I muse on the Republican climb-down and the US constitution

An abject surrender and betrayal by spineless establishment Republicans. That's how American talk radio and conservative bloggers are excoriating the bipartisan vote on Wednesday to reopen the government without defunding President Obama’s health care law, today’s New York Times tells us. Hooray! A widespread collapse in public support seems to have forced this humiliating retreat on the Republican leadership who are blaming the Tea Party for the whole fiasco. Will the Tea Party soon split from the Republicans I wonder?

Federal workers protesting at the shut down

What makes my blood boil most? That public service workers have been laid off without pay, or (if they are deemed essential) have been forced to work without pay; or that the Tea Party has been trying to ditch the Affordable Care Act (ACA)?  Millions of Americans led by the nose by the millionaire Koch brothers. In Monday’s New York Times, columnist Bill Keller reckoned the real mission of the Tea Party and their big money backers was to use the shutdown lever to scuttle the new law before most Americans recognized it as a godsend and rendered it politically untouchable.  The Act has already within the past fortnight embarked on the task of enrolling millions of uninsured Americans.   Though on the other side here's a story in The Guardian about low-paid workers living on the breadline fearing a trend by employers to respond to the ACA by withdrawing workplace health insurance at the same time as cutting hours.

By the way don't allow me to mislead you. I can bluff with the best, and I may have given the impression I understand the Affordable Care Act. I don't. All I know is that for poor people it's a whole lot better than what went before, because to get health care in America you need to be insured, and though you still do, the insurance is now affordable. That’s as much as I understand. I'll pass lightly on. 

I got sidetracked from the government workers being forced to work without pay. In The Guardian on 12th October, Jeffrey David Cox, president of the federal workers union the AFGE, said nearly half his 670,000 members had been deemed essential workers and faced disciplinary action and the sack if they didn't turn up for their jobs despite not being paid. “Indentured servitude” he called it. 

Blame George III

Now to the big question. How come the American constitution allows one party in Congress to shut the government down like this? Crazy or what?  Well it's designed that way. The framers of the constitution were determined the president they were about to create wouldn’t become a tyrannical king like George III. A couple of weeks ago when pondering the Irish referendum to abolish the senate, I made some disobliging remarks about the parliamentary system in Ireland, where the parliament fails to hold the government to account, because through the party system the government dictates to the parliament, and not the other way round. It's so in Britain too, and so far as I know in any country whose constitution is modelled on the British system. The American Congress is a horse of a different colour. There as we’ve recently witnessed, the people’s representatives really can hold the government to account.  Trouble is of course that millionaires can sway the people’s representatives, both directly, and by persuading voters to believe in things against their interests. Even so, though I despise the Republican shenanigans on this occasion, I have to applaud the fact it was possible.
  

Why I welcome the vote to keep the Irish senate

Two posters both urging a YES in yesterday's Irish referendum. 10/10 for the Socialist Party poster.  0/10 for the inaccurate, dishonest and populist poster put up by Fine Gael, the centre-right main government party.

Irish senate referendum posters, Dublin Socialist Party left, Fine Gael right. The Socialist Party focuses attention on the tiny elite electorate for the senate, congregated in Dublin 4. Dublin 10 is a working class area. They put up similar posters in other cities.

The voters were asked to assent to a government proposal to abolish the upper house of the Irish parliament, Seanad Éireann.  Although you can't argue with the Socialist Party case, I did. I voted no, and I'm glad about the result: YES 48.3%, NO 51.7%,  on a miserable 40% turnout (nearly).

Just to be clear, none of the reasons for keeping the senate are strong and most are invalid. The Irish Seanad bears no resemblance whatever to the US senate (either in its composition or powers) and a very close resemblance to the House of Lords. So why keep it for heavens sake? I certainly don't support keeping the Seanad in its present form (no-one does) and I'm not even wedded to the idea that Ireland needs a 2-chamber parliament. A lot needs fixing in the Irish constitution. The Dáil is (like the House of Commons) a tool of the government of the day, the Seanad is almost powerless, local government has even less independence than in England, corruption is an issue.

