Book Review: A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914-1918

A World Undone:  The Story of the Great War 1914-1918  by G.J. Meyer

A fantastic overview of World War One. Meyer writes with integrity and style making even the most tedious details clear and understandable. Between each chapter describing the chronological events of the war, Meyer places chapters of "Background;" The Serbs, The Hapsburgs, The Hohenzollerns, The Romanovs, The Junkers, The Sea War, Genocide, Lawrence of Arabia, Ludendorff, War and Poetry (my favorite background chapter) Kaiser Wilhelm, etc. These chapters were invaluable to a reader like myself, who picked up this book in hopes of learning about a war about which I found I knew very little when I visited the National World War One museum in Kansas City. 

But it is an overview. Anyone wanting intricate particulars should probably find another volume. The detail Meyer manages to cover in some 600 pages is impressive but he refrains from tedious specifics on troop movements and battle maneuvers and implements of war (rifles are just rifles - no more specific than that). There are very few maps (which may be my one negative note) but without these details, the broad picture of the war is clearer, which is good because this is one of those wars (and indeed, perhaps all wars are, in the end, like this) where one spends most of one's time wondering what in the hell everyone was thinking and why in the hell they started fighting in the first place.

The futility of the war, as a whole, can be summed up in a quote Meyer uses to summarize the Second Battle of Artois; "As usual, the fight went on long after any chance of success had evaporated, with repeated French and British attacks neutralized by German counterattacks, casualties piling up, and nothing of importance accomplished."

There isn't just one battle of Ypres. There are four or five. I lost count. The generals didn't understand their new technology and how industrialization had changed the ways war "should" be fought; they just kept sending bodies into a mincing machine; rifles were still equipped with bayonets but there was no reason for them to be. War had changed. Strategy had not. And that is one of the many tragedies of this war.

French general Petain decried the old philosophy, writing that "this war would not be won by some breakthrough, some great and brilliantly executed conclusive battle. This was a war of attrition, and it required keeping casualties at a tolerable levels. 'Success will come in the final analysis,' he said, 'to the side which has the last man.'" No one listened.

Why the fighting started remains somewhat of a convoluted mystery that begs study of hundreds of years of European history to fully understand the complex systems of alliance in which Europe was embroiled at the turn of the 20th century. But why they kept fighting is clear; pride. Each country had saturated their citizens with propaganda about the enemy so completely and effectively that when it became clear that it would be impossible to win, negotiating peace was also impossible. How do you negotiate peace with the devil?

The Battle of Verdun is an excellent example of all the above points; the quagmire of history and the futility of the war as it was being fought and the pride that kept the war going long after it was clear no one could really win.

Verdun had been an important location since the Roman times (Verodunum meaning 'strong fort') Meyer writes in the "Old Wounds Unhealed" background chapter, that throughout history, "Any mass of warriors on the rampage in Western Europe was likely to find itself drawn to Verdun. Thus Verdun's whole history has been written in blood. Even Attila the Hun sacked and burned the place. When the quarreling grandsons of Charlemagne met in 843 to divide the Frankish empire, they did so at Verdun. Their agreement, the Treaty of Verdun, created three new realms. In the west was the Kingdom of the West Franks, which would evolve over time into France. The Kingdom of the East Franks became Germany. It is not much of an exaggeration, in light of this history, to say that not only France and Germany but also their twelve hundred years of struggle over the territories between the Meuse and the Rhine all were born at Verdun."

Meyer continues, "Anyone inclined to believe that some dark force beyond human comprehension intervened again and again to make the Great War long and ruinous would have no difficulty in finding evidence to support such a thesis. There is no better example than the Battle of Verdun, which in its length and cost and brutality and finally in its sheer pointlessness has always and rightly been seen as a perfect microcosm of the war itself."

Shell Shock. This was new. And a "singularly ill-chosen term." But in 1922 around six thousand British veterans were still living in insane asylums. Shell shock was simply the human reaction to the futility; "It remained inadmissible for physicians to suggest that a loss of the will to fight could ever be justified. The few who dared to suggest that it might be rational for a man to disobey an order that could not possibly lead to anything but sudden death - an order to climb out of a hole into a blanketing gunfire, for example - were likely to be dismissed." War had changed. Those who spearheaded its waging had not.

