Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline
How bad is it?
Pretty bad. Here is a sample of factlets from surveys and studies conducted in the past twenty years. Seventy percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Fifty percent believe that the earth has been visited by UFOs; in another poll, 70 percent believed that the U.S. government is covering up the presence of space aliens on earth. Forty percent did not know whom the U.S. fought in World War II. Forty percent could not locate Japan on a world map. Fifteen percent could not locate the United States on a world map. Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only 6 percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, 30 seconds attending a play or concert, 25 seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television.
Among high-school seniors surveyed in the late 1990s, 50 percent had not heard of the Cold War. Sixty percent could not say how the United States came into existence. Fifty percent did not know in which century the Civil War occurred. Sixty percent could name each of the Three Stooges but not the three branches of the U.S. government. Sixty percent could not comprehend an editorial in a national or local newspaper.
Intellectual distinction isn’t everything, it’s true. But things are amiss in other areas as well: sociability and trust, for example. “During the last third of the twentieth century,” according to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, “all forms of social capital fell off precipitously.” Tens of thousands of community groups – church social and charitable groups, union halls, civic clubs, bridge clubs, and yes, bowling leagues — disappeared; by Putnam’s estimate, one-third of our social infrastructure vanished in these years. Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45 percent; card parties declined 50 percent; Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30 percent. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77 percent to 37 percent. Over a five-year period in the 1990s, reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50 percent — admittedly an odd, but probably not an insignificant, indicator of declining social capital.
Still, even if American education is spotty and the social fabric is fraying, the fact that the U.S. is the world’s richest nation must surely make a great difference to our quality of life? Alas, no. As every literate person knows, economic inequality in the United States is off the charts – at third-world levels. The results were recently summarized by James Speth in Orion magazine. Of the 20 advanced democracies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. has the highest poverty rate, for both adults and children; the lowest rate of social mobility; the lowest score on UN indexes of child welfare and gender inequality; the highest ratio of health care expenditure to GDP, combined with the lowest life expectancy and the highest rates of infant mortality, mental illness, obesity, inability to afford health care, and personal bankruptcy resulting from medical expenses; the highest homicide rate; and the highest incarceration rate. Nor are the baneful effects of America’s social and economic order confined within our borders; among OECD nations the U.S. also has the highest carbon dioxide emissions, the highest per capita water consumption, the next-to-largest ecological footprint, the next-to-lowest score on the Yale Environmental Performance Index, the highest (by a colossal margin) per capita rate of military spending and arms sales, and the next-to-lowest rate of per capita spending on international development and humanitarian assistance.
The American West, 150 Years Ago: In the 1860s and 70s, photographer Timothy O’Sullivan created some of the best-known images in American History. After covering the U.S. Civil War, (many of his photos appear in this earlier series), O’Sullivan joined a number of expeditions organized by the federal government to help document the new frontiers in the American West. The teams were composed of soldiers, scientists, artists, and photographers, and tasked with discovering the best ways to take advantage of the region’s untapped natural resources. O’Sullivan brought an amazing eye and work ethic, composing photographs that evoked the vastness of the West. He also documented the Native American population as well as the pioneers who were already altering the landscape. Above all, O’Sullivan captured — for the first time on film — the natural beauty of the American West in a way that would later influence Ansel Adams and thousands more photographers to come. [34 photos]
Early Days in the Fight for Gay Rights
In late 1971, two years after the Stonewall riots in New York sparked the modern gay rights movement in America, and twelve months before LIFE ceased publishing as a weekly, the magazine featured an article on “gay liberation” that, seen a full 40 years later, feels sensational, measured and somehow endearingly, deeply square all at the same time.
Titled “Homosexuals in Revolt” and touted as “a major essay on America’s newest militants,” the piece elicited strong reactions from readers — many of whom, of course, were less than happy that their beloved LIFE would devote a dozen pages to people whom one letter writer characterized as “psychic cripples.” Other responses from peeved readers that were printed in the January 28, 1972, issue of LIFE included:
From Telford, Penn. — There was plenty to lament in your year-end issue, but the thing that struck me as most sad was the fact that LIFE felt compelled to devote 11 pages to “Homosexuals in Revolt.”
From Chicago — Essentially, it is absurd to accept as a mere “variant lifestyle” a practice which, if universal, would mean the end of the human race.
And, from Glendale, California, the standard (as well as reductionist and selective) biblical critique — “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22).
