Writing the Coattails

Boris Johnson: The Churchill Factor - How One Man Made History

National Review, December 18, 2014 (December 31, 2014 Issue)

About halfway through Britain’s long Blair nightmare, I went to two dinners where Boris Johnson was billed as the guest speaker. Each time he was eagerly awaited: a man on the rise, a gifted journalist, an engaging and eccentric television personality, a Tory MP. Each time he was late. When he eventually turned up — all scarecrow hair and unconvincing excuses — he explained that he’d left his notes behind. He pressed on regardless in that blend of Drones Club and High Table that he has made his own. Both speeches were funny, sharp — and more or less identical. Johnson knows, as Winston Churchill knew, that a spontaneous speech takes plenty of preparation. A book by Boris on Winston — first-name politicians both — ought to make sense. Like Churchill, Johnson is phenomenally ambitious, unusually resilient, and remarkably skilled at using showmanship, élan, and his pen to build, refine, and reshape his image.

It’s a shame, then, that The Churchill Factor is not very good. The grand old stories roll on grandly by, but there’s little that’s new for those who know their Churchill, and not enough depth for those who don’t. But if you’re interested in Johnson, this book is well worth a look. If Boris was someone to watch back when I listened to him make one speech two times, he is much more so today. He has since twice won election as mayor of London — no small feat for a Conservative — and is poised to reenter Parliament in the 2015 general election. From there he will be well placed to run for the Tory leadership in the likely event that David Cameron has just led his party off a cliff.

Johnson’s success owes a great deal to the manner in which he has defused his potentially toxic poshness. Like the hapless Cameron, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson went to the wrong school (Eton) and the wrong university (Oxford), and then capped the whole disgraceful gilding by joining the Bullingdon Club, an Oxford gang of the rich and sporadically destructive brought to politically tricky national attention some years ago when an ill-wisher leaked the club’s 1987 photo — a snapshot of archaic finery, Flashman attitude, and Sloane Ranger hair, a photo in which both Cameron and Johnson appeared.

Cameron has tried to deal with this embarrassment of privilege by recasting his public persona (very) gently downscale. The more charismatic Johnson, gambling that Brits take more pleasure in eccentricity than in reverse snobbery, has moved in the opposite direction, putting on a display of wild toff rococo — a bit of Wooster, a spot of Biggles, a touch of Raffles — that has left class warriors too amused to be chippy.

It’s a performance that rests heavily on Johnson’s way with words. His speeches are punctuated by slang, dated terminology, and madcap verbal construction. An accusation of infidelity was famously, if inaccurately, dismissed as an “inverted pyramid of piffle.” But what works in a sound bite palls over the course of a book. Tootling, monstering, wonky, squiffily, tosser, prang, perv, titfer, snortingly, bonkers, bunging — crikey, Boris, hold the shtick already. Unnecessary adjectives and superfluous adverbs run wild. Metaphors meander. A promising description of Churchill’s house — crammed with researchers, writers, and secretaries — as “one of the world’s first word processors . . . a gigantic engine for the generation of text” dragged on so long that all I wanted was the delete button. To be sure, there are splendid moments (“the French were possessed of an origami army: they just kept folding”), but they are swamped by verbosity.

So it’s ironic that the best section of the book is Johnson’s superb analysis of how Churchill’s oratory was put together, what it was meant to convey, and why it worked as well as it did. Sadly, Johnson himself ignores two key Churchillian tricks — short words over long, “Anglo-Saxon pith” over intruders with Latin and Greek origins — burdening the readers of this book with such treats as chiasmus, philoprogenitive, and eirenic, words that probably played little part in the small talk of Alfred the Great.

But these ten-guinea words are sly demonstrations of erudition, deployed for political, not literary, effect. Boris may play Wooster to beguile the plebs, but he wants them to understand that he is no upper-class twit. At the same time, he needs his audiences to feel that he is an inclusive sort of fellow, with them if not necessarily of them. So he brings his readers alongside him on trips to the sacred sites — to Chartwell, to the House of Commons, to kind Nurse Everest’s grave — while throwing in glimpses of a life that he invites them to share, if only by proxy: lunch at the Savoy, a birthday bash for a hedge-fund “king” at Blenheim Palace. Condescending, yes, but cleverly disguised. Only rarely does the mask slip, and the text sprouts tics more typical of history books written for the late-Victorian nursery: “Those were the days, you see, when there was no moral pressure on MPs to have a ‘home’ in the constituency.”

“You see”? Well, I suppose I do. Thank you, sir.

Notionally, Johnson has written this book to revive ebbing memories of Churchill and to remind his readers that, whatever some cruder Marxists might have to say about history’s being driven by “vast and impersonal economic forces,” one man can make a difference. Based primarily on a fine retelling of the events of 1940, Johnson makes a strong, if unsurprising, case that Churchill was such a man.

But Boris’s real objective in writing about Churchill is to promote Boris. Wisely, he doesn’t try to push Churchill comparisons — hosting the London Olympics doesn’t quite rank with seeing off Hitler — but there’s enough there for a satisfactory subliminal message. So Johnson tells the story of a man comfortable in his unorthodoxies, a statesman who was larger than life, and, like a certain twice-elected mayor of London that I could mention, larger than party.

In recent years, Johnson has positioned himself as offering a more robust, less politically correct version of David Cameron’s “modernized” conservatism, more libertarian, not so committed to environmentalist piety, pro-immigration (for its purported qualities as an agent of economic growth), and a booster of London’s cosmopolitanism, too, but not so respectful of multiculturalist orthodoxy. Johnson portrays Churchill, not unreasonably, as an early-20th-century Whig, an optimist, a Progressive of sorts.

But the old imperialist is not safely pigeonholed. Johnson defends his hero against the accusation that he was a warmonger and — as he should — places some of Churchill’s rougher views within the context of his times. Occasionally (not as uncharacteristically as fans of the allegedly plain-speaking Johnson like to believe), Boris simply dodges the issue: There is nothing on Churchill’s response to the Bengal famine of 1943, startlingly callous then and now.

Johnson — clearly conscious that times have moved on for the island race — takes care to signal that, despite his obvious admiration for Churchill, he himself is no reactionary. He distances himself from some instances of the more “unpasteurized” Churchill, but not too far. The last lion is still idolized by many of those who will be picking the next Conservative leader, an election evidently on Johnson’s mind. Why else tread quite so carefully on the question of Churchill’s complicated views on a united Europe, that most treacherous of Tory topics?

But tread carefully Johnson does. He has his eyes on the prize. Churchill would have understood.

Latvia Divided

National Review, August 25, 2014

Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

Riga — The cover of the British edition of Anna Arutunyan’s The Putin Mystique features a grainy, somewhat sinister image of the Russian leader, remote, mysterious, distant. In a bookstore on Riga’s Krisjana Valdemara Street, the Latvian edition is on sale; its cover shows Putin at the shooting range, a gun in his hand, a wry smile on his face, close, too close.

The key to understanding Putin, explained one Latvian official, is to think of him as a petulant and badly behaved teenager who likes to provoke, prod, and see what he can get away with. For quite some time now, that’s what Russia has been doing in the Baltic. Planes skim and sometimes cross borders. Military exercises are staged that seem intended to intimidate rather than to train. Last year saw some 70,000 Russian and Belarusian troops war-gaming a scenario in which “Baltic terrorists” were the villains.

Walk into the Latvian foreign ministry and you’ll see three large flags, Latvian, EU, and NATO. The EU is meant to secure Latvia’s economic development, NATO its safety. Article 5 of the NATO treaty provides that an armed attack on one NATO member is to be treated as an attack on all, but in a paper written in April, Janis Berzins of Latvia’s National Defense Academy wondered how NATO’s politicians would react in the event of a Crimea-like assertion of “self-determination” in Narva, an Estonian city on the Russian border where almost all the inhabitants are of Russian descent. It’s a question that’s just as easy to ask about Daugavpils, the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking capital of Latvia’s poorest, easternmost region.

Daugavpils, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

And it’s not a question that can safely be confined to Daugavpils. When Putin speaks about the plight of his “compatriots” cut off from their kin by the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is countries like insultingly independent Latvia that he has in mind. Around 26 percent of Latvia’s 2 million people are of Russian descent (and, more significantly, a higher percentage speak Russian at home). Riga itself is roughly evenly divided between Latvian and Russian speakers. The city’s mayor, Nils Usakovs, an ethnic Russian, heads up the leftish Harmony Centre, a political alliance that draws much of its support from the Russian community and, less than reassuringly, has links to Putin’s United Russia party.

But if Putin is to play his games here, he needs his “compatriots” in Latvia to be not only numerous but unhappy. Ukraine, I am frequently told, was a failed state, but Latvia is not. Latvia’s Russians are freer, and generally richer, than their counterparts in the motherland. And they know it. At the same time, there’s no denying the sense of exclusion that many of them feel, especially the nearly 300,000 who are “non-citizens,” a status that Putin has described as “shameful” and worse.

