Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion is the first use of force in what was to become the United States to thwart the policies of the legally established government.
The governor, William Berkeley, had become somewhat rigid with age and longevity in office. In 1676, the House of Burgess, responding to demands from Bacon, proposed reforms that would limit Berkeley’s power and restore some rights to landless men. Bacon stormed the sitting assembly with 500 armed men and demanded a military commission. His men then attacked local Indians, before returning to burn Jamestown. The rebellion collapsed when Bacon died and England sent Berkeley reinforcements.
The revolt has been ensconced in popular history as the first battle between freedom loving poor folk and the tyranny of an unelected government, even though the dispute lay over the rights of native Americans to land they had cleared and developed, which the government sought to protect. Some even think much of it was motivated by family feuds between Berkeley and his wife’s family, the Culpepers, who were related to Bacon.
The psychology of fear in Virginia was closer to the reaction of New Englanders to attacks by Indians encouraged by England’s enemies in the French and Indian Wars, which coincided with the Salem witch hysteria in 1692, than it was with the reactions of men allied with the losing side in the English civil war who supported Humphry Walrond in Barbados in 1650 because they felt mistreated.
The difficulties of early frontier life were real. Richard Thompson migrated to Maryland in the 1630's on a ship that had stopped en route at Barbados. In 1637, he returned home to find his wife, children and servants killed. During the English civil war he remarried and moved to the Virginia area between the Potomac and Rappahannock, where he died in 1649 when his children were still toddlers.
In 1662 his son Richard came of age and named Thomas Willoughby his legal guardian. He had been granted land south of the James near Norfolk and married Willoughby’s daughter, Sarah. Willoughby’s grandfather, Thomas, had migrated to Virginia and acquired land through his connections with Percival Willoughby, an investor in the Virginia Company.
The Willoughby family entered the English peerage with Christopher, who was knighted by Henry VIII for military action at Tournai in 1513. His oldest son, William, established the Erseby line, his second son, Christopher, began the Parhams, and his youngest of five boys, Thomas, served as Chief Justice and married an heiress. Their son Robert married Dorothy Willoughby; their grandson, the Percival, married Francis Willoughby of the Eresby branch.
Francis Willoughby of Barbados was descended through the Parhams. Jorge H. Castelli thinks the immigrant Thomas may have been the fifth son of Francis’ great-grandfather Charles.
The Willoughbys not only intermarried, but maintained other face-to-face contacts. Thomas, the husband of Sarah Thompson, was sent to London for his education at the Merchant Taylors School founded by one of the livery companies in London. In 1655, Francis Emperor wrote to the same Thomas Willoughby in Barbados for help in recruiting a Puritan minister.
Emperor had left Barbados in 1650, probably when the royalists, led by Humphrey Walrond, were threatening dissidents, and moved to the Norfolk area which, April Hatfield says, had become a magnet for emigrants from the island. The local economy was tied to export trade, supplying naval stores and dried meat provisions. Settlers from England were more likely to move north of the James where tobacco was grown.
Men like Emperor continued to trade with relatives in Barbados, and provided an example for islanders who needed more land than was available there. In 1652 Thomas Modyford had written to Berkeley about the possibility of sending settlers. In 1662 Francis Willoughby had done the same. Even Guy Molesworth, who’d been forced to leave the island in 1650, was in Jamestown in 1660 as an aide to Berkeley.
Hatfield says about 9% of the population of Virginia’s eastern shore were immigrants from other colonies. The son of Isaac Allerton, a somewhat unscrupulous New England merchant who had originally trained as a tailor, moved to Virginia where he became active in the tobacco trade. The younger Isaac eventually married Thomas Willoughby’s sister Elizabeth and moved to the area above the Rappahannock that had been opened after the Indians were subdued.
When Bacon rebelled, personal experience as much as family ties determined who supported whom. Richard Thompson, the Willoughby in-law who grew up hearing about Indian depredations, supported Bacon and later issued a written apology. Allerton, the Willoughby in-law who grew up hearing about family ties to the leading Pilgrim magistrates, supported Berkeley. Thomas himself was dead and his son, Thomas, was too young to participate.
When you look for concrete links between generations to show the diffusion of attitudes towards government and threats of armed rebellion, it is extremely difficult to do more than establish people knew one another. Everyone knows brothers who never speak, and anyone who’s looked at family genealogies knows the problems that arise when the same name is repeated. Some still aren’t convinced Allerton’s wife wasn’t Elizabeth Thompson, sister of Sarah and Richard, instead of their sister-in-law, Elizabeth Willoughby.
But I suspect somewhere in those dusty records, more likely in those for an indentured servant following Francis Emperor than for a major landowner, lay the lines of influence that possibly tie the uprising in Barbados with later ones in this country through oral history. We can only guess what might have been, not what was.
Notes:
Allerton, Walter Scott. A History of the Allerton Family in the United States: 1585 to 1885, 1900.
Brooke, Francis Taliaferro. "Some Contemporary Accounts of Eminent Charaters," William and Mary Quarterly Historical Magazine, 1908, on Richard Thompson.
Castelli, Jorge H. "Willoughby Family of Parham," Tudorplace website.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kennedy, Mary Seldon. Seldens of Virginia and Allied Families, volume 2, 1911, on Willoughby family.
Lepore, Jill. Review of Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare, The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002., discusses Indian background of Salem witch trials.
Nichol, Margaret Nolan. "The Thompson Family" of Northumberland County, Virginia, Genealogenie website.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
State of the Market
I work for a subcontractor who focuses on the custom home market, which here is dominated by wealthy retirees and people with multiple homes. Almost all the building permits issued this year for new residential construction went to Centex Homes, whose local single family tract homes begin at 199,900 with an advertised monthly payment of $1,344.47.
That places them in the lowest price category for the local home builders annual Parade of Home show, but beyond the reach of most of our workers who, if they make $20 an hour, can’t afford to spend half their net income on housing.
Only one building permit, so far, has gone to a luxury home builder. And the last I heard, some of the biggest winners in this year’s parade, still have no offers.
When I read Ford Motor’s marketing executive Ken Czubay’s comment that the uptick he saw in demand for F series pickup trucks was due to more sales to contractors, I wondered about his logic. The only companies I see here getting work are the ones expanding the road twenty miles north of town and the two general contractors are headquartered a hundred miles to the south of here.
Some heavy equipment operators and bridge builders will be buying new trucks, and possibly some may be able to buy something from Centex, but nothing will trickle up to us.
John McAfee, who recently sold his 157-acre rural estate in New Mexico for $1.15 million, is the extreme example of our market: he was worth more than most of our customers, more than $100 million, and lost more, some $96 million. That sale price, incidentally, is the mid-range for the local home builders show, and less than the asking price for some of this year’s big winners.
