Are you ready for the country?

...cause it's time to go!

I will not be blogging for the next two weeks, unless I post some more today.

Lowry in Berwick

Long ago, Berwick-on-Tweed was a prize in the Anglo-Scottish wars over old Northumbria. For centuries now it has been English, but the casual visitor (me) has a hard time telling which kingdom it belongs in (Northumbria?). The big social issue seems to be whether dogs should be welcome in pubs.

It is not a flashy place and may never have been, but Berwick had its artistic champion in the mid-20th century, when one L.S. Lowry did many striking paintings of the streets and the people. There is now a downtown "trail" on which you can visit sites he made famous, and which are pretty much the same.

A genealogy site has a good selection of Berwick neighborhoods and the paintings they inspired.

Another review of Noel Fallows' book on jousting in Iberia

This reviewer, writing for the online Medieval Review, also has a high opinion of it.

Fallows, Noel. Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia.
Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010.  Pp. xix, 541.  $99.00.  ISBN:
9781843835943.

  Teofilo F. Ruiz
       University of California, Los Angeles
       tfruiz@history.ucla.edu


In this handsomely-produced and beautifully-illustrated book, Noel
Fallows offers, for the benefit of scholars and general readers alike,
four engaging, valuable, and interrelated contributions to our
understanding of jousting in late medieval and early modern Spain.
More importantly, the author, through a thoughtful deployment of texts
and images, takes us into the complex social and cultural world of
late medieval and early modern chivalry. Having just completed a book
on festive traditions (at the copy-editing stage presently), I can
only bemoan not having read this book earlier. And although I have
tried to incorporate many of Fallows' valuable insights and
information into my own work, his insights into these questions and
capacious treatment of the subject deserve more than just a passing
reference.

Anchored on the close reading of four seminal texts on jousting (plus
a series of other ancillary texts)--Pero Rodríguez de Lena's El
passo honroso de Suero de Quiñones (1434), Ponç de Menaguerra's
Lo cavaller (1493), Juan Quijada de Reayo's Doctrina del
arte de la caballería (1548), Luis Zapata de Chaves' "Del justador
(in his Miscelánea, 1589-93), plus short excerpts from Hernán
Chacón's Tractado de la cavallería de la gineta (1551)--Fallows
brings to life the chivalric world of jousting, connecting these texts
to their particular historical contexts. His four distinct and signal
contributions to the scholarship on jousting and other martial games
rest on his careful edition and translation of the above mentioned
works. His edition of the texts of Menaguerra, Quijada de Reayo,
Zapata de Chaves, and short excerpts from Chacón are the first modern
grouping of these works into one book. Although closely related to
each other thematically, they have never been examined as an almost
century and a half long discussion on jousting, warfare, and knightly
values. As such, his editions of these texts--also translated into
English for the first time--allow us to trace changes over time in the
rules, character, and equipment employed in Spanish jousts and
elsewhere in the West in the transition from the Middle Ages to the
early modern period.

Moreover, his new edition of significant portions--the most salient
ones--of Rodríguez de Lena's El passo honroso (the ur-text of
jousting in the Iberian peninsula) offers, once again through his up-
to-date edition and translation, an important source for the study of
fictional warfare in late medieval and early modern Spain, and,
because of the international nature of jousting in this period in
general and of the passo honroso in particular, the rest of
western Europe. His edited and translated short excerpts of Chacón's
Tractado is similarly the first version in English of a very
significant treatise on Spanish equestrian skills.

Second, although the edition and translation of the texts are found in
the second part of the book--almost as a stand-alone monograph--the
introductory study, found in Part One of Jousting in Medieval and
Renaissance Iberia, expands on the textual evidence, offering to
the reader four diverse perspectives on Spanish chivalrous culture.
His introduction and chapter 1 provides a typology of knightly armed
encounters: mêlée tournaments, tournaments, jousts, and other such
martial games. The introduction also places Fallows' edition of the
texts within a judiciously drawn map of methodological and
historiographical approaches to the topic. His opinions are measured
and sound, dealing as he does with diverse and, often times,
contradictory interpretations. And he does this in a civil fashion,
assessing the worth of each approach, while presenting his own point
of view. Moreover, he allows the texts to guide us through these
discussions, and what can be better than his command of these primary
sources in guiding his readers to a new understanding of the evidence.

