Pater Familias

THE WITCH’S HOUSE. When I was in elementary school, one of the houses was known to all the kids as “the witch’s house.” It was an ordinary house. In fact, the only thing unusual about it was that it was set much farther back than any of the other houses in town. We thought that a witch lived in the house because we’d heard it from other kids. It was a big deal to cross the patch of sidewalk in front of the witch’s property. You paused for a moment to gather yourself and then ran the short distance as fast as you could. All the kids did that. Then one Halloween there was a large group of kids trick or treating together, with grownups nearby, and a few brave souls went up the sidewalk to the house, with everybody else tagging along behind. Of course, the people in the house were very nice, disappointingly nice, and the walk to school was never the same.

MY NIGHT WITH A CELEBRITY. I know what it is like to be a celebrity. At least I know what it is to be the escort of a celebrity. Back in the early days of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, Mary Jane and I marched in it twice. One of the times, she had a Miss Piggy mask and an appropriately glamorous gown. I escorted her as the Swedish Chef. It seemed to me that, appropriately enough, the main audience for the parade consisted of children, and they were beside themselves that Miss Piggy was in the parade—cheering and reaching out to touch her. Wherever Mary Jane went, there was a commotion.

THE NOTORIOUS DOCTOR CRIPPEN AND DNA. Dr. Crippen has a claim to being the most notorious criminal of the last century. His name was used by a major publisher of detective stories, Crippen & Landru. Why was he so celebrated? Probably because of the circumstances of his capture. When police, led by the soon to be famous Inspector Dew, interviewed Crippen about his wife’s disappearance, he fled. He wound up on a ship headed for Canada with his mistress, who was disguised as a young man. In London, the police found the dismembered body of a woman in Crippen’s cellar. The ship that Crippen and his mistress was one of the first to have Marconi’s invention. The ship’s captain suspected that Crippen was a passenger and used the wireless telegraph to send a message to that effect. Inspector Dew took a faster ship and arrested Crippen when he landed, making Crippen the first person arrested as a result of wireless communication. Crippen was hanged. His mistress was acquitted. Now, DNA tests have established that the body in the cellar was not that of Crippen’s wife, leading to all kinds of questions: Could the DNA test be wrong because Crippen’s wife or another female relative was adopted? If not, did Crippen’s wife commit the perfect crime? And whose body was in the cellar?

JOURNALISTS AND SOURCE GREASERS (REVISITED). Almost a year ago, I posted here about some of the problems that arise when journalists rely on anonymous sources. Not only does the reader not know what the source’s agenda is; he can never tell when the journalist is slanting an unrelated story to make one of his sources look good (Mickey Kaus had referred to a related practice is “source greasing.”)

In the New York Review of Books for October 25, there is a review by Russell Baker of Robert Novak’s new autobiograpy, PRINCE OF DARKNESS:50 YEARS OF REPORTING IN WASHINGTON, which describes some problems with sources. It is possible to be an innocent source, but “Novak’s only entrant in the innocent category is Robert Matsui, a California Democratic Congressman.” (Remember this is over 50 years of reporting.) Novak acknowledges that some one who chose not to be a source, could become a target for Novak. The example he gives is Robert Haldeman: “‘Bob Haldeman was treated more harshly because he refused any connection with me. He made himself more of a target than he had to be by refusing to be a source.’” And a source could be protected: “Alexander Haig was protected frankly as a longtime source of [Novak’s longtime partner, Rowland Evans].” All this makes it hard for those outside the Beltway to evaluate what we read, although Baker cites two sources, Congressman Melvin Laird and Robert Strauss, a longtime Democratic party heavyweight, where what Kaus would call “source greasing” was so obvious over the years that my brother Elmer noticed it.

