Captain Edgar O. Smith: A great man, as good as he was great

Edgar Oliver Smith of Cape Sable Island at the southernmost extremity of Nova Scotia died of tuberculosis one January night in 1917, when the youngest of his six children was all of 14 years old. After dawn that youngest, who happens to have been my grandfather William Edgar "Bill" Smith, waded with his elder brother Harvey into the snow to cut firewood; they were the men of the house, as of their father's passing hours before, and the day was cold and the household without fuel. Captain Edgar was born the 2nd of January and he died on that date, he was born on Cape Island and he died there, but in his 56 years in the world he saw a great part of it, and he was in his way a maker of history.

Edgar looks to have gone to sea by 1876 and the age of 15, as "bowman in a dory with his cousin Edmund". From his cousin's dory Edgar graduated to the schooner Fearless, and thence to the brig S.N. Collimore, then from 1882 to '84 Edgar fished the Triton out of Gloucester in Massachusetts, about the time the Gloucester fleet was reported by the Boston Globe to be lousy with Nova Scotians. Edgar was formally Captain Edgar by 1891 when he was certified Master in the Coast Trade, being certified seven years thereafter for Foreign Service. But by 1886 Edgar was second mate on the Hector, crossing the Atlantic and passing through the Strait of Gibraltar to Valencia on the east coast of Spain and Sete in the South of France, and by 1890 Edgar had made captain, fishing the Grand Banks for Newfoundland concerns.

Sometime in his couple years on the Grand Banks a hook caught Captain Edgar in his left forefinger, which had the effect of fixing it in a rigid extension. For the balance of his days Edgar never could crook that finger, and the bum finger is conspicuous in the photography of him.

At the risk of reinforcing the stereotype of island folk, it must here be recorded that Captain Edgar married his first cousin, in a double-wedding wherein his sister-in-law married her first cousin. Edgar married Susan Cornelia, also a Smith, which saves on paperwork, in the December-est of December weddings, on the winter solstice of 1887, and biennially from 1892 through 1902 they begat four daughters and two sons, namely Felicia and Edith and Edna and Clare, and Harvey and William, in that order. Susie was daughter to the Captain William Black Smith, also a sea captain and a great man, and as deserving of a biography. And Susie survived Edgar by 31 years, living to see victory in the First World War and the Second, and then some.

It may've been 1892 that Edgar first served as an officer on a steamship, on the S.S. City of St. John running between Yarmouth and Halifax, as second mate under the family friend Captain Arthur McGray whose biographical sketch of Edgar is invaluable. The next year Edgar graduated to pilot of the City of St. John, and the year after to captain. Then two years thereafter Edgar was taken on by the Yarmouth Steamship Company, to captain their flagship the S.S. Yarmouth, with passenger and mail service between Yarmouth and Boston. The Yarmouth company fleet of half a dozen steamers were grand ships, each with capacious dining rooms. Bill Smith reported that his father's Yarmouth-to-Boston run departed Yarmouth about suppertime and arrived Boston about dawn, and that his mother packed sandwiches, to keep their strength up till they landed in the morning.

It was in the course of his service for the Yarmouth Steamship Co. that Captain Edgar was charged with the odd job in 1898 of crossing to England, taking receipt for the Yarmouth company of the "fast sidewheeler Express", and steaming those 428 tons home to Yarmouth, with a stop at St. John's for coal. Paddle-wheelers by then had been overtaken by "screw"- or propeller-driven steamships, but paddle-steamers were in service still, and it may be that a paddler was in this instance preferred, for the reason that it was meant for the shallower waters of coastal service, between Yarmouth and Halifax "via intermediate ports". And the Express was a new construction, with two paddle-wheels and as many enginerooms and smokestacks, making 15 1/4 knots and breaking "all records" for passage from Halifax to Yarmouth. Edgar manifestly had the trust of the Yarmouth Steamship Co., and on June 20 he landed their baby in one piece, at 4 in the morning.

But Edgar's Express job was for naught: not three months into its service, the Express was wrecked comprehensively on Outer Island, called in the newspaper account Bon Portage Island, five miles from Cape Sable Island. The Express had cost Yarmouth Steamship $80,000, but after Outer Island was through with it, its 202' steel hull went for $475, although the Yarmouth company evidently were prudent souls and had insured for $60,000. The captain at the time of the Outer Island misfortune was not Edgar.

As the century turned, a year and a half after the Spanish-American War and assumption of the American protectorate over Cuba, Edgar captained the ship on "the first expedition to establish an American colony" in Cuba. He and his crew conveyed to Cuba 211 colonists from 30 states, two territories, and three Canadian provinces, "the vanguard of the first American colony planted in Cuba." Edgar's S.S. Yarmouth departed New York Harbor for Nuevitas on December 30 of 1899, recorded as "a stinging cold day" by James Meade Adams in his masterly account of that first American colony in Cuba, published 1901 and titled Pioneering in Cuba. Adams goes out of his way to commend Captain Edgar, as "a popular and efficient officer".

