Remembering the Civil War

On this Memorial Day weekend, we might well think especially of the war that gave rise to Decoration Day, in time so renamed.

Nancy Pearl has made the observation that every generation of Americans since the end of the civil war has re-written that war in fictional form to reflect its own "dreams, desires, fears, and beliefs."

The nineteenth century was not over yet when Crane wrote RED BADGE OF COURAGE.

Forty years after Crane, Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND gave us a crystallization of nostalgia for the antebllum society of Tara and the O'Hara clan.

Twenty years after that, MacKinley Kantor wrote ANDERSONVILLE, a novelization of the horrors of life in that prisoner-of-war camp.

Identifying more recent books is easy. Deciding which of the more recent ones deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those is more difficult. COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier, can make a strong claim. Pearl mentions others.

On a trip through Virginia a few years ago, I noticed that the sports teams of Appomattox High School call themselves "The Generals." I bet when they lose, the sportswriters of the towns of the rival team can't help but begin with a lede like this: The Appomattox Generals surrendered again Wednesday to the Jubreau Devil's crushing linesmen...."

Baseball and Football

The U.S. Supreme Court recently re-affirmed that antitrust laws apply to football. More particularly, they apply to relationships between the teams -- the National Football League is not to be treated as a single entity selling a single product.

Go here for the decision.

This is in contrast to baseball, and "Major League Baseball," and the disparity in the legal treatment of the two favorite sports of the US came about through an intriguing historical accident. Back in the 1920s, judges still cared (at least sporadically) about the separate spheres of the federal and state governments, and still interpreted the interstate commerce clause to mean something specific -- movement of people or goods across state lines.

So when the subject of enforcing federal antitrust laws in a baseball context first arose, the courts said the laws can't apply, because baseball teams aren't engaged in moving anybody or anthing anywhere. The stadium stays in one place! Customers coming to it may cross state lines, but that is their concern. This visiting team generally crossed state lines to get to the home team's park, but that is incidental. The actual game is intra-state. That was the justification for the immunity.

In the 1930s, the commerce clause came to mean anything it had to mean. So logically, the antitrust immunity for baseball could have been reconsidered. But it wasn't. It remained in place as a sort of relic of the old days.

In 1972,in the Curt Flood case, the Supreme Court admitted that this makes baseball an "established aberration," but said the immunity will stand until Congress changes it.

I'm okay with that. As I believe I've indicated in this blog before, I think the result is rational as to baseball, for reasons the SCOTUS opinion didn't so much as mention. When the Red Sox play the Yankees, they are both in the business of putting on a show -- the same show. More broadly, all of the teams in the two leagues of MLB are in the business of puttinbg on the season-long show that begins with spring training and ends with the World Series. They have the same overriding interest in maintaining public fascination with that show, and this retaining their viability for the television audience ands the advertisers who pay the big bucks. It is all a single enterprise.

Still, I'd like to see the NFL get the benefit of the same immunity. Their stadiums (stadia?) stay in place, too.

Too Bad His Name Isn't Clyde

A woman who works -- or until this week worked -- as the executive assistant of a Disney executive has been arrested for conspiracy to sell inside information to stock traders.

Her boyfriend was in on the scheme too, and has also been arrested.

Her name is Bonnie. His name, alas!, is not Clyde. It is Yonni.

I have been known to rise to the defense of the accused in insider trading charges. But these two were ... stupid. Bonnie Hoxie sent an email out to a variety of hedge funds saying, "Hi, I have access to Disney's (DIS) quarterly earnings report before its release on 05/03/10. I am willing to share this information for a fee that we can determine later."

Gee, I think I, too, will write perfect strangers and ask them if they want my assistance committing a crime. What could go wrong?

The Tree of Jesse

In Christian iconology, the "tree of Jesse" refers to Isaiah 11:1, and the imagery it inspired.

The pertinent text (KJV) says: "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots".

In the Latin Vulgate, the passage reads: "Et egredietur virga de radice Iesse et flos de radice eius ascendet," so we see that a Latin term for a tender green shoot, "virga," [with the near-pun, obvious enough to western Europe for centuries before King James' day, to "virgo" or "Virgin"] became the sturdier-seeming "rod" in English.

