The Civil War as Tragedy

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing a series of blog posts (first, second, third, fourth) on the question of whether the Civil War was a tragedy. He argues that it isn't. Now, Coates is, as I've noted before, one of the most perceptive and interesting writers writing about American history today, so I don't disagree with him lightly, but I think he's wrong about this.

I don't think, however, that he's wrong because he's wrong about what the Civil War was; I think he's wrong because he's wrong because he's wrong about what tragedy is.

Let me see if I can explain.

The first thing to say is that, until fairly recently, to say that the Civil War was a tragedy was not false so much as a category error. "Tragedy" was a literary genre (and still is -- but it's no longer, as used, only that). You could write a play (or, by extension, a novel or a history) of the event as a tragedy -- or you could write it as a comedy, or a chronicle, or a farce, or a horror. This is particularly true since the Civil War as a big, complex event, and had tragic, comedic, farcical, horrific, and many other elements besides. But the event itself was just an event.

I grant that the word "tragedy" has moved on, and so should we; but it's worth remembering its literary roots, because they're still important. In particular, their persistence entangles the common word "tragedy" in two almost-contradictory meanings. Coates is using one; I am going to argue that the word should be reserved for the other. So he's right, by his definition; but I think his definition is a poorer one, so that (in another sense) he's wrong.

Coates is using the word tragedy in a way that has two overarching implications: first, that the event in question was avoidable -- it was a tragedy, and if only we'd done something different and better, then it wouldn't have happened. Secondly, that the event in question was negative -- if not entirely negative for every person on Earth, then overwhelmingly so. Ultimately, a tragedy is something you wish hadn't happened -- meaning that it might not have happened, and that it was bad that it did happen.

It is in this sense of the word that Coates argues that the Civil War was not a tragedy. And, of course, he's perfectly correct. He points out the overwhelming good -- emancipation -- that arose from the war (this first point is, at least in his bit of the internet, fairly uncontroversial). And then the bulk of the argument tends to be about whether this good could have come about otherwise -- could we have had a peaceful end to slavery, as happened (for instance) in Brazil or with Serfdom in Russia, or was a war the only way that it could have ended? So that people who disagree with Coates -- such as Matt Yglesias here -- tend to imagine that another, less violent way to end slavery might have been found. In reply, Coates argues -- correctly, to my mind -- that the nature of the South as a slave society* made no other ending possible. So the Civil War was neither evitable nor (on balance) negative in its consequences; hence, it was not a tragedy. As Coates writes, "Shorter me: I'm glad the Civil War happened". Because if it hadn't happened, slavery would have continued; and slavery was an evil that had to be ended, and there was no other way. QED.

In this use of the word, any sort of bad thing, or at least any avoidable bad thing, is a tragedy. On the news airplane crashes and the like are referred to as "tragedies" -- they were evitable, and they were bad. And, I grant, this use of the word is very common, probably increasingly so. Perhaps the change of the word's meaning has gone too far to be reversed (not unlike, say, "beg the question" -- or "novel", which every year my students seem to think refers to any book, nonfiction or otherwise). But I hope not, because I think "tragedy" has a different meaning than that (even aside, that is, from its earlier one defining a literary genre) -- one for which there are not other synonyms.

You see, I don't think that evitable things with bad consequences -- say, airplane crashes -- are tragedies. I think they're horrors, calamities, catastrophes. One might write them up as tragedies, but they aren't, in and of themselves, just by happening, tragedies.

Because, traditionally, tragedies were not evitable; traditionally, tragedies were the working out of inevitable fate. In the classical Greek tragedies, this tends to be a fate decreed by the Gods, inhuman in their purposes and methods.** In Shakespearean tragedies, this element of inevitability is turned inward: no longer brought upon by the capriciousness of the Gods, it's brought about by the tragic figure's own character.*** This is a version of tragedy that I (and a great many other people) ultimately feel is richer than the Greek version -- his shift of the locus of tragedy from outer fate to inner character is one of the reasons that Shakespeare is, well, Shakespeare.

In this sense, tragedies are the working out of the inevitable consequences of character flaws of great (in the sense that they tend to be kings rather than peasants) figures. They're not, perhaps, inevitable in the sense that if they person in question had been other than they are the events needn't have happened. But the person's character is too deeply embedded in them to make this a live possibility. Othello without his jealousy, Macbeth without his ambition, Hamlet without his hesitation, Lear without his arrogance, simply would have been other people. Once those people were placed in those situations the tragedy was inevitable.****

In this sense, the Civil War was a tragedy: it was the horrific working out of a deep character flaw. America's racism (and, really, it was America's, not just the South's, although the role the South played was of course unique) led to the bodies all over the floor at the end of Act Five.

Nor is the other element that Coates focuses on -- the unquestionable good that arose from the Civil War -- incidental to this understanding; rather, it's essential.

In the traditional literary sense, tragedy is not simply the working out of horrors due to inevitable character flaws (or fate); it is an elevated version of that. In a literary context, the elevation is largely due to the language and the literary presentation: Hamlet is a tragedy because it's Shakespeare writing it as Hamlet, and not me nattering on about some Danish prince who saw a ghost, spazzed out and killed a bunch of people.

In a historical context, however, the element of literary presentation drops away. What replaces it -- what elevates mere horror into tragedy -- is that some good comes out of the horror. The case is even tighter if the good could have come about no other way, and if the good is proportionate in scale to the horror needed to bring it about. In the context of the Civil War, more than six hundred thousand dead are elevated by the fact that it lead to the end of slavery for millions. Coates recently asked whether seeing the Civil War as a tragedy involved "saying something like, 'It's really tragic the South was, uhm, the South?'"; and that, I claim, is precisely right: the sin of slavery was embedded in the South (really, I think, in America's) nature, just as ambition was in Macbeth's or jealousy was in Othello's. The Civil War was the working out of the character flaw; what elevated it to tragedy is that it was the only way a good end -- emancipation -- could have happened, given the character of the nation involved.

(Note that in a literary context the good outcome is optional because the nobility is supplied by the literary form. It's not necessarily absent -- there's no good at the end of Hamlet or Lear, but Macbeth ends pretty well for the people of Scotland, with the rightful King restored and villainy punished. But it's not a necessary component. With the switch of the term from literary genre to classification of an event, the good outcome not otherwise achievable becomes necessary as the ennobling element.)

