... the birth of the 'American Empire'

Sublime noble serenity

The noble Indian pictured here in full native regalia is the legendary Sitting Bull, a Sioux war chief during the years of resistance to United States government policies in the latter 1800s. This remarkable photograph was taken in 1885. He was to die violently five years later at age 59, apparently in a bungled arrest attempt, but more likely part of a deliberate elimination scheme by government authorities bent on suppressing every last remnant of native Indian resistance to a land grab of unprecedented proportions. It was the end of a remarkable life full of trials and tribulations, sadness, and tragedy.

A surly youth

Sitting Bull gained lasting notoriety in the infamous battle at Little Big Horn (1876), in which General George Custer (1839-76) [pictured right striking a strident pose as a cadet at 20] and his entire contingent of some 300 men were annihilated. The battle ("Custer's Last Stand") came to symbolize the conflict between new settlers and native Indian culture over lifestyles, land, and resources. The incident itself was nothing but a side-show compared to the willful slaughter of hundreds of starving, desperate native Indians who were being harassed by the likes of many a Custer. These self-styled agents of American “progress” marauding about in territory considered sacred by native Indians and solemnly promised to them in perpetuity in sham treaties, pillaged and killed innocents wherever they could be found, at will and with impunity.

Sitting Bull’s leadership skills and resilient dignity proved to be such a powerful obstacle to federal forces endeavouring to break Indian resistance that attempts to persuade them to sell their land were made in order to save the government the embarrassment of having to break treaties to get it. The attitude of the Indians was captured in a defiant gesture by Sitting Bull, picking up a pinch of soil and releasing it to the wind. “I want you to go and tell the Great Father that I do not want to sell any land to the government – not even as much as this.” With regal contempt, he taunted government bureaucrats who demanded the turnover of coveted land for “acting like men who have been drinking whiskey”.

Although they were definitively not beaten on the battlefield, the Indian people were eventually broken through terror, political pressure, and the relentless logic of demographics, and finally reduced to abject poverty and starvation. The Americans were too numerous to repel, their government too powerful to resist, their rulers entirely without pity or scruple. Indians were subjected to harsh government controls over every aspect of their individual sovereignty. They suffered the indignity of having to accept government handouts just to survive and then insulted with the thought of needing to be grateful for it.

For his defiance, Sitting Bull was upbraided to his face by a powerful republican senator from Illinois, John A. Logan (1826-86) who was also a Presidential hopeful at one point, and whose legacy is still recognized by several prominant statues sprinkled throughout the land. His arrogant diatribe delivered to a totally defeated yet still proud Sitting Bull was nothing short of a mean-spirited bigoted totalitarian rant:

A mean-spirited bigot

“You are not a great chief of this country. You have no following, no power, no control, and no right to any control. You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all that you have and are today is because of the government…. The government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.”

... and thus was ushered in the birth of the American Empire (quite literally, because it was a term used unblushingly in triumphalist literature of the period) which now girded the entire North American continent, its rulers ominously free to confer the blessings of civilization on untutored masses beyond its shores. [http://thewaywardtycoon.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-post_05.html]

In striking contrast, the sublime noble serenity of Sitting Bull so delicately captured in the photo [top] conveys a tale of a vanished way of life and a proud people unceremoniously and cruelly wiped out ... a shameful loss, but just the way things are when there is unbridled growth and mindless exploitation, rife with ignorance and careless insensitiviy to consequences.

Dignity in disgrace

Lewis Morley's 1963 portrait of Keeler

This iconic 1960s portrait of 21 year old English “party girl” prostitute Christine Keeler [b. 1942] relates to one of the 20th century's biggest political scandals known as the Profumo Affair [1963]. Her liaison with a prominent British government minister, 27 years her senior, entirely destroyed an illustrious and promising political career, and brought down a government, earning her fame and fortune and a jail sentence in the process.

The encounter was as brief as it was casual and the matter might have ended without public awareness, but for a bizarre set of circumstances. The affair advanced not by public disclosure but via a grapevine of rumour that got considerably bigger until the truth could be concealed no longer. It had all the alchemy of a TV soap opera and then some, quickly mushrooming into a media frenzy given a toxic brew of salacious high society shenanigans involving weekend house parties, call girls, and pimps in high places, with MI5, Russian spies and senior government ministers thrown in for good measure, against a backdrop of Cold War paranoia.

