The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, translated by J.A. Underwood

    I don't usually include essays on here, but I read this as a way to kick off a unit on media studies. It was a little tough to understand, but a very thought-provoking piece written in the mid-1930s about how photography, film, and recorded sound were changing the nature of art at that time. I think it is extremely interesting to read today, as the internet and social media continue to change the nature of art in such different ways. The essay is densely packed with important ideas that I'll discuss below.

    Aura refers to the uniqueness of art in its place and sort of its genuineness, as I understand it. So, something that "art" needs to deal with in the age of mechanical reproduction is that when a photo is printed twenty times, no individual print is more "genuine" than the others, whereas a great painting, copied by another artist, retains an aura of authenticity. Art was also originally "embedded in the context of tradition" through worship. So, art wasn't always for another person's viewing. Art originated to fulfill spiritual needs. A caveman drawing an elk on the wall might show it to his friends, but he also expected that spirits might see it. Or a medieval craftsman carving details high up on a cathedral would know that no passerby would see them, but that God would. With the advent of perfectly reproduceable art, with no "aura" to distinguish the original or the genuine piece, art is thrown into a crisis, illustrated by disputes about whether or not photography is art. But, writes Benjamin, the question is not whether photography is art, but how it changes the nature of art. In the modern era, writes Benjamin, art is underpinned not by ritual, as in the past, but by politics.

    Religious art was viewed for the purposes of provoking a spiritual experience, and therefore was not to be taken lightly. Statues of the Madonna, for example, would only be revealed at certain times, and some works of art were only allowed to be seen by certain people, like the Ark of the Covenant. But with religious ritual removed from art, opportunities for displaying art proliferated. 

    Benjamin writes that fascism allows the masses to express themselves through the spectacle without actually having their needs or wants addressed. The mass protest or rally is best captured through photography, and especially in the bird's eye view, which normal people rarely experience. With the advent of aerial photography, or just tall enough buildings, it makes more sense to hold mass rallies and have them photographed to show the popularity of certain ideas. Moreover, fascism seeks to grant the masses a spectacle to serve as a sort of distraction from real needs. It uses art as a way to divert attention. Communism, on the other hand, rather than aestheticising politics, politicizes aesthetics. Benjamin doesn't elaborate too much on that, but I take it to mean that Communists instead assert control over artistic media to turn them into propaganda.

    One thing that Benjamin notes in a footnote is from Aldous Huxley's Beyond the Mexique Bay, in which Huxley uses some rough math to assert that there is a proliferation of art in the modern era, but that the bad art has increased more than the good art. The media have allowed for the creation of more art, but only allowed for a creation of talented people to a lesser extent. I am not sure that is true. In my experience the current era (90ish years later) is full of bad and good art, but above all is characterized by individual art. Art is so commodified now that we don't even refer to people as artists so much as they are "content creators." We have sort of tacitly acknowledged that whatever it is people are doing on Vine, Tiktok, Instagram, etc. is not art, but "content." However, it is getting more reach than art ever was. It is normal for a ten second video made by some random person to get millions of views--this happens to different videos every day. More people are seeing this "content" than ever saw the Mona Lisa for the first hundred years after it was painted. So this "content" is going to be more influential than any "art" ever was. I think that has changed the nature of art. Whereas photography forced the world to expand the definition of art, social media has narrowed the definition, turning art into something more purposeful and thought provoking, and separating mere diversion into a separate category of content for the masses. 

    When we watch this "content," I would say most people are of the opinion that we are not doing ourselves any favors. You hear people call it rotting, or refer to it as screen time, which we use apps on our phones to try to diminish. People try to keep their kids from having too much screen time, which usually doesn't even refer to TVs but just to social media and games on smartphones and tablets. But it is so attractive, like junk food but for attention. What will the result be? I think the aggregate result of the proliferation of accessible information consumption and creation will be more trash creation and consumption in the short term, but over decades, people are becoming more knowledgeable, getting good and bad information the would have never had before. Now, the problem is not being uninformed, but misinformed. We can take for granted that there is now a constant stream of information being consumed by billions of people all the time through their social media.

    I wonder whether AI will alter this trend. Before AI, the trend for information was for a reduction in the influence of experts and an increase in the amount of non-experts' influence. Knowledge was becoming decentralized--anyone could create a video or a post and have it go viral, and the cause of virality was rarely whether the information provided was true or thoughtful, but whether it spawned engagement. To go viral, a post only needs to get engagement, which it can get by being entertaining, outrageously wrong, controversial, or extremely negative. However, with AI, I wonder whether people will just turn to asking Claude or ChatGPT their important questions about history, science, etc., and therefore we would see a return to the influence of experts whose data was harvested by LLMs. 

    Maybe AI will lead to a divergence in knowledge or information like "content creation" has split art from content. People will use AI seemingly more like they would use a Google search, and consume content more for entertainment purposes. But maybe that entertainment will also misinform people who will never actually consult their AI tools for an answer. The result then would just be more general misinformation and an overall lowering of the quality of information, as the creators of content become the ones in control over public knowledge. This democratization probably leads to a flattening of knowledge. With experts unable to serve as gatekeepers of knowledge, more information and misinformation spreads around, bringing up the general knowledge level of the people who were the least informed while reducing the knowledge level of those who were most informed. Now that you can find anyone on the internet to agree with you on any given thing, people can connect with each other over shared interests, but those connections are mediated by machines. Like how Benjamin talks about the actor and the audience versus the actor and the camera and the audience, the more people will socialize through the internet, the more that real-life connections will diminish. We will end up adapting to an "internet society," and lose physical connections. 

    I think that this will also lead to a flattening of the quality of communication. In-person communication is the most effective way to communicate. It would be at the top of a metaphorical ladder, followed by videochatting, phone calls, emails, etc. When people can communicate through other media more, that increases the amount of total communication, but it also transfers some part of the real-life communication to a lower form of communication. So communication is increased, but high-quality communication is somewhat diminished. With everything getting flatter, our social structures will probably also get more democratic. It will be harder for "experts" or the rich or the powerful to rule over a population that is better informed than they were before because the top 10% of society will also be worse informed than they were before. It will be harder for people in the halls of power to rule over the people who aren't because people will have fewer conversations in those halls of power while people outside will have more communication with one another through media. Those forms of communication, which can be forms of organization, will flatten power relationships as the upper rungs of society diminish in the qualities that make them the upper rungs of society while the bottom rungs get access to the same sources of information and means of communication they have.

    Okay, that was a big rant that I wrote out all at once. No clue if it makes sense. Not reading it back, but clicking "publish."

Games Criminals Play: How You Can Profit by Knowing them by Bud Allen and Diana Bosta

    This was a pretty interesting book all about lessons that should be learned if you are ever going to work in a prison. I don't plan on doing that, but in the criminal justice system, many people become prisoners, so it's interesting to read about. The book mainly talks about schemes that prisoners use to try to "down a duck," which I guess is 80's terminology for finding a correctional officer to manipulate into bringing contraband into the prison. Mostly, the lessons are to keep things professional, and to keep things in the open. No secrets. Interesting book, but it felt a little dated in its terminology and language.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

    Bloodlands is an important book, and Timothy Snyder obviously knew it was important when he was writing it. The book contextualizes the Holocaust, WWII, and the Great Purge in the USSR to show how the same people perpetrated and suffered from the same horrors in the "Bloodlands," roughly the area stretching from the older version of Poland up through the Baltics to Tallinn and Petrograd/St. Petersburg, and East through Ukraine. Today, It's mainly Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, with some of Russia. This is the region where, in the late 1930s and the 1940s, people had to choose between Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. 

    After World War One, the three powers that partitioned Poland in 1795, Austria-Hungary, Prussia/The Second German Empire, and Russia, had all collapsed, allowing Poland to re-emerge. Poland was in a weird situation since it had been ceded by Tsarist Russia to the Germans, but then the Germans fell, and it came under threat from revolutionary Russia. It defeated the USSR in a war from 1919-20, led by Joseph Pilsudski, and ensured its independence, whereas Ukraine and Belarus were conquered. But over the 1920s, Poland was destined to grow relatively weaker than Russia and Germany. There was really nothing the Poles could do. They were smaller than both countries, less technologically advanced, and also dealt with the fact that, like the Germans, they were stuck in the middle of Europe, surrounded by other states that would be happy to take pieces off of Poland. The only policy available to Polish leaders was to use alliances to obtain non-aggression pacts with their neighbors. They got one with the USSR in 1932, which allowed Stalin more room to maneuver in his own western borderlands, where he was putting down rebellion against failed agricultural collectivization and "de-kulakization" that was starving the citizens of the USSR. I noticed that in the chapter, "The Soviet Famines," Snyder gives particular attention to Ukraine, without using the term Holodomor. I'm interested in that because it shows a sort of dissenting position against what had been official Ukrainian rhetoric on Stalin's starvation policies, while also paying particular attention to Ukraine. In Stalin, Stephen Kotkin specifically argued that Ukraine was not particularly targeted by collectivization, and that per capita deaths were actually higher in Kazakhstan than in Ukraine. However, since Snyder focuses on the "Bloodlands" that do not include Kazakhstan, and since Ukraine had the highest number of total deaths, I think his focus still makes sense.