Adams: "[F]or thirty-six hours, in the neighborhood of Cape Hatteras, very rough water was encountered. But few on board had ever known such a sea, and sickness was universal." But Edgar's Yarmouth was "safe if not swift, [and] brought the colonists to this port without mishap." The Yarmouth also was "large and fine enough to have easily commanded the unbounded admiration and amazement of Christopher Columbus had he beheld her when he landed...near this point more than four centuries ago."

Edgar anchored at Nuevitas Harbor four and a half days after departing New York, on the fourth day of the new century. The colonists carried on to the settlement of La Gloria, and the Yarmouth carried on in the service of the Cuban Land and Steamship Company of 32 Broadway, undertaking second and third runs to Nuevitas through January and February, commanded presumably by Captain Edgar. (A couple years after Edgar's passing the Yarmouth would enter its last and least likely chapter, being sold to "noted social reformer, capitalist, and screwball" Marcus Garvey.)

And then came 1902 and the Mallory Line of New York. Edgar had of course captained the Yarmouth out of New York in 1900, but how it was that he came to be taken on by a considerable concern in Lower Manhattan is not now known to me; what is known is that Captain Edgar counted as a "staunch friend" one H. H. Raymond, President of the Mallory Line, and that he would be a Mallory man until his forced retirement in 1916. And an expedition of our family friend Otto Atkinson found Edgar's portrait hung prominently in the marble halls of the Mallory Line, three-quarters of a century after Edgar.

Captain Edgar was not at first captain, for the Mallory Line, but chief officer, on the S.S. Denver, graduating to captain on the Colorado, and captaining later the Lampasas. Edgar's service on the Mallory Line took him southward following the eastern seaboard to the southernmost extremity of the United States, at Key West off Florida, north again to Tampa on Florida's west coast, up and over to Mobile in Alabama, and across the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston off Houston in Texas, and to New York City where Edgar moved the family for half a decade. Edgar on his runs to the Gulf was three weeks at sea, per his daughter Clare very much later.

Captain Edgar's business now was in New York, and he moved the family to a house there in or about 1906, in what the baby of the family Bill Smith described nine decades later as a "countrified" quarter of Brooklyn. The family managed visits to Cape Island on holidays, but they were New Yorkers -- Bill's New York schooling accounted for the larger part of his formal education, even -- until 1911 or thereabouts. The full and true story of the family's quitting New York for Cape Island was not known to Edgar; that was a secret of Bill's and his brother Harvey's, until it was not so much a secret as a joke.

The heating in the New York house was central, and the ductwork was tin, and one fine day the boys Bill and Harvey had the idea of stuffing the vent in their room with rags. Bill explained that the tin of the ducts would turn "red hot", and after a time the rags combusted and the house burnt to sticks. The fire marshal pronounced the cause of the fire to be "accidental", and Bill and Harvey weren't minded to correct him. Bill suspected that his mother Susie suspected the boys might've had something to do with the fire, but that she was just as well pleased to quit New York for Cape Island. And so about 1911 Captain Edgar moved the family back to his house in Centreville, built incidentally by Ephraim Atkinson who along with William Kenny conceived the Cape Islander or "Novi" boat.

(As to how exactly Susie Smith and six smaller Smiths managed their sort-of commute between Brooklyn and Centreville in the first decade of the 20th Century, I can do no better than to guess, to wit: cab from house in Brooklyn to port in Manhattan, not improbably by way of the Brooklyn Bridge; steamer from New York to Boston; steamer again from Boston to Yarmouth; train from Yarmouth to Barrington, maybe connecting the port in Yarmouth and the ferry crossing in Barrington; ferry from Barrington to North East Point; and at last maybe a cab or hired cart from the ferry landing to the house in Centreville. Captain Edgar would've been counted among the wealthier Cape Islanders of his generation, and bills like those not-infrequent passages-for-seven-from-Brooklyn-to-Centreville may go some way to solving the mystery of whatever became of Edgar's fortune.)

Captain Edgar turns up in the March 1909 issue of a fraternal association periodical called The American Marine Engineer, in a moving obituary which digresses into an extraordinary commendation of Edgar. The deceased was a "Bro. G. Youmans, late second assistant engineer officer of the steamship Lampasas" of New York, on "his untimely demise at sea from injuries accidentally received while in the performance of duty." The obituarist was a "C. W. Read, Chief Engineer, S. S. Lampasas", who remarks on Edgar, "I also extend to Capt. E. O. Smith, of S. S. Lampasas, the heartfelt thanks of myself, and officers of my department, for his manliness and untiring efforts to relieve sufferings of the deceased from the instant of the accident to the end; burial disposition at port. Which goes to prove that he is the possessor in a large degree of that 'fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind.'"

