#series: appointments with the patrician

[helenvader]

The way people learn they have an appointment with the Patrician or decide to have one is always delicious.

‘Ah, Mr Lipwig,’ said Lord Vetinari, looking up. ‘Thank you so much for dropping in. It has been such a busy day, has it not? Drumknott, do help Mr Lipwig to a chair. Prophecy can be very exhausting, I believe.’

Moist waved the clerk away and eased his aching body into a seat.

‘I didn’t exactly decide to drop in,’ he said. ‘A large troll watchman walked in and grabbed me by the arm.’

‘Ah, to steady you, I have no doubt,’ said Lord Vetinari, who was poring over the battle between the stone trolls and the stone dwarfs. ‘You accompanied him of your own free will, did you not?’

‘I’m very attached to my arm,’ said Moist. ‘I thought I’d better follow it. What can I do for you, my lord?’

[thetldrplace]

SPQR- Mary Beard; Ch 4

4 Rome's Great Leap Forward

Besides the two consuls, there were a series of positions below that: praetors and quaestors. The senate was a permanent counsel of those that had previously held public office.

It was in the republican period between 500-300 BC that the roman institutions and a way of thinking about things were solidified. There were on the one hand series of violent conflicts between the hereditary patrician families, who had monopolized control of power, and the mass of citizens called plebeians, who had been completely excluded. Through time, the plebeians won the right, or freedom, to share power with the patricians. On the other hand, Rome was gradually gaining control over the Italian peninsula through a series of military victories.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, around 450 BC, rose to lead Rome to a victory, then gave up power and returned home to farm. Gaius Marcius Coriolanus was a war hero turned traitor around 490 BC.

The laws, or the twelve tables, were a series of around 80 clauses from the first written regulations. We can recognize that the scope and language reveals a still nascent legal and literate mind. It shows that by this point there was a need to codify law. They aren't nearly as grand as a comprehensive legal code, but they show a need for some sort of agreed upon ways of settling disputes.

The conflict of orders Shortly after the republic, plebeians started to grumble about their exclusion from political power. They asked why they should go fight in wars that would only line the pockets of patricians? Starting in 494 BC, they went on a series of strikes until they won concessions. Over the next centuries, they gained the political power they wanted. First, in 494 BC, was the tribuni plebis, to defend the interests of the plebs. Then they were granted a pleb assembly, but this time based not on wealth, but on geographic location.

By 287 BC, the decisions of this assembly were automatically binding over all Roman citizens. In 326BC, debt slavery had been outlawed. In 342 BC, consuls could be plebs.  

In the mid 400s BC, the plebs were able to get the laws published. They had previously been held by the patricians, and weren't available to everyone. A panel of ten men (decemviri) were appointed to collect, draft, and publish the laws. The second decemviri collected more laws and published them, but this panel was much more conservative. The second set banished marriage between patrician and pleb.  

The outside world: Veii and Rome In 396 BC, the Romans conquered the Veii, a town about 10 miles north of Rome. It seems rather to have been annexed, since shortly after, there were four new geographical tribes of Romans created. Livy mentions that the soldiers fighting against the Veii were paid from Roman taxes, marking a truly centralized organization of the state.   In 390 BC however, Rome was invaded by "Gauls", who sacked the city.

The Romans versus Alexander the Great In 321 BC, the southern Italian Samnites trapped the Romans in a valley, and the Romans surrendered. But despite some of these defeats, between 390 BC and 295 BC, the Roman army grew dramatically. Veii was a small town 10 miles away. Sentinium in 295 BC was 200 miles away across the Appennine mountains. The results of Roman victories were increased Roman territory and Roman citizenship offered to the defeated.

Expansion, soldiers and citizens Despite Rome's reputation for belligerence, they probably weren't any more so than others of that time. Rome likely never thought of conquering territory in the way we think of it today. They probably saw the wars more as a change of relationship with the conquered peoples. There was really only one obligation Rome placed on conquered people: supply of men for the army. There were no occupying forces or administrative changes forced on the conquered. But the fact that their sons were now part of the Roman army effectively forged unspoken alliances, by forcing the locals to root for Rome while their sons were engaged in fighting. If Rome succeeded in the fight, their sons shared in the booty. If Rome was defeated, their sons were captured or killed. By around 300 BC, Rome had probably close to half a million soldiers. This made them nearly invincible.  

But the more radical development was that the conquered peoples were offered citizenship in Rome. This had the unparalleled, in the ancient world, consequence of redefining what citizenship meant. Citizenship had previously meant living in a particular city. Now, citizenship was being defined as a political status regardless of race or geography. This model of citizenship would have enormous significance for Roman ideas about governance, political rights, ethnicity and nationhood.  

Causes and Explanations There was a further consequence of the conflict of orders. It effectively replaced a government defined by birth with a one defined by wealth and achievement. But no achievement was more celebrated in Rome than military victory, and the desire of the new elite to achieve victory was an important factor in intensifying and encouraging warfare. It was also the power over increasingly far-flung peoples that drove many of the innovations that revolutionized life in Rome.

Finally, it was the size and logistics of managing such an empire that developed Roman management. Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.

[troutfur]

A guide to Augur AU

As my longest solo project (sans a guest addition) and most developed AU, as well as on a request from an anon, I thought I'd make an introduction post and masterlist to the sprawling mess that is augur AU. So, without further ado!

So, what is Augur AU?

Augur AU is the universe in which my series to Aaron and his sons is set. The basic premise is to flip the script on the medicine cats can't have kits rule. Now instead they must because the position is hereditary. They also engage in the making of marriage alliances by transfering their kids across Clan lines, because I really like arranged marriage and marriage alliance drama and it felt fitting to include.

I first floated the concept way back when I was still posting Warriors content to my main blog (@aerial-jace). Since then I've talked a lot about my ideas and worldbuilding for this universe. I consider the Ao3 series the only definitive source of canon, any concept I throw around on my blog is subject to chane at any time for any reason unless it's already been established in an entry on the series.

Why is it called to Aaron and his sons?

The title is a Biblical reference, more specifically it is pulled from Numbers 3:5-10 as quoted in the NIV (New International Version) translation.

5 The Lord said to Moses, 6 “Bring the tribe of Levi and present them to Aaron the priest to assist him. 7 They are to perform duties for him and for the whole community at the tent of meeting by doing the work of the tabernacle. 8 They are to take care of all the furnishings of the tent of meeting, fulfilling the obligations of the Israelites by doing the work of the tabernacle. 9 Give the Levites to Aaron and his sons; they are the Israelites who are to be given wholly to him. 10 Appoint Aaron and his sons to serve as priests; anyone else who approaches the sanctuary is to be put to death.”

The passage refers to the establishment of the two priestly castes present in Judaism, the levites and the kohanim, which felt appropriate for a series all about exploring the concept of medicine cat as a hereditary priestly caste. Although the series is not meant to be a commentary on any real world religions, least of all Judaism, it still felt appropriate to turn to a Biblical reference for a title just due to how important and widely read the Bible is as a work of literature.

What is a patrician, an augur, and a matriarch/patriarch?

Patricians are the direct descendants of Moth Flight through the lineage of one of her kids: Blue Whisker, Bubbling Stream, Spider Paw, and Honey Pelt (or as the modern clans know them Mothflight, Bluewhisker, Bubblestream, Spiderpool, and Honeypelt). They are the only ones allowed to become augurs which is the term for medicine cats.

In order to not dilute the patrician status too much, only cats with an augur parent or grandparent are considered true patricians. Cats whose closest augur ancestor is a great grandparent don't qualify. So, for instance, while Sandstorm was an augur, neither her daughter Squirrelflight nor her granddaughter Sparkpelt were, thus her great grandchildren Nightheart and Finchlight aren't either.

A patriarch or matriarch is the most senior augur in a Clan, with preference for an augur born in the Clan they reside in. So, for instance, at the start of the story Sandstorm is the matriarch of ThunderClan and under her are the augurs: Leafpool (ThunderClan born) and Crowfeather (WindClan born). Although Crowfeather is 6 moons older than Leafpool, at Sandstorm's death it's Leafpool who gets the matriarch title instead of Crowfeather getting the patriarch title.

As the originators of the augur bloodline, Mothflight and Micah are often given the titles of The Matriarch and The Patriarch. Although it's usually Mothflight alone who's given a lot of press and importance given she was the one directly chosen by StarClan to be the first augur and he was just the matching set of chromosomes to create the lineage founders.

Fun aside about why I chose those terms particularly: I wanted to give them a Roman aristocracy vibe, particularly because in my research as I was looking for terms to replace medicine cat and such it came up that priestly offices in the Classical Greek and Roman world were often hereditary. Thus patrician for the caste, and augur (a term for a diviner/priest that reads the future in bird flight patterns) for the profession. Matriarch/patriarch was almost going to be materfamilias/paterfamilias, but I decided on English instead of Latin as to not seem too pretentious.

What is The Gift of the Patricians?

The Gift of the Patricians, also commonly called just The Gift, is a set of hereditary health conditions and neurodivergences that have been reinforced in the patrician bloodline through generations of intermarrying. These include traits that are seen as positive (such as autism or ADHD, seen as signs of closer spiritual connection to StarClan) as well as those that are seen as negative (such as hip dysplasia, a condition interpreted as a sign that the natural place of a patrician is inside the augurs' den and not out and about as a warrior).

Not all patricians are what the Clan cats call gifted but it's very, very common in the bloodline. Other conditions that often present in gifted individuals include but are not limited to: epilepsy, diabetes, and dementia. Jayfeather's blindness in particular is something I want to emphasize is NOT due to The Gift. It may be congenital but it is not genetic at all.

So, are the patricians all inbred?

Most are to a degree, yes! Outsider blood does enter the bloodline with some regularity. Sandstorm and Firestar, Ashfoot and Deadfoot, Leopardsun and Stonestar, and Littlecloud and Tawnypelt are all examples of augurs taking a mate outside the bloodline. But because of how important augurs are to the foreign policy of their Clan, they often are offered up to the augur of another Clan as a mate as a way to seal marriage alliances.

More often than not, an augur taking a non-patrician mate is done as a way to legitimize a controversial deputy choice or otherwise give them a popularity boost.

What's the family tree situation?

You can consult it right here. Beware spoilers, it goes all the way to Shadowsight and the plot of to Aaron and his sons is only just getting to late Po3. Might merit an update. The fact they don't go all the way back is intentional in most cases. For the sake of my sanity, the ThunderClan patrician lineage only goes as far back as Spottedleaf.

EXTRA!

Posts containing ideas I've thrown around for augur AU. Some explain background events a little more. Some touch upon the future of the series beyond the core plot of the Jayfeather & Willowshine arranged marriage love story. Some are possibilities I'm deliberating for said main plot.

A potential explanation for why Leopardsun and Stonestar are still lovingly married in spite of TigerClan

Unexplored Crowfeather angst

Why was Willowpaw born when her parents were relatively old?

Berrynose, Hazeltail, and Mousewhisker

The politics of WindClan

Ashfoot angst

Littlecloud & Tawnypelt

Daisy's second litter

Needletail's reaction to being roped into all this

SkyClan's reaction to this weird tradition

The current generation of ThunderClanners (Nightheart, Finchlight, Bayshine, Myrtlebloom, Graykit, Stemkit, and Bristlekit)

Frostpaw

As well there are dozens of mini AUs built off this one contributed on by the anons in my inbox. I could give y'all a guide to those as well, but this one has run on long enough.

Hope this was a useful introduction to augur AU for the uninitiated. Hope I can keep creating content y'all will enjoy.

[badkatdesignsmastersblog]

Character Writing and  Motivations in Terry Pratchett’s “The Truth”

Much like Gosho Aoyama’s Detective Conan, Terry Pratchett’s The Truth has been a personality-defining text for me since I read it in my junior year of high school. I could definitely relate to William deWorde, mouthy intellectual second-born of a high ranking noble family with a real hatred for his own overpriveleged upbringing and genuine desire to do right by others in any way he can, even if it sometimes means using his worse traits to get things done. 

And even outside of my (admittedly very personal) connection to this text I think it’s genuinely one of the funniest and most incisively insightful looks at news media out there, but the real meat of why this story works so well is the character writing. Spoilers for the story below the cut.

So this book is a razor sharp skewering of the news journalism industry, and is still as relevant today as it was in the late 90′s when it was written. But the plot itself revolves around the Patrician essentially being framed for a crime he didn’t commit by a shady group of wealthy nobles behind the scenes that don’t like how he’s running the country. In the text, this is framed as a murder in and of itself, of the Patrician’s reputation, and it’s such an interesting and good look at how being framed for a murder would actually impact the political infrastructure and systems surrounding the policies and day to day running of Ankh-Morpork. 

This in turn leads to the newly-appointed editors of the Ankh-Morpork Times having to basically exonerate the head of state following a series of clues that require a lot of fairly backwards-working logic and investigative instincts. At one point a talking dog interprets for the key witness to the crime. 

But this is all just set dressing for the real MVP of this book: the character motivations. Yes, the murder of Vetinari’s reputation is fascinating, but this book does a spectacular job at fleshing out characters that we only ever see tangentially outside of this text, and the roles they play in this world, and their motivations and inner machinations. The main three groups whose points of view are most clearly illustrated throughout the text are below.

THE TIMES EDITORIAL STAFF William is a well-meaning young man born into wealth with a chip on his shoulder who willingly chose poverty. His upbringing has made him functionally unable to tell lies thanks to (presumably) abuse, and he spends his days informing nobles around the planet of interesting things happening in his country. His motivations change from “making an honest living” to “helping exonerate the head of state” because he falls into it but just can’t seem to leave well enough alone. His associates Sacharissa Cripslock, Gunilla Goodmountain and Otto von Chriek are likewise just trying to make their way through invention or artisan services or photography before they end up similarly embroiled and also in a battle for journalistic integrity with a tabloid rival that pops up over the course of the story.

THE VILLAINS The villains are no less rich in their writing. Turnip and Pin have several sections of the book written from their perspective, and they’re also very well-written in persona and motivation (”f--kin scrag people, get money”), but the characters are so genuinely enjoyable that even the slightly jokier writing of these characters works in their favor as lovably stupid but nonetheless threatening puppet villains. And then there’s Lord deWorde - never a more unpleasant character has been written and put to the page. He’s ruthless, manipulative and conniving, and wants his way - to the point where he and his lackeys will hire two henchmen to get the main politician out of the way so he can crush the state sanctioned unions (the Ankh Morpork guild system can be read that way but let’s not get distracted). He twists and manipulates language, poise and bearing to achieve his ends, and it’s never presented as a good thing that William has these traits. 

