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The Grannies, the Gambian, and the Bannon
Noted recently in a Roman paper, as reported by Roberto, who had taken a local bus to Villamaina, his hometown in Campania. Another passenger boarded just after him. The news photo indicates a slight resemblance to the young Tiger Woods, black cap and brown arm stretched confidently, possibly tensely, across the headrest.
Several nonnine, grannies, on the bus, far from any country club fairway, took an immediate interest in the young stranger. One asked his name, another his birthplace, his story, his plans. He was Omar from Gambia, living at the refugee center in Lacedonia, on his way to visit friends in the next town.
Lacedonia’s modest center accommodates sixteen unaccompanied minor refugees. When it opened in 2017, Italians were still rescuing drowning migrants from the Mediterranean, taking in more refugees than any other European country.
Here you don’t see the townspeople marching in solidarity, but they did.
Two years ago the mayor of Riace, a crumbling medieval village in Calabria, had become the international hero of migrant resettlement, having integrated several hundred refugees into his depopulated community, using good sense, good will, and government stipends for migrants (39 euros per day).
Then last November, the so-called Salvini Decree was passed, and in April five hundred refugees were evicted from one of the largest migrant centers. The new decree abolishes the two-year humanitarian residency permits granted to migrants who don’t qualify for asylum status yet are deemed too vulnerable to be deported. No longer eligible for assistance, they are now effectively homeless. Critics of the decree say it will push thousands to live on the streets, unable to rent housing, work legally or go to school. The remaining centers in the CARA system(Centers for Refugee Welcome & Accommodation) are set to close in coming months.
Meanwhile, Riace’s mayor Domenico Lucano
has just been indicted by the Italian supreme court for specious fiscal violations. Laura Boldrini, former speaker of the Italian parliament, says that Salvini plans to dismantle a model of refugee integration that has worked and is known around the world. “Every cent of public money should be accounted for, but how can the head of a party that has stolen 49 million Euros from Italian citizens tell a Calabrian mayor that there can be no irregularities in the public finances.” A recent court ruling called out Salvini’s League party for fraudulent claims of 49 million euros in electoral expenses.
Two ancient Greek statues washed ashore near Riace in 1972. In the 7th and 8th centuries BCE, the coasts of the Italian boot and the island of Sicily had hosted—willingly or not—such large numbers of Greek immigrants that the area became known as Magna Graecia.
Aeneas, legendary shipwrecked warrior, found a warm welcome at his Mediterranean landfall in Carthage. Maurizio Bettini, the widely respected Italian humanist, begins with Aeneas and traces vivid continuities between the acceptance of basic human rights in antique and modern times, despite the ancients’ slavery and subordination of women. Strangers in the ancient world were to be welcomed, the hungry fed and the thirsty given drink. Lost travellers were to be guided. Bettini evokes the true horror in the many corpses of refugees floating today in the Mediterranean.
While the Italian government turns away refugee rescue ships and closes migrant centers, it manages to accommodate the far-right takeover of a 13th century monastery, the Certosa di Trisulti, on a hilltop south of Rome.
Certosa di Trisulti
Spearheaded by Trump’s former chief strategist and international populist extraordinaire, Stephen K. Bannon, the Dignitatis Humanae’s academy aims to prepare students to become “warriors” against secularizing enemies of the Judeo-Christian tradition who persist in denying that man was created in the image of God.
Bannon and well-connected Catholic friends hope to counter the influence of the pesky liberal pope Francis, with his compassion for migrants and his warnings about the dangers of growing nationalism in Europe.
Mr. Salvini and his allies contend that an erosion of the traditional family by liberal values has contributed to Italy’s low birthrate.. They argue that if Italians don’t have babies, they risk replacement by migrants–Muslims–from Africa.
In the wake of the Salvini Decree, several Italian mayors have declared their intention to ignore it. Leoluca Orlando, mayor of Palermo, has been joined by other left-leaning mayors in Naples and Florence who say they will bypass parts of the decree which they believe to be unconstitutional. The mayor of Naples has also offered to take in migrants stranded at sea that Italy has turned away. Maurizio Bettini has been declared an honorary citizen of Palermo.
Meanwhile, the bus holding Roberto, Omar, and the grannies arrived at Sturno, pop. 3,083, where the ladies descended. But before leaving, they turned to wave at Omar. “Bye, Omar, stay strong, you are fine, don’t worry, we love you.”
Roberto, who had originally passed the story on to La Repubblica, said that the incident was a small testimony that “the other Italy” still exists and resists, even though mostly unobserved in the cascade of violence that the press faithfully reports almost every day.
With that ficcanasare (nosiness) typical of old people in the provinces, those grannies managed to bring normality to center stage, to remind us that there have always been those who sought to escape, “even from here”. One woman cited her husband, away in Germany for twenty years, and a nephew who emigrated to England. “There is always a north and a south, wherever you are.”
∞
WAITING FOR VERDI
Last month I was in Italy, where summer had steamed in early and politics had moved into operatic extremes of drama and imbroglio only slightly leavened by farce. Finally running the new coalition government are the boy wonder of the Five Stars populist movement, founded by a comedian, and the head of the proto-fascist League, who is no longer a joke. The two chose as the new premier an amiable law professor with a CV padded by drive-through sojourns at prestigious universities in Europe and the U.S.
Five Stars leaders
Luigi di Maio and Matteo Salvini
While peculiar politics also reign in my own land, in Italy we tend to see their aberrations as a familiar comedy rather than a dark threat to the survival of the planet. Hard to remember that our Yankee republic was founded almost a hundred years before the bickering regions of the Italian boot could be laced together.
At least Italy’s revolution was accompanied, if not actually orchestrated, by music—with Giuseppe Verdi as its figurehead. Verdi’s poignant chorus from Nabucco, “Va Pensiero, sull’ ali dorate,” sung by homesick Hebrew slaves, has come to symbolize the patriotic fervor that led finally to Italian unification.