But there were also letters from readers praising LIFE’s “accuracy, fairness and dignified tone,” and one from a woman in New Jersey, Jule Lee, who was (in her words) “one of the oldest lesbian activists — both in age and years of participation in the movement.” She was outraged, she wrote, not only because the “Homosexuals in Revolt” article focused on what she called “LIFE-made ‘leaders’ [who] do not represent me and my age group,” but also because “out of ten picture pages … lesbians are mentioned on two. If this isn’t a new high in male chauvinism, I don’t know what is!”
For its part, LIFE introduced its 1971 feature in language that certainly feels more “Us vs. Them” than what we might see in a similar article today, but it’s also language that, four decades on, has about it a sense of an old world trying — really trying — to get a handle on the new:
It was the most shocking and, to most Americans, the most surprising liberation movement yet. Under the slogan “Out of the closets and into the streets,” thousands of homosexuals, male and female, were proudly confessing what they had long hidden. They were, moreover, moving into direct confrontation with conventional society. Their battle was far from won. But in 1971 militant homosexuals showed they they were prepared to fight it…They resent what they consider to be savage discrimination against them on the basis of a preference which they did not choose and which they cannot — and do not want to — change. And while mist will admit that “straight” society’s attitudes have caused them unhappiness, they respond to the charge that all homosexuals are guilt-ridden and miserable with the defiant rallying cry “Gay is Good!”
On Harvey Milk’s birthday (the pioneering San Francisco activist and politician was born on May 22, 1930), with photographs by Grey Villet, LIFE.com remembers the early days of a movement that, incredibly, in the second decade of the 21st century, still has cause to take to the streets.
Ugly Experiments
John Horgan catalogues some of science’s worst “missteps”:
In a paper published in 1972 in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, [Robert] Heath described an experiment on a 24-year-old male homosexual with a history of epilepsy, depression, and drug abuse. The man, whom Heath called patient B-19, was facing charges for marijuana possession when he agreed to serve as Heath’s subject. Heath drilled a hole in B-19′s skull and inserted an electrode in the septal region of his brain, which is associated with pleasure. B-19 could stimulate himself by pressing a button on a hand-help device. B-19, who according to Heath had never had heterosexual intercourse and found it “repugnant,” stimulated himself to the point of orgasm while watching a heterosexual porn film and, later, having intercourse with a 21-year-old female prostitute supplied by Heath. The patient “achieved successful penetration, which culminated in a highly satisfactory orgiastic response, despite the milieu and the encumbrances of the lead wires to the electrodes,” Heath wrote. One wonders what an institutional review board would say about Heath’s research today.
![Nazi legacy: The troubled descendants
Photo: “My Nazi father shot women with babies in their arms from this balcony, I am tormented by how much of him is in me’ … Monika, daughter of camp commander Amon Goeth
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The names of Himmler, Goering, Goeth and Hoess still have the power to evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany, but what is it like to live with the legacy of those surnames, and is it ever possible to move on from the terrible crimes committed by your ancestors?
When he was a child Rainer Hoess was shown a family heirloom.
He remembers his mother lifting the heavy lid of the fireproof chest with a large swastika on the lid, revealing bundles of family photos.
They featured his father as a young child playing with his brothers and sisters, in the garden of their grand family home.
The photos show a pool with a slide and a sand pit - an idyllic family setting - but one that was separated from the gas chambers of Auschwitz by just a few yards.
His grandfather Rudolf Hoess (not to be confused with Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess), was the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. His father grew up in a villa adjoining the camp, where he and his siblings played with toys built by prisoners.
It was where his grandmother told the children to wash the strawberries they picked because they smelled of ash from the concentration camp ovens.
Rainer is haunted by the garden gate he spotted in the photos that went straight into the camp - he calls it the “gate to hell”.
“It’s hard to explain the guilt,” says Rainer, “even though there is no reason I should bear any guilt, I still bear it. I carry the guilt with me in my mind.
“I’m ashamed too, of course, for what my family, my grandfather, did to thousands of other families.
“So you ask yourself, they had to die. I’m alive. Why am I alive? To carry this guilt, this burden, to try to come to terms with it.
“That must be the only reason I exist, to do what he should have done.”
His father never abandoned the ideology he grew up with and Rainer no longer has contact with him, as he attempts to cope with his family’s guilt and shame. […]
For Bettina Goering, the great-niece of Hitler’s designated successor Hermann Goering, she felt she needed to take drastic action to deal with her family’s legacy.