This is not, I should note, a sense of "tragedy" that I am introducing; it is an established usage -- a stage between the purely literary usage and the common habit of making "tragedy" synonymous with "catastrophe". For example, mid-Twentieth Century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr uses the word in a similar way in his 1952 book The Irony of American History:

The tragic element in a human situation is constituted of conscious choices of evil for the sake of good. If men or nations do evil in a good cause; if they cover themselves with guilt in order to fulfill some high responsibility; or if they sacrifice some high value for the sake of a higher or equal one they make a tragic choice. Thus the necessity of using the threat of atomic destruction as an instrument for the preservation of peace is a tragic element in our contemporary situation. Tragedy elicits admiration as well as pity because it combines nobility with guilt.

This is not, to be sure, precisely the use I'm suggesting here -- Niebuhr focuses on a conscious choice, what W. H. Auden famously called "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder"*****, which doesn't fit the case of the Civil War since emancipation was very much an unintended consequence of the decision to go war -- but it's pretty close. As for why this usage is preferable to the modern usage, I think it's because, first, it is more closely connected to the traditional meanings which we still closely identify with the word -- we still see Lear and Hamlet and Othello as tragedies -- and, second, because there is no other word which means this, whereas the airplane-crash sense of tragedy (the sense in which Coates correctly argues the Civil War was not a tragedy) has lots of available synonyms, such as "catastrophe" or "calamity".

To clarify further, let's contrast the Civil War with another war which, while a horror and a catastrophe, was not a tragedy: World War One. World War One was not a tragedy partly because it seems like it ought to have been avoidable -- perhaps not, it's arguable -- but above all because nothing good came out of it, certainly nothing comparable to emancipation. World War One is simply a calamity, out of which arose a great many other calamities of a calamitous century. There is nothing ennobling about it at all -- nothing equal to the scale of the horror, nothing that couldn't have come about in a better way. We can, simply, wish that World War One hadn't happened. That's why it's not a tragedy.

Whereas we can't wish the Civil War hadn't happened -- not given who we, as a country, were. We can wish that we were otherwise -- that the South was not the South, that America was not racist. Which is like wishing that Hamlet wasn't Hamlet -- better, perhaps, but it's not him any more.

The Civil War involved terrible, mass death, but it was the only way to end American slavery, which had to end; that defines rather than denies its tragic character.

Perhaps the first person to see the Civil War in this way -- as a horror, but a necessary horror, a horror that came about due to character flaws too deep to be dealt with in any other way -- was none other than Abraham Lincoln, in the famous passage from his second inaugural:

The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether".

Lincoln here mixes the Greek sense of tragedy (brought about by the will of the gods or, in his case, God) with the Shakespearean (the consequences of a character flaw, namely, slavery). But the basic elements are the same: he sees the horror ("this mighty scourge of war") but also sees that, perhaps, it is necessary to right the wrong that lay at America's heart.

So yes, given what America was -- a nation built on racism and slavery -- one has to be, in some sense, glad that the Civil War happened -- sad, perhaps, that it was necessary: sad that we were who we were, that we couldn't have ended slavery another way as other countries did, or, better yet, never committed that sin to begin with. But we were who we were, we did what we did, and thus it had to end as it did: in a horrific war with a morally necessary outcome that could not have been otherwise achieved.

In other words, a tragedy.

Update: Some hours after I wrote this, I saw this post by Freddie deBoer (via) making some similar arguments to what I'm making here, in particular this passage:

...the classic definition of tragedy [is] that the tragic is the downfall that springs from character, that tragedy occurs because there is some failing within the tragic character (here the United States) which makes that tragedy inevitable. In this sense I would say that the Civil War is precisely tragic: given the character of the early United States, it was both inevitable and necessary. That equality was codified in so many of our foundational texts while simultaneously denied to many millions of the country's people isn't merely an ugly contradiction but one which made violent correction inevitable.

deBoer is rather less impressed with Coates than I am overall, and he says a lot in his post that I disagree with; indeed, the post might be fairly characterized as something of an anti-Coates rant. But he's clearly thinking along the same lines as I as far as how to understand "tragedy" goes. (deBoer has a follow-up post here, presenting a somewhat more nuanced take on Coates's work (although still a critical one); but don't follow it for more on my topic here, because by that point deBoer's mostly talking about something else.)

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* Historians use "slave society" as a technical term, contrasting it with a "society with slavery": the latter includes slavery as one of its features, but not as a foundational one. In a slave society, the entire economy, society and culture are inextricably entwined with slavery's role within it. The American South was a slave society; in the Eighteenth Century (and stretching into the early Nineteenth in some places) the American North was a society with slavery.

** It is in this sense that David Simon has defined The Wire as a Greek tragedy, with our (post-modern, post-industrial) institutions standing in as the capricious and cruel Gods.

*** Following the Greek philosopher Heraclitus's famous aphorism that "Character is fate".

**** There's a nice commonplace -- I think it might be due to A. C. Bradley, but I'm not sure -- that if you switch the heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies, there's no play. Othello in Hamlet's situation would have simply dispatched his uncle; Hamlet in Othello's would have seen right through Iago. A tragedy is the working out of the flaws of a particular person as embedded in a particular situation; change either and it is no longer a tragedy.

***** Which George Orwell equally famously castigated as a phrase which "could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word," adding, "[p]ersonally I would not speak so lightly of murder." -- an attack which was, apparently, one reason that Auden disavowed the poem and excluded it from his Collected Poems.

Wonderful Coal Consumption

In my recent foolin' around with Chinese*, I was looking at this bilingual web comic -- which, in this instance, was simply a translation of the opening phrases (no, not even the entire opening sentence**) of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. (Note that I have no idea whether or not it's a good translation.) Looking at the way the comics artists translated "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" I was drawn to the characters that looked different in the two sentences (meaning, presumptively, "best" and "worst"):

那是最美好的时代，
那是最糟糕的时代；

The characters for "best" are 美好.

Now, one of the things I've found is that different dictionaries will translate the same Chinese word*** in different ways. So that if you look up 美好 in this dictionary it is translated as "happy, fine, ok"; but this dictionary gives "beautiful, fine" -- not quite the same. And then this dictionary gives "wonderful". All three, that is, give quite different meanings to the same word. (And none of them, incidentally, make it sound like a good translation for the English word "best". Now, I'm not saying the translators were wrong -- it's quite possible that in the context 美好 is a perfectly good translation for "best" -- but either they were wrong, or the dictionaries aren't giving very complete answers, or the context dependence is doing a lot of work here.)

