nation, but the demographic shift scared away many non-Hispanic white residents, who resented the cultural transformation of "their" city.
Polls in the 1970s found opposition to the continued entry of Vietnamese refugees and other Southeast Asians fleeing the devastating war in Vietnam and its aftermath. News stories about the high casualty rates of Vietnamese boat people stranded at sea and about squalid refugee camps in Thailand did little to change public opinion: By 1979, only 32 percent of Americans surveyed wanted to accommodate more Southeast Asian refugees, and the government struggled to find people willing to sponsor them. Americans complained that the refugees were culturally "unassimilable," politically suspect, self-interested migrants who came to mooch off the welfare system. Resentment fueled conflict in many communities across the country, from Philadelphia to Port Arthur, Texas, to Los Angeles.
Cuba and Vietnam (along with the Soviet Union) eventually became the top source countries of refugees during the Cold War. As in the Hungarian case, the White House took the lead in crafting refugee policy, so much so that Congress passed the 1980 Refugee Act to make admissions more accountable to public will. Since then, the White House, in consultation with Congress, has established an annual refugee quota, with numbers allotted to different regions of the world. These allotments reflect geopolitical and foreign policy interests, as well as humanitarian obligations.
But 9/11 completely changed our refugee policy. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration restructured the immigration bureaucracy to convey a greater sense of safety to the public. Refugee admissions were casualties of that restructuring. The annual quota constantly goes unfilled; 2013 marked the closest we came to meeting it after 9/11, although even before then, the quota was almost never met. Refugees now face many bureaucratic hurdles: They must be investigated by national and international intelligence agencies; their fingerprints and other biometric data are checked against terrorist and criminal databases. They are screened for disease. They are interviewed and reinterviewed by consular officials. In sum, they must prove that they are worthy of refuge in the United States.
The State Department reports that refugee applicants can expect to wait on average 18 to 24 months for processing and screening, but humanitarian aid workers on the ground report a much longer wait. Just like other immigrants, refugee applicants are not guaranteed admission. There is no "waiting list" per se, and the selection process can be capricious. Even Iraqi and Afghan translators, already cleared to work with U.S. military personnel, have difficulty securingrefugee status or special immigrant visas. If many in this doubly vetted population can't get visas, those without connections will encounter still greater obstacles.
This past week's political rhetoric warns that the Syrian refugee population, dominated by young men traveling alone, poses a risk. But adult males traveling solo are the least likely to be admitted to the United States unless they can demonstrate persecution. U.S. resettlement policies favor women and children, the elderly and the infirm, victims of torture, and religious minorities. Those with family here are also prioritized.
As generous as our refugee policy has been, the real burden is borne by countries that border areas of crisis. The Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, near the Syrian border, for instance, is home to 80,000 people. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees refers only 1 percent of refugees for resettlement in third countries such as the United States. The refugees our nation admits each year are but a drop in the proverbial bucket.
In September, the Obama administration announced that it would increase the annual refugee quota over the next two years to accommodate a larger number of Syrians. The quota, set at 70,000 to 80,000 for more than a decade now, will increase to 100,000 by October 2017. This will be the largest refugee quota since before 9/11. But the numbers are allotted by region, not country, and Syrians compete for visas with many other displaced people. In 2012, amid Syrian President Bashar Assad's violent crackdown, only 31 Syrian refugees were admitted to the United States. This year, despite the ongoing civil war and the rise of the Islamic State, just 1,682 refugees came from Syria - 2.4 percent of the total refugee admissions. The administration promises that at least 10,000 of the coming year's 85,000 refugees will be Syrian, but the numbers will probably be smaller.
Is it possible that a terrorist will arrive undetected in the small pool of admitted refugees? No system is 100 percent secure. Even tourism can pose a potential threat: The Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, arrived in the United States on tourist visas in 2002 and became legal residents when their parents were granted asylum. So it was the asylum bureaucracy, not the refugee system, that handled their case. But what immigration official can predict that children will be radicalized on American soil?
So some fears and suspicions are understandable. But we can't always protect ourselves from our homegrown assassins, either. (Who predicted Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston?) We live in a society unable to guarantee safety on our streets and our college campuses, in our movie theaters, churches and schools.
Sixty years ago, Eisenhower reminded the nation that the United States must accept its "full share" in assisting victims of oppression. That remains true. Denying vulnerable populations - and populations we made vulnerable - the chance to make a case for refuge goes against everything our country claims to stand for. If fear paralyzes our movements, dictates our policies and erases a proud humanitarian tradition, then those who wish us harm will celebrate indeed.
María Cristina García is the Howard A. Newman professor of American studies at Cornell University.
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — A decade ago, when 5,000 settlers a month were arriving in this valley, the suburban frontier moved out into the desert so fast the zip codes couldn't keep up.