To talk to Elizabete Krivcova of the Latvian “Non-Citizens” Congress is to hear an echo of Selma, but, to add some proportion to that picture, consider that Latvia’s non-citizens have permanent residency, can travel visa-free through most of the EU and (unlike Latvians) in Russia too, and are eligible for most social benefits. They are excluded from voting and a range of jobs, most of them in the public sector, but the door to citizenship is wide open. Quotas have long since been scrapped, and the citizenship requirements (residency, a language test, some knowledge of Latvian history, and so on) have eased over the years: Some 140,000 (including Krivcova) have now been naturalized.

The House on The Corner, Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

But when I suggest to one prominent Latvian politician that it might be time to lance this boil and grant citizenship to all the rest, he flinches, quickly adding that this would mean “losing Riga.” His body language says more than his reply: This is not just an expression of political calculation. In 1989, a future president of Estonia spoke of the “biological and social terror of belonging to a people that is dying out.” That’s a fear evidently shared by a good number of the 1.2 million Latvians who remain in their native land, the last of the last after half a century of Soviet occupation in which Latvians were brutalized, imprisoned, exiled, slaughtered, and denied their right to be. It was a systematic process of national obliteration, and it was reinforced by a continuous inflow of Russian settlers designed to swamp the people whose country Latvia once was.

Many local Russians supported Latvia’s bid for independence, which it finally won in 1991, and most of them thought that they should automatically become citizens of the republic in which they had lived for a good part, or maybe even all, of their lives. Latvians did not agree. From a strictly legal point of view — and during an occupation denied legal recognition by much of the West, strictly legal was all Latvians had had — the restoration of the pre–World War II Latvian republic meant that only its citizens (or their descendants) would be immediately eligible for a Latvian passport: The settlers would have to wait in line.

This bought time for Latvia to reestablish itself as a national republic, time in which the population balance shifted in a direction that favored ethnic Latvians, but not by enough to resolve the demographic impasse that history had left behind. For ethnic Latvians, the way to proceed was with a unitary state, with Latvian as its sole official language: “We are too small to be Canada.” Russian speakers would be slowly assimilated: Indeed, those under 35 can generally now manage pretty well in Latvian. Left (usually) unsaid: The problem of the non-citizens, a significant percentage of whom are elderly, would fade away as the Soviet generations died off.

Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

For many Russian speakers, this will not do. What they argue for is integration rather than assimilation, perhaps not formal bilingualism but certainly increased recognition by the state of both the Russian language and a distinct Russian cultural identity. The current generation is, it is maintained, not responsible for the crimes of the past. Maybe, but too many of Latvia’s Russians are still reluctant to acknowledge the full horror of what happened here. Whatever one thinks of criminalizing speech (I’m not a fan), it is still a jolt to see the poster in Krivcova’s office mocking recent legislation banning the denial, justification, or trivialization of both Nazi and Soviet aggression against Latvia. This is not the best way to reassure Latvians nervous about the bully next door and a fifth column within.

Nevertheless, despite occasional bouts of bad feeling — such as that generated by a failed 2012 referendum to introduce Russian as a second official language — the two communities rub along well enough. The difficulty is that there is a third party — Russia — in this mix, and it seems set on contributing all the poison it can. Latvia’s NATO membership means that the likelihood of a direct attack by Russia is very small. What can be expected instead is an intensification of Russia’s longstanding attempts to subvert the country from the inside. For now, a Donetsk- or Crimea-style “uprising” is unlikely: The Russians reportedly took soundings in the Daugavpils area and found, even there, little enthusiasm for a move of that type. Meanwhile, Riga is quiet. Even the polling that showed that most Russian-speaking Latvians supported the annexation of Crimea should not be cause for too much concern: Cheering on the ancestral motherland at a safe distance is very different from wanting it to turn up on the doorstep.

Freedom Monument, Riga, Latvia, June 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford

But the potential for trouble exists, made more dangerous by the fact that a huge majority of Latvia’s Russian speakers get so much of their information from Russian TV. The Russian stations are typically more entertaining than the local offering, but they act as portals into the venomous parallel universe where Kremlin propaganda roams. The loyalty of many of Latvia’s Russians to Latvia is real, but it is not particularly deep. It’s easy to see how Russia could stir the pot. It has the resources, and Latvia’s is a divided society, history is still raw, and there is more than enough resentment to go around. Another risk is that further Russian adventurism, even if well away from the Baltic, creates a heightened climate of mutual distrust within Latvia that rapidly degenerates into something worse. And then there is the general election due in October. Best guess is that Harmony Centre will again come out on top, if less convincingly than in 2011, and will once more be kept out of power by an unwieldy coalition of the weak, often chaotic “Latvian” parties, a result that will only emphasize the divisions that Mr. Putin will undoubtedly still be looking to exploit.

Vaper Strain

National Review, September 2, 2013

As I write, I am vaping — yes, that’s the word — inhaling an odorless vapor from a plastic facsimile of a cigarette, battery-powered, bought for $10 at a local store, and good, it is claimed, for 400 puffs. The business end is fashioned to look like a filter. In another nod to nostalgia, the tip glows as I inhale. It’s not the real thing, nothing like. Plastic is neither leaf nor paper. It holds no memories of that old bar down on the Lower East Side, that conversation once upon when. There’s no tobacco, no combustion, none of the warmth, none of the evocative transience, none of the mouth-feel of cigarette or cigar, and it looks just a bit dumb. Walk into Rick’s with an e-cigarette and Rick would laugh. Then again, Bogie died at 57.

Whatever the aesthetics of e-cigarettes, as nicotine-delivery systems go they are a lot safer than the cancer sticks of old. There’s no carbon monoxide, no tar, very little, in fact, of tobacco smoking’s carcinogenic stew. To be sure, the Food and Drug Administration has detected tobacco-specific nitrosamines (a carcinogen) in the e-cigarette cartridges that contain the treats to come. A 2009 study revealed about the same quantity of TSNAs in cartridges as might be found in a nicotine patch, a total about one-nine-hundredth of the level found inside Joe Camel. The vaper (I know, I know) will inhale an even smaller portion, a tiny fraction of a minuscule amount. Furthermore, TSNAs were the only carcinogens detected in this study. Boston University’s Dr. Michael Siegel, a 25-year veteran of tobacco-control work (and a Centers for Disease Control alumnus), has noted that smokers of conventional cigarettes may inhale maybe 40 other carcinogens, not to speak of “thousands of [other] chemicals.”

But what about the antifreeze? This substance, more happily associated with autos than lungs, has seeped into the e-cigarette debate, setting up a scare or 50. The truth is that the FDA found some diethylene glycol — an important ingredient in antifreeze — in just one of the cartridges surveyed in the 2009 study, a dismaying result but almost certainly a rogue finding. E-cigarettes generally do contain, however, a base of propylene glycol to “hold” the nicotine and any added flavoring. Propylene glycol is used in antifreeze, but as a kinder, gentler alternative to its rough diethylene cousin, particularly when there is any danger of contact with food. As is explained in the compound’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry toxicological profile (September 1997), “the [FDA] has classified propylene glycol as ‘generally recognized as safe,’ which means that it is acceptable for use in flavorings, drugs, and cosmetics, and as a direct food additive.” Move along, there’s nothing to see here.

As an alternative to propylene glycol, some e-cigarettes use vegetable glycerin as their base. This common food additive will affect their taste, but not your health.

And so far as the ingredients lurking in an e-cigarette are concerned, that ought to be about it. This is not, of course, a reason for arguing that research on these products should cease, or that stricter quality control should be opposed. Nor is it a claim that e-cigarettes are risk-free. They may, for example, inhibit lung capacity, at least temporarily. Beyond that and those pesky TSNAs, there is also the matter that most e-cigarettes will be used to deliver nicotine, a potentially addictive substance — albeit one that has been given up by tens of millions. Then again, much of nicotine’s famously powerful addictiveness can be attributed to the fact that it is being delivered via tobacco, a medium with naturally occurring monoamine oxidase inhibitors that seem to have a great deal to do (it’s a long story) with the difficulty of quitting smoking. Divorced from its leafy accomplice, nicotine is not that addictive, nor under those circumstances, to quote John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for Britain’s Royal College of Physicians, is it even a “particularly hazardous” drug.

What about secondhand smoke, butcher of innocents, enricher of laundries? E-cigarettes give off little or no odor, and, although the research is still at an early stage, the health risks of secondhand vaping likely rest somewhere between zero and infinitesimal.

Considering all this (Dr. Britton has been quoted as saying that if everyone switched over to e-cigarettes it could save “millions” of lives), the medical world ought to be cheering the swift rise of a hugely safer alternative to demon tobacco. E-cigarettes are, so to speak, catching fire. In the U.S., sales are expected to hit $1 billion in 2013, twice the total of a year ago. That’s still only about 1 percent of the total spent on tobacco products, but it says something that Altria Group Inc. (parent company of Philip Morris USA), Reynolds American Inc., and Lorillard Inc. (which paid $135 million for blu eCigs in 2012) have all entered this market. Non-U.S. e-cigarette sales have been expanding rapidly too, reaching an estimated $2 billion in 2012.