In the late 80s, Keeler's autobiography and the film, Scandal in which she collaborated revived interest in the events and raised doubts about the perjury charges made against her. Her latest book, "Christine Keeler, The Truth At Last (2001)" continues to raise questions about the case even after almost 40 years, which cannot be verified until 2046 when official papers will be released.





real shame

John Porfumo, who died in 2006 at 91, suffered scandal without reply. He made a vow of silence and never opened his mouth again to answer any criticism or misrepresentation, however unfair. Buffered from financial concerns by an inherited family fortune, he and his wife, the former film star Valerie Hobson (1917-98), disappeared from public life and London society, and cloistered themselves in their country estate. He quietly assumed a new identity and purpose through charitable community service work for the rest of his life. He did not cooperate with the inevitable books and movies about the scandal. A friend said of him, "No one judges Jack Profumo more harshly than he does himself. He says he has never known a day since it happened when he has not felt real shame."

Curiously, despite Profumo’s devastating fall from political grace and shameful loss of social respectability, his enduring legacy may well have been his vote  in 1940 (some 20 years before the scandal) against his own party... a vote which led to the downfall of Chamberlain (1869-1940) and the arrival of Churchill (1874-1965) as a wartime prime minister. Profumo's prospects some years later for the Prime Minister role were arguably within his grasp had events turned out differently.



Survival of the fittest?

"It is not clear yet that intelligence has any long-term survival value''.

... Stephen Hawking (b. 1942), theoretical physicist

Imperialism's legacy ... at least an important snippet

"genius is prolonged patience".

 

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

... Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), British Prime Minister at the height of British Vistorian imperialism. Indeed, the man was idolized by Queen Victoria herself. It was also the heyday of the mechanical industrial revolution, but well before electric power grids, instant communications, and the car with its all pervasive infrastructure and inherent oil dependence. Even then, the very seeds of present day political turmoil in Asia and the Middle East are arguably linked directly to the policies of his government almost 150 years ago. Curiously the British at the time, yielding to imperialist prerogatives, were stridently meddling in Afghanistan with a massive invading contingent of some 30,000 troops, stultifying and dismantling the fledgling country's established order, deepening the fractious tribal nature of the region that persists to this day.

A stage too big for the drama

Physics is like sex: it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama”.

... Richard Feynman, Physicist (1918-1988)

A rose is a rose is a rose

"Everybody gets so much
information all day long
that they lose their common sense"

... Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

In a flash ...

"For sale: baby shoes, never used."


... Hemingway's (1899-1961) answer when challenged to make a story out of just six words.

... an anti-intellectual take on age

"At fifty everyone has the face he deserves"

... George Orwell (1903-50) who died at 46

Life imitates art ...



interplanetary astronaut

The remarkable visionary 1968 science fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey" suggests that the entire history of humankind from the ape-like creatures foraging and fighting in the opening scenes to a climatic ill-fated odyssey to the planet Jupiter, has been the result of manipulation by extra-terrestial forces.



This picture of actor Keir Dullea in the role of an interplanetary astronaut, remains as a photo icon of 60-70's pop-culture lore. In a perilous bid for survival, he matches wits with “HAL”, a spaceship computer gone amuck, only to become ensnared in a surrealistic Einsteinian curved space-time realm where in a remarkable sequence, he ages dramatically before our eyes and then is transformed into a heavenly "star child" ... a fascinating rendering of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke's existential metaphor for being and nothingness set in the vastness of space. This particular movie scene is depicted here, synced with Barber’s Adagio for Strings affording a curiously haunting atmosphere of dignity and wonder:



... 40 years later

This scene has prompted controversy largely concerning confusion between the imaginary world depicted and the real; but in truth, the same drama is being played out today as portrayed by the gracefully aging Mr. Dullea himself, pictured some 40 years later, caught as all are, in the same curved space-time realm, albeit not traveling in a speeding Jupiter-bound spaceship, but essentially beset on a speeding planet in a holding pattern around the sun.

Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive director, apparently destroyed all the props for the movie because he didn't want them reused for lesser movies or sold as memorabilia.

... the pleasure principle

"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil' -- and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."


... Baudelaire [pictured in 1863 at 42]

... the ethics of ambiguity

"Naughty"

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting"

... Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86)


The great love of de Beauvoir’s life was arguably not Sartre but the American novelist Nelson Algren (1909-81). She would visit him in Chicago, finding his small rundown apartment in the Polish section to be “refreshing, after the heavy odour of the dollars in the big hotels and the elegant restaurants which I found hard to take.” His friend, the photographer Art Shay, took a snapshot of her just after she had emerged from a bath, seen nude from the rear, with her rather elegant upper half and sturdy buttocks and legs. He wrote: “She had taken her bath. It was while she fussed at the sink afterwards that I had the sudden impulse. She knew I took it because she heard the click of my trusty wartime Leica Model F. ‘Naughty man’ she said”.



