Good afternoon.
I received
an email, a word-a-day sort of thing, defining the word "skirl." It is "of a bagpipe: to emit the high
shrill tone of the chanter; also: to give forth music" or "to play
(music) on the bagpipe." I sent it
to a few Scottish friends to ask if they were familiar with it. They are, although not in the second sense,
as a verb. One wrote that Scots know the
word, "but I would say rather literary and bordering on the archaic. It might be used to persuade visitors to
Scotland that bagpipes emit music rather than execrable noise :-) But I've never heard of it being used as a
verb . . . rather a noun as in 'the skirl of the bagpipes was driving Bruce
slowly mad'".
I confessed
that I liked bagpipe music, in limited doses.
My friend wrote back:
Rest assured if you lived in
Edinburgh for any length of time you would rapidly cease to like bagpipe music
:-) particularly the funerary version of this – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pibroch. He is an extremely short sample –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRzQGvIshNQ – only 10 minutes. I guarantee that by the end of this you will
have come round to my point of view.
After listening to it, I agreed; I wouldn't want to listen
to what is funereal music very long. But
I said that surely there is livelier bagpipe music that one could listen to for
slightly longer a period.
My friend
suggested that I "try 'Flower of Scotland' – which must be the world's
worst national anthem." I found a
recording of "Flower of Scotland" on the web. I don't know whether it's among the worst
because I don't know the universe of national anthems, but it wouldn't have
been one I voted for. The lyrics
celebrate the defeat of Edward II of England by the Scots at Bannockburn in
1314; the music isn't exactly uplifting because it almost seems more like a
dirge than an anthem.
There is a parallel with "The
Star-Spangled Banner" (which ranks up there among the worst as well, in my
opinion): both songs commemorate battles
(and both against the English!) that happen to be 500 years apart (Bannockburn
in 1314, Fort McHenry in 1814). I asked
my friend if Scotland, in the 21st century, really wants to continue to
celebrate Bannockburn (and snub their noses at the English)? And does the U.S. really need to celebrate a
minor battle in the War of 1812? (One of
my favorites—of the few anthems I know—is "Advance Australia Fair,"
but I can imagine that the Aborigines are not thrilled with it—not that it
denigrates them in any way, but beyond the first verse it does celebrate those
who came from across the sea.)
My friend
wrote back. "There's a reason the
Scots aren't fond of "God Save the Queen," the British national
anthem. Mostly just because it's seen as
an English anthem, "but for the more erudite amongst us it's because of
the words of the sixth (!) verse:
Lord grant that Marshal Wade
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush.
God save the Queen!"
Which is why, he concluded, one can "understand the
absolute relevance of celebrating a victory in 1314 in our anthem :-)"
Field Marshal Wade (1673-1748),
beginning in 1725, led "the construction of barracks, bridges and proper
roads to assist in the control of" Scotland for about a dozen years,
raised military companies from the gentry, and put down an uprising. At the end of his career, however, he failed
to "crush the rebellious Scots"; during the second Jacobite
insurrection in 1745,
Wade concentrated his troops in
Newcastle upon Tyne on the east coast of England; however, the Jacobite forces
advanced from Scotland down the west coast of England via Carlisle into
Lancashire and the speed of their advance left Wade scrambling. In freezing
conditions and with his men starving, he failed to counter their march into
England or their subsequent retreat back from Derby to Scotland.
Wade was fired. (His
successor won the Battle of Culloden, in 1746, ending the Stuart bid to reclaim
the throne of England. So George II
remained on the throne and his son George III became the focus of American
colonists' ire that led to the revolution.)
Seems to me
that if the Queen wanted to promote amity with Scotland, she should direct that
the 6th verse of "God Save the Queen" be discarded! Whether the Scots want amity is, of course,
another matter.
* * *
My friend
Joe Dixon talked me into playing club competitive duplicate bridge (at a place
in south Minneapolis called, appropriately enough, The Bridge Center). I quit playing club/tournament duplicate
bridge about 30-35 years ago because, if you'll pardon the term, I thought
those games attracted a disproportionate share of assholes. Too many of them were nasty to one another
(their partners!) or to us (their opponents).
Not all, of course, but enough that I found the experience
unpleasant. It's just a game, for Pete's
sake!
Maybe times
have changed. The one time we've played
thus far, the people were pleasant. We
even played reasonably well; we were second out of nine pairs. I think we would have been first except that
on one hand I pulled the wrong card, transforming what would have been a good
result into a lousy result.
* * *
Adam Gopnik
wrote a piece in the New Yorker about
the incident at the Red Hen restaurant, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked
to leave. "To sit and share or to
shame and shun? On the issue of Sanders being expelled from a restaurant, mixed
emotions are the only ones a rational person can have." I think that's correct. Mine are mixed. Here are the concluding four paragraphs.