But I'm thinking just now of the window in Chartres Cathedral in which a tree rises from a sleeping Jesse, and the rod, the trunk of the tree, consists of figures of David, Solomon, then two other crowned but uncertain referents, then Mary and at the tree's peak -- Jesus.

The 19th century French architect and theorist, Viollet-le-Duc, rhapsodized about this window, as an achievement in color. Then he turned to the issue of perspective -- not something, in his opinion, that can possibly enter into the particular form of art that produced this window.

"The radiation of translucent colors in windows cannot be modified by the artist; all his talent consists in profiting by it, according to a given harmonic scheme on a single plane, like a rug, but not according to an effort at aerial perspective. Do what you like, a glass window never does and never can represent anything but a plane surface; its real virtues even exist only on that condition. Every attempt to present several planes to the eye is fatal to the harmony of color, without producing any illusion in the spectator."

The March of Science

The latest news on biochemical engineering is fascinating and, to my mind at least, quite disturbing. Here's the BBC account.

Apparently, the scientists took the genome of one species of the bacterial genus Mycoplasma and sequenced it. They used that data to produce the same sequence in vitro. They injected this DNA into the cell of a different species of Mycoplasma, creating a hybrid.

In a message board, someone has offered me the following analogy, "You take a Ford V8 and tear it apart, make measurements and draw a blueprint of the engine. Then you go into your home foundary & machine shop and builld your own copy of the Ford V8.

"Then you put that Ford V8 in an old Chevy and drive it around the block.

"You haven't even designed a new car, let alone invented the automobile, but it is a pretty impressive bit of engineering for an amateur."

That's what worries me. Even if the significance of this step has been overstated in some of the coverage, it does seem that our species is getting depressingly impressive at engineering the basics of life.

Hitler's Holy Relics II

In yesterday's blog entry I discussed the case of the missing relics of the "first Reich," the Holy Roman Empire, and the efforts on the part of the U.S. Forces, European Theatre, to secure them at the end of the Second World War.

I didn't say anything there about Horn's troubled relationship, in the course of his investigation, with the man to whom he had to report in Nuremburg, Captain John Thompson. Thompson is portrayed here as a clueless bureaucrat, who didn't understand all this fancy stuff about arts and antiquities. As evidence in support of this characterization, our author, Sidney Kirkpatrick, mentions a conversation between the two men in which Thompson, wondering why the Nazis would have gone to such trouble to hang on to some of the more religious artefacts in the vault, such as a reliquary containing a sliver purported to be from the True Cross, casually described the Nazis as pagans.

This remark induced Horn to give Thompson the benefit of a quasi-academic lecture about how "The Fuhrer's ideologues sought not to do away with God but to champion their own twisted notions of Aryan Christianity, Germanic history, and rulership. Lines couldn't be drawn separating the ecclesiastical treasures from the regalia of the emperor. The 'stuff,' as Thompson so blithely referred to the contents of the vault, was all sacred symbols of Reich continuity and the dynastic succession of the Holy Roman Emperors."

Here we get to how the whole story matters. Some may take the book as an unusual angle on the military-occupation period in German history. But I see it as making a timeless point about sovereignty. People believe in (earthly) sovereignty not so much because the idea is logically compelling, but because it is bound up in a lot of things. Stuff. It has physical manifestations that surround us and with which we become familiar, to which we become attached. The town hall by the green. The flag on the big pole out in front of the town hall. Fenway Park! -- or wherever it might have been in your case, dear reader, where you first saw a professional ball game and where you were happy to stand for the national anthem as part of the ritual of it all. We become attached to sovereignty because it floods through our lives, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, in sounds and sights and even smells.

The Germanic artefacts around which this book's plot turns are a token of a type.

It has for a very long time been very difficult for most people to think their way out of the box of sovereign power, or a unilateral imposition of legitimacy, because we have to try to think our way past a mist through which we have been walking our whole lives, and we havew become attached to that mist. It someone says, "perhaps we could see better if we could clear this mist away" he is met by indignation. "How dare you! Aren't you grateful to the mist-givers for all they've done for you???"