Most of our past customers weren’t in McAfee’s tax bracket, but like him, they saw their investments wither this past winter. This spring, when we were called to do our annual work, it turned out not to be the usual exterior maintenance, but the final preparation to put homes on the market. Their experiences only humanized what we already knew. No one was building and few were buying.
A year ago, we regularly worked for maybe nine contractors, two small ones who are basically gone, two medium size ones that are holding on with remodels and no subcontractors, and five high-end builders. Of those, two have no business, and have laid off most of highly skilled crews who made their reputations. Two are surviving by demanding we do the same level work we did in the past for less money. The other is using another subcontractor, and has been replaced in our list by someone else who’s still getting work. We have less than one-third the number of steady customers we did a year ago, and one third the number of employees.
A few weeks ago when we were called to do emergency work in a home after a plumbing leak, we called another subcontractor only to find he and his crew had gone to Colorado to work. There were no craftsmen left in town skilled enough to do the restoration work, so my boss was the one who did the work himself. The insurance company, however, only allows the standard billing rate for a journeyman, not a master craftsman.
A few days ago I asked one of our contractors about Czubay’s observation on contractors. He snorted, and said there was no paper anywhere in town, meaning no one was drawing or bidding blueprints. He said he had recently taken a set of drawings into a copy shop and felt like he’d entered a nest of vultures - all the contractors and subcontractors there started surreptitiously eyeing them to see who was the architect, who had business.
As he said, until the local architects stop laying people off, there’s no recovery here. It doesn’t matter what New York or Detroit thinks.
Notes:
See posting for 9/13 on "Cash for Clunkers" for more on Ken Czubay.
That places them in the lowest price category for the local home builders annual Parade of Home show, but beyond the reach of most of our workers who, if they make $20 an hour, can’t afford to spend half their net income on housing.
Only one building permit, so far, has gone to a luxury home builder. And the last I heard, some of the biggest winners in this year’s parade, still have no offers.
When I read Ford Motor’s marketing executive Ken Czubay’s comment that the uptick he saw in demand for F series pickup trucks was due to more sales to contractors, I wondered about his logic. The only companies I see here getting work are the ones expanding the road twenty miles north of town and the two general contractors are headquartered a hundred miles to the south of here.
Some heavy equipment operators and bridge builders will be buying new trucks, and possibly some may be able to buy something from Centex, but nothing will trickle up to us.
John McAfee, who recently sold his 157-acre rural estate in New Mexico for $1.15 million, is the extreme example of our market: he was worth more than most of our customers, more than $100 million, and lost more, some $96 million. That sale price, incidentally, is the mid-range for the local home builders show, and less than the asking price for some of this year’s big winners.
Most of our past customers weren’t in McAfee’s tax bracket, but like him, they saw their investments wither this past winter. This spring, when we were called to do our annual work, it turned out not to be the usual exterior maintenance, but the final preparation to put homes on the market. Their experiences only humanized what we already knew. No one was building and few were buying.
A year ago, we regularly worked for maybe nine contractors, two small ones who are basically gone, two medium size ones that are holding on with remodels and no subcontractors, and five high-end builders. Of those, two have no business, and have laid off most of highly skilled crews who made their reputations. Two are surviving by demanding we do the same level work we did in the past for less money. The other is using another subcontractor, and has been replaced in our list by someone else who’s still getting work. We have less than one-third the number of steady customers we did a year ago, and one third the number of employees.
A few weeks ago when we were called to do emergency work in a home after a plumbing leak, we called another subcontractor only to find he and his crew had gone to Colorado to work. There were no craftsmen left in town skilled enough to do the restoration work, so my boss was the one who did the work himself. The insurance company, however, only allows the standard billing rate for a journeyman, not a master craftsman.
A few days ago I asked one of our contractors about Czubay’s observation on contractors. He snorted, and said there was no paper anywhere in town, meaning no one was drawing or bidding blueprints. He said he had recently taken a set of drawings into a copy shop and felt like he’d entered a nest of vultures - all the contractors and subcontractors there started surreptitiously eyeing them to see who was the architect, who had business.
As he said, until the local architects stop laying people off, there’s no recovery here. It doesn’t matter what New York or Detroit thinks.
Notes:
See posting for 9/13 on "Cash for Clunkers" for more on Ken Czubay.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
South Carolina - Humphrey Walrond
Humphrey Walrond’s rebellion in Barbados occurred more than 350 years ago. Historians can either dismiss the similarities to today’s more extreme conservative activists or argue similar conditions produce similar responses or that there are direct connections from person to person.
In other words, they confront the classic case confronting anthropologists: coincidence, reinvention or diffusion.
In some ways, the psychological case is the easiest to make.
Humphrey Walrond was the oldest son of a junior branch of a family that established itself in Somerset. His grandfather Humphrey had amassed a fortune in Chancery, bought land in the village of Sea, and opened the local grammar school.
When civil war broke out in England, Walrond was 43 with ten children. He showed no particular inclination to serve either side, but later told Parliament he had done what he could to protect his roundhead neighbors from the depredations of the royalists who dominated the countryside.
In 1645 he fell foul of both sides when the nature of the war changed. Parliament had wearied of protracted warfare that depended on local militias, and established the New Model Army as a professional force, an action akin to Lincoln’s when he elevated Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in our civil war. The first forays under Thomas Fairfax were in Walrond’s area.
As Fairfax neared, the royalist hounded Walrond from his home. He fled to the nearest fortified town, Bridgewater, which Fairfax soon made his first example of Parliamentary resolve by laying siege to the castle and lobbing fire bombs that destroyed much of the town.
Walrond was among the fifty gentlemen taken prisoner when the town was defeated, sent to Gatehouse, and stripped of his property. His oldest son, George, lost as arm sometime fighting for the royalists. When his petitions to Parliament were refused, he sold his property and moved to Barbados.
The town’s local historian, James Street, observed the "Col. Walrond, across the Atlantic, was (as we have said) a strangely different character" than he had been in Sea."
He used every method of the roundheads - legislative maneuvers, war, sequestration of estates, purification of all but the most loyal - to destroy representatives of the men he felt had wrongly punished him. He borrowed the oaths of the Stuarts, but was more an inversion of the men he felt had destroyed him than he was a royalist.
His ally in Barbados, Francis Willoughby underwent the same psychological transformation. During the war, he fought for Parliament, but in 1647, after Charles I had been defeated, he supported Parliament in its disputes with the New Model Army. When the army took London, he was jailed for six months, then fled to Holland to support Charles I.
Once Willoughby took control in Barbados from Walrond, he appeased the moderate royalists, who wished to remain isolated from England’s wars. However, when the banished landowners continued to sponsor partisan accounts of Walrond’s activities, Darnell Davis says Willoughby confused the personal with the political and redirected his anger from the Commonwealth toward anyone who disagreed with him.