Then came the financial crisis, and the frontier stopped at places like the back fence of 4132 Recktenwall Ave.
The four-bedroom house there, meant to be owned by its residents, is today a rental. And the Severance family, meant to be owners, are its $1,365-a-month renters.
It's all part of a national shift away from home ownership and toward renting.
The U.S. home ownership rate peaked 10 years ago. Since then it has dropped from over 69% to under 64%, where it was a half century ago, with each percentage point representing more than a million households.
An Urban Institute study this year predicted that in 15 years the home-owning rate will sink to 61%. Baby Boomers — far more apt to own than members of succeeding generations — will move or die. And Millennials, now 18 to 34, will be slow to own, either because they can't afford to or don't want to.
The shift to rental in single-family homes is visible on streets like Recktenwall. Between 2005 and 2009, about 80% of such houses in greater Las Vegas were owner-occupied; by 2013, that had dropped to 71%, a 12,000-unit shift.
Nationally, the number of single-family detached house rentals increased by 3.2 million between 2004 and 2013, according to Harvard's Center for Housing Studies.
The Severances lost their first house to foreclosure in 2009, and haven't been able to buy another. Bryan Severance, 37, admits this rental is OK for his family of six, "but it's not ours. There's something about owning your own home.''
THE DEMISE OF THE DREAM?
America, we've long told ourselves, is a nation of homeowners. It's part of our national credo: A family that owns its home cares for it and improves it, luxuriates in its memories and profits from its sale.
A home is a comfort, a burden, an investment, a status symbol. Above all, as Bryan Severance says, it's yours.
But now this most tangible measure of the American Dream is in doubt.
Consider the Millennials. Although a MacArthur Foundation survey this year found that 88% aspire to own a home, and 53% say it's a high personal priority, relatively few are following through.
Homeownership among households headed by those 30 to 34, which was above 50% for decades, is at a record low 45%. The first time homebuyer's median age, once under 30, is now almost 33.
Millennials face many economic barriers, including student loan debt, income stagnation and tighter credit rules imposed after the housing crash of 2007-08 and attendant subprime loan scandal. All inhibit either the ability to save for a down payment or to secure the mortgage financing used by most home buyers.
Rents are rising, creating unprecedented burdens in many regions. That should encourage people to buy homes, but it also eats away over time at the savings needed to do so.
But the homeownership decline is not entirely tragic. For the footloose, the empty-nested, the risk-averse and assorted others (contract workers, military servicemembers) renting makes sense.
When Linda Slayden, 64 and semi-retired, moved to Las Vegas from South Bend, Ind., she rented. Back home she had owned a Tudor-style house and a condo, but says, "I left those worries behind.''
Spencer Lubitz, a 29-year-old broadcast journalist with his career ahead of him, feels the same way: "I can't commit long term. I need mobility.''
Home ownership, once akin to Mom and apple pie, has become the subject of a policy debate.
Advocates say it's a bedrock of middle class prosperity, and cite research showing that owners take better care of the property and are more civically engaged than renters.
Joel Kotkin, an analyst based at Chapman University in Southern California, says home ownership is under assault by "elites"— urban planners, academics, even financiers — who oppose the edge-of-suburbia development that made houses affordable in the first place.
Those seeking to prevent sprawl, he says, want a new "tenement era'' populated by "rental serfs.''
No one opposes single-family home ownership per se. But Christopher Leinberger, a developer, researcher and writer, says that many Americans want to live in more compact neighborhoods closer to mass transit and less dependent on cars. And such precincts traditionally have had more renters than owners.
In this view, home ownership is merely a residential option (albeit one that enjoys the mortgage interest tax deduction), and one not necessarily best suited for a more fluid economy and more environmentally conscious times.
A POST-WAR HOUSING BOOM
Home ownership was not always the American dream. It didn't become a widespread aspiration until the 1920s, or a practicality for most until after World War II, when mortgage aid for veterans and construction of interstate highways helped push the ownership rate over 50%.
Every postwar president embraced the ownership dream, none more enthusiastically than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Concerned with disadvantaged minority groups' lag in home ownership, both promoted policies, such as tax credits and easier mortgage terms for first-time buyers, that helped home ownership rise to record levels.
But too many loans to people with no ability or inclination to pay them off helped create a financial bubble, which burst with disastrous results for the economy. Home ownership, once one of the few things on which Democrats and Republicans agreed, became a political pariah. Rarely has a national ideal fallen so far so fast.
The housing crash's ground zero was Las Vegas. People who thought you couldn't lose money on a house lost everything. At one point, an astonishing three quarters of Las Vegas mortgage holders owed more on their homes than they were worth, a percentage that still hovers around 25%.