    As collectivization ended and Stalin began the Great Purge, to find people to blame for the millions of failures of collectivization, the Nazis took power and opened the first concentration camps, which primarily focused on killing the physically and mentally handicapped. They opened camps at Dachau and Lichtenberg in 1933, Sachsenhausen in 1936, Buchenwald in 1937, and Flossenberg in 1938. When taking relative populations sizes into account, the Soviet Gulag system was still 25 times bigger than the German concentration camp system at this point. The Nazis were nowhere close. What becomes clear is that the two terrors of Stalinism and Nazism differed in their approach. Stalinist terror was at its worst in peacetime, when he had total control of his people. Hitler's terror was worst in wartime, when expediency created a twisted logic of killing, in which it made sense to enact the Final Solution during, not after the war. These opposite approaches to killing are illustrated by the fact that in 1937 and 1938, 267 people were sentenced to death in Germany, whereas 378,326 were sentenced to death in the kulak operation alone in the Soviet Union. The USSR's killing was more legalistic than the Nazi killing. But like Nazi terror, Stalinst terror was largely national. Chapter 2 of the book largely focuses on anti-Ukrainian terror and chapter 3 on anti-Polish terror.

    When the Germans invaded Poland, they invaded the most Jewish country in the world, and added massive numbers of Jews to their empire. He tripled the number of Jews in Germany from a little over 330,000 to nearly a million, and if you counted the Jews of the occupied General Government, there were another 1.5 million Jews. Lodz alone had 233,000 Jews, more than Berlin (82,788) and Vienna (91,480) combined. Warsaw had more Jews than all of Germany combined. But the Germans weren't the only ones to invade Poland in 1939, the USSR also did so simultaneously. The Soviets quickly began a "lesser Terror," killing 21,892 Polish citizens, 8% of whom were Jews, and deporting tens of thousands more to Kazakhstan before the winter of 1939-40. In June of 1940, the Soviets deported another 78,339 people from Poland, 84% of whom were Jewish. Jews were caught in the middle of this massive clash of ideologies and empires, one of which wanted to wipe the Jewish people off the map, and the other of which wanted to erase Jewish identity from people's minds. The Poles were also caught in the middle, and the two major powers both targeted Polish leaders for destruction. Snyder writes:

In eastern Europe the pride of societies was the 'intelligentsia,' the educated classes who saw themselves as leading the nation, especially during periods of statelessness and hardship, and preserving national culture in their writing, speech, and behavior. The German language has the same word, with the same meaning; Hitler ordered quite precisely the 'extermination of the Polish intelligentsia.' ... It was the intelligentsia who was thought to embody this civilization, and to manifest this special way of thinking. [para. break] Its mass murder by the two occupiers was a tragic sign that the Polish intelligentsia had fulfilled its historical mission.

    June 22, 1941, is the beginning of the worst phase of the calamity that should really be considered as an eastern European apocalypse. On that day, the Germans invaded the USSR, and that invasion would result in tens of millions dead. Snyder points out that from 1933-38, the Soviets did almost all the killing in the Bloodlands, and that from 1939-41 it was balanced. But from 1941-45, it would be "the Germans who were responsible for almost all of the political murder."

    Germany, in World War One, tried to challenge Britain, for control of the seas. Seeing the Kaiser's failure, in World War Two, Hitler tried to challenge Russia for control of the vast lands that would become the Bloodlands. Hitler saw them as a frontier for his empire, necessary not to compete with Britain for control of Europe, but to compete with America for control of the world. If Hitler's aim had been to rule Europe, it would have been best achieved by waiting. Germany needed only to stay united to become the richest and most powerful country on the continent. But his goal was world hegemony, and he saw that the country most likely to assume world hegemony, the United States, had done it thanks to an enormous frontier that it could fill. Hitler wanted to do to the Jews and the Slavs what the Americans had done to the Native Americans, but he lacked the diseases to do so. Instead, his plan for the Final Solution began as a plan for a reservation in Eastern Poland, the Lublin Plan, which was abandoned by November 1939 as too complicated. It transformed three more times. The next was a consensual plan to send the Jews to the Soviet Union, which Stalin rejected in February 1940. Then the plan was to deport the Jews to Madagascar, but that required British cooperation, and the British fought Germany after Poland's conquest. Finally, after invading the Soviet Union, the plan became to exterminate the Jews, and then the Slavs, by starvation. By the end of 1941, no government in history had ever ruled over so many Jews as Germany. It's plans for eastward expansion to match American westward expansion a century prior required the same extermination of the people already living there, and the only plan going into the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941 was starvation. However, once Operation Barbarossa began, the Germans began an improvised extermination: first with bullets, then with vans that put exhaust back into their passenger compartments, then with stationary vans with exhaust into rooms filled with Jews, and then with gas chambers, using a pesticide known as Zyklon B.

    Under the Nazi regime, there could be three places Jews would go: ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps. Ghettos locked Jews into specific blocks of cities and could put Jews to work. They largely characterized the first year or two after the Germans invaded Poland. Concentration camps came about quickly as work camps designed to produce munitions and other goods for Germany. And death camps were extermination centers. Auschwitz was a rare combination of the two that is well known for its concentration/work camp side. Few of the death camps are well remembered because they were all liberated by the USSR, which suppressed the Jewish-specific parts of WWII historical memory, and because there were so few survivors of the death camps to tell their story (at Treblinka, only 50 survived while 780,863 were murdered). Six major facilities were established and functioned from December 1941 until November 1944: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the core of the killing was done in Operation Reinhard, gassing 1.3 million Polish Jews in 1942. It ended with Auschwitz, where two hundred thousand Polish Jews and seven hundred thousand other European Jews were gassed, mostly in 1943 and 1944. Gassing was chosen as the best way to exterminate Jews once deportation was understood to be impossible. East of Molotov-Ribbentrop, mass shooting was more common.

    One of the social phenomena that made gassing millions of Jews possible was the division of society throughout the war. Obviously, national and religious divisions were paramount, isolating Jews from Poles, Catholics from Atheists and Russian Orthodox. But within the ghettos, the Germans also made use of Jewish police forces, and divided those who could work from those who could not. This way, even after it became clear that the Germans were exterminating Jews, once already completely under the Germans' control, Jews vied to be kept alive for labor at selections. This created a social division between those Jews who had papers and those who did not. People believed that their families could remain in the ghetto with the right work papers, and much energy was spent in the hunt for the right documents instead of on resistance. In most ghettos, people wouldn't come together en masse until it was clear that the ghetto would be liquidated, and then everyone, knowing that they all shared the same fate, would rise up. But even then, ghetto uprisings were never successful in preventing a ghetto's liquidation, merely delaying liquidation a few days and merely guaranteeing a different type of mass murder on a different day.

    One really interesting aspect of this book is that, like how it combines its analysis of both German and Soviet conquest and occupation, it also extends its analysis past the Second World War. The ethnic cleansing continues as the Germans and Poles are both forced by the Soviets to the west, into a reduced Germany and a shifted Poland. For the Germans, it was new, and for the Poles, it was just a continuation of what they'd already been facing during the war. Snyder ends the books with a really interesting historiographical discussion of his influences, Hannah Arendt and Vasily Grossman, and of the errors in the popular imagination of the Holocaust. He reminds the reader that the majority of those killed never saw a gas chamber, and that Auschwitz is really primarily known due to being the furthest west of the death camps and the fact that it had a work camp attached to it, where a lot of people survived to tell their story. Now that the iron curtain has fallen, it is important to unite the "Bloodlands" into the historical understanding of the Holocaust, because that story was not well-known before the 1990s. This book is an incredibly important work in bringing that story out.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5%, whereas the death rate in POW camps for western soldiers was less than 5%.
• Snyder writes that on any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian empire.
• The Soviets paused their advance just east of the Vistula river from early August 1944 until January 1945. This doomed Polish resistance fighters and Jews alike by design. Stalin wanted the Polish resistance to be killed so that they couldn't resist him later on. Once they restarted the offensive in January, it only took two weeks to liberate Lodz and Auschwitz.

