v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Our Misery Index

 

James Fallows writes at The Atlantic:

The most traumatic year in modern American history was 1968. But what is now the second-most traumatic year, 2020, still has seven months to run. The comparison provides little comfort, and several reasons for concern.

How could any year be worse than the current one, in which more Americans are out of work than in the Great Depression, and more people are needlessly dying than in several of America’s wars combined?

How could the domestic order seem more frayed and failing than it has in the past week—when the filmed record of a white Minneapolis police officer calmly killing a black man, George Floyd, as other officers just as calmly looked on, led naturally to protests? Protests in some cities decayed into looting or destruction. Then in many cities, police and troopers kitted out as if for Baghdad circa 2003 widened the violence and hastened the decay with strong-arm tactics sure to generate new protests.

Most of the objects of police roundups have been civilians. But in a rapidly expanding list of cities—first Minneapolis, then Louisville, Seattle, Detroit, and elsewhere—reporters appeared to be singled out by police as targets, rather than caught up by accident. In Minneapolis, CNN’s Omar Jimenez was arrested while in the middle of a broadcast to a live national audience. Also in Minneapolis, according to Molly Hennessey-Fiske of the Los Angeles Times, Minnesota State Patrol members approached a group of a dozen reporters, all bearing credentials and yelling to identify themselves as press, and “fired tear gas ... at point blank range.” In Louisville, Kaitlin Rust, a reporter with WAVE 3, an NBC affiliate, yelled on camera, “I’m getting shot!” as her cameraman, James Dobson, filmed an officer taking careful aim and firing a pepper-ball gun directly at them. In Detroit, the reporter JC Reindl of the Free Press was pepper-sprayed in the face, even as he held up his press badge. The examples keep piling up.

According to a careful study by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Donald Trump started referring to the press as “the enemy of the people” about three years ago. It’s a vile term, with a dangerous and dehumanizing history, used during the French and Russian Revolutions, among other times, to place people beyond the pale. It’s vilest and most dangerous of all when used by people in power, while attacks are going on. Those are exactly the circumstances in which Trump used it again yesterday afternoon, in yet another tweet.

All of this is bad, and getting worse. How does it compare with the distant past of 1968? Naturally there is no objective comparison of suffering or confusion. Fear, loss, dislocation, despair are real enough to people who encounter them, no matter what happened to someone else at some other time.

But here is what anyone around at that time will remember about 1968: The assassinations. The foreign warfare. The domestic carnage and bloodshed. The political chaos and division. The way that parts of the United States have seemed in the past week, in reaction to injustices, is the way much of the U.S. seemed day after day. I think I can remember every week of that eventful year.

The BrokenCountry

Roxane Gay at the NYT has OpEd piece that hits home:

After Donald Trump maligned the developing world in 2018, with the dismissive phrase “shithole countries,” I wrote that no one was coming to save us from the president. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, we see exactly what that means.

The economy is shattered. Unemployment continues to climb, steeply. There is no coherent federal leadership. The president mocks any attempts at modeling precautionary behaviors that might save American lives. More than 100,000 Americans have died from Covid-19.

Many of us have been in some form of self-isolation for more than two months. The less fortunate continue to risk their lives because they cannot afford to shelter from the virus. People who were already living on the margins are dealing with financial stresses that the government’s $1,200 “stimulus” payment cannot begin to relieve. A housing crisis is imminent. Many parts of the country are reopening prematurely. Protesters have stormed state capitals, demanding that businesses reopen. The country is starkly dividing between those who believe in science and those who don’t.

Commercials celebrate essential workers and medical professionals. Commercials show how corporations have adapted to “the way we live now,” with curbside pickup and drive-through service and contact-free delivery. We can spend our way to normalcy, and capitalism will hold us close, these ads would have us believe.