That's one of many factors suppressing home sales. Another is the fact that millions of houses have been flipped to rentals by investors who snapped them up at rock-bottom prices years ago.
One was 4123 Recktenwall.
'AN UNLUCKY GENERATION'
When a burglar broke in the front door last month, Bryan Severance realized once again how much he wants to own his own home.
Bryan says the place needs a stronger door, a security camera and decorative window grills. "If I own a home, I can make a home safe,'' he says.
Bryan and Melissa bought a house in 2003, the year after they married. Bryan took over his father's business and in the boom years, expanded it quickly with funds borrowed against their fast-appreciating house. When the economy collapsed, they lost the business and the house.
After renting for five years, they tried to buy again. They had their heart set on a house with a big covered backyard patio — ideal for family movie nights. But the lender pulled out at the last minute because the way Bryan's employer listed his income made it look as if he had two jobs. The Severances lost about $4,000 in pre-closing costs.
It's a typical story these days: A sale undone by a combination of a borrower's sullied credit history, and a lender's post-crash aversion to risk.
Melissa still chokes up thinking about the house. "That was going to be the house where we made memories for our family.''
The Recktenwall house was worth about $325,000 when it was completed in 2007 near the peak of the market. The owner lost it to foreclosure, and it was sold to an investment company for $135,000 in 2011.
The poignancy of having to rent a house that was built to be owned by families like them is not lost on Bryan and Melissa. They are members of Generation X, whose home ownership rates are 5% lower than others of the same age in previous decades.
"We're an unlucky generation,'' Bryan says. "We bought our house in the boom, and lost it in the bust. And now the market's rising again without us.''
PRIDE OF RENTERSHIP
When she moved to Las Vegas last year from Minnesota, LuAnn Chiesi thought she knew what a rental apartment complex looked like. Then she visited one called Veritas, which opened in 2010.
Three pools. Three gyms. Free Wi-Fi.The covered outdoor fire pit. The coffee bar. The Halloween Candy Carnival.
"This is not the place you lived in when you got out of college,'' says LuAnn, who's 61, retired and recently married.
Rents are rising to record levels around the nation. In markets like Las Vegas (unlike New York, San Francisco and other densely settled cities) it's cheaper to buy than rent — if you can get a mortgage.
Most of Veritas' 1,000 residents, who include a smattering of Generation Xers with young kids, could afford to own a home, but choose not to.
Veritas, where monthly rents range from $1,400 for three bedrooms to $850 for one, is part of a growing class of amenity-rich apartment complexes that offer an alternative to owning. In fact, most of the nation's newly constructed housing is now rental.
LuAnn and her husband Robert took a three-bedroom apartment for what they assumed would be a year, "until we found something to buy,'' she recalls. "Isn't that what you're supposed to do?''
But the Chiesis found they didn't miss lawn mowers or mortgage payments. "I don't care if I ever own a house again,'' LuAnn says. "When the lease was up this year, we looked at each other and said, 'Why would we ever move?''
FIRST-TIMERS AND BOOMERANG BUYERS
A year ago, the odds seemed against Lindsay Bell or Hazel and Ralph Lacanienta becoming home owners. They'd lost their house to foreclosure in 2011. And she was a teacher's aide making less than $34,000 a year who'd never even owned a credit card.
But now Lindsay, 28, a single parent with a 9-year-old daughter, owns a condominium in a gated community with a pool and a gym. And the Lacanientas and their three kids have a three-bedroom house in the region's most prestigious master planned community.
Their experience shows how, despite the end of the national policies that pumped up homeownership, some people are becoming homeowners through a combination of personal thrift, institutional aid and sheer persistence.
In 2012 Lindsay sought help from Neighborhood Housing Services of Southern Nevada, a non-profit that received grants from Wells Fargo and the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco to help first-time home buyers. Lindsay completed a course on how to buy and maintain a home; saved $6,000 for a down payment; and received $30,000 toward the purchase of the house, on the condition she not sell for five years.
After three years of saving, looking, and living with relatives, she bought a two-bedroom condo with an attached garage for $105,000. Her monthly mortgage payment is $337, which she says is cheaper than renting and allows her to save.
Paying rent is "like giving money away,'' she says. "I want my money to make me money.''
She revels in the memory of her daughter Ayden running to claim her bedroom; turning cart-wheels inside the empty living room; and hosting sleepovers for the first time.
This home, she says, is her legacy — "something I can give to my daughter.''
The Lacantientas are what their real estate broker, Bryan Kyle, calls "boomerang buyers.''
In 2002 the couple bought their first home for $211,000. In three years it almost doubled in value.
