France

When Formalism Kills

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I’ve read a great deal about the French defeat of 1940, attempting to understand the military, political, and cultural factors behind this debacle. (Some of my conclusions can be found  here.)  I had not, however, encountered a report Picasso’s response to Matisse, when the latter asked him, “But what about our generals, what are they doing?”

According to this article, Picasso’s response was “Our generals? They’re the masters at the Ecole des Beaux Arts!”…ie, men possessed by the same rote formulae and absence of observation and obsessive traditionalism as the academic artists.

Picasso’s comment is entirely consistent with the observations of Andre Beaufre, in 1940 a young captain on the French staff and after the war a general. When Beaufre was promoted to a staff position…

I saw very quickly that our seniors were primarily concerned with forms of drafting. Every memorandum had to be perfect, written in a concise, impersonal style, and conforming to a logical and faultless plan–but so abstract that it had to be read several times before one could find out what it was about…”I have the honour to inform you that I have decided…I envisage…I attach some importance to the fact that…” Actually no one decided more than the barest minimum, and what indeed was decided was pretty trivial.

I believe that the kind of formalism of which Picasso and Beaufre spoke is becoming increasingly dominant in many spheres of American society (though hopefully not the the degree to which it pervaded the inter-war French military…and that this malign phenomenon is largely a side effect of the higher-education bubble, although it is also being driven to a certain extent by the growth of government and the increasingly-abstract nature of much work.

Thoughts?

Mike Lotus Speaking in Paris, France on May 23, 2014 about “America 3.0, Decentralization and the Tenth Amendment”

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I will be speaking at the AFEA (The French Association for American Studies, Association Française d’Études Américaines) 2014 Conference. The title of the conference is The USA: Models, Counter-Models, The End of Models?

I will participate in a panel entitled “American Politics: What future model for political America: manifestly gridlocked destiny or reinvented union?” The panel will be at 8:15 to 11:45 a.m. on May 23, 2014. The venue is Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (13 rue Santeuil).

The panel will consist of Jérôme Noirot, of the Ecole Centrale, Lyon, the organizer of the panel, myself, and the following distinguished persons, speaking on the following subjects:

Ashley Byock (Edgewood College), «  The Bonded/Resistant Slave Body and The Emergence of Neoliberalism in the U.S. Context   ».
”¨Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3), «American Mythology in Presidential Discourse  : National Shared Values or Political Partisanship  ? ».
”¨François Vergniollle de Chantal (Université Paris Diderot),     «Polarized  politics under President Obama ».

I will speak on “America 3.0, Decentralization and the Tenth Amendment.”

(Don’t tell anyone, but I am currently mugging up on the Tenth Amendment!)

Immense thanks to Jérôme Noirot for this invitation. Initially Jim Bennett was the invitee, but Jim could not make it. So I am pinch hitting for the maestro!

I also offer my heartfelt thanks to two very good friends whose financial support helped to make this trip possible, and two a third old friend who kindly offered to let me stay at his home in Paris.

A detailed description of the issues to be raised in the panel discussion is below the fold.

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Descent of the Chioula, and GoPro

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Last year on my annual pilgrimage to cycling valhalla in the Pyrenees I took my GoPro camera for the first time. Below is my descent of the Col du Chioula, headed back toward Ax les Thermes (best viewed in HD).

This was probably my best descent of last year, the road surface and weather being just right. Everything fell into place. For those wondering, my top speed on this descent was 48.2 mph.

I took an insane amount of footage with my GoPro last year, and I am glad I did. But the problem is that when you bring back these hours and hours of video, there is nowhere for you to go with it. Options are buying an external hard drive and storing them there, or uploading them to one of many websites that do this sort of thing. I am about two thirds of the way done uploading my videos to YouTube, and it takes absolutely forever. A 15 minute video takes several hours to upload. I usually start one video a night and begin the uploading process before I go to bed.

Cross posted at LITGM.

Opening the Abscess

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I’ve previously quoted a passage from the  memoirs of General Edward Spears, who was Churchill’s emissary to France in 1940. There was a disturbing amount of defeatism, and in some cases actual sympathy with the Nazi enemy, among certain government officials and other French elites. Weygand’s friend Henri de Kerillis, a Deputy and newpaper editor, had been consistently pressing Prime Minister Daladier to investigate some sinister behavior by members of the extreme Right.

“Il faut de’brider l’abces,” he had said time and time again to the Premier. He had done so again lately and received this strange answer: I have done exactly what you urged, I have opened the abscess, but it was so deep the scalpal disappeared down it, and had I gone on, my arm would have followed.” This was really very frightening, and I said so. “You cannot be more frightened than I am,” said Kerillis.

I was reminded again of this passage by some links concerning the abuse of power by Obama’s IRS. See the below excerpts from a video interview with Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represents several individuals victimized by IRS misconduct over the past four years:

Part I

Part II

Part III

As Don Sensing says, “The IRS has become an enforcement tool of political hegemony.”  I hope he is wrong when he continues:

And what is going to be done about it?  Nothing. Obama has already said there is “not a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS, and as far as the  news media  Ministry of Truth is concerned, that’s the end of the story.It  does not matter  that this information is coming to light and being made public. From the president on down, the despotism will continue unabated — secretly if possible, in the open if necessary. There is no one in the country who has  both  the ability and the desire to stop it.The Democrats can stop it, but they are the perpetrators and even the ones who are not actively committing these crimes support them. They have the ability but certainly not the desire.

The Republicans (but by no means even half of them) have the desire but not the ability. They have abandoned the fight anyway.

The national media and the Democrat party are indistinguishable so there will be no protest raised by them.

All of these abuses will repeat in 2016 with the same effect as in 2012: opposition to the ruling party will be smothered and the election will be stolen. Again.

…but I am afraid he may be right.  Those Americans who place value on individual freedom and open government had better be very, very active and assertive over the next 3 years, or it is going to be too late, and things are going to be very dark for a long, long time.

The things that we know about paint a very sinister picture of the Obama administration’s operations and intentions…imagine what sorts of corrupt, anti-liberty, and quite likely outright illegal activities lurk among the things we do not know about.

Selected Posts from 2013, continued

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Western Civilization and the First World War…with a very good comment thread.

The Power of Metaphor and Analogy.

The Normalization of Abusive Government.

Would You Trust Your Financial Future to This Woman? Patty Murray, a U.S. Senator and an obvious moron and bigot..as the quotes in this post clearly demonstrate…is head of the Senate Budget Committee.

Whose Interests Will Jack Lew be Representing? There were some rather interesting clauses in the Treasury Secretary’s employment agreement with Citigroup.

Time Travel. Some personal connections with the past.