The rising malcontent is trackable nowhere better than in the poetry and letters of the soldiers and the silence of men of letters. At the beginining of the war, leading authors on both sides piped up with declarations of patriotism and noble verses describing the honor and glory of war. By 1917, they had all but fallen silent, as if saying there was nothing they could say. A young infantry officer, Roland Leighton, wrote to his fiancee, after she sent him a book of poetry declaring war purifying, patriotic and beautiful:

"Let him who thinks that War is a glorious golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honor and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half-crouching as it fell, supported on one arm, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped around it; and let him realize how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence. Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these."

Leighton was dead soon after he wrote the letter.

As the war entered its third year, desperation set in on both sides. "They were throwing everything they had - their people, their production capabilities, all the wealth accumulated over generations of industrial development - into the effort to destroy one another." Mutinies were rampant ("one official called the big French mutiny 'a sort of moral nihilism, an army without faith,' which is exactly what happens when people finally discover the futility of a system to which they have pledged allegiance") and though the generals had made some adjustments to how troops and materials were used, they all still pushed for the big breakthrough. Which never came.

And so it remained until Germany finally pushed things too far and stretched themselves beyond capacity; their soldiers were few, their citizens starving. They agreed to a negotiated peace and the Allies punished them so severely that the path was cleared for the discontent that allowed the rise of Hitler.

But that is another story.

"Historic events are often said to have 'changed everything.' In the case of the Great War this is, for once, true. The war really did change everything: not just borders, not just governments and the fate of nations, but the way people have seen the world and themselves ever since. It became a kind of hole in time, leaving the postwar world permanently disconnected from everything that had come before."

The Whole Story

Last week in the New York Times an article entitled   We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint   censured the popular Microsoft software for limiting military presentations to shallow and mindless proportions.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid," said Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander.

"It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," General McMaster said in a telephone interview.  "Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable."

Um, some problems?  How about most problems?

Politics.  Religion.  Immigration.  Energy.  Environment.  Health Care.  Abortion.

Shall I go on?

We are a polarized nation because we’ve become a PowerPoint nation.  We take our soundbites of summarized information from our pet sources, which are designed to encapsulate complex and dichotomous issues into shout-able phrases and ideas that match our politics.

And when you can shout an idea, it has no depth. 

Drill, baby, drill.   

BUILD THE FENCE

The Nazis Were Socialists

Vote Democrat, it's easier than getting a job. 

Vote Republican, it's easier than getting a life. 

Vote Green, it's easier than getting a clue.

In 1776, Liberals Fought For Independence; Conservatives Wore Red Coats

Don’t want a government?  Move to Somalia.

Who would Jesus bomb?

Has Anyone Seen Our Constitution Lately?

Guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.

If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?

These are slogans.  Propaganda.  The issues alluded to above are big, messy, complex issues with no easy answers.  In and of itself, propaganda is not a bad thing.  It becomes a bad thing, a deadly form of misdirection, when, instead of thinking, we take boiled-down tag-lines and craft our whole idea of who we are, what we think and who is right or wrong along the bold and carelessly drawn lines of buzzword black and white.

But the real world isn’t made up of bold black and white lines.  The world is gray.  A million shades of gray.

Buzzword propaganda never gives us the whole story.  Obviously.  But the media caters to our hunger for abbreviation and gives us buzzword propaganda instead of news.  And though we might think that this is a recent development (and, certainly, it has gotten more epidemic with the onset of 24-hour news channels and web-based news), I would guess that, since the dawn of human communication, purveyors of news have understood that people crave easy answers and condensed digests of simplicity rather than the cluttered aggregate of reality that would leave us free to form our own opinions.   Thomas Jefferson said, “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

And I just did what I’m railing against;  I quoted Jefferson and made him support my point.  Propaganda.  It turns out that I can make Jefferson support a variety of different ideas.

Jefferson is a Liberal

"Aristocrats fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society."

Jefferson is a Conservative

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

Jefferson is an Atheist

"Question with boldness even the existence of God"

Jefferson is a Spiritualist

“Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.”

Jefferson is a true follower of Jesus
“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus Christ]  by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence..."

In every one of these instances, we’re missing context.  And context changes meaning.  Here is a Jefferson quote that is often taken out of context;

“To this a single observation shall yet be added. Whether property alone, and the whole of what each citizen possesses, shall be subject to contribution, or only its surplus after satisfying his first wants, or whether the faculties of body and mind shall contribute also from their annual earnings, is a question to be decided. But, when decided, and the principle settled, it is to be equally and fairly applied to all. To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers' has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association,  the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.  If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree ; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature, while extra-taxation violates it.”