But as it happened, I didn't actually look up 美好 directly. It happened that I knew the pinyin for those two characters (isn't true for a lot of characters, but it was of those), so it seemed easier just to type "meihao" into a dictionary (as it happened, this one) instead. As pinyin goes, that's incomplete, since I didn't mark the tones, either through accents or through the (far less aesthetic but easier to type) numbers. But it seemed like it would work.

And it did. It gave two options for meihao, spoken with different tones. It could either mean 美好, wonderful, or 煤耗, coal consumption.

Now, note the difference between the pronunciation of these two words is just the tone of the second syllable. (Ordinarily 美 is pronounced third tone, but before another third tone it switches to second, and comes to match 煤.) In other words, a tone slip in a single syllable could have you say, accidentally, "It was the coal consumption of times".

This is why I'm not studying Mandarin. I'm just fooling around with Mandarin. Because it's too damn hard to actually learn for real.

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* A reminder of what this means, from the earlier post: "The difference between fooling around with Chinese and studying Chinese is that I'm not expecting it to go anywhere, that I'm not claiming (even, or perhaps especially, to myself) to have learned anything, that I'm not being systematic about it, and that it's just for the pleasure of discovery rather than for anything that may result from it (since probably nothing will). It's less about Growth, Self-Improvement and Opportunity than it is about idle procrastination and lazy curiosity."

** "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." -- The comic gives about two-thirds of the sentence -- up to "other way".

*** Yes, I said word: most modern Chinese words are made up of more than one character.

The Tale of Elizabeth and Hazel -- Updated and Longer

Four years ago I wrote a post plugging a magazine article about these two women:

The young African American girl is named Elizabeth Eckford, and she was one of the Little Rock Nine -- nine heroic high-school students who endured incredible things to integrate Little Rock Central High School (with the help of armed federalized troops) in 1957-1958. This incredibly famous picture of her is from what was supposed to be her first day at Little Rock Central High, when she got separated from her eight fellows and walked alone into a mob of segregationists. The young woman behind her, who was immortalized in this posture of hatred, is named Hazel Bryan Massery. It's one of the classic photos from the Civil Rights Movement, about one of the central events of that world-changing struggle.

In point of fact, it's two of the classic photos, because (although the fact is little-known), the incident in question was captured twice -- perhaps both by Will Counts, perhaps by two different news photographers. (Counts definitely took one of the two, which was named by the AP as one of the top 100 photos of the century, although I'm not certain which, because I've seen both of the images labeled as Counts's photo!) At any rate, here's the other version:

So far as I can tell, they were taken at almost the precise same moment -- note that the woman who turned to look behind her, clearly visible in the upper photograph to the left of the screaming Hazel, is also looking behind her in the lower photograph (half-hidden behind Elizabeth from the second angle). This seems to belie the claim I've seen made that Counts took both of them. On the other hand, maybe the woman behind Elizabeth, next to Hazel was simply carrying on a conversation with someone behind her, and turned around twice. And since it wasn't a planned event, the notion that one photographer happened to be there seems more plausible than that there were two. But I'm not sure. Anyone have any information on the provenance of these two images?

It's interesting to compare the two -- the subtle differences conveyed by different angles is fascinating. (Hazel's face in particular changes -- she's screaming and full of hate in both, but she looks wilder and closer to the edge of violence in the latter.) I think the top one is better purely as an image, but the latter one better captures Elizabeth's isolation and danger and bravery. I guess it's good to have both.

But life is odd, and it turns out that Hazel eventually apologized, became friends with Elizabeth -- and then had a falling out with her. The incredible, complex story was told in this incredible article in Vanity Fair by reporter David Margolick, which I recommend no less strongly today than I did four years ago when I first read it. It's a fabulous recounting of a key, powerful piece of the American story.

But I bring this up not just because the article is a perennial (although it is), nor because I'm about to start teaching my seminar on the 1960's in a month or so (although I am), but because its author, David Margolick, saw my post and was kind enough to write and tell me that he's expanded the article into a full-length book, which will be published by Yale University Press one month from today, under the title Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock. If the book is anything like as good as the article, it'll be a terrific read, one which will speak to the history both of the Civil Rights Movement and to the complex racial landscape of post-CRM America. I don't know too much about how the book was updated, although apparently Margolick was able to interview Hazel more than the first time around.

Anyway, check out the article. (Vanity Fair's site seems a bit twitchy, so if that link doesn't work, try here.) Then, if you're so inclined, you can pre-order the book from Amazon here, or Powells here. Margolick's official web site is here. It's a powerful tale in the shorter form, and I have high expectations that it will be even better in the long.

Links to Funny Things, Mostly Over a Year Old

As with this earlier post, these links are old, but still working (as of a few days ago), and still funny.

• The classic list of Star Wars Lines Improved by Replacing a Word with "Pants" is one of the funniest things ever on the internet -- and, sadly, its original location seems to have vanished. Fortunately, this site has saved the top twenty five of them (which, frankly, were by far the best). Here are the first five:

1. I find your lack of pants disturbing.
2. You are unwise to lower your pants.
3. The Force is strong in my pants.
4. Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.
5. I cannot teach him. The boy has no pants.

• 11 Funniest Classified Ads ever.

• 11 Ridiculous Signs.

• Lincoln's Facebook Page.

• Truthful titles for fantasy novels.

• My first dictionary. Biting and bitter, but brilliant.

• Every year the New Yorker has a contest for redesigns of its classic Eustace Tilley cover. These were the ones from 2009.

• Accidental maps.

• Neil Gaiman on winning the Newbery Medal.

• Everyone remembers Matt Taibi's classic evisceration of Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The World is Flat, right? Well, for some reason, his 2009 evisceration of Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded has never gotten the same level of internet love, despite being just as funny.

• Hang this up in your time machine.

Oh Yeah, Play Them Duì Bù Qǐ Blues - I Like That

As part of my recent fooling around with Chinese, I stumbled upon (via) this video of a song from the perspective of a struggling learner of Chinese. It's in Chinese, but the chorus (save in the final iteration, where it changes) translates as follows:

Sorry, my Chinese is not so good!
Really sorry
I don't understand what you're saying!
Sorry, my Chinese is not so good!
Really sorry
I just want to be friends!