But e-cigarettes have given tobacco’s fiercer foes, well, the vapors. Brazil, Norway, and Singapore have banned them. Others have imposed strict controls, including the prohibition of vaping in public places. Some British railway companies have exiled vapers from their carriages on the carefully considered grounds that they make other passengers “uneasy.” Such stupidities are not confined to abroad. A growing number of America’s politicians, bureaucrats, and other nuisances are on the offensive against e-cigarettes, including — if recent reports are true — New York’s nanny-in-chief, Michael Bloomberg. And he won’t be the last.

There are some legitimate concerns. There is a wide range of e-flavors, some of which, cherry crush, say, or chocolate (I’m not sure — on many grounds — about maple bacon), might appeal to a younger set, but such worries are best addressed by prohibiting sales to minors. Other objections — that e-cigarettes might act as a gateway to the real thing (in reality, they are more likely to represent an exit from it) or that they might re-glamorize smoking — are feeble stuff. This suggests that the real agenda is driven by the precautionary principle run amok, or, ominously, by something darker still.

Cynics might point to the loss of valuable tax revenues as the motive, but there’s much more to it than that. The campaign against tobacco began with the best of intentions, but it has long since degenerated into an instrument for its activists both to order others around and to display their own virtue. And with that comes an insistence on a rejection of tobacco so absolute, so pure, that it has become detached from any logic other than the logic of control, the classic hallmark of a cult. So mighty is the supposed power of this anathematized leaf that anything — even when tobacco-free — that looks like a cigarette or provides any approximation of its pleasures is suspect.

It’s too much, of course, to expect any respect these days for the principle that adults should be left to decide such things for themselves, but the chance that the e-cigarette could save an impressive number of lives should count for something. Europe’s sad snus saga suggests that that might not necessarily be so. For generations Swedes have taken a form of oral tobacco, a snuff known as “snus,” cured in a way that sharply reduces its TSNA content. Snus is available in the U.S., land of dip and chaw, but, within the EU, where no such tradition exists, it can be sold only in Sweden. Taking snus is not without risk, but it’s far less harmful than smoking. Its popularity in Sweden, especially with the guys, goes a long way to explaining why that country has Europe’s lowest incidence of lung cancer among men. It has been estimated that introducing snus elsewhere in the EU could save some 90,000 lives a year, but the EU’s capnophobic leadership has rejected the idea. Anti-tobacco jihadists are quite content, you see, to accept that the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

As America’s vapers might be about to find out.

Medium, Not Rare

Mark Edward: Psychic Blues - Confessions of a Conflicted Medium

National Review, January 23, 2013 (February 11, 2013 issue)

The tale of the whistleblower generally follows a predictable arc. There is the dreadful misbehavior, and the whistleblower’s shamefaced confession of his part in it. The whistle blows. The wrongdoing ends. The penitent whistleblower moves on to a better life, book contract in hand. That’s not quite how it seems to have worked out in the case of Mark Edward. But there has been a book contract, and the result is Psychic Blues.

Its author, Mr. Edward, is a mentalist (yes, that’s the word) who has set the traps of junkyard superstition for decades, and the gullible, the lonely, the hopeful, and the dim have fallen right in. Amongst other roles, he’s been a dial-a-psychic (with the old Psychic Friends Network, an entity that does not emerge well from this book), a rent-a-psychic, a TV psychic, a party psychic (“somewhere between the popcorn vendor and the mimes”), a Psychic Revivalist (don’t ask), a palmist, an ESP-tester, a runestone cowboy, a banana-reader (oh yes), a nightclub act, a fortuneteller, a graphologist, and the organizer of a hoax involving the possibility of a three-way interspecies dialogue to be arranged by whales between them, us, and the extraterrestrials that are, as you know, now living in our ocean depths. He has held “quick but dramatic psychic readings for attractive single women” and he has read the paw-print of a dog (“Whitney has a lonely side to her personality”). But there’s a problem. As the subtitle of Psychic Blues signals, Edward is a “conflicted medium.” Those paranormal abilities he’s been touting? He believes that he hasn’t any, and nor, for that matter, has anyone else. As for the supernatural, well, “there’s nothing there in the dark.”

Indeed. But these apparently long-held beliefs did nothing to stop Mr. Edward from pursuing a charlatan career, something that is a touch difficult to square with the way he likes “to look in a mirror and see integrity staring back.” Clearly he is not only in the business of deceiving other people.

But he’s a trickster, not a monster. Many of his clients will have treated his readings as a game. Even those who didn’t won’t have got into much trouble with pronouncements that, as Edward describes them, relied on common sense and his own sharp intuitive gifts, or were of a generality so wide, bland, or broadly benign as to be helpful at best and safely opaque at worst. And sometimes people just like to talk. “A sideshow tent,” writes Edward, “is never far from a psychiatrist’s couch; there’s just more sawdust on the floor”; an exaggeration, to be sure, but not by too much.

Edward goes on to claim that he has “consistently opted to tell people what I feel in my gut is what they need to hear.” This is not the most clinically rigorous of approaches, and Edward’s early background (according to the Wikipedian oracle, it included stints in various absurdly named bands and time as a fire-eater) involves nothing in the way of scientific training. Then again, would the study of old Freud’s woo-woo have added much more? Cleverness and empathy can frequently be enough.

Thus he notes that, “as P. T. Barnum once said, there’s a sucker born every minute. And in the 900 business, every minute counts.” But he then throws in tales of occasions where he was a genuine friend, if not a genuine psychic. As Edward fielded call after call from the “lost souls” out there, he had, he maintains, a “long list of 800 help-line referral numbers” covering everything from alcoholism to alien abductions. He tries to direct the savagely abused Trish to a women’s shelter. His session on the line with Ginger Triggs (“another drunk badly slurring her speech”) turns out to be a life-saver. He discovers later that their conversation has been enough to persuade her to put down the loaded gun that (as, naturally, he had failed to divine at the time) she was aiming at her head while they talked. Ginger leaves her abusive husband, tackles her alcoholism, and starts training to be a nurse: “I had saved someone’s life.” Who could have foreseen that?

Enlightenment sorts, as well as the more conventionally devout, will be dismayed by Edward’s neatly drawn description of the mumbo-jumbo America in which he works, a credulous place where a psychomanteum (look it up if you care; trust me, it’s ludicrous) is technology, tarot is wisdom, and a pendulum is a lie-detector. But Homo sapiens is who he is. Edward wonders whether the New Age abracadabra represents a “terminus of rationality” or a return to our roots, a distinction that implies, rather optimistically, that we have left them. However bizarre, beliefs like those he was pushing — and their antecedents and, inevitably, successors — offer the meaning that many folk feel that they need, but cannot find elsewhere. Such beliefs will forever be with us. What matters is whether they are put to good(ish) use or bad.

The odds of the latter markedly increase when there’s a buck involved. In Edward’s trade there is plenty of room for “callous exploitation” of vulnerable prey. He quotes Ambrose Bierce: “Magic is a way of ‘converting superstition into coin.’” And this coin can travel in unexpected directions. Edward argues that it’s the phone company, not the psychic, that does best out of all those late-night sessions on the 900 line, followed by the network’s owner, not the psychic. Edward depicts a tough world in which most of his cohort, a carny crowd really — all “greasepaint and bulls**t” — eke their way through. In a reflection of the hardscrabble existences of those on whom they so often feed, they too can struggle to survive. He describes the skills, tricks, flimflam, and cheating that they deploy to make a living, something made easier by humanity’s willingness to believe just about anything, or, for that matter, to pay for a spooky thrill: “Sweat it out, miss a few details, and the audience is left with no other explanation than that you are the real deal.”

At times, this makes for a fascinating read — and Psychic Blues would make a useful gift for a friend susceptible to circling light-workers — even if it falls far short of the bleak, brilliant brutality of Nightmare Alley, the Truman-era novel (and movie) with which Edward would dearly like his book to be compared. Perhaps it takes fiction to do true justice to fables of the psychic con. And some literary talent: Despite some good lines and better insights, Edward is not much more of a writer than he is a clairvoyant.

He’s also pretty cagey. Like so many of his peers, he has peddled what he knows to be nonsense. Nevertheless he claims that he would never “outright lie” (note that careful “outright”). He never, he declares, claimed “to see spirits,” which makes one think that the séances he has organized (briefly referred to elsewhere in the book) must have been a little dull. Nor has he, he says, tried to cheat his clients by telling them only what he “sensed they wanted to hear.” Given the shenanigans to which he does admit, not least his confession that “hope” is what he sells, more cynical readers may not be entirely convinced.

They may also puzzle over the question of why he really reached for that whistle. The way Edward puts it, he was tired of his double life as both skeptic and seer, and became “committed to letting the psychic cat out of the bag.” This book, complete with a foreword by the Great Debunker, James “The Amazing” Randi himself, is part of that process, but some of those pesky cynics may still be suspicious. Could this conversion be just another routine for a conjurer still — notwithstanding an appearance at Buddy Hackett’s 70th-birthday party — looking to hit the big time?