As the blockade continued, he nursed his grievance, and wrote his wife "since they began so deeply with me, as to take away all at one clap, and without any cause given on my part, I am resolved not to sit down a loser and be content to see thee, my children, and self ruined."
With no sense of the realities of a plantation economy that had always depended on trade for most of its food, he believed they "can neither starve us with cold, nor famish us with hunger" and so told her "If ever they get the Island, it shall cost them more than it is worth before they have it." It was this indifference to ruin that led moderate royalists to abandon his cause.
The two men, both sons who had inherited to follow the lines of their caste, were shocked when their reflexive responses not only weren’t adequate, but judged wrong when circumstances changed in unexpected ways. They reacted a bit like war prisoners today who internalize some of the attributes of their tormenters at the same time they lose any sense of causality in the outside world.
When Charles II was made king in 1660, Willoughby returned to Barbados, with Walrond as his assistant. By the end of the year, Walrond had displaced him and began prosecuting Thomas Modyford for treason, unmindful of the fact the moderate royalist was related to the man who helped engineer the restoration of the Stuarts, George Monck.
Walrond was expelled again in 1662, and a year later charged with trading with Spain in violation of the Navigation Laws his behavior in Barbados had prompted Parliament to introduce. During his previous exile from Barbados, he had offered his services to Spain, which then was putting down rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal. He angered everyone in England, but managed to leave his son George the most necessary inheritance of a royalist, a title, albeit the Spanish Marquis of Vallado, and debt.
Willoughby never returned to civilian life, but died in battle with the Dutch in 1666.
Notes:
Davis, Nicholas Darnell. The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887, quotes Willoughby’s letter.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile, Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
In other words, they confront the classic case confronting anthropologists: coincidence, reinvention or diffusion.
In some ways, the psychological case is the easiest to make.
Humphrey Walrond was the oldest son of a junior branch of a family that established itself in Somerset. His grandfather Humphrey had amassed a fortune in Chancery, bought land in the village of Sea, and opened the local grammar school.
When civil war broke out in England, Walrond was 43 with ten children. He showed no particular inclination to serve either side, but later told Parliament he had done what he could to protect his roundhead neighbors from the depredations of the royalists who dominated the countryside.
In 1645 he fell foul of both sides when the nature of the war changed. Parliament had wearied of protracted warfare that depended on local militias, and established the New Model Army as a professional force, an action akin to Lincoln’s when he elevated Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in our civil war. The first forays under Thomas Fairfax were in Walrond’s area.
As Fairfax neared, the royalist hounded Walrond from his home. He fled to the nearest fortified town, Bridgewater, which Fairfax soon made his first example of Parliamentary resolve by laying siege to the castle and lobbing fire bombs that destroyed much of the town.
Walrond was among the fifty gentlemen taken prisoner when the town was defeated, sent to Gatehouse, and stripped of his property. His oldest son, George, lost as arm sometime fighting for the royalists. When his petitions to Parliament were refused, he sold his property and moved to Barbados.
The town’s local historian, James Street, observed the "Col. Walrond, across the Atlantic, was (as we have said) a strangely different character" than he had been in Sea."
He used every method of the roundheads - legislative maneuvers, war, sequestration of estates, purification of all but the most loyal - to destroy representatives of the men he felt had wrongly punished him. He borrowed the oaths of the Stuarts, but was more an inversion of the men he felt had destroyed him than he was a royalist.
His ally in Barbados, Francis Willoughby underwent the same psychological transformation. During the war, he fought for Parliament, but in 1647, after Charles I had been defeated, he supported Parliament in its disputes with the New Model Army. When the army took London, he was jailed for six months, then fled to Holland to support Charles I.
Once Willoughby took control in Barbados from Walrond, he appeased the moderate royalists, who wished to remain isolated from England’s wars. However, when the banished landowners continued to sponsor partisan accounts of Walrond’s activities, Darnell Davis says Willoughby confused the personal with the political and redirected his anger from the Commonwealth toward anyone who disagreed with him.
As the blockade continued, he nursed his grievance, and wrote his wife "since they began so deeply with me, as to take away all at one clap, and without any cause given on my part, I am resolved not to sit down a loser and be content to see thee, my children, and self ruined."
With no sense of the realities of a plantation economy that had always depended on trade for most of its food, he believed they "can neither starve us with cold, nor famish us with hunger" and so told her "If ever they get the Island, it shall cost them more than it is worth before they have it." It was this indifference to ruin that led moderate royalists to abandon his cause.
The two men, both sons who had inherited to follow the lines of their caste, were shocked when their reflexive responses not only weren’t adequate, but judged wrong when circumstances changed in unexpected ways. They reacted a bit like war prisoners today who internalize some of the attributes of their tormenters at the same time they lose any sense of causality in the outside world.
When Charles II was made king in 1660, Willoughby returned to Barbados, with Walrond as his assistant. By the end of the year, Walrond had displaced him and began prosecuting Thomas Modyford for treason, unmindful of the fact the moderate royalist was related to the man who helped engineer the restoration of the Stuarts, George Monck.
Walrond was expelled again in 1662, and a year later charged with trading with Spain in violation of the Navigation Laws his behavior in Barbados had prompted Parliament to introduce. During his previous exile from Barbados, he had offered his services to Spain, which then was putting down rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal. He angered everyone in England, but managed to leave his son George the most necessary inheritance of a royalist, a title, albeit the Spanish Marquis of Vallado, and debt.
Willoughby never returned to civilian life, but died in battle with the Dutch in 1666.
Notes:
Davis, Nicholas Darnell. The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887, quotes Willoughby’s letter.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile, Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Corporate Detectives
My favorite detective writers are the ones who maintained a series for many years, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Rex Stout.
There are many reasons I prefer them to the American hard-boiled writers, including the quiet murders rather than the graphic violence and the respect for most of the characters rather than the gratuitous exploitation of women. There's also the expectation in the one that intelligence rather than action was critical to solving a mystery, and the assumption that, in the end, one could know the truth.
Now that I’m rereading the Christie novels I realized there is also a class difference between the writers I like and the ones I do not. I’m not talking about the obvious one between the upper class that inhabits the world of my favored writers and the mean streets of the other. Indeed, while Nero Wolfe indulges expensive tastes, both Hercule Poirot and Perry Mason are quite bourgeois.
Instead, Christie, Gardner and Stout create corporate detectives who depend on the specialization of function that enables mass production. Poirot is a retired policeman, Mason a lawyer, and Wolfe a professional inquiry agent. When each needs information, he hires someone, who in turn hires someone else to do the actual work. So, Poirot uses Mr. Goby who pays runners, Mason uses Paul Drake who runs a detective agency, and Wolfe uses Archie Goodwin who calls on Saul Panzer.
I’m not sure what it means that each of my favorites inhabits a three-tiered, capitalist world while the Americans do everything themselves. I would think my preference would be for the latter. Perhaps it’s just that I appreciate the first as products of a complex civilization they uphold in their pursuit of justice rather than the others who remain hunter-gatherers navigating a world without a social contract.
