November, 2010 archive

As I waited in the dentist’s office yesterday, I pulled out my phone and continued reading Mark Twain’s Following the Equator on my ebook reader (hence this morning’s QOTD). It’s an excellent way to turn waiting time into useful, or, at least, bearable time.

Reading books on my phone tends therefore to be an intermittent activity–I may go several weeks without doing it, then do it frequently for a week. Following the Equator is an ideal book for intermittent reading: As a travelogue, it has narrative, but no plot to remember, er, intermittently.

Twain published Following the Equator in 1897, late in his life. He tells the story of a tour around the world roughly along the equator. So far, he has taken me from San Francisco to Hawaii to Fiji to Australia to New Zealand to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). I am presently his guest in Bombay (now Mumbai).

The contrast between the patronizing, almost contemptuous portrayal of things not American in his very early Innocents Abroad (1869) and the more mature reflections on Europeans’ and Americans’ treatment of what in the parlance of the time were commonly called “inferior races” in the last decades of the second age of imperial expansion is notable.

According to Twain, it was common for Western tourists in visiting India at the time to hire a “bearer”–a temporary servant–to tend to their needs and to help them negotiate the visit. He tells of seeing one such tourist, a European, casually “cuff”–today we would say “come upside the head”–his bearer because of some trifling error.

And it sends him back in time:

My father was a refined and kindly gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly just and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie–which surprised me, and showed me how unsuspicious he was, for that was not my maiden effort.

He punished me those two times only, and never any other member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our harmless slave boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses. My father had passed his life among the slaves from his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the time, not from his nature.

When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of iron-ore at a slaveman in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly–as if that were a crime. It bounded from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an hour. I knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it.

Nobody in the village approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about it.

Persons sometimes speak of the “dehumanizing” effects of chattel slavery, commonly implying that it is the slave who is dehumanized.

In truth, the master becomes dehumanized.

With that in mind, consider what this report from the Booman tells us about Republicanism today.

Afterthought:

Dennis G., who blogs at Balloon Juice, frequently refers to the Republican Party as “The Confederate Party.” He has a point.

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*I have edited this passage by breaking it into paragraphs; in the original, it is one paragraph. Paragraphs were longer in the olden days when I was a young ‘un.

I didn’t need that tooth anyway.

Via Bob Cesca, who’s on a roll.

Helen Philpot composes the travelogue.

The Olympia – last surviving warship of the Spanish-American War of 1898 – may still be scrapped or face a watery grave as an artificial reef off Cape May without money for restoration.

But the Penn’s Landing attraction will not close as originally planned Monday after the Independence Seaport Museum’s decision, announced late Wednesday, to fund interim repairs.

The Olympia will continue its daily visiting hours through Dec. 31, then move to a three-day schedule through March 31 while its fate is pondered.

This would be a good target for some stimulus money.