That said, Edward has paid his skeptic dues. He has been on TV with Penn and Teller, he’s shown up at Skepticamps, he posts at Skepticblog, and he practices guerrilla skepticism, swilling what ought to be lethal quantities of homeopathic remedies and punking the infamous Sylvia Browne, “world-renowned” spiritual teacher, psychic, and author.

But Edward’s road to Damascus may have space for some U-turns. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he confirmed that he was “still involved” in some of his old psychic games. It’s impossible not to think that this particular whistleblower may be playing a decidedly ambiguous tune.

Meanwhile, just last year the septuagenarian Browne published her new book, Afterlives of the Rich and Famous, an update on how things are going for the glitterati on the Other Side — Princess Diana, Elvis, and Heath Ledger the newbie, to name but a few.

The gypsy caravan trundles on. Always has. Always will.

Quidditch, It’s Not

Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay

National Review, July 12, 2012 (July 30, 2012 issue)

Dystopias — dark, funhouse mirrors of our fears — will always be with us. Nineteen Eighty-Four was the product of a time when Big Brother Stalin was on the march, and the Eloi and the Morlocks of The Time Machine reflected H. G. Wells’s anxiety about where the onrush of 19th-century capitalism could lead. So what to make of the success of a “young adult” trilogy set in a North America that has — here a shout-out to a fashionably green vision of global catastrophe — emerged after “the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much,” including, it appears, all of the spirit of 1776? This land is now Panem, run by a despotism that proclaims and reinforces its control with the Hunger Games, a brilliantly, sadistically choreographed contest that is broadcast across the nation. This annual ritual turns slaughter into both spectacle and terrifying statement of who is in charge.

The Hunger Games, the first of the trilogy by Suzanne Collins, spent nearly two years on the New York Times bestseller list after its release in 2008. By May 2012, Scholastic reported that some 36 million copies of the three books were in print in the U.S. The movie version (not bad, incidentally) has been a smash, grossing over $150 million in its opening weekend alone.

Earlier this year Collins became the best-selling author in Kindle’s history. That’s quite something for a writer of works aimed at (to repeat that cloying phrase) young adults, even in the age of Harry Potter and Twilight. What she has produced is no great work of art (the trilogy’s numerous grown-up devotees need to move on to more challenging fare), but Collins fully deserves her legions of teenaged fans. Her characters can find themselves burdened with names that hint at vintage sci-fi or sepia bucolic idyll (Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch, Cartwright), but the writing is taut and spare. Chapters frequently finish with cliffhangers that beg for a turned page.

Collins’s heroine, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, is tough and ornery, an accomplished huntress and, when she has to be, a deft killer. If less glamorously so, she is a model of adolescent female empowerment in the venerable Buffy tradition, with her harsher traits both diluted and emphasized by nods to girliness that won’t have hurt Collins’s sales in Sweet Valley High: Despite the dangers that lie in the Hunger Games ahead, and despite herself, Katniss exults in the outfit created for her presentation to the crowds in Panem’s capital. Nor is this the trilogy’s only fashionista interlude: Throughout the books there are detailed descriptions of what is being worn by whom, and a “stylist” is one of the heroes.

There is also a love triangle that could have matched that between Twilight’s Edward, Bella, and Jacob in its angst, but, revealingly, does not. Perhaps Collins felt that male readers could take only so much. They, and other savages, are thrown plenty of bones, limbs, mutilations, sinister mutant creatures, and well-told grotesque, disgusting deaths.

The brutality is inclusive. Sympathetic characters don’t escape Collins’s chopping block. Then again, dystopias are not meant to be happy places. And Panem is not. It exists purely to serve the needs of a predatory capital — the Capitol — that feeds off twelve ruthlessly exploited districts. Its coal is mined in Katniss’s Appalachian home, the desperately hardscrabble District 12; its fish comes from District 4; and so on. The Capitol regime is a caricature of vicious imperial misrule, and the Hunger Games are the acme of a cruelty as depraved as it is carefully targeted, a reminder of the consequences of a failed revolt by the districts three-quarters of a century before. Each district has to furnish two “tributes,” a boy and a girl between the ages of twelve and 18, for a gladiatorial competition in which they and the other 22 will be consigned to an arena from which only one is allowed to emerge alive.

Unkind critics have commented on similarities between The Hunger Games and Battle Royale, a Japanese saga of high schoolers forced to fight to the death by a totalitarian state, a connection that Collins denies. She cites instead, as an influence, the legend of the, uh, young adults handed over to the Minotaur. Spartacus, she says, is another: “Katniss follows the same arc from slave to gladiator to rebel to face of a war.” Lest the classical analogies pass anyone by, there are other clues, from the occasional Latinate coinage (a slave with his or her tongue cut out is an Avox) to the fact that many of the Capitol’s inhabitants, not to speak of the city itself, are named with a distinctly Roman flourish: Coriolanus Snow, Seneca Crane, Caesar Flickerman — you get the point. Then there is this from a member of the Capitol’s elite who switches sides: “In the Capitol, all they’ve known is Panem et Circenses. . . . [It] translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The [Roman] writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.”

Ah, Panem.

Katniss connects the remaining dots. The districts are compelled to provide the Capitol’s frivolous and decadent citizenry with abundance and, through the tributes, the “ultimate” distraction of the Hunger Games. Duly sated, the frivolous and decadent citizenry then leaves the business of power to those who wield it. By now even the slowest of Collins’s readers may suspect whose reflection they have been glimpsing in this particular funhouse mirror.

That seems to have been her intent. She has said that the idea for The Hunger Games first struck her while channel-surfing between reality TV and coverage of the Iraq War, something that troubled her NPRish fastidiousness more than it should: It’s a long way from Survivor to Katniss. There are certainly viewers who have been desensitized by the tube’s manufactured conflicts, but only psychopaths or the extremely stupid could have confused the images from Iraq with entertainment, make-believe, or both.

Collins’s explanation that war is hell (a theme of her Underland Chronicles too) is unoriginal, but commendable enough, at least until the moment — sometime in the course of Mockingjay — when sermon overwhelms story. The tale of the Capitol’s fall offered an ideal opportunity for a deeper exploration of the principle of morally legitimate violence that, from Katniss’s arrival in the arena, forms one of a number of this trilogy’s more interesting subtexts. That opportunity is at first grasped but then thrown away in favor of a dull plague-on-both-your-houses world-weariness that is more evasion or tantrum than an attempt at an answer.

There are always true believers of one sort or another who see a popular phenomenon and claim it for their own. Some Christians have detected a Christian message in these books. Meanwhile, writing in The Atlantic, Nicole Allan saw Katniss as “the populist hero the Occupy movement wasn’t able to deliver.” To be fair, that’s a proposition more credible than the notion of one of Katniss’s two suitors (an admirable lad, but still) as a Christ figure. At a time when the left side of the elite is using inequality to bludgeon the right, it’s easy to see how this trilogy could be cast as a manifesto for the 99 percent. Maybe that has been some of its appeal. Perfectly, The Hunger Games came out as Lehman went down.

And there are historical resonances far closer to home than ancient Rome is. Collins has given Zola’s Germinal, no mash note to the 1 percent, as a reason for picking coal-mining as District 12’s industry, but that district’s pinched iconography also has more than a trace (underlined in the movie) of Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange about it. District 11 suggests the Jim Crow South. There are class and, possibly, ethnic tensions within the districts — the closest that District 12 comes to a bourgeoisie is WASPy, light-haired, and blue-eyed; the miners are olive-skinned, black-haired, and gray-eyed — and also between them. Pampered District 2, the source of Panem’s thuggish Peacekeepers, is filled with Capitol loyalists, but its stoutly proletarian stonecutters swiftly rally to the revolution.

But before draping Collins in a flag of the deepest red, look more carefully. The revolution’s base — the never-vanquished District 13 — is a repressive, sternly egalitarian place somewhere between Sparta and Mao, and it’s not sympathetically portrayed. Libertarians may appreciate the Sic semper tyrannis twist towards the trilogy’s end, and tea-party types will note that the Capitol is overthrown by a union of 13 districts.

Rebels of both Left and Right will identify with the contrast between the homespun virtues that can be found in the “real” Panem and the excess, affectations, and vice of its capital. And so they should: This is a time-honored narrative, sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but, in its combination of resentment and self-congratulation, one of eternal appeal to those on the outside. You would have heard it in Imperial Russia, you would have heard it in Imperial Rome, and, if there’s any truth to an old, old story, you would have heard it in Sherwood Forest too. Katniss, of course, is deadly with a bow.

What Lies Beneath

Norman Davies: Vanished Kingdoms - The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

National Review, April 13, 2012 (April 30, 2012 issue) 

Trakai, Lithuania, March 1994 © Andrew Stuttaford

How to make a nation? In Vanished Kingdoms, his fascinating — and characteristically hefty — new book chronicling the rise and fall of 15 European states (from Visigoth Tolosa to the good-riddance empire of the Soviets), historian Norman Davies offers a number of suggestions. They include “good fortune, benevolent neighbors, and a sense of purpose.” There are nods to the power of a common language and a shared myth, and an implied recognition of the usefulness of conquest (where now are the Baltic people, the Prusai, whose land formed the core of ascendant Teutonic Prussia?), but little focus on the shared (if often exaggerated) sense of an ethnic bond that has held nations, and nations-in-waiting, together through the centuries. Perhaps the last was too obvious to need spelling out, or, in an era that sets such store in being over that sort of thing, just too embarrassing.

