Paul Vitols's Blog, page 35

what scares me

In my post on what I unlearned from 9/ll there was a further point I wanted to address, but I didn't get to it. It concerned the issue of terrorism.

Since 9/11 the words terrorism and terrorist have shown up more and more in the discourse first of politicians, then of journalists. I think especially of George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror" (which has been rebranded as something else by the Obama administration). And now that some countries are under military occupation by the U.S. and its helpers (like Canada), another prominent word is insurgent. In both cases they are the Enemy, and are thought to deserve whatever they get. They are the bogeymen, and we're afraid of them.

It all gives me a feeling of deja vu. For when I was growing up in the 1960s we also had bogeymen, but in those days they were called communists. I remember watching, at about age eight, Art Linkletter on TV, who had a segment on his show called "Kids Say the Darnedest Things", in which he would briefly interview three children who sat on high stools. He was interviewing a girl of maybe about seven, American-born but of Chinese descent, and had asked her what things worried her. "I'm very worried about communism," she said solemnly. A couple of years later I remember reading a comic book about the Vietnam War, in which a Viet Cong officer finally has a breakdown in which he says to himself, with a frenzied expression, "I finally see what communism has done to my mind—how it has twisted me and made me do evil!" (or words to that effect). I remember that my aunt Jackie read the comic too and expressed disgust at the propaganda. I didn't understand what she was talking about.

I do now. And I have no doubt that comic books and video games and action movies today have their heroes taking aim at "terrorists" and "insurgents"—blowing their heads off or, like Jack Bauer on 24, torturing them in order to save whole cities of innocent civilians from imminent death. They're the bad guys—let's get them before they get us!

The communist threat was needed in order to justify the enormous expenditures of the Cold War and to justify the conscription of young American men to fight and die in Vietnam. When the trauma of the Vietnam War finally ended with the American evacuation of Saigon in 1975, the communist scare came to an end. It no longer served any purpose. The disaster on which so much treasure and blood had been spent to prevent, the conversion of Vietnam to a communist dictatorship, had occurred, but somehow life went on.

Fast-forward to today. Nobody worries about communists now. Now we worry about "terrorists" (and their good buddies the "insurgents"). Treasure and blood are again being poured away in an ostensible effort to stop them, to extirpate them. Whoever they are.

9/11 was a spectacular act—or several acts—of mass murder. But that's all it was; it was not an act of war. Treating it as such serves only to ennoble the perpetrators by turning them into warriors instead of criminals. It is an insult to real soldiers and does not serve the interests of the society that was victimized by the attack.

But somebody's interests are being served, otherwise it would not be happening. Consider these words:

But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Do you know who said them? Hermann Goering while awaiting trial at Nuremberg.

So I have a request for my government and all governments: Do not protect me from terrorists. Immediately desist from all military invasions and occupations; all assassinations, kidnappings, and torture; all operation of concentration camps, secret trials, and kangaroo courts; all intrusions into and suspensions of the freedoms and rights of your citizens, done in my name and for my "protection". If you want to invade developing countries and kill brown people in order to seize natural resources or to gain other geopolitical advantages, just tell me straight. But whatever you do, don't do it for my "protection".

I'm willing to take my chances with "terrorists" the same way I do with lightning strikes and drunk drivers. They don't scare me. My own government, though, and its allies, do scare me. And the more concern for my "security" that they profess, the more scared I get.

When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson

When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this book in October 2010 based on a recommendation from either BullionVault.com or another website devoted to providing a dissenting view to mainstream economics. It was first published in 1975, just four years after the Nixon administration had severed the last tie between gold and the U.S. dollar by closing the international "gold window" and terminating the right of foreign governments to exchange dollars for gold. At that time the prospect of an American hyperinflation seemed far off, even as inflation was rising fast, and those scratchy old silent-film clips of forlorn Germans pushing wheelbarrowfuls of banknotes to the bakery to buy bread were quaint and unreal-looking.