(That's as given in the subtitles of the video). The pinyin lyrics (although without tones, so sort of crippled pinyin) can be found here, and the Chinese lyrics here. (Warning: both of those links open with automatic sound playing -- and not the song in question, either.)

I'm not quite sure what people who haven't taken Chinese as a foreign language, or been fooling around with Chinese on their own, will make of it -- it might not be at all funny or fun to Chinese-free English speakers (on the one hand) or native Chinese speakers (on the other). But for anyone who's spent time in the vast region in between those two places, it's highly recommended.

Getting information about the song and the band is a bit tricky, because the name of the band (Transition) is a very non-googleable word -- and if you manage to target it more precisely (perhaps by googling the name of the band as they always give it, first in English then in Chinese -- "Transition 前進樂團"), then you get a lot of pages in Chinese. So for the benefit of those who's 中文不好 (zhōng wén bù hǎo -- Chinese is not so good), I thought I'd give a bit of information & links that I managed to find.

First, the song. In the Roman Alphabet (which is as close as the title gets to English) it seems to be called Duì Bù Qǐ (which means "sorry"), but in Chinese characters the song seems to be called by its entire first line -- 對不起我的中文不好 (duì bù qǐ wǒ de zhōng wén bù hǎo -- Sorry, my Chinese is not so good). Presumably this is because calling the song just "對不起" would make it identical to a thousand other songs, whereas (in the Roman script verse) there aren't that many songs called "duì bù qǐ". Anyway, once again, the video is here. (I'm not going to embed it, because in general I find that doesn't work that well on this site -- so click through if you're interested). The band's official page has a page offering a free mp3 download of the song, but the user interface on the page is pretty bad; you have to go to what looks like the play bar of a video, but is actually a song under a jpg image, and use the button on the far right to either save as source (which is an mp4, I think, although it's not labeled as such) or as a quicktime movie (which isn't actually a movie, just a sound file). Basically, it's less a free mp3 than a really irritating scavenger hunt. TANSTAAFL, I guess.

(Incidentally, the video begins with a little dialogue which is not on the mp3. A person working at a store calls to one of the band members (in Chinese), "Hey, American, Hello!" And the band member replies, "I'm English". The rest I couldn't catch, but I think it was about a misunderstanding anyway.)

Second, the band. It's called, as noted above, Transition 前進樂團*. It's an English band, but seems to be based mainly (entirely? I'm not sure) in Taiwan, and it's fanbase seems to be more Chinese than British. That link goes to their official site, but the site is, as noted above, not great. They don't, for instance, have links to their albums, either to buy or sample, or any information on what they've recorded -- let alone useful extras like lyrics or an actual, honest-to-God introduction to the band (they have one, but it's poor). They also have an official facebook page, but honestly it's not all that much better -- fairly little information, and what there is is in Chinese. Their Wikipedia page is brief and out of date. Frankly, it's a pretty good lesson on how not to present your public face in the digital age (2011 version). The best source of info I've found on them is this (translated) article from a Taiwanese newspaper. The band is made up of two pairs of brothers (although, judging from their web site & videos, one of the four has now left), has done three albums, and now lives in Taipei.

The other song of theirs I've found so far that I like is a bilingual song called "Turn Me Around", which is done in collaboration with some musician named "Wing 羅文裕"**, about whom I've been able to find out nothing (even less information via English-language google*** -- but since he seems to be just a Chinese audience, it makes more sense than the equivalent situation with a British band). Anyway, click here if you want to hear it -- as far as I can tell, the band is not on iTunes nor Amazon, so I think youtube is the only way to hear them.

But mostly I recommend duì bù qǐ 對不起我的中文不好, at least to those who have ever expressed the sentiment.

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* Google translate turns their Chinese name into "Forward orchestra", which this dictionary breaks down into "advance" (前进, qiánjìn) and "orchestra" (乐团, yuètuán) -- take with the usual boatloads of salt for trying to unearth meaning from such sources, and add salt.

** My best guess about "羅文裕" is that it's just a Chinese name, and has nothing to do with "Wing" -- "羅" is the traditional form of 罗 (luó), which is the twentieth most common Chinese surname. But again: salt, salt, salt.

*** The thin gruel I found: a few photos of him posted by the photographer; a brief reference in a post about another singer; a livejournal post that might have an album of his for (illegal?) download. That's it in English.

Comics-Related Links, Mostly Over a Year Old

These have been sitting in my "I should link to these" folder for a long time. They're all still fun.

• Snoopy writes a Batman story. Really.

• Scott Eric Kaufman on teaching Warren Ellis's Planetary.

• Comics (and cartoon) characters' names in Chinese.

• Scott McDaneil analyzes the layout of a page of Promethea. Anyone who likes my 100 Great Comics Pages series (which I do intend to resume, some day) will like this one.

• Tom Neeley boils down an old X-Men comic to a single page. The comic in question is X-Men #143 (discussion).

• The Peanuts as Marvel characters.

• More Peanuts-related humor.

• Watchmen characters as manga-style young girls.

• Todd Klein on making the "Library of Dream" poster.

• Ng Suat Tong writes about superhero comics, collaboration and writers.

• Sean T. Collins disagrees with ibid.

• Superuseless Superpowers.

• Stuart McMillen's Amusing Ourselves to Death: the Comics Adaptation.

• Ten most iconic Marvel comics panels of all time, from a poll. With links to #70 - 11, in case the top ten isn't enough for you.

• Government comic books.

• Sandman as a quintessential novel about/from the 1990's.

• And, a cri de coeur from two and a half years ago: Tom Spurgeon on why there's hope for comics in the recession (from December, 2008). Since, thanks to the action of our politicians, we're going to be dealing with economic misery for the foreseeable future, still timely.

"Inept or Evil?" is the new "Stupid or Lying?"

Round about 2005, someone on the internets -- I think it was Tom Tomorrow, but maybe he got it from somewhere -- summarized the issue with the (then) contemporary Republican party in a single question: stupid or lying? It was a brilliant question, one that captured so much about the Republican party. (They didn't believe in climate change? They didn't believe in evolution? Saddam Hussein had WMDs? Michael D. Brown was doing "a heckava job"? etc, etc, ad nauseum.)