Ralph had begun selling real estate. When business began to slide he doubled down, borrowing against their house to buy more properties. Soon, the Lacantientas owed $352,000 on a house whose value had sunk to $170,000.
They were able to rent another house. Ralph started selling used cars, and eventually opened his own dealership. This year they bought another house in the same community for $356,000.
Despite having lived through the crash, "I'm not scared of owning,'' Ralph says, as the family puppy, Enzo, runs around the two-story living room. "The value could go down, but we've learned our lesson. We always want to owe less than the house is worth.''
For Kraus, World War I was a kind of media event, in which hypocritical journalists whipped up xenophobia in the unthinking crowd and drove the killing on.
ENLARGE
A scene from a 2014 stage production in Austria of ‘The Last Days of Mankind.’PHOTO: GEORG SOULEK
The epic play “The Last Days of Mankind,” now available in a comprehensive new translation by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms, is widely regarded as the masterpiece of Karl Kraus (1874-1936), a writer who is still relatively little known outside his native Austria. Kraus was a loner, allergic to any kind of community, and his collaborative projects seldom lasted very long. His journalistic attacks on a variety of targets elicited numerous lawsuits and led on one occasion to his being physically assaulted in the street. Thanks to family wealth, he was able in 1899 to found his own magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch), for which he recruited contributors such as Oskar Kokoschka, Heinrich Mann,Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind. Even this level of collaboration was too much for him, however, and from 1911 Die Fackel with rare exceptions published only his own work.
Kraus’s specialty was satire and polemic. Fearless and feared, owing allegiance to no political party or tendency, he was above all else a moralist. He directed his invective against pretentious newspapers, lazy journalists, corrupt politicians and intolerant nationalists. His targets included Zionism, the creation of Theodor Herzl (Kraus publicly renounced his Judaism at the turn of the century); psychoanalysis, newly invented by Sigmund Freud; and sexual hypocrisy and repressiveness, demonstrated in the crusade of his erstwhile mentor, the German magazine editor Maximilian Harden, against the homosexual entourage of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Kraus became famous not only through Die Fackel, which he continued to publish into the 1920s and early 1930s and which had a circulation of 40,000 at the height of its fame, but also through hundreds of public readings and dramatic one-man shows, which attracted audiences of thousands. He faced his greatest challenge when Austria declared war on Serbia following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb, leading to the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.
THE LAST DAYS OF MANKIND
By Karl Kraus Yale, 645 pages, $40
While fellow writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal hurried to place their talents in the services of the Austro-Hungarian cause, Kraus fell into silence for a number of months before starting to publish critical articles on the representation of the war in the press, provoking intervention by the official censors on numerous occasions. What angered him in particular was the heroic language used by reporters, columnists and propagandists, a language that concealed the brutal realities of the war on the eastern and Italian fronts and, increasingly, as the Allied blockade of the Central Powers took effect, on the home front as well.
While Die Fackel was getting into repeated difficulties, Kraus began to draft “The Last Days of Mankind,” writing most of it before the war finished. As he wrote, his growing disillusion with the war pushed him to a more left-wing political stance, so that the anti-Semitic tone of the earlier parts gradually vanished and his antiwar, anti-Habsburg rhetoric grew shriller. Unable to publish the play during the war itself, he brought it out in four special issues of Die Fackel in 1918-19, then published an expanded version in 1922. By this time it had grown to monstrous *proportions, extending, in Messrs. Bridgham and Timms’s translation, to over 600 pages and losing any structure or coherence it might originally have possessed.
Kraus’s prime target in the play was the Austrian press. The war, indeed, was for him a kind of media event, in which irresponsible and hypocritical journalists whipped up mindless patriotism and xenophobia in the unthinking crowd and drove the war on in a red haze of unrealism. Early on in the play, a mob storms and trashes a hairdressing salon because the owner’s name is Serbian. The crowd is egged on by the historian Heinrich Friedjung, a real figure who in a famous court case a few years before had been shown to have used forged documents in accusing prominent Austrian politicians of being in the pay of the Serbian government. “Unless I’m very much mistaken,” Kraus has him telling the crowd, “documents relating to the Slovensky Jug plot for a Greater Serbia will be found in this hairdresser’s—the plot I started to uncover back in 1908.” The whole passage relentlessly pillories the unscrupulous use of conspiracy theories by rabid Austrian nationalists to further their own ends. Kraus was equally biting in his contempt for the impersonal language in which death, destruction and human misery were coldly described in official documents—“human raw material,” “holding on to the bitter end,” “doing one’s bit” and so on. He ridiculed the sermons with which priests justified the war and pilloried the moral irresponsibility of officers who talked of war as if it was a kind of hunting party. “Universal conscription has turned mankind into a passive noun,” one of the play’s characters notes. Austrians had been reduced to “cogs in the machine.”