As I type these words the price of gold is US$1,818 per ounce, an increase of 4400% since 1971, and last week Switzerland, long a bastion of monetary probity, gave up on maintaining the value of its franc and pegged it instead to the moribund Euro, joining the other major currencies in a death-spiral of competitive devaluation. For those aware of what hyperinflation is, the possibility of experiencing it for ourselves is becoming ever more plausible and imminent. Adam Fergusson's book gives a detailed picture of how hyperinflation—the death of a paper currency—played out in a modern industrial economy in the 1920s. It's not a pretty sight.

I never knew much about the Weimar hyperinflation, but assumed that it had something to do with the payment of war reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. And while Fergusson's topic is not really the cause of the hyperinflation, he does eventually come out and say that war reparations probably had nothing to do with it. Instead we see a fledgling republic facing severe social and economic problems, but whose leadership throughout remains stubbornly timid and ignorant. The leaders of both the government and its central bank, as well as newspaper editors and other leaders of opinion, were almost unanimous in asserting that the inflation had nothing to do with the runaway printing of banknotes, which they saw as an effect rather than as a cause of rocketing prices.

Hyperinflation inflicts severe suffering on almost everyone except those able to profit by making bets on the collapse of the currency. The suffering, though, is very unequally distributed, and the injustice of the whole process is one of its most striking features. With a whole generation of children malnourished, women selling their bodies for a pork chop, and retired civil servants dropping dead on the street from hunger and cold, you also have farmers hoarding bumper crops, unwilling to sell for worthless paper money, and industrialists in a frenzy of factory-building to make use of cheap credit. Some of the best parts of the book are extracts from the journals and letters of housewives describing what they see around them. They witness mob violence and exchange their pianos for potatoes.

In other ways though I found the book to be a dry read, and I felt that it was really addressed to people who were already students of this period of German history and had a grasp of the people and events of that time. He assumes a knowledge of the time and place that in my case was lacking, which made the reading tougher going. I also found that his style lacked fluency, which made things harder as well. A sentence taken at random: "The uncertainties to which these postponements gave rise in large measure accounted for the wild fluctuations of the mark during the year." Another writer would have put this is a more readable way.

All of that said, this book was for me very readable because of its relevance to the events unfolding around me in the world. The enormous federal budget deficits in the United States are starting to look like the Weimar deficits, and although printing presses are no longer used to create money, dollars are being created by the trillion—a figure that became familiar in Germany in the early 1920s. When I go shopping I'm struck by how much less my money buys than even a year ago, and I fully expect that prices will only accelerate upward from here.

But does that mean we're headed for actual hyperinflation? According to writers like James Turk of GoldMoney.com and John Williams of ShadowStats.com, yes we are. Williams, a longtime statistician with the U.S. federal government, thinks it will be in the next year or two.

But are our governments as timid or as deep in denial as the Weimar republic? I'll leave that question with you. Another thing I'll leave with you is a favorite quote from another writer, Henry Hazlitt, an American journalist on economics and finance. In 1946 he wrote these words:

Inflation discourages all prudence and thrift. It encourages squandering, gambling, reckless waste of all kinds. It often makes it more profitable to speculate than to produce. It tears apart the whole fabric of stable economic relationships. Its inexcusable injustices drive men toward desperate remedies. It plants the seeds of fascism and communism. It leads men to demand totalitarian controls. It ends invariably in bitter disillusion and collapse.

If you're looking for a refutation of Hazlitt's points, you won't find it in When Money Dies.

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sketchbook: Sunday 11 September 2011

SUN 11 SEP 2011 ca. 1:45 p.m. THE BAY WOMEN'S WEAR

Department store quiet and cavernous as the sun shines outside—thermal-inversion light filtering through far-off glass doors. Subdued, librarylike, mainly the heavy industrial thrum and squeak of the escalators. Then a low-volume sound of a woman's power vocal performance on the sound system—just audible. The floor is tiled with white linoleum squares, with subdued, camouflage-green hard-wearing carpet under the racks of clothes. Close by me: a small rack of denim shorts, 50% off.

