Brad DeLong on who subsidizes who

Brad does not even talk about defense spending.

HALLOWEEN ON THE PRAIRIE: CONGRESSMAN TIM HUELSKAMP IS THE MOST FRIGHTENING THING I WILL SEE ALL DAY

Congressman Tim Huelskamp:

“I’m from a district that pretty much ignores Washington. If you say government is going to shut down, they say, ‘OK, which part can we shut down?’”
--Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, to Associated Press

Farm subsidies! Shut down farm subsidies! Move farm subsidies from the "mandatory entitlements" to the "discretionary appropriations" side of the budget, and Congressman Huelskamp would switch his attachment to government shutdowns with the force of twenty mules!

In an average year, Congressman Huelskamp's First District collects roughly $1.5 billion in farm commodity and crop instance subsidies. There are about 20,000 farmers in the First District.
You do the math: That's $75,000/year per farmer in the district. That's $9,000/year for every family of four living in the district--a district where mean household income is $50,000/year.

I tell you, the Californias and the New Yorks and the Massachusettses... the Bostons and the San Franciscos and the Los Angeleses and the New York Cities... Those Americans who live in such places know that we work hard, and are smart. But we also know that we have been very lucky. And we know that we are Americans. And so we don't really mind having our net tax dollars flow out of our communities to pay for a Medicaid beneficiary in Salinas, KS, or a Social Security recipient in Emporia, KS. We even don't mind that much paying to keep the farms going--we can envision futures in which global warming disrupts crop production in other places and the world is very glad to have Kansas agriculture on-line and tuned-up.[1]

But we do mind Congressman Huelskamp's and his constituents pretending that it does not happen: that the First is a self-reliant rugged-individualist district, rather than one that feeds much more greedily than most via redistribution of what the rest of us produce.

Living in the material world

Imagine George Harrison and Madonna singing their different versions on the same stage!

Long ago a good friend of mine, Sandra Dodd, drew my attention to a book with the title “Material World”. It was a select survey, pictorially oriented, of living conditions in about two dozen countries around the world. One notable feature was that each family brought all their property out of the house arranged it neatly, and then sat behind their pile of things to have their picture taken. The poorest country in the survey was Mali, and they had next to nothing except various pottery containers. The Americans had a great deal of stuff. The contrast was shocking, as it was meant to be.

When we moved out of Ravenhill, we became that American family. The stuff! Ye gods, the stuff!

There are a lot of excuses that can be offered. As several people have pointed out, if you live in the same location for 22 years of course you’re going to have a lot of stuff. We have a hobby, the Society for Creative Anachronism, that requires a serious player to have clothing, tents, and other props. For a while we ran a bit of a farm, with horses, sheep and poultry. But still…

Even though we are not big shoppers, not really hoarders either, not particularly rich, our move to smaller quarters, a house already full of its own furniture and appliances, put us in the position of throwing away huge and astonishing array of… Things.

We left most of our furniture and all of our major appliances for the buyers, for whom this is the first house. And still…

We were put in the onerous and to me rather depressing situation of throwing out the evidence of the past half-century or so of our lives. It was that, or apply to the federal government for a huge grant for the Muhlberger National Museum (and be rejected of course).

I have to admit that much of the stuff came down to me. Not even counting stuff in my office at the University, I had tremendous amount of paper associated with academic projects that I have either finished or abandoned. I had an amazing amount of paperwork associated with the SCA in Ontario in the 1970s and 80s (mostly). I had to very determinedly ask myself if I would ever look at this particular pile of paper again. If not, out it went.

It was more difficult in some ways to deal with the books. Again, the question asked was will any of us ever read this book again? The alternatives here were not keep or throw, but keep or find some alternative to throwing. I took boxes and boxes to the University and got rid of a great many serious and frivolous volumes  there. Otherwise, they went to a thrift shop/recycling depot called Rebuilt Resources. How many of them they threw out I don’t want to know. It was hard enough to get rid of those old friends, those pocket universes, those enjoyable but not classic science fiction novels that are basically unavailable, relics of an almost lost popular culture. (The book covers, especially from the early 60s, preserve a style of abstract illustration found nowhere else!)

And when I was done with all of this, and the sale of Ravenhill was concluded, I went to my office at Nipissing University and got rid of  about half the stuff that was stored there.

This whole process took a psychic toll on me. Lots of questions were raised,   like what on earth was I thinking. Well, I was probably thinking that I would live forever and didn’t want to lose track of anything that happened to me, especially if it was pleasant. And after all I am a historian. The great purge forced me to wrestle with these attitudes.  It shows the state that I was in during much of it that I took comfort in the idea that if we were in a car crash and killed, it would all have to go anyway. Comfort, eh?