Making matters more complicated still is the way that history has left many Europeans with overlapping, and, not infrequently, conflicting identities: Sorb and/or German, Briton and/or Scot? But there can be few better guides to these muddled layers of nationality than Norman Davies, a combative, unusually original historian of Europe (Europe: A History) best known for his studies of Poland (God’s Playground, most famously), a nation blessed and burdened by shifts in borders and identity to an extent that stands out even in this most tangled of continents. That said, those expecting Vanished Kingdoms to be a comprehensive guide as to how, why, and when countries fail will, despite a postscript titled “How States Die,” be left a little disappointed. Suspects, usual or otherwise, are listed: invasion, of course; artificiality (Napoleonic Etruria); stillbirth (the day-long Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine); exhaustion; merger; de-merger; and the loosely defined “implosions” that put paid to the USSR and Austria-Hungary alike. But Davies has both a romantic streak and a sharp awareness of humanity’s susceptibility to hubris, and the explanation, I suspect, that really appeals to him is the inevitability of impermanence: Nothing endures forever, Ozymandias and all that.

For the most part, we are left to draw our own conclusions from the 15 national obituaries that form the backbone of this book. So densely packed that they can be difficult to digest (the five, six, or was it seven Kingdoms of Burgundy do rather blur), they reveal their author’s romanticism in a sometimes elegiac tone, crowned with moments of unexpected beauty. In his description of a piece of ancient Britain that endured in Scotland until the 12th century, Davies includes lines from a poem written in the days of its twilight of a loveliness so vivid that a scene from 800 years ago comes close enough — almost — to touch: “Gentle meadows and plump swine, gardens pleasant beyond belief, / Nuts on the bough of hazel, and longships sailing by.”

The forgotten and the neglected attract Davies, a passionate writer drawn to history’s underdogs (thanks to this book, I am now something of a Montenegrin nationalist): “Historians usually focus . . . on the past of countries that still exist. . . . They are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards. . . . In [the] jungle of information about the past, [today’s] big beasts invariably win out.” Attention is sucked away from smaller states, let alone those that no longer exist. We learn more about that of which we are already aware, and “the blank spaces in our minds are reinforced.”

References to “big beasts” hint at Europe’s history of, given human nature, all too imaginable violence, a blood-drenched danse macabre that reached a ghastly apogee in the wars, genocides, and ethnic cleansings of the mid–20th century. As so often is the case, these horrors are most powerfully conveyed in miniature. Thus we learn of Ustrzyki Dolne, a small, largely Jewish sub-Carpathian town that emerged from Austro-Hungarian Galicia into the interwar Polish republic. When, after Stalin’s pact with Hitler, the Soviets arrived, the local Germans were sent off into the temporary safety of the expanded Reich, and most of the town’s ethnic Polish inhabitants were deported to the east, and, in the majority of cases, their death. Two years later Hitler’s legions arrived. Ustrzyki’s Jews were exterminated.

That left the Lemkos, Ruthenians who had long farmed the surrounding countryside — and then they, too, were cleared out by the Communist authorities after the end of the war. Their replacements inherited a ghost town and ruined villages, “blank spaces” of the most literal type, and filled them with a Polishness that lacked any traces of that old awkward, butchered Galician ambiguity. Violence had done its bit for nation-building yet again, helped, as the years passed, by fading memory and the easing of inconvenient history into convenient oblivion. The annihilation of old Ustrzyki has little to tell us about Poland today: Lemkos, Germans, and Jews will never again come back to their land by the River San.

Under the circumstances, it’s unsurprising that the notes that conclude Vanished Kingdoms occasionally strike a wistful tone: “Since it cannot be fitted tidily into French, Swiss, or Italian history, Savoy is frequently overlooked. No standard survey has been published in English, either of the land of Savoy or of the House of Savoy.” Such are the “blank spaces” that Davies is looking to fill, beginning, as he has to, with “flotsam and jetsam.” He is a beachcomber-historian, delighted by a cabinet de curiosites in Krakow’s Czartoryski Museum bursting with celebrity treasures that include Rousseau’s briefcase, Voltaire’s quill, and Queen Barbara Radziwiłł’s knife and fork. Nearby is “a half-gnawed, rock-solid, bright green chunk of moldy bread . . . allegedly cast aside by . . . Napoleon.”

Allegedly: With a wink, Davies hints that, like some of the other wonders on display, Bonaparte’s bread may not be the real thing. But never mind: “Like all holy relics, genuine or fake, it has immense powers of imaginatory stimulation.” Above it hangs an inscription (“The Past in the Service of the Future”) that once crowned the entrance to a Temple of the Sibyl erected by Izabella Czartoryska (1746–1835), a Polish princess of the Enlightenment who was, splendidly, “as rich as she was patriotic as she was debauched.” But “whose past,” asks Davies, and “whose future”? The past, for Czartoryska, was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The future of which she dreamed was the reversal of the partitions that had consigned that state to history, but if that past, and its relics and its memory, mean anything now, it is as symbol of a reinvented Poland — and a Polishness — very different from the sprawling multiethnic Rzeczpospolita for which the princess so yearned.

The persistence of some sort of Poland, however changed, brings up the question that lurks just below the surface of Vanished Kingdoms: What is it that defines a nation? And identifying that question helps us detect what Davies is really up to. A Briton of Welsh descent (aha!) who has predicted the disintegration of the U.K. with somewhat unseemly relish, he clearly doubts the authenticity, and thus the pretensions, of some of the nation-states that now dominate Europe, at the expense, in his view, of the essence of the peoples that live within their borders, and, indeed, beyond.

The time of the Prusai has irrevocably passed, but including a chapter in Vanished Kingdoms on the glories of Aragon makes the point that Spain’s restless Catalans may well be on to something, an approach Davies explored at even greater length in The Isles (1999), in which he argued that the United Kingdom was, is, and will be anything but united. The road to the future apparently ran through Brussels: The EU, wrote Davies, long an over-enthusiast for the gold stars on blue, “gives a place in the sun to Europe’s smaller and middle-sized nations,” a claim that looks absurd in the era of Merkozy and that was, even a decade or so ago, at best willfully naive. It is true that Scots and Fleming nationalists (and, doubtless, others too) maintain that the EU provides a framework within which they can “safely” claim their independence, but this independence would be one stripped of all meaning by a European project profoundly opposed to popular sovereignty and the assertion of national identity.

But as the bitter, distinctly un-communautaire feuding over the euro-zone crisis reminds us, notions of nationhood have a way of climbing out of the footnotes to which they have been banished. Rousseau warned the Poles of the doomed Rzeczpospolita that they were “likely to be swallowed whole” but must “ensure that [they were] not digested.” They did. The Baltic States were not fully “digested” by their Soviet occupiers either, but, as Davies (in a typically striking image) notes, “fifty years later, like the Biblical Jonah, they re-emerged from the belly of the whale, gasping, but intact.”

Should they so choose, the nations of the EU will now face a subtler challenge: how to escape from a trap they (or their politicians) set for themselves. Were they to succeed, and were Davies to write about it, the results would be well worth reading, but they would differ from Vanished Kingdoms in at least one crucial respect: Telling that story would not be a labor of love.

Cristina’s Whirl

National Review, November 10, 2011 (November 28, 2011 issue)

Montserrat, Buenos Aires, August 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

If you want to understand why Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner triumphed quite so conclusively (with 54 percent of the vote against 17 percent for her nearest challenger) in October’s presidential election, the University of Buenos Aires’s Museum of Foreign Debt is a splendid place to start. That such an institution exists says nothing good about Argentine financial history. What it contains suggests yet more turbulence ahead.

San Telmo, Buenos Aires, August 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

The museum is a showplace for an unconvincing national alibi. Argentina is innocent and maligned, its tale not one of squandered wealth, but of victimhood, as it is repeatedly plundered by Anglo-Saxon (of course!) financiers, helped in later years by their stooges at the IMF. Under Juan Peron, however, things had been different. During the Peronato, the foreign debt was repaid. Indeed it was, but (as is not explained in the museum) that owed more to the capital surpluses built up during World War II than to Peronism’s autarkic economic model, which was in deep trouble by the time its creator was deposed in 1955. No matter, Peron’s curious mix of fascism, corporatism, and Evita has never quite lost its grip on a nation forever searching for a magical solution to its largely self-inflicted woes. And now, a decade of growth under a new generation of Peronists has convinced many Argentinians that the conjurer-caudillo was on to something.