 

 

Un verdor terrible por Benjamín Labatut

    Un verdor terrible explora la historia de la ciencia y como se alterna en sus capacidades de promover y extinguir la vida. Labatut muestra como el mismo hombre puede inventar el gas de cloro, que mata a miles durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, y tambien el fertilizador con nitrogeno, que salva las vidas de milliones. Y como el mismo compuesto químico se usa para crear ambos el Zyklon B y el azul de prusia, amado de los pintores. Labatut usa las vidas personales de cientifícos para dramatizar al narrativo, y no pude resistir en pensar como Thomas Kuhn disentiría de este narrativo basado en la epifanía.

    El libro se acaba con un anecdota de como los árboles limones mueren. En su última cosecha, el limón pare una sobreabundancia de limónes, hasta que se rompen las ramas de estar sobrepesadas. Me parece que el propósito de esta anecdota es argumentar que el florecimiento de las ciencias en el siglo XX es una subreabundancia, que otorga mucho, pero que también presagia el fin de todo.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

    This is the first book that I've ever listened to, instead of read. Abundance is a very popular book right now for the challenge that it offers to liberals while offering an olive branch to conservatives. Klein and Thompson put forward ideas that seek to diminish economic inequalities by expanding the pie, rather than dividing it up differently. Left-wing critics will say that it fails to actually diminish inequality, and right-wing critics will say that the solutions really only apply to major cities, but I think that the "Abundance agenda" is a lot more positive than negative. It is important for the country to be able to build, whether in manufacturing, housing, transportation, or whatever is needed. I like that the book has an optimistic feel, and I've become a really big fan of Ezra Klein this year.

    I liked the audiobook as a format for the same reason I like podcasts, but I have to say that it is far inferior to reading a book and being able to take notes on it. I don't remember nearly as much of this as I would if it were a book that I could revisit. I will also say I far preferred Klein's parts of the book that he read to the ones that Thompson read. Thompson sounded patronizing to me. Anyway, it was a really good book, and regardless of their voices, I thought they put forth good ideas and a good new way of thinking about how we should evaluate ideas. The country will be better off if we embrace an abundance mentality than a scarcity mentality.

Maus by Art Spiegelman (The Complete Maus Vol. 1 & 2) (Re-read)

    I don't normally read graphic novels, but Maus is a special book. Art Spiegelman's relationship with his father reminds me of my own father's relationship with his father, also a Holocaust survivor. Maus really grippingly tells the story of the Holocaust and of interviewing a survivor of the Holocaust, and uses different animals to depict the Germans, Poles, Jews, Americans, etc. The animal metaphor is controversial, but I think it works very well, and is especially useful when depicting Jews (mice), who wear the masks of pigs (Poles) to blend in. 

    I remembered a good amount about the book, but not much since I last read it probably around the age of ten. I specifically recalled a scene early in Volume 1 where Art's father, Vladek, conscripted into the Polish Army, is not shooting at the oncoming Germans, afraid. A Polish NCO comes over, feels the coldness of his rifle, and reprimands him for not shooting. Then he does shoot, kills a German soldier, and when the Germans win the battle and take him prisoner, they shout at him for having a hot barrel, having shot. There was no winning, and I think that was very emblematic maybe not of the precise situation, but the general feeling of living through the Holocaust, when a Jew couldn't really ever make a "correct" choice. 

    Something I didn't remember so much was the information about Anja, Art's mother and Vladek's wife, who took her own life in 1968. That was a really tragic part of the whole book that I'd forgotten. I also took note of how different Vladek's Holocaust experience was than my grandfathers. My grandpa was in a ghetto for almost all of the war, working, while Vladek at times worked, at times faked his papers and pretended to be a Pole, at times was in hiding, and then ended up being sent to Auschwitz. It made me think of how diverse the experiences of the Holocaust could be. Maus is a very sad book, but it's a very beautiful book. It's just very real about difficult relationships between people, difficult choices, and above all love. One of the best books ever.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

    Another heavy book by Corman McCarthy. When I set out to read more literature this year, I specifically wanted to avoid heavy books like this, but he is so damn good at writing. I definitely didn't think I would want to read Westerns, but my friend Frank kept mentioning how good Cormac McCarthy is, so I gave All the Pretty Horses a try and now I'm hooked. The Crossing is the sequel to that book, and the second book of The Border Trilogy, but follows a completely different character. But like the protagonist in All the Pretty Horses, Billy Parham makes multiple trips down to Mexico, fails to achieve his goals there, and finds death instead, but also the wisdom and kindness of strangers. Now that I've read two McCarthy books, I notice some trends. The obvious one is not much punctuation. Another one is that the characters in these books inhabit our world, but it's not our world. People in these books are wiser, and kinder, but they're also capable of more cruelty. Most characters that we meet are strangers on the road or in small towns or haciendas, who usually show kindness either by sharing food or a story or wisdom. Some others we meet are pure evil, who commit cruelty for cruelty's sake. And a very small number are benign, usually working for some cruel overlord, but willing to be merciful; or they are a person with no reason to harm out characters, but admit to their indifference to human suffering. Spoilers ahead. McCarthy also uses his books to draw big contrasts between the United States and Mexico, and to use Mexico as almost a time warp, where we hear stories going back to the Mexican Revolution and see poverty that would suggest the Stone Age. And then the characters return north of the border and confront modernity in the form of cars, war, and diners.

    The book, I would say, is dominated by three big stories in each part. The first is Billy Parham's search for the she-wolf terrorizing the cattle of the land, finding her, and trying to bring her back to Mexico. The second is Billy and his brother Boyd as they try to find the men who killed their parents and stole their horses. And the third is Billy returning to Mexico to find his brother Boyd. All of the stories deal with cruelty, and all these missions end in failure. When Billy tries to join the Army for World War Two its a failure. Failure is just an all-pervading theme of this book. Another one is truth. Throughout the book, we hear people saying things that are false, and we hear stories emerge out of nothing, or take a kernel of truth and turn it into something else entirely.

    McCarthy loves a sensitive cowboy. He loves how they love their horses, and he loves to think about the thoughts they think while they sit alone on the range at night, or atop a horse in the morning. He loves to write about them crying over horses they've lost, and in this book, he writes about an inverted scene, a pregnant wolf that Billy Parham loses. One other thing he likes to write about is a wound that lasts. In this book, the dog's throat gets cut, rendering it mute, the boys cause the death of a one-armed man, and Billy meets a blind man who tells him his story. I think surviving with wounds or with disabilities is important to McCarthy.

    I love McCarthy's writing and I've really never read anything else like it, so I wanted to just throw a few examples in here that stood out to me while I was reading. This first one is long, but I really didn't expect him to jump into the mind and the whole backstory of a wolf:

THE WOLF had crossed the international boundary line at about the point where it intersected the thirtieth minute of the one hundred and eighth meridian and she had crossed the old Nations road a mile north of the boundary and followed Whitewater Creek west up into the San Luis Mountains and crossed through the gap north to the Animas range and then crossed the Animas Valley and on into the Peloncillos as told. She carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He’d bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She’d flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.

She wandered the eastern slopes of the Sierra de la Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.

She crossed the Bavispe River and moved north. She was carrying her first litter and she had no way to know the trouble she was in. She was moving out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them. When she pulled down the veal calf in the snow at the head of Foster Draw in the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico she had eaten little but carrion for two weeks and she wore a haunted look and she’d found no trace of wolves at all. She ate and rested and ate again. She ate till her belly dragged and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under a wire fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before. Now they did.

She ranged west into Cochise County in the state of Arizona, across the south fork of Skeleton Creek and west to the head of Starvation Canyon and south to Hog Canyon Springs. Then east again to the high country between Clanton and Foster draws. At night she would go down onto the Animas Plains and drive the wild antelope, watching them flow and turn in the dust of their own passage where it rose like smoke off the basin floor, watching the precisely indexed articulation of their limbs and the rocking movements of their heads and the slow bunching and the slow extension of their running, looking for anything at all among them that would name to her her quarry.

At this season the does were already carrying calves and as they commonly aborted long before term the one least favored so twice she found these pale unborn still warm and gawking on the ground, milkblue and near translucent in the dawn like beings miscarried from another world entire. She ate even their bones where they lay blind and dying in the snow. Before sunrise she was off the plain and she would raise her muzzle where she stood on some low promontory or rock overlooking the valley and howl and howl again into that terrible silence. She might have left the country altogether if she had not come upon the scent of a wolf just below the high pass west of Black Point. She stopped as if she’d walked into a wall.

She circled the set for the better part of an hour sorting and indexing the varied scents and ordering their sequences in an effort to reconstruct the events that had taken place here. When she left she went down through the pass south following the tracks of the horses now thirty-six hours old.