GASPODE AND THE CANTING CREW And below the heroes and villains there’s the Beggars’ Guild and their talking dog friend, who does most of the thinking. Gaspode himself is always looking out for the Guild who keep him safe and (for lack of a better word) fed, and it is on his suggestion that they get involved by selling newspapers. The different members of the Canting Crew as well are more than just pitiable caricatures or just meant to illicit disgust - they all have their own distinct personalities and are never denigrated or treated poorly by the text to prove a point. They all have really strong relationships with one another, and very well written dialogue amongst themselves. 

And this doesn’t even mention the literal dozens of minor characters with their own rich internal lives and motivations. More likely than not this will impact and inform the story I choose to tell, the characters I emphasize and how I write them.  

[squadron-of-damned-writes]

Chapters: 2/? Fandom: Discworld - Terry Pratchett Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Lord Downey/Havelock Vetinari Characters: Lord Downey, Havelock Vetinari, Roberta Meserole, Original Characters, John Keel - Character, Johan "Ludo" Ludorum, Wuffles (Discworld), Duke Sto Helit, Mort (Discworld) Additional Tags: Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Third Person, POV Character Much More Intelligent Than The Author, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Alternate Universe - Noir, Attempt at noir Series: Part 2 of The Skirt of Time Summary:

In which the banker fails to recall a song, a dog sets a devious trap, and a king has an appointment

Set in the timeline where John Keel became the Patrician of A-M, Downey dropped out of the school after graduation, and Vetinari handles the family bank.

[ratherhavetheblues]

INGMAR  BERGMAN’S ‘SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE’ “Something peculiar is happening…”

© 2020 by James Clark

By the year of 1973, Ingmar Bergman had crafted a remarkable wave of trenchant and thrilling films, not to mention an auxiliary career in theatre. He had no conspicuous need to produce a television series; but he did. Figuring out what possessed him to do that, becomes our job today.

The singularity (at that point), namely, Scenes from a Marriage, became a hit. But we must add that a television hit is not a Bergman film hit. He promptly pared that melodramatic jag into a feature film, of the same title; and something very strange and demanding came to pass. The two protagonists, Marianne and Johan, remain the patrician piece of work who ramped up those ratings. But, with Marianne’s caseload, as a divorce lawyer reduced to only one client to be seen, the Bergman we’ve come to know trains his concern about how a pair like Marianne and Johan (the latter being a professor of psychology) and their somehow lofty ilk manage to rule, not only modern life but all of world history.

The only adult on the screen being that client of Marianne’s—readily forgotten by the young and the restless in thrall to the seeming endless riot— a middle-aged woman who presents a need which Family Law (shored up by clinical psychology) does not touch, becomes a hit and run casualty, bound to self-remedy. (Later on, Johan makes an unintentional joke when declaring—bold as brass—“I don’t know anything about reality…”) The certified expert in the room (a room with Marianne’s beige apparel on beige décor) sits down with the client wearing black with a small yellow scarf. “In the first meeting we usually establish the issues and look at how to solve them,” Marianne explains. “I want a divorce,” the composed customer already concludes. The solver, with a process which may not avail itself to pat solutions, takes a statistical slant. “How long have you been married?” (The answer being, over 20 years.) “Do you have a profession?”/ “No, I’m a housewife.”/ “Why do you want a divorce?”/ (After a long pause, Marianne looks up from her notepad and sees the stranger twisting an envelope.

 Eventually, within a transaction she was perhaps not prepared to give reasons, she states, “There is no love in our marriage.” Cut to the lawyer, wide-eyed. “Is that the reason?” the far younger fixer asks. “Yes,” the somewhat nonplussed lady replies. Smiling professionally, our protagonist asks, “You’ve been married for a long time. Was this always the case?”/ “Yes, always.”/ “And now that your children have left the nest, you want to leave as well.” She nods, not looking directly at Marianne. “My husband is a responsible man. He’s kind and conscientious. I have nothing to complain about. He’s been an excellent father. We’ve never quarreled. We have a nice apartment and a lovely summer cottage we inherited from my mother-in-law. We’re both fond of music. We belong to a chamber music society and play together…”/ “It all seems idyllic.”/ “But there’s no love between us. There never has been.”/ Marianne in close-up and her notes, as she asks, not looking at the puzzling client, “Forgive me for asking, but have you met someone?”/ Cut to the lady in close-up, her candid eyes directed at the lawyer, measuring up Marianne. She smiles, more relaxed. “No, I haven’t.”/ With the lady onscreen, there is the questioner asking, “What about your husband?”/ “As far as I know, he has never been unfaithful.”/ Marianne in close-up, looking tired, says, “Won’t you be lonely?”/ “I guess… But it’s even lonelier in a loveless marriage.”/ Marianne, with pursed lips, and eyes down to her notes. “Have you told your husband you want a divorce?”/ The lady becoming quietly annoyed by the tenor of this interaction. “Of course.” Her eyes direct, and slightly ironic. She adopts a resolved smile. “Fifteen years ago I told him I didn’t want to live with him anymore, since there was no love in our marriage. He was very understanding.” (The lady’s eyes drift into a void.) “He merely asked me to wait until the children had grown up. Now all three have grown up and left home. Now I can have my divorce.”/ Marianne speaks while we still see the petitioner. “So what does he say?”/ “He keeps asking me what’s wrong with our marriage. And I tell him I can’t go on with a relationship that lacks love. Then he asks me what love is supposed to involve. But I tell him I don’t know. How can I describe something that’s not there?”/ Cut to a rather blasé, smug lawyer, lipped-pursed and pedantic. “Have you been on good terms with your children? Emotionally…”/ The lady now back onscreen. Her gaze at Marianne suggests that she knows she won’t be more than an item of cash-flow here. “I’ve never loved my children [her face being stricken by more than that]. 

I know that now [her mouth tight]. I used to think I did… You always do… But now I know that I never loved them. Still, I’ve been a good mother… I’ve done all I could, even though I never felt anything for them.” As she looks downward, the paradox of her discourse begins to bite. That standoff can’t continue. Her divorce and its solitude comprises a crucial daring, far from readily resolved. (She’s neither as severe nor as discerning as she likes to think.) She’s ready for the inevitable critique from a fat cat (late for the appointment due to a lunch with Johan being a bit prolonged due to her mooting an exotic trip, for the sake of doing something about her malaise, having been broached on the car ride into town; then dropped, as if nothing). The lady addresses the girl, “I know just what you’re thinking” (brief cut to Marianne, with a strained smile). The girl with the profession says, “Really?”/ “A spoiled woman with no sense of humor… She has everything she could possibly want—but still she goes on about love. What about friendship, loyalty, security?”/ Cut to a smiling Marianne. “Something like that, yes…”/ This elicits a hard look across the universe. “Let me tell you something. I have a mental picture of myself that doesn’t correspond to reality.”/ Being reminded that she recently made a short cut through that path [in the sprawling TV version—not to be too caught up in its soap opera; but not to be entirely ignored], Marianne wakes up a bit. “Pardon me if I ask you a personal question… Isn’t true love…” [She rubs her brow, looks down]/ “What were you going to ask?”/ “I’m not sure. Forgive me” [lips pursed]./ From the lady’s punishing depths to a precinct of control, there is the notice, “I tell myself I have a capacity to love [hands closed]… but it’s been [open hands] bottled up…”/ (Cut to a bemused Marianne)/ The errant lady oracle, invading a corporate sanctuary, recounts, “The life I’ve led has stifled my potential…”/ Clearly unimpressed now, Marianne wants this to end. The stranger—like those of the string of other oracles of past films by an artist so adept in weaving discursive presentation into scintillating film—knows intuitively that nothing avails with the Marianne’s of the world. But, for the sense of a semblance of intelligence, the payer continues, “The time has come to change all that. The first step is divorce. My husband and I cancel each other out.”/ “That sounds frightening,” the solver declares./ “It is frightening. Something peculiar is happening. My senses—sight, hearing, touch, are starting to fail me. This table, for instance… I can see it and touch it. But the sensation is deadened and dry…”/ (A very quick slide pan catches Marianne with a visage of fright.”/ “Do you understand?” the bidder for change asks./ “I think I do…” [at least while emoting, “I’m not certain I  know who I am,” in the simplistic version]./ The real thinker leaves us with, “It’s the same with everything, music, scents, faces, voices. Everything seems puny, grey and undignified.”

 Marianne had been heard, in the loose-lips, television version, to aver, “Sometimes I wish that I could go with the flow… I’m not certain I know who I am [smoothing over the darkness with a finger kiss to assure Johan he had nothing to worry about]. It’s as if I no longer perceived myself as being real… We’re pitiful, self-indulgent cowards that can’t connect with reality…” We soon discover, from that shaky baseline, that she (and he) evince no serious critical fibre, and, on the cusp of middle-age allow themselves to toe a line prescribed by their affluent, pedantic, scared-frozen parents—his father a physician and hers a lawyer. (“It was decided early on that I would become one too.”) Seeing them both, being interviewed for a glossy magazine which specializes on emphasizing that life can be a bowl of cherries, Johan, particularly, does a victory lap in nailing for the readership the trick of domesticity. “I’m bright, youthful, successful and sexy… My mind has a global scope. I’m educated and I’m a great mixer… I’m a good friend, even to those less fortunate than myself. I’m sporty, and I’m a good father and good son… I respect our government… I love our royal family… I’m a fantastic lover…” The shoot ends with, “Don’t move! Hold that pose!…” He adds, “I’m entitled to simply look for number one…” Marianne, with her modest input and priority of “compassion,” here, might (erroneously) imagine that cut-throat advantage does not stain her actions.

Not particularly surprising, then, the sporty one decides that his wife is less than stellar and opts for a more blue-chip constellation. It is, however, the overview of this trouble in heaven which provides the food for thought. The same day our lawyer mangles the case of the lady, Marianne and Johan are seen coming home from a theatre presenting a probing Ibsen play which they found to be too dark and demanding after a hectic day attending to their excellent careers. Needing a snack, and needing quite a lot of brandy, they touch upon the switch that puts them somewhat on a stage of decisive pain. “We thought the future was bright,” she runs with. “It’s nice to have faith in things,” is Johan’s backhanded put-down. (Earlier that day we caught a glimpse of his experimental campaign—a system of lenses by which a subject would [hopefully] see something of moment. An old friend and colleague was, on that occasion, far more concerned about his past than his present. She reminded him, “In our old crowd, many of us believed you were destined for greatness. You were way ahead of us…” Included in this nostalgia was his manuscript of poetry, hanging there like a reminiscent of an asteroid. Also impinging on their self-esteem was her attempt to break the long habit of having Sunday dinner with one or other of the relatives. She phones to cancel, but can’t prevail. He, seemingly more comfortable about the sway of coercion, mocks her attempt, “The revolution was smothered at birth.”) Leaning upon their land’s reputation for being the sexpots of the planet, it would be that drift of power which the two—lying back on matching sofas, eating vintage cheese—would launch their bid for dignity. She blurts out, “What if we started cheating on one another? What would you do?”/ “I’d kill you, of course… Sometimes I wish… Nothing…” An almost surreal fissure. He lays a trap for her. “But married couples aren’t as hot for each other after a while.” Quick to jazz up a perceived embarrassment, Marianne argues, “When evening rolls along, we’re exhausted.” He, needing, it seems, bad news, fires up some purple prose, “Our life is full of little evasions and restrictions…” To that, Marianne grabs some zoology: “I can’t help the fact I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to… Sex isn’t everything, after all…” Johan, advancing like a hostile army, posits, “Making love is pretty basic… You suffer from devastatingly high standards…” She, perhaps resonating in tune to the evening’s play’s tenor of high critical standards, emphasizes kindness as a panacea in cynical times. “You don’t give me enough affection.” / “Affection takes time,” is his push-back against her and Ibsen. Sheer venom on the move, she tells him, “You have moments of greatness, interspersed with sheer mediocrity.”

     As if shifting to another theatrical attraction—this one perhaps a Strindberg volcano—(one of the periodic titles now signaling, “Paula”)—there is Johan, returning from a business trip, driving up to their summer home (the major features there being an ancient, grey-stone fence and a series of ancient wood planks shoring up the interior walls), and announcing he’s leaving her for a woman called Paula. (Such stones feature in the property of an effete and cynical architect, in Bergman’s film, The Passion of Anna [1969]. The hulking, no longer functional windmill on the ground here, recalls the comedic verve of a couple in the Bergman film, Smiles of a Summer Night [1955]. Our film today retracing malignancy and slap-dash stupidity.) Prefacing the melodrama, as she does, Marianne, on seeing him a day early, emotes, “It can’t be!” (What it can very definitely be here is lives inured to cheap gestures.) She tells him, “There was nothing on TV, so we [and their two young girls] turned in early.” (“Nothing on TV,” being a dipsy-doodle within the heart of this breathtakingly rich saga.) Finding him distracted by the pile of mail, she tries, “I was nasty on the phone last night… If you don’t want to wear a tuxedo, that’s your business… It’s hardly essential for our marriage…”/ “I’ve gone and fallen in love,” is his gambit.

“It can’t be!” no longer defines their marriage; but, unlike so many such absolute changes in marriage—as in the scene right after the socialite interview where a couple of dinner guests of theirs exchange marriage-killing insults and physical attacks—they have priorities contemporaneously overriding their formal bonds. (This may not be the patented loyalties which the world at large feels to be necessary; but it remains for them to show us an even more venerable [and malignant] force.) “I feel great, but also damn guilty for you and the children.” Though being shocked and saddened, Marianne, can, as if only in a play, speak calmly, “I don’t know what to say… Funny, I didn’t notice anything…” That that famous “guilt” has a high ceiling may indicate in his retort, “But you’ve never been particularly observant.” Her, “Where do we go from here?” shows a consummate gamer. “We’re leaving for Paris, tomorrow. I want to get away. At least for a while,” indicates that optic bite here must never be slow to use. (Paula’s being enrolled in the City of Light for six months polishing her Slavic languages, comes to us as a sign that she’s far from dedicated with major communication. The lady wanting a divorce—while Marianne also misplaces a Gallic, sophisticated power implicated in her name—could be described as learning an important [body] language.) Though Johan could be riding high in the current of advantage—she tidying up their impromptu dinner like a servant; and offering to pick up his grey suit from the cleaners—Marianne, instead of seeing a lost cause, clings to retain a life-long (often surreptitious) battle of wits in the course of having things ultimately their way. The rhetoric of finality does have a life—“I want to have a clean break… I’ve wanted to get rid of you for four years… I don’t give a damn… You can name your price. I’m not taking a thing… I’ll vanish… I’ll denaturalize…My needs are minimal…”—but when he goes on to argue that the family ties are what forced his hand, you know he’s panning for a cogency he can’t reach, but feels that only with her and her intimate perversity and insupportableness can he feel any sense of becoming significantly different from the horror he has always been. After his rant, he says, “All the words I’m spouting are just empty talk…” Hoping to get beyond empty talk, and rudely deflecting her tears, he delivers the apologia, “I don’t possess much self-knowledge, and I know little about reality, in spite of all the books I’ve read. But I believe this catastrophe is the chance of a lifetime.” (Her shot back is, “Has Paula filled your head with garbage like that?”) That oration overshoots his usual, pragmatic reasoning. Both of them will occasionally make that leap—Marianne that very night insisting to see a photo of Paula, leading her to admires her breasts—while striving to make themselves better than ludicrous. But both of them, we shall see, lack what it takes (and what the lady at Marianne’s office could proceed with some seriousness). Both of them, after a fuss, manage to sleep.