There are many reasons I prefer them to the American hard-boiled writers, including the quiet murders rather than the graphic violence and the respect for most of the characters rather than the gratuitous exploitation of women. There's also the expectation in the one that intelligence rather than action was critical to solving a mystery, and the assumption that, in the end, one could know the truth.
Now that I’m rereading the Christie novels I realized there is also a class difference between the writers I like and the ones I do not. I’m not talking about the obvious one between the upper class that inhabits the world of my favored writers and the mean streets of the other. Indeed, while Nero Wolfe indulges expensive tastes, both Hercule Poirot and Perry Mason are quite bourgeois.
Instead, Christie, Gardner and Stout create corporate detectives who depend on the specialization of function that enables mass production. Poirot is a retired policeman, Mason a lawyer, and Wolfe a professional inquiry agent. When each needs information, he hires someone, who in turn hires someone else to do the actual work. So, Poirot uses Mr. Goby who pays runners, Mason uses Paul Drake who runs a detective agency, and Wolfe uses Archie Goodwin who calls on Saul Panzer.
I’m not sure what it means that each of my favorites inhabits a three-tiered, capitalist world while the Americans do everything themselves. I would think my preference would be for the latter. Perhaps it’s just that I appreciate the first as products of a complex civilization they uphold in their pursuit of justice rather than the others who remain hunter-gatherers navigating a world without a social contract.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Cash for Clunkers
Despite people’s worst expectations, the government program to give people up to $4,500 to trade in their old cars for more fuel efficient ones spurred automobile sales, especially when dealers added their existing sales incentives.
Cash for Clunkers didn’t immediately restart any assembly lines, but it did clear the stockpiled inventory that has to be removed before manufacturing can resume. Now marketing specialists are studying the sales results for clues to forecast future demand that should reopen the lines.
Many of the program participants were loyal Detroit supporters upon whom the industry depends. The Department of Transportation listed the top ten swapped vehicles, and all the cars and trucks came from Chrysler, Ford and GM. Since the department didn’t give a percentage breakdown, like they did for new cars, it’s difficult to know from the published lists how many Japanese vehicles were brought in or how much these trade-ins reflected the relative popularity of what must have been durable cars and trucks made ten years ago when Detroit held a greater market share.
In general, the program began well for Detroit with these special buyers. At the end of the first week, 47% bought vehicles made by GM, Ford or Chrysler, a number slightly above the three companies’ market share that hovers between 44 and 45%.
However, as more people took advantage of the government’s offer, Detroit lost its preeminence. By August 14, the big three only accounted for 42% of the new car sales, and by the end of the program the number was down to 38.6%.
In the first two weeks, the Ford Focus was the top car, with the Dodge Caliber in eighth place and Chevy’s Cobalt in tenth. Two weeks passed, and Focus fell to third place behind Toyota’s Corolla and Honda’s Civic, while Chrysler and GM disappeared. By the end, the Focus was fourth behind Toyota’s Camry, but the Ford Escape had crept into tenth place.
While Bill Ford could feel vindicated that the changes he’d introduced in the past few years were finally being rewarded, General Motors could console itself the old strategy was still valid: that it had so many models in the market, that even though no one did well enough to make the top ten, the range of choices meant it still outsold their competitors.
At the end of two weeks, it had the largest market share, 18.7%, compared with Toyota’s 17.9%. However, the general drift of the market also affected them: by August 14, Toyota outsold them 18.9% to 17.6%, and by end Toyota was up to 19.4% while GM stayed at 17.6%. In 2008, before they went to Congress for money, GM’s share was 19.1%.
Ever since GM had problems with the Corvair in the 1960's, it has retrenched into the strategy that trucks and luxury cars were its core business. Unfortunately, the government’s sales numbers show people are no longer as interested in trucks. The nature of the program may have skewed the statistics by favoring people who had outgrown their pickups, perhaps because, at their stage in life, they no longer needed to haul things for their house and yard, and now needed a different type of vehicle for a changing family.
Still GM should be worried that at the end of the second week of the program, August 5, 83% of the participants brought in trucks, but only 40% bought new, more fuel-efficient ones. By the end of the program, August 26, the numbers remained essentially unchanged: 84% brought in trucks and 41% drove away with new ones. The cars it eschewed were the market.
Instead, GM’s chief sales analyst, Michael C. DiGiovanni, picked through the data and discovered strong interest in the Camaro muscle car and Equinox SUV. Over at Ford, the vice president for sales and marketing, Ken Czubay, saw hope for the F-series pickup trucks when sales rose for the first time since October of 2006.
These men seem to still hope the interest in fuel efficient automobiles is a passing flirtation, perhaps one encouraged by a matchmaker, but that people will return again and rescue their behemoths from becoming mere niche vehicles. Detroit is nothing if not consistent in its drive towards obsolescence.
Notes:
August 3. David Shepardson, "Big Three Sell 47 Percent of 'Cash for Clunkers' Sales; Ford Focus Top-seller," The Detroit News.
August 15. David Shepardson, "Japanese Sales Climb in 'Clunkers' Program; GM, Ford Slip Behind Toyota in Vehicles Sold," The Detroit News.
August 26. Department of Transportation press release 133-09, "Cash for Clunkers Wraps up with Nearly 700,000 Car Sales and Increased Fuel Efficiency, U.S. Transportation Secretary LaHood Declares Program ‘Wildly Successful’."
September 1. Bill Vlasic and Nick Bunkley, "Clunker Program Spurred August Sales," The New York Times.
Cash for Clunkers didn’t immediately restart any assembly lines, but it did clear the stockpiled inventory that has to be removed before manufacturing can resume. Now marketing specialists are studying the sales results for clues to forecast future demand that should reopen the lines.
Many of the program participants were loyal Detroit supporters upon whom the industry depends. The Department of Transportation listed the top ten swapped vehicles, and all the cars and trucks came from Chrysler, Ford and GM. Since the department didn’t give a percentage breakdown, like they did for new cars, it’s difficult to know from the published lists how many Japanese vehicles were brought in or how much these trade-ins reflected the relative popularity of what must have been durable cars and trucks made ten years ago when Detroit held a greater market share.
In general, the program began well for Detroit with these special buyers. At the end of the first week, 47% bought vehicles made by GM, Ford or Chrysler, a number slightly above the three companies’ market share that hovers between 44 and 45%.
However, as more people took advantage of the government’s offer, Detroit lost its preeminence. By August 14, the big three only accounted for 42% of the new car sales, and by the end of the program the number was down to 38.6%.
In the first two weeks, the Ford Focus was the top car, with the Dodge Caliber in eighth place and Chevy’s Cobalt in tenth. Two weeks passed, and Focus fell to third place behind Toyota’s Corolla and Honda’s Civic, while Chrysler and GM disappeared. By the end, the Focus was fourth behind Toyota’s Camry, but the Ford Escape had crept into tenth place.
