James Lockhart Perry's Blog, page 2
January 17, 2019
The Raj
January 14, 2019
Boston
January 12, 2019
Mumbai
January 5, 2019
The Taj
January 1, 2019
19 x Death Valley
December 16, 2018
Fatih
December 9, 2018
11 x Père-Lachaise
November 17, 2018
Armistice Day
I remember one evening sitting through one of those ghastly, self-righteous arguments about the Vietnam War that seemed to plague any attempt at serious conversation in the 1970s. The wild-eyed beard next to me showed no interest whatsoever and seemed to regard all the hot air as little more than an opportunity to bogart the joint someone had lit. He, of course, was the only fighter at the table, having earned his serious case of PSTD the hard way, in the infantry during the Tet Offensive. The two righteous dudes who almost came to blows over the conflict were also veterans, but had earned their stripes in the Saigon Headquarters Typist Pool and as an MP in Bitburg, Germany. Somehow, it all made perfect sense.
I’ve never much cared for talking to strangers and can’t help a smidgen of discomfort when I see a civilian approach some random soldier and ostentatiously declare, “Thank you for your service!” What exactly was that soldier’s service? Was he rescued from the unemployment line to chauffeur bigwigs around Washington DC, or did he slog through rice paddies in sheer terror as his best friends dropped around him? If the latter, then who are we to thank him—we who have no earthly idea what he suffered (sitting through pontificating movies and sit-coms doesn’t count). Does a “thank you” do anything for the veteran, or does it somehow legitimize the speaker, like wearing a #12 Brady jersey to a Patriots football game and screaming at the refs?
Anyway, this all came to mind on Veterans Day this year, a day that used to be called Armistice Day, and that, in 2018, fell exactly 100 years after the guns went silent on the Western Front. In that earlier conflict, so inadequately designated (in the US at least) as World War I, eight individual countries lost more than a million soldiers each. The total dead came in at somewhere around 40 million—staggering not just for the quantity, but for the fact that no one even today can remotely pin down the exact number. So many people died, that we simply lost count.
And for the returning wounded—another 22 million souls, give or take—thanks were far and few between. The numbers would have overwhelmed the most conscientious of social programs, even without the post-war Spanish Flu pandemic spiriting off a further 20 million lives. The veterans of the four-year nightmare were in practice left to their own devices, either selling pencils in the unemployment line, or beaten up as Bonus Marchers, or signing up for the latest Fascist revenge sect.
And yet the common men and women of the Great War had literally turned the world upside down. Empires had crumbled, entire social strata had vanished. All the mass marketing that went into selling the war came back on the principals when the masses woke up to the carnage and deprivation behind all those sweet, confident promises. The modern world, in all its hideous glory, had become fact.
But as the minuscule ebb and flow along the Western Front supremely illustrated, it all happened one yard and one life at a time. The misery fell not on grand armies, and certainly not on any decision-maker, but on the individual grunts stuck in the fear and squalor of the trenches. If anyone cares to look, those dead are still with us today. Thousands of graveyards dot the North European landscape. Farmers still plow up unexploded munitions by the ton. Entire tracts are so thoroughly saturated with blood that they’ve been designated “Red Zones” into eternity.
So Armistice Day might sound a bit foolish these days as a celebration (as it was intended) of the end of all wars, but I still rather like the ring of it.
November 16, 2018
Tain-l’Hermitage
November 2, 2018
Glasgow
When you come to Glasgow, you might wonder at Saint Paul’s assertion that, “the wages of sin is death”—and not because of the famously gloomy weather or the dreary, coal-stained sandstone of the buildings. Nor because of the crime, violence, and drug addiction that have afflicted the less fortunate of this city for as long as anyone can recall. But because the vast wealth at the other end of the social scale found its origins and the personal security of its descendants in the early trans-Atlantic tobacco trade.
And not because tobacco has fallen out of fashion and favor in the last 50 years. As an American, you might quibble over the sharp business practices of the self-styled Glasgow Tobacco Lords that were designed to drive planters like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as close as possible to the edge of bankruptcy (in Virginia and the Carolinas, the chronic debts owed to the Scots had as much as anything to do with the revolutionary ardor of the times).
And you might quibble at the practices of Tobacco Lords like William Cunninghame, who anticipated the break with the colonies and bought up every dried leaf between the Chesapeake and the European Continent (although multiplying prices to take advantage of mass addiction in times of drought sounds as American as apple pie and Rockefeller oil).
But the cultivation of tobacco in the labor-starved colonies required slavery. And far from simply ignoring the fact while profiting off the results, the Glasgow Lords leapt in to organize, outfit, and finance the boatloads of half-dead human beings delivered to auction houses throughout the English-speaking Americas. The infamous Triangle Trade begat a Glaswegian financial paradise.
Slaving might have been one of the world’s oldest professions, but the American version added a new and rather insidious wrinkle. In earlier practices, from Rome to the Ottoman Empire, you generally needed to lose a war to be taken. Even then, only yourself landed in chains—your children would be as free as any other citizen of the empire. But in America, it was decided that any child of a slave mother—whether through rape, forced intercourse, or whatever, and regardless of the father’s status—would be born a slave. Generations of planters would be taught to think nothing of buying and selling their own children.
Ironically, just as it did in the young United States, slavery and its financial desserts allowed the Scots to finance the struggle for human rights and independence from the English King and to underwrite the philosophies of freedom-loving individualists like Adam Smith and the faculty of the renowned Glasgow University. And to build vast, ugly homes (or was it mausolea?) like the mansion depicted here, which would eventually morph into Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art.
William Cunninghame and his partners all died wealthy and content in their beds. Today, you have to dig deep into the history books (and forget the tourist guides) to find even a hint of their worst crimes. But their legacy lives on in civil war, Jim Crow, sharecropping, segregation, race riots, freedom rides, assassinations, protest movements, and even kneeling football players.
Somewhere, someone should be paying something for all of that.