As the war went on, Austria-Hungary came more and more under the thumb of its German ally. Kraus’s play portrayed the Germans as rabid militarists and annexationists: “The moment has now arrived,” he has a German liberal politician saying, “when the result of the war can only be a peace based on the expansion of our borders to the east, to the west, and overseas, with Germany as a world power setting the agenda.” While the aged Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph (“that formidable nonentity”) talks, sings and signs documents in his sleep (“Can’t stand the Prussians—they tricked me into it!” he mutters somnambulistically), Kaiser Wilhelm II rants and raves in a militaristic frenzy, declaring that the collapse of the Russian armies in 1917 is due to divine intervention. In a withering parody of the flattery that constantly surrounded the Kaiser, Kraus has his generals declare: “When we make our breakthrough, with the help of God and poison gas, we owe it exclusively to Your Majesty’s brilliant strategic planning.”
In recurrent dialogues between two anonymous characters, the “Optimist” and the “Grumbler” (a partial version of Kraus himself), the pretensions of the craven press and the falsehoods of the government are mercilessly punctured. The war, says the Grumbler, is “a daily lie out of which printers ink flowed like blood, the one feeding the other, pouring out like a delta into the great ocean of insanity.” Horrifically injured soldiers lurk in the background while journalists prattle on about deadlines and column inches. Much of the effect of “The Last Days of Mankind” comes from juxtapositions of propaganda with realities such as these.
Kraus’s play was perhaps the first docudrama, in which genuine documents were combined with a fictional representation of real events. Could it ever work onstage? The play has nothing resembling a plot or even a progression of events; perhaps it is best regarded as a verbal and dramatic mine from which chunks can be quarried and rearranged to deliver something more coherent, more intelligible and more polished.
Kraus himself thought the play “would take some ten evenings” to perform but recognized that it did not really lend itself to the theater, remarking that it was “intended for a theater on Mars.” The modern reader has to agree. Kraus himself thought “The Last Days of Mankind” unperformable because “theatregoers on planet earth would find it unendurable.” But in fact the main reasons were, and remain, practical. Quite apart from its inordinate length, the play has a vast number of scene changes that would be impossible to manage. In Act III, just to take one example, we move from Scene 24 to Scene 31 in fewer than three pages: beginning with a conversation between two followers of a conservative newspaper to “In front of the War Ministry” (a mere six lines) to a crowd of 50 draft dodgers on Vienna’s Ringstrasse (one line), back to “In front of the War Ministry” (six lines again), to inside the Ministry, then to “Innsbruck: a restaurant” (four lines), “Market square in Grodno, Belarus” (another crowd), and finally “a German front unit.” This would be impossible to manage in a live theatrical performance.
In contrast to these very brief scenes, the collage technique used by Kraus leads to the inclusion of some very long documents that would lull an audience to sleep if they were read out in the theater in full. Act V, Scene 54, for example, has the Grumbler reading a document that goes on for more than six pages. The speech by an Austrian general at a ceremonial banquet that constitutes the next scene is four pages long. And even if these scenes could be adapted, as they might be in the 21st century, for film or television, the 50-odd “apparitions” that conclude the play are completely impossible to stage in any medium, moving as they do from a mountain path with “thousands of carts” and “an enormous mass of humanity” to the dining car of the Balkan Express, a winter scene in the Carpathians, “a turnip field in Bohemia,” a bomb falling on a school, and a procession of gas masks. Another scene has the instruction: “Twelve hundred horses emerge from the sea, come ashore, and set off at a trot,” all speaking in unison.
As these elaborate directions indicate, “The Last Days of Mankind” demands a cast of thousands. Most of the characters are unidentified in the dialogue, so that a theater audience would with rare exceptions find it impossible to guess who they were unless the management supplied surtitles as opera houses do, distracting the audience from the action. The characters in any case are not real characters at all. They are merely the mouthpieces for documents reprinted by Kraus: “The document takes human shape; reports come alive as characters and characters expire as editorials,” he wrote in his preface to the play: “the newspaper column has acquired a mouth that spouts monologues; platitudes stand on two legs, unlike men left with only one.”
Kraus himself cut the play by three-quarters to make a performance version, put on the stage in 1928. He rearranged some scenes to give it more chronological coherence and deleted many others, including all the discussions between the Optimist and the Grumbler. An English version of this edition appeared in 1974. In 1982 there was a production by the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, repeated the next year at the Edinburgh Festival, of scenes specially translated by Robert MacDonald, later broadcast by the BBC. It had a huge effect on the historian Niall Ferguson, who saw it as a college student and rated it “certainly the most powerful theatrical experience I have ever had. . . . As I left the theater that night,” he later wrote, “I resolved that I must teach myself German, read Kraus’s play in the original and try to write something about him and about the war.” A college friend of mine who attended the same production told me: “Really long, chaotic, loud, hugely energetic. Didn’t really have much of a clue what was going on but just carried away by the momentum of it all. . . . Immense sense of relief when it was over.”