Looking past the big square pillar: the shoe department, more spacious and open, like looking out on a field from the dimness of the forest or a cave—although all fluorescent-lit from rectangular panels set in the dropped ceiling. Tables with curved legs and glass tops hold podiums with women's shoes, solitary and unpaired. On the far wall: spotlit wooden shelves of shoes looking more like books in a bookstore.

Snatches of muted conversation as shoppers pass by with their children: "Because a promise is a promise," says a little boy, "you can't go back."

The clop and clack of shoes on the tile; the strained squeaking of the escalator handrails, ceaselessly moving. A false, air-conditioned world, weakly and cheaply lit. Out those glass doors: the flash and sparkle of cars rolling by.

sketchbook: Saturday 10 September 2011

SAT 10 SEP 2011 ca. 1:45 p.m. LONSDALE QUAY

Sun bearing down; high summer arriving late. These are steps of speckled concrete set in red steel frames . Before me a long alley of a farmer's market: the ground tiled with square bricks, awnings jutting from the white wall of the market, a long row of white-canopied pavilions running down the other side, standing on spindly galvanized legs.

And people: Chinese kids in bright clothes running up and down the steps by me, their mother ordering them to get down and come with her. People saunter in both directions: Filipino woman in an orange sweater; man in brown Hawaiian shirt, shorts, swinging a water-bottle jauntily from one hand; another Chinese woman in glasses and white T-shirt, perusing the trays of apples. Teenage girls walking briskly; young woman with short shorts, on her cellphone; Chinese man with a disabled son walking uncertaintly behind him; another Chinese man in tropical shirt and casual pants, barefoot in sandals. An old couple seeking something, the whitehaired woman shading her eyes as she peers beyond me.

The nearest pavilion: Wild Westcoast RainForest Products: bottled goods, maybe jams and condiments. Next to that: a mini-clothing boutique: shawls and scarves it looks like—leopardskin, tie-dye, batik. Chinese mother and son talking and laughing. Now Kimmie in pink tanktop and denim shorts, bringing a bag of Roma tomatoes.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs

Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

(This review is an edited version of a blog-post I wrote on the occasion of the death of Jane Jacobs in 2006.)

The first I heard of Jane Jacobs was in 1986, while I was working as a user test analyst at the Insurance Corporation of B.C. I had coffee one day with a coworker who, it turned out, had a degree in economics. We got talking about economic issues and he mentioned Jane Jacobs.

"She's really good," he said. "Cities and the Wealth of Nations. You should read that."

I picked up a copy of the Vintage paperback, read it, and loved it. I admired everything about it: the simple, practical, and persuasive way she developed her points; her lack of attachment to any theoretical school or point of view; her fearlessness in junking whole continents of sacred-cow economic theory; her passionate interest in the subject she was writing about, in this case, the economies of cities and how these are the real agents behind the purely artificial construct we call national economies; her admiration for human ingenuity; her brevity; and her exemplary writing style. She was and is everything I think a writer of nonfiction should be.

In chapter 1, "Fool's Paradise", 25 pages long, she demolishes all of economic theory, at least in its efforts to explain the twin phenomena of inflation and unemployment. In simple, insightful, nonrancorous prose she demonstrates the embarrassing failure of the most revered economists—from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman—to account for these unwanted conditions, especially when, as in the 1970s, they happen simultaneously (I remember terms like "stagflation" and "slumpcession" being coined during the Ford administration to describe the economic malaise gripping the U.S. at that time).

Having demolished the previous explanations for inflation and unemployment, she goes on to propose her own. The pith of it is that, first, there is no such thing as a "national economy". The U.S. economy, for example, is actually an agglomeration of many different economies, and different parts of the country are in vastly different economic condition, and earn their living in vastly different ways. The real, organic generator of human wealth is the city, and vital cities undergo bursts of wealth-generation through one basic process: the replacement of imports. This means that a city—not a country—stops importing certain goods and services, and replaces these with things that are made (or done) locally. Money or goods that formerly left the city to buy imports now stays within it, creating jobs, buildings, and new businesses—wealth.