You young whippersnappers, take a lesson from this. You might just maybe want to start cutting down your possessions now instead of having to do it at some very inconvenient time in the future.

Or at least slow down your pace of acquisition.

Edmund Burke, conservative hero

Corey Robin has a noteworthy anecdote.

"That's the way you do it, money for nothing..."

Worlds of Arthur, by Guy Halsall

I know Guy Halsall and correspond with him fairly frequently. I think he's a very good historian. So when he wrote a book with a riproaring commercial title like "Worlds of Arthur" it was only a matter of time before I got around to having a look.

Frankly, I don't know how commercial this book is, or how much impact it will have on even the more serious readers among the general public, namely the people who actually shell out their own money to read books on serious subjects like post-Roman Britain and King Arthur. Certainly Halsall tries very hard to reach those people, and does a much better job than most academics do on similar projects. But the book is a thorough debunking of certain ideas about Arthur and his place in history, and is already provoking a mixed reaction.

Halsall believes that trying to find the real Arthur behind the legends is entirely futile, and he classifies most efforts to do so as pseudo-history.  It is possible that somebody named Arthur led British forces against Saxon invaders, but the simple truth is that we know nothing about any such person and can't  reconstruct his life and career. The few written sources we have for this two-century period (410-597) does not allow us to do it and unless some miraculous discovery turns up new information (and none has appeared for many centuries) we will never find Arthur. A lot of professional historians agree with this, but I doubt that anyone has made such an uncompromising presentation of this fact – the unknowability of Arthur – as Halsall does here. 


Halsall is equally interested in revising a framework that scholars of the past have imposed on our understanding of post-Roman Britain. To simplify, Halsall does not think that British history of the fifth and sixth centuries is best understood as a fight between "the Britons" and "the Saxons," a long contest which resulted in the expulsion of Britons from most of what is now England. In line with developments in other parts of Western Europe, English ethnic identity came to dominate because older identities, specifically the Roman identity, were no longer relevant to a Britain where the Roman economy and society had collapsed.

Halsall both discusses changes in our interpretation of British archaeology over the last 40 years, and offers his own reinterpretation, which he frankly labels as speculative. It's an interesting interpretation and one I find fairly persuasive, though in this period we will never have certainty.

One of the best things about this book is that Halsall discusses how people use and misuse evidence for difficult historical problems in great detail. This may put people off, but it is one of the most transparent discussions of what historians do in interpreting the often difficult to understand early Middle Ages that I've ever seen. It is not likely to be everybody's cup of tea. But have a look at this discussion of DNA evidence and how it can deceive, especially people who want to be deceived.

Even with these data, an even more serious problem concerns the move from DNA to conclusions about ethnic or political identity. Ethnic identity is multi-layered. It is deployed (or not) in particular situation as the occasion demands, and can be changed. DNA cannot give you a sense of all the layers of that person's ethnicity, or of which she thought the most important, or even if she generally used a completely different one, or when and where such identities are stressed or concealed. A male Saxon immigrant into the Empire in, say, the fourth century, would – one assumes – have DNA revealing the area where he grew up, but he would probably increasingly see himself, and act, as a Roman. Saxon origins would have little part in his social, cultural, or political life, and even less for his children, if they stay in the Empire. If he returned home with the cachet of his Imperial service, it might have been his Roman identity that gave him local status. He might even have called himself a Roman. However, if a distant male relative moved to Britain 150 years later, his DNA might be very similar but, in complete distinction, he might make a very big deal of the Saxon origins. They would, or could, propel him to the upper echelons of society. DNA tells us nothing about any of this. What is pernicious about this use of genetic data is its essentialism. It views a person's identity as one-dimensional, unchanging, and as entirely derived from that person's biological and geographical origins. In short, it reduces identity to something similar to 19th century nationalist ideas of race. Everyone sane knows that people moved from northern Germany to Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. In that sense, these expensive analyses tell us nothing we do not already know. In their implicit reduction of identity to a form of race, masking all the other contingent and interesting aspects of cultural interaction and identity-change they risk setting back the understanding of this period by more than a century. Moreover, they provide pseudo-historical and pseudo-scientific ammunition for present-day nationalists xenophobes and racists.

If you teach history, wouldn't you want your students to be exposed to such a clear discussion of a historiographical problem?  One with real relevance to the present?

Image: Tintagel. People in the 12th century thought this was an Arthurian site.