   The chapter, “The Vale of Tears,” sets forth with Johan inviting himself to the chic townhouse in Stockholm where they lived together, and where Marianne has branched out quite a lot. Paula has turned out to be far less than heavenly, and he’s used her week in London to look for rehab. “Are you such a coward that you can’t stand up to her?” is the register she presents, having moved quickly to disregard his gambit, “You look nice in your pretty dress.” She still prefers beige, but now she can say things like, “I’m afraid it’s too girlish for me…” Though the tone is careful, she doesn’t hesitate to tell him, “You look funny in that haircut. And you’ve put on some weight…” Something else she’d find funny is his fumbling lurch, “You really turn me on…” Seeing that was a mistake, he had big news about his scientific heights, couched in near-doggerel: “I don’t mind telling you, things are going pretty well for me. I’ve been offered a chair at Cleveland University for two years.” (That being the era when the town’s waterway would often catch fire.) “There’s nothing to keep me here. I’m fed up with this academic backwater. With this annoying offensive she fires back, “We should perhaps discuss our divorce… We might as well get the ball rolling…” That rolling would have a very indistinct purchase upon buoyancy.

The magnetism of this pair might appear to be strange and unusual. That it isn’t, can be discerned along a pathway of power in contrast to Peter and Katrina, the seething technocrats. Doing dishes in the aftermath, Marianne remarks, rather smugly, “Peter and Katrina don’t speak the same language… We speak the same language…” We have hitherto brought to light a small corner of the homogeneous habits and methods derived through many generations. The seeming eccentricity of our protagonists allows of how many of us cobble alliances with enemies found to be useful. During the numerous feasts and other occasions, much is in play as to entitlement on the basis of proficiency in intellection. Now we must make the inference that, though much can be accomplished along that track, it is what cannot be accomplished along that track which is paramount. Not paramount, however, to Johan and Marianne, being products of high-powered academic training, pedantry. But paramount to the lady whom Marianne regarded as a dangerous nutcase.  The lawyer and the professor—addicted as they are to crunching data—set up a rather bizarre think-tank, stretching beyond the facts of their defunct marriage. They came to hate each other as spouses, but continue to depend upon each other for combined discovery—discovery which, though gratifying in displaying advantage, was going nowhere toward incisive territory. Though the details of that conclave might be rare, the phenomena of forceful, conceptual impingement amongst antagonists are everywhere, sustaining a barrier against primordial concerns.

   With Marianne eager to formally see him gone, she still can maintain, “You should know I think of you all the time… I wonder what I did to cause the break between us.” In conveying a landslide of abortive initiatives, from (her) recent psychiatric encounters, to childhood ingratiation yielding rewards, she returns to the semi-phony refrain, heard with the lady, “I seemed to detect something that had eluded up to then…To my surprise, I must admit that I don’t know who I am…I’ve never considered what I want…It’s not unselfishness, as I used to believe. It’s sheer cowardice… Even worse [even, in fact, a copout in facing cowardice, slithering away from her responsibility], it stems from my being ignorant of who I am… Our mistake was that we never broke free from our families to create something worthwhile on our own terms” (which would be more of the same—heedless advantage). Johan had slept through all of that, just as the ringmaster in Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) had slept through an account of “something worthwhile.” They sleep together, after reading a note from Paula to Marianne: “He has no self-confidence at all…”

Two episodes at the end of this trail corroborate all we have experienced in the previous scenes. With a title, “The Illiterates,” Marianne and Johan do get their signatures on the divorce document. But the only illumination they muster is their chronic superficiality. They’re in Johan’s Brain-Station/ office, at night; and she immediately takes over in what is her province. Spoiling her triumph, however, is her frivolous resort to a magnifying glass with the papers on the table. Once again they commence consuming a lot of alcohol, as if their sober communications need something else. Soon she demands him to lie on top of her as she lies on the carpet. Other nonsense in that tone of hers suddenly finds her putting her hands over her face. She goes to the bathroom, and on returning she proposes “a tribute to a long and happy marriage.” But, by then, Johan’s taste for conflict has returned, and he insists that his interests be served. She sneers, “You and Paula can pore over the wording to make sure I haven’t screwed you over…” (The camera angle shows her eclipsing him.) From there she pushes for him to finance a school trip to France, for one of their daughters. Along with telling her he won’t be paying, he characterizes the girl as “spoiled,” which the debater/lawyer recasts as “a difficult age”—grossly misunderstanding that every age is difficult far beyond her wildest dreams. She rounds out her side of the skirmish with, “I could care less about petty details like manners.” He goes on to say, “We’re emotional illiterates. We’ve been taught about technical details, scientific discoveries and math formulas by heart. But we haven’t been taught a thing about our souls. We’re tremendously ignorant about what makes people tick.” Though she hasn’t fallen asleep, she yawns and silently expresses her boredom with that matter (of “manners”). “I don’t agree with you, but no matter…”

     Now shifting to the subject of his losing out on the hotbed of Cleveland (“Someone spat on me and I’m drowning in the spittle…”), he’s in a mood to declare, “Viewed objectively, I’m dead weight.” A few glasses more and their patience entirely disappears. She tells him, “I think I’m breaking free at last… It’s callous of me, but I don’t care…” She screams and spits toward him, “Your idiotic sarcasm!”/ He faults her regarding the way she moves and how she squats at the bidet after coitus. “I should have beaten you… I wanted to smash that hard-white resistance that emanated from you! Your behavior’s deeply seated… There is such a thing as simple affection… sensuousness… physical desire… [which he will build on this in the final episode]… In your case that’s all blocked.” She taunts him, from out of the reservoir of fake news, that he is a “parasite.” He states, from his reservoir of low-key truth, “I’m tired of being alone… Paula is worse than being all alone…” At loggerheads in various perspectives (including his preventing Marianne to reach the cab she phoned), there is the avatar of “simple affection” grabbing her throat and then punching her several times and continuing to do so while she lies on the carpet. He then sits down, exhausted; and his adversary—an avatar of violent measures previously withheld—now takes the key to clean up her bleeding face. Thus follows promptly, signatures on the divorce stationary.

   Bergman then wields, marvelously, his mastery of rich drama, in cutting to the finale, called, “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House,” which begins with the grateful gone (each long married to another spouse) getting together—the spouses both travelling out of the country—and happily headed to the old summer cottage for a tryst, not the first and not the last. There could be no change from their mutually hated positions. But the itch to scratch toward a miraculous transparency brings them, again and again, to delude themselves that they’re effectively in the action. What happens here can be very briefly shown. She had parked her deluxe vehicle in downtown Stockholm and become a beaming passenger in his unkempt, cheap car. The jet of a powerful fountain where the trip begins mocks their hopeful roulette habit. Finding the property in decline and the idea of bringing their baggage to a less than joyous spot being a mistake, Johan phones a friend still owning a beach house along that shore, and they decamp to the second dwelling. The latter is on the scale of Johan’s car; but the additional irony is its adolescent features. What they are and will always be. (A big paper clown face hangs from the ceiling.) Marianne stares into the mess, while he whistles happily in getting the fireplace to light. She begins to cry. “My dear, beloved Johan. You’ve grown so small… You’re better this way. [And the TV audience will say, “Yes! Yes!”] Are people mean to you?” He replies, “I don’t know. I’ve stopped being defensive. Someone said I’d gone slack and gave in too easily… But I’ve accepted my true dimensions, with a certain sense of humility. It makes me kind… and a bit mournful.” She says, “You had such expectations.”/ “No, you’re wrong,” he argues. “Those were my family’s expectation.” Changing the subject, he makes the mistake of asking how her husband is. He learns, as if he hadn’t already been given some inkling, that, “Henrick truly enjoys sex. And he made me realize that I felt the same way.” Her much in need here subsequent long paean to orgasms annoys him. (They lack the wit to have appreciated that that initial clash of theirs has undergone a complete switch.) “I know you didn’t want to hear the truth,” she declares, missing the huge irony. She adds that she has a taste for the marvelous things life has to offer. “Think of the awareness we’ve gained!… I persevere… I enjoy myself… I rely on common sense [that register of truth apparently impossible to surpass]… I like people… I enjoy negotiation…” That night she has a nightmare. He tries to comfort her. She comes up with, “Sometimes it grieves me that I’ve never loved anyone. I don’t think I’ve ever been loved…” He tries to bring about buoyancy by saying, “We loved each other in an earthly and imperfect way…” She becomes fine again, all things considered, by is caress and his quiet. They’re swallowing it all, for a while.

   But before that there was Johan (linked to a Johan in Bergman’s film, The Passion of Anna [1969], who had much more of what it takes), musing about nightmares. He posits, “… something in your well-ordered world you can’t get at…” (Her fright had to do with, “… my hands were missing… stumps… sliding around in soft soil… Are we living in utter confusion? you and me? Do you think we’re secretly afraid of slipping downhill and don’t know what to do?”/ “Yes, I think so, “ the slack psychologist tells the forceful lawyer. She asks, “Is it too late?” He—but what would a psychologist know?—says “Yes.”/ “Have I missed something important?” she asks./ “All of us,” the lost-Clevelander rushes to maintain. She pulls up, “… having to efface myself…” Where would creatures like them begin?

[thefortyeightlawsofpower-blog]

LAW # 34 : BE ROYAL IN YOUR OWN FASHION: ACT LIKE A KING TO BE TREATED LIKE ONE

JUDGEMENT

The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated: In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.

TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW

In July of 1830, a revolution broke out in Paris that forced the king, Charles X, to abdicate. A commission of the highest authorities in the land gathered to choose a successor, and the man they picked was Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans.

From the beginning it was clear that Louis-Philippe would be a different kind of king, and not just because he came from a different branch of the royal family, or because he had not inherited the crown but had been given it, by a commission, putting his legitimacy in question. Rather it was that he disliked ceremony and the trappings of royalty; he had more friends among the bankers than among the nobility; and his style was not to create a new kind of royal rule, as Napoleon had done, but to downplay his status, the better to mix with the businessmen and middle-class folk who had called him to lead. Thus the symbols that came to be associated with Louis-Philippe were neither the scepter nor the crown, but the gray hat and umbrella with which he would proudly walk the streets of Paris, as if he were a bourgeois out for a stroll. When Louis-Philippe invited James Rothschild, the most important banker in France, to his palace, he treated him as an equal. And unlike any king before him, not only did he talk business with Monsieur Rothschild but that was literally all he talked, for he loved money and had amassed a huge fortune.

As the reign of the “bourgeois king” plodded on, people came to despise him. The aristocracy could not endure the sight of an unkingly king, and within a few years they turned on him. Meanwhile the growing class of the poor, including the radicals who had chased out Charles X, found no satisfaction in a ruler who neither acted as a king nor governed as a man of the people. The bankers to whom Louis-Philippe was the most beholden soon realized that it was they who controlled the country, not he, and they treated him with growing contempt. One day, at the start of a train trip organized for the royal family, James Rothschild actually berated him—and in public—for being late. Once the king had made news by treating the banker as an equal; now the banker treated the king as an inferior.

Eventually the workers’ insurrections that had brought down Louis-Philippe’s predecessor began to reemerge, and the king put them down with force. But what was he defending so brutally? Not the institution of the monarchy, which he disdained, nor a democratic republic, which his rule prevented. What he was really defending, it seemed, was his own fortune, and the fortunes of the bankers—not a way to inspire loyalty among the citizenry.

Never lose your self-respect, nor be too familiar with yoetrself when you are alone. Let your integrity itself be your own standard of rectitude, and be more indebted to the severity of your own judgment of yourself than to all external precepts. Desist from unseemly conduct, rather out of respect for your own virtue than for the strictures of external authority. Come to hold yourself in awe, and you will have no need of Seneca’s imaginary tittor.

BALIASAR GRACIAN. 1601-1658

In early 1848, Frenchmen of all classes began to demonstrate for electoral reforms that would make the country truly democratic. By February the demonstrations had turned violent. To assuage the populace, Louis-Philippe fired his prime minister and appointed a liberal as a replacement. But this created the opposite of the desired effect: The people sensed they could push the king around. The demonstrations turned into a full-fledged revolution, with gunfire and barricades in the streets.

On the night of February 23, a crowd of Parisians surrounded the palace. With a suddenness that caught everyone by surprise, Louis-Philippe abdicated that very evening and fled to England. He left no successor, nor even the suggestion of one���his whole government folded up and dissolved like a traveling circus leaving town.

Interpretation

Louis-Philippe consciously dissolved the aura that naturally pertains to kings and leaders. Scoffing at the symbolism of grandeur, he believed a new world was dawning, where rulers should act and be like ordinary citizens. He was right: A new world, without kings and queens, was certainly on its way. He was profoundly wrong, however, in predicting a change in the dynamics of power.

The bourgeois king’s hat and umbrella amused the French at first, but soon grew irritating. People knew that Louis-Philippe was not really like them at all—that the hat and umbrella were essentially a kind of trick to encourage them in the fantasy that the country had suddenly grown more equal. Actually, though, the divisions of wealth had never been greater. The French expected their ruler to be a bit of a showman, to have some presence. Even a radical like Robespierre, who had briefly come to power during the French Revolution fifty years earlier, had understood this, and certainly Napoleon, who had turned the revolutionary republic into an imperial regime, had known it in his bones. Indeed as soon as Louis-Philippe fled the stage, the French revealed their true desire: They elected Napoleon’s grand-nephew president. He was a virtual unknown, but they hoped he would re-create the great general’s powerful aura, erasing the awkward memory of the “bourgeois king.”