While noting the cultural importance of printing in the diffusion of
the new culture and technologies of jousting, Fallows, by deploying
Pedro Cátedra's ideas about "paper chivalry," Martín de Riquer and,
most famously, Huizinga's arguments about late medieval chivalry,
explores the links between literature and armed combat and the
circularity of writing about chivalrous deeds, fictional combat, and
the reality of lived lives. In chapter 1, Fallows turns to a careful
analysis of the three main treatises on jousting, examining how these
texts intersect with the authors' personal experiences, as well as the
different contexts from which they wrote. These brilliant mini-
biographies and case studies allow us to place the three main writers
of treatises on jousting within a long tradition of martial games,
warfare, and court life. For me in particular, the information on two
of these authors, Quijada de Reayo and Zapata de Chaves, and their
role at the great pageantry held at Binche in 1549 and at Philip II's
court is a most welcome revelation.

Although his introduction and chapter one are also in themselves a
small monograph, chapters 2 and 3 offer us a different and as equally
valuable contribution. These two chapters,  erudite and technically
complex, discuss types of armor, helms, saddles, weapons, and every
other piece of equipment used by knights during jousts and
tournaments. Profusely illustrated, technically precise, and with a
myriad of examples and images from the sources, they are a veritable
mine of information and a source for tracing the evolution of armor
and other equipment associated with these martial games from the late
fifteenth century into the sixteenth.

Chapters 4 and 5 shift the inquiry from armors and knightly equipment
to the nature of combat, its rules, and expectations. Fallows notes
the principles or ideals that governed the joust, how scores were
kept, excessive harm prevented, and wounds tended to. In chapter 6, he
turns his attention to war or, far more accurately, to the
relationship between jousting and actual warfare. Fallows, once again,
places his inquiry within the historiographical debate on whether
tournaments were a form of preparation for war or simply a form of
theater and display. Yet, his somber reflections on the actual carnage
found in sixteenth century warfare, the increasing toll taken by
firearms, and by the emphasis (for the sake of victory over the enemy)
on infantry and well disciplined formations over heroic single combat
clearly show the disconnect between the world of jousting and that of
the battlefield. Chapter 7 focuses on other forms of martial
spectacle, with the game of canes and the running of bulls featured
most prominently. These two semi-martial activities came to parallel
the medieval joust, marking a transition that the author describes as
"from sport to spectacle."

Early in his introduction Fallows notes that "chivalry must be seen in
order to be understood."(p. 27) This he has done as best as it could
be done by his vivid textual examples, case studies, and vivid
descriptions, creating a textual portrait of the joust. This he has
done superbly well by his choice of images and by the abundant amount
of visual material included in the book and keyed to the text. When
Spanish images have been lacking, he has borrowed from Italian,
German, French, and English visual evidence to provide us with a clear
idea of what was like to be in a joust. Technical at times, highly
engaging at most other times, this is a book that does many different
things, and it does all of them well. While examining the diverse
social and cultural aspects of fictitious and chivalrous warfare, the
texts that he has so carefully edited and translated remain a thread
that links the book's varied themes into a comprehensive and
compelling vision. I would have liked to see a more careful discussion
of the game of canes and of the role of bulls. I, for one, think that
they occupied an important place in the festive imaginary of early
modern Spain, but this is a very small quibble on what is an
impressive and important achievement. Fallows' super book, beyond
bringing these important treatises to the attention of scholars and
other readers, reintegrates Spain--often neglected in Huizinga's
masterpiece or in Roy Strong's discussions of festivals--into the
general late medieval and early modern European culture of jousting
and chivalric culture.  That in itself is a worthy achievement.

A wonder of the 1850s

The Beamish winding engine.

More on this later, I hope.

And here (updated) is some more!

Inexorable doom?

A fearful story from Stonekettle Station.

A BBC documentary on the Syrian opposition

Here

Thanks to Syria Comment.

Modern Medieval: (inflammatory) language has consequences

Crusading rhetoric, then and now.