Kraus’s original German presents many challenges to the translator, especially perhaps its incorporation of Viennese slang and its rendering in prose of a variety of accents. Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms opt to put these colloquialisms into present-day American, as if the action was set not in Vienna but in the Bronx. “Look,” says one character in the prologue, “d’ya recognize those broads there?” In a rival translation currently in progress, by Michael Russell, available online, this is simply rendered as “Look! Do you recognize those two over there?” In Act II Scene I an untranslatable derogatory term for Italians, “Katzelmacher,” is translated by Mr. Russell as “Greaseballs” and by Messrs. Bridgham and Timms as “dagoes,” which is just as serviceable, except that the latter translation has “them dagoes” and omits the final phrase, “Also natürlich!,” which appears in Mr. Russell’s version as “That’s their nature, isn’t it?” One can’t help feeling that the attempt to use modern English colloquialisms to express the Austrian everyday language of a century ago is misguided, and the plainer version is likely to last longer. And if the intention is to produce a text for performing, surely it’s better to leave matters such as pronunciation to the actors rather than prescribing the accents they should use.
These problems of translation stem from the play’s deep anchoring in the street life of Vienna and the multinational cacophony of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in 1917 and grew up in Vienna in the 1920s, wrote in one of his last essays: “For Viennese of my age, ‘The Last Days,’ despite all allusions to forgotten figures and forgotten events of the day, is comprehensible, even taken for granted. But this is hardly the case for others, particularly for non-Austrian readers.” This is certainly true. Even Hobsbawm’s phenomenal memory must have struggled at times to identify figures from a time when he was under 2 years of age. Messrs. Bridgham and Timms provide a combined glossary and index, but uninitiated readers will find themselves constantly turning to the back of the book to try and figure out who’s who, and the notes could often have done with some amplification. A full, page-by-page list of Kraus’s sources would have been even more helpful.
Among students and practitioners of modern Austrian and German history and literature, “The Last Days of Mankind” has for many years enjoyed cult status, helped immeasurably by Edward Timms’s lifelong advocacy and in particular by his magnificent two-volume study “Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist.” Kraus and his work have influenced a wide variety of writers, from Walter Benjaminand Elias Canetti to Thomas Szasz and Jonathan Franzen. On hearing of his death in 1936, Bertolt Brecht’s verdict was: “As the epoch raised its hand to end its own life, he was the hand.” One of Kraus’s own last works was a bitter satire on Nazism, whose opening words, famously, were: “Nothing occurs to me about Hitler.”
But satire is perhaps the least durable of all art forms. It can only transcend its own time and reach a wider audience if it frees itself from the shackles of contemporaneity and addresses universal topics in universal terms, like Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” or, in a more savage mode, his “Modest Proposal.” Even George Orwell’s two masterpieces, “Animal Farm” and “1984,” still assigned reading in English schools, now require elaborate explanations of the history of the Russian Revolution and the nature of Stalinist and Nazi rule before children can understand them.
Judged in the court of literary immortality, “The Last Days of Mankind” ultimately fails these tests of universality and durability. As an indictment of the misery and futility of war and the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of its advocates, there is more power in the 28 lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et decorum est” than in the hundreds of pages of Kraus’s magnum opus. For all its sophistication and its flashes of bitter humor, “The Last Days of Mankind” remains in the end a provincial work, unlikely ever to enter the central canon of world literature.
—Mr. Evans, a former Regius professor of history at Cambridge, is the author of “The Third Reich in History and Memory.”
11/25/2015 03:08 PM EST ROME -- Italy will respond to growing terror threats in Europe in an appropriately Italian way -- by increasing funding to museums, theaters and concerts.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi laid out a plan Tuesday, which includes 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in new spending, to ramp up security in the wake of the Paris attacks. Of the allotted funds, $1 billion would be spent on security and defense purposes and the other $1 billion would go to cultural programs.
"What happened in Paris signaled a step-up in the cultural battle that we are living," Renzi said at a speech at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. "They imagine terror, we answer with culture. They destroy statues, we love art. They destroy books, we are the country of libraries."
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said in his security budget announcement that $530 million would be earmarked for the Italian armed forces.
In an attempt to ease relations between marginalized populations and Italians, the government will invest more in fringe and immigrant neighborhoods in large cities, the Financial Times reports.
Additionally, every 18-year-old in the country will be given $530 to spend on cultural activities such as concerts and theater productions.