Powerful people may be tempted to affect a common-man aura, trying to create the illusion that they and their subjects or underlings are basically the same. But the people whom this false gesture is intended to impress will quickly see through it. They understand that they are not being given more power—that it only appears as if they shared in the powerful person’s fate. The only kind of common touch that works is the kind affected by Franklin Roosevelt, a style that said the president shared values and goals with the common people even while he remained a patrician at heart. He never pretended to erase his distance from the crowd.

Leaders who try to dissolve that distance through a false chumminess gradually lose the ability to inspire loyalty, fear, or love. Instead they elicit contempt. Like Louis-Philippe, they are too uninspiring even to be worth the guillotine—the best they can do is simply vanish in the night, as if they were never there.

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW

When Christopher Columbus was trying to find funding for his legendary voyages, many around him believed he came from the Italian aristocracy. This view was passed into history through a biography written after the explorer’s death by his son, which describes him as a descendant of a Count Colombo of the Castle of Cuccaro in Montferrat. Colombo in turn was said to be descended from the legendary Roman general Colonius, and two of his first cousins were supposedly direct descendants of an emperor of Con stantinople. An illustrious background indeed. But it was nothing more than illustrious fantasy, for Columbus was actually the son of Domenico Colombo, a humble weaver who had opened a wine shop when Christopher was a young man, and who then made his living by selling cheese.

Columbus himself had created the myth of his noble background, because from early on he felt that destiny had singled him out for great things, and that he had a kind of royalty in his blood. Accordingly he acted as if he were indeed descended from noble stock. After an uneventful career as a merchant on a commercial vessel, Columbus, originally from Genoa, settled in Lisbon. Using the fabricated story of his noble background, he married into an established Lisbon family that had excellent connections with Portuguese royalty.

Through his in-laws, Columbus finagled a meeting with the king of Portugal, Joao II, whom he petitioned to finance a westward voyage aimed at discovering a shorter route to Asia. In return for announcing that any discoveries he achieved would be made in the king’s name, Columbus wanted a series of rights: the title Grand Admiral of the Oceanic Sea; the office of viceroy over any lands he found; and 10 percent of the future commerce with such lands. All of these rights were to be hereditary and for all time. Columbus made these demands even though he had previously been a mere merchant, he knew almost nothing about navigation, he could not work a quadrant, and he had never led a group of men. In short he had absolutely no qualifications for the journey he proposed. Furthermore, his petition included no details as to how he would accomplish his plans, just vague promises.

When Columbus finished his pitch, João II smiled: He politely declined the offer, but left the door open for the future. Here Columbus must have noticed something he would never forget: Even as the king turned down the sailor’s demands, he treated them as legitimate. He neither laughed at Columbus nor questioned his background and credentials. In fact the king was impressed by the boldness of Columbus’s requests, and clearly felt comfortable in the company of a man who acted so confidently. The meeting must have convinced Columbus that his instincts were correct: By asking for the moon, he had instantly raised his own status, for the king assumed that unless a man who set such a high price on himself were mad, which Columbus did not appear to be, he must somehow be worth it.

In the next generation the family became much more famous than before through the distinction conferred upon it by Cleisthenes the master of Sicyon. Cleisthenes... had a daughter, Agarista, whom he wished to marry to the best man in all Greece. So during the Olympic games, in which he had himself won the chariot race, he had a public announcement made, to the effect that any Greek who thought himself good enough to become Cleisthenes’ son-in-law should present himself in Sicyon within sixty days—or sooner if he wished—because he intended, within the year following the sixtieth day, to betroth his daughter to her future husband. Cleisthenes had had a race-track and a wrestling-ring specially made for his purpose, and presently the suitors began to arrive—every man of Greek nationality who had something to be proud of either in his country or in himself.... Cleisthenes began by asking each [of the numerous suitors] in turn to name his country and parentage; then he kept them in his house for a year, to get to know them well, entering into conversation with them sometimes singly, sometimes all together, and testing each of them for his manly qualities and temper, education and manners.... But the most important test of all was their behaviour at the dinner-table. All this went on throughout their stay in Sicyon, and all the time he entertained them handsomely. For one reason or another it was the two Athenians who impressed Cleisthenes most favourably, and of the two Tisander’s son Hippocleides came to be preferred.... At last the day came which had been fixed for the betrothal, and Cleisthenes had to declare his choice. He nzarked the day by the sacrifice of a hundred oxen, and then gave a great banquet, to which not only the suitors but everyone of note in Sicyon was invited. When dinner was over, the suitors began to compete with each other in music and in talking in company. In both these accomplishments it was Hippocleides who proved by far the doughtiest champion, until at last, as more and more wine was drunk, he asked the flute-player to play him a tune and began to dance to it. Now it may well be that he danced to his own satisfaction; Cleisthenes, however, who was watching the performance, began to have serious doubts about the whole business. Presently, after a brief pause, Hippocleides sent for a table; the table was brought, and Hippocleides, climbing on to it, danced first some Laconian dances, next some Attic ones, and ended by standing on his head and beating time with his legs in the air The Laconian and Attic dances were bad enough; but Cleisthenes, though he already loathed the thought of having a son-in-law like that, nevertheless restrained himself and managed to avoid an outburst; but when he saw Hippocleides beating time with his legs, he could bear it no longer. “Son of Tisander, ”he cried, “you have danced away your marriage. ”

THE HISTORIES, Herodotus, FIFTH CENTURY B.C.

A few years later Columbus moved to Spain. Using his Portuguese connections, he moved in elevated circles at the Spanish court, receiving subsidies from illustrious financiers and sharing tables with dukes and princes. To all these men he repeated his request for financing for a voyage to the west—and also for the rights he had demanded from João II. Some, such as the powerful duke of Medina, wanted to help, but could not, since they lacked the power to grant him the titles and rights he wanted. But Columbus would not back down. He soon realized that only one person could meet his demands: Queen Isabella. In 1487 he finally managed a meeting with the queen, and although he could not convince her to finance the voyage, he completely charmed her, and became a frequent guest in the palace.

In 1492 the Spanish finally expelled the Moorish invaders who centuries earlier had seized parts of the country. With the wartime burden on her treasury lifted, Isabella felt she could finally respond to the demands of her explorer friend, and she decided to pay for three ships, equipment, the salaries of the crews, and a modest stipend for Columbus. More important, she had a contract drawn up that granted Columbus the titles and rights on which he had insisted. The only one she denied—and only in the contract’s fine print—was the 10 percent of all revenues from any lands discovered: an absurd demand, since he wanted no time limit on it. (Had the clause been left in, it would eventually have made Columbus and his heirs the wealthiest family on the planet. Columbus never read the fine print.)

Satisfied that his demands had been met, Columbus set sail that same year in search of the passage to Asia. (Before he left he was careful to hire the best navigator he could find to help him get there.) The mission failed to find such a passage, yet when Columbus petitioned the queen to finance an even more ambitious voyage the following year, she agreed. By then she had come to see Columbus as destined for great things.

Interpretation

As an explorer Columbus was mediocre at best. He knew less about the sea than did the average sailor on his ships, could never determine the latitude and longitude of his discoveries, mistook islands for vast continents, and treated his crew badly. But in one area he was a genius: He knew how to sell himsel£ How else to explain how the son of a cheese vendor, a low-level sea merchant, managed to ingratiate himself with the highest royal and aristocratic families?

Columbus had an amazing power to charm the nobility, and it all came from the way he carried himself. He projected a sense of confidence that was completely out of proportion to his means. Nor was his confidence the aggressive, ugly self-promotion of an upstart—it was a quiet and calm self-assurance. In fact it was the same confidence usually shown by the nobility themselves. The powerful in the old-style aristocracies felt no need to prove or assert themselves; being noble, they knew they always deserved more, and asked for it. With Columbus, then, they felt an instant affinity, for he carried himself just the way they did—elevated above the crowd, destined for greatness.

Understand: It is within your power to set your own price. How you carry yourself reflects what you think of yourself. If you ask for little, shuffle your feet and lower your head, people will assume this reflects your character. But this behavior is not you—it is only how you have chosen to present yourself to other people. You can just as easily present the Columbus front: buoyancy, confidence, and the feeling that you were born to wear a crown.

With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception they are overcome by belief in themselves: it is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those around them.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

KEYS TO POWER

As children, we start our lives with great exuberance, expecting and demanding everything from the world. This generally carries over into our first forays into society, as we begin our careers. But as we grow older the rebuffs and failures we experience set up boundaries that only get firmer with time. Coming to expect less from the world, we accept limitations that are really self-imposed. We start to bow and scrape and apologize for even the simplest of requests. The solution to such a shrinking of horizons is to deliberately force ourselves in the opposite direction—to downplay the failures and ignore the limitations, to make ourselves demand and expect as much as the child. To accomplish this, we must use a particular strategy upon ourselves. Call it the Strategy of the Crown.

The Strategy of the Crown is based on a simple chain of cause and effect: If we believe we are destined for great things, our belief will radiate outward, just as a crown creates an aura around a king. This outward radiance will infect the people around us, who will think we must have reasons to feel so confident. People who wear crowns seem to feel no inner sense of the limits to what they can ask for or what they can accomplish. This too radiates outward. Limits and boundaries disappear. Use the Strategy of the Crown and you will be surprised how often it bears fruit. Take as an example those happy children who ask for whatever they want, and get it. Their high expectations are their charm. Adults enjoy granting their wishes—just as Isabella enjoyed granting the wishes of Columbus.

Throughout history, people of undistinguished birth—the Theodoras of Byzantium, the Columbuses, the Beethovens, the Disraelis—have managed to work the Strategy of the Crown, believing so firmly in their own greatness that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The trick is simple: Be overcome by your self-belief. Even while you know you are practicing a kind of deception on yourself, act like a king. You are likely to be treated as one.

The crown may separate you from other people, but it is up to you to make that separation real: You have to act differently, demonstrating your distance from those around you. One way to emphasize your difference is to always act with dignity, no matter the circumstance. Louis-Philippe gave no sense of being different from other people—he was the banker king. And the moment his subjects threatened him, he caved in. Everyone sensed this and pounced. Lacking regal dignity and firmness of purpose, Louis-Philippe seemed an impostor, and the crown was easily toppled from his head.

Regal bearing should not be confused with arrogance. Arrogance may seem the king’s entitlement, but in fact it betrays insecurity. It is the very opposite of a royal demeanor.

Haile Selassie, ruler of Ethiopia for forty or so years beginning in 1930, was once a young man named Lij Tafari. He came from a noble family, but there was no real chance of him coming to power, for he was far down the line of succession from the king then on the throne, Menelik II. Nevertheless, from an early age he exhibited a self-confidence and a royal bearing that surprised everyone around him.

At the age of fourteen, Tafari went to live at the court, where he immediately impressed Menelik and became his favorite. Tafari’s grace under fire, his patience, and his calm self-assurance fascinated the king. The other young nobles, arrogant, blustery, and envious, would push this slight, bookish teenager around. But he never got angry—that would have been a sign of insecurity, to which he would not stoop. There were already people around him who felt he would someday rise to the top, for he acted as if he were already there.

Years later, in 1936, when the Italian Fascists had taken over Ethiopia and Tafari, now called Haile Selassie, was in exile, he addressed the League of Nations to plead his country’s case. The Italians in the audience heckled him with vulgar abuse, but he maintained his dignified pose, as if completely unaffected. This elevated him while making his opponents look even uglier. Dignity, in fact, is invariably the mask to assume under difficult circumstances: It is as if nothing can affect you, and you have all the time in the world to respond. This is an extremely powerful pose.

A royal demeanor has other uses. Con artists have long known the value of an aristocratic front; it either disarms people and makes them less suspicious, or else it intimidates them and puts them on the defensive—and as Count Victor Lustig knew, once you put a sucker on the defensive he is doomed. The con man Yellow Kid Weil, too, would often assume the trappings of a man of wealth, along with the nonchalance that goes with them. Alluding to some magical method of making money, he would stand aloof, like a king, exuding confidence as if he really were fabulously rich. The suckers would beg to be in on the con, to have a chance at the wealth that he so clearly displayed.

Finally, to reinforce the inner psychological tricks involved in projecting a royal demeanor, there are outward strategies to help you create the effect. First, the Columbus Strategy: Always make a bold demand. Set your price high and do not waver. Second, in a dignified way, go after the highest person in the building. This immediately puts you on the same plane as the chief executive you are attacking. It is the David and Goliath Strategy: By choosing a great opponent, you create the appearance of greatness.

Third, give a gift of some sort to those above you. This is the strategy of those who have a patron: By giving your patron a gift, you are essentially saying that the two of you are equal. It is the old con game of giving so that you can take. When the Renaissance writer Pietro Aretino wanted the Duke of Mantua as his next patron, he knew that if he was slavish and sycophantic, the duke would think him unworthy; so he approached the duke with gifts, in this case paintings by the writer’s good friend Titian. Accepting the gifts created a kind of equality between duke and writer: The duke was put at ease by the feeling that he was dealing with a man of his own aristocratic stamp. He funded Aretino generously. The gift strategy is subtle and brilliant because you do not beg: You ask for help in a dignified way that implies equality between two people, one of whom just happens to have more money.

Remember: It is up to you to set your own price. Ask for less and that is just what you will get. Ask for more, however, and you send a signal that you are worth a king’s ransom. Even those who turn you down respect you for your confidence, and that respect will eventually pay off in ways you cannot imagine.

Image: The Crown. Place it upon your head and you assume a different pose—tranquil yet radiating assurance. Never show doubt, never lose your dignity beneath the crown, or it will not fit. It will seem to be destined for one more worthy. Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emperors crown themselves.

Authority: Everyone should be royal after his own fashion. Let all your actions, even though they are not those of a king, be, in their own sphere, worthy of one. Be sublime in your deeds, lofty in your thoughts; and in all your doings show that you deserve to be a king even though you are not one in reality. (Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)

REVERSAL

The idea behind the assumption of regal confidence is to set yourself apart from other people, but if you take this too far it will be your undoing. Never make the mistake of thinking that you elevate yourself by humiliating people. Also, it is never a good idea to loom too high above the crowd—you make an easy target. And there are times when an aristocratic pose is eminently dangerous.