(I take it "manliness" there is Edwardian euphemism, to the effect that the scene was not for the faint of heart, and the Annual Report of the Supervising Inspector-General, Steamship Inspection for 1909 elaborates that George Youmans was "burned about the arms and the entire upper part of his body" by steam from an engineroom explosion, and that he passed after about eleven hours.) Edgar's and the deceased's are the only names to appear in the obituary, and Edgar's part in the obituary amounts to a quarter of it.

Captain Edgar in New York was a lay-preacher at the East Side Mission, and a friend to the unfortunate of the slums. A newspaper notice headlined "A Sailor-Preacher", turned up at the home of the great friend of the family Effie Atkinson, unattributed and undated but from the time of Edgar's service on the Lampasas, is unimprovable as an account of Edgar's lay-preaching, with the exception of the unrecognizable mangling of its subject's name, and so it's reproduced herewith: "Captain O. L. [sic] Smith, commander of the Mallory Liner Lampasas, regularly in service between Mobile and New York, is not only a speaker of note, but is regarded as one of the ablest sailor-preachers on the Atlantic-Gulf service. While at Tampa, Fla., recently Captain Smith delivered a sermon on evangelism at the Y.M.C.A., and has since received invitation to preach in Tampa churches when there."

Bill Smith observed of his father that he "never had a spare minute", and among Captain Edgar's extracurriculars were his membership as a Master Mason in the Philadelphia Lodge No. 47 of Barrington; his membership in the Sons of Temperance, Lifeboat Division, #158, where he was elevated for a year to Worthy Patriarch among other offices, and where he was party to great debates such as "Which have been the greater element for good in the world -- men or women?" (the formulation presumably is Edgar's) with its Victorian finding in favor of the latter; and his contributions to publications wherein "he could commend and condemn with equal facility," in the words of Arthur McGray, including letters-to-the-editor in The Coast Guard of Shelburne and The New York Times Saturday Review of Books.

The address Captain Edgar claims in his letters-to-the-editor from New York turns out to be his professional address, in Lower Manhattan, maybe half a mile from the World Trade Center and practically in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge which looks today precisely as it would've done in Edgar's time.

Captain Edgar's formal education might've amounted to a couple boyhood years, but Captain Arthur McGray in his biographical sketch of Edgar remarks on Edgar's "retentive memory which enabled him to recite long passages from the works of outstanding authors". Oceanic steam navigation did leave a captain time to pursue his reading, and that Edgar was a prodigious reader is attested by his immense oak-and-glass library -- built by his onetime ship's carpenter Ezra Atkinson -- and by Edgar's margin-notes, in pencil. Edgar's library includes among many other volumes The World's Greatest Orations, in ten volumes; Homer's Odyssey, as translated by Alexander Pope; Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, the 1827 first edition published twelve years after Napoleon's Waterloo; a History of England, by the Scots philosopher David Hume; and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, which is a very English book with a very French title.

Also Captain Edgar did not a little writing, and to judge by what survives to us of it, he might almost have quit captaining and taken up writing professionally, with his mastery of his subjects, and his force of argument, and his grand and baroque British-English prose, and his wit.* Which is not to say that Edgar's was not a head also for figures; he was after all a sea captain in an age of charts and sextants, and his felicity for math was what struck his nephew Arthur Newell who had served under Captain Edgar. Bill Smith -- whose form of address for his father was not "Dad" or "Daddy" but "Father" -- recalled Edgar's putting to the children a demanding arithmetic riddle, involving a puncheon of molasses. Bill solved the riddle and nine decades thence he recalled every convoluted particular of it, but he evidently was too shy of his father to present his solution to the great man.

Captain Edgar developed tuberculosis and in 1916 retired to Cape Island, where he passed January 2 of the new year, his 56th birthday. Edgar was "possessed of a driving energy [and] rare judgement", in the words of Arthur McGray, and possessed also "of that fellow feeling which makes us wondrous kind"; a great man, as good as he was great.

(Acknowledgements: This biographical sketch would be sketchy biography, absent the research and compilation of my elder brother Stephen J. Smith. Also the summary biographical sketch of Edgar by Captain Arthur McGray, per my brother's compilation, was invaluable, the balance of the material being drawn from latter-day online research, interviews recorded in the 1990s of my grandfather late in his life, and family remembrances. And the notion of a biography of Captain Edgar was the doing of my uncle Laurie T. Smith.)