It’s hard to blame them. Just ten years ago, the botched free-market experimentation of the 1990s had pushed Argentina into the abyss. It began well enough, but pegging the peso to the U.S. dollar (a key part of the process, and the wrong currency to choose) without sufficient structural reform left Argentina increasingly uncompetitive. Lower export prices and successive emerging-markets crises in the latter part of the decade made matters worse. The country’s budget swung wildly off-kilter. Spending was too high, tax revenues too low. Foreign lenders filled much of the gap. Today’s Greeks know how the story ends. They should also note this: Billions in additional borrowing and belated attempts at austerity were not enough to put things right. The economy plunged. Capital fled. In December 2001, the government introduced the corralito (later toughened into the corralon), a measure that (more or less) froze all bank accounts. Argentina went into default shortly thereafter.

This remains (fingers crossed) the largest sovereign-debt default ($95 billion) in history. The dollar peg was dropped a few weeks later; the peso crumpled. Dollar deposits in Argentine banks were swapped into hugely depreciated pesos, a precedent that ought to alarm savers in the eurozone’s PIIGS. If the drachma and its feeble kin are to return, there will be corralitos first. Depositors have been abandoning their banks in Greece, Ireland, and elsewhere. Who can blame them?

Image of Nestor Kirchner outside Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires, August  2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

San Telmo, Buenoa Aires, August 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

Argentina’s financial breakdown had been accompanied by trouble in the streets and chaos in the corridors of power. Depending on how the term “president” is defined, the country had as many as five of them within two weeks. The last was Eduardo Duhalde, appointed interim president by the legislative assembly. After elections 16 months later, he was succeeded by Nestor Kirchner, a Left-Peronist governor from refreshingly distant Patagonia. The fever had broken. Argentina took a mulligan. Private savers had been crushed, and much of the middle class was pushed into poverty, but many businesses were saved by the effective “devaluation” of their debt. Peso collapse bailed out exporters and local manufacturers battered by the once-overvalued currency, as did a reviving economy fueled by the accelerating global commodity boom (Argentina is a major food exporter) and increased government spending. That spending was financed by the fruits of recovery, the windfall from taxes on those ever-more-valuable food exports and, in a sense, the lower debt burden that was default’s naughty reward. In 2005, Argentina repaid its IMF loans ahead of schedule. Kirchner no longer intended to listen to the organization’s nasty “neo-liberal” advice.

Growth continued to soar. Kirchner would have won comfortable reelection in 2007, but stood aside for his wife, Cristina, an abrasive would-be Evita, but without her cult appeal. Only a few months after taking office, she lost a brutal fight with farmers over plans to hike export taxes, a defeat that contributed to her allies’ taking a hit in nationwide legislative elections in 2009. In a tango variant of the Putin-Medvedev waltz, Nestor Kirchner was due to succeed his wife as their party’s candidate in the presidential elections in 2011, but ended up doing something even more useful for the cause: He died last year, aged only 60.

Eternauta Kirchner, Buenos Aires, August 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

Tragedy is often a vote winner, and particularly so in a place like enthusiastically morbid, histrionic Argentina. Cristina’s approval ratings jumped 25 points. As a character in a novel by Argentine author Tomas Eloy Martinez once said, “Every time a corpse enters the picture in this country, history goes mad.” A black-clad Cristina threw her widow’s weeds into the political battle with aplomb, gusto, and tears. Nestor (“he is watching, he is here, isn’t he?”) haunted her speeches and her rallies, transformed into the lost leader who sacrificed all. It worked. Wander around Buenos Aires, a city more skeptical about the Kirchners than most, and you will see numerous stenciled graffiti of Nestor as El Eternauta, an iconic Argentine cartoon figure who traveled through time and space, and to the left. Cristina, already Evita, also became Juan to Nestor’s Evita, keeper of the martyr-spouse’s flame.

Nestor Kirchner, Buenos Aires, August 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

The economy lent a large hand. By year’s end, GDP will have grown by over 90 percent since its 2002 nadir. The spoils of success have been spread around. Thanks to better times, unemployment has been more than halved from 2002’s 20 percent. The number of those in poverty has fallen sharply. Income inequality has shrunk. Social spending has leapt. The descendants of Evita’s descamisados (the shirtless) knew whom to thank. Throw in a divided and uninspiring opposition, and the rest was victory.

The worry is what comes next. Growth is forecast to ease to a still impressive 4–5 percent in 2012 (after a little over 8 percent this year), but envious PIIGS should be aware that there’s plenty of snake oil in the Kirchner cure, and danger too. Revving up the demand side can work (and has worked), as can devaluation, but, like steroids, such policies are best not overdone. And they have been overdone. Officially running at a fantasy-math 10 percent, inflation is now thought to stand at around 25 percent, a level that has been eroding the devaluation advantage (the trade balance has deteriorated in recent years). Price controls, whether direct (such as those on utilities) or indirect (export taxes), have merely forced this inflation to express itself through shortages and underinvestment, a variant of the distortions now emerging as a result of the country’s growing protectionist tilt.

Buenos Aires, August 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

Recoleta, Buenos Aires, August 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

With public spending still roaring ahead, a cash crunch is drawing closer, exacerbated by the way that the 2001 default and its heavily litigated aftermath have (and perhaps this is just as well) constrained access to international capital markets. The government has taken to raiding the central bank’s foreign-currency reserves to pay those overseas debts it does acknowledge. In a different smash-and-grab, private pension funds worth $24 billion were nationalized in 2008 (in the pensioners’ best interest, of course), a move that also boosted the state’s ability to meddle in some of the country’s largest companies, a temptation that it will probably find difficult to resist: The Kirchner years have already seen the outright nationalization of a number of enterprises.

The markets have read the runes: Foreign direct investment in Argentina has slowed sharply and the locals have followed suit. Capital flight is accelerating and is now estimated at $3 billion per month, something that has provoked a draconian response, even if reserves (for now) remain reasonably healthy. Just after the election, Kirchner launched a new series of initiatives designed to bring dollars back home. These included ordering the country’s energy and mining businesses to repatriate their export revenues, and compelling insurance companies to cash in their foreign investments by year’s end.

These diktats were another display of an authoritarianism that has become more visible as the economic miracle comes under pressure. Economists have been fined for publishing inflation data that differ from the official spin. The inconveniently independent president of the central bank was forced out with the assistance of questionably legal maneuvers. The tactics deployed in the long struggle against the giant Clarín media group have become ever rougher, and show little respect for the idea of a free press. Under the circumstances, Kirchner’s fondness for Hugo Chávez is no surprise, nor is her recourse to conjuring up a handy foreign devil: that “crude colonial power in decline,” Malvinas-stealing Britain.

This is unlikely to end well.

Greater Europe, Lesser Europe

National Review, June 2, 2011 (June 20, 2011 Issue) 

By the time you read this, Greece may have defaulted on its debt. Or it may be preparing to default, but without the D-word. Most likely it will be negotiating another rescue package, but it may still be fighting to secure the latest payment under its existing bailout. Only one thing looks certain as I write. The eurozone crisis will not be over.

It’s been a long, hard journey since the first Greek bailout just over a year ago, a €110 billion loan package from the European Union (€80 billion) and International Monetary Fund (€30 billion) secured by pledges of drastic austerity. A €750 billion European Financial Stability Facility was announced a little later. The prospect of its billions’ being available to any eurozone country that ran into difficulties was intended to “shock and awe” (yes, that term again) the financial markets into calm.

It did not work out. Both Ireland and Portugal have since had to be bailed out. The destructive contradictions of the one-size-fits-all currency remain unresolved. The damage they caused is unrepaired. Then there’s the fact that the very nature of the eurozone leaves its weaker members vulnerable to fears of default. Most of their debt is in euros, and, for all practical purposes, the euro is a foreign currency. Once investors move out of, say, Irish bonds to safer euro debt elsewhere, all that Ireland can do to lure them back is increase interest rates and tighten its belt yet again. If that doesn’t work, the cash will run out.

Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe argues that a liquidity crunch of this type could force an otherwise solvent country into default. Maybe; but in Greece’s case that’s beside the point. The country has, financially speaking, ceased to be a going concern. Neither the 2010 bailout nor the (partial) introduction of austerity measures that are already at the limit of the politically possible have been enough to do the trick. Indeed, by depressing domestic demand, the latter have — at least in the short term — made the budgetary situation even worse. Tax revenues have been hit by the slump in an economy that shrank by over 4 percent last year, and will likely dwindle by another 3.5 percent this year. The conventional response — a massive devaluation designed to restore international competitiveness — is unavailable so long as Greece remains yoked to the euro.

And it’s not easy to break free. Capital controls would be introduced overnight. The Lazarus drachma would collapse in the morning. Inflation would surge the day after. The country would, de facto or de jure, default on its debt (as would a sizeable slice of its private sector). Greek industry would face a painful funding squeeze. Payrolls would plunge, a brutal blow with the official Greek unemployment rate already at 16 percent or so — and rising.

Beyond Greece’s borders, there would be panic selling of debt issued by some or all of the other PIIGS. With a number of EU banks heavily exposed to the PIIGS, an uncontrolled Greek default, and, more dangerous still, its consequences, could conjure up sweaty memories of the financial crisis. And those affected might include the European Central Bank itself. The ECB has been an active buyer of PIIGS debt. Writing down those holdings could be awkward, especially since the eurozone’s embattled taxpayers would be left holding the tab.