Charles I, king of England during the 1640s, faced a profound public disenchantment with the institution of monarchy. Revolts erupted throughout the country, led by Oliver Cromwell. Had Charles reacted to the times with insight, supporting reforms and making a show of sacrificing some of his power, history might have been different. Instead he reverted to an even more regal pose, seeming outraged by the assault on his power and on the divine institution of monarchy. His stiff kingliness offended people and spurred on their revolts. And eventually Charles lost his head, literally. Understand: You are radiating confidence, not arrogance or disdain.

Finally, it is true that you can sometimes find some power through affecting a kind of earthy vulgarity, which will prove amusing by its extreme-ness. But to the extent that you win this game by going beyond the limits, separating yourself from other people by appearing even more vulgar than they are, the game is dangerous: There will always be people more vulgar than you, and you will easily be replaced the following season by someone younger and worse.

[danielklaidman-yahoonews]

Ten things to know about Robert Mueller

FBI Director Robert Mueller at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, U.S. in  2013.  (Photo: Larry Downing/Reuters)

 Robert Swan Mueller III, 72, who was just named special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the presidential election, is a jut-jawed former Marine with a bone-dry wit who retains traces of his Main Line Pennsylvania upbringing. At the Justice Department he was known as Bobby Three Sticks, a playful allusion to his patrician name, and, some say, to the three-fingered Boy Scout salute. He started as FBI director a week before 9/11, and oversaw the remaking of the bureau into an intelligence and counter-terrorism organization, charged with preventing new attacks as well as arresting the perpetrators. Here are 10 things you should know about Mueller:

1) He graduated from the ur-preppy St. Paul’s School in 1962, where he was the captain of the hockey, soccer and lacrosse teams and won the medal for all around best male athlete, before going on to attend Princeton.

2) He enlisted in the Marine Corp in 1968, soon heading to Vietnam where he led a rifle platoon.  He rose to become aide de camp to 3rd Marine Division’s commanding general and was awarded a Bronze star, two commendation medals, a Purple Heart and a Vietnamese medal of Gallantry.  He never talks about his service, according to a close friend.

3) He got his law degree from the University of Virginia law school. After a stint in private practice he joined the Justice Department as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney offices in San Francisco and Boston, rising to become chief of the Criminal Division during the first Bush administration. While there he oversaw two of the most high-profile prosecutions of the era — the Pan Am 103 bombing and the case against Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega.  He was known for cutting through the bureaucracy to get the resources and support he needed for his staff.

4) When President Bill Clinton took office he left the department and went to work for a law firm in Boston, focusing on white-collar crime. But he wanted to get back to prosecuting criminals, so he asked deputy attorney general Eric Holder for a job as a line prosecutor in the homicide unit of the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia. Holder was astonished that a former chief of the criminal division would seek such a relatively low-level job. “It was one of the most extraordinary calls I’ve gotten,” he told Yahoo News—but he made the appointment.

5) In 1997 he was given an interim posting to the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco after his predecessor left abruptly.  He did so well that Clinton nominated him as the permanent U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, even though he had a been a political appointee of George H.W. Bush.

6) He was nominated to be FBI director by George W. Bush on July 5, 2001.  His confirmation hearing took place on July 30, just three days before successful prostate surgery, and he began in the job one week before 9/11.  At the FBI he instituted major reforms, including transforming the bureau into a full-fledged intelligence organization, modernizing the bureau’s outdated technology and bringing non-agents into senior positions.

7) At the FBI he bucked the administration’s push to torture suspected terrorists to obtain intelligence.  He ordered agents to maintain traditional interrogation tactics.

8) He played a key role in the 2004 confrontation in the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Needing a Justice Department signoff on the Bush administration’s controversial program for wireless wiretapping, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card tried to talk Ashcroft, who was recovering from surgery and partially sedated, into giving his assent. Mueller and the deputy attorney general—who was James Comey at the time—intervened and helped persuade Ashcroft to hold off. “In every man’s life there comes a time when the good lord tests him,” Mueller told the attorney general, according to Barton Gellman’s account of Vice President Dick Cheney’s tenure, “Angler.”   “You have passed your test tonight.”

 9) Cheney, who badly wanted the surveillance program to go into effect, arranged for Gonzalez to sign the authorization in place of Ashcroft. In a frantic series of late-night meetings, Mueller, Comey and some half-dozen ranking Justice Department officials agreed to resign if the order wasn’t reversed—something that could have touched off a constitutional crisis, and posed an embarrassment for Bush, who was running for reelection. At the White House, Comey and then Mueller were called separately into private meetings with the president, where they explained their objections. The administration backed down, modifying the program to meet the Justice Department’s demands.

10) When Mueller’s statutory 10-year FBI term came to an end in 2011, Holder stepped in again and convinced the Obama White House to go to Congress to ask for a one-time extension of two years.  He left the bureau in 2013 believing, according to a friend, that his days as a law enforcement officer were over.

[thisdaynews]

How Bloomberg Could Win. Again.

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-bloomberg-could-win-again/

How Bloomberg Could Win. Again.

Yet less than a year after announcing he was a candidate, Bloomberg was elected the 108th mayor of New York.

And now, two decades later, he is running for president in more or less the exact same way.

To understand how Bloomberg can become president, it is worth considering how he first became mayor—by executing, and succeeding with, a plan no less unlikely than running for president and skipping Iowa and New Hampshire.

“Before he ran, I said to him, ‘Do you know what guys like me do to guys like you?’” said Bill Cunningham, a longtime Democratic operative who became Bloomberg’s top strategist and later his spokesman as mayor. The implication was clear: We fillet people like you—wealthy men with political ambitions—alive.

In 2000 and 2001, candidate Bloomberg forged a path that seemed almost dauntingly difficult, but he pulled it off by recognizing an unusual opening and quickly moving to capitalize on it. It was a campaign that relied on a lot of things going right for him but also made sure that his candidacy was well-positioned to exploit his advantages whenever and wherever he could. It’s not crazy to think he could do it again.

***

Buzz had begun building in the summer of 2000that Bloomberg, at the time worth $4 billion (now $54 billion), was considering a run for mayor as Rudy Giuliani’s term was ending. The smart play for Bloomberg, it seemed, would be to run as a Democrat. It was the party that Bloomberg belonged to his whole life, and, conveniently for his prospects, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 5 to 1 in New York City. Giuliani wasn’t all that popular, either. In the spring of 2000, he was facing a 37 percent approval rating in New York.

Then Bloomberg polled the prospect of running in the Democratic primary. According to Kevin Sheekey, his longtime political aide, and one of more than a dozen Bloomberg aides and associates interviewed for this story, the poll came back with bad news for Bloomberg’s chances. Beyond the polling, the primary was crowded, and the city’s interest groups, labor unions and civic organizations had been courted relentlessly by other candidates for the previous eight years.

So he decided it couldn’t be done. And so in 2000, with the election more than a year away, he changed his registration to the Republican Party. He began courting Giuliani, having what theNew York Timescalled a “supplicantlike breakfast at Gracie Mansion,” the mayor’s official residence, in late 2000. It was the beginning of a delicate dance that would continue through the election. Bloomberg needed Giuliani’s support, especially in the primary, in which a former top Giuliani administration official, Herman Badillo, represented Bloomberg’s biggest threat in the GOP nominating contest. Bloomberg would often praise Giuliani on the campaign trail, while making clear his differences with someone who, pre-9/11, was running a city that had largely tired of him.

“I am not here to run as Rudy Giuliani,” Bloomberg said at his campaign kickoff, quickly adding, “He has made this city better, and for the groups that don’t hate him, he has made the city better based on numbers.”

After 9/11, Giuliani gave a final, tepid endorsement to Bloomberg, one literally so quiet that reporters in attendance could barely hear him, but it was enough to allow the Bloomberg campaign to run ads of the two of them on television in a near nonstop loop.

In addition to wooing the Republican mayor, Bloomberg made another adroit move to assure wary Republicans of his devotion to his new party: He donated money to the five county Republican parties in New York City. The amounts were not huge, but for county parties no one much paid attention to, they were enough to bring loyalty. And Bloomberg wooed Roy Goodman, a patrician state lawmaker and head of the Manhattan Republican Party, and Guy Molinari, an old-school machine politico who was then the most powerful Republican on Staten Island, New York’s most Republican borough. Molinari literally taught Bloomberg how to kiss babies, demonstrating for him at a Beatlemania tribute concert and fireworks display on the island’s South Shore—“The first thing you have to learn as a candidate,” he said—even as he got slammed by conservatives for backing a left-leaning Democrat in everything but his new voter registration.

But Bloomberg mostly kept his distance from New York’s party politics. He grabbed the endorsements of the county parties before he was an officially declared candidate, and he didn’t even bother showing up when the groups officially backed him. His campaign said it was because he was traveling and didn’t know the endorsements were coming, but it is hard not to notice that it was part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the businessman to keep his distance from party politics as much as he could.

When Bloomberg was endorsed by the Manhattan Republican Party, a group that considered its prerogative to set the direction of the GOP for the rest of the city, it turned into something of a fiasco, one of the rare party endorsements in New York political history in which the major players couldn’t agree on basic facts or even bother to stand side by side with one another for a photo op. “We didn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat today,” Goodman told the media after the endorsement, disputing the candidate’s account that the timing was a surprise. But the party released a news release calling the mogul “an authentic mensch” who was a “warm and caring human being.”

“He made it very clear that he was running on the line because it was available, and that he didn’t agree with a lot of Republicans,” said William F.B. O’Reilly, a prominent party operative. “He made the rounds, he did what was required, but he really wasn’t into any party stuff. He never even appointed a Republican judge, but on the other hand he never said that he would.”

New York’s unique voting laws meant Bloomberg didn’t just run as a Republican, he also sought the Independence Party line. The group was controversial: Among its leaders were Lenora Fulani, an activist who had made a series of inflammatory remarks, including that “Jews are mass murderers of people of color,” and Fred Newman, a psychotherapist who has been accused of operating a “therapy cult” that encouraged sex among therapists and patients.

“He was very personal and very approachable, and I know that is not his reputation,” saidJacqueline Salit, one of the leaders of the party. Salit and others met with Bloomberg at Bloomberg L.P. offices, and afterward he sent her and others a copy of his memoir along with a handwritten note. The Liberal Party and the Conservative Party had both rejected Bloomberg’s candidacy, but he relentlessly courted the independents, visiting Staten Island for a breakfast with party leaders there and sitting for a screening-committee interview at the midtown Hilton.

The Independence Party’s most important criterion for deciding whom to nominate was a candidate who would support nonpartisan city elections. As a Democrat-turned-Republican running in a heavily Democratic city, Bloomberg shared this view. He pledged to push for a citywide referendum to get it passed. He gave the party $250,000, and the day after he announced, he was officially a candidate (through a massive blitz of television advertisements that ran while Bloomberg was out of the city attending his daughter’s graduation from Princeton University) he appeared on the steps of City Hall and made nonpartisan elections his first policy proposal as a candidate, a proposal that led John del Cecato, the spokesman for one of Bloomberg’s Democratic opponents (and currently a strategist working on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign) to quip to the media, “If my poll numbers looked like his, I’d call for nonvoter elections.”

In the end though, Bloomberg and the Independence Party seemed to know what they were doing. Bloomberg got 59,000 votes on the Independence line, largely if not primarily from Democrats and liberals who blanched voting Republican. He won the race by fewer than 35,000 votes.

Bloomberg preferred to throw money at political consultants—some of whom made upward of half a million dollars on the race—to the scutwork of campaigning. As early as the summer of 2000, the rest of the field was in full campaign mode. Mark Green, the eventual Democratic primary winner,was passing out palm cards for Al Gore and Hillary Clinton on Election Day 2000 with the words “Next Year, Make Mark Green Mayor” scribbled across the top, while even by the end of 2000 Bloomberg was still dithering on whether to enter the race. A few days after Christmas, Bloomberg delivered chicken breasts, potatoes and peas as part of Meals on Wheels, an appearance that was promoted by Bloomberg. L.P. in an official release, but which led to Bloomberg chastising the political media when they showed up to ask questions. “This isn’t a campaign stop,” the mogul said, acknowledging, “It’s very flattering that people think I am a legitimate candidate.”

Once Bloomberg became an official candidate, his skills as a candidate scarcely got better. He would disappear from the trail for long stretches of time, but it was more of a problem when he reappeared. He praised Hillary Clinton’s campaign skills as he tried to consolidate Republican support. At an endorsement news conference alongside Gov. George Pataki, Bloomberg repeatedly called himself a liberal—the very epithet Pataki had used to pound Mario Cuomo into submission in his first race in 1994—as the governor stared on in silent astonishment. Bloomberg’s aides abruptly cut the news conference short, leaving Pataki alone to answer questions, but then promptly brought Bloomberg back when they realized the visuals of the governor alone at the podium didn’t look right.

Public polls had Bloomberg down by 16 percentage points in the race’s final weeks. His aides insisted that private polling had him down only 12. And those weeks were consumed with Bloomberg’s inability to explain why his company had done business in South Africa, a charge that led him to accuse Green of playing “the race card” and with Bloomberg’s accusation that Green, a rather conventional Upper West Side liberal, was an apologist for Josef Stalin.

But if the candidate could seem erratic, the campaign was not. Bloomberg cleverly made a hard play for black and Hispanic voters turned off by Green, who was accused of running racially coded advertising in the Democratic primary. Young aides likened the campaign, and each of his subsequent races, to working on a presidential campaign, with a virtually around-the-clock war room, campaign staff deployed to handle even the smallest neighborhood media outlets and constant care and feeding of important allies.

Bloomberg spent $69 million on his first mayoral race. To put that figure in perspective, it was more than Ross Perot spent to run for president 10 years earlier. His campaign ran ads featuring Giuliani’s endorsement of Bloomberg during the late innings of the World Series between the Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks, sent dozens of glossy mailers on high-quality paper into the homes of millions of New Yorkers, and even sent video cassettes of the mayor to targeted homes. When it was over, Bloomberg had spent more than $90 per vote.

***

After Bloomberg won, by more than 2 points,Democrats were left stunned at their own ineptitude. Dennis Rivera, a prominent labor leader in the city, said the party was in “an incredible crisis” and that it treated minority voters like “battered women.” Freddy Ferrer, the Bronx borough president who lost a divisive runoff to Green, said the “party had been taking people for granted,” and he sent shock waves through the party’s upper ranks by meeting Bloomberg for breakfast the day after the election.