Renzi's plans come amid fears of terror attacks during Pope Francis' Jubilee Year of Mercy, which is due to begin Dec 8., when millions of pilgrims are expected to descend on Rome. The self-styled Islamic State signaled to the Vatican in March that it intends to attack.
The prime minister's proposed budget would be largely funded by a delayed corporate income tax bill, which was expected to revitalize the country's slowing economy. There is expected to be a major pushback from Italian businesses and it is unclear whether the plan will pass in parliament, according to the FT.
The recent controversies on American campuses such as Yale and the University of Missouri have been sad to watch. They reveal a country of chasms, in which ethnic and racial groups see, experience and speak of the world so differently. I find it difficult to comment confidently on what triggered the outrage among so many minority students. Every new video of the mistreatment of African Americans should make all of us pause and recognize that there is still a deep, unresolved problem in the United States. My concern is that the remedy for it, at least on college campuses, is more segregation.
Over the past four decades, whenever universities have faced complaints about exclusion or racism — often real — the solution proposed and usually accepted has been to create more programs, associations and courses for minority students. This is understandable, because these groups have been historically ignored, slighted and demeaned. But is this solution working, or is it making things worse?
Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and a contributing editor for The Atlantic. View Archive
A 2004 empirical study led by Harvard University psychologist James Sidanius (who is African American) concluded that “there was no indication that the experiences in these ethnically oriented . . . organizations increased the students’ sense of common identity with members of other groups or their sense of belonging to the wider university community. Furthermore . . . the evidence suggested that membership in ethnically oriented student organizations actually increased the perception that ethnic groups are locked into zero-sum competition with one another and the feeling of victimization by virtue of one’s ethnicity.”
The academic programs that have been created and expanded also reinforce feelings of separateness. Again, there was a need for greater attention to many of the areas of study, and some extraordinary scholarship has been produced in these fields. But the cumulative effect is one that distinguished scholar Tony Judt wrote about in an essay for the New York Review of Books in 2010. “Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: ‘gender studies,’ ‘women’s studies,’ ‘Asian-Pacific-American studies,’ and dozens of others,” he noted. “The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves — thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.”
There is increasingly a perception on campuses that there are groups of students who have administrators, social clubs and courses specifically for them. This does not help minorities. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1954, in words that were meant to change the United States, “separate . . . [is] inherently unequal.”
It is worth keeping in mind that segregation on campuses is simply a reflection of the growing segregation of American society. Increasingly, people live among others of the same socioeconomic class, political orientation and race. In fact, because of the generous financial aid policies of many elite schools, Ivy League campuses are far more diverse than most American communities. Kids arriving there will encounter, often for the first time, substantial numbers of people who are very different from them in terms of income, class, ethnicity and race. Negotiating these encounters is complicated, and it shouldn’t surprise us that they produce tension.
The solution to this tension is surely open discussion in which everyone can participate. And yet, the prevailing ethos seems to be that if one feels hurt or offended that is the end of the discussion. You cannot understand another’s experience or arguments. But a liberal education is premised on precisely the opposite idea, one that requires not safe spaces to retreat to but a common space to engage in. And democracy requires that common ground, one that anyone can access. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois . “Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius . . . and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
Today in the United States, we all believe that we are victims and nobody understands our pain. If you want to see that view in its crudest form, though, don’t go to college campuses — just listen to the followers of Donald Trump. They are mostly angry whites who feel that they are being shafted by society. And don’t bother trying to bring up facts or argue with them — you just don’t get it.
A fascinating, uncomfortable and purifying wave is sweeping through America’s college campuses.
In the past several weeks, the campuses of the University of Missouri,Amherst College, Yale University and Ithaca College are just a few of the institutions that have been rocked by protests and sit-ins agitating for racial justice. Princeton University is the latest battle theater in this fight. Black students at Princeton staged a walkout demanding that the Ivy league university acknowledge the racist legacy of President Woodrow Wilson, for whom a residential college and the School of Public and International Affairsis named, and to remove his name from campus. In their petition, the students have also demanded courses about marginalized groups and cultural competency training for staff and faculty.
Predictably, many in the media, including several of my colleagues, have seized on the students’ focus on demanding Wilson’s name scrubbed from the halls as yet another example of activists going too far in their social justice fervor. The students at Princeton are just another crop of coddled college students, they say, incapable of navigating a world that doesn’t give a hoot about their feelings. In the case of Princeton, traditionalists plead for “understanding” of Wilson’s complicated persona, that he was a product of his time. Others, in their “Yes, he was racist, but” defenses of the 28th president, contend that his policies of segregation, wish to repeal blacks’ right to vote and embrace of the Ku Klux Klan are mere personal failures, and if black students want to be taken seriously as adults, they ought to learn to stomach his anti-black bigotry and segregationist policies.