Some people are trying to provide the salvation the government will not. There are community-led initiatives for everything from grocery deliveries for the elderly and immunocompromised to sewing face masks for essential workers. There are online pleas for fund-raising. Buy from your independent bookstore. Get takeout or delivery from your favorite restaurant. Keep your favorite bookstore open. Buy gift cards. Pay the people who work for you, even if they can’t come to work. Do as much as you can, and then do more.

These are all lovely ideas and they demonstrate good intentions, but we can only do so much. The disparities that normally fracture our culture are becoming even more pronounced as we decide, collectively, what we choose to save — what deserves to be saved.

And even during a pandemic, racism is as pernicious as ever. Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting the black community, but we can hardly take the time to sit with that horror as we are reminded, every single day, that there is no context in which black lives matter.

Breonna Taylor was killed in her Louisville, Ky., home by police officers looking for a man who did not even live in her building. She was 26 years old. When demonstrations erupted, seven people were shot.

Ahmaud Arbery was jogging in South Georgia when he was chased down by two armed white men who suspected him of robbery and claimed they were trying perform a citizen’s arrest. One shot and killed Mr. Arbery while a third person videotaped the encounter. No charges were filed until the video was leaked and public outrage demanded action. Mr. Arbery was 25 years old.

In Minneapolis, George Floyd was held to the ground by a police officer kneeling on his neck during an arrest. He begged for the officer to stop torturing him. Like Eric Garner, he said he couldn’t breathe. Three other police officers watched and did not intervene. Mr. Floyd was 46 years old.

These black lives mattered. These black people were loved. Their losses to their friends, family, and communities, are incalculable.

Demonstrators in Minneapolis took to the street for several days, to protest the killing of Mr. Floyd. Mr. Trump — who in 2017 told police officers to be rough on people during arrests, imploring them to “please, don’t be too nice” — wrote in a tweet, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The official White House Twitter feed reposted the president’s comments. There is no rock bottom.

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The Reopening

From The Atlantic, always room to make more mistakes with this administration:

President Donald Trump has issued strong calls for reopening, saying that doing so will revive an economy knocked flat by the pandemic. The problem is that there’s not much evidence that simply dropping restrictions will save the economy, even as it does create health risks. States that have loosened the rules haven’t seen economic activity bounce back to anywhere near pre-crisis levels.

At a Senate hearing this week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin echoed his boss’s line, saying there’s a danger of permanent damage to the economy if businesses don’t reopen now. But Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell differed from Mnuchin, saying that economic and public-health concerns can’t be separated. “The No. 1 thing, of course, is people believing that it’s safe to go back to work so they can go out,” he said. “That’s what it will take for people to regain confidence.”

Politicians seldom take major, risky steps without knowing that public opinion is behind them, and that makes the decisions by governors to reopen all the stranger. As I have written, public opinion is astonishingly united behind social-distancing measures. Across party lines and geographic regions, Americans think that caution is prudent and restrictions are smart. They believe wearing a face mask is more about public health than personal choice. And they hold these views even, or especially, when it means personal sacrifice.

It is true that the partisan divide on anti-coronavirus measures has been growing in recent days. Yet what this polling suggests is not the typical Democrats-versus-Republicans split, but instead a difference of opinion within the Republican Party. And even then, governors of both parties are, in many specific instances, embracing a minority opinion within their party.

The haste to reopen, in defiance of medical expertise, economic data, and public opinion, is thus peculiar. The most obvious possibility is that it is a testament to the power of the presidential bully pulpit and intense media coverage. Earlier this month, I wrote that the unity behind social distancing “should serve as a warning to governors and a rebuke to the press. The protests in state capitols have gained extensive attention, but—despite the vocal support of the president—the activists remain part of a fringe movement.”

That warning was unheeded. Trump continues to beat the drum, and the protests continue to garner attention outside their numbers. But that’s not a static situation. Extensive coverage of both can help shift public opinion—turning what is not an especially partisan situation into a polarized one, a process that’s already in progress. And as the split widens, more Republicans are likely to take the partisan cue they’re receiving and turn against closures and distancing, in a feedback loop.