Bloomberg had replicated in many ways Giuliani’s coalition, but he made clear as mayor that he was going in a different direction. On election night, a few hours after Bloomberg was declared the winner, he had a top aide, Jonathan Capehart, put a call in to Al Sharpton. The civil rights leader had clashed repeatedly with Giuliani—and was a more controversial figure in 2001 than he is today. Giuliani saw that attacking Sharpton was key to firing up his base. Bloomberg said he wouldn’t do that. “I know you have not been welcome at City Hall over the last eight years,” Bloomberg told Sharpton. “You and I aren’t going to always agree but we are always going to have a dialogue.”

The next night was the annual gala for 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an organization of members of the Police Department who advocated for better relations between police and minority communities, and Bloomberg, who had just won election to America’s largest city, asked Sharpton for permission to go and pay his respects.

“He wasn’t playing to that Rudy/Trump crowd,” Sharpton said. “He wanted to show that he was going to be a different kind of a mayor. He wanted to manage the city and he didn’t think racial discord was a good way to manage the city. Rudy didn’t care about managing the city, he just cared about managing his image and making sure he was going against people he wanted to go against.”

Bloomberg showed up in January with former Mayor David Dinkins at Sharpton’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Harlem and pledged to come back every year. Over the years, Sharpton led protests against some of Bloomberg’s policies, most notably stop and frisk, and he backed each of Bloomberg’s Democratic opponents, but Bloomberg kept his word and even donated money to the education arm of Sharpton’s National Action Network, and, according to Sharpton, never once asked for his endorsement.

“He would tell me, ‘I know you are the opposition,’” Sharpton said. “I think his calculus was that if he kept reaching out, and I refused to work with him, I would look unreasonable, and he would look like the person trying to get things done.

“He was just more secure in who he was than most politicians you meet,” Sharpton said, noting Bloomberg would often face a hostile crowd at Sharpton’s headquarters. “Most politicians can’t handle being heckled. He just kept coming back anyway.”

Looking back it can seem almost as if, early in his first term, Bloomberg tried to be as unpopular as he could to give his approval ratings a chance to recover in time for his reelection bid. In his first term, he raised $3 billion worth of new taxes, primarily by a massive property tax increase and a progressive income tax that raised taxes on those making over $100,000 a year, and he raised them further on people making more than $500,000. He proposed cuts across city agencies, including for police and firefighters, which were considered sacred after 9/11. He cut the city’s recycling program, library hours, senior centers and ambulance shifts. Most alarmingly for budget wonks, Bloomberg proposed borrowing $1.5 billion to cover the hole in the budget, raising fears the city would go back to the dark and deeply indebted days of the 1970s.

He pushed for nonpartisan elections, as he promised the Independence Party he would, a move that consolidated the entire Democratic establishment against him. Bloomberg spent millions on the effort, but it was badly defeated in a citywide referendum. He passed a smoking ban in bars and restaurants. He lobbied both the Democratic and the Republican parties to hold their conventions in New York, and then endorsed the highly unpopular (by New York residents, at least) George W. Bush when the GOP chose New York City. By mid-2003, Bloomberg’s approval rating in the city had dropped to 32 points. It was the lowest approval rating any mayor had received since 1993, the last year of the Dinkins administration.

“I understand what the public wants,” Bloomberg insisted to a reporter midway through his second term, as his approval numbers hovered near historic lows. “I am not out of touch at all.”

Eventually, Bloomberg’s numbers began to rise. A booming economy helped, and Bloomberg’s billions did too. Besides the donations to political entities, Bloomberg showered cultural groups and nonprofit organizations with his own money, filling in holes that had been cut by his budgets. On the eve of his reelection, the subway system announced an unprecedented fare cut for the last six weeks of the year, something that was widely seen as a boost to the mayor’s prospects. Hours before his first debate with Democratic nominee Ferrer, Bloomberg announced that there was a credible terror warning against the city’s subways and declined to participate in the debate, leaving Ferrer to spar with an empty podium. It looked like the mayor was using the threat of terror to get out of his civic obligations, but after spending $102 million of his own money, he won in a landslide.

Four years later, Bloomberg decided he wanted to run for a third term, even though city voters had twice voted in a referendum for a two-term limit on all elected officials in the city. But the way he went about it revealed how he had learned to move his agenda. Rather than begin a public marketing campaign, the mayor met privately with the owners of the city’s three daily newspapers—Arthur Sulzberger of theTimes, Mort Zuckerman of theDaily Newsand Rupert Murdoch of theNew York Post—and convinced them of the wisdom of the move. Then he met with Ron Lauder, a fellow billionaire and the heir to the Estée Lauder empire, who had made term limits his pet cause, and persuaded him to grant Bloomberg a one-time exemption. His administration rallied social welfare organizations that had benefited from Bloomberg’s money and worked wavering city council members over one by one until Bloomberg had enough votes to announce that he would, in fact, run again.

***

It is hard not to see in this tale how Bloombergwould campaign, and how he would govern were he to win. Just like he determined that he could not win a Democratic primary in 2001, so Bloomberg has determined that he can’t win in the first four primary states, and so is relying on another path. His aides say he was the first candidate in history to personally register for the nomination in Arkansas, and while the rest of the field can resemble a children’s soccer game, chasing after the ball wherever it lands, Bloomberg will follow a path through delegate-rich states like California and Texas, places that don’t often see the kind of full-throttle campaign resources his team believes it can bring.

And his campaign believes he has a story to tell that will at least get liberal Democrats to give him a look. It is not just on guns, immigration and the environment, either. Despite his push for a third term, Bloomberg has made a name for himself a political reformer, pushing for nonpartisan elections outside New York as well as inside. It is easy to imagine him calling for filibuster reform, or strengthening voting rights, or even adding a Supreme Court justice. His comments over the past several years defending Wall Street have gotten him in trouble, but his aides point out that not only did Bloomberg raise taxes in a way that no other candidate in the field has, but he also built 185,000 units of affordable housing (a figure that essentially means building another South Bend, Indiana, and still having tens of thousands of housing units to spare), lowered the racial temperature in a city reeling from 9/11 and eight years of Giuliani, defended the right of Muslims to build a mosque near ground zero, drastically raised teacher pay, reduced the city’s prison population by 40 percent, mounted an aggressive anti-poverty campaign that recalculated the city’s poverty rate to allow more people to receive federal benefits, and spent $3.1 billion on new school construction.

“The argument is going to be, ‘You can listen to what other people say they are going to do, or you can look at what Mike actually did,’” one adviser said.

None of which is to say that Bloomberg can win this thing. Eight million things had to go right for Bloomberg to become mayor—a divisive Democratic primary, a flawed opponent, the shock of 9/11, a city scared of what a return to the days of Democratic rule might mean. But his team knew what they could do to position themselves to win, how to run straight through the narrow opening that led a virtually unknown rich guy to City Hall.

That race looked impossible to win. And this one does too. Which isn’t to say that Bloomberg has a good chance of winning. He doesn’t. But he doesn’t have no chance, either, not in a party or a nation as unsettled as this one.

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[helenvader]

Spontaneous decision: I'm going to collect quotes about people learning they have an appointment with the Patrician. :-)

In the best traditions of awaking from a nightmare, the voices gradually became one voice, which turned out to be that of Mr Pump, who was shaking him.

‘Some of them were covered in jam!’ Moist shouted, and then focused. ‘What?’

‘Mr Lipvig, You Have An Appointment With Lord Vetinari.’

This sank in, and sounded worse than wizards in jars.

‘I don’t have any appointment with Vetinari! Er … do I?’

‘He Says You Do, Mr Lipvig,’ said the golem. ‘Therefore, You Do. We’ll Leave By The Coach Yard. There Is A Big Crowd Outside The Front Doors.’

Moist stopped with his trousers halfway on. ‘Are they angry? Are any of them carrying buckets of tar? Feathers of any kind?’

‘I Do Not Know. I Have Been Given Instructions. I Am Carrying Them Out. I Advise You To Do The Same.’

Moist was hustled out into the back streets, where some shreds of mist were still floating. ‘What time is this, for heavens’ sake?’ he complained.

‘A Quarter To Seven, Mr Lipvig.’

‘That’s still night time! Doesn’t the man ever sleep? What’s so important that I’ve got to be dragged off my nice warm pile of letters?’

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

A Freelance Diplomat Takes Scandinavia

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/a-freelance-diplomat-takes-scandinavia/

A Freelance Diplomat Takes Scandinavia

COPENHAGEN—On a Tuesday evening this summer, 600 people took their seats in a sold-out theater in Copenhagen. Their mood was electric. The applause and laughter came in generous portions—which was surprising, given that they were there to see an American ex-diplomat giving, essentially, a PowerPoint presentation about the United States’s role in the world.

That Danes would give this kind of adoring treatment to a mid-level government official—and a former one at that—says something about America’s enduring role in the world at a time when the U.S. is attempting to limit its overseas commitments. In this case, it also says a lot about object of this audience’s affection, the former U.S. ambassador to Denmark Rufus Gifford. These Danes were concerned about the future of American democracy and foreign relations, but, perhaps more than that, they were enamored of this particular representative of American values. And in 2017, for better or worse, the fate of those values is bound, at least in part, to the resilience of one American export—celebrity culture.

Indeed, Rufus Gifford’s route to a packed theater that Tuesday night in some ways resembles Donald Trump’s path to the presidency, though the former ambassador differs from the current U.S. president in almost every substantive way. Where Trump is famously nativist, Gifford is internationalist and cosmopolitan. Where Trump spent his adult life straining to transcend his outer-borough roots by conquering Manhattan, Gifford—who was born to a patrician New England family and arrived in Washington via Hollywood—is the archetypal insider. Trump has positioned himself as Obama’s opposite; Gifford raised $1 billion as finance director for Obama’s reelection campaign. What they have in common is improbable political clout launched by Twitter and reality TV.

In his three and a half years as ambassador, Gifford’s charisma, transparency, and earnest, self-deprecating attempts to speak Danish won him a large following. And, as I wrote last year in The Atlantic, Gifford found his way into the public eye more than the average diplomat, through his Danish television show “Jeg er ambassadøren fra Amerika” (“I Am the Ambassador from America”) and his frequent guest appearances on news shows. Last year, I spoke to Abdel Aziz Mahmoud, a Danish journalist and TV personality who had hosted a special on the Fourth of July party Gifford hosted at the American ambassador’s residence. In a small country like Denmark, Mahmoud explained, so many of the most popular “series and dramas and movies and pop stars” are American. With Gifford, he said, Danes feel like “we finally found an American that seems like a superstar”; better yet, he’s a superstar who loves his Danish fans back.

It was precisely because of Gifford’s image as an all-American nice-guy that DR, the Danish public broadcasting corporation, first approached the new ambassador after seeing a short 2013 State Department video meant to introduce him to Danes. “They told me this afterwards,” Gifford confided to the audience at his talk this summer, “that [the video] was so annoyingly American, super cheerful,” such an “over-the-top presentation where you’re smiling all the time,” that they had to get in touch. By the time he left Denmark in 2017, Gifford had become a kind of avatar of American optimism.

Like politics, diplomacy is largely about cultivating relationships and wielding influence. Until January 20, Gifford was making speeches and taking selfies on behalf of the Obama administration. As ambassador, he traveled to Greenland (part of the Kingdom of Denmark) for bilateral meetings on climate change, promoted counter-extremism initiatives and Danish-American trade, and worked to maintain Danish military support in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these efforts lent themselves to TV cameras more readily than others. In 2016, he accompanied then-Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx and several U.S. mayors on a bike ride around Copenhagen to showcase its success as a cyclist-friendly city.

Now Gifford is a kind of freelance diplomat (riding around, these days, on a loaner bike from his hotel) at a time when dozens of ambassadorships—including the one to Denmark—remain vacant, and America’s traditional allies are seeking reassurance. “A number of senators have formed a kind of parallel operation to the State Department by visiting allies to assure them of America’s commitments,” The New York Times reported in June. In October, Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona made international headlines when he launched a spirited defense of American values from the Senate floor—in an explicit rebuke to a president of his own party. Diplomats, meanwhile, have grappled with the challenges of adjusting their messages to the Trump era. After Trump fired FBI director James Comey in May, Dana Shell Smith, then the U.S. ambassador to Qatar, tweeted: “Increasingly difficult to wake up overseas to news from home, knowing I will spend today explaining our democracy and institutions.” In June, she quit. David Rank, the chargé d’affaires at the American Embassy in Beijing, resigned over Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement.

Denmark, though, has something the other countries don’t—an unemployed, unattached, unofficial diplomat on a paid speaking tour to explain American democracy and institutions to anyone who will listen. (Tickets to Gifford’s paid speeches cost upwards of $45; Gifford is paid by a Danish events company.)

For Gifford, these speeches are an all-expenses-paid chance to try to defend the legacy of the president he spent nearly a decade serving, to reconnect with friends in a country he loves, to reassure his audiences and himself that all is not lost, at least not the good feelings. But as the new administration becomes less new and Gifford’s own domestic political ambitions take shape, the question of what he’s explaining, and why, gets harder to evaluate. Who exactly is he speaking for, and why should people listen?

While Gifford has yet to declare his candidacy, he is likely preparing to run for Congress in Massachusetts’ 3rd district. The speeches he has given in Denmark this month may be his last there, at least in his current capacity. Even now, they cross into the realm of policy and advocacy—pro-Obamacare, pro-Paris agreement, pro-NATO—rather than sticking exclusively to more general statements of American values, broadly defined.

But what “values” aren’t political at this point? As the American president downplays so much of what Gifford is claiming as proud American tradition—welcoming immigrants and celebrating diversity, for instance, or positioning the United States as a global leader in diplomacy—these speeches may end up revealing more about Gifford’s outlook and his values than they do about the country’s at large.

* * *

The night before his first summer speech, sitting at a casual Italian restaurant in central Copenhagen, Gifford told me he was nervous. This was not his first time back in Denmark since his appointment as ambassador ended in January, but in February was mostly a goodbye tour, and in April it was just for a layover en route to Greenland. “It feels like my first trip really back as a former ambassador,” he said, and he’d spent a good deal of time reflecting on what these new circumstances might mean for his public role here.

Now, he said, instead of speaking for the United States, “I’m speaking for myself.”

Before he was ambassador, he told me, the term “American greatness” was one that “in my liberal progressive American head I would’ve bristled at.” He now believes that the concept was “epitomized by the Marshall Plan” and the notion “that we had a responsibility to help people outside of our borders and that with great power comes great responsibility and with great wealth comes great responsibility and we had both. So this idea that we pull back from the world stage, we spend less money, we give less aid—” he pauses. “[Trump’s] speech about [pulling out of the Paris agreement] was just the most defeated, miserable speech I’ve ever heard.”

