Friday, April 13, 2018

Quote: Gene Healy on the Imperiling Presidency


from The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power by Gene Healy. p. 265

Over the course of the 20th century, Americans have transformed the presidency from a modest chief magistrate into a national father protector invested with the responsibility for fixing every major problem in American life. We've matched that responsibility for fixing every major problem with powers that are unlikely to meet those demands, but are virtually certain to threaten the American constitutional order.
How do we choose the person who will wield these powers? By accident more than design, we've come to select the president via a competition that favors boundless ambition and power lust. The winner of that competition lives in a social environment that would corrupt a saint. And he walks the halls accompanied by the military aide who carries the nuclear launch codes. 
Published by and available for free as a PDF from The Cato Institute.


Thursday, April 12, 2018

My UnTwitter


How I use Twitter:
  1. "This looks interesting. It reminds me of something..."
  2. Spend time looking for the quote, image, etc.
  3. If necessary, translate.
  4. Stop to be with my family.
  5. Write a short reflection.
  6. Stop to be with my family. 
  7. Hem-and-haw about how much detail to include
  8. Edit and post to blog.
  9. Post to Twitter with no reference to original Tweet.
  10. Declare success
Therefore. . . something reminded me of this line from Velleius Paterculus about the Roman Tribune Marcus Livius Drusus, born c. 131 BC. Speaking to an architect who promised him a very private abode on the Palatine, Drusus replied:

"si quid in te artis est, ita compone domum meam, ut, quidquid agam, ab omnibus perspici possit". [The Latin Library]
"If there is anything of skill/craft/art in you, construct my house so that whatever I do is able to be observed/examined by all."
According to Velleius, it was outside that house that he was assassinated, after which promptly started the Social War between Rome and several allied Italian cities over the issue of Roman citizenship that Livius had tried to address, without success.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Mow Vergil, Mow Problems


Forged by Vulcan himself, the Aeneas 500
cuts through grass, weeds, Greeks,
Rutulians, and more!
My wife and I often spend the duration of our daughter's naps at some quiet work or gently scurrying about the house trying to rescue it from the pitiless clutches of entropy. This past Sunday afternoon, though, we decided to take it easy. We reclined and took up some light reading: Bob Murphy's Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and New Deal for my wife and for me Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles, of which I had yet to read the sections on the Argonauts and Odysseus.

We were listening to Mozart's string quartets, starting with my favorite, the B-flat of the Haydn set (KV.458.) The temperature was the ideal, just cool enough to justify a thin blanket, and the mood most relaxed.

So while the weary Odysseus was dozing his crew opened the bag of winds that blew them, nearly home, away again, I too dozing was suddenly and violently awakened by the plosive, clangorous din of someone's lawnmower. Ritchie quotes not Homer but Vergil's account in Aeneid I of Aeolus unleashing the winds upon Aeneas and his fleet fleeing Troy:

     . . . velut agmine facto
qua data porta ruunt, et terras turbine perflant.

So too might you describe the violent, teeming onrush of sound from these modern mechanical banes to peace and quiet. A thousand curses upon these machines and endless tempests on their drivers! May ever twigs be beneath their feet and weeds at their heels!

Even if I were not offended by their emissions—noxious to both nose and ears—I would disapprove of what seems a grossly disproportionate use of force. Who needs a large gas-powered machine to cut grass? It's grass, for crying out loud. If you have issues with the flora, go pick on some your own size.

For my part, I'm quite content merely to trim the grass without the casualty of the neighborhood's serenity and so I'm also pleased with my manual push-mower. It's quiet, so I can hear my wife and daughter, who are able to play in the yard while I mow, there also being neither fumes nor risk of high-velocity projectiles. More of a tool than machine, it requires only lubrication and is easily sharpened when run in reverse. It simply requires prudent use and a little muscle, though less than you might expect.

Like tools of yesteryear, I find it encourages discipline. The mower is not effective—indeed it is useless—if the grass is very tall, so I have a great incentive to be consistent and not cut corners. I cannot let the yard go for weeks and then sweep in and chop it all down in a great fury of fumes and blades. Too as the often firm and stiff clothes of yesteryear encouraged an upright posture, so I find the mower cuts best, and I am most comfortable, when standing upright and pushing with the strength of my arms, which are also exercised to greater strength.

In contrast consider the effects of mowers that propel themselves. Their operators lay slumped over them, seeming almost to be dragged along. Worse are the unfortunate drivers of large riding mowers, who perched atop their colorful rides seem endlessly to orbit their trees and flower beds like the motorized ornaments of Christmas displays.

I wish I found the situation so humorous last weekend, but in the moment the noise seemed a violation. Something beautiful was lost—or at least prematurely ended—not out of necessity but because quiet, and therefore that which comes only in quiet, are no longer valued.

Perhaps I need my own alta moenia.

Friday, April 6, 2018

Things I Don't Get: Beethoven in Smurfs for the ColecoVision


Vienna, 1802. Ludwig van Beethoven takes a stroll through in country outside the city. The birds are singing as a soft, wispy cloud momentarily blots out the sun. Beethoven stops to run his hands over the heather and as filaments of light shine through the slender cloud and warm his fingers, the heart of the composer awakens full of joy in this realm of nature. His journal entry for the day reads, "Today a tune came to me straight from nature. I have begun to work it into a theme for a pastoral symphony, but in truth I just hope it makes it into Smurfs for Colecovision."

Not enough? Then mix in the Shaker theme from Copland's Appalachian Spring and loop both themes ad infinitum without development in front of trees that look like I could have drawn then in Microsoft Paint and voila! nature itself. Now throw in a little blue mushroom-dwelling socialist wearing a white Phrygian cap and dodging birds and bats and well smurfy smurf smurf you have something totally absurd.