Isaac Laquedem

Let's make America great again works . . . only if you first define what was great about the past

A question for people who want to make America great again, the stuff of story and legend: what are you looking forward to?

The Depression as depicted by John Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath"? Unsafe food and 12-hour workdays, as described by Upton Sinclair in "The Jungle"? Slavery (oops: I meant "the involuntarily sharing economy"), as limned by Harriet Beecher Stowe in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? Or the days of honest graft, as explained by George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall?  Or all of the above?

Isaac celebrates Tax Day 2016

As is our custom, we celebrate Tax Day 2016¹ with a apposite reading from A.P. Herbert.  Today's reading is an extract from his story "Rex v. Haddock: Can a Worm Turn?", written in the form of the decision of a trial court.  The author's protagonist, Albert Haddock, has been accused of knowingly filing an untrue income tax return, in which he stated that he expected his gross and net income for the coming year to be "nil," and in one instance "Absolutely nil."  The Chairman of the Bench of the West London Police Court sums up Haddock's first defense, which is that Haddock could not make sense of an instruction on the form, as follows:

The evidence of the accused is that in this pronouncement (which is headed NOTE AS TO THE RELIEF WHICH MAY BE CLAIMED BY TAXPAYERS) there are nearly two hundred words; that, after reading the first fifty words, he laughed heartily; that he then began again and read the whole passage through from start to finish six or seven times, first silently, then aloud, and finally singing to a chant in B minor; that after these exhaustive experiments the words still conveyed no meaning to his mind whatever; that he concluded that not even a Government Department could with serious intent have issued to the whole body of income-tax payers two hundred words entirely devoid of sense or meaning;² that therefore his first impression was probably correct and the whole Form a base practical joke, to which he replied in the same spirit and kind.

Having myself studied the Form in question, I find this defence a good one.

The Chairman describes Haddock's fourth defense with these sprightly words:

Fourthly, [Haddock] says that, as a professional man (if writing can be called a profession), he sees no reason why any professional man should in any way assist the officers of the Crown in the collection of Revenue; that the professional man is the dog's-body of the State; that he is constantly writing to The Times newspaper or to Ministers to protest against injustices, or to point out the errors of His Majesty's Government; that no notice is taken of these protests; that he is referred to in Parliament contemptuously as a direct taxpayer, as if he were somehow immune from the payment of indirect taxes; that in fact he pays the greater part of both; that the wine-tax is monstrous,³ the whisky-tax monstrous,⁴ and the tobacco-tax monstrous; that he sees no reason for the present ferocious treatment of these simple indulgences, while those poisonous pleasures with which women ruin their systems, such as tea, coffee, and sweets, are classed as 'necessaries' and go almost free; that beer is as much a necessity as tea; that there should be no representation without taxation; * * * that he (Haddock) has studied carefully the items of National Expenditure, and that from that eight hundred million pounds he (Haddock) received no benefit except the agreeable spectacle of the Changing of the Guard and an occasional view of a distant battleship; that if every Government Department were to collapse in ruins at this moment he (Haddock) would not be a penny the worse; that in these circumstances he does not propose to exhaust himself by any elaborate efforts to assist the Inland Revenue Department to collect his money; * * *; that the income-tax is intolerable; and that the Income-Tax Delayers' Association are paying his expenses in this case.

Our usual jovial support of the commercial-welfare state will return tomorrow.

¹  I know the returns are actually due on April 18 this year, but I refuse to move Tax Day to a Monday as if it were the birthday of a President.

²  Later developments in tax law would disprove Haddock's argument.

³  Sound thinking.

⁴  Again, sound thinking.

County councilor to newspaper: if there's news, keep me out of it

Most publicity is good publicity, especially for an elected official.  The editors of a Maryland newspaper, the Frederick News-Post, must be scratching their heads over the request of Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter, conveyed through Facebook, that the newspaper not print his name without his permission.  In his own words:  "Do not contact me and do not use my name or reference me in an unauthorized form in the future. * * * Use my name again unauthorized and you'll be paying for an Attorney."

Bethany Rodgers, a reporter for the News-Post, responded in a proper First Amendment way, saying that the newspaper has the right and the responsibility to report on people, such as Mr. Delauter, "who occupy positions of trust in our government."  That's the right answer.  People who run for public office shouldn't take offense when the citizens who elected them want to get reports on what they're doing in office.

Still, it seems to me that the News-Post has missed an opportunity to simultaneously take Mr. Delauter up on his request (or hissy-fit), and to make its point in print, as I recalled Myron, a forty-year-old novel by Gore Vidal.  The Supreme Court had just issued its 5-4 ruling in Miller v. California, a landmark ruling that said what is obscene depends on the standards of the local community.  Vidal, in satiric protest, used the names of the five Justices who voted in the majority in place of the words that might violate the standards of more conservative communities. For instance, Vidal referred quite often in the sex scenes to the rehnquists and powells of the male characters.

The News-Post might do the same thing, and substitute another name in place of Mr. Delauter's, perhaps that of William Cosby, the governor of colonial New York who in 1734 ordered the arrest of journalist John Peter Zenger for libel.   (No connection to the troubles of the modern Bill Cosby would be implied.)  Or the News-Post could substitute "Mr. Bumble" for his name, in reference to the character in Oliver Twist who said "If the law supposed that, the law is a ass - a idiot."  Or, more simply yet, simply call him "Myron."

The first western pope takes the name "Francis," in 1979

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio is the first of the 266 men elected pope to choose the name "Francesco," and is also the first pope from the Western Hemisphere.  In an interesting coincidence, he and the church are 34 years behind the world of fiction.