Both she and her brother chose to be sterilised.
“We both did it… so that there won’t be any more Goerings,” she explains.
“When my brother had it done, he said to me ‘I cut the line’.”
Disturbed by her likeness to her great-uncle, she left Germany more than 30 years ago and lives in a remote home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“It’s easier for me to deal with the past of my family from this great distance,” she explains.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4hzzz41Ca1r42dfro1_1280.png)
Nazi legacy: The troubled descendants
Photo: “My Nazi father shot women with babies in their arms from this balcony, I am tormented by how much of him is in me’ … Monika, daughter of camp commander Amon Goeth
-The names of Himmler, Goering, Goeth and Hoess still have the power to evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany, but what is it like to live with the legacy of those surnames, and is it ever possible to move on from the terrible crimes committed by your ancestors?
When he was a child Rainer Hoess was shown a family heirloom.
He remembers his mother lifting the heavy lid of the fireproof chest with a large swastika on the lid, revealing bundles of family photos.
They featured his father as a young child playing with his brothers and sisters, in the garden of their grand family home.
The photos show a pool with a slide and a sand pit - an idyllic family setting - but one that was separated from the gas chambers of Auschwitz by just a few yards.
His grandfather Rudolf Hoess (not to be confused with Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess), was the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. His father grew up in a villa adjoining the camp, where he and his siblings played with toys built by prisoners.
It was where his grandmother told the children to wash the strawberries they picked because they smelled of ash from the concentration camp ovens.
Rainer is haunted by the garden gate he spotted in the photos that went straight into the camp - he calls it the “gate to hell”.
“It’s hard to explain the guilt,” says Rainer, “even though there is no reason I should bear any guilt, I still bear it. I carry the guilt with me in my mind.
“I’m ashamed too, of course, for what my family, my grandfather, did to thousands of other families.
“So you ask yourself, they had to die. I’m alive. Why am I alive? To carry this guilt, this burden, to try to come to terms with it.
“That must be the only reason I exist, to do what he should have done.”
His father never abandoned the ideology he grew up with and Rainer no longer has contact with him, as he attempts to cope with his family’s guilt and shame. […]
For Bettina Goering, the great-niece of Hitler’s designated successor Hermann Goering, she felt she needed to take drastic action to deal with her family’s legacy.
Both she and her brother chose to be sterilised.
“We both did it… so that there won’t be any more Goerings,” she explains.
“When my brother had it done, he said to me ‘I cut the line’.”
Disturbed by her likeness to her great-uncle, she left Germany more than 30 years ago and lives in a remote home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“It’s easier for me to deal with the past of my family from this great distance,” she explains.
Who Goes Nazi?
Article originally published in the Harper’s Magazine of August 1941.
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times–in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation–the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
How the Chicken Conquered the World
The epic begins 10,000 years ago in an Asian jungle and ends today in kitchens all over the world.
The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on his way to confront the invading Persian forces, stopped to watch two cocks fighting and summoned his troops, saying: “Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.” The tale does not describe what happened to the loser, nor explain why the soldiers found this display of instinctive aggression inspirational rather than pointless and depressing. But history records that the Greeks, thus heartened, went on to repel the invaders, preserving the civilization that today honors those same creatures by breading, frying and dipping them into one’s choice of sauce. The descendants of those roosters might well think—if they were capable of such profound thought—that their ancient forebears have a lot to answer for.
Chicken is the ubiquitous food of our era, crossing multiple cultural boundaries with ease. With its mild taste and uniform texture, chicken presents an intriguingly blank canvas for the flavor palette of almost any cuisine. A generation of Britons is coming of age in the belief that chicken tikka masala is the national dish, and the same thing is happening in China with Kentucky Fried Chicken. Long after the time when most families had a few hens running around the yard that could be grabbed and turned into dinner, chicken remains a nostalgic, evocative dish for most Americans. When author Jack Canfield was looking for a metaphor for psychological comfort, he didn’t call it “Clam Chowder for the Soul.”