Perhaps the experts are wrong, and there won’t be a significant resurgence in cases. But if they are right, this shift will make it harder for governors and localities to reimpose safety measures that have become a partisan litmus test. On Thursday, during a visit to Michigan, Trump was asked about the prospect of a second wave, and he allowed that it might happen but said mass closures wouldn’t be necessary.

“We’re not going to close the country; we’re going to put out the fires,” he said. “Whether it’s an ember or a flame, we’re going to put it out. But we’re not closing our country.”

One of the lessons of the past few years, in firefighting and politics alike, is that once the conflagration has been set, it doesn’t always behave the way people want or expect.

The American Photographer John Beasley Greene

From an article for the Art Institute of Chicago about John Beasley Greene's small out put of photographs:

Over the course of his exceptionally brief career—he died at the age of 24—Greene made an extraordinary body of pictures that advanced both archaeology and photography and continues to offer insight into the central concerns that shaped the two fields.

Born in Ingouville, France, to American parents, Greene grew up in a well-connected merchant-banking family. This financial and social standing enabled him to pursue his twin passions: photography and Egyptology. In the early 19th century, Europeans developed a voracious drive to acquire and systematize knowledge about ancient Egyptian culture—an intellectual enterprise tightly bound to Western economic and colonialist interests in the region. After studying in Paris, Greene twice traveled to Egypt, where he used the camera to record hieroglyphic inscriptions on ancient monuments and to make spare, unpeopled views of the unfamiliar landscape. In late 1855 he traveled to Algeria, where his evocative images were similarly divided between documentation of excavations and studies of built and natural environments.

Much of Greene’s story remains a mystery. The albums and photographs he left behind attest to a curious mind, an inventive eye, and a keen sensitivity to the needs and possibilities of archaeology and photography in his time. Although he exhibited his photographs while he was alive, Greene’s work escaped serious notice until the 1970s and 1980s, when an expanding art market for photographs encouraged renewed interest in 19th-century photographers. To 20th-century viewers trained in modernist art, it was impossible to ignore the striking spareness of Greene’s landscapes, his adept manipulation of negative and positive space, and the near abstraction of his close-up views.

We Forgot to Outsource the Grief

 

Marylin Robinson writes in NYRB this week:

Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.

The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.

In the recent environment, I was hesitant to criticize the universities because they are under assault now, as humanist institutions with antique loyalties to learning and to freedom of thought. But the universities have in general bent the knee to the devaluation of humane studies, perhaps because the rationale for that devaluation has come from their own economics departments and business schools. For decades scholars have read American history in these and related terms, excluding those movements and traditions that would challenge this worldview. Freedom of thought has valorized criticism, necessarily and appropriately. But surely freedom of thought is meant to encourage diversity of thinking, not a settling into ideological postures characteristic of countries where thought is not free. If the universities lose their souls to a model of human nature and motivation that they themselves have sponsored, there will be some justice in this and also great loss, since they are positioned to resist this decline in the name of every one of the higher values.

The Lockdown and Berlin

We are now in the 8th week of the stay-at-home lock-down order here in Maryland as a result of the CODVID19 pandemic. It sounds worse than it is and that is partly because I retired 3 years ago and have had control of my day to day life during this time. Being at my house is not a bad thing. Most of these days we have spent walking in different parks and testing my cameras. Reading has been a good activity. Then there is the editing photographs, and of course watching films. Also cooking. All activities I enjoy and have learned to love during this time. In terms of editing and reviewing old photos, recently I went through over 2,000 photographs from Cambodia and Thailand-I edited the ones that looked promising in Lightroom - most are Jpegs so the type of control that I have over today's images was not possible, but they yielded many excellent images. Lately I've started going through the photos I took during my visit to Berlin in 2014 when I had to speak at a Mobile Research conference. Here are some of the better shots from the first couple of days in that great city.