Waiting for Verdi is the title of a long-awaited new book by Mary Ann Smart, a music historian who writes brilliantly about opera and society. The title clearly contains an ironic reference to Samuel Beckett’s play, but also to the high anxiety shared by struggling Risorgimento patriots, artists and revolutionaries as they struggled toward Unification.
Often as Verdi’s work is linked to Italian revolution, A Masked Ball is set instead in colonial Boston, replete with an a doomed romance, an assassination, and a dusky-skinned fortune teller. Not very diligent research has revealed that the original libretto required Ulrica, the fortune teller, to be played by a “negro.”
Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial
Thus the Metropolitan Opera debut of the sublime contralto Marian Anderson, in 1955 the first African-American to sing there.
Nabucco was also playing at the Vienna State Opera when I was a student living with the family of an impoverished baron just a block from the opera house. But the concert and opera posters reminded me of periodic tables, and knowing next to nothing about opera, I went to the Richards, Wagner and Strauss, but never to Nabucco. Little did I know that it was a thrilling tale of King Nebuchednezzar, proprietor of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and featured madness, passion, betrayal, and wanton destruction of selected temples and gods.
In 2015, the Greco-Roman Temple of Bel at Palmyra, 32 CE, was destroyed by ISIS vandals soon after they had beheaded Khaled al Asaad, Palmyra’s much respected chief of antiquities. The Temple of Bel, according to another archaeologist, Khaled’s friend, had actually been a kind of a monument to religious coexistence. The main altar of the temple had been used for sacrifices to different gods, sometimes even side by side. The archaeologist also pointed out that ISIS had announced the destruction of Palmyra well in advance of the fact, but the international community had done nothing.
ruins of the Temple of Bel, 2015
In any case, peaceful coexistence in Syrian lands is hardly even a memory. Now the best expectations are that some 75,000 Syrian refugees fleeing Daraa—where the so-called civil war began—can be sheltered in Jordan. Four million other Syrians are still homeless.
Meanwhile, the tragic histories of the ancient Middle East have fueled many operas besides Nabucco. How many works of art and music will commemorate the refugee flights of this century, and to what end?
For some years it has been proposed, and rejected, that Italy’s national anthem be replaced by “Va Pensiero,” the haunting Hebrew slaves’ chorus in Nabucco. Only recently it has been adopted by the far-right League, as its official hymn. Matteo Salvini and his League are committed to labeling and expelling all immigrants, including thousands of Roma who are legal citizens. Here, whatever Verdi’s politics were, we could use the intervention of the Anvil Chorus.
THE GOOD NEWS!
THE GOOD NEWS!!
Where to begin? Simply typing that unlikely heading suddenly turned my screen deeply black—tracked with tiny white letters like tearstains.
Anna, a Google emergency chatter, rescued me. I decided to persevere. Anna had promised to stand by in case the Dark Side returned.
Though the Comey imbroglio doesn’t qualify as Good News yet, it may prove the beginning of the end of 45’s reign.
For Genuine Good News, vetted by the UNHCR, Al Jazeera, BBC, and Wim Wenders, please consider the following:
RIACE: ITALIAN VILLAGE ABANDONED BY LOCALS, ADOPTED BY MIGRANTS
This southern Italian village saw its population plummet from 2,500 to 400 by 1998. It’s a familiar pattern, locals moving north in hopes of better jobs.
Riace mayor Domenico Lucano saw the international flood of refugees into Italy as an opportunity rather than a blight. When a boatload of Kurdish refugees landed on Riace’s beach, Lucano proposed that they remain in the village and occupy some of the hundreds of empty houses and apartments— while making themselves useful around town, in construction and gardening, learning Italian, and sending their children to school.
This they did, and before long Riace was becoming the model for other depopulated towns. Each asylum seeker receives ca. $39 a day from Rome to cover housing, food, clothing, and medical care. Much of this funding is recycled right into rentals and local shops—which have revived thanks to renewed needs..
Obviously the welcoming policy is more economically and socially sound than financing massive refugee camps outside the big cities. Riace is now inhabited by people from 20 countries.
The mayor of a nearby town, Gioiosa Ionica, notes that aside from the economic benefits, the presence of refugees also brings a certain cosmopolitanism to local children, who learn that people of another color or religion may play cricket, not football. But they can all play foosball.
In Germany a couple of enterprising mayors have also welcomed migrants into their dying towns, with mixed success. On the whole, European countries are notoriously unwilling to absorb more than a tiny number of refugees.
The question of admitting and resettling refugees has brought down governments across the world. Domenico Lucano of Riace certainly deserved his prize in the Mayors of the World competition, but the big picture is still dark.
The first group of migrants to accept Lucano’s invitation to settle in Riace happened to be those two (or three) hundred Kurds. The Kurds do have a distinctive history, relatively unknown in the West these days—though they are increasingly viewed as the most effective military force against ISIS in the Levant.
En route to China, Marco Polo met Kurds in Mosul, and had little good (or reliable) to say of them. The high point of Kurdish history seems to have been the reign of Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria in the twelfth century.
Saladin was a swashbuckling Sunni of Kurdish origin, lord of several Crusader castles.
Krac de Chevaliers, which I saw just before the outbreak of the civil war, has been many times threatened, destroyed and restored. Saladin was defeated by Richard I of England (the Lionhearted) in the battle of Arsuf in Palestine. Arsuf had been Appollonia in the Classical Age; such are the layerings common in the Levant.)
The Janpulat clan were Kurdish feudal lords in the north for almost a century before the Ottoman conquest of Syria. One was appointed governor of Aleppo in 1604, but that ended badly, as so many campaigns have in that ancient city.
A thousand years after Saladin, the United States believes that the Kurds of Syria are the most powerful indigenous force against ISIS. Certainly the Kurds would like to reunite their fragmented holdings in northern Syria, Iraq, and Turkey.