I’ve seen this condensed by Conservatives as,  “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers' has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association,  the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.”

Liberals condense it like this;  ”If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree ...” 

If you don’t have access to the full quote, you don’t see the whole picture.  You can’t even see the whole picture with the whole quote because the quote comes from a letter that provides even more context.  

But we read the quote, or part of the quote, and say, “Hey!  Jefferson thinks the way I think!”   And we say this even though what we "think" is a broad brush stroke that we hand-picked to match the notions and ideas we formed by reading and listening to the hand-picked abridgments of others.

Kate Walbert, in her novel A Short History of Women, wrote, “"Conversation is now just approximations of opinions adopted from other opinions that were approximations of opinions, etcetera, etcetera. I'm just trying to be real when everything is an approximation." 

And that’s what I’m trying to do here, in this ridiculous blog; be real in a world of approximation.

Of course, I don’t have time to research every story to the depth it would take to find the whole story.  What I DO have time to do is to allow my assumptions to be presented as just that; assumptions.  I have opinions.  I have ideas.  I have very strident views of how things ought to be done.  But I know they are my ideas.  Only ideas.   Not basic truths.   And my assumptions change as I develop and grow.

I believe what I believe.  I take stands.  I advocate.  I counsel.   I teach.  But part of teaching is learning.

If I don’t learn from you - if I just shout and decry your wrongness and stupidity - I have cut myself off from the opportunity to strengthen my beliefs while simultaneously incorporating some of yours into my lexicon.

We can’t escape our PowerPoint World.  But we can prevent our PowerPoint World from irretrievably polarizing us by listening to our opposition - provided they, too, learn not to shout and synopsize without real meaning attached.

You and I may never fully agree but if I have your story, and you have mine, we are one step closer to that whole story that I crave.

One hundred and forty characters

Though I reluctantly participate in some forms of social networking I have not yet found love for Twitter.  I find it flagrantly absurd to consider that one’s every waking moment must be logged for all to consume, replete with asterisks, pound signs and asperands.  Furthermore, I find it illogical and impossible that anyone believes that they can effectively express oneself with any sense of clarity and completeness using only one-hundred and forty characters.

One-hundred and forty characters.  An arbitrary length determined by some mobile phone engineer as perfectly sufficient for human communication via text and adopted by an entire online community of people attempting to find meaning by narrating and documenting their meaninglessness - in one hundred and forty characters or less.  

I have only recently learned to text but I’m not good at it.  At all.  Even now that I have a phone with an actual miniature keyboard.  And it’s not only that the keyboard is too small even for those of lilliputian dimensions.  It’s because I don’t know how to say things succinctly. I once used the word “superfluous” in a text.  And I didn’t do it ironically. 

You might write, “I saw a cat.”  I would write,  “I glimpsed a creature of the feline persuasion.”

You might write, “There’s rain on the window.”  I would write, “I gather from the rivulets of liquid slinking like new tadpoles from the top of my window to the bottom that it is raining outside.”

You might describe someone as uptight.  I would describe that same person as so stiff and formal that Roman statuary break the bonds of permanent paralysis in stone to cover their exposed parts when she walked by.

You might describe someone as being in a hurry.  I would say they were moving in a manner suggesting a full bladder combined with the realization that they left the iron plugged in and placed squarely on a linen shirt.

Ernest Hemingway would spit upon my copy and then pour a stiff drink.  He wrote The Old Man and the Sea.  I would have written The Venerable Gentleman and the Briny Waves. No flowery adjectives for Hemingway; piss on them.  Make it short.  Make it mean something without really saying anything.

For sale: baby shoes, never used.

Hemingway would have made one hell of a Tweeter, though it is likely he would have refused to participate, citing the relentless banality of the world chronicled there.

And as far as authors go, I prefer the master of British wit, P.G. Wodehouse, to Hemingway, hands down.  After all, where Hemingway said, “There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed,” Wodehouse said, “I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.”  No contest.

In Wodehouse, one is not simply “fat.”  One is “a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'” Or one fits into the “biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.”