By evening she’d found all eight of the sets and she was back at the gap of the mountain again where she circled the trap whining. Then she began to dig. She dug a hole alongside the trap until the caving dirt fell away to reveal the trap’s jaw. She stood looking at it. She dug again. When she left the set the trap was sitting naked on the ground with only a handful of dirt over the waxed paper covering the pan and when the boy and his father rode through the gap the following morning that was what they found.

Just a good quote that illustrates the type of words McCarthy puts into unnamed strangers' mouths:

    The boy didnt know if he understood or not. The old man went on to say that the hunter was a different thing than men supposed. He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

More wisdom from strangers, who predict the future or understand what has happened far away, which is that Billy's parents have been murdered.

He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. He said that while the huérfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. Then he removed his hands from the boy’s saddle and stepped away and stood. The boy thanked him for his words but he said that he was in fact not an orphan and then he thanked the women standing there and turned the horse and rode out. They stood watching him go. As he passed the last of the brush wickiups he turned and looked back and as he did so the old man called out to him. Eres, he said. Eres huérfano. But the boy only raised one hand and touched his hat and rode on.

Sometimes, you can't be sure who exactly is talking, thanks to the lack of punctuation. The result is to be unsure if we are hearing narration or Billy Parham's thoughts. This is one such example of that, which also serves as an example of the theme of simple kindness of strangers:

He went back to the kitchen and looked for something with which to write. In the end he dusted flour from the bowl on the sideboard over the wooden table and wrote his thanks in that and went out and got his horse and led it afoot down the zaguán and out through the portal. Behind in the patio the little mule turned the pugmill tirelessly. He mounted up and rode out down the little dusty street nodding to those he passed on his way. Riding like a young squire for all his rags. Carrying in his belly the gift of the meal he’d received which both sustained him and laid claim upon him. For the sharing of bread is not such a simple thing nor is its acknowledgement. Whatever thanks be given, however spoke or written down.

And this is just a bizarre example of the needless cruelty that is so common in McCarthy's writing. It makes you wonder what happened to him. And by the way, I looked it up, and this is not humanly possible:

The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man’s spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive’s head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and it may well have looked to others that he bent to kiss him on each cheek perhaps in the military manner of the French but what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man’s eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cords wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks.

And here is another example of the types of conversations people have in these books. Just one of many:

The man sat his horse and weighed this soberly. As if there might be some deeper substrate to this reflection with which he must reckon. He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men’s ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Qué piensa usted? he said. Billy said that he had no opinion beyond the one he’d given. He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be?

Bien dicho, the man said. He looked across the country. He said that he could read men’s thoughts. Billy didnt point out to him that he’d already asked him twice for his. He asked the man could he tell what he was thinking now but the man only said that their thoughts were one and the same. Then he said he harbored no grudge toward any man over a woman for they were only property afoot to be confiscated and that it was no more than a game and not to be taken seriously by real men. He said that he had no very high opinion of men who killed over whores. In any case, he said, the bitch was dead, the world rolled on.

He smiled again. He had something in his mouth and he rolled it to one side and sucked at his teeth and rolled it back. He touched his hat.

Bueno, he said. El camino espera.

The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir by Ben-Zion Gold

    I was looking for a book that might give me some idea of my grandfather's experience in the Holocaust, and I found this beautiful memoir of a man born the same year as my grandpa, also in Poland, 100 miles away. However, Ben-Zion Gold was much more religious than my grandfather's family, and a lot of his reminisces are about religious life at cheder and yeshiva. I know that like Gold, my grandpa had to worry about being attacked on the street for being Jewish, even before the war. Gold writes that of the three and a half million Jews living in Poland in the 20s and 30s, less than a third were religious. The majority were attracted to different Jewish ideas, like Zionism or the Jewish Socialist Bund, or to Communism.

    This book is especially good because Gold writes with immense wisdom as an octogenarian. He can look back on his childhood and understand better not just his own feelings, but the feelings and thoughts of the other children around him. With age, he is more accepting and forgiving of everyone, and I think he also feels nostalgic for everything, even what was bad, because it came from a world and a people destroyed by the Holocaust.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

    This was a very challenging book that I did not fully understand, but the parts I did understand were pretty interesting. In brief, Kuhn argues that the history of science is not continuous and is not always the history of pure progress. Rather, it is a history of revolutions and paradigm shifts. Apparently this book popularized the word "paradigm." Science depends on paradigms to set out the goals of research, the questions worth asking, many of the rules of a field, and the general conception of what is true. With a paradigm in place, scientists can conduct normal research (synonymous, I think, with basic research), which is a type of science designed to confirm the paradigm, using experiments to confirm the theory. However, sometimes, in the course of normal research, scientists discover anomalies. Some anomalies, and more likely when many anomalies of the same type are found, it can trigger a crisis in the field--the paradigm ceases to adequately explain the world. Then, from that crisis, a revolution in science can occur, in which a new paradigm emerges to explain both the old paradigm and the anomalies as well. A paradigm doesn't need to completely explain all phenomena, it just needs to be better at doing so than its competitors.

    Paradigms are useful because, once they can be taken for granted, scientists don't need to publish long treatises, establishing very fact upon which they make assumptions for more detailed research. Rather, once a paradigm has crystallized out of experience and theory, scientists can publish shorter articles, acknowledging, sometimes implicitly, the paradigm under which they work, and continuing to develop more detailed knowledge within that paradigm. Then, information can be passed on more quickly through textbooks that compile the normal research that occurs within the paradigm. Given this, scientists need to be aware that the science they learn in textbooks is an incomplete history of science. The science of textbooks, by eliminating all the rejected paradigms and interpreting all research through the accepted paradigm, imply that the development of the field has been a linear process of construction one block onto another. A more accurate conception of scientific development would be something like a story of searching for a road through dark woods, with different paths representing different paradigms, and the normal research under the current paradigm being the best and longest path out that has been discovered so far. But other paths have been taken in the past which led to becoming lost, backtracking, and working down the current path/paradigm. This means that, when looking back, all scientific production would seem like progress, but it may in fact be leading to a crisis and revolution.

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs, by Theodore Draper

    This book is way too long but it is just so impressive. I found myself being so bored with the granularity of getting three versions of mundane conversations, while also being so impressed with how detailed Draper's research was. He not only reported on Iran-Contra at the time, but Draper went through over 50,000 pages of primary sources to create this book, which is essentially a reference book for the Iran-Contra Affairs (Draper says they really should be thought of as two separate but connected schemes) told in chronological format.

    So why did I read this book? Well, I had some questions about the Iran-Contra Affair. I did not need this many answers. But anyway. This is what I knew. I understood the Iran-Contra Affair to be a scheme in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in order to make money to send to the Contras in Nicaragua, and that Ollie North was the fall guy. This was a very incomplete understanding, and it also made me wonder why the Reagan administration would work with Iran, a country/regime that was not Reagan's preferred one. I was also curious to know what Reagan's personal involvement was. What I learned was that the Iran-Contra Affairs were caused by the collision of a vague use of presidential authority with the massive delegation of power to the "imperial presidency." The cumulative effect of growing power to the president made it so that the president was presumed by many bureaucrats to have sole power over foreign policy, and the creation of the National Security Council Staff empowered bureaucrats (Ollie North) to plausibly act with that increased presidential authority.

    The NSC, as originally created, meant four members: the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, along with two advisory members, the CIA Director and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were originally granted staff, but under Eisenhower, the NSC staff were put more squarely under the sole control of the President through the Executive Office of the President. The National Security Advisor position, created post-WWII, developed over the next four decades to become a rival with the Secretary of State for control of foreign policy. The NSC staff also grew to 1,600 by President Reagan's time, from just 35 under LBJ, who were mostly temporary assignees from the State Department. The Reagan-era NSC was large enough to duplicate many roles in the State Department and operate independently of it. This capacity would allow for Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North to start his own covert operations outside normal channels.

    North gained too much influence as an NSC staffer from staying too long. On assignment from the Marine Corps, it would be typical for North to spend 2-3 years at the White House, North was there for nearly six years, over and over again managing to get the White House to override the orders of the Commandant of the Marine Corps for him to follow a normal career progression to become an infantry battalion commander.

    Before this all happened, Congress passed some laws that the Reagan administration would go on to break. They were the Boland Amendments, passed between 1982-86, which limited US government assistance to the contras in Nicaragua. Moreover, in 1983, the State Department launched Operation Staunch, which was an attempt to stop the flow of weapons from any country to Iran. The Reagan administration would break both of these, one being a violation of the law and an arrogation of power from Congress, and the other being a violation of the administration's own policy, showing the internal divisions between Reagan and his own Secretary of State, George Schultz. Reagan was also just plain confused about what was going on, and also just didn't want to know. He was repeatedly telling his subordinates to do things that were very legally questionable, and then just telling them to "follow the law" over and over. 