How did the chicken achieve such cultural and culinary dominance? It is all the more surprising in light of the belief by many archaeologists that chickens were first domesticated not for eating but for cockfighting. Until the advent of large-scale industrial production in the 20th century, the economic and nutritional contribution of chickens was modest. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond listed chickens among the “small domestic mammals and domestic birds and insects” that have been useful to humanity but unlike the horse or the ox did little—outside of legends—to change the course of history. Nonetheless, the chicken has inspired contributions to culture, art, cuisine, science and religion over the millennia. Chickens were, and still are, a sacred animal in some cultures. The prodigious and ever-watchful hen was a worldwide symbol of nurturance and fertility. Eggs hung in Egyptian temples to ensure a bountiful river flood. The lusty rooster (a.k.a. cock) was a universal signifier of virility—but also, in the ancient Persian faith of Zoroastrianism, a benign spirit that crowed at dawn to herald a turning point in the cosmic struggle between darkness and light. For the Romans, the chicken’s killer app was fortunetelling, especially during wartime. Chickens accompanied Roman armies, and their behavior was carefully observed before battle; a good appetite meant victory was likely. According to the writings of Cicero, when one contingent of birds refused to eat before a sea battle in 249 B.C., an angry consul threw them overboard. History records that he was defeated.
![Laurent Binet’s “HHhH” and Historical Fiction
The American Ambassador’s residence in Prague was built in the late nineteen-twenties by Otto Petschek. The Petscheks were among the wealthiest families in Czechoslovakia, and the mansion was lavish: long curving corridors, ornate bathrooms, a swimming pool in the basement. The Petscheks were also German-speaking Jews, wise enough to foresee the horrors that awaited them: they left Prague in 1938. When the Germans occupied the city in 1939, Nazi officers, with their unerring instinct for such things, seized the huge home, and made baleful use of it until the end of the war.
As with many buildings in Europe, the Petschek villa is scored and crossed, like the hide of a whale, with the history of its accidents. Last year, I spent some time in the house as a guest—the current Ambassador’s family and my family once shared an apartment building in Washington, D.C., and we became friends. In Prague, my friend showed me something I will not forget: he got me to lie on my back and peer at the underside of some piece of ambassadorial furniture. There, on the naked wood, was a faded Nazi stamp, with swastika and eagle; and next to it, quietly triumphant in its very functionality, was a bar-code strip, proclaiming the American government’s present ownership.
This is one of those “telling details” which are also loudly allegorical facts: it would be hard to imagine a novelist inventing anything better, and equally hard to imagine the historian who would not covet this perfect concrete emblem. To what extent is the useful vitality of that detail inseparable from its historical reality? If a novelist invented it, would it be somehow worth less—morally speaking, aesthetically speaking—than if a historian authenticated it? I take a special pleasure in recording its actuality, but I can imagine relishing it in a novel, feeling that the writer had created a new reality—while being aware, of course, that an invented reality is not identical with an actual reality. The French writer and academic Laurent Binet, to judge from his novel “HHhH” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Sam Taylor), is sure of his answer: invented facts—invented characters, for that matter—have no place in historical fiction, and weaken it both aesthetically and morally. “This is what I think,” he writes. “Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.” There are at least two difficulties with this purism. First, it would abolish most fiction; second, Binet has written a historical novel of sorts, a book that, if not quite full of invented details, certainly uses invention. That Binet’s solution seems obvious is testament to the brilliant ease and fluency of his book: his historical novel makes use of novelistic invention while apologizing for doing so. Binet has his cake and eats it, and gets to cry over the spilt crumbs, too.
“HHhH” is about the rise and fall of Reinhard Heydrich, the monster whom even Hitler called “the man with the iron heart.” As Binet puts it, Heydrich is not the protagonist of this book but its target; almost anywhere you look in the politics of the Third Reich, “and particularly among its most terrifying aspects, Heydrich is there—at the center of everything.” “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” people would say: “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.” (Thus “HHhH.”) […] In some respects, “HHhH” is a conventional historical novel about the Europe of the nineteen-thirties and early forties. As we witness Heydrich’s rise in the Nazi system, and the simultaneous preparation of Gabčík and Kubiš in England, we move through the familiar stations of the period—Hitler’s seizing of power, in 1933; the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, in March, 1939; Chamberlain’s appeasement; Wannsee; and so on. Paragraphs begin with cheap exclamations like “A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss,” or end with duff sentences like “It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution. Heydrich will be its principal architect.” But Binet’s novel has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction. He has threaded his novel with a contemporary story, which is the drama of the book’s own making.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ad247EIN1r42dfro1_r2_1280.jpg)
Laurent Binet’s “HHhH” and Historical Fiction
The American Ambassador’s residence in Prague was built in the late nineteen-twenties by Otto Petschek. The Petscheks were among the wealthiest families in Czechoslovakia, and the mansion was lavish: long curving corridors, ornate bathrooms, a swimming pool in the basement. The Petscheks were also German-speaking Jews, wise enough to foresee the horrors that awaited them: they left Prague in 1938. When the Germans occupied the city in 1939, Nazi officers, with their unerring instinct for such things, seized the huge home, and made baleful use of it until the end of the war.
