Fall of Rome

The paperback edition
I read in college.

The Roman Empire became old and tired, corrupt and decadent.  Eventually, it could no longer defend its borders.  The Germanic barbarian tribes poured in, and by the late fifth century, the Western half of the Empire was dead, to be replaced by a new feudal economy led by Germanic peoples like the Franks .  The death of the Empire was a tragedy, but in the long run the infusion of vigorous Germanic blood created a new, more vigorous Europe.

This was the version of history I picked up in school, and is essentially the story told by Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  It wasn't until college -- where, in one of my many academic incarnations, I was a medieval history student -- that I ran into what was (and is) known as "the Pirenne thesis."  That was long ago, and I had more or less forgotten Pirenne and his historical studies until a couple of months ago.  Out of curiosity and nostalgia, I ordered from a book club a freshly formatted and nicely bound version of Henri Pirenne's seminal work, Mohammed and Charlemagne.

The gist of Pirenne's thesis, based on his study of all the social and economic evidence available to him at the time, was that the Germanic tribes entering the late Empire -- while causing a certain amount of local havoc, mayhem, and destruction -- actually had little effect on the on-going Roman economy.  The Empire, east and west, was a Mediterranean civilization, and its economy was based on Mediterranean shipping back and forth among Italy, North Africa, Greece, Egypt, and the Levant.  The barbarian invasions did not disrupt this shipping, Pirenne believed, and the Germanic tribes eventually, at different times in different areas, settled down and became assimilated into the Empire's social life and economy.

In 600 the physiognomy of the world was not different in quality from that which it had revealed in 400.

It wasn't until Islam unexpectedly sprang out of the Arabian peninsula, spreading its armies across North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, seizing control of the seas, that the Mediterranean unity was broken, and that the western Empire was severed from the eastern half controlled from Constantinople.  No longer having access to the Mediterranean, the Western Empire's trade ceased, the West's economy was devastated and each small region was forced to become self-sufficient -- a process lasting from about A.D. 650-750, ultimately leading to the far more primitive feudal economy. 

Mohammed and Charlemagne was published posthumously in 1937, but its basic ideas were developed by Pirenne while, as a Belgian, he was held captive by the Germans during the first world war.  By the time I first learned of the Pirenne thesis, it had been highly controversial for several decades, with national prides at stake.  Emerging German nationalism had taken comfort in the concept of a vigorous Germanic wind blowing away -- in an act of "creative destruction," if you will -- the worn-out remnants of the ancient civilization.  The concept of Germans (and other ethnic barbarians) being co-opted for two hundred years by the Roman world they had conquered, until finally the old world was blown away by a vigorous Muslim wind blowing out of Arabia, was considerably less congenial.

In her preface to my recently-purchased volume, Oxford historian Averil Cameron assures us that issues raised by Pirenne are as controversial today as they were before I first learned of them.  Many of the data relied on by Pirenne have been questioned or their importance has been superseded by newly discovered data.  I gather that there is now a tendency to conclude that the "true" version of late Roman history is an admixture of Gibbon's original description and Pirenne's attack on that position.

Dr. Cameron reminds us that history is always subjective.  Historians examine the limited evidence available, and from that evidence draw sweeping generalizations.  She reminds us that

Pirenne's questions about West versus East, antiquity versus the Middle Ages, the origins and definition of Europe, and the role of economic factors in history are issues which historians have been addressing for centuries and which are still among the great issues of today.

Why Roman civilization declined and fell, and why it was succeeded by the feudal structures of the early Middle Ages, fascinated me as a student, just as it has fascinated centuries of historians and generations of ordinary people.  We'll never have a complete answer, but as historians acquire an ever-increasing amount of data -- economic and archeological, not just literary -- their conclusions gradually inspire more confidence. 

Synthesizers like Henri Pirenne add excitement to the study of history, and prompt ever new questioning. 

Now, I really need to read the book I hold in my hand -- Pirenne's actual text, not just his concluding chapters and Dr. Cameron's preface!