For many years Turkey has feared establishment of a Kurdish state and would like to insert the Turkish army into the battle for the ISIS capital of Raqqa.
“Let us, huge America, all these coalition powers and Turkey, let us join hands and turn Raqqa to Daesh’s [IS] grave,” Erdogan said recently. He could have added, “Without the Kurds!”
Raqqa is not so interesting, said our guide, driving us quickly into and out of the nondescript town in October 2010, shortly before Syria began to implode. In fact Raqqa was once a major capital, competing with Baghdad along the Euphrates River, until its definitive destruction by the Mongols in the 12th century.
Erdogan and Trump will meet in Washington on May 16. It will be the first meeting between the two authoritarian heads of two NATO countries.
Trump said early on that he planned to stay out of Syria, but then changed his mind. Mysteriously, the badly targeted bombs raised his approval ratings both at home and abroad.
Now what? Trump holding hands with Putin over the smoking remains of Syria. Though the present nation of Syria was of course only a convenient figment of western imperialism. The Kurds have at least as much historical claim to a homeland as today’s Syrians.
Those Kurdish refugees who chose to settle in the little town of Riace are not only out of the line of fire, they are in a grand tradition. In the 7th and 8th centuries BCE, the coasts of the Italian boot and the island of Sicily hosted—willingly or not—such large numbers of Greek immigrants that the area became known as Magna Graecia.
The reasons for the ancient exodus have never been clear: war, famine, expulsion, plague, simple overcrowding or a whim of the oracle at Delphi.
In 1972 a scuba diver discovered two bronze statues buried in the sand not far from the Riace beach.
They turned out to be splendid life-size warriors from the 5th century BCE. Probably they were part of an ancient coastal settlement now underwater on this “subsiding coast.”
But that’s another story, and definitely not Good News.
POTUS FULFILLS CAMPAIGN PLEDGES AND MORE
I was in the “wait and see” camp, and now we have seen.
Closest to home, the helicopters were back above Berkeley this week, along with the police from nine campuses and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. The latest techniques in protest enhancement include dramatic use of fireworks and safely contained fires.
Social media will soon feature these scenes of the conflagration from scores of phones, in a technique pioneered in the Arab revolutions.
Potus, always alert, tweeted a pre-dawn threat to defund Berkeley, for allowing and then cancelling, in the face of violent protest, the appearance of a truly scary young right-wing provocateur invited by the College Republicans. Nobody gained from the hullabaloo but the anarchist Black Bloc, of whom we’ll no doubt hear more.
Meanwhile we await Potus’s promised actions against the ongoing carnage in Syria and the globalizing terror of ISIS. Bombing ISIS does involve continued slaughter of civilians. The proposed Syrian safe zones for refugees would have to be defended. One thing he has already clarified: there’s no haven for Syrian refugees in the U.S.
In the early years of the rebellion, foreign journalists were variously expelled by the Assad regime or beheaded by the rebels. The major news organizations retreated to report on Syria from desks in Beirut or Istanbul. Only very lately have we had lucid analyses of events in Syria and the Levant. ( See Joshua Landis in TPR and Rania Khalek in FAIR.) Recent accounts explain how incoherent U.S.and U.N. interventions have only served to lengthen the conflict. There have never been “moderate” rebels to “support” with arms.
Meanwhile, no new road to peace has emerged amid the ruins of ancient cities and hardscrabble desert. But given Potus’s apparent bond with Putin, what seems likely is the restoration of the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad. For the ten years prior to the serial eruptions of the Arab revolution in 2010, Assad managed to keep the peace in Syria. Sunnis and Shiites, Alawites and Druze, Iraqi Christians and Kurds, and Saudi versus Iranian oil interests–all were prevented from annihilating each other. Assad and his wife were popular enough to be able to appear in public without bodyguards.
Assads as tourists in October 2010
Early on, Assad had outspokenly condemned the West’s war in Iraq as illegal, and even Obama never forgave him. (Two tall, slender, intelligent, somewhat arrogant men with attractive, charismatic wives…) Oil makes strange allies, but when the U.S. partners with such murderous regimes as that in Saudi Arabia, condemning the heavy-handed security measures of Assad’s generals could be seen as somewhat hypocritical.
Last week Russia, Iran and Turkey met in the capital of Kazakhstan, in the Astana Rixos President Hotel. For only $1,913, including flight and hotel, I could have provided first-hand news of the conference. As it is, we had to rely on the New York Times.
International conference on peace in Syria, Hotel Rixos, Kazakhstan
“Palm trees planted indoors belied the subzero temperatures and blowing snow outside, as a flute-and-piano duo wearing evening gowns played “Strangers in the Night” and the theme from “Titanic.” Western diplomats, largely sidelined, huddled in the hotel’s Irish pub, and the United States ambassador to Kazakhstan, who was invited over Iran’s objections and attended only as an observer, avoided reporters..”
While the diplomats dance and drink in Astana, Syrian rebels amass in Idlib province in the northwest, where the Syrian government’s Minister of Reconciliation has been relocating rebels from Aleppo and Daraa.
Daraa, the southernmost settlement in Syria, had been the main stopover between Baghdad and Damascus for a thousand years or so. When we stopped there for water on a hot October day in 2010, the dusty square was filled with what I gathered later were refugees from the drought in the northeastern desert, Others had moved across its porous borders with Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.
Not surprising that this place would be the Syrian flashpoint of the Arab uprisings. A few months later, some bored Daraa boys posted anti-government graffiti and were arrested. The locals massed to protest, and government security forces firing on the crowd were filmed on cell phones, not unlike the chroniclers in Berkeley this week. When one of the protesters died, videos of the funeral went viral, sympathetic rebellions broke out across the country and were brutally repressed.
Protests erupted next in Deir ez Zor, a dreary town on the Euphrates that was once an important trading post between the Roman Empire and India. In October 2010, we Americans were welcomed as the harbingers of coming tourist masses. The owner of our hotel gave us a preview of his new restaurant, which had a southwest American motif and dance-hall chandeliers. Tourism had increased fourfold in the past year, he said.