* - Herewith is excerpted and transcribed verbatim a tour-de-force letter-to-the-editor published 1894 in the long-shuttered Yarmouth Times, by a certain "Fair Play", namely Edgar O. Smith, depressing in the familiarity a century-and-a-quarter since of its indictments, but stirring as ever in its lion's roar for greatness:

An Earnest Protest Against Humbug.

... I wish to make a plain statement of facts which must recommend themselves to the intelligence of every voter in Shelburne County.

Almost two years ago the scheme of building a narrow guage [typographical hiccup] railroad from Yarmouth to Lockeport began first to be agitated in this county. ... We were plainly told that a narrow gauge road was the best that we could hope for, and that as a railroad it was all that Shelburne county required. This was a falsehood. ...

Narrow gauge roads have long since become almost a thing of the past. ... Comparing the miles of standard railroad with the other in the United States ends all discussion upon that point. If one is as good as the other why is not the cheaper road adopted? ...

Now I ask any intelligent voter in Shelburne to tell me what definite end has been obtained in regard to the proposed road. After two years of agitation through the press and from the platform; two years of false representations, unfulfilled promises, silly trumped up tales of capitalists interested in the project and fabulous sums granted by governments on its behalf; two years with nearly every month promises that ere its end we would see the road take upon itself tangible form. After all this we are no nearer a road than at first.

... The narrow gauge scheme in itself was an insult to our intelligence as a county; in event of its success it simply made us hewers of wood and drawers of water to a neighboring county. ... We were not far enough advanced in civilization to merit the standard railroad of the civilized world.

... Must this county with its industrious, enterprising and intelligent population; with its unsurpassed harbor and natural advantages be ever made the football of office boys and the prey of the non-supportable element within its limits? I think it is high time to call a halt and let our declaration of independence be signed once and forever at the polls on the 15th.

... Fair Play.
Centerville, Cape Island,
March 10th, 1894.

Viking Age England arcana

Suspect etymologies

I've developed a suspicion, and it is now nothing grander than a suspicion, that contemporary English etymologies for reasons I might guess at are prejudiced in claiming wherever they can get away with it that English derives from Old Norse, making out that a very considerable part of English is imported from those Scandinavian raiders and invaders of the Viking Age, which in England amounts to the century-and-a-half from the first Viking raid in 793 to the more-or-less final English victory in 954.

"Wassail" makes a case-in-point: the convention is that the Modern English "wassail" from the Old English "waes hael" derives ultimately from the Old Norse "ves heill". I esteem the American Heritage Dictionary and I consult it daily, despite that its etymology for "wassail" accepts the convention that the English abandoned their native salutations in preference to aping some boozy invocation of the monstrous Vikings who terrorized them. But that same etymology stipulates a native English pedigree for "wassail" in three iterations, recorded in even Beowulf and the West Saxon Gospels. American Heritage cites the native English salutation "wes thu hal", which in its most direct rendering recognizable to us would read "be thou healthy", and that combines the "wes" and "hal", and in the same order as "waes hael", with the marginal variation of inserting between them the pronoun "thou" for "you".

So to suppose that the merry English "wassail" derives not from the terrorizers of the English but from a native English pedigree would not contradict the documentary record, and that documentary record of English before 800 can be uneven, so that we may assume where there's smoke, there's fire: that if "wes thu hal" appears in written English, then "wes hal" absent the "thu" may've been spoken but not recorded in those manuscripts which survive to us.

But more than that, these etymologies ought to apply common sense: the English were terrorized, impoverished, brutalized, enslaved, raped, and slaughtered by the Vikings, until they drove the monsters out and kept them out by force, so this etymology that the English abandoned their native salutations for the Old Norse of the Viking monsters is about as sensible to me as imagining "hail" as in "hail a cab" is an English aping of the German "heil" heard by the British in the Nazis' "heil Hitler".

Then there's the case of the suffix "by" or "bee", which appears on a good many English placenames and surnames, as in "Appleby" or "Applebee": we're taught that "-by" or "-bee" is not native English but an import to English from Old Norse. And the "by" suffix does appear on Scandinavian placenames to this day, as in "Rinkeby" in Sweden. But see for example Naseby in the English Midlands, immortalized by the momentous battle in that place and of that name in the English Civil War. Naseby was founded in the 6th Century by a Saxon called Hnaef, as Hnaefes-Burgh, then per the Domesday Book in 1086 the name had developed to Navesberie, and it's not for some time that the name develops to Navesby and Nathesby and ultimately Naseby. So the "by" suffix in "Naseby" appears well after even the Norman Conquest, centuries after England had dispatched the Vikings, a contraction or simplification arguably of those earlier "b-" suffixes "Burgh" and "berie".