Wodehouse has a way with words that I admire.  That I emulate.  A way with words to which I aspire.  Wodehouse is a master of the kind of descriptive prose I adore.  The elegant insult.  The turn of phrase. 

One of my favorite Wodehouse-ian moments appears in Right, Ho Jeeves! - an exchange of telegrams between Bertie Wooster and his Aunt Dahlia which engages the reader in their relationship whilst simultaneously lampooning the telegram's penchant for minimalism, which makes it incapable of fully functioning as a medium of true communication.

Come at once.  Travers.

Perplexed.  Explain.  Bertie.

What on earth is there to be perplexed about, ass?  Come at once.  Travers.

How do you mean come at once?  Regards.  Bertie.

I mean come at once, you maddening half-wit.  What did you think I meant?  Come at once or expect an aunt’s curse first post tomorrow.  Love.  Travers.

When you say “Come” do you mean “Come to Brinkley Court?”  And when you say “At once” do you mean “At once?”  Fogged.  At a loss.  All the best.  Bertie

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.  It doesn’t matter whether you understand or not.  You just come at once, as I tell you, and for heaven’s sake stop this backchat.  Do you think I am made of money that I can afford to send you telegrams every ten minutes?  Stop being a fathead and come immediately.  Love.  Travers.

Suffice it to say, Bertie doesn’t come.  But he sends a friend; Gussie Fink-Nottle.  The aunt unleashes, again in telegram form;

Am taking legal advice to ascertain whether strangling an idiot nephew counts as murder.  If it doesn’t, look out for yourself.  Consider your conduct frozen limit.  What do you mean by planting your loathsome friends on me like this?  Do you think Brinkley court is a leper colony or what is it?  Who is this Spink-Bottle?   Love.  Travers.

Not Bottle.  Nottle.  Regards, Bertie.

Well, this friend of yours has got here, and I must say that for a friend of yours he seems less sub-human than I expected.  A bit of a pop-eyed bleater, but on the whole clean and civil, and certainly most informative about newts.  Am considering arranging a series of lectures for him in neighbourhood.  All the same, I like your nerve using my house as a summer-hotel resort and shall have much to say to you on the subject when you come down.  Expect you the thirtieth.  Bring spats.  Love.  Travers.

On consulting engagement book find it impossible come Brinkley Court.  Deeply regret. Toodle-oo.  Bertie.

Oh, so it’s like that, is it?  You and your engagement book, indeed.  Deeply regret my foot.  Let me tell you, my lad, that you will regret it a jolly sight more deeply if you don’t come down.  If you imagine for one moment that you are going to get out of distributing those prizes you are very much mistaken.  Deeply regret Brinkley Court hundred miles from London as unable to hit you with a brick.  Love. Travers.

No, but dash it, listen.  Honestly, you don’t want me.  Get Fink-Nottle distribute prizes.  A born distributor, who will do you credit.  Confidently anticipate Augustus Fink-Nottle as Master of Revels on thirty-first would make a genuine sensation.  Do not miss this great chance, which may never occur again.  Tinkerty-tonk.  Bertie.

Well, all right.  Something in what you say, I suppose.  Consider you treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardy custard, but have booked Spink-Bottle.  Stay where you are, then, and I hope you get run over by an omnibus.  Love.  Travers.

I shudder to think what Wodehouse would make of our sound-bite society.   I also wish like hell he were still around; Bertie Wooster and Aunt Dahlia could have some marvelous tiffs via Twitter.

DTravers  @WoosterB regret to inform you that Spink-Bottle unable to fulfill required duty.  Skype at once.

WoosterB @DTravers Skype down.  Connection not functional.  Jeeves on the case.  #verygoodjeeves

DTravers @WoosterB Poppycock. If you can twat, you can skype. Need immediate assistance w/Spink-Bottle’s newts  #sheturnedmeinto

WoosterB @DTravers Could not believe you not even if I knew you were telling the truth. #whatho.  

DTravers @WoosterB  Abysmal chump. It is young men like you who make a person with the future of the race at heart despair #uselessnephew

And so on.  Of course, with only one hundred and forty characters the insults are less poetic.   And less epic.  And much less amusing.   Difficult to find meaning in a sea of # and @ and /.

Ergo, I embrace words. And rococo description.  And redundant adjectives.  With my writing, I shall rebel against an entire culture learning to express itself in the most abridged way possible.  I refuse to abbreviate.  I spurn text-speak.  Categorically.  And emphatically.