Deir-ez-zor, August 2014
Further south, we explored the ruins of Sumerian Mari and Roman Dura-Europus, where the ancient east-west trade routes intersected with the Euphrates. Returning to Deir, we crossed the old suspension bridge over the Euphrates; its eastern end was at the Iraqi border, then quiet.
Bridge across Euphrates from Syria to Iraq
Note: Marking the long tradition of conquest in Syrian lands: Daraa, Deir, and Dura all mean “fort” in different ancient languages.
Syria’s latest conflict has killed more than 300,000 people and forced 4.8 million to flee. Turkey has taken in more than 2.7 million of them, according to the UNHCR, followed by Lebanon with more than a million, and Jordan with disputed figures, some 228,000 to Iraq, 115,000 to Egypt.
Some 6.6 million have been internally displaced, driven from their homes. These would be the inhabitants of Potus’s projected Safe Zones.
A million ambitious Syrians have applied for asylum in Europe, and we read in the news just how few of them are welcomed.
The U.S., that nation founded by immigrants on the backs of its natives, has found room for some 14,000. But no more. Potus and his advisor, the Cromwell of Breitbart Manor, have closed the gates after the Syrian forbears of the likes of Steve Jobs, Paula Abdul, and Jerry Seinfeld. According to an Ellis Island Record, Selim Hosni, Jerry Seinfeld’s maternal grandfather. arrived in 1909 from Aleppo, Syria, aboard the S.S. Hudson with his wife and infant daughter.
In any event, this is no time for comedy. Or is it?
DEBT IN VENICE AND ELSEWHERE
Dispatch from the Laguna
Italian friends have been most sympathetic about our recent election. After all, they say, we survived Berlusconi. It’s not the end of the world.
Silvio Berlusconi & Amico
They offer us political asylum, but then say that of course we are needed in our own country. Meanwhile, we are still here to see them through their coming referendum vote on the so-called “Italicum” reform of their electoral system.
The dynamic young Italian leader, Matteo Renzi, has pushed for a “Si” on the referendum, but is canny enough to have backed off as “No” rises in the polls
Matteo Renzi (technically irreducible, perhaps politically as well)
Renzi has been intrepid in many ways, not least in defending the rescue and accommodation of many thousands of profughi, refugees, arriving in Italy during the current migration crisis. Renzi points out that while Italy pays hundreds of millions of euros in this humanitarian mission, most other European governments have used their euros to build walls.
At a pizzeria on the Strada Nova the guy behind the counter couldn’t decide whether to use English or Italian. I suggested Cinese and we both laughed. I asked where he was born and he said Romania. He has been in Italy for fourteen years and lives in Mestre, twenty minutes away by bus on the mainland. We talked about the high rents and long commutes in Venice and California. He said he could give my husband and me one room and shared use of his Mestre apartment for 350 euros a month. I said that unfortunately we already had a rental contract through December. He said that he really wanted to learn more English so that he could get a better job, and I said that I could give him lessons if I was staying longer.
I only had a 50-euro bill to pay for my pizza. He smiled and ran off with it to get change. I wasn’t really worried when he didn’t reappear for ten minutes, but it did occur to me that 50 euros was probably more than a couple of days’ take-home pay. He said his name was Nikolai, Nicola in Italian, he added. I said mine was Frances, Francesca in Italian. See you tomorrow? he said.
A hundred yards on, I stopped to let a herd of school children go ahead of me across a narrow bridge. Meanwhile I went to a kiosk to get a paper with news about the latest earthquake in the Marche, and about the crises with the new refugees. The earthquake had definitely won that news cycle; there was not a word about the town in the Veneto that had barricaded its streets against the arrival of a dozen refugee women and children to be billeted in an empty hotel.
The vendor gave me two papers even after I had said, conversationally, that my husband usually bought the Gazzettino so I would only take La Repubblica. I said that I was sorry my Italian was so bad. He said, no, MY Italian is bad. I asked where he was born, and he said Bangladesh. He had only been in Italy for six months, he said in English. Before that, he had lived in London for six years, but it was too expensive. His brother, who had been in Italy for a long time, owned the kiosk. He lived with the brother nearby, and planned to go to school to learn Italian so that he could get a better job. My name is Francesca, said I. His is Nabis. See you tomorrow, I said. La Repubblica is running a series on changes in the Italian language, so I will be back. (I wish that Nicola’s pizza had been better.)
Of course it was only an idle thought that Nicola and Nabis could exchange language lessons. But maybe with ingenious use of cellphones and social media…some kind of networking?
I had been hoping to make myself useful in the refugee crisis, perhaps teaching or translating, during our Italian stay, but that too was an idle thought. The needy refugees were not in la Serenissima, but in Mestre and smaller inland towns, Veneto, where, unfortunately, the locals are not always welcoming. In Venice the neediest refugees only come for the day trade, foreigners passing from Rialto to San Marco from cruise ship to gondola, who might need an umbrella or a carnival mask, or will drop a euro into an outstretched hand.
Many constructive responses to the migrant crisis are to be found in the 2016 Architectural Biennale in Venice, too soon closing. And note that funds for housing the homeless were voted in by healthy margins–at least in California. As Italian friends tell us, we’ll get through this somehow.
https://francessmithstarn.in/2016/07/18/dirty-tom-trump-tower-san-francisco-venice/
WAR, PEACE, MIGRATION, and CLICKBAIT
The Ebell Theater without journalists
The elegiac tone of the 2016 Pulitzer centennial celebration, in a slightly musty but historic Los Angeles theater, suited the program’s somber themes—“War, Migration, and the Quest for Peace.”