Classical economic theory, which holds that inflation and unemployment are reciprocal, that if one is high the other must be low, is wrong. Jacobs holds that the two of them have always in fact appeared together, and that they are symptoms of economic decline. She gives the example of Ethiopia as a country that, in the centuries before Christ, had been a vital, wealthy empire, but now is a poor. Aside from subsistence agriculture, there is very little work there (high unemployment), and even though prices for most things are very low by our standards, they have slipped out of reach of most of the population (high inflation).

I became a kind of Jacobsian. I read all of her other books—each one is excellent. If you start by reading the first, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, you can follow the progress of her thinking from book to book: how her interests gradually spread from the question of how and why slums appeared in American cities to, finally, how the world economy functions with respect to the environment.

She was an example of a brilliant and nonacademic thinker. She held no teaching post and had no university degree. To me, fussy, picky, and critical as I am, she is one of the very few writers whose work, in its entirety, I truly admire.

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what I unlearned from 9/11

On Tuesday 11 September 2001 I was still an employee of the Insurance Corporation of B.C. At that time my daily routine included a reading period before work over my morning cup of coffee in the living room. Kimmie spent that time upstairs in our ensuite bathroom making her own preparations for work, also at ICBC. That morning, unusually, she appeared at the foot of the stairs to tell me that she was hearing something strange on the radio.

"They say a plane has crashed into one of the buildings of the World Trade Center in New York."

"Not a joke?" I said. For Kimmie at that time listened to Bro Jake, popular for his nonstop politically incorrect humor.

"No—they sound serious. It's all they're talking about. Something's going on."

I switched on the TV and sure enough, found "breaking news" coverage of the crash of a jetliner into one of the World Trade Towers. There was screaming and confusion as black smoke poured from the building. And maybe my memory is playing tricks with me, but my recollection is that I saw the second collision, live on TV at 6:03 a.m. local time. Feelings of shock, excitement, and unreality swirled through me, and like everyone else who had witnessed the event, it put to an abrupt end the question that was being urgently asked up to that moment: was this an accident, or part of some evil plan? And soon I would be watching, live on TV, the collapse of the buildings and the mayhem of Lower Manhattan becoming engulfed in a black fog of toxic dust and smoke.

I went to work as usual but everyone was somber and traumatized by the events, and continually listening to the radio or looking online for news updates. Part of the shock of that day was at the scale and boldness of the attacks. Who could be doing this and why? How could they be able to do it?

Soon the name of a Muslim fundamentalist named Osama bin Laden was mentioned, and that of his organization Al Qaida. I'd never heard of either one of them. Who were they and what did they want?

In my life I'd done a lot of reading and study of many topics, but very little to do with Islam or the politics and history of the Middle East, although I had visited Israel and Egypt in the winter of 1981–82. Now, apparently, Islam and the politics and history of the Middle East had reached out and not only touched me but grabbed me by the lapels and shaken me. I wanted to know more, but the news commentators, American and Canadian, didn't seem to know much more than I did.

I eventually responded in my usual way: by buying and reading books. The first book on Al Qaida I was able to find was Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror by Paul L. Williams, a short background guide to the organization and bin Laden. I also put my hands on The Crisis of Islam and What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis. And in 2006 I found a very interesting book called Understanding Terror Networks by a psychiatrist named Marc Sageman, which looked so relevant that I was willing to pay the high price for the hardback, the only existing edition.

By that time the United States had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, ostensibly in response to 9/11, and which they still occupy, with the help of Canada and others in the case of Afghanistan. The invasion of Afghanistan appeared to be inevitable when it became known that bin Laden was holed up there and the ruling Taliban refused to turn him over. The invasion of Iraq was being justified on the basis that Saddam Hussein was creating nuclear weapons that he intended either to use himself—he had already attacked at least three neighboring countries, including Israel, at which he had launched Scud missiles during the first Gulf War—or to make available to terrorist groups such as Al Qaida, presumably in the manner in which the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was said to have aided terrorist groups. At the time, I was persuaded that it made sense. Saddam's actions with regard to the UN nuclear inspection team seemed to me to be consistent with someone who was hiding something. I was also influenced by reading The Economist, of which I was then a big fan and whose editors were strongly in favor of an invasion of Iraq—an issue that I later learned was very divisive at the magazine.