Well, in the wake of the recent national-game-of-chicken that the Democrats played with the Republicans, a new question seems to be being asked a lot -- this time of the Democrats: are they inept or evil? That is, are the Democrats, in particular Obama, getting the results they want -- letting the Tea Party "force" them to enact right-wing policies that they (or their paymasters) want to enact, but not to be seen to enact? Or is Obama simply such a bad negotiator, so willfully stupid in his insistence on trying to negotiate with hostage takers who will never, ever negotiate in good faith, that he ends up doing a lousy job despite his best intentions? Inept or Evil?

First a nice, brief quotation summing up the charges to which inept or evil? will be the plea:

The fact that John Boehner walked away shouldn’t obscure the facts: A Democratic president offered to pay for the Bush tax cuts by handing over the health care, education, safety, and savings of the American people.

That's just on the most recent political own-goal, of course; there have been so many, many others, it's hard to count.

Oh, and before you say: yes, there were some things Obama could have done -- if he wasn't so...

Well, which is it?

Most of the mainstream left is going with "inept", with only occasional questions about whether there's a certain amount of evil involved; see Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, James Fallows (also here), Matt Yglesias. But here are some arguments which weigh in on the side on "evil": Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, Chris Floyd, Johnathan Schwartz. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of splitting the difference -- Robert Kuttner, for example, or pretty much everything Digby's written over the past few weeks. For a variety of views in one conversation, check out this interesting debate here between a variety of left-wing intellectuals, basically going back and forth between various points on the inept or evil? spectrum.

So what do you think?

To be sure, Obama still has a few defenders -- Kevin Drum, Steven Bennen, Mark Rosenfelder -- who argue he's neither Inept nor evil, but in fact he's doing pretty well. Some of these assume that the Democrats will actually show a little spine in the future, however, which strikes me as unlikely in the extreme. (The only thing I'm not sure about is why (inept? evil?)) The rest just strike me as aiming so low you shoot your own foot.

In all fairness, I don't really think the inept or evil? question really captures the complexity of what's going on (any more than stupid or lying? did); it's a useful summary of the poles, of which the truth is somewhere in the middle. Which is to say, I think Obama is essentially partly evil and partly just inept.

Odd as it sounds, I don't find that particularly comforting.

(Post Scriptum: For one link that I couldn't fit into the above, but which is nevertheless interesting, here is David Frum, an actual grown-up Republican, bewailing the Republicans' role in all this... in a way that places him to the left of where Obama currently is. Depressing, when you think about it.)

Clicke, lege

As part of the desacralization of the world, we have moved from tolle, lege followed by a spiritual experience, to clicke, lege*, followed by amusement. Whether this is a diminishment or not is one of the points where the so-called New Atheists disagree with Nietzsche. In the meantime: clicke, lege. You won't find God, but the following are all worth reading anyway: 

• I began reading Curzio Malaparte's astonishing story "The Traitor" (translated by Walter Murch) under the misapprehension that it was a true story. At some point along the way I figured out it couldn't be. But I have to admit that I enjoyed it more thanks to the false belief that led me into it. Still, it is an utterly fabulous story -- a hilarious story in a black-humor vein. Highly recommended. If you only click one link in this post, make it this one. 

• Michael Moorcock on how to write a novel in three days. (via) 

• John Holbo talks about books about the history of reading. The part that stuck with me over the past month is this paragraph from Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator by Elspeth Jajdelska:

A change from reading aloud to skilled silent reading is important because it radically changes the underlying model of what writing and reading are. Reading aloud creates an identification between the writer and the reader. The reader is a speaker, the writer’s mouthpiece, with the writer’s words in his or her mouth. Silent reading creates a different relationship between writer and reader. Instead of identifying with the writer as a speaker of his or her words, the reader becomes an (internal) hearer of the writer’s words. So the move from reading aloud to reading silently involves a move from reading as speaking to reading as hearing, and from reading as declamation to reading as silent participation in an imaginary conversation between writer and reader. This is a radical change in the orientation of both writer and reader to the text.

Click through to read what Holbo has to say about that, and another book on a similar topic, too. The earlier post referenced therein is also worth reading. 

• Cool word: deepity, "term coined by Daniel Dennett in his 2009 speech to the American Atheists Institution conference. It refers to a statement that has (at least) two meanings; one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound, but is essentially false, or meaningless with respect to this deeper meaning, but would be "earth-shattering" if true." 

• This is pretty much the whole thing, this paragraph:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

...but this is the post that made it go viral, and it has lots of follow-up links trying (and mostly failing) to identify the source. 

• For those who liked this post: how long do the events of Goodnight, Moon take? An astrophysicist investigates. 

 • The shortest Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ever written. 

• Geoffry Pullum versus Strunk and White. Blood everywhere. 

• The Nobel Prize in Literature from an alternative universe. Y'know, the one where Tolstoy, Ibsen, Mark Twain, Henry James, Proust, Kafka, Borges and Philip K. Dick won it. 

 • Atlas of True Names: maps with the etymological roots of names instead of the names themselves. Highly cool. 

• Uncomfortable plot summaries. Four samples:

FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement. LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property. RISKY BUSINESS: Privileged rich kid gets everything he wants with no consequences. STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.

If you liked those, click through for loads more. 

• Not to read, but to look at: really awesome art made of Chinese characters. Sample:

The characters at the bottom are, of course, the components of the art (if you don't see it, look at the woman's forehead and compare to the first character). Google translate it as "beautiful Jí mother" -- whether that's "beautiful Mother Jí" or "Jí's beautiful mother", I don't know. (This dictionary confirms that 姞 (Jí) is a family name, but otherwise gives no particular guidance.) At any rate, the rest are wonderful too, so clicke, vulticuláte**. 

• Incidentally, the full iPhone/iPad app version of that dictionary is on sale this week. They also have a stunted version which is free (which is all I've tried). • A second one to look at it: a very cool optical illusion. 

• And one more just for looking: life in four bottles. Utterly brilliant.

Update: I added a few links after this was first posted.

Update 2: Mammothly stupid mistake about the Chinese corrected.

 _____________________ 

* Note bene: "clicke" is pulled out of thin air, not actual Latin, since I don't really know what verb the ancient Romans used to speak about following a link on the internet. 