In "The Vicar of Christ," a 1979 novel by the late Walter F. Murphy (1929-2010), a professor of political science and jurisprudence, the cardinals elect an American as pope, who in Professor Murphy's fictional world is the first pope from the western hemisphere, and who is the first pope to take the name "Francesco," in his case after St. Francis of Assisi.

Coincidence?  Prescience?  Either way, Professor Murphy would have loved to see this day.

Children's literature supplies names for the OHSU tram cars

Much as I was prepared to dislike the Oregon Health Sciences University tram on principle (I still think they should have built a tunnel), I have to admit that the thing looks cute when the pods are gliding silently above Interstate 5.  I think of the cabins as "pods" rather than "cars" because they look like pods from below, fat white peas that fade into the fog and mist of winter.  Calling them pods led me to think of better names for the two cars than my first suggestion, which was to call one "$30,000,000" and the other one "Each."

For "Pod" in children's literature brings to mind Mary Norton's series about the Borrowers, a group of hominids a few inches tall who live in nooks and crannies of houses and "borrow" from the humans around them the things they need to survive and live comfortably.  Pod is the name of the father of the family that is at the center of the stories. 

One of Miss Norton's books describes a business war between two hobbyists named Pott and Platter who operate model railroads in their yards a few miles from each other:  as they each upgrade their model railroads, when one's fortunes go up, the other's go down.  Platter charges high admission fees to see his railroad; Pott is content if the adults who visit put a penny in the tin.  Consider "Pott" and "Platter" as names for the tram pods: when one goes up, the other goes down.  The capper to this is the name of the book that features Pott and Platter:  it's called The Borrowers Aloft.  Could anything be more suited?

David Bodanis buries a political comment in a book about electricity

An elegant political comment lies hidden in a footnote in Electric Universe, a book by David Bodanis that describes the discovery and use of electricity, through which the Laquedemitasse is slowly working his way.  Mr. Bodanis explains the difference between a cipher and a code.  In a cipher, a rule (or a machine) changes text character by character.  A simple substitution cipher might move each letter one place forward, so that HAPPY BIRTHDAY becomes IBQQZ CJSUIEBZ.  A code, Mr. Bodanis says, is different from a cipher; a code is "where one word is used to stand for another, as with a child's code in which, for example, the words national embarrassment are substituted wherever the word shrub has been written."

Harry Potter in Kyoto in English; "No Trespassing" in Spanish in Oregon

I mentioned to the Laquedemitasse that book 6 of the Harry Potter series had just been released, and he asked if I would buy a copy for him.  This was as we were riding a train in Japan.  A guidebook directed me to the largest bookstore in Kyoto, a store called Maruzen.  We found the store after a little searching, behind a prominent sign that said "Maruzen" (in the Roman alphabet only, and not in Japanese).

The bookstore covers 8 or 10 floors, with foreign-language books on the top floor.  Maruzen had several dozen copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in both the English and the American versions. 

It was another sign of Japan's commitment to learn English.  Do we have a similar commitment to learn other languages?  I suppose the "No Trespassing" signs that the highway department uses to mark its turf might qualify.  They used to say "No Trapasan" until someone told ODOT that "No Trapasan" isn't Spanish.  So we still have some room for improvement.

Speak of the devil and he will hear about it shortly

So Ambrose Bierce could have advised Shelley (of The Menagerie) when she ended her answers to a five-question meme a few hours ago with this daring sentence:

I tag Rozanne, Mellow-Drama, Isaac (although he appears to be meme-proof), and the Mad Poet.

How can I resist answering?

1.  You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451.  Which book do you want to be saved?

-- The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas pere, in the original French.  It's a good adventure story, it's long, and I need to practice my French more often, so by reading it I could combine civil disobedience with self-education.

2.  Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

-- Yes, but not one that any reader of this blog is likely to have heard of.  Quite some time ago I was madly enamored of a fictional character in a work of non-fiction.  Her name is Kate Crandall and she appears in John J. Tarrant's book How to Negotiate a Raise, which I first read shortly after it appeared in 1976.

3.  What is the last book you purchased?

-- Like Shelley, I hardly ever buy only one book at a time.  On my last trip or two to a bookstore (the trips blend together), I bought Amos Oz's memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, a mystery by Robert van Gulik called The Emperor's Pearl, and four Batman graphic novels.

4.  What are you currently reading?

-- It's rare for me to "be reading" a book because I read most books from start to finish in one sitting, so I'm rarely partway through a book.  At the moment the only two that I'm partway through (or more exactly, still working on) are Elementary Theory of Numbers, by William J. LeVeque, and De Re Metallica, by Georgius Agricola, as translated by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover.

5.  What five books would you take to a deserted island?

-- The Count of Monte Cristo (see above) for escapism, The Oxford English Dictionary (with the magnifying glass, please) for education, a P.G. Wodehouse omnibus for amusement, and any two volumes from Will and Ariel Durant's history of civilization.  If I'm stranded on the island and not just visiting then in place of the Durant volumes I would substitute Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything and a field guide to edible and poisonous plants.

Isaac Asimov

Today is the 85th anniversary of the birth of Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), the prolific science and science fiction writer best known for his "Foundation" series about the fall and rebirth of the Galactic Empire, and also remembered for coining the words "robotics" and "psychohistory."

He wrote and published several books of limericks and light verse.  In one he rhymed "Oregon" with "foregone."  I wrote him that our state's name rhymes with "Corrigan" and not "foregone," not expecting to get a reply.  Within two weeks I received a postcard from Dr. Asimov, thanking me for giving him the correct pronunciation of "Oregon" and pleading in apology that, according to his wife, his thick Brooklyn accent made all words rhyme with one another.