    To get around legal restrictions on aid to the Contras, North started to coordinate funding from third party donors, starting mostly with private individuals. This alone was already pushing the limits. Congress had made clear the government could not send military aid to the Contras, but North was sort of inventing a loophole to send non-governmental money to the Contras. North even acknowledged in letters that he was deceiving Congress and hiding the money from Congress. North was not just doing his job. He was clearly very passionate about the Contras and got carried away- one private funder quoting him as saying, "no, I don't care if I have to go to jail for this and I don't care if I have to lie to Congress about this." Draper acknowledges some kind of post-Vietnam syndrome affecting North, blaming the American defeat in Vietnam on a lack of funding from Congress, and seeing this as a noble opportunity to get around Congress.

    The reason why Draper calls it the Iran-Contra AffairS is because he very convincingly shows that they were really two different issues that got combined later on, not a master plan in the slightest. The reason that Iranian money got sent to the Contras was not because it was planned that way, but because the two covert operations were both handled by Ollie North. The Iranian plan really originated outside the US government with Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi and sketchy Iranian businessman Manucher Ghorbanifar. They wanted to end the arms embargo on Iran and sell arms to Iran as a business opportunity, since Iran was in desperate need in its years-long war against Iraq. They ended up developing the idea that they would use Israel as an intermediary, which became the reality.

    The Contra affair is somewhat straightforward, since it makes sense that Reagan would want to send cash to anti-communists. But Iran makes no sense. SecState, George Schultz, was opposed. SecDef, Caspar Weinberger, was opposed. But analysis out of the CIA and the NSC Staff showed that there was some room for a rapprochement with Iran, which felt threatened by the ongoing Soviet invasion of its neighbor, Afghanistan, which would last until 1989. But there was some confusion about whether it would be weapons sold to the government of Iran for rapprochement or to some opposition group to topple the government. And there was also analysis of different camps in the Iranian government jockeying for power (mostly invented by Ghorbanifar), which confused things more. Ultimately, it seems like Reagan did not know what he wanted out of Iran policy, but wanted to free hostages in Lebanon that he thought Iran could control. But Iran didn't even have these hostages! Hezbollah did! The State Department's policy was still that there was an arms embargo on Iran, but by the late summer of 1985, people in government were explicitly talking about an arms-for-hostages deal through Israel with Iran. Simplified, the plan was for Israel to sell weapons to Iran  and for the United States to resupply Israel. Israel thought that new weapons for Iran would prolong the war with Iraq, but official US policy was that it wanted the Iran-Iraq war to end, not stalemate for years.

    On August 20, 1985, the first shipment of arms reached Iran from Israel. But no hostages were released. Ghorbanifar explained that these weapons were seized by an "extremist" faction, and did not make it to the moderates for whom it was intended, as if they existed or were separate groups in the government controlling weapons (false). Then, arguments broke out--it turned out that the weapons were mistakenly delivered on an Israeli-marked plane, which could cause huge embarrassment to Iran, and were also of the wrong type. So, the Israelis agreed to send more weapons in exchange for one American hostage, who was the least valuable. The most valuable hostage was a CIA agent who was, unbeknownst to all, already dead in Lebanon. In November, to avoid the earlier embarrassment, Israel planned to ship the weapons to Iran by way of Portugal, so it wouldn't be clear what was happening. But nobody told Portugal, and the Portuguese authorities detained the flight. North became involved at this point and directed retired Major General Secord, who had been privately working on the Contra affair, to go to Portugal to try to get the plane off the ground. The Portuguese were befuddled at why the Americans, whose State Department was proclaiming an arms embargo on Iran, was trying to get them to let a shipment of arms reach Iran. To finally solve the problem, the CIA provided a charter flight from Portugal to Iran for the weapons, for which the Israelis deposited one million dollars into Secord's private account, Lake Resources, which was used for Contra funding, mixing the Iran and Contra funds. This was the first direct use of US government funds to support the Iranians. Critically, CIA covert activities require a finding of their necessity by the President, which nobody did at the time.

    As the relationship went on into January 1986, significant profits were made, some of which were due to typos, which resulted in the Army selling the weapons too cheaply to Israel, who marked them up and sold them to Ghorbanifar, who marked them up and sold them to Iran. North, who never ever took a cut for himself from these funds, took the "residuals," $16 million from the arms sale to Iran, and diverted it to the Contras. The US government just got bad deals over and over on the arms shipments. The original goal, hostage release, was not being met, since Iran could not get Hezbollah to release hostages. And the money that the Department of Defense got was miniscule compared to what Ghorbanifar, Secord, and the Contras were getting. I really wish that Draper had more information on the Hezbollah-Iran negotiations, which were impossible for him to get, but that would have revealed a whole lot of information about a whole other side of the negotiations. It was honestly just so funny that in May of 1986, somebody finally asked Hezbollah to release the hostages and they said hell no- we'll release them when Israel withdraws from the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, Lahad prisoners are returned, Da'wa prisoners freed in Kuwait, and for the United States to pay all of Hezbollah's expenses in holding the hostages. Come on now. 

    As the scandal was revealed, the nightmare was impeachment, a la Watergate. People in the executive branch reacted so differently than they would in today's much more partisan environment. They were hurt by the fact that they pissed off both liberals and conservatives in both parties. And the public generally didn't believe the administration's explanations. Even Barry Goldwater, Mr. Republican, said, "I think President Reagan has gotten his butt in a crack on this Iran thing." Nowadays, I think the president would just say he can do what he wants and nobody in his party would blink, but then, North was shredding so many documents that the shredder broke, and the Attorney General was investigating his own president for breaking the law.

    The fundamental problem that caused the Iran-Contra Affairs was a failure to respect the Constitution. The Constitution empowers three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances on each other. But LtCol North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter made clear in later testimony to Congress and trials that they gave their absolute loyalty to the President. They thought this was they duty, but they were mistaken. While they served at the pleasure of the President, they swore an oath not to the President, but to the Constitution. And it is Congress who the Constitution appoints as the holder of the power to appropriate funds, not the President. North and Poindexter asserted that the President controls foreign policy, but this is not what the Constitution says. While the Constitution grants the President significant affairs over foreign policy, it requires approval of the Senate to approve treaties, and both houses of Congress must be responsible for any funding. Similarly, when North and Poindexter made calls to other government officials from the White House, those officials "snapped to," thinking of doing what the President wanted, but not that what the President wanted may have been against the law. Draper concludes the book by focusing on these constitutional issues. He points out that Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, was clear that 

The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a president of the United States.

The massive power that rested in the executive by the time Reagan was President, and is even greater today, has proven to be the greatest danger to the existence of the constitutional republic in the United States. None of this power has been taken by force, but has been willingly granted by Congress and the courts. The problems of the Iran-Contra Affairs were not problems unanticipated by the founders and framers of the Constitution. The founders understood that the power of foreign policy could not be solely controlled by the executive. As James Madison put it, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace in the legislature, and not to the executive department..." and later, in a letter to Jefferson, that 

The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging, and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other.

 

 

Mexico in Review

    As I finished the Russia unit, I started to intersperse some miscellaneous books because it gets boring to read only the same topic over and over again. But the big unit I moved to next was another country, Mexico. I read 6 books about Mexico: Pedro Páramo, Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810-1910, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl, Fifth Sun, El laberinto de la soledad, and then All the Pretty Horses. All the Pretty Horses is the first in a trilogy that I plan to read, but I am cutting off the blog post here, and I hadn't even been sure I would include it as a Mexico book, but the book was set mostly in Mexico and I finished it before writing this post. Two of the authors, both of more "literary" books, were Mexican. I tried to avoid the Mexican Revolution since I think there is just so much on it, but it was impossible to truly avoid it since almost everything in modern Mexico is touched by it. So Pedro Paramo, El laberinto de la soledad, and All the Pretty Horses all discussed the Revolution or the Cristero War in some way or another.

    The first big theme I picked up on in my reading was modern Mexico needing to catch up to the modern world. There is sort of a feeling that Mexico was this great empire under the Aztecs and then a really successful colony under the Spanish through the 18th century, but that it fell behind, and that the 19th and 20th centuries have been a big effort by Mexico to catch back up. This is really noticeable in Mexico's Crucial Century, as well as in El laberinto de la soledad, where Octavio de la Paz is very explicit that he sees the Revolution as a big moment that allowed Mexico to reach modernity.

    The other big theme was most apparent in Shadow of Quetzalcoatl and Fifth Sun, which was the birth of Mexico through contact between the indigenous people and the Spaniards, resulting in alliances or war between and among all the different people in contact with each other. It is pretty unusual in world history for two people to merge so fully like in Mexico, and when I went to Mexico City in June, it was apparent in murals and art and in the history museums that Mexicans see themselves as a combined people, who glorify their European and their indigenous history, especially the Aztec side of things. 