Ideology

Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, on the Norwegian "Templar:"

It is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad: no one in their right mind would behave as he has done. Nor is it enough to say that he is evil. If the word evil has any meaning at all, then it must obviously apply to a man who can go to a lake island summer camp, call innocent young people to run towards him – and then shoot 85 of them with an automatic rifle.
We will never be satisfied with simple words like “mad” or “evil”, and for the days and weeks ahead we can expect exhaustive psychoanalysis of this dreary and supercilious 32-year-old sicko. We will summon and interview all the potential hobgoblins of his mind. With the help of the Norwegian investigators, we will try to understand how these demons persuaded him to engage in an act of such premeditated cruelty; and as our guide we will use the 1,500-page manifesto of hate that he (and possibly his accomplices) have posted on the internet.
It is in many ways a preposterous document, with its plan to revive the ancient order of the Knights Templar, with Breivik as “Justiciar Knight”. The idea is to mobilise an army of similar loathsome berks and to liberate Europe of immigrants by 2083. It seems that this is the 200th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, whom Breivik blames for egalitarianism, feminism, multiculturalism and all manner of other things he dislikes. Breivik’s attempt at Mein Kampf is awash with Wikipedia-generated teenage ruminations about Gramsci, Adorno and Islam, and I must confess I have not slogged all the way through to the end.
But I have read enough to grasp the gist – and there is something both curious and troubling in his obsessions. He goes on and on about the EUSSR and “Eurabia”. He attacks multiculturalism as a “big lie”, and asserts that “political correctness now looms over Western European society like a colossus”. “Can the European Union be reformed?” he asks. “I doubt it. The EU is bound together by a self-serving class of bureaucrats who want to expand their budgets and power, despite the harm they do.” He claims that Europe has been systematically betrayed by mass immigration from Muslim countries, and that the method of this immigration has been concealed from the electorate. He cites a great many British commentators to make his points. Indeed, it is fascinating to see how rooted is this Norwegian extremist in the political discourse of the Anglosphere.
My friends, there is no easy way of saying this: a lot of what this evil nutcase says could be drawn from the blog-post threads that you will find in the media, especially the “conservative” media, in Britain. Some people will read his dismal expectorations and conclude that this inflammatory guff is what really drove him on. They will say that his barbarism was spurred by fury at the EUSSR and immigration, just as the murders of 9/11 were triggered by the various tenets of Islamic extremism.
It is certainly true that on the face of it he has much in common with some recent Islamic suicide bombers. He is disturbed by female emancipation, and thinks women would be better off in the home. He seems to be pretty down on homosexuality. Above all – and in this he strongly resembles an Islamist – he believes that his own religious leaders are deeply decadent and have deviated from orthodoxy. He is repelled, like so many Muslim terrorists, by anything that resembles the mingling of cultures.
People will say that we are looking at the mirror image, in fact, of an Islamic terrorist – a man driven by an identical but opposite ideological mania. There is certainly a symmetry here, and yet in both cases, Breivik and the Muslim bomber, I don’t think that ideology is really at the heart of the problem. Yesterday the television reporters found an acquaintance of his from Norway, a fellow called Ulav Andersson, who said that he had known Breivik pretty well. He was surprised by all the Knights of Templar stuff, because he had never really been religious, and he wasn’t aware that he had been interested in politics.
“He didn’t seem opinionated at all,” he said. He just became chippy and irritable, said Ulav Andersson, when some girl he had a crush on jilted him in favour of a man of Pakistani origin.
It wasn’t about immigration, or Eurabia, or the hadith, or the Eurocrats’ plot against the people. It wasn’t really about ideology or religion. It was all about him, and his feeling of inadequacy in relation to the female sex. The same point can be made (and has been made) about so many of the young Muslim terrorists. The fundamental reasons for their callous behaviour lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause, that potentiates the poison in their bloodstream, that gives them an excuse to dramatise the resentment that they feel in the most powerful way – and to kill.
There is an important lesson, therefore, in the case of Anders Breivik. He killed in the name of Christianity – and yet of course we don’t blame Christians or “Christendom”. Nor, by the same token, should we blame “Islam” for all acts of terror committed by young Muslim males. Sometimes there come along pathetic young men who have a sense of powerlessness and rejection, and take a terrible revenge on the world. Sometimes there are people who feel so weak that they need to kill in order to feel strong. They don’t need an ideology to behave as they do.
Michael Ryan had no ideology in Hungerford; Thomas Hamilton had no ideology in Dunblane. To try to advance any other explanation for their actions – to try to advance complicated “social” factors, or to examine the impact of multiculturalism in Scandinavia – is simply to play their self-important game. Anders Breivik may have constructed a portentous 1,500 page manifesto, but like so many others of his type he was essentially a narcissist and egomaniac who could not cope with being snubbed. We should spend less time thinking about him, and much more on the victims and their families.