And I think even Hemingway would have shuddered at lol, omg, and “you” replaced with u.

BTW?  7,806 characters: the equivalent of about 56 tweets.  #verbose.

Exponential Growth

I am no mathematician or scientist.  I hear the term "exponential growth" and I fade into a painful reverie that includes all of the math and science teachers who ever looked over their glasses at me, exasperation brimming in their throats, as I brought a paper up to their desk with yet another question.  The definition - Exponential growth occurs when the growth rate of a mathematical function is proportional to the function's current value - clears nothing up for me.

This week, I watched Earth Days on PBS, a documentary about the development of the environmental movement.  Dennis Meadows, the author of The Limits to Growth, the 1972 book decrying the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, began to discuss the concept of exponential growth using a tablecloth as an example;  


Most of us don’t have an experience of growth the way it’s impacting the planet because you get up every morning and look around and it seems to be pretty much as it was yesterday. Our species just naturally tends to assume that change happens more or less linearly: one, two, three, four, five, six. Like that. But in fact, the problems that are causing environmental deterioration arise out of exponential growth, which is where instead of going up by a constant amount over some time period; it goes up by a percentage over some time period.

I’ve tried to illustrate what this means with a very simple example, I bring out a tablecloth, is show it to everybody. I fold it four times. So I am doubling the thickness of the tablecloth four times. And I let everybody see it, and I say suppose that is half an inch thick, not much. If I were to fold it another 15, 16 times, how thick would it be? Now I can’t actually, but suppose I could do that. When you keep doubling the tablecloth, of course it is growing exponentially, and after 21 folds it’ll be about a mile thick. If I double it another five or six times, it extends out past the edge of space. Continuing that process, rather quickly it gets you amazingly big numbers. With just 39 folds, it is already shooting past the moon. That is how quickly you get to very large numbers when a process grows exponentially.


This video is another visual example of exponential growth; the chain reaction set off by the action of one item involving itself with another.  Which involves itself with another.  And so on.

This morning, I woke up and thought about Earth Day.  I've thought about all the changes I've made to the way I live my life with regards to my health and the health of the world in which I live.   I thought about how some of those changes are second-nature now and some are still a struggle.


Then I thought about reusable bags. 


Only a couple of years ago, checkers at various stores looked at me cross-eyed when I held out my reusable bag and, trying to inject levity in what was an uncomfortable situation because of their judgmental raised eyebrows, said, "Trick or Treat!"   I still say "Trick or Treat" but now the person behind me has their own bags, too.  And the person in front of me apologizes for having forgotten theirs in the car.  

Exponential growth.  In a fit of hubris, I can see that someone like me, having the guts to go into Target with my reusable bag, caused someone else to have the guts to do the same.  And then that someone else inspired someone else.  And so on.

These are not heroic actions; it used to be uncomfortable and rather embarrassing to walk into a huge chain store with a reusable bag.  But it was never brave.  Strangers laughed or rolled their eyes.  Some of the more crotchety and cheeky folks had the gall to lecture me; "One person cannot make a difference.   And you're holding up the line."   I would smile and say, "Maybe not.  But it doesn't hurt to try.  Sorry to inconvenience you."

But it isn't uncomfortable anymore.  Bringing your own bags is now the acceptable norm.  Even the crotchety, cheeky people are doing it.

How did that happen?  Exponential growth.

We often hear the term applied to unfathomable concepts.  Or used by preachers of doom to scare us into a sense of paralyzing fear.  But why can't we rehabilitate it and use it to help us make our small changes meaningful?

Think of one of your small gestures to improve the world around you.  Now think of one person you may have inspired to do the same.  Now think of the people that person may have inspired.   And so on.

Exponential growth.

Some days - most days - all days - the problems of the world seem too insurmountable to fix.  So we stop doing even the small things.  Because the small things are useless.  The small things are futile.   The small things cannot possibly make a difference.

But they can.  The potential for exponential growth makes our small gestures mammoth forces.  Agents of change.  A recipe for a better world.

What did you do today that has the potential for positive exponential growth?

Book Review: The Once and Future King

The Once and Future King
by T.H. White 

I began re-reading a favorite from childhood because I didn't remember anything about it but I always smiled when I saw the cover so I must have enjoyed it at least a little before I went senile and lost all vivid memory of anything.