    Visiting Mexico in June made all of this a lot more significant and salient for me. Getting to see Teotihuacan and the Templo Mayor made it really cool to see how massive of structures the people of Mesoamerica could build, but then also how primitive it was compared to what the Spanish were doing an ocean away. The arrival of the Spanish was nothing short of cataclysmic, just like the arrival of the English and the French to the north. But the difference was that the natives combines with the Europeans in Latin America in a way that didn't happen to the north, and the way that people conceive of themselves in North and South America today are different as a result. North Americans can only really claim either Native American or European heritage, but it is very unusual to be able to claim descent from both like is common in Mexico.

    A big difference from the Russia unit is how the state is felt in each country. In Russia, the state is the primary violent actor. There was tons of death and destruction, but it was all at the hands of the Russian state or a state invading Russia. In Mexico, it was the opposite: a more extensive violence that operated at a higher level than Russia at peace but a lower level than Russia at war. The big danger to the safety of the people I read about in the Mexico books was not the government of Mexico, but the local government or criminals. 

    Reading the Mexico unit made me want to read a lot more literature in Spanish, building on my goal of reading more fiction this year. I think I've turned a corner and gotten a lot more interested in reading fiction, but I still don't know how to write about it yet. With my non-fiction books, I've settled into a "reflection," where I write the things I think are important to know from the book and I give a couple of my thoughts on it. But that has gotten a little redundant so I am trying to mix it up in these units where I can do some comparisons. With fiction, it is a totally different ballgame and I still don't know exactly what to write about for those books. But this unit has encouraged me to add more books in Spanish to my miscellaneous reading in between and throughout units, because I really need the practice. Next, I am moving on to some books broadly in the category of science.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

     Man, this was a good book. Better than I expected. Contact McCarthy can really write. He doesn’t just create a good story about boys going on horseback from Texas to Mexico in the fifties, he can make it all about the important things in life without taking you out of the context of the story for a moment. He can put such interesting words in peoples’ mouths and also just describe what they say really well. At one point he writes,

     

He spoke of his campaigns in the desert of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. His own father said that no man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse and he said that he supposed he wished that this were not so but it was so. 

     Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shared a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all the horses that ever were.

     McCarthy writes wise characters who go on soliloquies about life in believable ways, despite being teenagers or peasants. When he writes words into the mouths of peasant children, they are simple, but cut to the heart of issues like love, money, etc. the people in his writing all have a very functional intelligence. The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a teenager who loves horses and doesn’t need to speak much. But he is a talented young cowboy who loves horses and the western lifestyle. When he is in a dark cell recovering from knife wounds, McCarthy writes, “So he thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about.” The horses are honestly big characters in the novel, and their connections to their riders are so important. It is no coincidence that McCarthy calls Blevins’ big bay horse “thunderstruck,” when it was Blevins who feared being struck by lightning.

     All in all, I loved this book and crushed it in a few days, and I will definitely be continuing with the rest of the border trilogy. Thanks to Frank for the recommendation. 

El laberinto de la soledad por Octavio de la Paz

 Mientras leía este libro, perdí mis anotaciones, y ahora no tengo con que recordarme de mis pensamientos. También estoy de vacaciones y prefiero relajarme que escribir tanto. Voy a decir esto- la gran diferencia entre México y los Estados Unidos se ve en las relaciones raciales y étnicas. En Estados Unidos, hubo un genocidio de los indígenas. En México pasó lo mismo, pero el fenómeno más significante es la combinación entre los indígenas y los españoles. Por eso, la fundación de México es un nacimiento doloroso, pero en Estados Unidos es un cuento de desplazamiento y una conquista más pura de puede decir. Creo que esta diferencia impacta toda la auto concepción de los dos países. La otra mitad de este fenómeno tiene que ver con la esclavitud pero no forma tan gran parte de la historia mexicana, pues no voy a escribir tanto de eso ahora.  

     Otra cosa importante de que escriba De La Paz es cómo imperios sienten una “seducción  al muerte” en sus últimos días, sin embargo, los aztecas nunca sintieron eso porque estaban todavía muy temprano en su ascendencia sobre los pueblos de Mesoamérica cuando llegaron los españoles. Me parece inusual que cae un imperio así, en plena ascendencia, de una fuerza external. Lo más usual sería el largo declive hasta un colapso, como el imperio romano. Pero no sé. Quizás me parece así porque me siento que veo en mi mundo más declive.

     Algo interesante del libro es que De La Paz está escribiendo sobre “el fin de la Historia” en México, anunciando la llegada de México, después de la revolución, al laberinto de la soledad, que describe el dilema de los pueblos cuando llegan a la modernidad. Para él, a diferencia de Fukuyama, el mundo alcanzó el “fin de la Historia” después de la segunda guerra mundial. Para Fukuyama, la Historia finalizó cuando cayó la unión soviético, revelando que la democracia liberal es la última fase del estado o del gobierno. Para De La Paz, el dualismo de la unión soviético y los Estados Unidos es una especie de fin de Historia porque es un “empate.” Sabemos nosotros que se rompió este empate unas décadas después de la publicación de este libro, y también sabemos que el liderazgo de los Estados Unidos sobre el mundo ha sido en declive desde el libro de Fukuyama.

     Lo interesante de este libro que no contiene The End of History and the Last Man es que es el primer libro en que leo de la llegada al fin de la Historia un país desarrollando. Fukuyama solo habla de países desarrollados. El consejo de De La Paz a México al fin de la Historia es lo siguiente: México, como cualquier otra nación, llega solo an fin de la Historia. En este laberinto de decisiones que encuentra, los mexicanos deben buscar los demás naciones solitarias para formar una solidaridad entre las naciones contemporáneas. Así todos se trascienden los problemas de la modernidad.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend

Image from the book.

    Fifth Sun is a really cool Aztec history that seeks to primarily use indigenous sources, focusing on primary sources from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. I really liked it. Townsend covers the earliest Aztec history, from the Mexica migration to what became known as the Valley of Mexico, until about a hundred years or so after the Cortez's conquest of Tenochtitlan, by which time the Aztec Empire had passed out of living memory and was being recorded by the grandchildren of those who lived through it.

    The Aztecs originally came from the American Southwest to the Valley of Mexico sometime in the mid-13th century, at first arriving as a nomadic people who served as mercenaries for the other Nahua peoples who had settled the area in the century prior, also coming from the same region and speaking similar language. Then, the Aztecs were called the Mexica (Meh-SHEE-ka), and they settled the city of Tenochtitlan on bad marshland that nobody wanted in the middle of Lake Texcoco sometime in the early 14th century. There is obviously a lot of history I'm skipping over, but long story short, they became the dominant people in the valley after a civil war erupted in 1426. That was the year that Tezozomoc, ruler of the Tepanecs, the most powerful people in the basin, who had ruled since 1370, died in his bed. During the unrest, the Aztec ruler (who still only ruled the small city of Tenochtitlan at this point), Chimalpopoca, was killed, and so was his son, Xihuitl Temoc. His cousin, Itzcoatl, would become the first Emporer of the Aztecs, with the help of Tlacaelel, another relative, by forming the Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan against Azcapotzalco.

    An issue that never went away after the war that led to Aztec dominance in the valley was Tlaxcala (Tlash-ka-la). The Tlaxcalans were never defeated by the Aztecs. This became the basis of human sacrifice, since the Aztecs could not fully defeat the Tlaxcalans, but could capture them for sacrifice. The most interesting thing about the Aztecs to most people is human sacrifice. However, when the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs had only been practicing human sacrifice for a couple decades, and really mostly against the Tlaxcalans. Like many things about the Aztecs, it was more recently established than many would think. This not only served a religious purpose for the Aztecs, but allowed them to save face by claiming that the Tlaxcalans did not defeat them, but rather needed to be kept around for the ceremonial "Flower Wars" to capture future sacrifices.

    Under Moctezuma I, the Aztecs united their royal dynasty by agreeing to a system of power sharing between the Itzcoatl's branch of the family and Chimalpopoca's. Moctezuma and Tlacaelel were both sons of Chimalpopoca. They would do this by having their successor, from the other side of the family, always take as his primary wife a daughter of the ruling emperor.