Had the abolition proposal come to us as part of a reasoned plan to strengthen the parliament against the government, and to loosen the iron grip of centralisation, it would have had my support. But I objected to being thrown the “less politicians” bone to distract from austerity. This referendum was a stunt pulled by prime minister Enda Kenny and he got the result he deserved.

We plough the fields and scatter

The field behind our house:  the tractors were there last week.  We have plans.  A wildflower meadow.  A bit of lawn in the middle. A summer house. The photo with the sheep (of which more below) shows how lumpy the field used to be, most uncomfortable to walk on, with the risk of sprained ankles. So we paid for the field to be ploughed, harrowed, seeded and rolled, and now we’ve had plenty of rain and each morning look for first signs of the grass sprouting. 

One could ask, indeed I do ask, why our field hasn’t become a wildflower meadow already. I neglected it for years, withstood insistent advice from farmers to spray the nettles, and had a donkey in it all summer. Too late, oh too late, I've read this advice from Plantlife on creating a wildflower meadow:

“Firstly, remove the top few inches of very fertile topsoil in late summer, perhaps making some raised beds for vegetables from it. This can be hard work but is essential, as wildflowers must have poor soil to thrive.”

That nettles grow prolifically, is a sign of fertility, I believe.  So I guess my hopes will be frustrated. I do have one last throw of the dice though. Yellow rattle: a lovely annual “with a slightly sinister character”. Its roots tap into those of grasses, stealing their nutrients and suppressing their growth. This keeps them in check and many other meadow flowers benefit from the reduced grass growth. Must investigate where to get the seed.

A plug for Plantlife, an organisation I'm proud to belong to. It speaks up for and works to protect wild plants and fungi in Britain, campaigns on invasive plants, claims success in updating the law to include over 50 species that it is now an offence to plant or cause to grow in the wild, campaigns for a ban on sale of invasive plants, and owns a farm reserve in Kent with a 57 ha wildflower meadow.

Now a word about those sheep. The flock (I counted 23 of them) invaded our field in late July. For over a week they drifted in and out, visiting the fields of the surrounding farmers.  Everyone knows whose land they came from, though I'm too polite to mention your name here! As it happens we didn't mind the sheep invading our little field; but still and all it was a bit of a liberty.  And the adjoining farmers were NOT PLEASED. They resented the sheep eating their grass every bit as you would resent a neighbour walking into your house and plugging in an electric cable to power their tumbler drier from.

In which Jane Austen illusions are shattered

Fota House near Cork

Happy days. The first session of a Jane Austen class. An evening class in the morning if you will. And just to give us all the right ambience, the venue is Fota House, a stately home near Cork. Mainly ladies of a certain age, plus two blokes of a certain age of which I'm one. It's called “Austen’s World in Novels and Film” and it caught my attention because one of the three films we're going to look at just happens to be my all time favourite: Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility.

Emma Thompson as Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, 1995

Today we did Jane Austen’s world and Regency England. Jane Austen’s well-known opposition to the slave trade came up. But disappointingly for Jane Austen fans, well-known though this opposition might be, it turns out to be well-known on rather slender evidence. One sentence namely in Mansfield Park where the (slightly annoying though that’s not the point here) heroine Fanny Price has her attempt to raise the slave trade as a dinner table topic rebuffed with a general silence.

Another illusion gone: it turns out the famous portrait of Jane Austen may not be a very good likeness. “Hideously unlike” according to a niece. Actually it gets worse. The portrait we are all familiar with is a later copy of the one panned as hideously unlike. 

A copy from an original which was itself “hideously unlike”

"Comments can be bad for science"

"Comments can be bad for science" is a surprising statement from Popular Science, explaining why their website PopularScience.com, has shut comments off.