The Paris announcement had happened less than two weeks before we met; it clearly preoccupied him. “For us to cynically say, ‘We don’t wanna do this anymore, we’re just gonna open up the coal mines again,’” he said, “I just think it’s depressing.”

In August, Trump’s equivocal response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville would present another opportunity for Gifford to speak about values. “Watching the scenes in Charlottesville yesterday and The President’s appalling response,” he wrote on Facebook, “as my emotions shifted from anger to sadness and back again, it became clearer than ever that we all have to step up.” He incorporated remarks about Charlottesville into his Danish speeches in August, displaying the covers of the New York Post and the Daily News side by side to show that the president’s response disappointed observers across the political spectrum. But Danes, he says, have come to expect racial strife as a given in American life, and didn’t spend much of their Q&A time with him asking about the events or their aftermath. “Whether we like it or not, most people understand that real racism exists in the United States,” Gifford told me in September.

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Big in Denmark: The U.S. Ambassador

If Gifford tries to shun cynicism, he also knows it is a potent force—and that Danes, aware that Trump is upending norms of American foreign policy, are not immune from its geopolitical implications. “The American brand,” he said, “has been dragged through the mud in the last four or five months. You just see the difference.” That brand, he told me, citing comments on his Facebook page and newspaper headlines as evidence of the shift in public opinion, always suffers somewhat in Europe when a Republican president is in office. But the negative response he sees now is about more than “that left vs. right divide.”

“This is different,” he said. “This is, like, real fear about the direction of the world.”

If anything, this fear has reinforced Gifford’s own popularity among Danes. Maybe it’s his history as a political fundraiser showing; when Gifford talks about diplomacy, marketing jargon has a way of creeping in. He referred to the “American brand” more than once, spoke of “building an audience” as ambassador, and frequently used “message” as a verb (On Trump’s travel ban: “There’s no way” the American embassy could hope to “message that to the Danes effectively”). One of the goals of his ambassadorship’s “aggressive media strategy,” he says, was to “talk to people in a way they hadn’t been spoken to before.”

The idea of communication is integral to Gifford’s worldview—it’s present in his description of his own political goals, and in the way he explains Trump’s success, and Obama’s. Good PR may not solve America’s problems in the world, but he seems to believe that America can’t solve its problems without it. Yet no matter how skilled the practitioner, there is inevitably a limit to what even the best-crafted message can achieve. At some point, America’s actions in the world matter more than its messaging. Even under Obama, Gifford had to answer to Danes who challenged him on the United States’ treatment of prisoners, its surveillance programs, and its requests that European NATO allies increase their military budgets—not to mention the aesthetics of its fortress-like embassy in Copenhagen.

And then there’s the diplomat’s other dilemma in using an overseas tour to condemn an American president. “Can I actually try to be anti-Trump and pro-American at the same time?”

* * *

In the green room at the theater, as Gifford checked his phone and nursed a pre-show beer, I spoke with his husband, Stephen DeVincent. Though Gifford had warned me that “Stephen is much more of a glass-half-empty guy than I am,” DeVincent nonetheless had a lofty vision for the evening’s diplomatic experiment. “People still want to believe in the United States,” DeVincent said. Outside, there was a line down the block.

On stage, Gifford was introduced as “the former U.S. Ambassador of Denmark and maybe the next president.” (The Dane who introduced him meant president of the U.S.—Denmark has a prime minister.) The whooping applause lasted for a full 30 seconds.

“Det er dejligt at være tilbage,” he told the audience. “It’s good to be back.” iPhones were out, pictures and videos being snapped.

Gifford’s PowerPoint started with an illustrated recap of Danish-American cultural stereotypes and misunderstandings (Americans see Danes as “beautiful blonde people”; Danes see Americans as “rich obnoxious people”). “I’ve spent the last three and a half years in Denmark trying to reassure [Danes] that their stereotype of the United States is not real. … And then we elected that guy as president,” he said, pointing to a slide of Trump.

He pivoted to a discussion of the U.S. electoral map (“I’ve always lived in these blue parts. … The rest of this, a lot of times, gets to make the decisions”) and a description of checks and balances built into the U.S. government. The system has worked, in his description: Trump administration ambitions on health care, climate, and immigration policy have been tempered by courts, Congress, or citizens. Audience questions ranged in topic from Citizens United to how Gifford’s dog is doing. (“She’s been happier,” said DeVincent, a veterinarian, who had joined his husband onstage for the second half of the program.)

“Maybe this is what people needed, in some ways,” Gifford said of the election. He was referring to Americans, though he sees the rejection of right-wing populism in recent western European elections as another sign of the 2016 wake-up call’s force.  “Maybe we can take this election and do something, go somewhere big, go somewhere bold, and maybe, maybe, maybe change the world in a way that no one expected.”

When it’s over, Gifford and DeVincent take pictures with the hundreds of people waiting in a receiving line to meet them.

To the extent that diplomacy is about showing up and listening, Gifford’s lack of a job title doesn’t seem like much of an obstacle to doing the job. Charlotte and Tobias Rasmussen, a young couple who sat in the front row, told me they traveled and hour and a half to see Gifford in person, and get a break from Trump-dominated Danish media coverage of American politics. “Even though the title of the lecture is ‘I was the ambassador,’ he’s doing a great job still promoting this relationship between America and Denmark,” Charlotte told me.

It remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to evoke the same kind of enthusiasm in Massachusetts—where, after all, before 2017 he hadn’t lived for two decades. The district he’s set his sights on is home to family and friends, and prides itself on its military tradition and its status as a clean energy hub—two of Gifford’s interest areas as ambassador. The state, of course, consistently votes Democratic by a wide margin. Still, the ideas he articulated in Denmark to an audience broadly sold on ideas like the welfare state and free movement of people might need some reframing before he brings it to small-town New England.

He will not, he insists, “try to be somebody I’m not or run away from my résumé.” He knows he’ll be seen as an outsider. But as with diplomacy, Gifford believes earning people’s trust is at base about communicating with them. “My belief fundamentally,” he said, “is that human beings respond to the same kinds of messaging whether you’re Danish, American, or whatever.” Massachusetts voters may soon get the chance to put this theory to the test.

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[ratherhavetheblues]

QUENTIN TARANTINO’S ‘ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD’ “Lightning in a bottle…”

© 2019 by James Clark

     The films of Quentin Tarantino are arguably the gold standard of amusement while indirectly excoriating the history of reverence. His recent shot, Once upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), attends in a rather special way toward his enmity regarding pious foot-soldiers on guard for the sake of half-truths, at best. The target of Hollywood might seem to be a rather minor concern, not to mention that nearly everyone intuits its flaws already. But do they?

We take a ride with Cliff, a movie stunt man/ and double, for actor, Rick, in Rick’s cream-colored Cadillac convertible. While the actor attends to his well-known métier of Western adventures, overblown, underwhelming but passionately popular, Cliff, not being needed to spare the daring in this outing, takes up his other functions as chauffeur and handyman at Rick’s mansion in the exclusive hills. This day, there is the insupportable collapse of the perhaps, sinking brand’s television antenna, the year being 1969. Two magical events occur during Cliff’s hiatus. The first is the remarkable agility of his reaching the roof—sheer acrobatics in leaping from purchase to purchase. When on the irregular roof, his panache is not only bankable but poetry. The second surprise occurs on the freeway with the top down, of course, and music on the radio, to a tune called, “Gamblin’ Man.” The pitch and volume of the sound inundating the fast car can be discerned, with the driver in closeup, that intensity of this degree is, however unspoken, a field of grace. Much remains to be explored regarding Cliff’s solitary day off; but this film invites disparate, rare and desperate action to coalesce. Some months later, and late at night, with the sidekicks about to go their separate ways (and making a last-ditch party of the crisis), Cliff and his pit bull, Brandy, take a walk in the vicinity of Rick’s opulent (but now financially threatened) castle. The acrobat, saying nothing of the earthquake but feeling much, evokes another ecstatic song, far more explosive than the treacly film productions which made the actor affluent, namely, far from matinee-idol, Chris Farlow’s, one-hit-wonder, “Out of Time”—“Baby, Baby, Baby, you’re outta’ time…” And it’s freeway-time again, because the Stones (far more explosive than the earnest writer) know their Hollywood-Rare. The latter’s, wisely distorting the phrase, “Baby, Baby, Baby, you’re outta’ ooaa” [connoting, both “time” and “sight”]. The fateful musical presentation penetrates the mansion next door, the short-lease range of the now-pregnant starlet, Sharon Tate, where a dizzy anti-climax is about to unfold, which obliges us to consider a step far more demanding of nuance than Hollywood can afford. Back to Cliff, on the rich man’s roof, who couldn’t miss hearing the neighbor’s music, a bemusing effort by the laughably named, “Paul Revere and the Raiders.”

We had been up close to her the night before (at an intersection between convertibles; the play-list no improvement on her home choice), on their drive back to Rick’s, not the restauranteur, of course, but the ravenous, for Bogart’s fame. Here she was accompanied by her recent husband, Roman Polanski, still, at that point, a bright light of European avant-garde movies. (His elevated stature depended upon two early 1960’s efforts, Knife in the Water and Repulsion; from there he coasted and became a notorious child molester.) Rick, regarding this sighting as an epiphany, gushes to a less than thrilled Cliff, “He’s been living next door for a month and this is the first time I’ve seen him. I could be one pool party from starring in a Polanski movie…” Rather typically, he cites the big name for bringing to us, Rosemary’s Baby. The “glamorous couple,” dressed in rococo-era costume (once-stifling for all it’s worth in the 18th century) were en route to the Playboy Club, where Sharon cavorted as more polka-Polish than anyone else in the establishment. She and Mama Kass were the life of the party. But the real story had to be “no-bullshit,” tough-guy, Steve McQueen, describing, Louella Parsons-style, the tangled affections of Sharon’s depths. (A pan, while Cliff was still fighting off her music on Rick’s roof, discloses very briefly a lithographic poster by Alphonse Mucha. The sensitivity of the woman’s presence in that work must clearly derive from Polanski’s better days. That day, the so-called auteur was tossing a ball to her miniature dog, while the sweetheart slept snoring.)

There is about the first moments of our film today such miasma-inducing artificiality, that a whole universe of sensibility has to be invented to counter such an aberration. Firstly, there is a clip of a re-run of Rick’s television series of yore, namely, “Bounty Law,” the facile and preposterous rhetoric there being perhaps engaging for an eight-year-old. But soon we realize that those far more advanced in age than that swear it to be some kind of elixir. In the instalment mentioned, after dispatching five attackers in two seconds, he intones, “Amateurs don’t make it!” Cut, then, to a TV fan program where Rick can do no wrong. The peppy master of ceremonies, one, Allen Kinkaid, congratulates himself for including Cliff—by which he gets to maintain that the viewers are not “seeing double.” Rick explains that Cliff saves him from falling off his horse in high action. He admits, “Yes, I can fall off a horse.” This causes mysterious mirth all round. Then Cliff, convinced that the exercise doesn’t make it, blurts out, “I carry his load,” and more slippery goodwill fills the airwaves.  Scatology closing the mainstream show. But there is more to Allen Kinkaid (and more to Hollywood madness) than that. The seeming inconsequential host is sitting on Hollywood gold dust, in the figure of Jeramiah Kinkaid, a farm boy and his black lamb, in the Disney film, So Dear to My Heart (1948). Jeramiah brings the lamb to the county fair and goodwill prevails. But the action having occurred in 1903, the lamb and the boy are no longer a joy. (The boy, played by Bobby Driscall, died destitute at age 31.) The skills invested in that little story did manage a topspin that fans are not to be ridiculed for cherishing. But, in failing to vigorously discern the hardness and settle for a pathos rapidly becoming bathos, those fans fail to appreciate how few such gems obtain; and they fool themselves that sentimental and melodramatic extracts are close enough to the template. They actually, in great numbers, become an uncritical and militant cult. Rick moves on to an appointment with his agent who urges, in light of his frequent drunkenness wrecking for good “Bounty Law,” and doing “guest appearances” on the order of a cover of the “Specialty Song,” “Green Door,” that he reboot in Italy, where American has-beens enjoy a second life. Over and above the insider’s savvy pragmatism, he enthuses about what is obviously his client’s favorite role, from some time quite long ago, as wiping out much of the Nazi hierarchy with a flamethrower, in the movie, “The Fourteen Fists” [recalling the many fists in play, killing the fearful pagan, Johan, in the Ingmar Bergman film, Hour of the Wolf ]. The unctuous go-getter, mimes the attack and we hear our protagonist call out the comic-book line, “Anybody for sauerkraut?”

   Before plumbing here any more details of this nearly inscrutable myopia, let’s bring to bear more detail of that vigilante saga—from 1968 (set, wouldn’t you know it, in Germany)—where another homogeneous group of militants see fit to kill a painter who does not subscribe to an infinite future in a heaven. The painter, Johan Borg, could be described as some kind of acrobat, inasmuch as he has ventured to reach a dimension of life with which the vast majority are unconcerned. (“Borg,” denoting, in Swedish, a mountain, a castle stronghold. The film in point being set on a German island, there would be the very different lexical sense of a male castrated pig when young.) Cliff, a self-styled, easy-going guy, carries his skillset with significantly more panache than Johan.  But, like the artist, who had repeatedly crushed the skull of a rude boy on a deserted beach, along a steep cliff, there is a past in which Cliff has murdered, in this case, his wife; and gone free, as with the kills Cliff delivered during his military days. (The relentless smashing of an intruder at that swan song party, by the sometime reckless athlete, will give us much to ponder.)