But then read the comments...

Crusader

The Norwegian terrorist considered himself a Knight Templar, thought "multiculturalists" were traitors, and expressed admiration for the effectiveness of al-Qaeda.

Another member of the "rivers of blood" gang. And oh so self-righteous with it.
z

Update: An older post on the rivers of blood gang.

The Atlantis mission-- end of an era

Let's hope a new era succeeds it.


Again, brilliant photography from the Big Picture.

Marinus Green

Seen today on the Detroit River, a ship evidently named after a cousin of Sirius Black.

Summer, Park Avenue, 1930

From Ephemeral New York.

An 18th century challenge between the armies

At the historic site called Beamish, in County Durham, there is a gentleman's house recreated to the era of the 1820s. It's not very big or very impressive, but it has pretention. Part of that is mediocre but fashionable -- or maybe just past fashionable -- art in the form of engravings.

One of them is a single sheet illustrated and captioned recording the 18th century military careers of Belgrade and Clumsy. Belgrade was a widow (?) who continued to follow the British army after she lost her husband. The engraving celebrates her role in rescuing and caring for wounded soldiers.

Clumsy was her dog. And what a dog! At the battle of Dettlingen, as French and English armies faced each other, a dog emerged from the French lines and began to berate the English in dog fashion. Clumsy was having none of it. He went out, beat up the French dog, chased him away, and then calmly returned to the English lines.

The English went on to win the battle.

You can't make this stuff up. Well, I didn't. But just as I saw every modern re-creation and restoration at every historical site I visited in Britain, I can't help seeing Deeds of Arms everywhere.

Heavy armor

A BBC article on the weight of armor has got just about all my Facebook friends chattering.

Some of the professional historians think this is "pope is Catholic" junk science, and ask why in this time of disappearing funding for scholarly history, need this money be spent in this way? And were any historians consulted anyway?

Some of the reenactors are more interested, but the more informed -- the ones who have both worn armor and studied actual warfare -- ask whether this was a well-designed experiment.

I am both a professional scholar and someone who has worn armor (for 4 decades if you can believe it!) and I am not overly impressed -- tho I haven't seen the actual writeup behind the BBC article.

First, where are the horses? For much of the Middle Ages, it was the guys on horseback who were well-armed, and vice-versa.

Second, I say to the people who emphasize the drawbacks of armor what I say to those who are skeptical about the usefulness of heavy cavalry. Why did rich and important people buy expensive armor and wear it? and why did people who organized and paid for armies pay extra to well-armed men?

Third, full armor did have drawbacks and went out of use fairly quickly after it hit its peak of development. But the situation is not a binary one of full armor/no armor. Let's have a little more subtle analysis here.

Beamish and Puffing Billy!

In County Durham there is an amazing outdoor museum called Beamish, where various structures have been relocated and restored.

So there is an Edwardian high street, a coal mine of the 1850s, a "home farm" of the late 19th century, a Georgian-era gentleman's country house of the 1820s, and more.

Somehow I managed to miss this amazing place until now.

One of the best parts for me were the vehicles and the steam engines. The high point, a ride on an 1820s train pulled by Puffing Billy!

Guy Halsall asks...

Why do we need the barbarians?

My contribution to these sessions is essentially to sum up by asking you one big question: why do we need the barbarians?  For it seems that we really do need the barbarians.  The answer was found, or at least suggested, in 1904 by C.P. Cavafy in his famous, much quoted, poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (even quoted, inexplicably, in the names of chic jewellery boutiques in the 7me arrondissement in Paris, as left):

“Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come
And some of our men just in from the border say
There are no barbarians any longer.

“Now what’s going to happen to us without the barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”

He was right; the bigger question, a hundred years on from Cavafy, is probably ‘a solution to what?’  As far as I can see, the problem which they solve cannot be ‘why did the Roman Empire fall?’  The barbarians’ role in any analysis of the Empire’s collapse must surely be sought under ‘consequences’ or ‘effects’ or – perhaps better – ‘components’, rather than under ‘causes’.  If one looks at the matter in simple descriptive terms, the number of provinces or amount of territory actually conquered by barbarians during the fifth century is minimal.  Note that the general move, in the colour scheme adopted in these maps [a reference to the PowerPoint Slides, I'm afraid, but they were simply the maps in Barbarian Migrations], is rarely from white to black, from Roman rule to barbarian rule, but from white to some shade of grey, either as a federate kingdom or as an area simply where the write of the Ravennate court did not run.>

Lots more, from what was a contentious paper at the Leeds conference this past week.