As with many buildings in Europe, the Petschek villa is scored and crossed, like the hide of a whale, with the history of its accidents. Last year, I spent some time in the house as a guest—the current Ambassador’s family and my family once shared an apartment building in Washington, D.C., and we became friends. In Prague, my friend showed me something I will not forget: he got me to lie on my back and peer at the underside of some piece of ambassadorial furniture. There, on the naked wood, was a faded Nazi stamp, with swastika and eagle; and next to it, quietly triumphant in its very functionality, was a bar-code strip, proclaiming the American government’s present ownership.
This is one of those “telling details” which are also loudly allegorical facts: it would be hard to imagine a novelist inventing anything better, and equally hard to imagine the historian who would not covet this perfect concrete emblem. To what extent is the useful vitality of that detail inseparable from its historical reality? If a novelist invented it, would it be somehow worth less—morally speaking, aesthetically speaking—than if a historian authenticated it? I take a special pleasure in recording its actuality, but I can imagine relishing it in a novel, feeling that the writer had created a new reality—while being aware, of course, that an invented reality is not identical with an actual reality. The French writer and academic Laurent Binet, to judge from his novel “HHhH” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Sam Taylor), is sure of his answer: invented facts—invented characters, for that matter—have no place in historical fiction, and weaken it both aesthetically and morally. “This is what I think,” he writes. “Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.” There are at least two difficulties with this purism. First, it would abolish most fiction; second, Binet has written a historical novel of sorts, a book that, if not quite full of invented details, certainly uses invention. That Binet’s solution seems obvious is testament to the brilliant ease and fluency of his book: his historical novel makes use of novelistic invention while apologizing for doing so. Binet has his cake and eats it, and gets to cry over the spilt crumbs, too.
“HHhH” is about the rise and fall of Reinhard Heydrich, the monster whom even Hitler called “the man with the iron heart.” As Binet puts it, Heydrich is not the protagonist of this book but its target; almost anywhere you look in the politics of the Third Reich, “and particularly among its most terrifying aspects, Heydrich is there—at the center of everything.” “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” people would say: “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.” (Thus “HHhH.”) […] In some respects, “HHhH” is a conventional historical novel about the Europe of the nineteen-thirties and early forties. As we witness Heydrich’s rise in the Nazi system, and the simultaneous preparation of Gabčík and Kubiš in England, we move through the familiar stations of the period—Hitler’s seizing of power, in 1933; the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, in March, 1939; Chamberlain’s appeasement; Wannsee; and so on. Paragraphs begin with cheap exclamations like “A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss,” or end with duff sentences like “It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution. Heydrich will be its principal architect.” But Binet’s novel has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction. He has threaded his novel with a contemporary story, which is the drama of the book’s own making.
One of the greatest kisses in History is the one that took place between communist leaders Erich Honecker, from East Germany, and Leonid Brezhnev, from Soviet Union, during the 30th Anniversary of the German Democratic Republic in June 1979. Despite the controversy and ridicule arisen in the West, this was actually a common sign of socialist solidarity, very used since Khrushchev era. It seems, moreover, that both leaders were very keen on kissing*. However, this kiss has a greater story.
Honecker had become the leader of German Socialist Party in 1971, after the fall of Walter Ulbricht in disgrace, thanks to Brezhnev support, and in 1976 had become president of the Counsel of State of the GDR, also aided by the latter.
In the new 70’s spirit of the “détente”, the Soviet Union achieved, in exchange of a relaxation of weapon tensions, that the United states recognised its influence area in Eastern Europe. In this political atmosphere appeared the “Brezhnev Doctrine”, that imposed the right for Soviet military intervention in European socialist states. This happened, for instance, in the invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact in 1968, with the passivity of Western allies.
Honecker carried out a series of economic reforms in the GDR that lead the country to a so-called “consumption socialism”, that resulted in an improvement of the population’s standards of living. Apart from that, relationship with its Soviet colleague were a true love story. GDR and the USSR needed each other, the first became the greatest ideological defender of Communism in a time when this system was more than questioned. In turn, the Soviet Union guaranteed the Red Army intervention in case of a popular revolt similar to that in Prague, which was pretty probable considering the number of opponents to Honecker’s regime. Finally, the GDR was interested in furthering all possibilities of German reunification, so the “détente” politics was very useful to follow.