The unprogrammed elephant in the room was the general consensus that newspapers are in serious trouble. The Los Angeles Times, hosting the occasion with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, is healthier than many metropolitan dailies–but struggling. Its parent, Tribune Publishers, has just received a $70.5 billion infusion from the ambitious entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose other quixotic investment is a cancer cure.
Many states now lack any newspaper reportage from their capitals, much less in D.C. or foreign countries.. Given the digital revolution’s decimation of local newspapers and/or their staffs, coverage of city halls and state assemblies has almost disappeared. Without journalistic surveillance—familiarly known as muckraking—government corruption flourishes, as it does in any banana republic.
War correspondents’ stories were reliably transfixing. Terry Anderson, with seven years as a hostage in Lebanon; Shirley Christian, who reported on the conflicts in Central America, discovering that nine of her ten sources in El Salvador had been killed. Journalist-director Sebastian Junger (Restrepo) said that war movies were based almost entirely on other war movies, making Hollywood a major source of military history.
Sadly, there wasn’t much on the “quest for peace”. The most memorable was certainly the photographer Nick Ut, whose 1972 photo of the “Napalm girl” was instrumental in ending the American war in Vietnam.
Everywhere, photography showed up as the most powerful tool in journalism, documenting the horrors of war, the desperation of migration, whether from Mexico or Syria.
U.S. warriors in training—photo by Craig Walker
The other elephant in the room was of course Donald Trump. Press coverage of his campaign was cited, with curious specificity, as one of the two most shameful episodes in the history of American journalism.( I don’t recall whether the second was inadequate reporting on U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Vietnam. Any would serve.)
Washington Post reporter Dana Priest explained drily that the excessive, uncritical coverage of Trump is because he is “clickbait”. Many people, my spouse included, want to know, with their morning coffee, what outrageous position Trump has just taken. In case you’ve been in a remote village on the upper Amazon for the last ten years-the total number of clicks on links to news stories on your computer or phone screen determines investors’ decisions to pay for advertising on the news site.
Someone observed that an important function of the Pulitzer awards is to reassure publishers that it is worthwhile to keep losing money for another year.
Joseph Pulitzer. by John Singer Sargent
Oddly, nobody talked about Joseph Pulitzer, the very singular Hungarian immigrant who amassed the fortune that endowed the Pulitzer prizes in journalism and the arts. Ordinarily, donors and founders, dead or alive, are respectfully, on occasion even affectionately, noted. The low spot of Pulitzer’s career, his resort to yellow journalism in a circulation contest with William Randolph Hearst, was an early recognition of the “clickbait” principle in print media.
Stanford historian David Kennedy(Pulitzer 2000) decided to end the program with a boyhood memory. His favorite uncle had taken him on a fishing trip with a bunch of his oldest and closest friends, great pillars of the (New Haven) community. Afterwards, driving home, his uncle said, “’You know, all of us were together in France during the war. You wouldn’t believe what they did.’ He meant atrocities. He meant that I couldn’t imagine what normal human beings were capable of in a war…”
This is not to suggest that the Pulitzer celebration was unrelievedly grim. The box lunch, especially the roast vegetable option, was cheering. But it was a pity that the “Quest for Peace” had short shrift in the proceedings, as elsewhere in the real world.
Sad to remember that Barack Obama in 2009 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after his eloquent anti-nuclear speech in Prague. Obama visiting Hiroshima in 2016 was eloquent again and still. But his administration has cut spending on programs to stop nuclear proliferation, and caved on Pentagon demands for funding of “modernization” of U.S. nuclear weapons. It’s not entirely clear which of Obama’s potential successors is less likely to lead us into more wars.
Pulitzer and Hearst made fortunes off coverage of the Spanish-American War, but the battles were fought with simpler weapons, and more soldiers died of disease than in combat.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” —Albert Einstein
The Panama Papers, Now Playing
Map from ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists)
“The Panama Papers” could be the title of a mid-century noir starring Humphrey Bogart or maybe Alec Guinness. In fact it is an ongoing opportunity for our failing news media to research juicy data on global tax evasion by the rich and unscrupulous here and abroad. The 11.5 billion documents are from the files of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and incriminate evenhandedly heads of state, corporations, and figures in sports and the art world. The prime minister of Iceland resigned immediately following exposure of his offshore bank holdings, and David Cameron has had to defend his father’s dealings. Putin seems to be condemned by association, and Bashar al Assad’s cousins are definitely enmeshed. (Much more will be revealed by the ICIJ on May 9.)
Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca
Our press, after reporting, often gleefully, on the rowdiest and least morally serious primary campaign in recent memory, now has an opportunity to reveal to the U.S. electorate the shady investments and slippery connections of donors and politicoes at home and abroad. There are no Clintons on the Panama Papers list so far, but some of their closest confreres have been named. Bernie Sanders will not have needed a tax shelter, and no doubt Donald Trump has other ways to protect his billions. Still, we can expect an exciting round of follow-the-money discoveries in the coming campaigns, in addition to the usual salacious reminders of sequential marital difficulties on the part of the major candidates.
Moral seriousness seems to be in short supply these days, not only in journalism and politics. This puts into high relief Adam Hochschild’s fine book on the Spanish Civil War. While the topic may seem remote just now, as the world warms, the Middle East implodes and Europe falters under the waves of its refugees, Hochschild focuses on a related issue: when is intervention in a foreign war justifiable?
The poorly armed Spanish Republicans were unable to prevent Generalissimo Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, from taking over. If the U.S. had officially joined Russia in reinforcing the ragtag Spanish Republican army, might that have forestalled the slaughter of the Second World War? If the U.S. had more heavily armed an elusive “moderate” Syrian opposition against the Assad regime, could the bombing of that hospital in Aleppo have been averted? It seems safe to say that in each case, the only certain outcome would have been greater bloodshed.
During demonstrations against the U.S. war in Vietnam, I remember a spirited peace march through through San Francisco on a sunny day, with my parents, husband, and two young children. It was one of the few times that I saw my father, an embittered veteran of World War II, suspend his cynicism. And we did eventually get out of Vietnam, whether or not our antiwar protests were crucial.