Grasshopper Jungle

When I write a book review on this blog, I also cut and paste it onto the Goodreads web site.  For books that I find interesting, but not so interesting as to write a blog review, I often write a short blurb directly to Goodreads, but ignore it here on my blog.

Today, I began writing such a short blurb for Grasshopper Jungle, by Andrew Smith -- a book I read because of a very favorable review in Sunday's New York Times.  The blurb kept expanding, as I thought of aspects of the book that I liked, to the point that I've decided to reverse my usual modus operandi, and copy and paste it from Goodreads to here.

I'm not really sure yet that the book -- or the review -- is fully blog-worthy, but what the heck.

Austin Szerba is a 16-year-old, small town, Iowa boy. Through a complex series of events, he triggers the creation of a genetically designed race of six-foot tall praying mantises, with exo-skeletons as strong as those of a Naval vessel, bugs who live only to eat and to mate, both of which they do ravenously. While he observes over a period of time virtually all his neighbors being slurped up alive, Austin finds himself worrying primarily about the fact that he's deeply in love, simultaneously, with both his girlfriend Shann and his gay best friend Robby. World cataclysm can't change the fact that he's sixteen and slave to his hormones.

This summary of the plot doesn't sound promising. But a NY Times book review compared the book favorably to the best of Kurt Vonnegut. For the most part, I agree.

While dealing with teenage love and the war against the "Unstoppable Soldiers," as the kids call the mutants, Austin speaks learnedly of historiography, causation, free will versus determinism, the history of Poland and of his own Polish ancestry, the life of St. Kazimierz, the cave drawings at Lescaux, rock music, Iowa sociology, Xanax, Lutheranism, and corporate greed. He also talks a lot about the science of the giant bugs, but you shouldn't take that seriously. He talks even more about his own sexual fantasies, but they are the sort that probably would be unexceptional for a very bright -- but sexually very confused -- Iowa boy.

We learn in the epilogue that Austin is writing his book, based on his exhaustive teenage diaries, at the age of 21 from the safety of an underground bunker, where he lives with Shann and Robby, Shann's parents, Robby's mother and her boyfriend, and Austin's own four-year-old son. So far as he can determine, the other 7 billion human beings have all become dinner for bugs. The Unstoppable Soldiers still roam the earth, seeking out whomever they can devour.

Austin wonders if humans had ever really learned anything essential, from generation to generation. How do we differ from our cave man ancestors? And how do we and those cave men differ from the Unstoppable Soldiers, obsessed only with eating and sex, other than the fact that we occasionally draw pictures on the walls of our caves in an attempt to make sense of it all? This book is Austin's attempt at cave drawing.

The book's subject is grim, but the treatment is humorous.

When he came out of the bathrooom, Grant Wallace [now transformed into an Unstoppable Soldier] ate his two younger brothers, his mother, and the family's Yorkshire terrier, which was named Butterfly.

That gives you a sense of the tone. Book is recommended for young adults, 14 and older. Most teenagers, and many adults, will love it. But I suspect that many parents of teenagers may think twice before suggesting it to their kids.

Happy William Henry Harrison Day

Happy Presidents Day.

'Twas not always thus.  Back when I was in school, we celebrated the birthdays of only two presidents:  Washington (February 22) and Lincoln (February 12).  Washington's Birthday was a national holiday.  Lincoln's Birthday was a holiday, but not (as I recall) the kind of holiday that permitted workers to stay home from work and (more to the point) students to stay home from school.

Both holidays called for the usual use of colored construction paper and crayons.  Washington's Birthday involved designing axes used for chopping down cherry trees ("I cannot tell a lie"), and (I suppose) dollar coins (for throwing across the Potomac).  Lincoln's Birthday involved log cabins (in which he was born).  We didn't draw black slaves -- whether as owned (Washington) or freed (Lincoln).

So yes, we learned a prettified and mythological rendition of the lives of both presidents.  And that's fine with me.  We were kids.  Kids need uplifting stories.  The stories we learned about Washington and Lincoln were myths; as with all myths, they expressed deeper truths through fictional or fictionalized events. 