Skeptics—or, as I thought of them, cynics, including most or all of my friends—felt sure that the invasion of Iraq was about oil. My thought was, "But it's so much cheaper just to buy oil. For the money you'll spend invading a country, you can buy a lot more oil, and without having to slaughter people." I deplored what I regarded as knee-jerk cynicism about government and those in power. Let them do their job, I thought.

But I came around. As the increasingly halfhearted hunt for nuclear weapons—or, by that time, "weapons of mass destruction", hoping for a consolation jackpot of chemical weapons which Iraq was known to have used—in Iraq turned up nothing, it became clear that there were no nuclear weapons there. The evidence for their existence could not have been overwhelming after all. It became increasingly obvious that what "evidence" there was had been fabricated, and that such fabrication must have happened with the knowledge and participation of the highest levels of government. I withdrew the credit I had been willing to extend to governments. I became skeptical.

So for me 9/11 was, among other things, the beginning of a process of political disillusionment. That same year, 2001, had also seen a provincial election here in B.C. called by the then-premier Ujjal Dosanjh, who had replaced the disgraced NDP premier Glen Clark. While the campaign was going on the B.C. government ordered two of its Crown corporations, ICBC and BC Hydro, to mail "rebates" to all their customers, essentially all the voters in B.C. At ICBC, where I worked, the project was undertaken as an emergency: those $100 checks had to reach the customers—a couple of million of them—before election day.

Here, as with the invasion of Iraq, I was slow to realize what was going on. But by the end of 2001 I felt there was no other way to construe the events than as a desperate and corrupt—and failed, as it turned out—effort to buy the provincial election. At ICBC the rebates were to be financed with layoffs, and it was the earnest denials of senior management that the rebate program and the ensuing "voluntary separation packages" were connected that crystallized my feelings of skepticism into disgust. I left the company in January 2002 (one of only a handful of employees who did not qualify for a buyout package, by the way).

By April 2006 I was actively seeking out dissenting literature to try to find the truth behind what we were being spoon-fed by our governments with respect to the world situation. I know this because I book I picked up at Indigo, Rogue State by William Blum, has this date inscribed in it. Since then I have accumulated and read many more books examining American "foreign policy" from points of view other than the official line. It's not a pretty picture.

But am I a cynic now? No. Cynicism is "assuming the worst about others' motives", and I don't do that. I believe that the cynic is confessing more about his own motives than saying anything about other people's. I don't believe other people are worse than I am. They're in different circumstances than I am, with different knowledge and different incentives. What would I do if my hands were on the levers of power? Especially if I had spent a lifetime getting there, and sold various parts of my soul to do so? I don't know. I do know that I've been tempted by things—and have given in to temptation. Jesus knew what he was doing when he composed the Lord's Prayer.

In all, it's hard not to agree with the words of Lord Acton in April 1887:

All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

sketchbook: Friday 9 September 2011

FRI 9 SEP 2011 1:50 pm MY OFFICE

I'm at my desk. I don't spend too much time actually sitting at my desk. More often I swivel here from the whirring PC behind me to look up a word or other fact. Merriam Webster's red Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition, stands in a row of books lined along the edge of the desk to my right. It's sandwiched between a copy of Bleak House and Dictionary of Word Origins by John Ayto. Next to that, The Origins of English Words by Joseph T. Shipley. Next to that, 7 more books, then some notebooks and binders.

Stacked by my left elbow here on the grayed moss-green blotting paper are 3 books I've referred to in the past day while writing. From the bottom up: A History of Architecture by Spiro Kostof; The Stoddart Visual Dictionary (excellent resource—I got it in 1993); and The Astrological Body Types by Judith A. Hill—a fascinating and useful little guide to how astrological factors—planet, sign—affect one's physical appearance. Each has a little colored paper flag attached to a page I'm using.

