Poem for Luca

A poem for my grandson

Italia oltremare

One of the elements in the new pope’s CV has been noticed in the media but not, as far as I can see, much discussed; at least, not in the English language realm.  It is the fact that Pope Francis was born the son of immigrants from Italy who, as so many others did, made a success of themselves in their adopted country.

The Pope escapes

One of several occasions when a Pope has been forced to flee his palace rather than be roughed up or even murdered; this time in 1848, as retold by Augustus Hare, quoting Beste. Interesting to note that this escape for Pius IX was organised by a woman.

Britain and Europe

A map highlighting the (former) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland within Europe. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some political issues never get resolved, it seems, and those we consider urgent may be a lot older than we think.  Britain and Europe?  The author and journalist Stephen Graham has something to say; a surprisingly long time ago:

“England is a democracy, but what is the virtue of a democracy which languishes in ignorance? Of all countries Britain has now the broadest basis of franchise. We can vote, but what is the use of voting when you know nothing of the issues at stake, and when even the candidates are ignorant of affairs and try to win by making sentimental popular appeals to varying prejudices? England is low. It is a humiliating platitude. England stands far lower to-day than the level of her national sacrifices.

The civil service and army and police are carrying on the administration of Great Britain and Ireland, and foreign and imperial policy. Politicians and statesmen seem to be inferior in mind and training to the civil servants who keep the machine going. The gifts requisite for getting into power in England are not the same gifts which are needed for wise government. What the undistinguished have learned painfully at school our leaders somehow have missed. One could forgive the politician if he understood the elements of political economy. But the unforgiveable confronts us, and our new system of government has admitted to power people capable of abrogating penny post and abolishing penny-a-mile railway travel, and of raising telephone charges because the more the subscribers the more the expense. If they are capable of these elementary mistakes it is not surprising that they should have failed to ward off the great trade depression, and failed to help Europe to get together. The accessibility of markets in Europe does not interest politicians except in the most casual way.”

Stephen Graham.  Europe – whither bound?  Being Letters of Travel from the capitals of Europe in the Year 1921.  Ch 16 London.  Toronto, 1922

Courtesy of Project Gutenberg

Imagine a vain thing

No doubt reports that the Tea Party movement is splitting are premature, and it’s possible that here in Britain, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) will continue to grow if voters find they still don’t trust the Conservatives’ attitude to Europe.  So why is it that in advanced democracies, people still display a willingness to vote for these protest movements, at the expense of more established parties ostensibly working in their interests?

It often comes down to tax; or rather, the feeling that taxation revenue is excessive and is being misused.  John Kenneth Galbraith says somewhere that the middle classes resent having to pay for any public services other than defence and security.  Politicians who want to draw water from this particular well, like Congressman Ryan, lose no opportunity to demand that taxes be cut, however much risk that poses for the more vulnerable amongst us. Governing parties have to be pretty careless to let this happen.

Often, though, these protest movements spring up in response to fears about ‘others’, especially immigrant workers, penetrating the host society and endangering its most revered features.  Other times, it is simply about resisting change itself.  The threat of change – anywhere, anytime – is felt most keenly by those who have not been educated, formally or informally, to handle change and benefit from it.  They fear change because they cannot work out how and why it happens; or rather, happens to them.

Selfishness, prejudice and vulnerability: these seem to be the three well-springs.  But each represents something are only too human in any society.  Sometimes the only way to express it is by demanding to be hear and listened to, by voting for side-parties that know how to stoke all this anger and confusion, articulate the grievances and exploit the dynamic.

For a time, they flourish as Poujadism did in France in the 1950s and gain seats in the legislature. But they never last, so long as the basic sensible assumptions of democracy reassert themselves in the public’s mind and memory.  That way, democracy learns how to survive such insurgencies by noting what they want and then using that knowledge to derail them.

It’s already happening in the US and the UK.  The bad old parties will, ultimately, never lose; but they endure, and renew themselves in the process.  The others become footnotes.