** My deep apologies to Mr. ------,*** my 9th & 10th grade Latin teacher, for this entire post. He was a much better teacher than I was a student, so the butchery of Latin in this post should not be laid at his feet. 

*** Name omitted to avoid besmirching the innocent.

Obama 2012 Campaign Poster

We've come a long way from "hope", eh?

If I Was On Twitter, I'd Retweet These

Re-Elect Obama: He'll agree to Republican demands, but only after prolonged negotiations!

GOP held up spending cuts as core value. Obama held up compromise. So we compromise on spending cuts.

- Both from Matt Yglesias

As the deal is being done...

More or less what Gerry said:

What worries me is that many progressives seem to have mistaken Boehner’s bad press in recent days for a reversal of results. Make no mistake: Republicans are still running the table, having somehow managed to transform what was once a purely pro forma vote into massive unilateral concessions. The final deal is much closer to Boehner’s than Reid’s, where Reid’s plan was a more right-wing version of McConnell’s, which itself was far to the right of where negotiations began, which itself is far to the right of just raising the debt ceiling without conditions, which is what was done the last hundred times this came up.... [I]t’s a testament to just how badly Democrats have been outplayed on the debt ceiling that some progressives seem to think our side is winning. In fact the Republicans won this game by a mile: they got the drastic, draconian spending cuts they wanted and total control over an automatic trigger for even worse cuts—all without any new revenue whatsoever. Democrats got the good sportsmanship award.

And, as Yglesias points out, this entire affair has most likely normalized taking the economy hostage as a future tactic -- at least for Republicans (obviously, if the Democrats did it, it'd be treason or something).

The only reason I say "more or less what Gerry said" rather than simply "what Gerry said" is because I think this underplays the degree to which the result is along the same lines as what Obama -- and quite possibly a lot of other Democrats too -- has been aiming for. There's every reason to think that Obama has wanted a center-right deal all along, one far to the right of what the majority of his voters want (and most of those that *do* want it did so because of the relentless disinformation and misinformation about what will and what will not actually help them and theirs find jobs). So some of what Gerry makes out to be the Democrats getting punked is actually Obama joining with the right to punk those who voted for him. Not 100% -- this is almost certainly will be a farther-right deal than Obama (or Reid, or Pelosi...) wanted; but Obama has clearly wanted to be forced to move right, and if the Republicans have made him move some degree farther than he wanted, well, that's just business. We all have to sacrifice, right?

And ultimately precisely what degree this is Obama being punked and what degree this is Obama joining with the Republicans to punk us doesn't matter: the long and the short of it is that we're going to get screwed -- not quite as badly as if default happens, I guess, but it's always harder when it's someone you thought was to-some-degree on your side doing the knifing

Oh, and in addition to the link above, another what Digby said bit here.

I suppose that the rumors could be wrong, and that no deal might happen... in which case, instead of Obama joining the Republicans to punk the country, they will have mutually driven off a cliff dragging us behind them. The results will be worse; but saying that shouldn't distract us from how very, very, very bad this deal was -- and how much responsibility Obama has for it. To what degree what was atrocious negotiating and to what degree it was deliberate betrayal can be figured out once the historians pick the documentary bones.

Update: Oh, and via Gerry: what Glenn said.

Foolin' Around With Chinese: Translations of Children's Classics

So I've been fooling around with Chinese. The difference between this and studying Chinese is that I'm not expecting it to go anywhere, that I'm not claiming (even, or perhaps especially, to myself) to have learned anything, that I'm not being systematic about it, and that it's just for the pleasure of discovery rather than for anything that may result from it (since probably nothing will). It's less about Growth, Self-Improvement and Opportunity than it is about idle procrastination and lazy curiosity.

But it's fun, at least for me, and so I thought that I'd share a bit of the fun with my readers.

For this initial post, I thought I'd share three popular English-language children's books which have been posted online in Chinese.

In ascending order of age-appropriateness, the first is Eric Carle's classic The Very Hunger Caterpillar, a book designed for the tiniest of babies -- and, thus, appropriate for those who have only achieved the level of, say, a fairly impressive beginner in Chinese. (It has to be fairly impressive because, of course, we don't expect the babies to read it to themselves!)

Anyway, it's online here, in a translation pieced together by the bloggers from various existing commercial ones, picking what they liked of each. (They don't include the pictures or anything like that, but some of us -- say, parents of young children -- will have read it so many times that it doesn't matter.) It's just in Chinese, but if you mouse over any of the text the pinyin (for pronunciation) and the meaning of the word are given. It's a lot of fun, and good for learning things like the days of the week and the names of various fruits.

Second in our ascending order of age-appropriateness we have this version of Beatrix Potter's Tale of Peter Rabbit. It is really a quite superb web presentation. They have many of the original illustrations (I think they have the core set; nowadays you can buy editions which include ones left out of the early printings, and that's the one I read to my son (thus the one I'm familiar with), but the ones they include are more than sufficient to tell the story). Each page has the same bit of text -- one to four sentences -- in both English and Chinese; you click one of the buttons at the bottom of the page to switch back and forth. Another button will play that snippet in whichever language is displayed (the English taken from the librivox recording). Hovering the mouse over the Chinese text displays the pinyin (just the pinyin, and the whole sentence in one lump, so that one feature's not quite as useful as the The Very Hunger Caterpillar presentation). All-in-all, a splendid version -- you could just keep it in English and let a child play with it, learning to play the text and go forward and back at will; or you can use it yourself to, well, fool around with Chinese. (Not, please, to learn: that requires textbooks and flashcards and furrowed brows; it produces Results.)

Finally -- and this is a book on a level that I am far beyond getting anything out of (just as my (two-and-a-half-year-old) son couldn't enjoy it, unlike the other two), but I mention it because I found it so why not -- is a translation of Alice in Wonderland into Chinese. This is at the same site as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, although the presentation is much less fancy. (The same site also hosts one of the best free online English-Chinese dictionaries.) I don't know anything about the translation -- for instance, I know there's a classic translation of Alice into Chinese that's supposed to be very well done, but I don't know if this is it or not. At any rate it is, as I said, way over my head -- well, all three are way over my head, but the first two are over my head in a it's-still-fun-to-jump-and-see-how-close-I-can-get-to-touching-them sort of way; the Alice is -- well, c'est du chinois. 'nuff said.