Plunder in history: more from Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

In Postwar, Tony Judt evokes the chaos of living under the thumb of Nazi Germany: It is misleading to think of the German occupation of continental Europe as a time of pacification and order under the eye of an omniscient and ubiquitous power. Even in Poland, the most comprehensively policed and repressed of all the occupied territories, society continued to function in defiance of the new rulers: the Poles constituted for themselves a parallel underground world of newspapers, schools, cultural activities, welfare services, economic exchange and even an army—all of them forbidden by the Germans and carried on outside the law and at great personal risk. But that was precisely the point. To live normally in occupied Europe meant breaking the law: in the first place the laws of the occupiers (curfews, travel regulations, race laws, etc) but also conventional laws and norms as well. Most common people who did not have access to farm produce were obliged, for example, to resort to the black market or illegal barter just to feed their families. Theft—whether from the state, from a fellow citizen or from a looted Jewish store—was so widespread that in the eyes of many people it ceased to be a crime. ...

As occupying forces, both Nazis and Soviets precipitated a war of all against all. They discouraged not just allegiance to the defunct authority of the previous regime or state, but any sense of civility or bond between individuals, and on the whole they were successful. If the ruling power behaved brutally and lawlessly to your neighbour—because he was a Jew, or a member of an educated elite or ethnic minority, or had found disfavour in the eyes of the regime or for no obvious reason at all—then why should you show any more respect for him yourself? Judt is, I think, in speculative but interesting territory. There's nothing about a social contract that necessitates equality among shareholders. What happens when some shareholders pay in more, but get out less? What is the message that a Power sends to its subjects when it says to them "Some members of society enjoy the protection of the State, and others are outside of the law?" And what happens when a whole sector of society is effectively branded as the rightful field for plunder?.... 

The ‘right’ of possession was shown to be fragile, often meaningless, resting exclusively on the goodwill, interests or whim of those in power. There were winners as well as losers in this radical series of involuntary property transactions....hundreds of thousands of ordinary Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Dutch, French and others became complicit in the Nazi genocide, if only as its beneficiaries. It is important to remember the ordinary beneficiaries who do not always wear the swastika. It is important to remember that atrocity is not simply insanity, that it is often not insanity at all, but hard interest, that even in the Holocaust there were interests, that there were winners and that they saw themselves as such. 

In our own land, we have long observed this. To better avoid the painful fact that there were "winners" in a slave society, that those winners were not merely great planters, to avoid the fact that ordinary Americans are indicted in all that came from slave society, we discuss the "race problem" as though it were a problem of manners and civility. I am sure the average African-American in 1963 could empathize with the dream of little white boys and little black girls hold hands. But he likely would have settled for a day when white people would no longer see he and his family as a field for plunder. Judt is not wrong to focus on property. Theft is the essence of atrocity--if only the theft of dignity and life. Indeed, where I forced to to offer one word to sum up black people's historical relationship to the American state, "Theft" is the first that would come to mind. Theft of labor and theft of family in slavery. Theft of life through lynching and pogrom. Theft of franchise in half the country. Theft through mortgages for some and contract loans for others. Theft through unemployment insurance for some, and debt-peonage for others. Theft of tax dollars which support "public" libraries that do not want you, "public" pools that will not have you, "public" schools that will not teach you and "public" universities that will riot at the sight of you. 


Should we conclude that theft is the marker of the black human's interaction with his government, that she lives, not under the aegis of the state, but in its cross-hairs, we head into dangerous waters. No. They went that away. These are not the facts you're looking for. Better to move along and go about your own private business. Better to forget this entire ugly everything. Better to focus on civility, your local diversity workshop and the reduction of harsh and intemperate language. Better to forget that indigestible truth--behind every great atrocity, stands some particular winner.

Culinary despair in the USA

Squarely Rooted disses Cincinnati Chili over at Brad DeLong's blog:

For the mercifully unacquainted, "Cincinnati chili," the worst regional foodstuff in America or anywhere else, is a horrifying diarrhea sludge (most commonly encountered in the guise of the "Skyline" brand) that Ohioans slop across plain spaghetti noodles and hot dogs as a way to make the rest of us feel grateful that our own shit-eating is (mostly) figurative. The only thing "chili" about it is the shiver that goes down your spine when you watch Ohio sports fans shoveling it into their maws on television and are forced to reckon with the cold reality that, for as desperately as you might cling to faltering notions of community and universality, ultimately your fellow human beings are as foreign and unknowable to you as the surface of Pluto, and you are alone and always have been and will die alone, a world unto yourself unmarked and unmapped and totally, hopelessly isolated.

There's more!

(I have no personal experience of Cincinnati Chili, but I love a good rant.)