Inarguably English did take on words from Old Norse, and in those parts of the north and east of England which were subject to the Danelaw are found placenames which are altogether Norse, as for instance "Ormskirk" in Lancashire, with its "Orm" from "ormr" meaning "serpent, dragon", and its "kirk" for "church". But that etymology comports with the record, that the English word was "church" and never "kirk", and it comports as neatly with the history, that Lancashire was subject to the Danelaw.

Old Norse and Old English are after all cousin-tongues, the Germanic dialects and languages of Germanic tribes and nations in Northern Europe in the first half of the Middle Ages, and it's my suspicion that etymologies too often find parallels and imagine antecedents, that too many of those words they identify as imports to English from Old Norse are native English stock, English words with cousin-words in our cousin-languages including Norse.

And there's the practical difficulty in supposing that a very considerable part of English derives from Old Norse, which is that the window for it is narrow, in time and in space. The Vikings in England in the first 72 years of the Viking Age were raiders and not invaders; when from 865 to '78 the greatest warriors of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden did invade and overrun England with their Great Heathen Army, they were soon enough driven back to the north and east of England, to the Danelaw which by 918 the English had reduced to Northumbria; and 36 years thereafter even Northumbria was reclaimed by the English.

Plus which these Viking Age Northmen were the sorts to rob monks and rape nuns and murder both, when they didn't sell them into brutal slavery. The English had resisted the language of even the native Britons they had displaced, and they had that much more cause for resisting the influence of these heathen Northmen whose evil was not again seen in Europe until the Nazis. English imported "blitz" from German in the Second World War, but there wasn't much call in Britain for German imports about the time of the Blitz, and it defies reason to suppose that England in the Viking Age was mad for things Scandinavian, save for some naval technology and a military tactic or two.

Not to mention, it was the Northmen who converted to Christianity, not the English who converted or rather relapsed into pre-Christian Germanic paganism. It was the English who had a large literate class of churchmen, and the Northmen who were illiterate. And it was the Northmen who were the few, fleeting occupiers in a Saxon sea which had seen centuries before the Vikings and has seen a millennium and more since. I cannot accept that English is in any considerable part hand-me-down Viking-talk, and not out of my violent nationalism so much as my residual rustic common sense.
  
The historical liberties of History's Vikings

Michael Hirst's Vikings is very fine television, and Michael Hirst with his Elizabeth movies and The Tudors is a historical-drama force-of-nature. Vikings surely has driven a general education in Viking Age Europe. And I appreciate that Vikings is a TV show and not a textbook, plus which there is such a thing as artistic license. But at the same time Vikings is a co-production of the History channel, and it must be said that the history in the show is compressed by times and by times it's madness. So I offer herewith several paragraphs on the historical liberties of Vikings.

Vikings has King Egbert (the show prefers "Ecbert", and the show may have it right) of Wessex handing off to his son Prince Aethelwulf with the Great Heathen Army on the doorstep, then executing a charter conceding the Danelaw before slitting his wrists in his Roman bath, but Egbert was dead a quarter-century before the coming of the Great Heathen Army, and even Aethelwulf was seven years in his grave before that time. Wessex between Egbert and the Great Heathen Army had four kings: Aethelwulf, Aethelbald, Aethelbert, and Aethelred.

Also Aethelwulf was married to a Judith, but she was no daughter of King Aella of Northumbria; Judith was a Continental princess. And so much worse than that, Alfred the Great was not the bastard of Judith and a naughty monk, but Aethelwulf's legitimate son by his first wife Osburh.

As to King Aella of Northumbria, the show accepts the sagas' account of his death by "blood eagle" at the hands of Ragnar's sons, but the English histories report Aella died in battle in 867, and had he been tortured to death by Vikings then the English sources might've had an interest in playing that up. Also the show has Aella as king of Northumbria by the time of the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, through the coming of the Great Heathen Army in 865, but the history is that Aella was king for a year or at most five.

The invasion of the Great Heathen Army which concludes Season Four was not some blitzkrieg sweep across England, but fully a decade between landing in East Anglia and overrunning Wessex. And the invasion evidently was a reaction to the fortification of Francia which raised the cost to the Vikings of raiding there, more than revenge for the death of Ragnar. ("Revenge" there in the Viking sense, because only monsters on the order of the the Vikings would fault the English for executing the monster who had led the unprovoked slaughter and rape and plunder of English innocents.)

And Vikings has it that Ragnar Lodbrok (the show prefers "Lothbrok", and again the show may have it right) led the raid on Lindisfarne which came in 793 and which inaugurates the Viking Age, that his death was followed soon enough by the invasion of the Great Heathen Army which came in 865, and that Ragnar had a farm and family before turning to the slaughter, rape, and plunder of innocents, so that Ragnar Lodbrok would've been a man of a certain age by the time King Aella dropped him into that snake pit. Ragnar in the sagas may be a composite of more Vikings than one, and an embellishment of them, a mythological invention representing a historical reality, and Vikings evidently takes those Norse sagas very largely for its historical record. 