Nowadays, a painted version of the “Fraternal Kiss” can be seen on the eastern side of Berlin Wall’s ruins, performed by Dmitri Vrubel after the collapse. If one looks to it attentively, one can realise that this kiss is typical of a Greek tragedy, a suffocating kiss, in which lovers get too compromised on each other, despite of knowing that there is no future in that poisoned relationship. Actually, the painting is named “The Kiss of Death”, and one can read under it “God, help me to survive this deadly love”.
50 Years Ago: The World in 1962: A half-century ago, the space race was heating up and the Cold War was freezing over. Soviet missile bases discovered in Cuba triggered a crisis that brought the U.S. to the brink of war with the U.S.S.R. Civil rights activists won hard-earned victories against segregationists in the American South, and John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Algeria gained independence from France and the U.S. slowly escalated its involvement in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Seattle held a World’s Fair called the the Century 21 Exposition, celebrating the themes of space, science, and the future. Let me take you 50 years into the past now, for a look at the world as it was in 1962. [50 photos]
Walk like a Roman
In Walking in Roman Culture, Timothy M. O’Sullivan eloquently explains that how and why a person walked were crucial cultural indicators in ancient Rome: ways of walking divided barbarians from Romans, and good Romans from bad. If this aspect of Roman culture has not often bulked large in modern studies of the ancient world, that is partly because – as O’Sullivan notes – we have chosen not to recognize it, or have even actively “translated it away”. The key Latin word is incessus, which literally means “gait” or “how a person moves on their feet”. It is now regularly translated as “bearing” or “demeanour”; but that removes all the sense of movement from it. “He has a noble bearing” may seem to us a more “natural” thing to say than “He has a noble way of walking”. It is not often what the Romans said, wrote or meant. In ancient Rome how you walked was a sign of who you were. Quite simply, it could be an indication of paternity. When people wondered whether Cleopatra’s child, young Caesarion, really was the son of Julius Caesar, they pointed to his walk (incessus) as much as to his facial features. Gait ran in families. Think, for example, how often those Roman family names (often derived – like Crassus, “Fatty”, or Rufus, “Redhead” – from physical characteristics) referred to feet or to odd ways of walking: Plautus, “flat-footed”; Valgus, “bow-legged”; Varus, “knock-kneed”. As O’Sullivan observes, “‘a family gait’ was no less distinctive than ‘a family nose’”.
Walking was also closely related to morals and social status. Slaves moved quickly; in fact, they did not so much walk as run (servus currens, “the running slave” being almost a tautology). One particular social climber, parodied in a comedy of “flat-footed” Plautus, was advised to slow down and to ape the exaggerated stately pace of the Roman gentleman (the only pace possible, I imagine, when you were formally dressed up in a toga). But it was important not to go too slowly; for that was the mark of a woman, or an effeminate. And it is precisely this idea that helps us restore some sense to one of the “jokes of Cicero”, a sometimes pretty opaque collection preserved in the Macrobius’s fifth-century encyclopedia, the Saturnalia. Catching sight of his daughter walking too quickly, and her husband walking too “softly” (mollius), Cicero is said to have quipped to his daughter “Walk like your husband”, and to his son-in-law “Walk like your wife”. It’s still not a great laugh maybe, but we can begin to get the point.
(via instellation)
Three Myths of Immigration
I am giving the Milton K Wong Lecture in Vancouver in June. Entitled ‘What’s Wrong with Multiculturalism? A European Perspective’, it will try to explain to a Canadian audience, for whom multiculturalism has a very different meaning than it does to a European one, the contours of the European debate, as well as my disagreements with both sides. In particular I want to show why both multiculturalists and many of their critics (particularly their rightwing critics) buy into the same set of myths about the history of immigration into Europe, these three in particular: “European nations used to be homogenous but have become plural because of mass immigration,” “contemporary immigration is different to previous waves, so much so that social structures need fundamental reorganization to accommodate it,” and “European nations have adopted multicultural policies because minorities have demanded them.”
Sex and Punishment
Eric Berkowitz’s new book Sex And Punishment, out today from Counterpoint, is a fascinating survey of how legal systems over the millenia have attempted to regulate and police sex. In this excerpt, a discussion of the once-wide acceptance of same-sex unions between men in Europe of the Middle Ages.