Now that I've made it through the thick tome, I realize that, as a child, I only read the first book of the four included; Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind. I enjoyed all four, The Queen of Air and Darkness being my least favorite, as it deals with parts of the storyline that depict borderline child abuse, poor behavior and violence, three of my least favorite things.

T.H. White does a laudable job re-tooling the Arthur legend for "modern" audiences. His writing style is almost Wodehousian, with amusing asides and comments in a thinly veiled author's voice. White uses much anachronism (Pellinore wears glasses, the Tower of London exists, etc.) and twirls the timeline of the story around with great freedom, highlighting that there is no one actual myth. The Arthur legends are of dubious origin and every treatment of them is slightly different in detail. But the big lessons remain and though White's main purpose as he tells the story is to highlight the big lessons and morals, he has no qualms about entertaining the reader whilst doing so. I laughed out loud as much as I put my book aside to think for a moment.

A great read.

I dog-eared pages that included passages that made me think and ended up with a good many folded corners. A selection;

"Only fools want to be great"

"Learn why the world wags and what wags it"

"The destiny of Man is to unite, not divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees"

"There is no excuse for war, none whatever, and whatever the wrong which your nation might be doing to mine - short of war - my nation would be in the wrong if it started a war so as to redress it. A murderer, for instance, is not allowed to plead that his victim was rich and oppressing him - so why should a nation be allowed to? Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not by force"

"Unless you can make the world wag better than it does at present, King, your reign will be an endless series of petty battles, in which the aggressions will either be from spiteful reasons or from sporting ones, and in which the poor man will be the only one who dies."

"Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm troopers, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people"

"There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. The seventh sense. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. At this stage we begin to forget that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life ... there was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. There were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was. what we were ourselves. All of these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave"

"The world is beautiful if you are beautiful, and you can't get unless you give"

"She turned to him with a face of composure and relief - the efficient and undramatic face which women achieve when they have nursing to do or some other employment of efficiency."

"Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe - his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin-pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction"

"Perhaps, so long as people tried to possess things separately from each other, even honour and souls, there would be wars forever. Perhaps wars only happened between those who had and those who had not. As against this, you were forced to place the fact that nobody could define the state of 'having.' A knight with a silver suit of armour would immediately call himself a have-not, if he met a knight with a golden one. Perhaps war was due to fear; to fear of reliability. Unless there was truth, and unless people told the truth, there was always danger in everything outside the individual. You told truth to yourself, but you had no surety for your neighbour. This uncertainty must end by making the neighbor a menace. Perhaps wars happened because nations were like people - they had feelings of inferiority, or of superiority, or of revenge, or of fear. Suspicion and fear: possessiveness and greed: resentment for ancestral wrong: all these seemed a part of it. Yet they were not the solution. He could not see the real solution." 

Book Review: Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell 

I will never shop again.

I am thrifty. I hate to spend money. Though I have tried not to become dependent on big box stores, I do go to Target and Whole Foods on a fairly regular basis. I love a good deal. But how much do my good deals really cost?  Cheap educated me. And though my initial statement was a blatant exaggeration, it is solidly true that I have spent most of my mental energy while reading this book trying to formulate a plan to cut all of my ties to the world of discounting.

Sound crazy? It probably does. And that's why America is so effed up. We have no idea the damage we are doing, to ourselves, to our economy, to people in other countries we'll never meet, by rejoicing at a deal on cheap merchandise. As Shell writes in the opening note to readers, her warning, "Cheap fuel, cheap loans, cheap consumer goods do not pave the road to salvation. On the contrary, our Faustian pact with bargains contributed to the worst recession of two generations. The economics of Cheap cramps innovation, contributes to the decline of once flourishing industries, and threatens our proud heritage of craftsmanship. The ennoblement of Cheap marks a radical departure in American culture and a titanic shift in our national priorities."

See, we didn't used to be Cheap. When chain stores, CHAIN STORES, took their first wobbling steps on American soil, people were outraged. Anti-chain protesters in the 1920s represented almost 7 percent of the nation's population. A Shreveport, LA radio man, William Henderson, warned that chains would have the "... ruinous and devastating effect of sending the profits of business out of our local communities to a common center, Wall Street ... We have insisted that the payment of starvation wages such as the chain-store system fosters must be eradicated."