While Bill Ford could feel vindicated that the changes he’d introduced in the past few years were finally being rewarded, General Motors could console itself the old strategy was still valid: that it had so many models in the market, that even though no one did well enough to make the top ten, the range of choices meant it still outsold their competitors.
At the end of two weeks, it had the largest market share, 18.7%, compared with Toyota’s 17.9%. However, the general drift of the market also affected them: by August 14, Toyota outsold them 18.9% to 17.6%, and by end Toyota was up to 19.4% while GM stayed at 17.6%. In 2008, before they went to Congress for money, GM’s share was 19.1%.
Ever since GM had problems with the Corvair in the 1960's, it has retrenched into the strategy that trucks and luxury cars were its core business. Unfortunately, the government’s sales numbers show people are no longer as interested in trucks. The nature of the program may have skewed the statistics by favoring people who had outgrown their pickups, perhaps because, at their stage in life, they no longer needed to haul things for their house and yard, and now needed a different type of vehicle for a changing family.
Still GM should be worried that at the end of the second week of the program, August 5, 83% of the participants brought in trucks, but only 40% bought new, more fuel-efficient ones. By the end of the program, August 26, the numbers remained essentially unchanged: 84% brought in trucks and 41% drove away with new ones. The cars it eschewed were the market.
Instead, GM’s chief sales analyst, Michael C. DiGiovanni, picked through the data and discovered strong interest in the Camaro muscle car and Equinox SUV. Over at Ford, the vice president for sales and marketing, Ken Czubay, saw hope for the F-series pickup trucks when sales rose for the first time since October of 2006.
These men seem to still hope the interest in fuel efficient automobiles is a passing flirtation, perhaps one encouraged by a matchmaker, but that people will return again and rescue their behemoths from becoming mere niche vehicles. Detroit is nothing if not consistent in its drive towards obsolescence.
Notes:
August 3. David Shepardson, "Big Three Sell 47 Percent of 'Cash for Clunkers' Sales; Ford Focus Top-seller," The Detroit News.
August 15. David Shepardson, "Japanese Sales Climb in 'Clunkers' Program; GM, Ford Slip Behind Toyota in Vehicles Sold," The Detroit News.
August 26. Department of Transportation press release 133-09, "Cash for Clunkers Wraps up with Nearly 700,000 Car Sales and Increased Fuel Efficiency, U.S. Transportation Secretary LaHood Declares Program ‘Wildly Successful’."
September 1. Bill Vlasic and Nick Bunkley, "Clunker Program Spurred August Sales," The New York Times.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
South Carolina - Humphrey Waldron’s Rebellion
Humphrey Walrond’s royalist revolt on Barbados in 1650 is the first instance of the deliberate use of lies and threats of violence to overcome the will of the legal majority that I know might have influenced South Carolina.
When England tried, sentenced and executed Charles I in 1649, Barbados was a fragile society. Slavery was still new and the mechanisms for control weren’t yet in place. Indentured servants had plotted rebellion in 1647. In September of 1649, Oliver Cromwell told Parliament he had executed every tenth soldier captured at Drogheda and sent the rest to Barbados along with Catholic soldiers caught in other Irish towns.
The recent, unwilling arrivals had not yet been absorbed by a society that was rapidly converting to slave labor nor had many yet had the opportunity to remigrate to newly opened islands like Antigua. Any references made by agitators to violent rebellion or enslavement were heard against this background.
Land title on the island was dependent on the Lord Proprietor, and through him, on the English government which granted him a charter. In 1648, Francis Willoughby assumed the Barbados patent when he paid some debts of the current Earl of Carlisle. James Hay’s son James then revoked the appointment of Philip Bell as governor. Willoughby had appointed no successor and Bell was still in place.
Not only was there no legitimate chain of authority, most landowners realized their titles ultimately depended on the good will of the government that was still being petitioned by the creditors of William Courteen, who claimed his grant had priority over that of Hays-Willoughby. Most Barbadians wished to offend as few people as possible in England and so wished to remain neutral.
The Walrond rebellion began in Bermuda in 1649 when royalists overthrew the governor and replaced him with one who refused the request for loyalty from the Commonwealth’s Council of State and declared Charles I’s son Charles the legitimate power in England. They also banished the Independents to the Bahamas.
The term Independent was used for any dissident from the Anglican church, including a number of Puritans sent by the chief shareholder in the Somers Isle Company, Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. Their rebellion was then against both the state and their landlord.
Bermuda sent agents to the wealthier Barbados asking it to support Charles Stuart and join a mutual defense alliance. Royalists on the island favored the Bermudans, but one of the largest landowners, James Drax, convinced the government it could sell arms but should remain neutral.
Walrond began plotting against Drax, who he began calling an Independent, and infiltrating the key positions in the civil government. The treasurer, Guy Molesworth, was banished for his alleged role in the servant plot two years earlier. William Byam, recently deported from the Tower of London, was made treasurer and Master of the Magazines. Molesworth told Parliament that Drax was responsible for the false rumors.
By mid April, moderate royalists like Thomas Modyford, who were concerned that Walrond’s continued maneuvering for recognition of Charles Stuart could ruin the island, proposed a widely support Act for Uniting the Inhabitants of the Island under the Government which simply required every citizen obey the island’s government.
Walrond’s lawyer brother, Edward, added inflammatory language that anyone who attended an Independent service or did not attend communion should be sentenced for three months on the first offence, and then banished if he persisted.
Drax suggested to Bell that he should call an election for the General Assembly that, in effect, would be a referendum on the Modyford-Walrond bill. Humphrey Walrond responded with libelous broadsheets against Drax, each more scurrilous. He finally wrote the men who petitioned for an election:
"are Independents, their aim is wholly to Cashier the Gentry...and change for our Peace War, and for our Unity Division. Colonel Drax that devout Zealot (of the deeds of the Devil and the cause of the seven headed Dragon of Westminster) is the Agent...I have vowed to impeach him and prosecute him, but not in point of Law; for then I know he would subdue me (but at the point of Sword;)..against the pretense of Liberty, for thereby is meant Slavery and Tyranny" [Spelling modernized, emphasis added]
Walrond then began gathering armed men to force the governor, Philip Bell, to proclaim Charles king. When Bell wasn’t able to gather an equally strong military, he acquiesced at a showdown on the outskirts of Bridgetown. The next day, Francis Willoughby appeared in the harbor, talked with Bell and agreed to return in three months to assume power.
That gave Walrond time to deport as many people as he could, including Drax. Some of the wealthier men went to London to explain conditions to the Council of State. Inevitably, the Commonwealth declared the island in revolt and, in 1651, dispatched a fleet to blockade, then subdue the rebels.