This magazine devoted to science and technology news was founded in 1872, and is “committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. ”

But they say the problem is that trolls and spambots have overwhelmed intellectual debate, and diminished their ability to spread the word of science. “It wasn't a decision we made lightly.” They claim research points to the depressing conclusion that ignorant and vituperative comments can skew popular perception of issues such as climate change. Full story here.

PopularScience.com is a site I like to keep an eye on.  For example a recent article on How Do You Dispose Of Chemical Weapons?

Syrian soldier in gas mask from PopularScience.com
(Wikimedia Commons)

Pascal and the writing of short letters

Who said : I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Dr Johnson? Churchill? Cicero? Mark Twain?

Pascal said it, Churchill quoted it, Woodrow Wilson bettered it

Until today I should unhesitatingly have said Winston Churchill, since this is what Mr Dumbreck, my English teacher when I was 12, told us. But it turns out that though Churchill was indeed fond of quoting it, he gave the credit where it is due, namely Blaise Pascal, who in 1657 wrote:

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

I have made this letter long because I don't have the leisure to make it shorter.

Dozens of other writers have expressed similar sentiments over the years, and several have had the saying attributed to them falsely. The Quote Investigator has it all if you want it. The best is Woodrow Wilson who died in 1924. He was asked by a member of his cabinet about the amount of time he spent preparing speeches :

"It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now."

I imagine Wilson was familiar with this exchange of telegrams between Mark Twain and his publisher:

NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS, which got the answer: NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.

As to Blaise Pascal, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time has just kicked off its new season with an episode on him. I've already listened to it twice. And for more on Pascal see Man, the feeblest thing in nature.

References
Pascal: Lettres Provinciales (1657) no 16. Source: Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Woodrow Wilson: Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations edited by Suzy Platt, 1989, page 624.
Mark Twain: Guardian

Major Barbara and uncouth bacilli

G.B. Shaw in 1909,
five years after writing Major Barbara

Have been re-reading GB Shaw’s Major Barbara.  I studied it for A-level English in 1966 and never gave it a second thought until I found it was being performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where we saw it last Saturday. Much to say about it, but now (oh no not again I hear you cry) I'm sticking to apostrophes.

Shaw called them “uncouth bacilli" and condemned them in the following terms:-

"The apostrophies [sic] in ain't, don't, haven't, etc., look so ugly that the most careful printing cannot make a page of colloquial dialogue as handsome as a page of classical dialogue. Besides, shan't should be sha"n't, if the wretched pedantry of indicating the elision is to be carried out. I have written aint, dont, havnt, shant, shouldnt and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he'll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. I also write thats, whats, lets, for the colloquial forms of that is, what is, let us; and I have not yet been prosecuted."

Now we'll look at a pivotal moment from Act II of Major Barbara, in the 1908 edition of Archibald Constable & Co, London. I've highlighted in green where he's left apostrophes out and in yellow where he's left them in. To my way of thinking it's a mess. Why some and not others?  Shaw doesn't even appear to have followed his own rules.  It's almost enough to make you join the Apostrophe Preservation Society.

BARBARA. Oh, youre too extravagant, papa. Bill offers twenty
pieces of silver. All you need offer is the other ten. That will
make the standard price to buy anybody who's for sale. I'm not;
and the Army's not. [To Bill] Youll never have another quiet
moment, Bill, until you come round to us. You cant stand out
against your salvation.

BILL ... Ive offered to pay. I can do no more.

Shaw didn't get everything right. When almost 89 years old he wrote a letter to The Times published on May 18, 1945, saying Irish premier de Valera was correct in calling on the German ambassador a few weeks earlier to present condolences on Hitler’s death. Shocking. Though technically de Valera was correct and Shaw was correct in saying he was correct. So maybe that’s not an example of Shaw being wrong after all.  But the apostrophe business is, imho. Link to my previous disquisition on apostrophes.

Notes: The Shaw quote is from "Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers." The Author, 1901, quoted in grammar.about.com

For an essay on the history of the apostrophe see the excellent Grammarphobia blog. It came into use in the 1500's, and the possessive apostrophe originally indicated a missing letter.