On the one hand, one of the ritual
functions of restaurants is to make a common place for commonplace civilization
to proceed. They build social capital from their openness to all kinds. Think
of how much the civilization of American cities depends on our being able to
grab not just bite but a bit of anonymity—we eat alongside others without the
others looking down too sharply upon us. It's a fundamental liberal value,
worth protecting in all partisan instances and on all partisan sides. And, no,
we don't want to set a precedent in which politics are so personalized that
even simple common coexistence becomes impossible. As a moral duty, we should
share the pleasures and conversation of the table with as many people of as
many views as we can. . . .
On the other hand, the Trump
Administration is not a normal Presidential Administration. This is the
essential and easily fudged fact of our historical moment. The Trump
Administration is—in ways that are specific to incipient tyrannies—all about an
assault on civility. To the degree that Trump has any ideology at all, it's a
hatred of civility—a belief that the normal decencies painfully evolved over
centuries are signs of weakness which occlude the natural order of domination
and submission. It's why Trump admires dictators. Theirs are his values; that's
his feast. And, to end the normal discourse of democracy, the Trump
Administration must make lies respectable—lying not tactically but all the time
about everything, in a way that does not just degrade but destroys exactly the
common table of democratic debate.
That's Sarah Huckabee Sanders's
chosen role in life—to further those lies, treat lies as truth, and make lies
acceptable. This is not just a question of protesting a particular policy; in
the end there are no policies, only the infantile impulses of a man veering
from one urge to another. The great threat to American democracy isn't "policy"
but the pretense of normalcy. That's the danger, for with the lies come the
appeasement of tyranny, the admiration of tyranny, and, as now seems
increasingly likely, the secret alliance with tyranny. That's what makes the
Trump Administration intolerable, and, inasmuch as it is intolerable, public
shaming and shunning of those who take part in it seems just. Never before in
American politics has there been so plausible a reason for exclusion from the
common meal as the act of working for Donald Trump.
And what about civility? Well,
fundamental to, and governing the practice of, civility is the principle of
reciprocity: your place at my table implies my place at yours. Conservatives
and liberals, right-wingers and left-wingers, Jews and Muslims and Christians
and Socialists and round- and flat-Earthers—all should have a place at any
table and be welcome to sit where they like. On the other hand, someone who has
decided to make it her public role to extend, with a blizzard of falsehoods,
the words of a pathological liar, and to support, with pretended piety, the
acts of a public person of unparalleled personal cruelty—well, that person has
asked us in advance to exclude her from our common meal. You cannot spit in the
plates and then demand your dinner. The best way to receive civility at night
is to not assault it all day long. It's the simple wisdom of the table.
I sent the
article to Elliott and Kathy. Elliott
didn't agree with Gopnik's conclusion. "As
much as I dislike her and the administration she serves I have to side with
letting her eat. Not being a hypocrite is more important than getting even. Not
to mention the more adult thing to do."
In my view,
I told him, the question at hand is whether this administration is so
qualitatively different from all past Republican (to say nothing of Democratic)
administrations that its representatives should be treated differently. I am of a very mixed mind on this, because I
*do* think this administration has gone far beyond the bounds of decency and
civility in politics. Sometimes passive,
polite resistance works; other times, a more forthright and aggressive response
in warranted. In the case of this
administration, I confess to leaning toward the latter. But not without reservations. . . .
Elliott
still didn't agree, and Kathy agreed with Elliott. "I don't think so, because Trump just
turns any sleight against him into a Twitter rant and it just reinforces the
idea that everyone is out to get him and his supporters eat it up. I think
against someone like him ultimately the only option is to be the bigger person.
"
Then there
appeared an article in the Atlantic pointing
out that "attacks on incivility are rooted more in preserving the status
quo than in addressing ongoing harms and violence." The argument is that "civil" protests
haven't changed much, and that change has occurred primarily in the face of "uncivil"
protest.
* * *
It seems to me that if the Supreme Court, with
a new appointee, reverses the gay marriage and abortion decisions, and in light
of the slew of distasteful opinions the Court handed down this month and in
past years (e.g., Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, gun control), the governors of
California, Oregon, and Washington could seek to hold referenda in their states
on whether or not the three states should secede from the United States and
form their own country. I wonder if Mr.
McConnell, Mr. Trump, and the Federalist Society realize that that is the
direction their Supreme Court (and their Congress) is pushing the blue
states. I could imagine that New York
and perhaps some other New England states could follow the lead of the west
coast, as could some of the interior blue states. Yes, technically, there is no way for a state
to leave the country; the Civil War settled that question. In a practical sense, however, the west coast
could begin to move toward separation, were it supported by a significant
majority, and there wouldn't be much that the federal government could do short
of the use of force by the military.
This is
idle speculation, but if the country's leadership and decision-making lurch
further to the right, surely the question will arise.
If it does
begin to look serious, I might talk with Kathy about her taking early retirement
and us moving to Oregon. With our sons,
if they chose to accompany us.
On that
uplifting note, enjoy the day.
Gary
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