    When Moctezuma II took power in 1502, the Aztecs were for the first time unopposed in their region, and faced no rebellions from the other Nahuas they ruled over. With more time, their Empire would have become incredibly strong across the region. At thirteen, Aztec boys left home to train to be warriors, and went as teenagers into battle ingroups in order to gang up on and separate a man from his battlefield cohort and bring him down as a unit. They would finish with apprenticeship by about twenty, and were then responsible for making kills and taking captives on their own. By the reign of Moctezuma II, his sacrificial role took up lots of his time, and he rarely went to the battlefield. Those sacrificial practices were often used as religious and propaganda opportunities, as some captured warriors from enemy groups would be taken to Tenochtitlan just to watch sacrifices, and then set free to tell their people what they saw. 

    The arrival of Cortez and the Spanish brought about the downfall of the Aztecs. The Spanish made landfall and heard tales of a vast city in the heartland of Mexico and began to make their way there, defeating all the peoples they met in between, developing quite a reputation. And then, on their way, they met the Tlaxcalans, who hated the Aztecs and formed an alliance with the Spanish after being defeated by them initially. Townsend disagrees with any notion that the Aztecs saw the Spanish as gods. But they definitely did see the Spanish as a very powerful people who could not be defeated on the battlefield. Part of the myth of the Aztecs viewing the Spanish as gods may have been due to them using Nahuatl words for gods in reference to the Spanish talking a lot about converting to Christianity to worship the Christian god.

    Cortez arrived without permission from the Spanish crown and was in a rush to take Tenochtitlan and show off his success before he could be recalled. But then, while he was in Tenochtitlan, he got word that a second fleet arrived, from his rival, the governor of Cuba. Moctezuma II hoped that this tension would save his city, but instead, Cortez took Moctezuma hostage and travelled to the coast, where he bribed the men sent to capture him, and actually reinforced his party. They reentered Tenochtitlan and boarded in Axayacatl's palace, the great palace in the center of the city. But the next day, the Mexica attacked. At this point, the narrative gets confusing. I'm not clear on the exact order of things, but at some point, the Mexica begin the celebration of Toxcatl, which involves lots of dancing in front of an effigy of Huitzilopochtli. As the danced, the Spaniards flowed out of the palace and began slaughtering the Mexica with the help of their Tlaxcalan allies. The Mexica pushed them back into the palace, which they fortified, creating a stalemate in which the Mexica couldn't get in and the Spaniards couldn't get out. 

    After seven days, the Spaniards made a break around midnight, traveling quietly to the sole causeway that remained after the fighting had torn apart the city. They were discovered on the causeway, and the Mexica launched war canoes at them, killing 56 of the 80 horses the Spanish had, and dozens of Spanish men drowned or were killed, with about one-third surviving the night. An even smaller proportion of the Tlaxcalans survived the "noche triste."

    After escaping, it was time for the Spanish to reinforce to take and occupy the city for good. To do this, Martin Lopez, a shipbuilder, taught the Tlaxcalans to build brigantines, small sailing ships, which could quickly traverse the lake. This was the most important memory of the Tlaxcalans who related their stories years later, since it was the first time they ever sailed. Battle went on for weeks. The Tlaxcalans and the Spanish used their brigantines to land in less defended areas, loot them and leave. They used cannons to knock down walls and buildings, and then would go fill in canals with rubble or sand. Then, with a flat, open space available, the Spanish were invincible with horses and lances. The Mexica would re-excavate canals, and were twice able to isolate and kill large groups of Spaniards. During the fighting, the city transformed with barricades and canals, and the Mexica took captives to the top of their pyramids to sacrifice them where their comrades would see. The Mexica strung decapitated heads from a rope for all to see. The fighting lasted three months, and the Mexica also dealt with the effects of starvation and their first-ever wave of smallpox. They offered the Spanish safe passage to leave and forget all this, but were rebuffed.

    That's all I have in me for this one. I'm very busy right now and I just wanted to get through my notes on the actual conquest of the city.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Aztec girls (and maybe boys too?) were not given names until their personalities were known, and were called something like "Elder daughter" or "Youngest daughter" until then. 
• Townsend does a great job of telling the story of the Aztecs from a native point of view, which reminds me of Facing East From Indian Country, which I liked for the same reason.
• Until about 1600, more Africans were brought to Mexico than anywhere else in the world.
• Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz wrote some poetry in Nahuatl.
• Indigenous identity in Mexico suffered most in Mexico during the 19th century, when liberals came to rule the country and forced a sort of "Mexicanization" that required everyone to adopt the national culture and speak Spanish.
• Emiliano Zapata soke Nahuatl.

Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm

    The name of this book really drew me in, and I stuck with it because of my interest in learning about the rise of authoritarianism in the early twentieth century. Authors like Fromm, Arendt, and Hoffer are so engaging because their perspectives on the Second World War and authoritarianism are not only well-written, but highly relevant to democratic decline today. Fromm is especially concerned with the problem that is caused by “freedom from” without “freedom to.” Specifically, capitalism and liberalism freed individuals from feudal roles without tying them to anything positive or giving people a way to achieve self-actualization. As a result, individuals found themselves lost and unmoored in the world, and sought out authoritarian movements to anchor them to something. Fromm writes that “modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional, and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.” Fromm is important because while he acknowledges that psychology cannot alone explain the flight to Fascism, he explains in detail the psychology behind why individuals subjugate themselves to a fascist state.

     I think Fromm’s description and analysis of modern society are accurate and remain highly applicable today, but I am still skeptical of his historical analysis of the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation. I think the book suffers from a perspective that begins with the end of the Middle Ages. The book sort of acts like history only exists in Europe, and like history began with the closing of the commons. So much of what Fromm writes is describing why -Europeans- succumbed to authoritarianism, but doesn’t explain much about different groups of people all over the world who have done the same. His conclusions are universal- “We also recognize that the crisis of democracy is not a particularly Italian or German problem, but one confronting every modern state.” But he doesn’t really talk about historical examples or peoples outside Europe. Maybe it would have helped him to write the book fifty years later, seeing authoritarian movements take hold in Asia and Latin America.

     For Fromm, human beings are unique among animals in that humans require a far greater degree of learning than instinct. We have few instincts and are essentially helpless and doomed if left alone in the wilderness as children. We are -free- from instincts and have the free will to decide what to do from birth. In that sense, Fromm writes of “freedom from” that “human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable.” “Freedom from” is the lack of external restraints, while “freedom to” is the positive ability to self actualize, by not being impoverished or socially repressed. Fromm argues that since the Renaissance, the West has made massive advancements in “freedom from” while “freedom to” has lagged behind. I wonder what he would say about non-Westerners dealing with the same issue today. But that gap between “freedom from” and “freedom to” is what “has led, in Europe, to a panicky flight from freedom into new ties or at least into complete indifference.” 

     With the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and the fall of feudalism, religiosity, and the old order, “the individual was left alone; everything depended on his own effort, not on the security of his traditional status.” Today, we often think of this change as purely good, and it was almost definitely a net good. But for many, that loss of traditional status was a bigger loss than their material gains, and for some, social mobility meant mobility downwards, not upwards. Social castes are irrational and wrong, but there are many who benefit from a caste system that leaves them higher in the social hierarchy than they would be otherwise. So like white supremacists today who would rather be poor and benefit from racism, antisemites in Germany would do the same.

     Fromm starts to lose me when he gets deep into Calvin and Luther. He asserts that Calvin’s idea of predestination emerges again in Naziism through the basic idea of inequality of men. But I was unconvinced since lots of people have thought men are unequal, and nothing about Calvinism or Lutheranism could explain why Italy was the first country to adopt Fascism. Fromm is extremely hostile to both Calvin and Luther, writing that they “belonged to the ranks of the greatest haters among the leading figures of history.” But even if you accept that Calvin and Luther were the worst guys ever, it is hard to imagine that they somehow uniquely prepared Germans to become servants to the Fuhrer.

     Critical to Fromm’s analysis is that the same cause, the advent of the modern world, can have two effects. One is to make men more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and the other is to make men more isolated, alone, and afraid. Capitalism severs the individual from the world, allowing him to choose to use his freedom to relate with it spontaneously (which I did not understand), or to give up his freedom to eliminate the gap between the individual and the world.

     Ultimately is it “the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual” that creates the most fertile ground for Fascism. Further aggravating is the fact that facts have lost their power and salience in the modern world since we are bombarded, already by the 1940s, with radio, film, and newspapers that desensitize us to the events of the world. Left with this mass of information that is beyond any person’s comprehension, people become ready to accept any leader who can promise excitement or meaning. The remedy, as I understand it to be, is basically in creating a welfare state, according to Fromm. By meeting the basic needs of the individual and educating him, he is empowered to do that “spontaneous” interaction with the world that helps him achieve the life satisfaction to avoid being seduced by authoritarianism.