Whether Washington really ever chopped down a cherry tree, and owned up to it with his father, wasn't important.  Learning to acknowledge one's mistakes and faults was -- as was learning to tell the truth -- without trying to absolve oneself by seeking counseling.  Whether Lincoln was really raised in a rustic cabin, and loved books so much that he damaged a borrowed book by wedging it between two of the logs may or may not have been true.  What was clearly true was the fact that many great men in our history were born in humble settings and worked hard, both physically and mentally, from earliest childhood in order to succeed.

Washington and Lincoln were -- maybe for today's children, still are -- our Ulysses, our Aeneas, our King Henry V.

Then, in 1968, Congress decreed that Washington's Birthday would thenceforth occur on the third Monday of February.  The bill originally changed the name of the holiday to Presidents' Day, but that change was not ultimately approved.  Nevertheless, the new statute cut the direct relationship between Washington's date of birth and the federal holiday celebrating it, and various states enacted laws that called the new holiday by various names -- most frequently as "Presidents' Day", with the apostrophe either before or after the "s," or eliminated entirely. 

In Washington, ironically, a state statute ignores the president of whom we're the namesake, declaring the holiday to be "President's Day."

Presidents Day (regardless of apostrophic placement) suggests a civil adoration of all U.S. Presidents, an exaltation of the executive office, rather than a celebration of any specific president -- the sort of holiday that I doubt would have left either Washington or Lincoln feeling comfortable.  So today, I suppose, we must honor not only Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln -- but also Buchanan, Arthur, Harding, Nixon, and Bush (père et fils). 

Actually, of course, we celebrate primarily the American retail industry, whose Presidents Day Sales dominate our newspapers to the exclusion of any individual president.

On the University of Washington campus, one finds a statue of the eponymous George Washington.  For generations, each Washington's Birthday someone -- during the dark of night -- would slosh the statue with green paint.  "Keep Washington Green," was the pun intended.

I walked by the statue this morning.  It stood oxidized bronze and decidedly un-green in the falling rain.  No one had bothered making a connection between the statue and the holiday. No one at all was around.  All the students had probably gone off skiing for the day.  I doubt if George Washington ever wore a pair of skis.  With the sort of bindings they had back in those days, it's just as well that he didn't.

Happy Whatever Day!

Il Posto

The dreams of our childhood never come wholly true.  Unfortunately, for many, they come far less true than for others.

The film Il Posto (1961), which I saw last night as part of an Italian film series, is a wonderful introduction to the horrors of corporate employment -- a caricature of the life of a drone, Italian-style.

The hero, the teenager Domenico,¹ lives in a suburb of Milan -- the son of a lower middle class family, living in an Italy that's not yet prosperous, but that has progressed far beyond the destitution of the immediate post-war years.  Domenico has dropped out of school so that his family can afford to educate his younger brother.  It's time for him to find a job; his dreams of the pleasures and responsibilities of adulthood lead him forward with both hope and trepidation.  He seeks a job as an "administrative clerk."

Domenico, a shy and rather passive youth, dresses in his best coat and tie, and proudly takes the train into the city to interview for a job.  (The background scenes of Italian family and city life in 1961 are themselves worth the price of admission.)  He finds himself in a room full of similar slicked-up applicants for various jobs with the company -- all of whom seem equally bewildered.  They are marched through the city streets, like kids on their way to recess, to another building, where they take an absurdly easy "aptitude test," an "easy" test that many of them nevertheless fail.  The survivors are subjected to a group physical examination, reminscent of American army physicals back in the days of the draft.

The boy ends up assigned temporarily as assistant to the company's messenger, a man whose laziness and cynicism amaze him; then, when one of the older administrative clerks unexpectedly dies, he receives the job he had been aiming for.