Despite the risks, devotional relationships between men were common in Europe at the time, at least among the literate, and many of these affairs must have included sex at some point. Knights, aristocrats, and especially clerics left expansive evidence of their intense passions for male lovers, relationships that often ended in side-by-side burials. A letter from a respected monk–scholar in Charlemagne’s court named Alcuin (circa 735–804) to a beloved bishop shows how thick those relations sometimes became:
I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires. Alas, if only it were granted to me, as it was to Habakkuk, to be transported to you, how would I sink into your embraces … how would I cover, with tightly pressed lips, not only your eyes, ears, and mouth but also your every finger and your toes, not once but many a time.While this epistle is unusually erotic, it reflects the intimacies that existed among men everywhere. Assuming, as we must, that at least some of these men’s sexual longings were fulfilled, the next question is the extent to which intimate homosexual relationships were tolerated. Love was one thing, sodomy another. If male hustlers on the Rialto were burned to death and other European sodomites were being cut to ribbons, could long-term, loving relationships among men ever be permitted?
The answer, paradoxically, is yes. In the period up to roughly the thirteenth century, male bonding ceremonies were performed in churches all over the Mediterranean. These unions were sanctified by priests with many of the same prayers and rituals used to join men and women in marriage. The ceremonies stressed love and personal commitment over procreation, but surely not everyone was fooled. Couples who joined themselves in such rituals most likely had sex as much (or as little) as their heterosexual counterparts. In any event, the close association of male bonding ceremonies with forbidden sex eventually became too much to overlook as ever more severe sodomy laws were put into place.
Such same-sex unions—sometimes called “spiritual brotherhoods”—forged irrevocable bonds between the men involved. Often they involved missionaries about to set off on foreign voyages, but lay male couples also entered into them. Other than the gender of the participants, it was difficult to distinguish the ceremonies from typical marriages. Twelfth-century liturgies for same-sex unions, for example, involved the pair joining their right hands at the altar, the recital of marriage prayers, and a ceremonial kiss.
Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage
Paris’s most talked-about exhibition of the winter opened on Tuesday with shock and soul-searching over the history of colonial subjects used in human zoos, circuses and stage shows, which flourished until as late as 1958. Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, curated by former French international footballer turned anti-racism campaigner Lilian Thuram, traces the history of a practice which started when Christopher Columbus displayed six “Indians” at the Spanish royal court in 1492 and went on to become a mass entertainment phenomenon in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Millions of spectators turned out to see “savages” in zoos, circuses, mock villages and freak shows from London to St Louis, Barcelona to Tokyo. These “human specimens”, and “living museums” served both colonialist propaganda and scientific theories of so-called racial hierarchies. The exhibition at Paris’s Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac’s museum dedicated to once-colonised cultures – is the first to look at this international phenomenon as a whole. It brings together hundreds of bizarre and shocking artefacts, ranging from posters for “Male and Female Australian Cannibals” in London, which was the world capital of such stage shows, to documentation for mock villages of “Arabs” and “Sengalese”, or juggling tribeswomen in France, which was renowned for its extensive human zoos. Thuram, who was born on the French Caribbean island Guadaloupe, said the exhibition explained the background of racist ideas and “fear of the ‘other’” which persisted today. You have to have the courage to say that each of us has prejudices, and these prejudices have a history,” Thuram explained. He said he was appalled that Hamburg zoo still had sculptures of Indians and Africans at its entrance, a sign that humans as well as animals were on display.
75 Years Since The Hindenburg Disaster: Last Sunday, May 6, marked the 75th anniversary of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. The massive German airship caught fire while attempting to land near Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 35 people aboard, plus one ground crew member. Of the 97 passengers and crew members on board, 62 managed to survive. The horrifying incident was captured by reporters and photographers and replayed on radio broadcasts, in newsprint, and on newsreels. News of the disaster led to a public loss of confidence in airship travel, ending an era. The 245 m (803 f) Hindenburg used flammable hydrogen for lift, which incinerated the airship in a massive fireball, but the actual cause of the initial fire remains unknown. Gathered here are images of the Hindenburg’s first successful year of transatlantic travel, and of its tragic ending 75 years ago. (Also, be sure to see Recovered Letters Reveal the Lost History of the Hindenburg on Atlantic Video.) [34 photos]
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