But much like the out-sized focus on free-speech vs. safe spaces in the aftermath of the Yale and Mizzou protests, the furor over the audacity of students to demand the removal of Wilson’s name glosses over the fundamental root of the protests at schools around the country — and that is that students are fundamentally challenging symbols of anti-blackness on their campuses. The protests and demands are forcing universities to reckon with their roles in perpetuating racism, in no small part through the whitewashed reverence of historical leaders whose racist political legacies still haunt our societies today. This is a good thing.
Let’s be clear. Wilson was not just a personal racist, as in someone who had mean feelings against black people. As president, his white supremacist policies of segregation destroyed the lives of black professionals in the federal government. A powerful essay by Gordon J. Davis in the New York Times illustrates how Wilson’s directives purged blacks from federal government jobs, including Davis’s grandfather, who never recovered from the loss of income and became “a broken man” by the end of Wilson’s first term. As Corey Robin notes in Salon, “if there’s any erasing going on here, it’s in the daily practices of Princeton. In those campus tours, those campus addresses, the general celebration of the man. Why haven’t we heard criticism of how the past is being erased by Princeton’s celebration of Wilson?”
Wilson is credited for helping found the League of Nations, the precursor to today’s United Nations. But that Wilson’s name is on Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs is a cruel irony, given that his legacy in the League of Nations has also been whitewashed. Wilson took his bigotry and pandering to Southern Democrats to the global stage when he opposed the Racial Equality Proposal put forth by Japan in 1919, that stated that a basic tenet of the League of Nations should be to accord “equal and just treatment . . . making no distinction, in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.”
The fight against vestiges of white supremacy and racism on college campuses stretches far beyond America’s borders. This year, students in Cape Town, South Africa, began protesting to demand the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the unapologetic British colonizer who championed separation of whites from African natives from the University of Cape Town’s campus. The protests, which were organized under the hashtag #RhodesMustFall managed to succeed in getting the statue removed in April. The success of that protest has inspired students at Oxford University in the United Kingdom to demand the removal of a statue of Rhodes from campus. Rhodes, for whom the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford was founded (with money made from exploiting resources from South Africa) believed openly in white supremacy. He once said, “Africa is still lying ready for us, it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory . . . more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honorable race the world possesses.” As prime minister of the Cape Colony, one of the colonies that later joined to become South Africa, Rhodes pushed through the Glen Grey Act in 1894, forcing Africans into native reserves and into the migrant wage labor market; the act is seen as the foundation to South African apartheid. Like Wilson, Rhodes believed in keeping blacks and whites separate, saying, “At any rate, if the whites maintain their position as the supreme race, the day may come when we shall all be thankful that we have the natives in their proper place.”
Simply put, black students across the globe are forcing universities to go beyond simplistic notions of diversity as a panacea to address racial injustices, past and present. The protests against Woodrow Wilson and Cecil Rhodes are not about diversity. These protests are about dismantling white supremacy. These protests are about decolonization.
In a letter about Rhodes, the author Olive Schreiner wrote in 1897, “We fight Rhodes because he means so much of oppression, injustice, & moral degradation to South Africa; — but if he passed away tomorrow there still remains the terrible fact that something in our society has formed the matrix which has fed, nourished, built up such a man!” By revering and whitewashing the histories of Wilson and Rhodes, universities such as Princeton and Oxford are part of the societal matrix that feed, nourish and build up men such as these two, men whose policies have caused incalculable damage to generations of American blacks and Africans. Blacks in America and South Africa are still working to undo the damage leaders like Wilson and Rhodes inflicted. Racism is the “something” in our current society in the United States that is feeding, nourishing and building up men such as presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who riles up his base using anti-Muslim rhetoric, sanctions violence against black protesters and thinks nothing of tweeting false statistics about black-on-white crime. As Janelle Ross notes, the violence that broke out at Trump’s Alabama rally has shown America “the danger inherent in normalizing the utterly objectionable.”
Of course Wilson and Rhodes will never be erased from history, nor do they need to be. But in forcing their sins into the international limelight, universities, and society by extension, must reevaluate the lionizing of such men. Woodrow Wilson and Cecil Rhodes must fall. It’s been a long time coming.
THE LINGUO-DIPLOMATIC CORNER. Today: Why Substantive Discussions With Krymnashisty, Novorossisty, Russkii-Miristy, SyriAssadisty, etc.,Tend Towards Brevity and Unproductivity. Well-intentioned pedagogical resources (such as Английский язык для всех here) have yet to capture the “Realpolitik nature" of negotiations under the RF Standard VVP 3.0 Protocol, e.g.
I might have misunderstood you but…/ Врёшь! [you lie - JB]