Willoughby grew increasingly angry with the banished landowners, and seized more estates to pay for war. Men began to question the validity of Willoughby and Walrond’s claims of a vast, Roundhead conspiracy. Others, no doubt including the Roman Catholic refugees, grew less comfortable with the demands for religious conformity.
In December, Modyford began negotiating with Cromwell’s representative, George Ayscue. When Willoughby refused any treaties, Modyford raised a thousand men to match Willoughby’s thousand. The two armies spent several days in the rain in January, 1652, contemplating battle, which would necessarily have been war between neighbors, before Willoughby surrendered.
The treaty forgave as many actions as possible, and only made one action the grounds for future prosecution:
"the main and chief cause of our late troubles and miseries has grown by lose, base and uncivil language, tending to sedition and derision, too commonly used among many people here: it is there further agreed that at the next General Assembly a strict law be made against all such persons, with a heavy penalty to be inflicted upon them that shall be guilty of any reviling speeches of what nature soever, by remembering or raveling into former differences, and reproaching any man with the cause he has formerly defended." [emphasis added]
In March, Willougby banished the still threatening Walrond, his brother Edward, Byam and several more of their hard core supporters, but not before the pattern of minority subversion through threat of force and intemperate language was set.
Notes: Nicholas Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887 and available on-line, is the best place to start understanding the rebellion. More recent historians, no doubt, correct his errors and provide better analysis, but they offer less clear chronologies.
When England tried, sentenced and executed Charles I in 1649, Barbados was a fragile society. Slavery was still new and the mechanisms for control weren’t yet in place. Indentured servants had plotted rebellion in 1647. In September of 1649, Oliver Cromwell told Parliament he had executed every tenth soldier captured at Drogheda and sent the rest to Barbados along with Catholic soldiers caught in other Irish towns.
The recent, unwilling arrivals had not yet been absorbed by a society that was rapidly converting to slave labor nor had many yet had the opportunity to remigrate to newly opened islands like Antigua. Any references made by agitators to violent rebellion or enslavement were heard against this background.
Land title on the island was dependent on the Lord Proprietor, and through him, on the English government which granted him a charter. In 1648, Francis Willoughby assumed the Barbados patent when he paid some debts of the current Earl of Carlisle. James Hay’s son James then revoked the appointment of Philip Bell as governor. Willoughby had appointed no successor and Bell was still in place.
Not only was there no legitimate chain of authority, most landowners realized their titles ultimately depended on the good will of the government that was still being petitioned by the creditors of William Courteen, who claimed his grant had priority over that of Hays-Willoughby. Most Barbadians wished to offend as few people as possible in England and so wished to remain neutral.
The Walrond rebellion began in Bermuda in 1649 when royalists overthrew the governor and replaced him with one who refused the request for loyalty from the Commonwealth’s Council of State and declared Charles I’s son Charles the legitimate power in England. They also banished the Independents to the Bahamas.
The term Independent was used for any dissident from the Anglican church, including a number of Puritans sent by the chief shareholder in the Somers Isle Company, Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. Their rebellion was then against both the state and their landlord.
Bermuda sent agents to the wealthier Barbados asking it to support Charles Stuart and join a mutual defense alliance. Royalists on the island favored the Bermudans, but one of the largest landowners, James Drax, convinced the government it could sell arms but should remain neutral.
Walrond began plotting against Drax, who he began calling an Independent, and infiltrating the key positions in the civil government. The treasurer, Guy Molesworth, was banished for his alleged role in the servant plot two years earlier. William Byam, recently deported from the Tower of London, was made treasurer and Master of the Magazines. Molesworth told Parliament that Drax was responsible for the false rumors.
By mid April, moderate royalists like Thomas Modyford, who were concerned that Walrond’s continued maneuvering for recognition of Charles Stuart could ruin the island, proposed a widely support Act for Uniting the Inhabitants of the Island under the Government which simply required every citizen obey the island’s government.
Walrond’s lawyer brother, Edward, added inflammatory language that anyone who attended an Independent service or did not attend communion should be sentenced for three months on the first offence, and then banished if he persisted.
Drax suggested to Bell that he should call an election for the General Assembly that, in effect, would be a referendum on the Modyford-Walrond bill. Humphrey Walrond responded with libelous broadsheets against Drax, each more scurrilous. He finally wrote the men who petitioned for an election:
"are Independents, their aim is wholly to Cashier the Gentry...and change for our Peace War, and for our Unity Division. Colonel Drax that devout Zealot (of the deeds of the Devil and the cause of the seven headed Dragon of Westminster) is the Agent...I have vowed to impeach him and prosecute him, but not in point of Law; for then I know he would subdue me (but at the point of Sword;)..against the pretense of Liberty, for thereby is meant Slavery and Tyranny" [Spelling modernized, emphasis added]
Walrond then began gathering armed men to force the governor, Philip Bell, to proclaim Charles king. When Bell wasn’t able to gather an equally strong military, he acquiesced at a showdown on the outskirts of Bridgetown. The next day, Francis Willoughby appeared in the harbor, talked with Bell and agreed to return in three months to assume power.
That gave Walrond time to deport as many people as he could, including Drax. Some of the wealthier men went to London to explain conditions to the Council of State. Inevitably, the Commonwealth declared the island in revolt and, in 1651, dispatched a fleet to blockade, then subdue the rebels.
Willoughby grew increasingly angry with the banished landowners, and seized more estates to pay for war. Men began to question the validity of Willoughby and Walrond’s claims of a vast, Roundhead conspiracy. Others, no doubt including the Roman Catholic refugees, grew less comfortable with the demands for religious conformity.
In December, Modyford began negotiating with Cromwell’s representative, George Ayscue. When Willoughby refused any treaties, Modyford raised a thousand men to match Willoughby’s thousand. The two armies spent several days in the rain in January, 1652, contemplating battle, which would necessarily have been war between neighbors, before Willoughby surrendered.
The treaty forgave as many actions as possible, and only made one action the grounds for future prosecution:
"the main and chief cause of our late troubles and miseries has grown by lose, base and uncivil language, tending to sedition and derision, too commonly used among many people here: it is there further agreed that at the next General Assembly a strict law be made against all such persons, with a heavy penalty to be inflicted upon them that shall be guilty of any reviling speeches of what nature soever, by remembering or raveling into former differences, and reproaching any man with the cause he has formerly defended." [emphasis added]
In March, Willougby banished the still threatening Walrond, his brother Edward, Byam and several more of their hard core supporters, but not before the pattern of minority subversion through threat of force and intemperate language was set.
Notes: Nicholas Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887 and available on-line, is the best place to start understanding the rebellion. More recent historians, no doubt, correct his errors and provide better analysis, but they offer less clear chronologies.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Recently, Judith Thurman reviewed some books about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose that suggested she grew into a rigid, domineering mother and that both drifted into conservative thought that made her books icons for people like Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan.