All images are Vallejo Nocturno 2020-Berlin 2014

The Missing Masterpiece

From Tablet, Emily Benedek great reporting:

The day after Thanksgiving in 1985, just before opening time, a mustachioed man and a woman with a kerchief over her hair, both wearing glasses, slipped into the University of Arizona Museum of Art behind an entering employee. Though it was a temperate day in Tucson, both wore overcoats. While the woman distracted the guard on the stairwell with questions about a painting, the man proceeded up one flight. A few minutes later he dashed down the stairs, and the couple left in such haste that the guard became suspicious. Upon entering the second-floor gallery, he was horrified to discover that Willem de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre” had been cut from its frame. Before museum workers could stop them, the pair sped off in what was described as a rust-colored hatchback with black louvers over the rear window. The FBI was called in. A police artist sketched the suspects. Rumors abounded and tips were received, but the heist remained unsolved.

A break in the 31-year-old mystery came in August 2017, but not as the result of any inspired detective work. “Woman-Ochre” was discovered (accidentally would be an understatement) in the remote hamlet of Cliff, New Mexico, population 293, by junk store owners hired to clean out a house following the death there of New Jersey-born Rita Alter, 81. Her husband, Jerry, a former New York City music teacher and pickup jazzman in Brooklyn and the Catskills, had passed away in 2012, also at age 81. Hanging behind the door of their master bedroom, in such a way as to conceal it completely to strangers, was the de Kooning painting. Estimates suggest it could be worth more than $160 million today.

At the moment the painting and the junk man, Dave Van Auker, 55, made their acquaintance, Van Auker had no idea what he was looking at. In fact, he nearly missed it completely, which was, of course, the abiding fear of concerned museum officials—that the masterpiece would just disappear, maybe even wind up at the dump. Says Frances Vasquez, who worked with Rita Alter, a speech teacher in the Silver Schools, “It’s uncanny that it was found, not thrown out; that it was seen. Uncanny in Silver.”

Van Auker and his business partners, Buck Burns and Rick Johnson, had been asked to clear out the pink stucco house on the flat New Mexico plateau by Rita Alter’s nephew, Ron Roseman, who was helping to settle the estate. On Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2017, the three men entered the house and began photographing and evaluating the contents for the purpose of preparing an estimate. They noticed that most of the kitchen items had already been cleared out, and wall hangings and pictures—probably family photos, judging from the placement—had also been removed.

Van Auker entered the master bedroom and, seeing that a panel from the midcentury bureau had broken off and was lying on the rug, was obliged to pull the bedroom door toward him to reach it. He was surprised to see, behind the door, a large abstract painting of a female figure: sexual, provocative, wild. He was drawn to the colors immediately—ochre, black, burnt sienna, and turquoise. He at first thought it was a print, but when he stood up, light from the front window hit the canvas, and he saw its surface was wavy and cracked. It was a painting, and it had been damaged. He also saw that the bedroom door, if opened all the way, completely concealed it. And there was evidence that the painting was valued—a homemade doorstop, a single bolt attached to the baseboard—protected the painting from being bumped.

“It was odd how it had been hung in such a way that it was concealed from sight,” Van Auker recalled. “But there were other things hung in odd ways in the house too—so many paintings crammed in the rear hallway and in the bathroom, so I didn’t think much of it.”

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Risk-Dumb

Ezra Kline at Vox on Trump's innability to manage risk:

But the work doesn’t end there. Dig into the remainder of the budget and you find the government devoting itself to the management of more complex and exotic risks, in departments and programs that few Americans ever hear about. As Michael Lewis writes in his excellent book The Fifth Risk, risk management suffuses the entire federal bureaucracy in ways that are dizzying to try to appreciate in full:

Some of the risks were easy to imagine: a financial crisis, a hurricane, a terrorist attack. Most weren’t: the risk, say, that some prescription drug proves to be both so addictive and so accessible that each year it kills more Americans than were killed in action by the peak of the Vietnam War. Many of the risks that fell into the government’s lap felt so remote as to be unreal: that a cyberattack left half the country without electricity, or that some airborne virus wiped out millions, or that economic inequality reached the point where it triggered a violent revolution. Maybe the least visible risks were of things not happening that, with better government, might have happened. A cure for cancer, for instance.