During his day with Rick’s Coup de Ville, Cliff, giving a lift to a teenage girl (1969, again)/ entrepreneur who’d rather do tricks than go home, show’s no enthusiasm for the trade (and its possible quicksand); but, on hearing that “home” is the ranch just beyond LA where the boys worked on “Bounty Law,” he persuades the hooker to ease up for the afternoon and let him see a place he hasn’t visited for years. What he sees is another homogeneous group bent on murderous coercion of heretics—a group, however, right across the board, so inept, you’d think they were in some form of rehab, their main action watching television series, in the energies of a seraglio. This being the notorious Manson marauders, another form of resentment arrives therewith, to make us think. “Pussycat,” the unthinking navigator bringing the Cadillac to the cesspool, declares, angrily—after our protagonist discerns that the once-friend and owner of the property receives, as rent, daily favors from a dogma official, named, “Squeaky”— “You’ve embarrassed me!” She, operatically, like the patrician wolf-pack, in Hour of the Wolf, sneering that the now-non-owner whom the cult kept from Cliff on a pretext of his blindness, is a lie, “He’s not blind—you’re the blind one!” (Her ready playfulness, before the reversal, lingers as somehow at least a bit incisive.) More to the matter of short fuse, by remote soulmates, Johan and Cliff, one of the few males of the entourage (the big beachboy nowhere to be seen) has had, while Cliff was weighing the weight, the temerity to cut one of Rick’s tires. On discovering this, and seeing the sneering perpetrator nearby—a scrawny boy looking as if he should get a checkup—our anti-hero, in the course of ensuring that the inmate install the spare, beats the rascal, repeatedly and very bloodily, to within an inch of killing him. That the first punch lifted the vandal skyward, as in Hollywood cartoons, brings to bear Cliff’s state of far from immunity from the general crap. Later he crushes a sneering Bruce Lee during a lull of a very-short lived assignment. And later still, as mentioned, when Squeaky and a few others (still sans-Manson), have the temerity to invade Rick’s place with Cliff visiting, the latter, receiving a superficial gunshot wound (like that received by wife, Alma, from Johan, the hopeful killer), the retaliation is his taking the pudgy lieutenant by the neck and smashing her face, very often, and very hard upon the telephone receiver (more 1969) and other appliances, leaving her unrecognizable as a head. (Could there ever be anything about that sorority which makes your day? Come to think of it, early on, as the so-called “doubles” [Rick and Cliff] pass by to do their storied errands, there are several of them scavenging through a dumpster, pleased to discover and catch by the wind some white sheets [somewhat like Johan’s lost wife and her sheets in the wind]; and as they squeal like happy seagulls, they have something. They have something far more palatable than do-gooders, Simon and Garfunkel, chiming in here, with their so arch, “Mrs. Robinson.” Hollywood being predictable, but Tarantino, not.)

   The anticlimax—a maneuver in the same league as Bergman’s theatrical jolts—pertains, not to movie lore in general, nor to crime thrillers in particular, but to the explosive and lovely ways of intent within everyone’s grasp to sustain, however difficult. Tarantino’s priority is to see how advantages, far more cruel and formidable pieties than stupid murder, derive their monstrous power, and can be, though never not numerically dominant, eclipsed by courage and wit. The dust-up with Bruce Lee, eliciting from the now marginal pieceworker, Cliff,  the sneer, “You are a little man who [far from the boast he could beat up Cassius Clay] couldn’t hope to carry his [the boxer’s] trunks,” concerns a ridicule of the entire Hollywood Establishment, perhaps a failing of taste, on Cliff’s part, but a revelation of the metaphysical crisis here. More modulated mockery is to be seen during Rick and Cliff’s evening watching old tapes of “Bounty Law.” Depressed Rick can only register contained grief for a lost past. Non-depressed Cliff laughs out loud, seeing through the dramatic travesty, from beginning to end.

It is, then, the seeming fine Sharen Tate, who can lead us, in special ways, to the poison. We first see her returning to LA from Europe, accessing her priority luggage—including a small dog—in the vicinity of a carousel nudging her to be forever a child, as recommended on the highest authorities. She strides, in a slight slow-motion pace, along a corridor with only one exit, emphasized by the glimpse of her Pan-Am stream-line plane. Soon there is a day, like Cliff’s roundabout at the ranch, where, in her tiny, convertible, foreign vehicle (a 1969 phenomenon), she picks up a woman hitchhiker, very unlike Pussycat. Seen from above, there is no doubt that Sharon, granted good bones and good skin, can be as congenial as the girl next door. (The prelude to the lift is a Buffy Sainte-Marie anthem, in tremolo on the radio— “The Circle Game”—a decided improvement over what she listens to at home.)

(“And the seasons they go round and round

And the painted ponies go up and down

We’re captive on the carousel of time

We can’t return we can only look behind

From where we came.

And go round and round and round

In the circle game.”)

(But does this bit of taste rise to the celestial heights her promotors would insist? Or does it speak to the volatility of cogency?)  Arriving to the studio and giving the stranger a goodbye hug, we see the sign reads, “Fox.” (The infrastructure by Bergman reads “Wolf.”) Foxy advantage, all the way. Soon she’s done for the day, and she comes upon a movie house showing a film she’s in, along with Dean Martin. We can report she’s not another Jerry Lewis, but her enjoyment of seeing herself cavorting to little palpable effect finds her at some level of apparently remarkable fulfilment. She kicks off her sandals and places her dusty feet on the chair in front; and she foxes down every laugh and cheer in the theatre regarding her supposed martial arts skills. (Back to Cliff and Bruce; and wouldn’t you know, the latter—with his effete wolf howls—is a frequent guest of hers.) She had basked, coming into the show, in finding the cashier and the owner of the theatre typically elated by the presence of a goddess. But there’s a coda to this day even more edifying, in the goddess’ excellent day. On the way home she stops by a bookshop (remember them?) to pick up an order of the Victorian novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), by Thomas Hardy, for her brainy husband who must, like her, be a Victorian softy. (Bergman kicks ass, similarly, in Cries and Whispers [1972], where Charles Dickens is seen to be an antiquated wimp, and avatar of advantage in the sense of precious careers, precious families and precious patrimonies. Since we’re drawn, by both Tarantino and Bergman being adept dramatic phenomenological philosophers in lodging a pushback against lead-pipe dogmatists, we seem to require mentioning that maniacal, militant careerists, and such, stem from that ancient Platonic myopia as to dynamics while overestimating inert matter. From there, religion, and its causal conclusion, humanitarianism and its obligations to coincide with the former, and science and its quietist retreat have enjoyed pushing around those who see much farther and braver than those who have gone too far with Plato.) With that ascension coming to bear in the anti-climax, we find Rick, a near-perfect wimp, out on the private road, invited to Sharen’s—she being tantamount to an addict of Rick Dalton action television (when she’s not listening to Paul Revere and the Raiders—“Hungry for the good life, baby!”) She wears a team jersey showing 17, her emotional age.

   The suffocating majority that is Hollywood is at its apex with the pedantry of those behind the scene—producers, directors, agents, promotors, lawyers, accountants… The breathless Kinkaid raises “double” about our protagonists, only to show he doesn’t know what to do with it, having, the years gone by, allowing a swollen prose to predominate and a withered poetry to die. Earnest cheering for lead-pipe nonsense (see the hunks, see the babes) is the order of our function here. Just as egregious as the bishops presiding over The City of Angels, there is Rick, in semi-depression that his career options have dwindled, meaning that others will man the idiocy where he used to be quite paramount. Before the fading actor takes the advice of the savvy cash-sniffer sold on Italy, there is one more push we need to take into account—involving a director, seemingly near dementia—showing the last of Rick’s several-year stint as a villain. (Immediately after the interview about Italy, Rick rejoins Cliff and cries on the vigorous acrobat’s shoulder. “Don’t let the Mexicans see you crying,” the latter urges, a concern reaching as far as the appalling Mexican directors’ film coups of the present day.)

The obsequious last American helmsman he’ll see, for quite a while, probably aware of a disaster in the making, but knowing a way to lessen the cheapness, promises that modernity and novelty will be the watchword. His patter and timbre of voice about the quality of the chestnut in point somehow overruns his standard positivity, in fascinating ways. Aiming for “lightning in a bottle” and “zeitgeist,” he’s all about changing Rick’s image to “Hell’s Angels” and a new hair style. “I want this to be caliber, not cowboy… Hip…” Rick balks in hearing “hippie…” Though our fading star has for years seen himself as a lucrative entertainer first, to those easily entertained (having purchased a castle of sorts with a pool segueing to the heavens, Architectural Digest-perfect); and a participant in the arts running about #99th (the Polanski moment being a rare jog), that he cared at all would perhaps have factored in the eccentric leader’s rhetoric. And there’s something else crossing Rick’s path which Sam, the inflected snake-oil cheerleader, had to regard as a big plus. Waiting at lunchbreak for an early afternoon first take, he wants nothing more than to read his cowboy novella, and he pauses along a shady point of the concern’s walkway. Nearby, a little girl is reading a script. He asks if he could sit down there; and, after a long pause she says, “Sit.” Not the most cordial welcome; but her presence being far more mature than her age, he becomes curious. Lighting a cigarette and responding to her not small ego, he learns that she never eats before going in front of the cameras, because she wants to concentrate upon her persona. “If I can be a tiny amount better, I will.” She then, the sense of deep resolve losing some traction, declares that Walt Disney is the greatest human to have lived over the past hundred years. She goes on to ask about his book—with a topic about a once-world’s-best wild horse trainer in his 20’s becoming far less than that in his 30’s. Falling, as he would have done during those later acrobatic feats, he’s facing the future with “spine troubles.” “He’s not the best anymore. He’s far from it…” This state of affairs rather oddly brings upon Rick a spate of tears. She tries, by her sincere caring, to help lift the spirits he in fact seldom deals with. But the presence of a vigorous, though wobbly, commitment, has dredged up something he has failed to master, an acrobatic challenge demanding nerve and wit far beyond the ways of those million-dollar dogs. In this crisis, the strain of cheapness cannot be stanched. “Fifteen years, you’ll [the girl] be living it!” [no longer disinterestedly transcending that horde of wolves]. On to the oater and its cliché-fest. Rick flubs many lines; and on a break, back in his trailer, he beats himself up for being so unprofessional and being a drunk. (There are, as mentioned, stories tossed around about his addiction causing the end of “Bounty Law”—lacking bounty and lacking law. Having been inspired by the serious girl, he determines to stop drinking and yet he has a shot before tossing out the bottle). Rick does some homework and his subsequent deliveries of evil do surpass—for how long? —his usual Saturday morning television bilge. (This lost cause is interspersed with Sharen’s delight in a film of hers not noticeably any better than Rick’s. Moreover, Cliff’s radio, as he drives Pussycat to the Spahn Movie Ranch, plays, “Brother Loves Travelling Salvation Show,” another touch of bathos to make to make full sense of.) With a staged conflict between Rick’s “evil” emoting and a Bostonian rationalist, we have the goofy makings of a primal conflict no one is ever going to see as such. The empathetic girl, who was supposedly being held for ransom, tells Rick, “That was the best acting I’ve seen in my life!” Sam, sticking to his sticky story, finds that Rick had reached Shakespearian levels.

There is one more current to add, needing as much pondering as we can manage, that being Cliff’s. We’ll see how amenable our picaresque protagonist can see fit to be stronger and brighter than the level he’s settled for. After the brush with Polanski and Sharon and their effete, rare roadster, the “double” retrieves his severally damaged, early 1960’s Karmann Ghia convertible from Rick’s spacious entrance, performs a little UCLA huddle unwind and returns home—home being a severally damaged trailer at the backside, mud bowl of a drive-in movie of poor status, amidst a terminal truck, various bits of garbage and an operating oil well. (Would that latter apparatus have anything to do with depths?) He kisses and plays with his pit bull, “Brandy,” and presents him with a “Wolf Tooth” dog bone. The easygoing “nonentity” does demand some decorum and patience, at dinner, from the companion/ Alfa. His television, seemingly never turned off, is tuned to a pop singer in a tux, namely, Robert Goulet, a Canadian far less alive than Buffy Sainte- Marie. Discerning the spigot of entertainment may be a large obligation most of us neglect. How Cliff performs, as it happens, is far more momentous than that of anyone else in view here, and we’re obliged to see where he’s going. (Another prelude to a hidden slippage of dialectic is the two hand chow cans being slowly pulled by gravity to the bowl.)

Where he’s going, on that putatively fateful farewell party is far from transparent. It doesn’t involve Brandy chewing off one the intruder’s cock; but hostility does reign. Getting a bit closer is the Manson irregular and enduring fan of “Bounty Law,” lawyering, “My idea is to kill the people who taught us to kill.” Though far from  a debater, Cliff, were he to have been able to listen to such entitlement, he’d have recognized the mob murderousness, in lieu of serious discernment. He’d have recognized it, because everyone around him uses it, in order to rough up those, like him (far from fully acute), by way of ostracism, contempt and sabotage. Even more a setback than the flesh wound contracted in the skirmish, there would be weepy Rick, using a flamethrower to kill a wounded sitting duck; and dissolving a supposed friendship and livelihood, for reasons of clinging to advantage. (How anyone can see staunch buddies here must indulge in large selective cognition. Sure, Cliff goes over old episodes with the star, and enjoys them. But he’s especially savoring the stunts [the acrobatics]. Anyone on to “Outta Time/ Sight” is not apt to be a fan of what Rick does.) After the Manson massacre, there’s the likelihood of some contact, on Rick’s terms. More good-natured balance and risk.

   In the run-up to Sam’s hoopla, Rick lobbies to the producer to give Cliff some work, somewhere. “He’ll do anything…” That’s tastes of an in-crowd regarding a no-crowd. (On the plane home from Italy—where the jobs were easy for a Hollywood name, and Rick showed much more acute critical powers about European entertainment errors than the American brand—there was the name and his new wife in opulent “Business Class;” and Cliff getting drunk amidst the also rans.) On trampling Bruce Lee, Cliff loses that job, but occasions more gold than the studio is worth. Alma, the widow in Hour of the Wolf, the endeavor being consulted by Tarantino’s golden touch here, quite remarkably shows very little concern for her artist’s husband’s having stoned to death a young boy. Cliff, too, doesn’t lose any sleep about killing his wife. Here we’re in a volatile territory of crime, coming face-to-face with the heroes of civilization (Rick’s work) being strains of a plague the body-count of blasted fruition impossible to count, especially in view of the fact that it will never end. But the tuning is remarkably upbeat, because dudes like Cliff find a way. A T-shirt of his, somewhat covered by a full shirt, spells Champion. (Our film today, despite so many coincidences with the somber defeat in Hour of the Wolf, becomes a cornucopia of inflected  verve.)

A coda at the ending credits, finds black and white Rick urging the viewer to smoke, “Red Apples Cigarettes,” which cuts down “bitter, dry” intake and delivers “healthy flavor.” Hollywood and its dubious logical props not nearly seen for its poison the way cigarettes have come to be discerned.

Someone who would have had no difficulty spotting the poison of world history and the merchants getting rich on it, is Heraclitus (flourishing about 500 B.C.); but left behind by pedants and sissies. One of his aphorisms, paradoxically counselling long-term, creative civilization, proceeds, “War is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free.”

Let’s close things here with those well-known Heracliteans, the Stones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tyCOV3SyQc