Teargas poems from Egypt

And the Arabist:

I loved these revolutionary poems, by Egyptian poet Kareem Abdulsalam and translated by Elliott Colla over at Jadaliyya. The first two probably deal with events that took place on January 28. The last one speaks to the longing for Midan Tahrir as a place in which everything seemed possible, and everyone felt purposeful (a longing that as we've seen has led people to return to that square and others in the past week). Enjoy. 

4. What Comes From a Cop

Armored cars
Boxes of perfected fear.
     We thought they were divine creatures come to crush us
          as native Americans first looked at horses. 
     We thought death itself sprang from them.

Armored car
     Went up in flames
     And the policeman inside struggled against the tongues of fire
          Fought against fear.

When we rescued him, 
     He joined the rebellion.


5. He Thought We Were Going to Kill Him

Central security policeman
Peasant who came straight from the village
To fire tear gas at revolutionaries. 
When we grabbed him, 
He thought we were going to kill him
And cried like a child,
     I want my brother. He’s over there
     In that burning armored car.

We took him by the hand
     To his brother—the very one from the last poem. 
He’d taken off his black vest, 
     And was sitting on the ground with the revolutionaries.


6. What Is to Be Done, Now?

What shall we do, now that freedom has dawned over Midan Tahrir?

It would be senseless to go back home,
     To tell tales of the many victories won by the people. 
We will tell the stories often, 
     And listeners will ask us and ask us to repeat them.

In our hearts we might wish that the Dictator had persisted in his stubbornness
     that we had remained in Midan Tahrir forever…
          churning out hurried placards and posters
               sharing food with one another
                    sharing slogans of freedom.

We desire, each one of us, to go on talking about ourselves without end. 
     We dream of sitting,
          all of us together,
               on the ground,
                    singing ballads about our country
                         on cold nights
                              while the tanks protect us.

Places I didn't visit in or near York

...despite multiple opportunities:

Osbaldwick
Slug and Lettuce Restaurant
Reflex--the 80s Bar

Places I did:

Maltings (a pub)
Victoria Hotel (another pub)
University of York Library
Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate

Anyone who remembers the Vietnam war won't be surprised by this

From the Globe and Mail's long-time correspondent in Afghanistan.

Miscellaneous York

Most oppresive monument in York: a very fine medieval style pillar commemorating -- the South African (Boer) War. I have passed it many times this week and it bugs me every time. Perhaps because it reminds me of more recent colonial wars? I have found the new statue of Constantine-as-Caligula and its slouching treatment is pretty creepy, but the South African War monument gets under my skin.

New lows in British food: the chip butty. Which is chips on a burger-style bun. Hey, it's cheap and filling! And to think I was once shocked by beans on toast for dinner.

The real steam

No punk about it--the National Railway Museum in York. And free admission!

Goodricke and Constantine without honor in their own city

Today I went on a free guided tour of York, provided by one of the many volunteers who have been providing this service since 1950 (!). Well worth the time and I'm grateful to the organization and our guide.

However, I must say that he had me biting my tounge more than once with his version of York history (and of his weakness for terrible folk etymologies no more will be said). My faith in his knowledge of his home town's history -- and he called himself a local historian -- was given a shock when he called Athelstan a Viking king. I mean, is there a more (Old) English name? If, dear reader, you were a volunteer guide at York, I believe you would not make this mistake.

Nor, I hope, would you try to be relevant by saying that Henry VIII used the loot from the Dissolution of the Monasteries "to found the Oxbridge Consortium." Would you?

It's odd what people include, and don't. Maybe there was no archaeological or architectural hook to bring in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but I bet I could find one. (Just sitting here I now have one.) But how can you say that the late Roman HQ was found under the Minster in the late 1960s, and not mention that Constantine was elevated to the emperorship in York? This has got to be one of the most important things, on a world-historical scale, to ever happen in the city. But it went unmentioned.