The only way to manage that much risk effectively is to manage the government effectively. But Trump has never pretended to do that, or to want to do that. This can sometimes be mistaken for conservative ideology, but it’s more properly understood as disinterest.

Trump likes being the protagonist in the international drama that is America. He doesn’t want to make sure the world’s most massive, complex, and sprawling bureaucracy is well-run. He has shown little interest in nurturing the parts of the federal government that spend their time worrying about risk. His proposed budgets are thick with cuts to those departments, his proposed appointees often manifestly incompetent, his comments marinated in disrespect for the institution he oversees.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who originally ran Trump’s transition team, relayed to Lewis a telling comment Trump made about the pre-administration planning, which he considered a waste of time. “Chris,” he said, “you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”

Each day, the president of the United States receives the President’s Daily Brief: a classified report prepared by US intelligence agencies warning of gathering threats around the globe. US intelligence agencies warned Trump of the dangers of the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen of these briefings in January and February. But Trump “routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week,” reported the Post.

Two problems build amid this kind of executive impatience. First, the president is unaware of the nation’s constantly evolving risk structure. Second, the bureaucracy he, in theory, manages receives the constant message that the president doesn’t want to be bothered with bad news and does not value the parts of the government that produce it, nor the people who force him to face it.

It is, in fact, worse than that. “The way to keep your job is to out-loyal everyone else, which means you have to tolerate quackery,” Anthony Scaramucci, who served (very) briefly as White House head of communications, told the Financial Times. “You have to flatter him in public and flatter him in private. Above all, you must never make him feel ignorant.”

The Most Famous Man in the World after Napoleon

Vallejo Nocturno 2014- Humboldt Statue in Berlin

From Brainpickings an article on Alexander Humboldt:

No thinker has shaped our understanding of the astounding interconnectedness of the universe more profoundly than the great Prussian naturalist, explorer, and geographer Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859), who pioneered the notion that the natural world is a web of intricately entwined elements, each in constant dynamic dialogue with every other — a concept a century ahead of its time. His legacy isn’t so much any single discovery — although he did discover the magnetic equator, invented isotherms, and came up with climate zones — as it is a mindset, a worldview, a singular sensemaking sublimity.

Goethe, in his conversations with Eckermann, remarked that a single day with Humboldt enriched him more than years spent alone, enthusing:

What a man he is! … He has not his equal in knowledge and living wisdom. Then he has a many-sidedness such as I have found nowhere else. On whatever point you approach him, he is at home, and lavishes upon us his intellectual treasures. He is like a fountain with many pipes, under which you need only hold a vessel, and from which refreshing and inexhaustible streams are ever flowing.

Darwin asserted that Humboldt’s writings kindled in him a zeal without which he wouldn’t have boarded the Beagle or written On the Origin of Species. Thoreau was an ardent admirer of Humboldt’s “habit of close observation,” without the influence of which there might have been no Walden. Trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell, who met Humboldt weeks before his death, marveled in her diary that “no young aspirant in science ever left Humboldt’s presence uncheered,” and his ideas reverberate through her famous assertion that science is “not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.” Emerson, in his essays and lectures, called Humboldt “a man whose eyes, ears, and mind are armed by all the science, arts, and implements which mankind have anywhere accumulated” and saw him as living proof that “a certain vastness of learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible.”

 

10 Years Ago

Rafael, my father-in-law, passed away 10 years ago in San Juan at 90 years of age. An admirable man and great companion it was a surprise to some of us as he had appeared to be in good health. These are some photographs from his wake.