Miscellaneous:

• Great passage: “But Hobbes’s picture became outmoded. The more the middle class succeeded in breaking down the power of the former political or religious rulers, the more men succeeded in mastering nature, and the more millions of individuals became economically independent, the more did one come to believe in a rational world and in man as an essentially rational being. The dark and diabolical forces of man’s nature were relegated to the Middle Ages and to still earlier periods of history, and they were explained by lack of knowledge or by the cunning schemes of deceitful kings and priests. One looked back upon these periods as one might at a volcano which for a long time has ceased to be a menace. One felt secure and confident that the achievements of modern democracy had wiped out all sinister forces; the world looked bright and safe like the well-lit streets of a modern city. Wars were supposed to be the last relics of older times and one needed just one more war to end war; economic crises were supposed to be accidents, even though these accidents continued to happen with a certain regularity. When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak. Nietzsche had disturbed the complacent optimism of the nineteenth century; so had Marx in a different way. Another warning had come somewhat later from Freud. To be sure, he and most of his disciples had only a very naive notion of what goes on in society, and most of his applications of psychology to social problems were misleading constructions; yet, by devoting his interest to the phenomena of individual emotional and mental disturbances, he led us to the top of the volcano and made us look into the boiling crater.
• Fromm identifies the Renaissance as a movement by a small group of wealthy elites, while the Reformation was a movement of the urban middle class. So when the Reformation occurred among people who didn’t have the wealth or power that Renaissance patrons and lords had, they were overwhelmed with a sense of individual nothingness and helplessness. They stood alone facing the world, feeling “insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.” 
• What are the significant psychological atmosphere changes going on today? How are they the same or different from those that occurred with the development of capitalism? Is it about a pervasive visibility? Seeing and being seen? We didn’t know what privacy was until we lost it.
• Interesting idea about how death is a bigger idea in more individualistic societies since the death of an individual is just part of the life of the whole in collectivist societies.

In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelda Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations by Merilee Grindle

     So I didn’t love this book but it was an interesting look at turn of the century Mexico and a pretty interesting woman. Zelda Nuttall was a single mother and a Mexican American archaeologist who lived in Mexico but also travelled and lived throughout the United States and Europe. She published about the Aztecs mainly, and helped to make many discoveries.

     Unfortunately, not a ton is documented about her, so a lot of the book is filler about the setting of her life and the people she knew instead of about her. And the book takes a weird tone at times about the way she would assert herself to get credit for her discoveries. It felt a little infantilizing to me and made her seem egotistical instead of just matter-of-factly getting credit for her work. I think it is done to imply a point about her struggles as a woman, but that doesn’t get said explicitly. She is ultimately a really interesting person, but the book is probably a little too long.

Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810 - 1910: An Introduction by Colin M. MacLachlan and William H. Beezley

    So, I wanted to read about Mexico from the Mexican War of Independence until the Mexican Revolution. It turns out that such a book exists, and now I have read it. Mexico's revolution in 1911 is obviously a huge deal in Mexican history and is probably the defining moment in Mexican history, especially if you consider it as one whole historical event along with the Cristero War. But I was interested in how Mexico got to that point, and how Mexico fell behind the US in the time before then. Mexico fought several wars in the 19th century, against the Spanish, against the French, against the United States, and several times against each other. The "crucial century" in the book's title is all about state formation and a gradual stop-and-start strengthening of federal government control that wasn't consolidated until Porfirio Diaz came to power from 1876 to 1911. 

    There are many points at which Mexico ended up politically delayed compared to the British colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. First of all, Mexico didn't want to be independent of Spain. Mexico was forced into independence by the French conquest of Spain. Interestingly, when Spain was liberated from French occupation, Fernando VII returned to the throne unwilling to accept a modified form of constitutional monarchy like many thought. If he had adopted some reforms of liberalism, he might have held onto Mexico, but his actions further motivated the Mexican insurrection. Second, Mexico didn't have a Washington. Everything I read always reinforces how special George Washington was. Having a single figure who embodied the country with unanimous support and who knew when to step down was absolutely critical in early nation-building. The closest Mexico had to that was Father Hidalgo, but he was executed in March of 1811. After that, Mexico continued through a decade of sporadic fighting before securing independence. It is also critical that the United States had a head start, and as neighbors and competitors, used that head start to muscle Mexico out of the way. By the time Mexico gained its independence, the United States had already been independent for decades, had purchased Louisiana from the same French Empire that conquered Spain (which caused Mexican independence) and was encroaching on Mexico's border at a uniquely vulnerable time in Mexican history. Then Mexico just still didn't get very good leaders. Santa Anna is one of these big leaders, but it took a long time for him to become a centralist, and spent a lot of time fighting against central government, and Mexico failed to gain enough central strength to oppose rebels in the north who would form the Republic of Texas. I mean, at this point in time, Mexico was dealing with provinces refusing to send troops to fight in its wars and breaking off. So while we study the Texas portion in America, we don't follow as closely the fact that Jalisco and Zacatecas also seceded at that time.

    One of the critical points of conflict in Mexico's "crucial century" was the role of the Catholic Church, which was the primary line along which conservatives and liberals were divided. When Father Hidalgo issued the grito de Dolores, initiating the war for independence from Spain, he asked the people of Mexico to fight those who would aid in French control over the Spanish colony after Napoleon conquered Spain. It was the threat of liberalism and atheism that specifically prompted the development of a Mexican state, which had been more or less content under Catholic Spanish rule until then. In the final stage of the War of Independence, Agustin de Iturbide promulgated the Plan of Iguala, which made three specific guarantees: independence, religion, and equality. He specifically promised to protect the Catholic Church in the new Mexican state.

    Besides the conservative-liberal divide and/or the secular-religious divide, there was a debate between federalism and centrism. There were liberal centrists and federalists and there were conservative centrists and federalists. The long battle would culminate in an ultimate centralization by the end of the century, but it took a long time to get there. It took far longer and much bloodier conflict in Mexico than in the United States to reach an agreeable plan for an acceptable federal government. The authors say that the federalist-centralist divide was not very philosophical, mainly just depending on where a given liberal or conservative lived in the country, AKA Mexico City or not.

    Mexico didn't really get a clean democracy until 2000. From 1810 to 1876, it was a very weak central state with some elections, but just as many coups and civil wars. From 1876 to 1911, it was a dictatorship under Porfirio Diaz, with some elections. Then until the 1920s, it was in a chaotic revolution, which culminated in the rule of the PRI, a political party that established a one-party state until 2000. That's a very delayed political development. Spain was sending armies to retake Mexico as late as 1829. France intervened in 1838-39. When Santa Anna finally tried to centralize the regime, revolts in favor of federalism swept the entire regime, including seven in Jalisco, five in Puebla, and a temporary independence for Yucatan. Then the Mexican-American War from 1846-48. Liberals and conservatives fought civil wars in the 1850s. Then France invaded again from 1861-67. This was not a stable country or a country that could stabilize! These wars had huge negative impacts on the Mexican economy, reducing output from mines and farms, causing roads to be abandoned, and population loss. Mexico was economically weaker for much of 19th century independence than it was as an 18th century Spanish colony. Around the time that Texas broke away and the United States conquered Mexico's northern half, it took six months for a wagon from Mexico City to reach Santa Fe, New Mexico, and even longer to reach California.

    I'm just gonna wrap this up a little early because I honestly sort of lost where I was in the post and I am just too busy right now but I think I covered the big themes. The last thing I'll mention is the huge French connection going on in 19th century Mexico. French invasions and investments were a really big part of 19th century Mexico and that feels so foreign and bizarre today. Mexico was basically colonized economically by France even though the actual attempts at political takeover never happened. I'll also say that the authors assert that the Porfiriato may have politically stabilized Mexico and grow its economy, but the regime failed to distribute those gains fairly among the people, and resulted in land concentration and a reduction in real wages. The authors point out that Mexico diverged from the successful model of development in Britain and the United States that built strong domestic markets to provide consumption bases for production. Mexico suffered from being too poor to afford its own goods, and relied on external trade at a time when tariffs were rampant abroad.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Guatemala amicably separated from Mexico when Iturbide abdicated the throne of his "Empire of Mexico."
• Iturbide had initially been a royalist officer.
• At the Battle of San Jacinto, Sam Houston found out that the Mexican army bedded down for the night without setting a watch. So he took his numerically outnumbered force and led an attack that defeated them and caught Santa Anna.
• The Paseo de la Reforms was originally modeled off the Champs Elysees and created by the French Emperor Maximillian, who named it the Calzada de la Emperatriz. Benito Juarez named it Paseo de la Reforma.
• During the American Civil War, the Union occupied Brownsville, Texas, and the result was the creation of a boomtown called Bagdad on the south side of the Rio Grande that disappeared again after the war.
• The Yucatan Peninsula became independent in the mid-19th century and also had the Caste War, which caused a significant population decline.