And yet, we all in our various times and places do so badly need to clear away the mists.

Hitler's Holy Relics I

I've recently read a surprisingly fascinating book, Hitler's Holy Relics: A True Story of Nazi Plunder and the Race to Recover the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick.

The book is written from the point of view of Walter Horn, an art historian by trade who had improbably been given the task near the war's end in Europe of interrogating German prisoners on what they knew about poison gas. There was nothing improbable about the mission: allied intelligence was sensibly concerned, circa February 1945, that Hitler would unleash poison gas when he believed he had nothing left to lose. What seems improbable in retrospect was that Horn, whose interest in medieval art had had him studying before the war with such giants in the field as Erwin Panofsky and Bernard Berenson, should have been given that task. But it was a fortuitous circumstance, because one day one of the German prisoners, knowing nothing about poison gas but eager to please his captors and perhaps improve his own miserable conditions, leaned forward to ask Horn, "Are you interested in art and antiques?"

He was. And that sets Kirkpatrick's tale in motion. Private Huber told of a bunker on Blacksmith's Alley in Nuremburg that held a variety of artefacts that he, the private, had seen but the importance of which he did not understood. (Huber had been there because his father was in charge of maintaining the air ventilation unit, which is obviously crucial to any facility for the underground storage of antiquities.) Huber told of monarchical robes embroidered with pearl-studded pictures of camels and lions, of a crown with uncut sapphires, rubies, and amethysts, a golden apple tipped with a cross, and much else. Horn recognized that the descriptions matched the regal paraphenalia of the Holy Roman Emperors, the "First Reich" in the line in which Hitler fancied his own regime the Third.

US forces invaded Nuremburg on April 17. Acting on Horn's report, and on high command's concerns that the relics could become symbolically significant for the would-be founders of a Fourth Reich, a 135-man assault team was detailed in the chaos of that battle to secure the Blacksmith's Alley facility. Huber had been telling the truth. The facility was the Third Reich's treasure trove.

The war in Europe ended on May 8 (and the dying Third Reich had never employed poison gas). Horn's job in the early days of the occupation was to interrogate high-ranking Nazis, in anticipation of the eventual war crimes trials. So although he was now asking questions of people who far outranked poor Private Huber, his daily work had not much changed. But in July '45 Horn was called away from that task and given another. Some of the most precious of the treasures inside that Blacksmith's Alley trove had gone missing. He was ordered to become an impromptu gumshoe -- to report within three weeks on who was responsible for their disappearance, and if possible, to recover them.

SPOILER ALERT! Stop reading NOW if you hope ever to read this book in the spirit of reading a who-dunnit. Still with me? All right.

The two alternative hypotheses with which Horn begins his quest are: that the Nazis had established a covert resistance program near war's end in order to sabotage the occupation and lay the groundwork for an eventual restoration of their fortunes, and had spirited away the pick of the treasures -- including the aforementioned imperial crown -- for this purpose; and that one or more GIs within the occupation administration had taken them either for souvenirs or for a black-market profit.

The right answer was a variant of the first of those. There was general agreement among the Nazi elite that these treasures should be kept safe for a Fourth Reich, but the actual move of the five key pieces out of the Blacksmith Alley locale seems not to have been part of any very careful plan, but the result of an intra-party dispute, and of an order given by the City's mayor (who was himself murdered by an SA Group Leader just before the US forces invaded the city.)

Before that final confrontation, Mayor Liebel had instructed that certain artefacts be moved out of one underground hiding place ... into another. Not far away. Indeed, this mystery has a twist that reminds me of one of Poe's stories, "The treasures for which [Horn] had criss-crossed Germany had apparently been hidden less than a thousand yards from where his investigation had begun."

Two of the mayor's underlings did some prison time for lying about this to the occupation authorities, and Horn was treated like a conquering hero by the MFAA, the office of the US Forces European Theatre concerned with "Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives."

It's a fine story, with broader significance concerning the core matters of this blog -- pragmatism and sovereignty. I hope to speak to that significance tomorrow.