A big Ikea stein of water stands nearby on a rush coaster; a pencil lies beside them. Before me: some burgundy file folders in an escalating plastic holder, with labels like "Website Diagrams" and "The Mission—Research Clips". The wall is a rich sky-blue. Pinned at eye level is a Vajrayana postcard: a line drawing of a pair of jeweled deities in sexual embrace. Above that: a horizontal poster of the celestial sphere projected into a great ellipse with the Milky Way stretched along its major axis. All the major stars are depicted in color and the constellations labeled.

The large ground-floor window to my right looks out, through a loose grid of white bars and white venetian blinds, on the sunstruck green of the garden overhanging the brick patio. The window is shaded by our back deck, from which stairs descend to the end of the patio. A hibiscus blooms there with pale-lilac-colored flowers. But mainly it's a dense mini-forest of green, hemmed under the clapboard cliff of the building next door.

will you join the Party when it's time?

The study of history makes a man wise and judicious.

So says Ludwig von Mises on page 30 of Human Action. If he's right, that would make a powerful reason for anyone to study history—and I think he is right. We all learn from experience, and there is therefore a certain wisdom that comes naturally from aging. This is the reason that elders have traditionally been the repositories of a society's wisdom. History, written accounts of the past, allow our "memory" stretch back before our birth and before the births of our own parents and grandparents. It can give us that most precious of gifts: the opportunity to learn from others' mistakes.

Two of the books in my current reading pile are histories, and they both concern money: When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson, an account of the Weimar inflation in Germany published in 1975, and The Ages of Gold by Timothy Green, an overview of the history of humanity's relationship with gold. I find the subjects interesting in their own right, but also and more particularly because I believe they relate to our current situation in the world. The price of gold in U.S. dollars is at an all-time nominal high, but does that mean that gold has special relevance now for other reasons? Yes, I think it does. And the hyperinflation that hit Germany, Austria, and Hungary in the early 1920s, and that had modern Europeans dying of hunger and produced images of people rushing madly to shops with wheelbarrows full of near-worthless cash—does that have any bearing on our life now? Again, yes, I think so—very much so.

I'm about halfway through When Money Dies, and so far the most striking thing in the account is the persistent denial by authorities, journalists, and just about everyone in German society at that time that the steep climb in prices and the collapse of the mark's value against other currencies had anything to do with the enormous volumes of money they were printing. By 1923 several printers in Germany were printing nothing but banknotes, and these they were printing around the clock, as much as their equipment and the stamina of their employees would allow. Government ministers and newspaper editors solemnly asserted that the printing of notes was an effect, not a cause, and that the mark would recover if foreign sentiment changed and if the onerous reparation payments could be reduced or halted.

Paraphrasing a British diplomat's observation from the time, inflation is like a drug addiction in that it leads to death, but also helps get you through some rough times on the way there. The Weimar government printed money because they saw it as the least painful alternative, and they developed their arguments in order to rationalize the decision. When you print—or otherwise create—money it loses value, not because of people's behavior, but because when you increase the denominator of a fraction, that fraction becomes smaller. If you take a 12-inch ruler and divide it instead into 13 inches or 14 inches, the "inches" must get smaller to fit them all in. As we use a ruler to measure length, we use money to measure value. As the quantity of money increases with respect the total goods and services being measured, the more money it takes to buy any given thing. Put another way, prices go up.

But it takes time for the process to play out. Money is always injected at particular places in an economy. From those places it has to fan out in order to permeate the economy as a whole. That temporal process of fanning out causes a little-understood transfer of wealth—purchasing power—from those at the end of the process to those at the beginning. And those at the end of the process tend to be those with the lowest incomes and the least wealth: minimum-wage employees and those depending on them.

Those at the beginning of the process are, in the United States, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, followed by the banks most closely connected with them, followed in turn by major government contractors and other banks, and so on down the line. The creator of a new dollar gets to spend it at today's prices. By the time that dollar makes its way to a Wal-Mart greeter in Tulsa, prices have adjusted upward and it buys less for that person than it did for Haliburton, who was near first in line for it. That difference in prices was the amount of purchasing power, of wealth, that was, in effect, transferred from the greeter to Haliburton.