Demonstrations against the U.S. war in Iraq seemed less spirited, but then we were thirty years older, wiser, and sadder. Today, our weaponry and soldiers are still in Iraq, as well as Syria and Afghanistan—although many of the U.S. tanks and missiles have ended in the hands of the Islamic State and al Quaeda. But there are always more where those came from, given that the Uncle Sam is the largest arms manufacturer in the world, by far.
The important question of justifiable intervention in a foreign war is only too relevant, fiscally and morally, to the current presidential campaigns., “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk” by White House correspondent Mark Landler (NYTimes Magazine, April 24) examines at great length the evolution of her belief in military solutions, including her long-term friendships with various army generals. of which David Petraeus is the most photogenic.
Landler scarcely mentions Hillary’s controversial role in Libya, perhaps because the Times had recently covered it in an earlier pair of in-depth articles. The Times, which has endorsed Clinton, seems to have displayed unusual initiative in publishing these pieces, which conclude that American voters may be presented with “an unfamiliar choice, a Democratic hawk versus a Republican reluctant warrior.” Donald Trump claims that he was an early opponent of the Iraq war, which he said would destabilize the region. Fact-checkers report that he said no such thing at the time that he said it.
However these distorting, disheartening campaigns develop in the coming six months, unpacking the Panama Papers should result in more transparency about global networks of money and power.Whether the electorate’s responses will be too jaded to make the logical connections, time will tell. But after the election we can always look forward to the movie. For his part, Ramon Fonseca jauntily says that he plans to use the material in a novel.
Early Postcards from Aleppo, Belated Cease-fires from Munich, and Picking Up the Pieces
Ancient Phoenician city, Amrit, founded 3000 b.c. Near Tartous, a fishing town on the eastern Mediterranean, of doubtful strategic value.
And more recently……
Last week from Munich came a triumphant announcement by foreign secretaries Kerry and Lavrov of major humanitarian interventions in Syria, to be followed in a week by a cease-fire. Celebration was muted, and within hours the news was qualified, deprecated, and disparaged by almost everyone not involved in the negotiations, and some who were. Shortly before the news of the projected ceasefire, Bashar al Assad had declared that he would persevere until he had retaken all of Syria, beginning with Aleppo.
Given that neither a military nor a political solution is in sight, and none of the players seems deeply concerned about civilian casualties, the war will simply continue until the entire countryside, not just parts of it, becomes a sandy quarry for shards of ancient civilizations.
In 2010, near the so-called Dead Cities, left over from Roman settlement; probably by by February 2016 reduced to gravel
Perhaps the Bedouins will survive, with their camels. 
And the Alawites, with their dubiously valuable coastal bases at Latakia and Tartous.
Assad poster on door of Tartous museum in 2010
Shortly after January’s blizzard, exiting the Met Museum, I happened on a small display of postcards—faded pastel photos of Aleppo, Damascus, and Hama taken sometime during the French Mandate. These were a poignant contrast to an afternoon spent taking in many square yards of luminous Titians and Tiepolos, Brueghels and Rembrandts–not to mention the various treasures in the new Ancient Near East section.
Selections of the postcards were on offer in an envelope marked For the Syri an Relief Fund of Save the Children, $25, cash only. This last is either an ironic or realistic touch, given that in 2015 the so-called international community pledged $10 billion for Syrian refugee relief, of which less than half actually materialized. According to the U.N., last year’s biggest donor, Kuwait, provided $75 per capita for Syrian relief, followed by Norway with $28. The United States and the European Union provided less than $5 per capita, and Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates did no better.
An old postcard view of the famous Aleppo citadel shows it largely overgrown and silted up. It appears much better preserved now, even after the most recent shelling of the citadel, by the government and/or by the insurgents, than in the early photos during the French Mandate. One explanation is the extensive restoration of the ancient site initiated in 2001 by the admirable Aga Khan Foundation, a non-profit international development agency established in 1967 by Prince Shah Karim Al Hussaini, Aga Khan IV, who is the worthy son of the less worthy but colorful playboy who married a movie star named Rita Hayworth.
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The citadel of Aleppo has been destroyed countless times since the original temple was built on the plateau in the first millennium B.C.. Most of the remaining structures date from the 12th century, when the son of Saladin the Great excavated the moat, built the massive gateway and ramp, and most important, dug a deep well and a reservoir. The citadel’s slopes were faced with shiny, slippery limestone to discourage attacks, especially by night.
In 1260 the Mongols took the citadel anyway, beginning a series of invasions, from the Mameluks, who added a ring wall with 40 towers but lost it to the Ottomans in 1516. There followed three hundred years of Ottoman peace, which some now recall with nostalgia, and people moved back up to inhabit the citadel. But an 1822 earthquake leveled the citadel’s buildings to the ruins that were being mapped and restored when the Syrian civil war began. The Aga Khan conservation project focused on the outer walls and the Ayyubid palace complex within, while the Ottoman barracks became a well-equipped visitor’s center and cafeteria. The restoration was more or less completed in 2007 and presumably now serves the present convenience of the Syrian Army. Neither foreign journalists nor independent archaeologists have been inside the citadel since the war began. The extent of new damage during these latest years of fighting have inflicted will not be known for some time…..when a new assessment and reconstruction can be imagined to begin.
Is there anything to be said about these repeating cycles of feverish creation, violent destruction, and eventual restoration? The persistence and ingenuity of human efforts to repair and restore seem the only positive element of the terrible wars and natural disasters that have ravaged empires ancient and modern.
After the disastrous Florentine flood of 1966, an international rescue effort was carried out by art historians and students we recognized, even in their wading boots and mackintoshes, in the television coverage. (Cf. my account,”Restoration,” which I just located online, in J-stor.) Eventually, much was learned about art restoration, but much less about flood prevention, and some say that the Arno is as much of a threat now as it was in 1966.