And about the same time Constantine was being ignored, we were standing in front of the Treasurer's House in the old ecclesiastical enclave, also ignoring a sign that said John Goodricke worked there in the 1780s on Cepheid variables, the discovery of which eventually provided an astronomical yardstick to estimate the size of the universe. Talk about world-historical.

I should study up and volunteer myself...

Challenge: look up Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who should have got a Nobel Prize. No York connection.

Advice to Arab democrats

Juan Cole lists ten mistakes made by the USA that he hopes can be avoided by the young revolutionaries of the Arab world. In the course of it he says what must not be said:

5. Make a bill of rights central to your new constitutions, and be specific about what rights people have and what actions infringe against those rights. Include electronic rights to privacy, such as freedom from snooping in private emails or warrantless GPS tracking. You have suffered from intensive secret police spying on your populations, and should know that rights to freedom of speech, worship, press and publication, privacy, a fair and speedy trial, and protection from torture are hallmarks of any democratic system. We have given up most of these essential rights to our secret police, without admitting we have done so and without calling them secret police. But you have lived through domestic surveillance and would easily recognized the violations of individual rights that have become routine in the United States and which are defended by our increasingly corrupt judicial authorities, including a whole series of attorneys-general.

And:

The blood of your martyrs for revolution is too recent and too precious, and too often belonged to young people who sacrificed a bright future, for you to squander this once-in-a-century opportunity to put liberty and democracy on a firm foundation in your countries. You are young, and you still weep at the thought of freedom, and of those who died for it. You are having your weddings at Tahrir Square to celebrate a new beginning. Be careful. Be very careful. In my lifetime I have seen the American state spiral down into a brutal tyranny that tortures, spies, union-busts, engages in illegal wars, and plays dirty tricks on dissidents. We used to have something much more like a democracy. Maybe we can learn from you how to safeguard something so precious.

Who would have thought in January that the world would look so different in July?

The churches of York

The last time I was in York it was 1972. The town, with its medieval walls and street layout, overpowered me. I was particularly impressed by the cathedral, York Minster, the biggest piece of medieval architecture I had seen yet. But as a budding medieval historian I was seriously taken with the number of other medieval churches there were in the immediate vicinity. It spoke to me of the tangible presence of the church in the city which was the capital of the north. I mused on the revolt against that presence during the Reformation (in an unsophisticated way).

This time what strikes my eye is how the people of York kept doing it -- building churches in medieval style in the vicinity of the Minster and those other real medieval churches. There are an awful lot of churches from, say, the last two centuries crowding into the Minster neighborhood, demanding attention.

Image: the Minster, from which a "clerk in holy orders" told me you can see a distant brewery tower. Ask me in person.

On the waterfront, Windsor

Seen: The Peter R. Cresswell out of St. Catharines, going upriver.

(on another occasion)

Yoga on TV

Last night while watching one hour-long crime show, I saw three different ads where yoga was used to stand for a healthy lifestyle. Two of them I'd never seen before.

It's everywhere.

And if you want a truly hypnotic yoga TV experience, try Namaste Yoga. An amazing piece of cinematographical design and quite inspiring yoga. And of course the yogis are something else.

Big spending liberals/social democrats?

Brian Topp in the Globe and Mail sees it another way, taking off from the Greek crisis:

The details have been well covered here on globeandmail.com. It is Papandreou's conclusions about the future that merit thinking about next. “Are we too weak to deal with the financial and banking system?” he asked. “Are we too weak to deal the need for transparency in the financial markets? Are we too weak to deal with the ratings agencies? Are we too weak to fight tax havens?” He noted that bond rating agencies could destroy Greece's financial plan with a single additional downgrade. They have more power over the future of Greece than its people or its Parliament, “and that is totally unacceptable.”

Precisely so – which is why responsible social democrats in all jurisdictions are, and should be, allergic to excessive reliance on debt to finance government.

This is in stark contrast to conservatives in their modern form, eager as they are to finance tax cuts for their friends and other reckless spending through public debt. Doing so provides a perfect pool shot from their perspective. The rich get richer, and government is destroyed. Perfect!

But what we are seeing on our television screens from Athens is the inevitable consequence.

Certainly in Canada it has been the Conservatives who have been most irresponsible with deficits. But no one beats the champion George W. Bush, jr.

Read the whole article.