Miscellany, again: British reserve and British humor; English singularity; An exercise in Coltranian verticularity; In justification of a nobody with a blog

British reserve and British humor 

Britain is per capita the world's funniest country. I see no point in substantiating a proposition so inarguable as that, but because I'm a dreadful political-science sort, I am compelled to venture some theory to account for it. I don't dispute the cliche that Britain is a reserved society, and I wonder if that may make a foundation for this theory: in an otherwise-staid society like Britain's, humor is a permissible outlet. No sin or disgrace or folly in laughter, or in producing laughter. And if that humor is more cerebral then it's better than permissible, it's elevated. So it may be that British reserve and British humor are cause and effect. 

English singularity 

Among the many peculiarities of English is this: for as long as there has been a language identifiable as English, English has been a written or anyway a writable language. If it wasn't often written in those earliest times, English was at least writable, in a phonetic alphabet, and from the first. 

English is an insular development of the language and dialects of those Germanic tribesmen who migrated from the Continent to the British Isles about the time of the Fall of Rome, and among those people a phonetic alphabet had been adopted from not too long after Christ, called the "futhark", so that English was a writable language with a phonetic alphabet from the very first.  

The special and singular case of "read" and "write" might conceivably bear on this: English is alone among Western European languages in that "write" does not derive from the Latin "scribere", per the American Heritage Dictionary, and per that dictionary English is nearly alone among Western European languages in that "read" does not derive from the Latin "legere". "Read" and "write" are Old, Saxon English, not Latinate and not answered in our Germanic cousin-tongues. But then, English has been written for as long as it's been spoken, so that at no time would reading and writing have been novel or alien concepts in English, never imports demanding imported names.   

That English has been written for as long as it's been spoken may or may not account for some part of the prolific and extraordinary development of English -- the English vocabulary for instance is double the vocabulary of the world's second-largest language -- but English is a singular language among the civilizations of the world and of history, and whatever it is that accounts for English singularity must itself be fairly singular.

And another thing, while I'm about it: England is not a very old country and America is not so very much younger than the Old Country. There is no England before the Fall of Rome, and the first English colonies in America come only a millennium thereafter, and all of seven centuries after the advent of England as a unitary realm. England's not so old and America's not so much younger.

  

An exercise in Coltranian verticularity  

This extraordinary solo is as imaginative and inventive and artful and athletic a "vertical" improvisation as any in a century of jazz. The fellow who can play scales like that, can dispense with melodies. It's John Coltrane's tenor saxophone solo on a televised performance of Miles Davis' "So What" from New York in 1959, and it's a tour de force throughout. 

I've played saxophone, and tenor saxophone, and yet I can only guess at what I hear at 3:40-41. I notice the trombonist to the side looks up with a start on hearing it, and the next fellow over smirks, and I expect it'd have sounded that much more startling live or on a crisper recording. Coltrane plays two ascending scales ranging about the length of the horn, very low to very high, with such uncommon velocity that the sound practically crackles. He comes close to those same scales elsewhere in the solo, but without the peculiar effect at 3:40. I can only guess that Coltrane is moving so far, so fast, and with such a meticulous articulation, that the product is a sound unproducible to a lesser saxophonist.  

Coltrane does manage some truly fine riffs among the scales -- passages more melodic or "lyrical" than harmonic or "vertical" -- and his scales are such that they substitute for melody, but "So What" is modal and expansive and its "head" or chorus has no melody to speak of, so that Coltrane's accustomed scales-playing is just the thing. I imagine a transcription of that solo might look something like the Manhattan skyline: jagged ups and downs. In any event a solo like that isn't inspiration for a saxophonist, so much as an unanswerable argument for his retirement from saxophony.   

In justification of a nobody with a blog

I beg the dear reader's pardon for this unbecoming own-horn-blowing, but I've apprehended that my current-events bona fides need registering publicly, and that they'll go unregistered if not by me. My formal training and certification are in political science, from a university of 25,000 in a national capital and rated in that time the best in its country for political science, which rating was my solitary consideration in choosing the school. I've followed American politics and government like my life depends on it for a quarter of a century, from an age when I ought to have cared more about school dances than Iowa caucuses. I wrote on politics and government and history and war professionally for half a decade in the biggest paper east of Quebec, and unpaid for a couple years before, then there's this blog which I've kept up since '05, which in Internet Time is Before the Flood.  

And for what it's worth I was born into a political family, who had run for office and served in government and campaigned for candidates and counted votes and studied political science and staffed for a future secretary-general of NATO and knew the representatives and met the prime minister. So hate my ever-living guts if you will, for the God-Bless-the-USA-Unreconstructed-Redneck-American-Triumphalist-Peasants-Party militant that I assuredly am, but please don't suppose I don't have a clue.