There’s no way to make a transition to the disasters of September 11, 2001, where we had an agonizing, close-in view of the New York attacks. On that morning, we happened to have planned to breakfast downtown with a former student of my husband’s who was then city commissioner of culture. In the ensuing months and years, this remarkable woman had the heavy burden of coordinating much of the Ground Zero project planning and construction. But the terrorists’ mastery of 20th century destructive devices left much less of the World Trade Center to work with than the ruins of the Aleppo citadel.
A group called The Future of Syria is already planning the details of the reconstruction of the country if and when the war ends. At this point they are estimating that the recovery will cost at least $100 billion. Comparing it with the much-praised Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, which cost the U.S. $130 billion in today’s dollars, the Syrian plan seems a realistic if distant investment.
Today, this brutal conflict seems uniquely horrible in the number of innocent civilians killed, injured, and driven from their homes, but in the long view, perhaps it is not. Since 2014 there has been a lively debate, set off by Steven Pinker, as to whether our present bloody era is more or less violent than any in human history.
In any event, the Syrian civil war is a kalaidoscopic fragmentation of its conflicting forces, rebel entities all vying to represent “The Opposition” to the Assad regime in a series of variously stalled peace talks. Research has shown that in any civil war, the greater the number of warring factions and of their international sponsors, the longer the war will last. The Islamic State alone has at least four names, including ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh, and it has carved out for itself a role as the common enemy of all the groups fighting alongside or against the Assad regime. In North Latakia alone, dozens of insurgent groups have emerged, including irregular militias like the Muqawama Suriya and the Iraqi Harakat al-Nujaba, Jabal al-Akrad, and Jabal al-Turkoman. (Note that Jabal means hill or mountain.) I can’t resist adding that the A’isha Mother of the Believers Battalion was the name of a sub-formation of the Storm Brigade, now shifting to the First Coastal Brigade.
“Men and nations,” said the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, “do behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
The Syrian postcard benefit project was the bright idea of a conservator on the Metropolitan museum staff, Jean-Francois de Laperouse, who works primarily with the Ancient Near Eastern and Islamic collections. How much pain he must be suffering during these years of destruction of a culture that he knows so well.
His 18th-century ancestor was a famous explorer who mapped, among other places, the Pacific Coast of North America.
Comte Jean-Francois de Laperouse
I would like to include here an interview with the living Laperouse, but I had to leave the wonderful museum, and return to the coast mapped by his ancestor.
Again: the cards are $25 each packet, payable in CASH.
Looting and Decapitation through the Ages
In yesterday’s museums, few visitors knew or cared whether an emperor’s polished marble likeness or the graceful body of a goddess had once been goods for barter in some tomb robber’s grimy hoard. Now the end of colonial empires and the fevered growth of nationalism favor returning looted art to its place of origin. A Still, at the British Museum, you can still see, along with the Parthenon marbles, the magnificent Egyptian antiquities carted off by the son of a Paduan barber–one Giovanni Battista Belzoni.
Belzoni was an enterprising lad who dodged Napoleon’s draft by emigrating to England. Lacking both English and a profession, he found work as the strong man in a circus. Soon he won the heart of an intrepid Englishwoman, who may or may not have been a tightrope walker. She contrived somehow to set him up as an engineer, and before long he was invited by a travelling pasha to design a hydraulic system on the Nile.
When that project failed (fault of a lazy work crew, said Belzoni), he quickly shifted to the antiquities trade. Eventually he was able to dig up and haul off such trophies as Ramses the Great, with “Belzoni” chiseled naively near its large left foot.
I happened upon Belzoni during research in the old British Library, on the rich topic of Looted Art. How I enjoyed those months of bootless delving, the untidy piles of book request slips at my desk in the dimly-lit inner Reading Room, my notes filled with vivid and shocking details. Themes did emerge–Looted Art and Nationalism/Colonialism/Imperialism, but it seemed to me, then and now, that Belzoni’s story was a natural for a Sondheim opera.
I did meet a musicologist at the American Academy in Rome, who knew Sondheim well. This was immediately following 9/11. Military helicopters were circling in the blue September sky over the Janiculum Hill, and armed guards patrolled the American Embassy across the street. When we weren’t watching the sky and the street, we were all glued to CNN on our computers. Nothing would ever be the same again, we all agreed. Hardly the moment to float a frivolous opera project. Eventually the Academy fellows went back to their painting, their research, and their complaints about the Academy’s food. Although nothing in fact ever was the same again.
Still, Egyptian obelisks continue to adorn eight Roman piazzas. Venice still has its looted lions and horses, Florence an obelisk or two as well as a trove of mummies, and museums throughout the world hold treasures of other lands. Why did the Islamic State prefer to destroy rather than flaunt the captive architecture of pre-Islamic eras? Marketing of antiquities is said to be more profitable than oil sales.
While mourning Isis destruction in Palmyra, Mosul, and Nimrud, it’s hard to ignore the West’s own robust tradition of iconoclasm. This extended from biblical idol-bashing to the Crusades, the Reformation, and the French Revolution. In 16th-century Geneva and in Basel, Calvinist mobs destroyed every Catholic image they could find, from stained glass windows to statues of virgins and saints and holy medals.
And as we recoiled from the barbarous Isis beheadings, historical memory slid over an estimated 16,000 guillotined by French revolutionaries, not to mention the millions annihilated in the Holocaust. Note that enlightened France continued execution by guillotine until 1981. Their bloody revolution did occasion a French diaspora, mainly of the aristocrats. Irish emigration, almost entirely of the poor, followed in the mid-19th century.
Among the masses fleeing southern and eastern Europe before the First World War were my grandparents. Born in Moravian villages (then Austrian) they travelled to California via Galveston,Texas. My grandfather, a strapping redheaded farm boy, good with horses, had served in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry until the end of his term. It was in August 1914 as it happened, and he knew to immediately book passage to America. My grandmother, who had found work as a seamstress in Vienna, eventually followed him to California. There was no pot of gold for them in California, but they never returned to their villages.