I read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was ten, and I cherish my memories of them too much to reread them. When I saw them appear in small, thin paperbacks I feared by childhood would be diminished. The books I read were thick, no doubt with heavy pages, and covers swollen by the plastic wrappers that encased the dust jackets. The act of finishing such a large book was an action that felt like a step towards adulthood. I didn’t want to know they, in fact, had been so small.
I also never watched the television show. I remembered nothing of the parents from the books: the four girls inhabited that world so common in successful children’s books, the one where adults are reduced to marginal figures. When Michael Landon transformed it into a series focused on the father, it was no longer my book, but about his journey from the youngest son of the all male world of Bonanza to marriage and fatherhood. More, it encapsulated many people’s view of the frontier that went from a male world to that of the nuclear family, from the ranching pioneers to the farmers and towns.
I also knew the television series was wrong when I heard it featured the family’s long ties to the Olsens in Minnesota. As a child I knew every book took place somewhere different. The only incident I clearly remember was when they received clothes at Christmas from a barrel sent west by some church. I knew even then that signified a life of isolation and poverty where people, in fact, could not do everything for themselves.
I’ve since read Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner and the history of my hometown. I now know settlement took place in two phases. The first often lasted no more than a year or so, when people staked claims, cleared the land, then left - they either couldn’t succeed or sold to the next group who made the settled towns we think of as pioneer communities. Wilder’s father was one of the restless breed, best romanticized by Daniel Boone, not one of those who built society.
The history of my home town makes clear that Dickens’ description of incompetent settlers lured into bogus town plats in Nicholas Nickleby was not just satire. In Cameron, Patricia Averill describes people who came west with nothing more than a few tools, and were reduced to harnessing themselves to pull their wagons or whose only cooking implements were so burned they barely functioned. Once more settlers arrived, followed by the railroad, they were able to sell some crops, make some money, and begin the slow climb towards respectability.
For the television series to have been true to the books, each season would have had a new setting and a new set of secondary characters. That would have violated the expectations for continuity held by an audience who wants the comfort of the familiar each week. It’s the same dynamic that domesticated M*A*S*H when it lasted more than a few years. The logic of the original movie would have kept the chaos the same and changed the characters every season; when the characters became stable, the outside environment followed.
The reason the books worked, despite the constant change, is that the girls were the constants and children know childhood is not a time of sameness. Every day something is different.
Notes: Judith Thurman, "Wilder Women: the Mother and Daughter Behind the Little House Stories," New Yorker 10 August 2009.
I read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was ten, and I cherish my memories of them too much to reread them. When I saw them appear in small, thin paperbacks I feared by childhood would be diminished. The books I read were thick, no doubt with heavy pages, and covers swollen by the plastic wrappers that encased the dust jackets. The act of finishing such a large book was an action that felt like a step towards adulthood. I didn’t want to know they, in fact, had been so small.
I also never watched the television show. I remembered nothing of the parents from the books: the four girls inhabited that world so common in successful children’s books, the one where adults are reduced to marginal figures. When Michael Landon transformed it into a series focused on the father, it was no longer my book, but about his journey from the youngest son of the all male world of Bonanza to marriage and fatherhood. More, it encapsulated many people’s view of the frontier that went from a male world to that of the nuclear family, from the ranching pioneers to the farmers and towns.
I also knew the television series was wrong when I heard it featured the family’s long ties to the Olsens in Minnesota. As a child I knew every book took place somewhere different. The only incident I clearly remember was when they received clothes at Christmas from a barrel sent west by some church. I knew even then that signified a life of isolation and poverty where people, in fact, could not do everything for themselves.
I’ve since read Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner and the history of my hometown. I now know settlement took place in two phases. The first often lasted no more than a year or so, when people staked claims, cleared the land, then left - they either couldn’t succeed or sold to the next group who made the settled towns we think of as pioneer communities. Wilder’s father was one of the restless breed, best romanticized by Daniel Boone, not one of those who built society.
The history of my home town makes clear that Dickens’ description of incompetent settlers lured into bogus town plats in Nicholas Nickleby was not just satire. In Cameron, Patricia Averill describes people who came west with nothing more than a few tools, and were reduced to harnessing themselves to pull their wagons or whose only cooking implements were so burned they barely functioned. Once more settlers arrived, followed by the railroad, they were able to sell some crops, make some money, and begin the slow climb towards respectability.
For the television series to have been true to the books, each season would have had a new setting and a new set of secondary characters. That would have violated the expectations for continuity held by an audience who wants the comfort of the familiar each week. It’s the same dynamic that domesticated M*A*S*H when it lasted more than a few years. The logic of the original movie would have kept the chaos the same and changed the characters every season; when the characters became stable, the outside environment followed.
The reason the books worked, despite the constant change, is that the girls were the constants and children know childhood is not a time of sameness. Every day something is different.
Notes: Judith Thurman, "Wilder Women: the Mother and Daughter Behind the Little House Stories," New Yorker 10 August 2009.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Michael Jackson's Dreams
This is allergy season, and I keep waking at one in the morning. If my boss didn’t insist on my being in the office at eight, I would simply get up and do something productive until I was sleepy enough to return to bed.
As it is, I stay in bed and try not to wake thoroughly, and so remain in the netherland between dreams and consciousness when random thoughts about Michael Jackson pass through my brain. I probably should get up anyway, since I still wake with a sense of sleep deprivation.
A registered nurse, Cherilyn Lee, was the first to state Jackson wanted powerful drugs to fight his insomnia.
Since, sleep specialists have discussed the dangers of chronic insomnia and sleep deprivation as if what they were discussing was the same thing Jackson meant. However, his insistence of anesthetics suggests what he wanted wasn’t simple sleep with REM cycles filled with dreams, but immediate and complete unconsciousness.
Everyone who has had bad dreams or suffered sleepless hours and has followed Jackson’s life could suggest a different source for a fear of dreams and half-awake associations: something in his childhood, that burning hair, the upcoming tour, the trial for child molestation. Some might even speculate on why the problems got worse recently.
What’s truly frightening is that the most useful solutions were unavailable to him, and would be shunned by most of us. Freud may have had people willing to describe their dreams, but most of us are leery about seeing a specialist who might then be forced to report to some legal or insurance authority. As it is, almost anyone who could claim special knowledge about Jackson was talking after his death, either to assuage their own shock or to gather some reflected light.
And of the people Jackson allowed to get closer to him, Gerald Posner believes Liz Taylor is the one who first overcame his childhood, Jehovah’s Witness grounded aversion to drugs by her own example. She’s the one who introduced him to the Svengali dermatologist, Arnold Klein, who was providing her with illegal drugs in the 1980's.