While I would not agree with the French anarchist writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that "property is theft", I think a strong case could be made that inflation is theft, and of a uniquely unjust kind, because it is:

regressive—robbing the poor to pay the rich
stealthy—not easily perceived or understood
legal—sanctioned and rationalized by those entrusted with maintaining the order and justice of the state, who also happen to be the recipients of the wealth

People feel the injustice of inflation without being able to pinpoint its cause, which leads them to seek out scapegoats and to be attracted to demagogues. One of the most striking things to people in the Weimar hyperinflation was how the situation put different segments of society at odds with each other: town vs. country, rich vs. poor, native-born vs. foreigner, worker vs. capitalist. Society became charged with hatred and envy, and law was discarded as people stripped the lead from each other's roofs in order to buy groceries. This was the background against which fascism arose. A cry goes out from the people for someone to "fix this!" They well appreciate that it will take someone who is tough and ruthless, who rules by decree and who is willing, even eager, to liquidate opponents. They're ready for Hitler.

Am I saying that we're heading toward another episode of fascist dictatorships in the West? Yes I am; we're most of the way there.

I think about something I read in Toynbee. A couple of writers late in the Roman Empire discussed the incursion of barbarians on a couple of cities in Europe. Toynbee remarks in passing that these writers, unaware of the fate that awaits the Empire in a relatively short while, see the events as novelties rather than as portents. I think about, say, this year's riots in Britain. Those are mainly regarded as unfortunate novelties, but I see them as portents. The rioters are looking for leadership, and sooner or later they will find it.

How do I know this? By reading history.

sketchbook: Monday 5 September 2011

MON 5 SEP 2011 ca. 1:00 pm "LITTLE" CATES PARK

It's a shipping lane for private pleasure craft: the throb of motors as launches surge purposefully through the blue, active water. Their wash beats on the narrow, high-tide beach, striking the shore in syncopation, out of phase. Farther out, brick-colored freighters ride silently at anchor.

A man strokes by upright on his faddish paddleboard, 30 meters offshore. A gull flaps in a beeline closer in, heading maybe for the concession stand.

Not many people at this park, which must be one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Park benches, 3 of them, look out on the water from right above the beach. The northernmost one is entirely in the shade of two busily spreading maples. A young man and young woman sit on it, their backs to us, each with left leg slung over right knee, reading. The man, olive-skinned in a smoke-gray T-shirt, seems to have some kind of illuminated tablet, glowing blue and smaller than an iPad. The woman, grooming an eyebrow with her little finger as she reads, appears to have a book.

Another bench, the one nearest our blanket, also supports a young couple, but these are cyclists with their bikes propped against the back of the bench and their helmets on—his white, hers black. Two children's bikes are also nearby, one on its stand, the other on its side. They belong to little blonde girls wearing little cami-style tops and black cycling shorts.

Kayakers are paddling by in opposite directions; one pair drifts offshore in their coral-colored craft.

More people come, unloading their cars and making like homesteaders for unclaimed ground, as we have done. The park itself is a great sloping lawn with playground and trees, but people want to set up by the shore.

The reading couple have packed up and now stalk away.

sketchbook: Saturday 3 September 2011

SAT 3 SEP 2011 ca. 1:30 pm WILLIAM & GILMORE, BURNABY

An empty asphalt parking lot above and behind Kitchener Elementary School. A Canadian flag shimmies lazily by the steep shingle roof and bowler-hatted bell tower of the old-building part of the school. The profound sleep of summer vacation—the estivation at its deepest in these last days before the new school year.

A fresh breeze blows past Kimmie and me as we sit on this dry slope of yellowed grass. The yellow-poplar shivers over us. An airplane engine growls in tremolo overhead, filling the gap in the bustle of traffic on Gilmore Ave. The sky is big and blue. An unfamiliar and unexpected vista here, south and west: roughly flat, with conical evergreens standing amid roofs and from the green slope of a park. A sawtooth silhouette of tiny evergreens on the horizon, and faint blue humpbacks of distant Gulf Islands.

Clover trembles nearby.