Shortly before the Soviet Union fell apart, I went with my mother to then-Czechoslovakia. After a tense border crossing from Vienna, we pored over a large paper map and in a single day located both villages. In Mohelno we found a large war memorial and a few ancestors in the graveyard, including the the annoying uncle who had travelled more than once to visit them in Santa Cruz, California. Just outside the village were mysterious windowless towers that turned out to be a nuclear power station.
Near my grandfather’s village, Rohy, an old man hoeing by the main road pointed out the Pozar place. “Yes,”he said, in German, “that Alois Pozar (my grandfather’s eldest brother) was a hard man.” A large building near the village church still had “Pozar” over the door. Later I learned that “Pozar” meant “fire,” and the imposing structure would have been the firehouse rather than my ancestral manse.
Scant decades after my grandparents left for California, there was the crucial migration, from Europe in the 1930s, of the Jews. Many of these, in the academy and the art world especially, became our respected elders and/or the parents of many of our friends. Once, at a dinner party where table talk had turned to Israel, we realized that as gentiles, we were not as free to condemn Israeli expansionism as the others. America, founded by immigrants, didn’t welcome Jews until after the Holocaust, just as we aren’t welcoming most refugees from the Middle East now–even fewer under the new administration.
Regarding much earlier migrants, genetic research on the 5,200 year-old remains of a woman farmer found in Ireland, suggest DNA from the Middle East. Agriculture thrived there long before and after the Irish potato famine. But we don’t need ironies as much as we need peace settlements.
The good news from the Middle East is that American ally Saudi Arabia decapitated only 27 people in 2020, an 87 percent reduction from the previous year…probably because the pandemic limited the audience for this instructive public event.
Great Migrations I Have Known (11 December)
One cold November afternoon in the British Museum, a swarm of schoolchildren suddenly filled Room 41, the Sutton Hoo burial ship treasure and Europe 300-1100; the Great Migrations. Kids in school plaids circled among the glass cases holding the ship’s treasures—swords and halberds, croziers and chalices, Byzantine silverware, golden brooches, and the famous iron helmet.
Unlike most tribes sweeping through Roman Europe in those early centuries, the schoolchildren seemed peaceable and even modestly respectful of the cultural artifacts at hand.
The Sutton Hoo ship-burial dates from the early 600s, the era of Beowulf, that noble Anglo-Saxon saga read mainly in Sparknotes—at least until its luminous translation by Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
Seamus Heaney came to dinner one night in Berkeley. He was tall and solid, chatting amiably in our crowded front parlor. As it happened, he found himself standing back to back with one of the patrons of his Berkeley lecture chair, who was at that moment confiding to me that she simply couldn’t understand “one word” of his poetry. With one eye on the poetic back, I asked what she was planning to read next. After a pensive pause, she reminded me politely how much she had enjoyed my novel. Now, she guessed that she should read that new Harry Potter thing that everyone was talking about, written by some single mother on welfare.
The Irish potato famine, and the shocking British government policy surrounding it, starved at least a million Irish and forced another million to emigrate. By 1900 New York City was 60% Irish. Seamus Heaney’s family stayed in County Derry and survived, and he himself wouldn’t be commuting to Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford until the 1970s.
Apposite quotes from Heaney’s Beowulf appear backlit above the Sutton Hoo treasures, in the handsome new display underwritten by the very attractive and extremely rich Sir Paul and Jill Ruddock. The Ruddocks’ funding, and the database of the new Google Cultural Institute, have made Room 41 accessible to anyone on foot in Bloomsbury or anyone anywhere with an internet connection.
These days, opportunities seldom arise to add splendid new works to the world’s great museums, so the new philanthropy often concentrates on rearranging what already exists. And after all, the British Museum has more than 8 million objects, most from former British imperial colonies and territories on every continent and archipelago. International conventions now prohibit the wartime looting that has been common for millennia, as well as theft and resale of cultural artifacts, but those agreements don’t apply to items exported before national or global laws were in force.
A large literature and legal domain has developed around ownership of cultural property . In the most outstanding example, the Parthenon marbles were removed (hacked off the temple) by Lord Elgin during Ottoman rule, decades before the existence of the beleaguered Greek state that now wants them back on their Acropolis.
The riches of the British museum do also serve to highlight Britain’s ongoing population of immigrants. Julius Caesar in 55 A.D. arrived to spearhead, so to speak, four centuries of Roman rule, whose hegemony was eventually challenged in irregular bursts by the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, and others.
We don’t know much about the reception of migrants in the various Roman provinces. Presumably when the Saxons or Vikings or Avars or Normans had burned the crops, crushed the cities and raped the women, there was little talk of making them citizens. It’s only in recent history that the “Barbarian Invasions” have morphed into the sanitized “Migration Period”.
Now ISIS looting, its extent, intention, and execution, are much discussed. From outside, it appears that they only destroy what cannot be carried off and sold, such as the Temple of Bel and the Arch of Triumph at Palmyra, which I was so lucky to see in October 2010, gilded by a sunset, while munching on dates picked from a roadside plantation by our driver.
Abu Hani was a Palestinian exile who was able to make a life for himself and his family in Damascus. I asked him once, rather idly, what Syrian city he liked best, and he said “Perhaps Homs”. Tonight I heard that Homs, or what is left of it, has been recaptured by government forces, but I haven’t known for four years the whereabouts of Abu Hani.
The Syrians’ migration, and the others—economic, political, whatever, will continue whether or not various peace negotiations among Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, U.S. & Europe, and the (irreconcilable) Syrian factions are successful. These tens of thousands of Syrians clearly have lost hope in raising their children and making a life for themselves on their arid land amid the contending powers. Not many of them are likely to be welcomed in the United States of America, once known as “The Immigrant Nation.”
frances smith starn 