Buried beside Sartre with his ring

de Beauvoir observed of Sartre that he was “a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed”; but of Algren, her “Division Street Dostoievski”, she readily admitted that, at age 39, she had entered into the first sexually fulfilling relationship of her life. Their affair though intermittently intense over some 17 years was fitful. Algren was moody, undisciplined and insecure, and his literary star blazed briefly and then fizzled, while de Beauvoir moved on to enormous success.

The relationship had a nasty aftermath when de Beauvoir wrote about it in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, to Algren’s fury. Until his death in 1981, he was recalling the affair bitterly, although upon de Beauvoir’s death in Paris five years later, she was buried beside Sartre wearing a silver ring that Algren had given her nearly forty years before.

"Nevermore!"

"Vainly I had sought to borrow … surcease of sorrow. Darkness there and nothing more.”

   ... Poe (1809-49),  "The Raven"

The fairy tale image of the friendly giant found dead in his orchard lying under a soft blanket of tree blossoms by bewildered, adoring children conveys a wondrous sense of beauty in profound sadness. Such poetry, if we can call it that, attempts through sheer force of will to burst the fetters of aching pain, or at least to alleviate it through absorption in a happy past. But not just in fairy tales; these attempts happen in music and art too ... however, alas, all in vain! The clear and present reality is agonizingly stark, for the heart does not lose something -- it loses everything.

Grief is not date-stamped. Lines written by John Donne (1572-1631) or Ben Jonson (1572-1637) or Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) cannot be surpassed in controlled agony, nor can Poe's anguished "nevermore" lament resignedly muttered repeatedly in his poem "The Raven". But where words leave off, music begins as in Chopin's (1818-49) magnificent Nocturne Op.48 No.1. It was described eloquently by a contemporary as a work whose “chief subject is a masterly expression of a great powerful grief ... told in an agitated recitando; celestial harps come to bring one ray of hope, which is powerless in its endeavor to calm the wounded soul, which sends forth to heaven a cry of deepest anguish. There are fevers and cold sweats in this music; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be performed in a robust manner, but rather rendered almost as if in a somnambulant daze, with a tremulous delicacy of intensity, as if it were a living thing whose nerves were being operated upon, where every touch might mean life or death”:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_vZtpjNKVE&feature=player_embedded]

Perhaps Beethoven’s (1770-1827) weighty "marcia funebre" of the Eroica Symphony plumbs the pathetic depths of grief as powerfully as any ... so much so that people reportly were unnerved, even spooked by it in early concert performances ... a work considered then in 1805 to be a dramatically "new", even "revolutionary" kind of music:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJj9EydBM5g&feature=player_embedded].
In this noble and expressive passage of fugal music we might well be present at the actual obsequy of a renowned and deeply loved person, with all that is good and great looking on as bodily remnants of insensate dust are respectfully and ceremoniously dispatched; and the motto might well be Tennyson's (1809-92) eloquent words:

"In the vast cathedral leave him,
God accept him, Christ receive him."

Oscar Wilde: "Do you mind if I smoke?" . . . . . . . Sarah Bernhardt: "I don't care if you burn".

''Alas, poor Yorick! ... Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?''







Pictured above in the gravedigger scene in the Shakespearean play "Hamlet" is the actor (err ... actress) Sarah Bernhardt at 56, one of the few women to play the role, and arguably the most famous actress of the 19th century. Her Hamlet tour opened in 1899 in Paris, and continued for two years showing in London, Scotland, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. The tour attracted considerable attention in the literary press at the time. An interesting piece of contemporary published criticism has “Madame Bernhardt’s assumption of masculinity ... so cleverly carried out that one loses sight of Hamlet in one’s admiration of the tour de force of the actress”.

The gloves are off though as the same critic blasts the very scene pictured above:

“This skull, too, which had “lain in the earth three and twenty years,” instead of being brown, discolored, was of a staring and indecent whiteness, as of bone boiled and bleached. It was not pleasant to see the grinning object handled so callously. Some of the dramatic effect, too, went by the board in this; for what’s the use of bringing in the ironic emblem of mortality if it is treated as lightly as a lap-dog? Indeed, I feel sure that Madame Bernhardt treats her lap-dog more considerately, for it would be strange if she made gestures with it as unconcernedly as she does with the skull. If my eyes did not deceive me, she tapped the grinning teeth with her finger; and she certainly is far from objecting as genuinely to the odor of mortality as Shakespeare makes Hamlet when he asks if Alexander “looked o’ the fashion i’ earth, and smell so? Pah!” Here the actor is expressly directed to “put down the skull”, but Madame Bernhardt could not only endure to hold it without “Pah!” she seemed to forget what it was she had in those eloquent hands of hers, as she emphasized feelingly the lines on imperious Caesar by gesticulating with a skull of a former acquaintance.”