But if Greece’s departure from the euro is too risky to consider, that does not change the fact that the May 2010 financing has not worked. And default would be default whether inside the eurozone or out. It’s all very well criticizing the dodgy process by which Greece was admitted into the currency union, and there are few words ugly enough to describe the squalid state of Greek public finances. Nevertheless, for creditors to insist that the country can cut, privatize, and tax enough quickly enough to stave off disaster is to allow indignation to prevail over financial and political reality. Greece lacks the social cohesion (and shared memory of recent hardship) required to weather the kind of drastic “internal devaluation” that (fingers crossed) took the Baltic countries through their recent debt crises.

According to the EU Commission, Greece’s debt/GDP ratio will rise to 166 percent next year. The annual budget deficit will stand at just under 10 percent of GDP. Under the terms of the May 2010 bailout, that number is supposed to fall to 3 percent by 2014. Dream on. On May 30, Greece’s two-year bonds were yielding over 26 percent. The market’s message was clear. Without substantial additional external financing, default was on the way.

Adding to the concern have been worries that Greece might not satisfy the conditions necessary to allow the IMF (more rule-bound, it is speculated, in the wake of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s departure) or EU lenders to release their next portions of the original bailout funds. You may know if they have agreed to do so by now, but the best guess must be that these monies will somehow reach Athens, even if it takes a new bailout agreement to get them there. If they don’t, that could, within weeks, trigger the “hard” default that no one wants.

Arranging a fresh bailout will be an unpleasant process, thanks not least to politics. After years of restraint at home, financing the feckless abroad has proved highly unpopular in Germany, the EU’s principal paymaster. The single currency has been a boon for the country’s exporters, but its voters don’t seem to care. They never wanted the euro, and the events of the last twelve months have only reinforced their suspicion that their beloved Deutsche mark was replaced with an extremely expensive dud. Forcing through the earlier support for the PIIGS was a nightmare for Chancellor Merkel. To ask this most cautious of politicians to demand yet more from restless German taxpayers is to ask a great deal. And lender discontent, a useful reminder of how little grassroots appeal EU “solidarity” really enjoys, is not confined to Germany. The Austrians are unhappy, the Dutch government is floundering, and anger in Finland over its participation in eurozone rescue parties has helped propel the populist-nationalist True Finns to the top of the polls. A new bailout will only add fuel to these fires. Merkel, it seems, may be preparing to walk through them. On May 31 markets surged on reports that Germany had dropped its insistence that any new bailout should be conditional on bondholders’ sharing in the taxpayers’ pain.

But despite, doubtless, additional austerity measures and fierce mechanisms to enforce them, new rescue packages will do little to solve the underlying structural problem in Greece and, for that matter, elsewhere. They may buy time but, in the end, there is simply too much debt for some PIIGS to repay. If an honest, old-fashioned default is too terrible to contemplate, that leaves three routes to a theoretically more permanent solution.

The first is, basically, what Merkel wants, “restructuring,” a default in sheep’s clothing, albeit one timed later than she would like. This would be designed in a way that allows banks to dodge the write-downs that could bring them low. The ECB is fiercely opposed to this approach, arguing that it will inevitably set off a fresh wave of financial contagion, even a new Lehman. Nouriel Roubini, Doctor Doom himself, disagrees. It is impossible to say who is right. Both sides are, in the end, making guesses about the mood of a perpetually manic marketplace. That said, the ECB’s stance implies the PIIGS will eventually be able to repay all their debt: an idea as implausible as the notion that they might fly.

More probably, the ECB is relying on Brussels to push forward with the closer fiscal and economic union without which no large monetary union can succeed. This has always been on the European Commission’s agenda, but until this thoroughly predictable and most convenient crisis, it had been politically impossible. That’s changing. Fiscal and economic integration has gone farther and faster over the last 18 months than would have been imaginable just a few years ago. The Eurocracy may, despite current traumas, even see this all as a vindication of the great gamble that was taken when the euro was launched half-done. The problem for Brussels is that the events of the last year have left voters in the eurozone core free from any illusion as to how costly such deeper integration — which would essentially establish a permanent funds-transfer regime from north to south — would be. Will they go along? Will they even be asked?

The third, and, I’d argue, best alternative for now — the split of the euro into two, a strong “core” euro and a weaker euro for the PIIGS — is not without its difficulties, but it ought to work. It would give the PIIGS both the devaluation they need and a chance of avoiding default, and, in addition, it should trim some of the “excess” German surplus. This may be the best alternative, but it’s also the least likely. To Brussels such a velvet divorce would represent an unacceptable step back, and that would never do.

Estonia’s anti-euro campaigners compare the single currency to the Titanic. It’s easy to see why.

EUbris

National Review, February 18, 2010 (March 8 2010, issue) 

It’s a cliche to use the word “hubris” in an article involving Greece, but when that article is about the single European currency, what else will do? From its very beginning, the euro was a project of monstrous bureaucratic ar­rogance, a classically dirigiste scheme cooked up by an elite confident that it could ignore the laws of economics, the realities of politics, and the lessons of history. While the exact contours of the current crisis could not have been foreseen, the certainty that there would be a crisis could have. To build a monetary union without a political union (or something close to it), or, failing that, an extraor­dinarily high degree of economic con­vergence, was asking for, to use another Greek word, catastrophe.

But that’s what the Eurocrats did. And instead of having the humility to launch their new currency on a relatively small scale in, say, the genuinely converging economies of northwestern Europe — of Germany, say, and the Bene­lux — they redefined convergence. Any EU country that satisfied certain economic tests — the Maastricht criteria — would be eligible to sign up. In the first round (1999), eleven countries did, to be followed later by Greece and four others. The tests were tough, but not entirely unreasonable; yet in applying them as mechanically as they did, the architects of the single currency were in effect arguing that all it took to gauge an economy was something akin to a snapshot. This had the virtue of simplicity, but then so did Five-Year Plans.

Largely uninvestigated suspicions that some of those snapshots may have been photoshopped (there have long been doubts about the quality of the data submitted by Italy and, yes, Greece) were an early warning that the Maastricht criteria, which were also meant to be rules by which countries would continue to play once ensconced within the eurozone, would be enforced less vigorously than first agreed. As it turned out, there was little choice in the matter. The new rules were too rigid for the uncomfortable realities of the ordinary economic cycle, let alone the financial meltdown of the last two years. As things currently stand, they rank somewhere between a promise and a dream. That said, the revelation that Greece may have paid Wall Street’s sav­viest financial engineers to pretty up its national accounts is unlikely to play well in Brussels, except as ammunition for the claim that “speculators” are to blame for the mess in which the eurozone now finds itself.

The real culprits are closer to hand. The most important were those who in­sisted that convergence had been achieved when plainly it had not. The interest rates set by the European Cen­tral Bank were about right for the eurozone’s core, but they were too low for the nations on its periphery. The econ­o­mies of the latter may have had more capacity for growth, but they were also more vulnerable to inflation. One size did not fit all. Bubbles ballooned, then burst. Making matters worse was the damaging effect that the historically unusual combination of in­flation and a strong currency has had on the already shaky competitiveness of these countries’ industries. Nations with high inflation traditionally try to maintain their competitive position by devaluing their currency, but that option was not open to those now yoked to the euro. On some reckonings, Italy, Greece, and the other “Club Med” countries need to de­value by at least 30 percent to return to the competitive positions they held at the end of the 1990s. They need to, but they cannot.

If the hit to private business has been bad, that to the state sector has been worse, albeit to some degree self-inflicted. For countries with weaker public finances, the euro offered both carrot and stick. The carrot was the lower borrowing cost that came from adopting a currency im­plicitly backed by the stronger econo­mies at the eurozone’s core. The stick was the fact that debt could no longer be repaid by the printing press. Un­fortunately, a number of governments, most notably Greece’s, ate the carrot and ignored the stick, but even those that tried to improve or maintain budget­ary discipline found their best efforts swept away in the financial tsunami of 2008–09.

The immediate trigger for the current crisis was panic over the prospect of a Greek default. That’s understandable. Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 125 percent (more than double the notional Maastricht ceiling). The budget deficit is now projected at 12.7 percent (more than four times the Maastricht cap), compared with the mysteriously “low” 6 percent claimed by the outgoing government in October. It may still be understated. Nevertheless, however dysfunctional the Augean Greek state may be (did I mention the endemic tax evasion?), it is not alone in its woes, nor — despite the fact that it accounts for just 2 percent of the EU’s GDP — can it be treated as some inconsequential Balkan outpost.

If Greece defaults, a crisis of confidence in the credit of the eurozone’s other highly indebted nations is inevitable. Even in the unlikely event that default could be confined to Greece, a financial collapse in Athens would bring further devastation to Europe’s already battered banking system, both directly and, as sovereign debt was marked to market across the continent, indirectly. Ger­many’s banks have loaned a total of perhaps 20 percent of Germany’s GDP to Greece, Por­tu­gal, Spain, Italy, and Ireland, and French banks have loaned even more of France’s. “Con­ta­gion” is back. Greek withdrawal from the eurozone is legally possible, but it is no solution. The result would almost certainly be default.