So there it is. If anyone else wants to try to fool around with Chinese -- or if you know enough to just read 'em -- or (in the case of the Beatrix Potter) you just want a good presentation of a marvelous children's book -- enjoy! And I may have more foolin' around with Chinese posts in the future -- keep an 眼睛 on this blog if you're interested.

File Under 'Unintentionally Humorous Juxtapositions'

The final sentence from Paul Krugman's (characteristically spot-on) column today, along with the editorial note that is appended to it:

The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

David Brooks is off today.

Yes. Right.

(Why it's funny, for those not following the story.)

Update: ...but I shouldn't stop with the funny. Scott Lemieux described a different section of Krugman's column as "the heart of the matter", and he's right that it's a key aspect:

The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

We have been terribly failed by our political institutions, and terribly failed by the sociopathic madmen of the Republican party and the hapless cowards of the Democratic party, but we've been terribly failed by the media too. It's part of what is going on in our current national game of chicken.

Xu Bing's Book from the Ground

I'll get around to the explanation in a minute, but the main thing I wanted to do in this post is to quote the first paragraph of an avant-garde novel-in-progress, The Book From the Ground, by the contemporary artist Xu Bing. (The first name is pronounced -- very, very roughly -- like "shoe".*) So before I explain anything, let me quote the opening paragraph:

Go on. Read it. Yes, you can. Really. Just try. ... ... See? That wasn't that hard, was it?

-- that last of which is (if I understand it) precisely the point.

Xu Bing -- who was born in China, moved to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, but who seems to have recently repatriated to China -- is a conceptual artist. My experience of his work, however, differs from my experience of most conceptual artists in that I find that he's actually working with interesting concepts. The work which (as I understand it) really made his name was A Book From the Sky, which is described on the artist's site as follows:

An all-enveloping textual environment, "A Book from the Sky" is composed of massive sheets of Chinese characters, some left loose and some bound into books, which are suspended form the ceiling, pasted on the wall, and laid on the floor. Everything about "A book from the Sky" has the look of authenticity. Form its arrangement of headings and marginalia on the page to its string bindings and indigo covers, the work mimics in every detail the characteristics of traditional Chinese printing and book -making. While donning such a guise, however, "A book form the sky " is supremely inauthentic. Its characters are purely of the artist's invention and utterly without meaning. What is most [unsettling] perhaps is the way in which Xu Bing's characters approximate the real thing , for the artist has composed them from the variant parts that make up Chinese characters.**

The coolness factor here is a bit hard to grasp unless you understand the way in which Chinese characters are made from parts of other Chinese Characters, but if you do get this, it seems pretty cool indeed. (Or shocking -- apparently his work was very controversial when first displayed.)

The Book From the Ground -- a project begun eight years ago and still ongoing -- is conceived as a sort of thematic sequel (sidequel? something) to the previous work. Here's how Xu Bing describes the origins of the project on its associated web site:

Book from the Ground is a novel written in a "language of icons" that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years. Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life... This project first began with my collecting safety manuals from a number of airlines... Then, in 2003, I noticed three small images on a pack of gum (they translate into please use your wrapper to dispose of the gum in a trashcan), and came to realize that in so far as icons alone can explain something simple, they can also be used to narrate a longer story. From that point on, through various channels, I began to collect and organize logos, icons, and insignia from across the globe, and I also began to research the symbols of expression employed by the specialized fields of mathematics, chemistry, physics, drafting, musical composition, choreography, and corporate branding, among others...

Xu Bing then connects this to earlier (in and of themselves false) descriptions of Chinese as a universal language:

In 1627, the French thinker Jean Douet, in an essay titled "Proposal to the King for a Universal Script, with Admirable Results, Very Useful to Everyone on Earth," first suggested that Chinese was a potential model for an international language. The word "model" is important here because Douet does not limit this "universal script" to the form of Chinese characters per se. He instead focuses on the universal potential of the system of recognition upon which the Chinese language is based. Today, nearly four hundred years later, human communication has indeed evolved in the direction predicted by Douet. We have come to sense that traditional spoken forms are no longer the most appropriate method for communication. And, in response, great human effort has been concentrated on developing ways to replace traditional written languages with icons and images. For this reason, among others, humankind has entered the age of reading images.

And lastly connects the project with his own previous work:

I have created many works that relate to language. This subject first took shape twenty years ago with a piece called Book from the Sky. It was called Book from the Sky because it contained a text legible to no one on this earth (including myself). Today I have used this new "language of signs" to write a book that a speaker of any language can understand; I call it Book from the Ground. But, in truth, these two texts share something in common: regardless of your mother tongue or level of education, they strive to treat you equally. Book from the Sky was an expression of my doubts regarding extant written languages. Book from the Earth is the expression of my quest for the ideal of a single script. Perhaps the idea behind this project is too ambitious, but its significance rests in making the attempt.

(Despite the length of those excerpts, the full essay is, in fact, much longer -- click through if you want to read more.)

Whether he's successful or not you can yourself judge. Certainly the above passage is comprehensible to me -- and, I suspect, will be comprehensible to many people who speak no English, so it's not that language that's clarifying it for me. (I have doubts about its universality -- it seems to me to be a sort of "language" of its own -- but I agree with Xu Bing that the attempt itself is worthy.)

I should forewarn anyone who wants to read more, however, that the web site's navigation is a bit counter intuitive -- I suppose Xu Bing didn't spend as much time clarifying that as he did trying to clarify his symbolic language. If you go to the web site and click on the "read" icon, you are directed to this page, which is called (in the web browser) "basic", which contains a six paragraph text (can I call it a text?) of which the above-quoted paragraph is the opening. This text is titled, appropriately enough, "". But there's no indication of any further text -- at first I thought that that brief passage was the entirety of the work. If you then click again on the "reading" icon, however, it takes you to this table of contents, which lists fourteen chapters (by number only), with a final page promising "to be continued". There isn't any indication (that I've seen) about the relationship between the initial text and the fourteen numbered chapters. I've only carefully read the former, so I may well be missing something, but a brief scan of the latter makes it seem like the original text is a sort of proof-of-concept sketch, which is then elaborated in (rather than continued in) the first chapter of the actual book.

Still, if you're looking to read more, you'll want to go beyond just the first page.