Some of the best stuff on the internet

Ta-Nehisi Coates on  Tony Judt's Postwar:

 But it's fairly clear that hate that made the Shoah was neither an invention nor the magic of false-consciousness, but a reflection of the people themselves:

In the same poll of November 1946, one German in three agreed with the proposition that ‘Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race’. This is not especially surprising, given that respondents had just emerged from twelve years under an authoritarian government committed to this view. What does surprise is a poll taken six years later in which a slightly higher. percentage of West Germans—37 percent—affirmed that it was better for Germany to have no Jews on its territory. But then in that same year (1952) 25 percent of West Germans admitted to having a ‘good opinion’ of Hitler.

Attendant to all of this was something that any student of white supremacy in America will recognize--a strong propensity toward national amnesia:

 In Italy the daily newspaper of the new Christian Democrat Party put out a similar call to oblivion on the day of Hitler’s death: ‘We have the strength to forget!’, it proclaimed. ‘Forget as soon as possible!’ In the East the Communists’ strongest suit was their promise to make a revolutionary new beginning in countries where everyone had something to forget...

It's worth taking a moment to think about this "strength to forget" notion. National forgetting is always a selective endeavor. Italy had no more intention of dismissing its Roman heritage as "the past," then Americans have of dismissing George Washington as "the past." "The past" is whatever contributes to a societies moral debts. "Heritage" is everything else. 

Judt is making a very disturbing argument--that postwar Europe was built on  a willingness to only push deNazification but so far. There is here something not wholly dissimilar to our own reunion accomplished on an agreement to "forget" what the War was over. So far does the myth advance that Judt finds president Eisenhower lauding the Wermacht--"The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland."

We are confronted with a series of awful questions: What are the actual limits of human justice? How much of human justice, ultimately, rests on the accumulation of guns? What is one to do when the people, themselves--not sinister hidden forces are the engines of persecution? Of useful killing? Of genocide? ...

Man.  Such hate. What can we do against such reckless hate. Don't study history to boost your self-esteem. Study history to lose your religion. Or maybe in the end, to gain it. I am not religious at all. But seeing the limits of all of us, you start to understand why people might appeal to some higher, more certain, more fierce, invention.

Goodbye to Ravenhill

Ravenhill (sometimes known as the Last Homely House South of the Mattawa (River)) was the name we gave to our 95 acre rural property in Bonfield Ontario. We sold the place about two weeks ago. It is the home that I have lived in longest.

I am sad to be leaving. It really is very nice to have a huge piece of property, where you can take your dogs for a walk, raise sheep, allow medieval reenactors to camp (every year for 20 years), ride your horses. Never again.

On the other hand, as we got older, the disadvantages became more and more obvious. It is a lot of work to manage a property and a house in the Canadian countryside. Eventually it got away from us. My health is not what it once was, and my very healthy and energetic wife has limits, too, though our friends  may doubt that.

It also became increasingly expensive and inconvenient to be a half-hour to 45 minutes from about anywhere. (Even when you get to North Bay, you are basically in the no shopping zone.)

On top of that, the Bonfield environment has been turning sour. Most people in the village are perfectly nice people, but even working with our neighbors we were not able to stop someone bringing in a horrifically noisy dragstrip, or our Township Council from launching an experiment in unionbusting.

And then… There is winter. I’ve been proud of being able to deal with winter and even enjoy it, but the idea that I might never need to own snow tires again pleases me mightily.

Some of my friends reading this will think that they have lost something too. Well, I rather hope you feel that way. We put a lot of effort into making the last homely house the welcoming place it was for you. And we were very glad to have you there.

Tam Lin

A friend sent me a link to this marvelous rendition by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer of the British folk song Tam Lin.



Hearing this version of the song was a shock. It forcefully read reminded me of this version of Tam Lin by the folk-rock group Fairport Convention,, which I first heard in the summer of 1972:



That summer I was in Norwich, England taking part in an archaeological dig. It was a wonderful way to celebrate my graduation from University. The people running the dig provided us with cheap housing and a little bit of spending money, and we scraped or dug dirt. It was a social and informal learning experience and I soaked it up.

The house we were staying in was a student house during term time, and the usual residents had left lots of their property, including a record player and the Fairport Convention album Liege and Lief. I played the album a lot, particularly the song Tam Lin, about "an earthly knight" rescued from the Queen of the Fairies by his lover. I was an SCA member, a historian hoping to be a professional medievalist some day, and someone who really appreciated the rock elements of this particular arrangement.

And Tam Lin was just the beginning. Somebody told me about a weekly get-together of folk music enthusiasts at a pub near our dig, and I went there more than once, although I never had the nerve to to sing an American folk song. And before I left England a friend of mine gave me one of the early Steeleye Span albums.

The result was that I had found in British and later Irish folk the soundtrack of my life for the next decade, The decade when I was a graduate student and when I was most intensely involved in the SCA.

It was really something to reflect on that..

RIP Hopoquin Hay (Quinn)

and Patience, too.