“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;”
— excerpt from Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States.
Southerners called the 1828 tariff which had the effect of raising prices on imported manufactured goods while decreasing income from exported agricultural products the “Tariff of Abominations” because it hit hardest in the South. When President John Quincy Adams signed the bill into law, he assured his defeat by Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election. The 1828 tariff prompted South Carolina to propose the principle of nullification of federal law by the states, and the friction it set up between North and South was instrumental in leading to the Civil War more than 30 years later.
This color version of a John Tenniel illustration is from The Nursery “Alice” (1890), with text adapted for nursery readers by Lewis Carroll from his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. From the collection of the British Library. Carroll created in the Queen of Hearts, pictured at left, a model of imperious, irrational behavior.
The current president’s tariffs have exacerbated economic tensions within the country as well, this time not between North and South, but between rural, agricultural areas and urban, technological and industrial areas. They are his tariffs because over the past century Congress has ceded more and more authority to impose them to the executive branch as a matter of pursuing foreign policy, an authority which the current president, with his autocratic nature, is happy to exercise. He likes nothing better than to pronounce decrees, particularly ones that appear to punish Others, particularly foreign Others, and most especially darker skinned foreign Others.
He and his followersmay not fully understand the possible ramifications and unwelcome reverberations of tariffs throughout the United States and world economy. It doesn’t matter to him or to them. What matters is the feeling of appearing to punish the Other for sins real and imagined against Our Kind, and of feeding off negative energy generated by acting on impulse rather than putting in the grinding, hard work necessary to build positively toward equitable trade agreements. It’s a lot of stick, and very little carrot.
Tariffs have always been used to further domestic political aims and foreign policy objectives as much as they have been used to generate revenue, which makes them somewhat more loaded than other taxes. The latest tariffs are no different, and their implementation echoes the 1828 tariff, an irony no doubt lost on the current president despite his exaltation of Andrew Jackson over all other American presidents. Jackson and his supporters opposed the 1828 tariff. Jackson nonetheless drew the line at allowing South Carolina to flout federal authority by proposing nullification. Jackson contemplated sending federal troops into South Carolina to uphold the law. Free trade advocates and protectionists reached a compromise with an 1833 tariff soon after the South Carolina legislature enacted nullification, averting a crisis and imposing an uneasy peace for the next 28 years.
From the 1951 film Quo Vadis, directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring in this scene Peter Ustinov as Nero and Leo Genn as Petronius. Nero probably thought of himself as a stable genius, and had Twitter existed in his time, he no doubt would have used it as a political tool to share his addled observations with the world.
The political calculations behind the current president’s tariffs go beyond punishment of the Other which enthuse his base of followers to improving his prospects for the 2020 election in key Rust Belt states he narrowly won in 2016. Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other industrial products appeal to manufacturing centers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the states that tipped the Electoral College vote balance for him in 2016. Since the United States is a big exporter of agricultural products, it is no surprise that retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries in the trade war have hit farmers hardest. Many of those farmers live in Great Plains states with relatively few electoral votes, and at any rate the current president has a cushion of support there to absorb losses of the disaffected. To make sure disaffection doesn’t become widespread, the current president has bought off farmers with subsidies so that he can continue to pursue his trade wars as personal vendettas, rather than as maturely considered policies leading to equitable prosperity for all. To borrow a phrase from the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, “And so it goes.”
— Vita
“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.”
— Job 38:4, from the King James Version of the Bible.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Many Americans are probably familiar with it because it has been assigned reading in high schools when it hasn’t been banned or burned by the outraged and the self-righteous. Being assigned reading tends to sap some of the enjoyment of reading, and in that case it might be a good idea to read the book again voluntarily, as an adult.
Mr. Vonnegut was most of all a Humanist, as he himself proclaimed, and the last thing any Humanist would claim is to also be a Saint. On looking back at Vonnegut’s work, the one feature that stands out as discordant from our modern perspective is his treatment of female characters, whom he usually portrayed without much depth, and sometimes unsympathetically for no good reason. That again is viewed from our perch 50 years in the future. Mr. Vonnegut was not out of step with his times in regard to men’s views about women, sad and embarrassing as that may seem to us now. 50 years from now, who can say how people will view us for opinions and attitudes we hold in keeping with our own time?
An anonymous painting, possibly by Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich (1712-1774), of a fire at Dresden Castle.
We must remember that until Slaughterhouse-Five came out in 1969, nearly every book and movie in Western culture depicted the Allies in World War II as the good guys, and the Axis as the bad guys, with little shading of gray to add any moral nuance. The Humanist in Mr. Vonnegut could not abide that state of affairs, particularly since he had been present as a prisoner of war at the Allied fire bombing of the German city of Dresden, a target which had virtually no military or political value. The primary reason Allied command ordered the fire bombing was to terrorize the civilian population. In doing so, the Allies sought to deal out righteous retribution for German bombing of English cities earlier in the war. Atrocities, in other words, were perpetrated to one degree or another by both sides, and that is the nature of war and part of human nature and cannot be avoided, no matter how much books and movies gloss it over and glamorize one side over the other. And so it goes – to borrow a phrase from Mr. Vonnegut.