Teachers’ status

One of  my Italian relatives has found this interesting apophthegm about the status of teachers and reposted it on Facebook.  Translated, it says: “In Japan, the only citizens not obliged to bow to the Emperor are teachers.  This is because they hold that without teachers there cannot be emperors.”

French fries in Paris, 1909

Français : Inondations de Paris, 31 janvier 1910. Rue Lacordaire. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I love dipping into that huge treasure chest, Project Gutenberg, and coming up with gemstones from the past: the arresting sentence, the paragraph or vignette illuminating the way things were beneath the radar of great events.  Here is an example: everyday life in Paris as registered by an observant American woman, a Bryn Mawr graduate in her twenties temporarily residing in the City of Light with husband and baby in 1909-1910.  Her enthusiastic but shrewd perceptions are absorbing:

Everybody knows that the cochers of Paris are no fools. They can drive a horse, but they can drive a bargain too and afterwards settle down on their high box and fling you shrewd observations about art or politics or what not. But there is more to it than that. When you have lived a while in the Latin quarter you know who are the expert judges of cooking. In the old days, the meal you could buy in a tiny dark rendez-vous des cochers was as tasty as anything you could enjoy on a Grand Boulevard at ten times the price. Minor details like a table-cloth and clean forks and knives with each new plate are not missed when the gigot is done to a turn and the sauce piquante is just right. The rendez-vous des cochers restaurant has one distinct advantage over the swell place on the Boulevards. If you are in a hurry to go to the Concert Rouge and have had no dinner, you can stop for a second at a cab driver’s restaurant while you buy a portion of frites. The luscious golden potatoes, sprinkled with salt, are wrapped in a paper, and you consume them as you walk up the Rue de Tournon. They don’t mind babies there. Scrappie was asleep in her carriage. Monsier le Patron came out and rolled the carriage ever so gently under the awning beside the glass screen by the restaurant door. He beamed at us benevolently, then stepped over to explain that he was a père de famille and that courants d’air inflame babies’ eyes.

From the Project Gutenberg eBook of Paris vistas (1919), by Helen Davenport Gibbons (1882-1960), ch viii p86

The picture shows Paris flooded in 1910.

Cold wind

The freshening cold winds of autumn in southern England always bring to mind some delightful lines of poetry I’ve collected over the years.  To introduce some here, I’d like to recall reading an interview by the actress Angie Dickinson, in which she spoke about her childhood in North Dakota where, as I think she put it, there is “nothing between you and the Arctic except barbed wire.”

What a piercing image that is!  It brings up immediately those wonderful lines by R S Thomas in his poem A peasant:

…churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind…

It takes a few moments to realise that this arresting image achieves its effect without mentioning the word ‘cold’; it doesn’t have to.

Shakespeare, the Bible and the classics have many mentions of the wind, such as ‘hey,ho, the wind and the rain’ from Twelfth Night, but I also recall poets writing about the winds stripping the leaves from the trees: Housman does it superlatively in his poem On Wenlock Edge where he evokes the wnd blowing over the vanished Roman city:

Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

In his poem Autumn, Roy Campbell rejoices in it:

I love to see, when leaves depart,
The pure anatomy arrive…

and all those dead leaves fill the poet’s vision in Rilke’s melancholy Herbsttag, written in Paris in 1902:

… in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

Somehere in the classics is a line about how great it is to lie in bed while the wind blows outside, but I can’t trace it.

Lydia Calas

I don’t usually watch the signer who pops up on daytime TV news bulletins, but I’ll make an exception for the lady that Hurricane Sandy has blown into Mayor Bloomberg’s office.  Her looks and the passionata with which she transmits the mayor’s instructions to leave the city are both entrancing.  She is identified elsewhere on the net as Lydia Calas, from Puerto Rico.  Whoever she is, I look forward to seeing her again in this crisis.

Real concerns

How do we get there?

Voters’ discontents often seem to focus on the wrong objects.  This is a problem for democratic problem-solving, a process which, to be successful, has continually to come up with realistic solutions for real problems, not false ones. For this process to work, now more than ever, voters need to be properly informed about issues and options, by education, politicians and the media.  Evidence that this is happening in Anglo-Saxon countries is not encouraging.