Obama indicted

Barack Hussein Obama was for America and the world comprehensively a catastrophe. The indictment following is not so comprehensive, but it's unanswerable, to wit and in no particular order:

The astronomical national debt was astronomical enough by the time Obama swore to turn it back, damning Bush for his contribution to it and promising a "net spending cut"; in the event and despite Obama's hacking of defense and hiking of taxes on the wealthy and on capital gains, the piling on of the national debt over Obama's eight years comes to $9.3 trillion, near enough to doubling the debt, or amassing as much as the 43 presidents previous.

Obama makes the first president since GDP statistics have been calculated never to see economic growth of at least 3% in at least one year of his presidency. Obama managed to abolish the boom-and-bust business cycle by chopping the peaks off the peaks-and-valleys, his economic recovery, if a "recovery" it was, being the feeblest since the 1940s. GDP shrank or bounced along the bottom in nine quarters of Obama's 32, and lest it be supposed that the recession which Obama famously "inherited" accounts for that, let it be observed that the contractions or flatlinings or both come in six years of Obama's eight: 2009, '11 and '12, '13 and '14, and a flat quarter as late as the end of '15, just a year before Obama walked out of the White House for the last time.

Obama's labor participation rate was the worst since the stagflation 1970s, Americans uncounted in the labor force having multiplied by 14 million under Obama, to 95 million, which worked wonders on Obama's official unemployment rate but was not so wonderful for the real economy and the real people in it. One American family in five are unrepresented in the labor force, i.e., families having not one breadwinner amount to 20%.

Americans dependent for their daily bread on food stamps multiplied under Obama by 13 million, and Americans in poverty by 8 million.

And to round out the roundup of economic ruin, America imported more than it exported in Obama's terminal year by nearly three-quarters of a trillion, and by that blessed end of the Age of Obama the homeownership rate was the worst in better than half a century.

The first black president whose very election we were promised would "heal the racial divide" brought instead the first race war since the 1960s, sanctioning at the highest levels the racial-grievance excuse-making for ghetto pathologies, claiming "racism" behind political disagreement and law enforcement, and intimidating police forces into abandoning the policing of minority precincts, with the consequent explosion in violent crime and in race riots.

Murders in America's greatest cities leapt by 31% in these couple years past, and by 57% last year over the year before in Obama's hometown of Chicago, where the Second-Amendment-abolitionists wrote the gun laws and an old Obama administration hand runs city hall. A Chicagoan anymore is shot every couple hours, and Chicago is more treacherous than Kabul. And as many Americans were killed in Chicago under Obama as were killed in Iraq under Bush.

After two terms of the first black president, blacks uncounted in the labor force were up 18.5% and blacks dependent for their daily bread on food stamps up 58%; even homeownership among blacks was worse for eight years of the first black president. They may go to their graves in devotion to this "first black president" who was in fact half-white-American and half-Kenyan-elite, and whose only hereditary association with slavery was on his maternal, slavemaster side, and for whom discrimination was affirmative action, but Barack "first black president" Obama was a catastrophe for blacks in America.

Before Obama's preposterously-named "Affordable Care Act", cost was first among the deficiencies of healthcare in America, but Obamacare only multiplied that cost, driving up the average health insurance premium by 25% in 2017 alone.

The uninsured are with us still, and since Obamacare so too are the untold masses restricted by Obamacare to 30 hours' work and wages weekly. Then there are the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink policies demanded by Obamacare, and the outlawing of barebones, emergency-only coverage, plus the “Shared Responsibility” tax/fine of hundreds per person per year (one is at a loss as to which to call it, a "tax" or a "fine", for the reason that Obama swore it was a fine when political necessity demanded it not be counted a tax, then when the legal necessity was that it not be counted a fine, it was conveniently recast as a tax; what it is truly is an outrage and a burden). Obamacare also has dispossessed untold masses of their plans and their doctors, notwithstanding Obama's assurances, and strained Medicaid and Medicare. And that's to say nothing of the violence done by Obamacare to the American freedom of conscience, unto the point of compelling nuns to buy abortifacients.

The lawlessness of Obama and his administration is a subject fit more for a book, and a thick one, but at or near the top of any accounting of Obamian lawlessness must be its application for the furtherance of the invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World. Obama's lawless executive orders inviting "DREAM"-ers from Latin America to America made a commonplace of the hitherto-unknown phenomenon, of the herding and driving of masses of Latin American children on foot across Latin America, to be dumped on the American banks of the Rio Grande. And Obama's administration by their own accounting released into American society something over 86,000 criminal aliens in all of two years.