Obviously, Henderson and the 7-percenters lost. Chains took hold. Then came the discounters. Chains weren't enough profit and then Eugene Ferkauf came along, pioneering the low-margin, low-service, high-turnover model that our discounters still follow. Merchandise sells itself and employees are eminently replaceable because they are no longer experienced sales professionals but, rather, low-skill merchandise stockers and checkers. So down went wages. But logic said it was ok that wages went down because prices were going down too. So onward.

Woolworth's got into the act with Woolco, a chain that pioneered the "oversized, free-standing store with acres of free parking and the promise of one-stop shopping for a wide selection of merchandise at the lowest possible price." Shell continues, "The beauty part was this: By cutting back on customer service and most other frills, discounters not only saved money but created the impression that their merchandise was cheap due not to low quality but to low overhead." While this was partially true (wages being low, real estate in the middle of nowhere being sold at an incentive) quality levels sank dramatically; because the discounters were so big and powerful, they started pressuring suppliers to lower prices. And suppliers did this by squeezing more out of less. And quality, and craftsmanship, inevitably suffered.

But who cares if my toaster blew up? I'll just go to the Woolco and buy another one. Onward!

And so it goes. No one listened in the late seventies when Jimmy Carter railed against the direction America was taking; "...too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption ... (the) piling up of material goods leads to an emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose." But that wasn't Carter's zinger. The zinger, the whole reason for Cheap, in my opinion, is this; Americans have "a mistaken idea of freedom [as] the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others."

Boom. 

Cricket. Cricket. Cricket.   Did someone say something?

And onward.

Shell writes, "Harvard cultural historian Lizabeth Cohen has pointed out that mass market consumption offers the facade of social equality without forcing society to go through the hard work of redistributing wealth. Low prices lead consumers to think they can get what they want without out necessarily getting what they want - or need. The ancient Roman phrase for this is panem et circenses, bread and circuses, the art of plying citizens with pleasures to distract them from pain. Today, low prices are the circus."

Some Americans are, at this very moment, writhing and foaming at the mouth due to President Obama's "socialist" agenda. Put Carter's zinger together with Cohen's astute observation and one comes closer to seeing the reason why.

So we're ok that Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott Jr. took home in his bi-weekly paycheck in February 2009 what his average employee would earn in a lifetime. We don't get angry when Scott states that retail doesn't have a responsibility towards its employees; it has a loyalty to low prices, all the time, no matter what. And to get these low prices, one has to do more than treat employees like indentured servants; one has to cut quality, safety, environmental responsibility and human dignity. As Shell puts it, "As citizens, we recognize this 'collateral damage,' deplore it, and frequently decry it. But as consumers we habitually downplay and ignore it. We rail against exploitation of low-paid workers in Asia as we drive twenty minutes to the Big Box to save three bucks on tube socks and a dollar on underpants. We fume over the mistreatment of animals by agribusiness but freak out at an uptick in food prices. We lecture our kids about social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far flung foreign shore. Maintaining cognitive dissonance is one way to navigate a world of contradictions, and on an individual basis, there's much to be said for this. But somehow the Age of Cheap has raised cognitive dissonance to a societal norm."

We've lost our sense of thrift. We've lost our patience; we want something, we get it now. We don't care where it came from or that we can't pay for it. Now. Now. Now. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap. Shell writes, "A thrifty person does not drive miles to save three bucks on tube socks. A cheap person might. ... Cheap is about scratching the itch, about making real the impossible dream of having one's cake and eating it, too."

So the world is, in the words of a salesclerk at Bergdorf Goodman as he watched customers pawing through a discount bin of handbags, "off its axis." We've lost touch with the provenance of our furniture, our clothing, even our food. Craft is hard to find now. Shell writes, "Craftsmanship cements a relationship of trust between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines ..."

Cheap things resist involvement. We'll put an IKEA bookcase out on the curb because it's easier to buy a new one than disassemble and move an old one. Cheap encourages disposable. Disposable encourages waste. So we don't fix small appliances anymore. We don't even know how. We throw them away and buy new ones. Because we can. Because they are Cheap.