Jackson’s former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, said he was self-destructive 14 years earlier, in the middle 1990's, and that it was impossible to help him without being consumed by him. His personality was so strong, it was impossible for her to walk away without feeling guilty and angry for years. Those feelings resurfaced when he died. Most of his friends, sooner or later, faced the same choice.
To die from a fear of dreams. It’s too bad he didn’t listen to Ernest Tubb when he was young. Then he would just have gotten out of bed and sung "Walking the Floor over You."
Notes:
Associated Press. "Nutritionist Says Jackson Pleaded for Insomnia Sedative," 1 July 2009.
Posner, Gerald . "The Jackson-Liz Drug Link," The Daily Beast website, 6 July 2009.
Presley, Lisa Marie. Her 26 June 2009 MySpace comments after Jackson’s death have been widely repeated.
As it is, I stay in bed and try not to wake thoroughly, and so remain in the netherland between dreams and consciousness when random thoughts about Michael Jackson pass through my brain. I probably should get up anyway, since I still wake with a sense of sleep deprivation.
A registered nurse, Cherilyn Lee, was the first to state Jackson wanted powerful drugs to fight his insomnia.
Since, sleep specialists have discussed the dangers of chronic insomnia and sleep deprivation as if what they were discussing was the same thing Jackson meant. However, his insistence of anesthetics suggests what he wanted wasn’t simple sleep with REM cycles filled with dreams, but immediate and complete unconsciousness.
Everyone who has had bad dreams or suffered sleepless hours and has followed Jackson’s life could suggest a different source for a fear of dreams and half-awake associations: something in his childhood, that burning hair, the upcoming tour, the trial for child molestation. Some might even speculate on why the problems got worse recently.
What’s truly frightening is that the most useful solutions were unavailable to him, and would be shunned by most of us. Freud may have had people willing to describe their dreams, but most of us are leery about seeing a specialist who might then be forced to report to some legal or insurance authority. As it is, almost anyone who could claim special knowledge about Jackson was talking after his death, either to assuage their own shock or to gather some reflected light.
And of the people Jackson allowed to get closer to him, Gerald Posner believes Liz Taylor is the one who first overcame his childhood, Jehovah’s Witness grounded aversion to drugs by her own example. She’s the one who introduced him to the Svengali dermatologist, Arnold Klein, who was providing her with illegal drugs in the 1980's.
Jackson’s former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, said he was self-destructive 14 years earlier, in the middle 1990's, and that it was impossible to help him without being consumed by him. His personality was so strong, it was impossible for her to walk away without feeling guilty and angry for years. Those feelings resurfaced when he died. Most of his friends, sooner or later, faced the same choice.
To die from a fear of dreams. It’s too bad he didn’t listen to Ernest Tubb when he was young. Then he would just have gotten out of bed and sung "Walking the Floor over You."
Notes:
Associated Press. "Nutritionist Says Jackson Pleaded for Insomnia Sedative," 1 July 2009.
Posner, Gerald . "The Jackson-Liz Drug Link," The Daily Beast website, 6 July 2009.
Presley, Lisa Marie. Her 26 June 2009 MySpace comments after Jackson’s death have been widely repeated.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Realism and Romanticism
Recently I started reading a novel by Marge Piercy, Braided Lives, that I abandoned after 160 pages because I really didn’t care about the sex life of the heroine and her oafish boyfriend as they got through a joyless freshmen year at the University of Michigan and a summer in Detroit.
I lived that life. If I read someone else’s experience, I want it leavened by perspective and I want it in a style better than my own.
In frustration, I took down a book from the shelf as different as I could find. I ended up with a movie promotion edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Camille written more than 130 years before. It was one strange object, a thick paged Grosset and Dunlap from 1927 with photographs from the Norma Talmage production set in the 1920's interspersed with Dumas’ 1840's text.
The first problem was language. I was never sure how much simplification had been done beyond translation from the French. However, since the plot concerned a "kept woman" with a friend who provided the narrator with information on the economics of such a life, I figured it couldn’t be too bowdlerized.
The second reading problem was the conventions of the genre. While Piercy wrote about her experiences in the first person, Dumas used a third person to narrate his personal story. The anonymous narrator retells the story of a man he met when he bought a book at Marguerite Gautier’s estate sale that the stranger had given her. The lady of the camellias’ final days are described through the journal she left with a friend.
By the end of 150 pages I was bored by Dumas and went to bed. The next evening I tried again, and resumed at the point where the narrative crosses the threshold of engagement to takes on its own compelling life. This engagement existed despite the fact that the story concerned a prostitute dying from tuberculosis who gave up her pampered life to life with a jealous young man who truly loved her only to be punished by his family for her earlier ways.
At the time it was published the stereotype was fresh, but its very success - by Wikipedia’s count at least 20 movies starring women like Theda Bara and Greta Garbo, as well theatrical adaptions with Eleanore Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Gish, and Tallulah Bankhead and the opera La Traviata - has rendered it too familiar.
So why does the one autobiographical novel work better than another? I can only think the distancing required by the romantic conventions makes it easier for the author to transform private experience into the public domain without destroying the reality of the personal for the author. The imaginative leap necessary to produce art is simply easier when one can deny it’s my true life.
I lived that life. If I read someone else’s experience, I want it leavened by perspective and I want it in a style better than my own.
In frustration, I took down a book from the shelf as different as I could find. I ended up with a movie promotion edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Camille written more than 130 years before. It was one strange object, a thick paged Grosset and Dunlap from 1927 with photographs from the Norma Talmage production set in the 1920's interspersed with Dumas’ 1840's text.
The first problem was language. I was never sure how much simplification had been done beyond translation from the French. However, since the plot concerned a "kept woman" with a friend who provided the narrator with information on the economics of such a life, I figured it couldn’t be too bowdlerized.
The second reading problem was the conventions of the genre. While Piercy wrote about her experiences in the first person, Dumas used a third person to narrate his personal story. The anonymous narrator retells the story of a man he met when he bought a book at Marguerite Gautier’s estate sale that the stranger had given her. The lady of the camellias’ final days are described through the journal she left with a friend.
By the end of 150 pages I was bored by Dumas and went to bed. The next evening I tried again, and resumed at the point where the narrative crosses the threshold of engagement to takes on its own compelling life. This engagement existed despite the fact that the story concerned a prostitute dying from tuberculosis who gave up her pampered life to life with a jealous young man who truly loved her only to be punished by his family for her earlier ways.
At the time it was published the stereotype was fresh, but its very success - by Wikipedia’s count at least 20 movies starring women like Theda Bara and Greta Garbo, as well theatrical adaptions with Eleanore Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Gish, and Tallulah Bankhead and the opera La Traviata - has rendered it too familiar.
So why does the one autobiographical novel work better than another? I can only think the distancing required by the romantic conventions makes it easier for the author to transform private experience into the public domain without destroying the reality of the personal for the author. The imaginative leap necessary to produce art is simply easier when one can deny it’s my true life.
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