Whatever the legal issues (a direct EU rescue may be illegal under the Union’s law), political complications (hard-pressed Eu­ro­pe­an taxpayers do not relish the thought of paying up for Greece), and risks of a dangerous pre­ce­dent (how will the other debt-struck countries react?), the only feasible short-term solution will be some sort of bailout, ideally involving the IMF (whatever the supposed blow to EU pride) acting in conjunction with the EU or a group of some of its richer member-states. For now, nemesis will not be allowed to follow hubris. The legalities will be dubious, the politics a charade, and the deal last-minute, but that’s EU business as usual. “In­ter­na­tion­al spec­ulators” will be blamed for just about everything. Angela Mer­kel will make the necessary fierce speeches re­fusing to pay and will then pay. The Greeks will agree to the necessary fierce cuts in public spending and will then be paid. Whether these cuts (currently targeted at 4 percent) could, should, or will be made in a climate of collapsing domestic demand will be a decision left for another day.

The euro will endure, somewhat de­bauched (it has already weakened since the Greek panic began), but not all Ger­mans will be upset by that. Germany’s economy is driven by its export sector, and in tough economic times a little devaluation can come in very handy indeed.

Looking farther ahead, the Greek crisis and the fragility of the balance sheets of so many countries within the eurozone suggest that, absent some dramatic re­covery in the global economy, the single currency is reaching a point where muddling along is no longer an option. One alternative might be for Germany and some of the other strong­er countries to quit the euro, leaving it as a currency more suited to the needs of the eurozone’s weaker breth­ren. What’s more likely is that those in charge in Brussels will grab the opportunity presented by this mess to move forward with two items on their long-term agenda. The first will be to push for stricter controls on global finance. The second will be to forge the closer fiscal union without which their monetary union cannot endure. If they succeed in the latter, the European superstate will be even closer to birth.

What was it that someone once said about a crisis being a terrible thing to waste?

Walking With Destiny

Paul Johnson: Winston Churchill

National Review, December 9, 2009

One of the most remarkable aspects of Winston Churchill’s sprawling epic of a life was the way that he was able to cram it all in — to do all that — in a mere 90 years. It is only marginally less miraculous that Paul Johnson has now managed to make an excellent job of summing up that life — and, no less important, offer up a good measure of the man who lived it — in a book of a little under 200 pages.

This is not a “definitive” Churchill. For that, turn to the massive official biography begun by his son and taken to a triumphant conclusion by the indefatigable Sir Martin Gilbert. Nor is it a full-length (if not Gilbertian in size) work on the lines of Roy Jenkins’s Churchill (2001), a fine, feline interpretation (Johnson rates it as the best single-volume account of Churchill’s life) made all the more interesting for having been written by a man who had, like Churchill, been Britain’s home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, although not, mercifully (he was a socialist of sorts, and a Europhile of conviction), prime minister.

Paul Johnson’s take is something else, a deft, brisk, admiring Life of a Great Man, a book for a country-house weekend, perhaps, crafted in vintage style and best read, I’d think, in the company of some vintage port. A distinguished journalist (and a regular NR contributor) and successful popular (in the best meaning of that term) historian, Johnson writes in a slightly archaic rhythm, a lavish, lively prose that is sometimes old-fashioned (“At this moment providence intervened”) and occasionally orotund (“the two worked together to bring the great fleet of measures into harbor, wafted by the winds of their oratory”). This is an author who cares about narrative, and who relishes grand, sweeping (frequently, very sweeping) judgments, faintly irritating pulpitry (“It is a joy to write his life. . . . None holds more lessons, especially for youth”), well-chosen anecdotes, and neat, shrewd observations (“Churchill had always used clothes for personal propaganda”). The resulting mix comes as a rich treat after the dense jargon and denser preoccupations that characterize the efforts of so many contemporary academic historians. Readers looking for an attempt to squeeze Churchill into the straitjacket of early-21st-century attitudes will be disappointed, as will those looking for some rote revisionism, but then they probably should not have been reading Johnson in the first place.

Despite going a little easy on his subject over what were, at least arguably, his two most notorious (and very different) blunders — the Gallipoli campaign and his 1925 decision to put Britain back on the gold standard at too high a parity — and making no mention of some of the more harebrained schemes Churchill dreamt up in World War II, Johnson shows that he is prepared to criticize, at least on occasion. Thus he takes aim at Churchill’s quixotic, last-ditch defense of the poisonous Edward the Abdicator, and at more serious, if lesser known, errors of judgment, such as the role that Churchill played in carelessly pushing 1920s Japan on a path that was eventually to transform the Japanese from allies into antagonists. There was, Churchill told the then–prime minister of Britain, not “the slightest chance” of a war with Japan in their lifetimes. The eerie intuitive sense that enabled him to be one of the first Englishmen to understand the true nature of both Nazism and Bolshevism was, this time, nowhere to be seen. Less than 20 years later, Singapore fell.

But if Johnson has (for the most part) avoided the temptations of hero worship, he has an appreciation for the heroic qualities of Churchill’s life. This is only underlined by the obvious pleasure he takes in demonstrating how far Churchill could stray from more conventional notions of how heroes should behave, perhaps most charmingly in the story of when, in 1946 and aged 17, Johnson (lucky fellow!) had the opportunity to ask the greatest of Britain’s leaders to what he attributed his success in life: “Without pause or hesitation, he replied: ‘Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.’ He then got into his limo.” A seasoned veteran both of dusty, sand-blown imperial campaigns and of the mud of the Western Front, who had, as prime minister and aged nearly 70, to be dissuaded from showing up for the D-Day landings, Churchill was a warrior as much as he was a warlord, yet somehow I suspect this is not the sort of reply, self-deprecatory and sly, that an Achilles would have given.

What Achilles would have recognized, however, was Churchill’s relentless pursuit of glory and fame. Along with his romantic ideal of nation, and his gargantuan appetite for excitement, it is as close as we can come to finding a key to understanding what drove this complex man. With the idea of an afterlife appearing as unlikely to Churchill (for all practical purposes an atheist, but in a very English way: he was, he once said, a buttress of the Church of England, “support[ing] it from the outside”) as to the heroes of the Iliad, his achievements could be the only sure route to the immortality that he craved.

In bidding farewell to the outgoing Labour members of his wartime coalition, Churchill told them “the light of history will shine on all your helmets.” To make sure that it shone on his, he became his own Homer. “Words,” he had once remarked, “are the only things that last forever.” The sole reward he requested for his services during the war was that a large quantity of Britain’s wartime papers be classified as his personal property. By effectively gaining exclusive access to so much of the official record, he was able to be among the first to get in his word (or, more accurately, more than 2 million words) on the topic of the war; and so, aided by a dedicated team, he did. The six volumes of his The Second World War were to shape our understanding of the conflict for a generation, and in no small respect they still do. They also made Churchill a great deal of money ($50 million, at today’s value, not including serialization rights), something that was never a small consideration for a man so skillful at turning ink into gold.

His account is highly partial and, even allowing for what was known at the time, it leaves out much of the story, but, as Johnson explains, “by giving his version of the greatest of all wars . . . he was fighting for his ultimate place in history. What was at stake was his status as hero. So he fought hard and took no prisoners. On the whole he won the war of words, as he had earlier won the war of deeds.” But then, given Churchill’s way with language, a talent so profound that there was a time when it seemed only his speeches stood between the island race and defeat, this could not have been an entirely unexpected result.

And it’s a mark of Johnson’s sensitivity as a writer — and his keen eye for good material — how often he is prepared to let Churchill speak for himself. If there’s a drawback to this biography it is that it doesn’t contain much fresh detail for those already familiar with the story: The only two things new to me were the revelation that Churchill couldn’t stand the sound of whistling (by contrast, Johnson relates that Hitler was “an expert and enthusiastic whistler: he could do the entire score of The Merry Widow, his favourite opera”) and the claim that Churchill’s liver, “inspected after his death, was found to be as perfect as a young child’s,” something that might suggest that this peripatetic and famously bibulous statesman regularly included Lourdes in his wanderings.

But this lack of new information, almost inevitable in a brief summary of a well-known life, is compensated for by the pleasure of rereading the quotations from Churchill, familiar, well-loved friends for the most part, that Johnson weaves through his text as the best of all guides to the man who first said them. There are the jokes, the asides, and, of course, extracts from those great, rolling, resonant speeches. To read them is to hear again that voice, a voice (in this case speaking on the threat to British India) capable of conjuring up imagery that has not yet lost its power to chill or, in what may be our own coming age of Western retreat, sound the alarm: “Greedy appetites have been excited and many itching fingers are stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict Empire.”

And then there’s this, from 1940, on the Anglo-American “special relationship”: “The British Empire and the United States will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. . . . No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant [regrettably, Johnson omits that splendid ‘benignant’], to broader lands and better days.”

If I admit that rereading those words in the age of the EU, of Gordon Brown, and of Barack Obama left me sad, I hope that you will understand.