Since the table of contents lists only numbers, but the actual pages themselves have chapter titles (all in Xu Bing's symbolic language, naturally), I thought it might be of some small service if I were to provide a hyperlinked table of contents to the work as it exists so far:

Preface (?):
Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:
Chapter 3:
Chapter 4:
Chapter 5:
Chapter 6:
Chapter 7:
Chapter 8:
Chapter 9:
Chapter 10:
Chapter 11:
Chapter 12:
Chapter 13:
Chapter 14:

There it is, if you wish to read it. As with many tables of contents, I think you get at least a hint of the story's shape just from the titles. I can't recommend it -- again, all I myself have read is what I'm calling the "preface" -- which is interesting as language, but not so interesting as story. But it looks like the longer version may well improve on that latter score. Someday soon I hope to find out.

A post script: two categorical queries

Is The Book From the Ground a Oulipian work, i.e. a work of constrained literature?

I would say it is not. It is an experimental work, certainly, but not I think "constrained" in the sense that that term is used by the Oulipo and its adherents. I can imagine some disagreement on this point -- the Oulipo has done some work on altered languages, such as Jaques Jouet's "The Great-Ape Love-Song" (published in English translation in Oulipo Laboratory). Nevertheless, it seems to me that a newly-invented language -- particularly one not related to any existing language, but pictorial in origin -- while involving, as every task does, certain constraints, is clearly not constrained literature in any plausible sense.

Is The Book From the Ground comics under the McCloudian definition ("juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer"***)?

Again, I would say no. It's not that I am unwilling to apply McCloud's -- to my mind, extremely fruitful -- definition broadly. (In fact, I have been criticized for doing so in the past (see comments.)) But it seems to me that Xi Bing's work is clearly not comics in any plausible sense of the spirit of the term (again, in McCloud's usage).

Again, I can imagine some disagreement here: one might say that Xu Bing's work consists entirely of "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer", so if it is not comics, then does it not represent a plain counter-example to McCloud's definition? I would say it does not, because what Xu Bing is doing ultimately is repurposing what were pictures and other images into a symbolic language, i.e. by the time he's "written" his "texts" what he's working with are no longer images in the sense that McCloud intends.

That said, I think that you could make a plausible argument to the contrary, and either understand what Xi Bing is doing as comics (it is derived, as noted above, from airline instruction manuals and the like, which McCloud does specifically include in his understanding of comics), or tweak McCloud's definition to exclude it (which risks accusations of monster-baring, but may be the best way to go). Alternatively, you could understand Xi Bing as taking comics and changing it into a textual language -- see it not as comics, but as a derivation of one particular form of them. This might be the most accurate approach.

Did you include this entire postscript just as an excuse to tag this post with "ou-x-po" and "comics", since you thought Xi Bing's work would be of interest to those interested in those categories, despite the fact that it isn't, basically, either Oulipian or comics?

We said just two questions.

________________
* I haven't seen any site which prints that in proper pinyin, i.e. with tones marked, or I'd reproduce that. Without tones, the pinyin doesn't give sufficient information to pronounce his name. (If anyone happens to know, please leave the information in comments! If it helps, his name in Chinese (according to Wikipedia) is 徐冰.)

** Be grateful I cut off the quote before he started talking about "deconstructive bricolage".

*** Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 9.

"And the whole world was of one language and of one speech"

A fun site I found last night (via) has the bible in multiple languages, formatted in parallel columns. This is not itself so rare, but this particular site has the bible in both Chinese and Pinyin (the standard romanization system for Chinese), which I don't recall seeing before. And you can line those up with English, or French, or a number of other languages. Fun for those of us who don't know Chinese, but who enjoy lusting after it from a great distance.

Now, the English is that of the King James Bible -- which is to say, it's pretty but also pretty inaccurate as far as translations go. And I have no idea, really, what the provenance of the other translations are -- whether, for instance, they were translated from the original languages, or from other translations, nor how accurate they are.

Still, y'know, fun.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
Toute la terre avait une seule langue et les mêmes mots.
那时，天下人的口音，言语，都是一样.
Nàshí , tiān xià rén de kǒuyīn , yányǔ , dōu shì yíyàng.

That's Chinese in simplified characters; they also have traditional. Furthermore, they also have an audio recording of the Chinese -- pretty cool, frankly.

The one thing they don't seem to have -- an odd omission -- is the Bible in the original, i.e. Hebrew for the Tanakh, Koine Greek for the new Testament. On the other hand, you can find that a lot of places (e.g.). The site above seems really to be designed for the Chinese.

Oh, and this quote, of course, is Genesis 11:1 -- the beginning of the creation myth that this most excellent of myth collections offers for the multitude of human languages.

"America is not in decline, it has declined."

Timothy Burke had the terrible experience of getting Lyme Disease, and, in the process of telling us about it, presents some reflections that enlighten more than just his particular disease, or even the particular problem he applies it to:

...as a matter of policy, the hospital was coping with a large number of local patients using its ER for ordinary medical care by passive-aggressive neglect. Unless you walked in with an immediately and obviously life-threatening condition, time would be your triage, not a medical professional. If you could endure waiting eight to nine hours, that was proof that your condition was sufficiently serious that you might need urgent care....

The basic problem faced by this hospital and many others is structurally serious and requires a strong nationally consistent solution. Given that one political party struggled to formulate a fussy, detail-strangled series of half-measures to address the problem and the other party apparently thinks there isn’t any issue in the first place, I’m resigned to this situation happening again to me, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, for the rest of my life.

This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined. A nine-hour wait at a well-built, well-staffed, well-resourced medical center for treatment of a serious condition is decline. As a traveller seeking urgent care, I’ve been seen more quickly in similar facilities in both Africa and Europe.

I've given a bit of the context so you can understand what he's saying a bit better, but let me highlight this part again:

I’m resigned to this situation happening again to me, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, for the rest of my life. This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined.

Yes: resigned. Because what can we really do? Politics seems hopeless -- and yes, I know, rage rage, the political Pascalian dilemma, and all that, but even if the rational thing to do -- even if the rationally irrational thing to do -- is to keep struggling, it just feels hopeless, a hopelessness that washes up and batters you like the sea.

Sometimes it's hard to feel like they've already knifed the country (if not the world) in the heart, and all that's left is the flopping around, the ugliness of blood, and a doctor's calling the time to make it official.