And recession just encourages Cheap. Wal-Mart's sales have increased substantially during the current economic downturn; discounters profit when America hits bottom. "Poverty in America is market potential unrealized," said Andrew Young, a Wal-Mart spokesperson. This may explain why Wal-Mart lobbies not only against unions but against health care reform and other worker protections. The poor benefit the discounters just as much, or more, than the discounters benefit the poor. Though whether Cheap benefits the poor is a loaded theory ripe for arguing, which I will not do here.

And then there's food. Coming straight off Michael Pollan's writings, I was ready for the food issues. Food farmed, harvested and processed in enormous quantities and sold at very low prices is probably not, in the strictest definition, food. Low prices cause low overhead which causes lack of oversight, which causes contamination, infestation and infection. Add to that; goverment subsidies help agribusiness keep prices low; but they also help agribusiness squeeze the small farmer out of business and create a monopoly where consumers don't have an alternative to the low-quality, high-quantity food they create. And as bad as it is in American, it's worse overseas. Pulling people off the farm floods city centers with the unemployed (who are desperate enough to take jobs standing knee-deep in noxious clothing dye to make my 2 dollar tshirt ... but I digress). These displaced workers often end up in the United States, too, stressing our welfare and unemployment system. But we won't pay for them. Or even help them. Even though our penchant for cheap food put them there.

Broad swath I just cut, admittedly. But the pattern is unavoidable. And we just won't see it. We refuse to see it. Because we don't want to pay too much for anything. Because that wouldn't be fair.

But Americans spend less for food than do citizens of any other developed nation; and few people at the McDonald's drive-thru ever stop to think about that 99 cent burger they just ate (in their car, but I again digress). How on earth can anyone possibly raise a cow, feed it, butcher it, process it, freeze it, truck it across country and reheat it for 99 cents?  Then there are the environmental effects of the agribusiness system (most tellingly disgusting is one process for eradicating manure; liquifying it and spraying it into the air, letting it fall where ever it falls). Then there are imports from countries with even less oversight and care than we have here. But really. How can it possibly be cheaper to buy garlic imported from China than garlic grown in California if I live in Missouri? But it is. And we buy. But we fail to ask why or process the idea that it cannot possibly be a good thing in the long run. Cognitive dissonance again.

Perhaps by now you are thinking that it would be too expensive to change the system; after all, we are all on a budget and we need affordable goods. Ok. Robert Pollin, professor of labor economics, did a study just for you. If the wages of apparel workers in Mexico were raised by by 25 or even 30 percent it would raise the price of a shirt in the United States by 1.2 percent. A 30 percent raise for a worker would cause a $20 shirt to cost $20.24. We won't stop to pick up a quarter in a parking lot but we'll keep half the world in indentured servitude for that same quarter. Less one penny. Cognitive dissonance one more time.

But we are caught in a cycle. And we need innovation.

"What is happening is that we are creating low-income workers who become low-wage consumers who seek low-priced goods. Stores are built strategically to cater to these low-wage earners, filled with products that are there for the single reason that they are affordable. This is diabolical strategy, an evil strategy. What it comes down to is one group of workers eating another while the big boys in corporate sit back and watch the carnage." Robert Bruno

"Henry Ford is lionized for connecting the dots between worker prosperity and profitability. He understood that when workers are paid enough to purchase the fruits of their labor, companies thrive and communities prosper. When workers no longer have the means to buy what they make - or, for that matter, what other decently treated workers make - companies fail and economies crumble." - Ellen Ruppel Shell

"The discipline of the capitalist is the same as that of the frugalist. He differs from the latter in that he has no regard for the objects through which productive power is acquired. He does not hesitate to exploit natural resources, lands, dumb animals and even his fellowman. Capital to such a man is an abstract fund, made up of perishable elements which are constantly replaced. The frugalist takes a vital interest in his tools, in his land, and in the goods he produces. He has a definite attachment to each. He dislikes to see an old coat wear out, and old wagon break down, or an old horse go lame. He always thinks of concrete things, wants them and nothing else. He desires not land, but a given farm; not horses or cattle and machines, but particular breeds and implements; not a shelter, but a home ... He rejects as unworthy what is below standard and despises as luxurious what is above or outside of it. Dominated by activities, he thinks of capital as a means to a particular end." Simon Nelson Patten - 1905

So onward. As frugalists. As consumers who demand different, better and more fair. Pay the extra 3 bucks for the free trade products, the produce from your local farmer, the eggs from your local chickens, the milk from your local dairy. Start there. And onward.