THE MARKET REVOLUTION IN AMERICA 1815 TO 1846–GOOD OR BAD? I think most economists assume that the economic growth in the United States in the nineteenth century was a good thing. I know I do. Greater material prosperity and greater scope for individuals. How could one object to economic growth? Jill Lepore has a fascinating review in the October 29 New Yorker of Daniel Walker Howe’s WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA, 1815-1848. What struck me was Lepore’s description of the leading book in the field, to which Howe’s book is evidently a reply. That book is Charles Sellers’s THE MARKET REVOLUTION: JACKSONIAN AMERICA, 1815-1846, which claims that “the greatest transformation of the first half of the nineteenth century—indeed, the defining event in American and even in world history—was no mere transformation but a revolution, from an agrarian to a capitalist society.” Lepore says that “among scholars [Sellers’s book] enjoyed a huge influence ” and “launched a thousand dissertations.” Sellers apparently considers the market revolution a tragedy:”Before the market revolution: Americans grew food and made things for themselves or to barter with neighbors; they were humble but happy, rallying around ‘enduring human values of family, trust, cooperation, love, and equality.’ After: they grew food and made things to sell, for cash, to cold, unfeeling, and distant markets; they were frantic, alienated, untrusting, competitive, repressed, and lonely.” It appears that the historians and the economists are 180 degrees apart on the consequences of what happened. It makes me want to read the book.

DOWNTOWERING AND KARL MARX. This wikipedia article has the following quote from Karl Marx: “A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal of [sic] even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.” This well describes what it meant for a high-income banker in Hong Kong to be downtowered.

RELATIVE INCOME VERSUS ABSOLUTE INCOME. Kids, there is a vigorous debate among economists about the importance of relative income versus absolute income. This article discusses the difference between absolute poverty and relative poverty. The European Union uses a poverty threshold of 60% of “national median equivalized household income”, which is a relative poverty concept. Somebody who has 50% of average European income would fall below the poverty threshhold and be considered poor even though he or she would be very well off compared to the roughly 20% of the people in the world who live on less than a dollar a day (discussed here). An example given here is: “in 1905 an individual in the United States unable to afford a car would probably not feel or be viewed as deprived since cars were a luxury. In 2005, when cars are common, an individual unable to afford a car is likely to be seen as deprived.”

NEW WORDS—“DOWNTOWERING.” The Financial Times noted on October 23 that highly paid expatriate bankers in Hong Kong in the late nineties used the word “downtowering.” If a banker was unsuccessful, his housing allowance was cut and he would be forced to move to an apartment on a lower floor of the luxury towers that the bankers lived in. He would be “downtowered” and would lose status. (The source for the FT’s information is NEVER ENOUGH by Joe McGinniss.)

“GIANT WRESTLING BABIES.” The Economist for October 13 has an article on scandals in the world of sumo. There are allegations of abuse of young trainees—perhaps even murder—in addition to recurrent claims of match fixing. (FREAKONOMICS featured a statistical analysis of alleged match fixing by sumo wrestlers.) I was surprised to learn that the history of sumo wrestling goes back over 1500 years. The scandals are unfortunate because the sport televises well, and we have enjoyed watching it from time to time. Of course, we enjoy it the more because friends of ours told us years ago that their young children had come running to them once, shouting “Come see what’s on television! Giant wrestling babies!”

MUSSOLINI, THE INFLUENTIAL–JOURNALISM. The title of the article by the great Murray Kempton that I posted on yesterday was “A Genius of Journalism.” Kempton professed a perverse pride that Mussolini shared Kempton’s profession. Kempton pointed out that journalists made up half of Italy’s cabinet in 1930 and claimed that, “In democratic societies journalism is often a branch of government; but in Mussolini’s, government was a branch of journalism.” He quoted the historian Dennis Mack Smith that Mussolini “was probably the best popular journalist of the day” and that “he had discovered that readers liked extreme views and rarely bothered much about inconsistency.” (Many sportswriters have made the same discovery). How did Kempton feel about his fellow journalist? He said, “I should suppose that only those of us who have reveled in the guilty pleasure of employment on an especially outrageous newspaper can know the full mixture of amusement and horror at the thought of a government controlled by a mentality like its publisher’s.” The phrase “reveled in the guilty pleasure” seems to come from the heart, but with Kempton, one is never sure.