And partisan in their lawlessness: Obama and his administration were "the most dagger-partisan since Richard Nixon", to invoke an old formulation of Rex Murphy's. Obama's IRS isolated 400 Tea Party groups, to take but one example, and denied them the status they demanded and deserved so as to knock them out of two election cycles.

Obama presided over the triumphal march of the international jihad over the greater Near East including countries never dreamt of as terrorist territories, before there was a President Barack Obama; the jihad has today its first nation-state, also unthinkable before Obama; al-Qaeda is dwarfed as a force and a threat by the greater jihadi army of ISIS which before Obama was unconceived; and terror attacks in this country and in Europe which before Obama were one-offs, were in the Age of Obama a commonplace: in the two months preceding the 2016 Summer Olympics jihadis managed a terror attack someplace on earth outside Syria and Iraq every 84 hours. The Navy SEALs put a bullet in bin Laden's head on Obama's watch, but otherwise the war on terror went altogether the way of the international jihad.

ISIS is the product of Obama, and for a demonstration of Obama's comprehensive, catastrophic failure on ISIS this is unimprovable: Obama had pronounced ISIS "contained" a matter of hours before the Paris massacre of November 2015 wherein ISIS slaughtered more than 100 innocents. Before there was a President Obama, ISIS was unconceived and a jihadi nation-state was unthinkable; ISIS today constitutes the government of a swath of Syria and Iraq, and its jihadi empire of ISIS affiliates reaches into 18 countries.

In Iraq Obama inherited a won war, tossed it away along with its sacrifice, and extraordinarily has bequeathed to us a new, Third Iraq War.

More Americans died in Afghanistan in just the first year-and-a-half under Obama than in the seven-and-a-half years under Bush, and for a war which Obama's half-measures and declared timetable had determined could not end in victory: in Afghanistan Obama condemned America to the cost in blood and treasure of a war-winning big push, with the defeat of a retreat and withdrawal, abandoning the field to the enemy. And seven-and-a-half years after Obama assumed command of the Afghan War, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, 80 Afghan Shiites were massacred in Kabul, not by the Taliban or al-Qaeda but by Obama's “JV squad”, also known as ISIS.

So far from frustrating Iran's nuclear drive or better yet pushing to liberate the Iranian people from their theocracy and at the same time to liberate the world from the principal state author of terror, Obama lifted such sanctions as there were on Iran and spared the mullahs' wicked, Armageddonist tyranny for the second time in his presidency, rewarding Iran with $150 billion in international trade plus $400 million in airlifted cash, and opening Iran to development by the advanced economies, i.e., the greatest leap yet in Iran's drive for the bomb.

Before there was a President Obama Libya was an ally of the United States in the terror war; within months of Obama's intervention there, unauthorized by Congress and undebated by the people, Libya was a wild wild west for the international jihad. Not long thereafter Libya was the site of the seizure and slaughter of an American ambassador, among other American dead including those two whose deliverance of the survivors was in defiance of the suicidal stand-down order from the top, worse even than the Iranian Hostage Crisis of three decades previous and a failure of Obama three times over: Obama abandoned the American personnel in Benghazi to “normalized” security despite the manifest threats and appeals for reinforcement, then declined to rescue them in the event, and finally he made out that the affair was the doing somehow of an immigrant to America who'd spoken ill of Islam in a YouTube video. And Libya today is another project of the ISIS caliphate, to where Obama ordered it bombed in another of his undeclared wars.

Before there was a President Obama there was no notion of war in Syria; the inaptly-named Syrian Civil War today has run half a decade, killed half a million, displaced four million and driven the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War -- a crisis in the West as much as in the Near East -- and birthed the great jihadi army that is ISIS.

China in the Age of Obama seized dominion of the South China Sea, and Russia invaded and conquered some part of eastern Europe. Before there was a President Obama war in Europe was unthinkable; since Obama and his “Russian Reset” a Continental European shooting war is the everyday.

And that's to say nothing of North Korea and others I'm sure I'm neglecting, or of the contracting and crumbling under Obama of the United States Armed Forces. What Obama pursued instead was a retro-'70s arms treaty, to take but one example, restricting America's nuclear arsenal, unused since 1945.

To hear Obama tell it, he brought sunlit uplands, but surely if his fantasy were more than fantasy then that would be registered electorally, and there the very party he's led must know as well as any that Obama brought catastrophe: Obama leaves his party and his cause a shambles, the incoming Republican president and administration being the most militantly reactionary and conservative since the advent of conservatism as we conceive it, and Obama's Democrats having lost in his time 13 seats in the Senate and 64 in the House, 13 governorships, and 33 state houses. Time will tell if Obama's principal legacy will have been the advent and ascendance of a new Americanism, conceived in reaction against him.

(NB: For a large part of the facts and figures herein I owe to the very useful compilations of Sean Hannity)