Slaughterhouse-Five was not revisionist history, but a necessary corrective to over two decades of mostly superficial accounts of World War II, at least in the popular media. It joined John Hersey’s 1946 non-fiction book Hiroshima in telling of war’s cost in suffering and the capacity for cruelty, alongside acts of kindness. In 1970, a non-fiction book written by Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, was published and changed the national discourse about relations with Native Americans, a discourse which had been dominated for over a century by white people of European descent demonizing them.
American prisoners caught in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 march to their quarters in Dresden, Germany. In February 1945, Allied air forces fire bombed the city, killing as many as 25,000 Germans, mostly women and children. The 1972 film, directed by George Roy Hill, starred Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim, the character based on Kurt Vonnegut, and Eugene Roche as his friend Edgar Derby, the ranking soldier among the prisoners.
Important works by great writers and historians come along infrequently and, while nothing and no one is ever perfect, their overall worth to humanity becomes even more apparent over time than at initial publication. Mark Twain’s 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, another great work that has stood the test of time, has also been subjected to periodic bouts of righteous indignation and banishment by different groups for divergent reasons over the years. Certainly we cringe today at some of its language and at the attitudes Mr. Twain portrayed, but many readers, perhaps most, understand that at the heart of the novel is the growing respect and friendship between a white boy and a black man, which in its day was a radical idea that undermined social conventions. We are all prisoners of our time and cannot, like Billy Pilgrim, the central character of Slaughterhouse-Five, become unstuck in time. But we can be charitable and preserve and cherish the greater Humanist vision given us by Kurt Vonnegut and other writers whose works have stood outside of time, imperfect as the writers and their works, like we and our works, will always be.
— Vita
The Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, seems to be less in evidence every year. It’s difficult to understand why many people don’t like to use it, and it may be that they simply don’t understand what punctuation is all about. Punctuation is like musical notation, or at least the parts of it that indicate to the players where the rests are and indicate the rhythm in a piece of music. The players are the readers. If there were no commas or periods in writing, readers would not know where to take a break. Imagine listening to a piece of music played that way. For that matter, imagine listening to someone who runs on and on without a pause!
If it’s confusing trying to sort out punctuation marks on the written page, try differentiating all the butterflies named for commas and question marks. This one is an Eastern Comma butterfly, Polygonia comma, from Chippewa County, Wisconsin. Photo by Aaron Carlson.
Take the title of the 1966 Italian movieThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which in the original is rendered as Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (the order of the nouns in the original Italian is good, ugly, bad). Never mind the difference in capitalization conventions for titles between English and Italian, and the change in word order from Italian to English, the key point is the inclusion of the serial comma in the original Italian and its absence in the English translation. It’s a simple thing, that comma. Why leave it out? Perhaps the translator was thrown off by the missing conjunction “and” in the Italian, which would have been rendered “e”, as in Il buono, il brutto, e il cattivo. In English, we are used to “and” coming before the last item in a series. It would not sound quite right to our ears if the title were translated as The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. That sounds choppy and abrupt. Throw in “and” before “the Ugly” and we have a rhythm that sounds right to the ears of English speakers. Except for one little thing.
The Danish National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sarah Hicks, perform a suite of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (main title)” and “The Ecstasy of Gold”, a piece from near the end of the film.
What happened to the last comma? Without it, not only the rhythm, but also the sense of the film title is off. Are we to rush through when we speak the last part of it? Instead of saying “The Good [pause] the Bad [pause] and the Ugly [full stop]”, are we meant to say “The Good [pause] the Bad and the Ugly [full stop]”? No one talks in the rhythm given in the second example. Does the phrase “the Bad and the Ugly” refer to one person only, in the same way that “the Good” refers to one person? Is that person both bad and ugly? Absolutely not, as is clear from the original Italian title and from the movie itself. There are three separate characters referenced in the movie’s title, and each is named by his outstanding characteristic.
In another rendition of the same suite, the composer himself, the great Ennio Morricone, conducts the Munich Radio Orchestra. The soprano soloist is Susanna Rigacci. The musical notes are the same in both renditions, but it’s interesting to hear the differences in their presentation.
It must be the “and” that throws people off when they write out a series. They must think “and” stands in for the serial comma, making it unnecessary. But it doesn’t. Listen to the music: TheGoodtheBadandtheUgly slowed down a bit is The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and slowed down a bit more in the right places, rendered in the way we actually speak, becomes The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That wasn’t very hard, was it? We speak in words, and the words are like music, with rhythm and tempo. When we write down the words we speak, we need a way to convey to readers, to listeners, that rhythm and tempo, and that’s where punctuation comes in. That’s all it is. There’s nothing greatly mysterious about it, though semi-colons befuddle many, and the novelist and essayist Kurt Vonnegut disdained their use, remarking of them “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Homer, who of course spoke his poetry for listeners and never wrote it down himself, would probably have agreed.
— Vita
In this scene from Sergio Leone’s film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eli Wallach’s character, Tuco, encounters an adversary and ends up succinctly admonishing him that it takes too long to speak, shoot, and leave.