Bernhardt began touring internationally in 1880, travelling in special luxury railway cars and appearing for big money in cities across Europe and the United States. Reportedly not the most beautiful or even the most talented, she knew how to cultivate her stardom. She worked like a pack horse, her French patriotism made her a national emblem; her wit, temper tantrums and willingness to try new things ensured that her worldwide super stardom would last from her first hit in 1869 through to her death in 1923.



Sarah was as famous a personality as she was an actress. She painted, sculpted and wrote; she engaged in violent feuds and equally violent love affairs. Oscar Wilde apparently held her in awe, “throwing lilies at her feet” when she arrived in England, but curiously in a sonnet represents her as a “vampire from hell”, the recipient of kisses from “the loveless lips” of dead men. She obligingly slept in a coffin for photographers, though she used a normal bed for more private slumber. Her romantic conquests were legend involving royalty [presumably Edward VII of England for example], and countless famous artists and actors of both sexes. She is famously quoted as saying "We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing, remain indifferent a great deal, forgive often, and never forget."

... a precise duty

"If we are honest—and as scientists honesty is our precise duty—we cannot help but admit that any religion is a pack of false statements, deprived of any real foundation. The very idea of God is a product of human imagination.... I do not recognize any religious myth, at least because they contradict one another...". Paul Dirac, antimatter progenerater, Solway Conference 1927 [pictured centre in 1947 with Oppenheimer, developer of the atomic bomb at his right].

... the delicate art of seduction

"It wasn't the way I looked at a man, it was the thought behind it.''

 Gloria Grahame (1923-81)

The greatest thing you ever learn ...

Nat King Cole recorded "Nature Boy" in 1948 which was an immediate major hit. Rumour had it that the lyrics were apparently written by a homeless man who tried without success to present them personally to Mr. Cole, who did receive them in due course and was impressed enough to want to meet the author, but alas, the man was never heard from again.

Turns out that Nat King Cole did indeed track the man down. His name was Eden Ahbez* [pictured right with his wife and son in the 40's], a songwriter and recording artist who was something of a personality in southern California, living a bucolic life, traveling in sandals and wearing shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He became the focus of a short-lived media frenzy when Cole's version of "Nature Boy" became a hit song. He continued to live on the street, or in his van or with friends. He died in 1995 at 87 of injuries sustained in a car accident.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bReW4LQ3Yc&feature=related

*Reference: http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.hoohoohouse.com/.a/6a00e55395d127883301156e8e2b07970c-800wi&imgrefurl=http://www.hoohoohouse.com/hoohoo_house/2009/03/eden-ahbez.html&h=542&w=432&sz=61&tbnid=yPjxNdp0ywApuM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=105&prev=/images%3Fq%3DEden%2BAhbez&hl=en&usg=__eLAJlN-syKANvKR_LU_V96ogCow=&ei=oG75Sp7DL83jlAeYy9G7DQ&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=6&ct=image&ved=0CBMQ9QEwBQ

Why aren't people more interested?

“It's biology. Those who remember are dying, and the young are brainwashed by black-and-white versions of history which, in reality, is multi-coloured, like life".
 
 ... observed recently by Poland's Jaruzelski (its last communist leader) pictured here in court at 86. He was commenting on why Poles don't seem to be interested in his take on the country's liberalization history and his role in it.

Some 25 years earlier, Jaruzelski imposed martial law, initiating a brutal 19-month crackdown on the pro-democracy Solidarity trade-union movement, an event which apparently disturbed Pope John Paul II (himself a pole) sufficiently enough to prompt a visit. The poignancy of the moment captured in the iconic photo below is palpable.

... the inner music that words make

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act".  

     ... Truman Capote (1924-84)

"The only way you can control people is to lie to them" - L.Ron Hubbard, Journal of Scientology

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard,
To give the poor dog a bone:
When she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.


This wonderful dog
Was Dame Hubbard's delight,
He could read, he could dance,
He could sing, he could write;
She gave him rich dainties
Whenever he fed,
And erected this monument
When he was dead.

Capucine's complaint

"Men look at me like I'm a suspicious-looking trunk, and they're customs agents".