We have seen his new fellow employees in action (or, rather, inaction) in scenes before this denouement.  A room full of men, sitting at desks facing their supervisor like boys in a classroom, whose behavior also resembles those same school boys.  They have their sinecures; they receive their paychecks.  No one seems to care that little work is being done.  The deceased employee has left behind in his desk "Chapter 19" of a novel he'd been writing on company time.  The employees stare into space.  They read.  They grumble at each other.  They compete for minor advantages.

Domenico precipitates the biggest disruption the room had seen in ages when he inadvertantly sits down in the empty desk vacated by the deceased novelist.  A middle-aged time-server in the back of the room explodes that he'd been waiting for that desk for decades -- and now some kid was going to get it?  The supervisor soothes everyone's feelings, and Domenico willingly moves to the desk at the back of the room.  The ruffled feathers begin gradually to collapse once more.

Domenico stares off into space.  He adjusts the lamp on his desk, the lamp whose bright beams the complainer had been complaining about -- no doubt for decades.  He wonders what he's supposed to do.

Domanico is only a teenager, and he already has a paying job that he can hold until the day he dies.  He's accomplished his lifetime goal.  There's no where else, no where higher, for him to go.  How does he spend the next fifty or sixty years?

Responses to my one-paragraph Facebook summary of this film suggest that Domenico's plight is common, not one suffered only by Italians of the 1960s.
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¹ Domenico is played by Sandro Panseri, an actor best known for this part, who also played roles in two later Italian movies in the early 1960s.  He plays the shy youth brilliantly, speaking far more eloquently with his eyes and his face than his character's reticence would permit from his voice.  The actor still lives in Milan, according to IMDb, currently managing a supermarket.

Let it snow

This morning, from my deck.

We woke up this morning to snow in Seattle. Only the second time this winter that snow has stuck on the ground, and here we are, nearing mid-February.  We got only about two inches, and even that's now melting in above-freezing temperatures.  But it's been beautiful while it lasted.¹ 

It's been three or four years since I've been skiing, but the memories of briskly cold air, fast skis, and breathtaking mountain scenery tempts me to the hills.  As do the televised images of Sochi that we've all been watching -- ski jumps and runs set among the dramatic Caucasus mountains.

From what we see on television, it's hard to imagine that there were ever any concerns about the amount of snow available for the Olympics.  But everyone was, in fact, worried about the temperatures and the snow conditions -- right up until the beginning of the Games.  And some concern remains even now.  The temperatures at the Sochi venues are hovering right at the freezing level, although more snow and colder temperatures are predicted for next week.

Lurking in the back of everyone's mind is the subject of global warming.  Californians have virtually no snowpack this year, and the snowpack is only fifty percent of normal here in the Northwest Corner.  One year's aberration wouldn't be significant, of course.  But an article this week in the New York Times reminds us that Europe has lost half of its Alpine ice since 1850, and that in the past 47 years, the Northern hemisphere has lost a million square miles of spring snow cover.  At the present rate of decrease, the Western United States will lose 25 to 100 percent of its snowpack by 2100.

Luckily -- so to speak -- I won't be around to witness that snow sports Armageddon, and my days of active skiing will be even more radically curtailed.   But I will still want the opportunity to walk through crunchy snow, watching my breath condense in front of my face and finding myself surrounded by snow clad peaks, for as long as possible.  And even after I'm no longer able to drive into the mountains, I'd like to know the snow's still there on the mountains, still giving pleasure to those who do reach them.

In any event, our little snowfall last night -- what I referred to on Facebook as the "Great Blizzard of 2014" -- at least assures me that we snow enthusiasts have a few good years left ahead before we find ourselves simmering all year long in an atmosphere of super-heated carbon dioxide.  As I remind global warming skeptics -- who seize on every snow storm as proof of their position -- "local weather doesn't necessarily equate with global climate." 

My little mantra works in reverse, as well -- even while the globe is warming, perhaps irreversibly, for a few more years we still will get to enjoy our occasional bits of snowy weather locally.  And now, I really should go build a snowman, before it's too late.
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¹  Oregon and southern Washington had much heavier snowfalls over the past day or so.